The Sea Grape Tree (25 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

A
fter laying two of her scarves on the side table, Sarah wrapped the thin pink towel around her hand, holding it tight in her fist. She took up her position beside the door, the first minute ticked off by the thumping behind her ribs. Five minutes, feeling like twenty, went by. At the end of ten minutes, her chest had gone numb and her feet were starting to sweat in their tennis shoes, feet that had gone bare for thirteen scratches on the wall.

She'd hatched the plan that morning. As she'd stood in the shower, trying to wash off the sensation of scratchy hands on her face and arms, probing fingers in her privates, the reality of her rape had poured slow rage into her. It seemed to clear her head somehow, forcing her to sit on her bed afterward assessing her situation.

Her gut told her that the men in the living room had come to some conclusion about her fate, were probably planning it already. The idea of putting her on a plane had been scotched, she guessed, her passport not located. Another plan for her disposal had to be made and, according to Man-Up, they'd be coming for her soon.

They wouldn't expect her to do anything. Her docility, her painting of leaves, the amiable sketching of her captors had lulled them into an assumption that she was a passive person. Her most frequent visitors had started chatting to her when they entered. Clementine had stopped closing the door when she brought in her meal and Batsman had told her that his portrait was now in a frame. The maid had confided that she'd been named for the song her mother loved, and not a flower. She'd even warbled a few lines from the song.

Unwrapping the towel, flexing her hand, Sarah began to have second thoughts about her plan. Maybe it was safer to wait. If she tried to escape, a million things could go wrong. She started toward the bed, then turned back and took up her position again.

The familiar steps started shuffling down the corridor. She caught her breath. The shuffling drew closer. One bolt was drawn back, then the lower bolt, this time with a groan (she pictured the middle-aged woman stooping low, knees gaping, one hand gripping the tray). The door opened and Sarah ducked behind it. On her way to the bed, Clementine glanced at the closed bathroom door, from behind which came the sound of the shower.

“Your breakfast come,” she called.

Sarah pushed the bedroom door until it was almost closed. She tiptoed toward Clementine as the maid set the tray down and straightened. In a flash, she drew the towel tight across the woman's mouth. Clementine clawed weakly at the towel as Sarah pushed her facedown on the bed. After knotting the cloth behind the woman's head, Sarah snatched up the ends of the top sheet and tied them around her legs.

“You're just going to have to lie here for a bit, old lady,” she said as she turned her captive over. With one of the scarves, she secured the maid's shaking hands, hands that had fed her.

“I'm not going to hurt you.” She stood in front of Clem­entine, hands akimbo, the way the maid had often stood over her. “I just want a chance to live, really. Wouldn't you?” The woman lay still, a puzzled, almost hurt, look in her eyes, while the artist tied her sheet-wrapped feet with the second scarf.

Sarah took a last look at her captive, a pink mummy lying diagonally across the bed, before creeping to the door. She waited, listening. Only a few bird calls outside her window. She entered the corridor, pulling the door almost closed behind her, and tiptoed in the direction Clementine came from every day. Four closed doors lined the corridor, two on each side, and she glanced at them as she crept past.

A kitchen, dark and gloomy, lay straight ahead. When she got to the doorway, she paused and took a breath. It was an old-fashioned, L-shaped kitchen, and she could just make out a gas stove and laminated counter along one wall, a sink and refrigerator along another. Straight ahead was a door, probably to the exterior, and she started toward it.

A creak in the corner made her freeze. The older man was sitting at a table; a thin line of smoke streamed upward from an ashtray beside him. His startled eyes looked ominous above his coffee mug.

“Where the
fuck
you going?” he screeched, slamming the cup down.

“I'm getting some tea for Clementine,” Sarah said. “She's not feeling well.”

He jumped up. “Get back to your room, you trying to run away. You think I fool.”

“I'm not running away,” Sarah said, backing into the corridor. “I'll get Clementine.”

She turned and ran down the corridor, past the door to her room, and to the living room, the man pounding on the tiles behind her.

“Come back here!” he screamed.

The living room was empty. She darted to the front door and turned the handle. It was locked. The man grabbed her arm and swung her around, his nails digging into her.

“No woman, I don't care where they come from,” he snarled, “is going to escape from me.”

She wrenched her arm loose and ran to the louver windows, barred like hers. He grabbed her from behind.

“I tell them to send you away long time,” he whined, his off-key voice in her ear as he dragged her back down the passageway. “They didn't want to listen to me. Like somebody need to teach you a lesson.”

When they got to her room, he kicked the door open. Clementine was lying across the bed in her pink cocoon, red eyes bulging above the towel.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

T
his isn't a good idea,” Lambert declared, throwing his sunglasses onto the Rover's dashboard. “We're too exposed.” Early-morning sun was painting the eastern side of the house golden, the rest of the towering building in deep shadow.

