red X appeared at the end of the wire.
'Scheisser,' she said. 'Sorry, Mr. Wood. The storm has damaged the phone lines.'
'Oh,' I said. 'Shit.'
'Maybe tomorrow,' she said, 'it usually takes them a day or two… '
'All right. Thank you anyways,' I said.
'Wait,' I said as she stood up, 'could I write an email and put it in your outbox? So it would go out the next time you connected?'
'Certainly,' she said, and opened up Outlook for me. 'Just close it when you're finished.'
'Thank you,' I said, and sent a quick message to Talena:
Subject: To be opened in the event of my death or disappearance
His name is Morgan Jackson. He was on the Africa truck.
I thought the Subject: line was kind of funny. I was in that kind of mood.
When I was finished I saw that Femke had gone inside to check on her husband instead of returning to her hammock chair. I padded back across the wooden patio, dripping with every step. And just inside the patio screen I saw one of her husband's parangs, protruding from a wooden block.
I stopped and looked over my shoulder. Neither of them was looking. I reached down and took the cold wooden handle of the parang and pulled it free. It took a surprising amount of force. Her husband was much smaller than me but very strong. But I worked it free with a second violent jerk and walked back to my cabin.
Once inside I quickly dried the iron blade with a T-shirt and I examined it carefully. Like a machete, but curved like a scimitar. A blade maybe two feet long. The handle was well worn hardwood. It felt good to have a weapon. A sword. I imagined swinging it at Morgan Jackson. It was a pleasing image.
The rain lasted longer today, three and a half hours instead of two, and the sun was already sinking into the horizon when it let up, sudden as a thunderclap. I knew what I should do. What I should do was pack up and find a horsecart (cedak in local parlance) willing to drag my sorry ass down the muddy smear that was the road to Kotoraya. Then I should take a bemo back to Mataran and email Talena. And the next day I should ferry it back to Bali, head for Denpasar airport, and fly back to the good old U S of A, mission complete, Laura and Stanley Goebel's murderer identified.
But that is not what I did.
Chapter 15 Run Through The Jungle
I had an early dinner at Mekar Sari.
'Mr. Wood,' Femke asked me, after serving a superb dish of gado-gado, 'have you by any chance seen a parang anywhere near here today?'
'No,' I said, affecting surprise.
She shook her head. 'These people. They're terribly racist, did you know that? Because I am white, they think it is perfectly all right to steal from us anything that they can.'
I made sympathetic sounds, feeling a little guilty, and went to bed before the sun had sunk into darkness.
Hypothetical question. Suppose you have identified to your own satisfaction, beyond any reasonable doubt, a serial killer who has murdered at least two people for sure, one them a woman you loved, and will probably kill again. Suppose you know that there is no chance of the authorities ever catching up with him, because you have no hard evidence and furthermore he was smart enough to commit his murders beyond the jurisdiction of competent authorities. Suppose further that you and the killer know each other well. Suppose even further that he must also know that you know, or at least be very deeply suspicious. And finally suppose that you encounter one another in a remote Third World village.
The question is… no. There are three questions. One, what is the right thing to do? Two, what is the smart thing to do? And three, what do you actually do? Those were the questions that ached in my brain that night as I lay behind a locked door and window and stared at the ceiling, listening to the unnerving keening noise, just at the edge of hearing, that radiated from the rice paddies. Some local critter, I guessed, like a cricket but more disturbing.
The smart thing to do, that was easy. Run like hell.
The right thing to do — well, never mind right in the moral sense. We were way past morals here. Try right as in what I wanted to happen. I wanted Morgan Jackson dead. Of that I was certain. I was as opposed to capital punishment as the next guy. Amnesty International was my favourite charity. But I wanted him dead. It wasn't even the threat he posed to future victims. I wanted him dead for what he had done to Laura.
Could I kill him? Almost certainly not. He was the Great White Hunter, he was bigger than me, and stronger, and he had killed before, and overall was about a hundred times as dangerous as yours truly. But could I as in could I bring myself to do it? Would I kill him? I didn't know. In the heat of action, maybe, but in cold blood… I didn't know. Talena had said I wasn't a killer. But I didn't think she knew me as well as all that.
Let me stress that I had no crazy plans about breaking into his room and running amok with the parang. I wasn't going to try to exact revenge all by my lonesome. My self-preservation instinct remained strong. So why didn't I leave? Why wasn't I already in Mataran? I didn't know. I don't know. It wasn't mental paralysis, though the effect was much the same. It was just a deep-rooted feeling that I shouldn't go. That somehow my work there was not done.
Maybe, looking back, I was just waiting for him to come to me. I wasn't afraid any more. My anger didn't leave any room for fear. I understood now, for the first time in my life, what people were talking about when they talked about cold fury. I understood how it could last for years.
So when it was well past dark I unbarred the door and stepped outside into the warm damp night, Maglite in one hand, parang in the other.
He wasn't there. Nobody was there. I shined the Maglite around and its beam was swallowed up by the darkness. The moon was not yet up. Last night the starlight had been bright enough to navigate by, but tonight a thick tapestry of cloud hung overhead, and the darkness was absolute.
I closed the door behind me and began my trek to the Harmony Cafe. I had to walk a zigzag rice-paddy-ridge path for five minutes and then go down the muddy road about half a kilometer. There was nobody else on it. A donkey whinnied somewhere, and something splashed in one of the rice paddies. A cool wind blew in fits and gusts. The air was fragrant with the clean sweet smell of recent rain. I was nervous but not frightened. The parang was comforting in my hand. I didn't know what I was doing.
Like many Indonesian lodges the Harmony was built as a U-shaped bungalow around a flagstoned patio. I crept around the edge of the building, looking in windows. There were still three rooms that flickered with candlelight.
In the first, an old Indonesian man lay back on a moth-eaten bed, smoking ganja. I glanced in the second window, and past a curtain that covered it incompletely I got an eyeful of two topless Swedish beauties giggling and comparing their tan lines by candlelight. They seemed so completely incongruous to the pervasive sense of menace I felt that I nearly broke out laughing. After a moment's ogling I tore my attention away from the walking male fantasy and went to the third room, where Morgan and his redheaded friend Peter were lazily playing cards while Peter smoked a joint. I noticed that Morgan waved off Peter's offer to share. Very unlike him. Unless he was planning some kind of activity for which he did not want to be stoned.
I stood there for awhile, indecisive, and then I walked back across the road and found a big rock to sit on, close enough that I could still make out shapes at the Harmony Cafe, far enough away that I wouldn't be noticed. I sat there for a long time. I placed the parang and Maglite between my feet. I think I fell asleep.
Something brought me back to consciousness. At first I couldn't tell what. I looked around. The moon had risen. I suddenly realized that in the moonlight I might well be visible from the Harmony so I backed away another twenty feet.
And only just in time. A shape detached itself from shadow and set off up the road. From the Harmony, towards Mekar Sari. A tiny circle of light led its way on the ground. Someone carrying a flashlight, I saw, as my eyes
