from The Bull didn't seem like such a smart idea.
I recognized the pattern his fingers made on the keyboard — Alt-F4, closing down whatever window he had had open — and then he relaxed back, cool as the proverbial cucumber, and said 'And what can I do for you, Mr. Wood?'
My idea had been to leave him with the notion that maybe I hadn't been behind that mandi last night, that I hadn't heard his soliloquy. Just to seed a little uncertainty in his life, keep it interesting. I suddenly wasn't sure if that was such a good idea. I cleared my throat and said in a worryingly quavery voice 'Just came by to say goodbye. You off today?'
'We are indeed. Kuta Beach. The Lombok version. And yourself?'
'Thought I'd stay here for the day,' I said, 'maybe go back to Mataran tomorrow, Bali the next day.'
'That sounds very sensible,' Morgan said.
We looked at each other for awhile.
'Well,' Morgan said. 'You take care of yourself.'
'I'll try,' I said. And I turned to walk away, kicking myself for having come at all.
I walked back to Mekar Sari. The air was so thick with humidity that I felt as if I was swimming not walking. The phone lines were not yet back up. I felt bad about breaking my email-every-day promise to Talena, but I figured I would feel even worse if I broke my staying-here-until-tomorrow promise to Morgan. And it wasn't really my fault, what could I do about the monsoons knocking out the phones?
I spent the day playing chess, eating, and reading through my Lonely Planet. Indonesia actually sounded like quite a cool country and I would have to come back here sometime. But I wasn't going to stay for my whole three weeks. I had plans already forming. I wasn't going to come after Morgan Jackson here, but if he thought I was going to leave him alone, he was terribly mistaken.
Something nagged at me all day long, the feeling that I'd forgotten something important. I ignored it in the hopes my subconscious would throw it up when least expected; but the hopes went unfulfilled. I fell asleep trying to make myself remember it.
The next morning I went to the patio for my banana pancakes and rose tea, and Femke added one more ingredient to the breakfast; a folded piece of paper, taped shut. I looked at her quizzically.
'Your friend Mr. Jackson gave it to me before he left,' she said. 'To give to you this morning.'
'Oh,' I said. I managed to get to the relative privacy of the chair below my window before tearing it open and reading it. The words were scrawled so clumsily they were nearly illegible, but I managed to decipher it:
WOODSIE OLD BOY AREN'T KERRI amp; ULRIKA A TREAT?
NEVER DONE TWO AT THE SAME TIME BEFORE BUT DOWN IN KUTA THEY'RE GOING TO MEET THE BULL JUST THOUGHT I'D LET YOU KNOW…
HA HA HA and TA
I read it again. I felt very cold.
I was sure they were already dead. That was why he had me wait a day.
Even if they weren't I knew I shouldn't go after him. Here in Indonesia, without some kind of a plan, I wouldn't have a chance. He would kill me. I should leave him be, follow yesterday's plan, go home and there work out some way to get him. Rushing after him to save two perfect strangers was the worst kind of foolishness. This changes nothing, I told myself. Go with yesterday's plan. Yesterday's plan was sound.
Yesterday's plan was sound, and sensible, and utterly cowardly. It was very convenient how my elegant plan for revenging myself on the man who had murdered Laura involved letting him walk away and kill two more girls. Very convenient how it got me the hell out of danger as soon as was humanly possible. Abandoning the two Swedish girls, perfect strangers or no, was the act of a contemptible coward, and I knew it. Even if I was sure that they were probably already dead.
What if they weren't? He couldn't plan for everything. Maybe something had gone wrong. Maybe he'd gotten sick. They might still be alive. And even if they weren't, the sooner I got there, the better chance of getting the authorities to catch him before he left Indonesia.
Even as I contemplated this a raindrop the size of a marble smacked into the sheet of paper, smearing the cheap ink. I looked up. Dark clouds roiled the sky. I could see flickers of lightning on the horizon. The monsoon was back, and this time, I could tell, it wasn't going to fuck around.
No time to lose, I thought, and five minutes later I was packed and paid for. Femke looked at me as if I was crazy when I told her I had to go to Kuta Beach right away. I guess I could understand why. It was already pouring as I began to slog along the rice paddies towards the road. Not quite running, but close.
I left the parang behind. I was through with that particular madness.
Chapter 16 Meet Me On The Beach
It cost me a lot of money to get to Kuta that day. I can't blame the drivers. I wouldn't have wanted to go anywhere in that weather either. The storms of the previous few days had been mere warmups for the main event. The rain hit so hard I thought it might leave bruises. Visibility was approximately three feet. The cedak driver who took me from Tetebatu to Kotoraya wore his arm out whipping the horse with his bamboo switch. The bemo drivers were only a little better off. At one point on the leg from Kopang to Praya the driver slammed on the brakes and swerved so hard that two wheels briefly left the road. The road was too slippery for the brakes to have much effect, and I thought for a second that I was going to be roadkill, but the driver weaved with superhuman skill through a herd of water buffalo that appeared suddenly out of the monsoon like dark omens.
In the end I made it. My watch told me it was five o'clock. This Kuta Beach was nothing like the one on Bali. It was simply a road that ran along the coast, with jungle on one side and beach on the other, and eight hotels clustered near the T-junction that connected to the rest of the island. I walked along the road to the nearest hotel. I didn't hurry. I didn't mind being soaked any more. I and all of my possessions had been soaked all day.
I checked into the Anda Cottages, which had no Morgan/Peter/Kerri/Ulrika in the register, went into my cottage, changed into my swimsuit, and hung the rest of my clothes out to dry. I didn't feel the desperate need for speed that I had felt when the day had begun. After seven hours of travel, there didn't seem any point in worrying about another fifteen minutes. And nobody was killing anybody in this downpour, of that I was pretty sure, not unless Morgan was going to break into their room and start swinging a parang wildly, and that seemed unlikely. His modus operandi was the ambush.
And besides the most likely scenario was that they were dead already.
I went to the common room to find out what was going on. I wasn't sure how I would bring up the subject. 'So, anybody find a couple of murdered Swedish girls around here?' didn't seem like a winning conversation-starter. But then I saw faces that I recognized, Johann and Suzanne, the Dutch couple from Tetebatu, drinking Bintang- and-Sprite shandies. They waved at me and I joined them.
'When did you get here?' Suzanne asked.
'Today,' I said. The waiter came by and I asked him for a beer and then, as I realized I hadn't eaten since the banana pancakes except for half a pineapple in Pao Montong, a dish of nasi goreng.
'You came here through the rain?' she asked.
I nodded and smiled sheepishly.
'We didn't think the roads were open,' Johann said. 'We were supposed to take a Perama bus back to the ferry today, but they said they could not go because of the monsoon.' Perama was the Indonesian tourist authority, which provided air-con buses between major tourist destinations. A little more expensive than bemos, and without their gritty authenticity, but a whole lot more comfortable.
'The roads were pretty bad,' I admitted. 'I'm surprised I got here.'
'Have you been in Tetebatu?' Suzanne asked.
I nodded and drank greedily from my Bintang, which tasted wonderful and felt much-deserved. 'How are things around here?'
'They're good,' Johann said, and Suzanne nodded her agreement. 'Very peaceful. You can rent mopeds and bicycles and go up and down the road. An excellent road with nothing on it. The beach right here,' he motioned towards the sea, 'is not so good… '