“I don't know why we had to come out so early, anyway,” Eric put in.

“Dons don't get up early,” Shad said, “and Lambert have to go to work.”

“We're sitting ducks here,” Danny said. “Anybody can look out the window and see us.”

Shad leaned over Lambert's shoulder. “Just ease the car forward, like you don't mean no harm.”

In the front passenger seat, Eric rolled down his window. “I say we reverse and reconnoiter, like—”

“No, boss,” Shad said. “We can't come all this way and not find out nothing.” It had taken too much time, valuable time, to get the four men and two guns together.

“It's too late, anyway,” Lambert muttered, his eyes on the rearview mirror. All eyes turned in time to see an emerald-­green BMW pulling up behind them, the windows tinted jet-black. It came to a halt in reptilian silence close to their rear bumper.

“Keep the engine running,” Shad instructed. He took the Glock out of his pocket and placed it on the seat, glancing at Danny. As soon as he opened the car door, the driver's door of the BMW opened. An athletic-looking fellow unfolded from the car, navigator sunglasses hiding his eyes. He wore basketball shorts and a neon orange jacket, on his feet matching orange sneakers, one of the imports, with a logo on the side and the strings removed. Even with the expensive clothes, he looked disgusted and fearful, another candidate for the Pen.

The man sauntered toward Shad, jamming his hands into the jacket pockets. “Like you lost or something.” His voice was surprisingly smooth and deep like a radio announcer's.

“We not lost.”

“What you want?”

“We want to see Lizard.”

The man turned his head a few inches toward the car and shrugged. “What you want with him? He tired.”

“We looking for somebody.”

“Who you looking for?”

“That between him and me.”

Shifting from one sneaker to the other, ready to teach somebody a lesson, the man took his left hand out of his pocket. “Don't move.”

He walked backward around the front of the BMW, facing the Rover until he got to the passenger side. The window rolled down with an elegant humming noise and he bent and said something. A few seconds later, he beckoned to Shad.

“He say to come.”

Shad approached slowly, his heart in his throat, thinking of the gun he'd left on the seat next to a startled Danny. If he didn't have his back, maybe Lambert would.

“Stop there!” the driver ordered.

Shad halted in front of the vehicle's gleaming emblem, the circle of blue and white looking like a dartboard. He stared at the man's bright sneakers while the man patted him down, front and back, up and down, fingers not yet as invasive as a prison guard's. When he bent down to pat Shad's crotch, a gun handle stuck out of his jacket pocket. Satisfied, he gave a languid wave toward the passenger side. “He in there.”

The window was still down. Lizard was sitting with his mouth pouted at Shad, annoyed already. He was smaller than the photographs in the newspaper made him look, the rounded features and big eyes stamping him as Janet's family. Wearing a heavy cloth coat, he looked like he'd come back from a trip.

“Excuse me—” Shad started, bending toward the window. The driver stood close beside him, his hands again in his pockets.

“What you want?” Lizard said. “What you sneaking around my house for?”

“We looking for an Englishwoman, she name Sarah, a tall woman with red hair.”

“And why you come to me?” The man's surprise looked genuine, his eyebrows arching and relaxing.

“We can't find her nowhere. We was wondering if you see her or hear anything, like how you run things, you know.”

“I never hear of her.”

“We just checking, you know. We asking everybody around the area.”

“Nothing here to check, so just go on about your business.”

Shad nodded and started back to the Rover, Orange Jacket still close. When they got to the front of the Beemer, they peeled off to their separate vehicles.

“Pull to the side so he can pass,” Shad said after he climbed in. Danny handed him the gun and Lambert pulled the Rover over. The blackened windows of the BMW glided past, slowly enough for its passengers to take a good look at them, and the wrought-iron gates opened silently to admit them. Lambert reversed to the end of the road where he could turn around.

“What did he say?” Danny asked.

“He say he don't know any woman named Sarah.”

“End of mission,” Eric said.

“Not yet,” Shad replied.

“We have to make them think we're leaving,” Lambert said. He revved the car engine and turned the corner.

“But we not going to leave,” the bartender said sharply.

Lambert slowed down. “What now?”

“Damn, Shad,” the boss moaned.

“There's a banana walk just before we turn onto this road.” Shad nodded. “Turn up there.” Lambert found the narrow dirt road, lined on each side by banks of fifteen-foot banana trees, and turned in.

“We can't see anything from here, man,” Danny said. “This stuff is too thick.”

“At least it's hiding us,” Eric said.

“Get up close to the house,” Shad urged, “as close as you can get.”

The car bumped along the farm road until the large house rose to their left, its verandah balusters high above the trees.

