They nodded, tightening their grips on each other.
“Told you,” she said to Jude. The sun continued to sink; the deck darkened. Carolina lit night lights, which twinkled like the night sky, hugely, doubled by their reflections, across the windy sea and beyond.
“Why not switch to sail?” Jude asked. Islands twinkled in the distance, at least three close enough to shine crisply. Tortola, which had appeared so faraway, now loomed close and dark, with only a few spots with many lights. “Something wrong?”
Tom laughed. “Only that I’m a lazy sailor.”
Shauna refilled her wineglass for the third or fourth time, wobbling from the cooler to the bench.
“You cold?” Carolina asked.
“Yeah, but I’ve got a sweater.” She reached into her beach bag and found one.
The silvery gray sky wavered between day and night.
“A sunset to die for!” Shauna raised her wineglass to the ever-changing froths that lit the sky.
They all watched in awe as the sky trembled between red, peach, orange, gold, violet.
“Like flames.” Shauna settled herself against Jude, who put his arm around her.
“Not long, now,” Tom said.
Darkness, with the slim smile of a moon, starlight, and glowing sea, descended.
Suddenly, Jude sat up straight. A gun sprang from his pocket and into his hand.
Carolina and Tom blinked at the sight. “What have we here?” Carolina asked, the remaining half of her sandwich, chicken with avocado and a slice of tomato, in one hand, limp. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing personal,” said Jude, not high, not the least bit affected by the multiple alcoholic beverages he had previously appeared to suck down.
Shauna, a little less on the ball, eyes a bit blurred, stood up, knocking back her last glass of wine. She tapped the empty glass against a bench, then watched it break. “Sorry,” she said.
Carolina stood up.
“We’ll give you a fighting chance,” Shauna said. “Yours for ours.”
“You’d put us on that piece of junk?” Tom asked. “You survive and we drown?”
Jude said nothing, just nudged them to stand.
“We walk the plank and drown,” Carolina said. “You play pirates.”
“We do what we hafta,” Shauna said.
Walking Carolina toward the leaky, tethered Whaler, Jude pressed a gun to her back. A scrim of water shined in the bottom. “I’m grateful to people like you. Do-gooders.” After opening several bins and searching quickly, he found rope.
“Tie us up?” Carolina said. “You want us to die?”
“Here be dragons. I guess when you booked your honeymoon, you didn’t consider that.” Jude tried to wrap her wrists but since he was holding a gun, couldn’t. He motioned Shauna over to help.
“You’re smugglers. You steal boats. You kill people for drug money,” Carolina said.
“You have a fighting chance!” Shauna said.
Jude pushed the gun hard into her back. “Rich bitch.”
Shauna offered up an apologetic shrug, then looped nylon rope around Carolina’s wrists.
Carolina twisted quickly and kicked Shauna’s knee out from under her. Shauna fell.
Jude, startled, momentarily lost position, then aimed at Carolina. Behind him, Tom lunged. Smoothly, he grabbed the gun out of Jude’s hand and turned it on him.
Carolina wrestled free of the nylon ropes holding her wrists. She jumped up and pulled Shauna into a headlock.
“What the hell!” shouted Jude, staring down the barrel of his own gun, held by Tom, pointed at his face.
Sirens sounded.
Tom swiveled the younger man around, then pulled Jude’s hands behind his back, locking them in cuffs.
Shauna, quicker to recover than expected, stood, smacking Carolina’s head with a tightly balled fist. Then, while Carolina reeled, ignoring the gun pointed at Jude’s head, Shauna threw herself toward Tom.
Tom’s right arm struck her on the fly. She collapsed heavily onto the deck, panting, looking up at him, teary-eyed with pain.
Carolina jumped onto Shauna. Shauna wriggled and fought until Carolina pinned her like a wrestler to the deck. She cuffed her.
Tom and Carolina sat the two down on a bench a few feet apart from each other, where they drooped unhappily in the brilliant moonlight.
“Honeymooners?” Shauna frowned. Tom and Carolina faced the younger couple, each holding a gun, pointing steadily at their chests. “I could swear he French kissed you.”
Carolina didn’t react.
“I hope the money makes up for those ugly big, wet lips of his slobbering all over you.”
“Who are you people, anyway?” Jude asked, leaning against a cushion, legs shaking slightly, eyes narrowing. “You don’t sound local.”
“Special Ops,” Carolina said. “We’re out of St. Thomas, working along with the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force.”
“We hunt pirates,” Tom said.
Carolina picked up her fallen sarong and tied it around herself all the way up to her chest, the Caribbean’s version of New York City’s bulletproof vest.
Aerial view: Brilliantly lit boats rock and blaze over the black sea toward the yacht at center, from all directions.
One Confession Too Many
by Luis Adrian Betancourt
Translated by Donald A. Yates
Luis Adrian Betancourt is one of Cuba’s best-known crime writers and critics, with many novels and stories in print. His first appearance in translation was “Guilty” (EQMM 3–4/ 04). Here he is with a contemporary police tale; private eye stories do not exist in Cuba, where all sleuthing is done by state agencies!
Sergeant Hector Marcos covered the cold, naked body of the woman in Apartment 5 with a white sheet. Some of the neighbors had told him that she was a little loose, but really a good person. According to others, she was a “decent” person, but a little loose. The “loose” side of Paula Ortiz’s character consisted of the way she dressed, her fondness for parties and dancing, and the fact that she lived alone in an apartment where occasionally she received visits that were considered inappropriate.
The night before, when Alma Corrado was closing her window prior to going to bed, she was not surprised to see a young man rapping at the door of the tenant across the way and calling to her to let him in. At first he seemed to be pleading, then he began to sound threatening. The broad shoulders of Isaac Reyes, one of Paula Ortiz’s not infrequent visitors, were shifting back and forth in the rhythm of a manageable but evident state of drunkenness.
“Come on, baby...” he was saying, together with other words that went from mumbled to slurred. “Don’t get me mad,” he kept repeating. The moment came when Alma thought she should call the police, and she was about to do so when Paula decided to let her friend in. In no time they were yelling at each other at the top of their voices. Even after she closed her window, Alma could hear Paula complaining that her visitor was drunk and that this wasn’t any time for her to be receiving company. Then there was a long silence, suggesting that they had made up. Alma went to bed and thought nothing more about it until the next morning, when she woke up to find her street filled with bystanders, police, journalists, and a vehicle from the coroner’s office. In Paula’s apartment, people were taking photographs, dusting for fingerprints, and a police lieutenant who identified himself as Luis Adan was asking questions and looking for witnesses.
Alma needed to take several sedative pills for her nerves. She was fifty years old, but had never been even remotely associated with anything of a criminal nature. The death of her neighbor was a shock. She could have avoided becoming involved just by not telling what she had seen. Like the three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. But the image of her friend lying on the floor of her living room, her empty gaze fixed on the ceiling above, compelled her to tell the police what she knew. She trembled as she described the visit of Isaac Reyes at the moment when, ready for bed, she took a last look outside before closing her window.