But she felt sad and empty when he was gone. Even now, years later, he was still her image of the ideal physical man. She wasn’t tall, but she had a lot of body – she reminded herself of Marilyn Monroe. Ray was so big and strong he made her feel like a small and delicate flower. It was a beautiful feeling, while it lasted.
After Ray, she spent fall and winter collecting unemployment checks and walking the empty beach. When she looked in the mirror, she caught the first glimpses of something she had thought she would never see. Age. She was twenty-seven. Her skin had seen too much sun. Her body had seen too much alcohol and maybe too many lovers. She counted them and the number only came to twenty-one, less than the number of years she had been alive. She had come close with quite a few others, so close that she almost counted them, but didn’t. Twenty-one had received the gift, she decided. Still, it was more than she’d like. For the first time, she considered that she would like to be a virgin again.
The next one, she thought. I’ll take it slow and I’ll love him, and he’ll be the one I marry. It’ll all be innocent and like new.
Almost a year later, the next one was Tyler Gant. Handsome, fit and tough – in those days Tyler was every inch the newly retired cop. It had been good for a while with him, good enough to get married. He had taken care of her like no man before him – he was the first man who really had the means to do it. But things between them had turned dark and cold, and now their marriage, their love, was like a dead thing lying at the bottom of that pool on the rolling lawn below her.
The heat hit him like a blast from a furnace.
When the airplane door opened, Tyler Gant stepped from the sleek corporate jet into bright sunshine. He wore a suit of summer linen, and the air conditioning on the plane had let him forget how hot it would be here on the island. He climbed down the narrow steps of the plane to the airstrip’s tarmac, which shimmered in the heat. The black tar almost looked like it was bubbling. Gant was the only passenger disembarking from what had probably been designed as an eight- or ten-seater, but was laid out more like somebody’s living room. He’d sat in a barcalounger reading the New York Times for the whole two and a half hour flight. Bad news from everywhere – modern civilization was falling apart and there didn’t seem to be a damned thing anybody could do about it.
Four men in khakis and loose fitting, short-sleeved shirts waited for Gant at the bottom of the steps. They all wore wraparound sunglasses. They all had big shoulders and forearms. Their faces were nearly identical – stone-faced and expressionless. He guessed they all had guns in their waistbands. Hired help.
They didn’t ask him how his flight was. They didn’t offer him a glass of iced tea. They directed him to a corrugated tin shack near the side of the runway. They entered with him and one of them directed him to remove his clothes. The shack was nothing more than one room with a couple of chairs and a desk. It had a dirt floor.
Gant took everything off, right down to his BVDs. As he did so, he handed the articles of clothing to the men, each one pawing through his pockets, feeling the linings of his jacket and slacks, looking for hidden compartments in his shoes. They found nothing – no weapons, no wires, no nada. Gant stood barefoot in the middle of the room, his toes gripping loose dirt, the men hovering around him. They eyed his slim and muscular body, only a flicker here and there betraying the thought – this man is sixty years old? Barely concealed menace came off them in waves.
‘You guys want to do a cavity search?’ he said.
One of the men smiled. ‘We trust you, Gant. You’re one of the good guys.’ He gestured at Gant’s clothes hanging on the back of the chair and draped on the table. ‘Get dressed,’ he said, and the four gorillas stepped outside.
Gant put his suit back on, but there was no mirror to check his look. He made a Windsor knot without benefit of his reflection, the knowledge where it always had been – in his hands. He came out of the shack and a white Lincoln Town Car was now waiting for him. A black SUV was parked in front of it, and another black SUV brought up the rear. Energy crisis, what energy crisis? The commercial airline industry had disintegrated, and Fielding sent a plane to pick up one person. In the United States, fuel riots were a weekly event, but here Fielding sent a motorcade of gas-guzzlers out to the airport. Maybe it was all designed for show – here on fantasy island money and resources were not an issue. Maybe none of it was really true, a Potemkin stage play put on for Gant’s benefit. One of Gant’s guiding principles was not to trust first impressions – often enough, things were not what they seemed.
He climbed into the back seat of the Lincoln. A man sat in there, thin with round wire-frame glasses, nattily attired in a gray three-piece suit, sandy hair brushed back from his face. He extended a bony hand from a thin, fragile-looking arm. The arm could have been a loose thread at the end of his sleeve. Gant shook the hand, and the grip was firm enough. As Gant settled in, the little convoy rolled out. In fact it drove right down the middle of the runway toward a high chain link fence at the far end – the exit. The limo driver was a dark shadow on the far side of a smoked glass partition.
‘Mr Gant?’ the man said. ‘I’m Elliott Howe, Mr Fielding’s personal assistant. How was your flight?’
‘Smooth,’ Gant said. ‘No complaints.’
‘Would you care for a drink?’
‘Not at the moment. Thanks.’
‘Mr Fielding is eager to meet with you.’
‘That’s good news. I see he trusts I don’t have a bomb planted up my ass.’
Gant wasn’t one to suck up oxygen making small-talk, and he didn’t like having happy gas blown his way – especially not three minutes after a strip-search.
The car motored along a narrow, winding concrete highway lined with palm trees and dense undergrowth. Their little motorcade seemed to be the only cars on the road. Gant didn’t bother to look closely at the trees and other plants for what he knew he’d find. The island flora were sick – the rainy season was already lurching towards its end, and for the second year in a row it had barely rained at all. The climate patterns had changed here, abruptly and without calling the weatherman for permission.
Even in good times, many local people had been poor. A steady trickle of tourism had kept the island alive. Now the tourists were mostly gone. They had evaporated along with the gasoline and the good corporate jobs and the Wall Street funny money. With no rain, the meager crops the folks here had planted to save themselves were dried out and dead. There was trouble in paradise. Poverty was bad enough, and sustained drought made it worse, but events were quickly moving to the next level. The island government – dominated and manipulated for many years by the man Gant was about to see – had collapsed. People were going hungry. Roaming gangs of men, armed with machetes, had seized some of the land and homes of the wealthy.
Every few minutes, the Town Car rattled over some rough road, or slowed to a crawl to pick its way across a monster chuckhole. Road maintenance was no longer a priority, it seemed. On the right, a maxi van, that Third World taxi service deathtrap, zoomed by going the other direction. The driver laid on his horn as he passed. The maxi went by so fast that Gant didn’t notice much about it. He was left with the impression that maybe a dozen people were packed inside. All he knew for sure was that the van was still operational, the driver still had access to gasoline, and there was a slogan painted in bright colors on the front of the van: Angel Eyes.
On the left, across more undergrowth, Gant caught a glimpse of the turquoise ocean. On the right, through the bushes, and on the other side of a dilapidated green fence, Gant spied cinderblock homes and tin-roof clapboard shanties in a riot of fading colors. Many of the roofs were outfitted with cisterns to catch rainwater, Gant knew. The whole set up had been described to him months ago. But the cisterns were hardly much use these days.