“Stop here,” Shad said. “I going to get closer.” After Lambert stopped, the bartender climbed out.

“I'm coming with you,” Danny said.

Their footsteps silenced by the floor of dead leaves, the two men slid between the tree trunks, pushing aside the ripening fruit in their blue plastic bags. The wall was taller than it looked from the road.

“We can't see nothing, man,” Danny said. “We can't even see over the wall.”

“Help me up.”

Stepping onto Danny's bent leg, Shad grabbed the top of the wall and pulled up. The house ran eighty feet or longer, parallel to the wall, Lizard's green chariot now parked on its circular driveway. Underneath the overhanging balcony was a construction job in progress, an addition to the house. Unpainted concrete-block walls stood behind piles of sand and gravel. Bags of cement were stacked inside an unfinished doorway.

“What you seeing?” Danny hissed.

“Not much,” Shad whispered back. About to step down from Danny's knee, he clutched onto the wall. “Wait, I hear something.” There was a stirring at the front of the house, a door opening and closing. “Somebody leaving.”

“Can you see who it is?”

A woman in a red skirt appeared on the circular driveway, her back to them. She walked around the green car and toward the gate. The bold stride of the woman was familiar, something about the way she swung her hips and kicked out her feet when she walked.

Shad snorted softly. “It look like—no, it can't be—but it could be—”

“Who is it, man?”

“You never guess.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

E
ric chewed the inside of his cheek as Shad and Danny climbed into the Rover's backseat. He'd had enough of Shad's rescue missions. One day they'd be arrested—or killed, dammit—and for what? There was no hope of Danny investing in a hotel, anyway, not after this crap, and now this caper looking for a missing tourist who had nothing to do with the hotel.

Beside him, Lambert turned to the men in the back. “What happened? Why did you run back to the road? I didn't know if we were supposed to follow you.”

“We have to go to Annotto Bay,” Shad said.

“We saw Carthena,” Danny said, closing the car door quietly behind him. “She knows where Sarah is, man. She says she's in another house.”

Eric swung around. “You're kidding! I thought we were on a wild-goose chase.”

“She didn't want to talk at first,” Danny said. “She said all she was doing was visiting her mother.”

“You should have seen her face when we jumped out in front of her,” Shad said, snickering.

“And you got her to talk—just like that?” Lambert asked.

“She was vexed when we hold on to her,” Shad replied. “She say we shouldn't frighten a person like that. I ask her what she was doing in the house, and she say her mother sick and she come to see her. I ask her why her mother living in Lizard house, and she say none of my business. I tell her to talk if she know what good for her, and that I want to know where the Englishwoman is. But she so
facety,
little and fresh, she just suck her teeth at me. She say she don't know anything about the Englishwoman.
I tell you she leave and gone back to England,
she say. But then she say she glad she gone, that she never like her, and how she want to take every man she see, even the trumpeter man Ford. And, right then, I know she know something, just the way she happy that Sarah gone.”

“I took a photograph on my cell phone while Shad was holding her,” Danny said, “and I told her I was going to show it to the police and put it on the Internet, and I was going to say that she and her mother was family to Lizard, a known drug dealer. That seemed to get to her.”

“I think it was the gun on her neck.” Shad chuckled. “I never meet a woman yet who not afraid of a gun. Is a good thing she don't know I don't have no bullets. When I tell her to run down the road toward town, she start flying down the hill, you see.”

After they'd gotten back to the main road and were heading west, Eric broke the silence. “So, why are we going to Annotto Bay? You might as well tell us.”

“Carthena tell us Sarah in a house in Annotto Bay.”

“Oh, God,” groaned Eric, his only comfort knowing that Danny wasn't in the drug business, or didn't seem to be.

It was seventeen long miles to Annotto Bay and, one eye on Lambert's speedometer, Eric counted them off, ignoring the lush fields of bananas flying past his window. He'd never liked the parish of St. Mary, too competitive with Largo's parish of Portland, everybody fighting for skimpy tourist dollars far away from Montego Bay.

In Annotto Bay, Lambert drew up outside a redbrick Baptist church. “Where to now?”

“She said the house is on a hill, a house with a blue wall,” Shad said. “That was all she would say.”

“Sounds like another don,” Lambert said. “Or somebody in the business.”

“How do you know?” Danny asked.

“They like the hills because it make a good lookout,” Shad said.

Lambert frowned. “We're looking for a blue wall. That's all you know? There must be a hundred blue walls in this town.”

Danny leaned over his shoulder. “Why don't you get a good vantage point? Maybe a place where we can look up at the hills so we can spot a blue wall.”

“Good idea.” Lambert nodded and pointed the car toward the waterfront.