a smirk. 'Really something in bed, isn't she? Man, she could suck the varnish off a table leg.'
I couldn't look at his face any longer. I lowered my gaze to the front of his shirt, fixed it there. You could almost see the sweat stain spreading. The shape, if you looked long enough, seemed oddly trapezoidal.
'She come down here with you?'
'No way. She's had it with this island.'
'The blackmail—her idea?'
'Mine,' Cutter said. 'We were drinking one night, she had a little too much and dropped your name, and I dragged the whole story out of her. But she didn't try to talk me out of it, I'll tell you that. She needs money, same as me.'
'Why does she need money?'
'Dumb question, Jordan. Everybody needs money. The shittier your job, the more you need.'
'What kind of shitty job?'
'Quit trying to pump me. You got all the information you're going to.' I had something else I wanted to say, something I wanted him to tell her, but the words seemed clogged in my throat. Even after another swallow of rum I couldn't push them out.
Cutter pasted one of his dark-brown cheroots into a corner of his mouth, left it there unlighted. His drink was gone; he rolled the tumbler over his forehead again, then tapped the melting ice cubes into his mouth and began to chew them, the cigar bobbing up and down with the motion of his jaws. The sound he made was like glass being crushed.
He said, chewing, 'So you'll go down to your bank tomorrow and get the twenty-five thousand, right? No arguments?'
'Yes.'
'Good man.' He took the cheroot out of his mouth, scowled at it, spat out a shred of tobacco, and extended the empty glass. 'Do this again, Jordan. Tastes like crap, but at least it's wet. Then you can drive me back to my hotel.'
I got up slowly, took his glass, went around behind him and across to the sideboard. The shaking had stopped; my hands were steady. I put ice in the glass, picked up the heavy decanter. And then I just stood there.
Annalise. Annalise and Fred Cutter. The twenty-six thousand she took with her—gone or almost gone. The clothing manufacturer, the shot at being a fashion designer—gone, too. A different kind of life on the edge now, after only eight months. Back to working at shitty jobs, like the one she'd had in San Francisco. Bedding down with a muscle-bound halfwit, resorting to blackmail. Scraping bottom.
Outside, the wind was rising. I could hear it making a frenzied rattle in the palm fronds, feel its sultry breath swirling in through the open terrace doors.
'Hey,' Cutter said, 'hurry up with that drink. I'm dying over here.'
I turned around. He was leaning forward, rubbing slick off his face again. There was a wet spot on the back of his shirt, too, between the shoulder blades. Another geometric shape, this one a ragged-edged circle with a darker circle in the middle where the cloth stuck to his skin. It reminded me of something, but I couldn't think what it was. Couldn't seem to think clearly at all.
Twenty-six thousand. Five thousand. Another twenty-five thousand. And more bites to come, little ones and big ones until they bled me dry.
Screaming, that wind. Like jumbees in the night.
Some piece. Great in bed. Suck the varnish off a table leg. Lucky to hang on to her as long as you did.
It was as if the coming storm, the jumbees, were inside me now. Blowing hot and wild. Screaming.
Cutter and his
I don't remember hitting him with the decanter.
One second I was standing in front of the sideboard, looking over at him, the storm wind shrieking inside my head, and the next I was beside the chair staring down at him on the floor. The back of his head was crushed and there was blood mixed with rum streaked over the fair hair, blood and rum on the floor, blood and gore on the decanter and spattered across my shirtfront.
I knew then what that sweat stain on the back of his shirt reminded me of.
It looked exactly like a target.
Either I dropped the decanter or it slipped out of my hand, I don't know which. The sound of it hitting the tile floor dragged my gaze away from Cutter. An edge of the heavy cut glass had gouged a triangular chip out of a tile.
Now how am I going to fix that? I thought.
I kept on standing there. Looking at him again, at what I'd done to him. The wildness was still inside me, but it had mutated into a near panic overlain with numbness—
What? Yes, I know that sounds contradictory, but it's an accurate description. All the crazy rage and fear held down under the weight of dazed confusion, like a lid on a bubbling pot.
Time seemed to have gone out of whack, to stop and stutter with long spaces between the ticking seconds. I couldn't think; my mind was a wasteland. Then I grew aware of something moving on my cheek, like a fly walking. I raised a hand, brushed at it. The fingers came away wet and sticky. When I looked at them I saw that they were smeared with blood and something else, a whitish gelatinous substance that must have been brain matter. That broke the spell.
Bile pumped thick and hot into the back of my throat. I ran blindly for the bathroom, barely made it to my knees in front of the toilet before the vomit came spewing out. I pliked until there was nothing left but strings of saliva. It left me weak but calmer. I flushed the toilet, rinsed my mouth. Washed the blood off my hands and face. Pulled my shirt off, found more blood spots on my chest and neck and washed those off. Better still by the time I finished, both the wildness and the numbness starting to fade. I went back through the living room, not looking at what lay sprawled on the floor, and out onto the terrace.
The storm clouds were a dark, fast-moving mass, the wind blustery and hot, the air thick with moisture. When the rains came, the downpour would be heavy for a while but the storm wouldn't last long; before morning the skies would be clear again. You get so you don't need the Caribbean Weather Center to gauge the severity and length of each blow, from squalls to hurricanes. I had developed a mariner's eye, ear, and feel for any barometric change and what it meant.
I sat on one of the wrolight-iron chairs, letting the wind fan my naked torso, listening to it moan in the palms and guava trees while I ordered my thoughts. I was all right by then, my mind working more or less clearly again. It seemed incredible that I could have killed a man, any man; that in the span of a few seconds I had gone from blackmail victim to taker of human life. But the fact didn't have as profound an effect on me as I would have believed beforehand. Didn't frighten or disgust or even sicken me any longer. Temporary insanity, irresistible impulse. The product of circumstances and of my dark side. I was sorry it had happened, if not sorry that the life I'd taken was Fred Cutter's, but it was done and I couldn't undo it. The only thing to do now was to find ways to protect myself from the consequences.
I approached it as I'd approached the Amthor crime: as a series of mathematical problems—three of them— to be broken down and solved one at a time, by a combination of logic and creative planning.
First and most important: what to do with the body.
Limited options, on an island of just thirty square miles. The optimum solution would be to take it off the rock, dump it at sea, and let the sharks have it. But that wasn't possible. No way could I transport a dead man onto
Wait until late and leave the body in Frenchtown or out near one of the beaches? Crime was becoming a problem on the island, and there were occasional acts of violence against tourists; Cutter's death might pass for a mugging or a drug deal gone bad. No, that was no good either. The last thing I wanted was a murder investigation. Suppose one of my neighbors had seen him come here? Suppose he'd mentioned Richard Laidlaw to someone at his hotel, or at the harbor the day before? If he had, and the police found it out, it would bring them straight to my door.
Hide the body in the jungle? There were stretches of dense growth on both Crown Mountain and St. Peter's
