“Yes. I had the impression he’d had a very good look at yours.”
The stirring in my gut became a flutter as a trickle of adrenaline went through me.
Recently somebody did get an eyeful of my tattoo. The sharp edge of my right forearm was wedged tightly against his throat at the time while I rammed a machete into his guts and pinned him to a doorjamb. Unless there was something about that zombie folklore from the West Indies, I doubted that Hector Latore Wallace — whose name I only learned weeks after his death — was wandering around Tampa asking questions about me. Then again, there’d been another who’d quickly fled the scene after his leader was killed, and who might have got a good look at my ink.
“This man,” I asked, already suspecting the answer, “was he a black man?”
“Yes, but with skin more the color of café au lait, and the hair was like that reggae singer… you know… Bob Marley?” Marley rhymed with au lait the way in which she intoned the name.
“Dreadlocks,” I confirmed.
Jolie nodded in agreement. “You know this man?”
“I know his type,” I said.
In truth, I’d had a few run-ins with guys who favored the Rastafarian look. A few years ago, back in Manchester, England, I’d bumped heads with some of the Yardie Posse — Jamaican gangsters — who sported dreads and wouldn’t think twice before sticking a knife in your heart. But then, more recent than that, there was Hector and his Rude Boy crew.
Perhaps ordering Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee had been a portent of things to come. I thought I was done with what had happened down in the Caribbean a few weeks earlier, but it seemed Jamaica wasn’t yet done with me.
“I didn’t tell him your name, I only confirmed it from a friend after this man asked me about you. But, Joe”—she cast a nervous glance across the street to where my Audi A8 was parked—“I think he will return asking about you again.”
I picked up my mug of coffee and held it out to her.
“Can you make this to go, Jolie?”
“Ah, such a waste,” she said, and placed a soft hand on my wrist to press the cup back down to its rightful place at her table.
“I wouldn’t have this man return here. I have a feeling he won’t be as amiable next time, especially now that he might demand to know more about me from you.”
“I would not tell him.” Her eyes flashed with Gallic spirit. “I know he is not a good man, and no good comes of him asking about you. But, it’s like I said earlier; you are a good customer and I also believe a good man.”
Her sentiment was well-meaning, but I doubted that the mystery Jamaican would see things the same way. Perhaps if Jolie had witnessed what went down in Jamaica a few weeks ago it might alter her perspective of me too.
Three lazy men were about to die and didn’t know it.
They were lazy because they had allowed their guard to slip, and it wasn’t something that any sentry should ever do. They were so lax in their security that they had broken formation, and had all come together in one place to smoke and to complain about the long, uneventful night. That had allowed me to slip in through a gap in their defenses and I was now within the inner cordon. Even when one of them bothered to check the approaches to the compound, he was looking in the wrong direction. To think that I had things too easy would be to make the same mistake that they had, so I had to stay on my game and not allow tardiness to slip in. Otherwise four lazy men would end up dead.
The guards were talking and griping in low throaty voices that still carried to my ears, but though I understood a spattering of languages, Jamaican patois wasn’t one of them. It would have made my job easier if they were conversing in English, but this was some sort of singsong banter, interspersed by regular affirmations of “Yea, man,” and knuckle bumps, even when the subject required complaint. The guards were all men in their late twenties, two of them tall and skinny, with prominent cheekbones, the other a short, stocky man. They all wore slacks and Doc Marten shoes, and a collared shirt hanging loose over the gun in belt. The heavy cloying heat didn’t affect them. It was as stifling at four in the morning as it would be later in the day. Sweat oozed from every pore on my body and my hair was glossy and stuck to my scalp. My clothing had taken on extra poundage, it was so damp. It was difficult finding a place where I could wipe the moisture from my palms, but I knew from experience that the inner sides of my elbows were about the driest on my entire frame. I scrubbed my palms on each elbow in turn, in order that I had a firm grip on the butt of my handgun. My gun, a SIG Sauer P226 Tactical, was one I’d collected from a safe box supplied by a contact on the island — not my personal weapon, but I’d cleaned, oiled and test-fired the gun and knew it to be serviceable. It had a slightly longer barrel than my usual piece, and came equipped with threads to attach a suppressor. The suppressor I’d attached would affect the accuracy, but at the range I was to the guards it wouldn’t make much difference.
Some might challenge my decision to kill the guards, seeing as they were hopeless at their jobs, but I couldn’t allow them to be there on my return. I required a clean escape route — not for myself per se but for the civilians I intended bringing out with me.
It was August, a few days after my birthday, but there in Jamaica it was the rainy season. When it rains there it rains. It comes down in torrents, an almost solid sheet, a deluge. The heavens opened just as I approached the men. The noise was tremendous, as the rain battered the tree canopy and sluiced through the branches to the earth. The timbre of the guards’ voices changed, more highly pitched now as they moved for cover beneath the fronds of an Indian rubber tree. I smiled. They were actually aiding my task, because it meant I’d have to drag them a lesser distance to concealment.
I shot two of them in the backs of their skulls before number three even realized they were under attack. He let out a wordless shout but it didn’t carry over the noise of the water thundering through the leaves. The last of them was the stocky man, and I saw that he wasn’t a natural with a firearm. Not that he wasn’t familiar with it, but that his reaction was to fight fist to fist, the way he had while growing up in the ghettos of Kingston town. He came at me with his arms coming up to grasp at my throat, with the intention of bearing me to the ground where he could pound the life out of me with his meaty fists. I shot him in the throat, and the round exited at the base of his skull. The battering rain didn’t allow for the spray of blood and skull fragments to remain aloft for long, but purged them from the air. The guy was dead, but still standing. I caught him around his burly chest with the crook of my left arm, took him backward and allowed his settling weight to take him through the nearest rubber tree branches and out of sight. Then I turned my attention on the other two and dragged them inside the cordon of low-hanging branches and roots that were nigh on impregnable a body length beyond the outer branches. I moved back on to the trail and looked for the men. I could see nothing of them even though I knew where to look. It was doubtful that anyone would come across them until daylight, if then.
Moving along the trail, I was alert for further sentries. Those I’d just killed were the outer belt of guards, but there would be others. Perhaps they would be lazier still, expecting that the men I’d just slain would alert them to any trouble, but I couldn’t count on it. There were always one or two people who took their duties seriously, and I couldn’t allow my attention to slip for a second.
Thirty years previously this compound had been a holiday haven for rich Americans, but it had declined into bankruptcy and neglect by the early nineties, and was now a ghost of its former glory. The buildings that once housed the holidaymakers, as well as the restaurants and pavilions that pandered to their needs, were still there, but they had all suffered from the years of neglect and were now faded shells of their former beauty. The jungle had encroached in many places, and most of the outer buildings had been reclaimed by the land, and were now empty husks from which grew trees and shrubs. The buildings were of a colonial style, but just like the colonies they were based upon they were now a thing of the past. Years ago, while Diane and I were still married, we holidayed in Jamaica at a resort on Montego Bay, but this place didn’t bring back any happy memories of our time on the island. Then we did what most tourists did: we climbed the world-famous Dunn’s River Falls, swam with dolphins, and sailed on the turquoise waters and snorkeled on the reefs. My trip here this time would hold no such joys. Something that struck me back then was how the stereotype of the marijuana-smoking Jamaican Rasta was very much that, but the one where they were known as the “happy people” was true. I’d never met people so happy to be alive. The men in this compound went against the grain in that respect. They were scumbags of the highest order and only pleased when making the lives of others unbearable.