himself in the underbrush, wait for somebody to come by alone, whack ’em on the head, drag ’em into the bushes, hack off a hand-right hand, he reminded himself-and melt back into the forest.
Melt back into the forest-Lewis liked the sound of that. Hot damn! he thought, pouring himself a celebratory shot and slamming the half-empty bottle down hard on the table next to his armchair. Maybe this Machete Man thing wasn’t going to be so difficult after all.
6
For law enforcement the decision to issue advisories was a tough one, for civilians a no-brainer. Ater-lay that afternoon Dawson told Holly about Pender’s warning; just before sunset Holly convened a residents’ meeting in the vacant A-frame across the tamarind-shaded lane from Andy Arena’s house.
This second ’frame was the most expensive rental at the Core, which was why it was also generally vacant. It featured a sleeping loft, electricity, and a back porch that overlooked a rolling meadow with a great spreading rain tree plunked down in the middle for a centerpiece, so elegant, graceful, and symmetrical it could well have been Mother Nature’s corporate logo, especially from spring through fall, when it was covered with pink tufts that lit it up like a Tiffany lamp at sunrise and sunset.
The assemblage of adult Corefolk (the kids, supervised by Dawson, were playing a vigorous game of Red Rover Come Over down in the meadow), was an object lesson in diversity, a rainbow coalition, if your idea of a rainbow is varying shades of white, peach, beige, brown, and black. Holly stood with her back to the fine-mesh plastic screening that enclosed the rear A of the A-frame.
“I’ll make this short. Most of you know that Andy Arena has disappeared. Yesterday an FBI agent named Pender came around asking questions about him. Then when Dawson ran into Pender at Smuggler’s Cove this afternoon, he gave her a vague warning about how something dangerous was happening on St. Luke, and not to hike alone in the forest.
“She wasn’t sure what he was talking about until we saw in the paper that Mrs. Apgard, our landlord’s wife, was murdered yesterday. Now neither of us knows exactly what’s going on here, but we thought the least we could do was let everybody else know what we knew.”
There were a few questions; Holly had even fewer answers. Everyone left the meeting in a somber mood, none more somber than Fran Bendt.
The reporter already knew about Hokey Apgard’s death, including the manner of it, which seemed on its face to be the work of the Machete Man. But it did seem like quite a coincidence, Hokey Apgard becoming one of the Machete Man’s victims the day after her husband learned of his existence. And now that the FBI was sniffing around the Core and Smuggler’s Cove, the story was getting juicier and juicier.
So tomorrow, Fran decided, he would do a little more sniffing around himself, see what he could find out about the G-man. Maybe even get an interview. Then he’d take one last stab at persuading Faartoft to buy the story before he offered it to St. Thomas’s
Still the question remained: now that the Machete Man seemed to be striking close to home-Arena had been a resident of the Core, and Estate Apgard was less than a mile to the east-was it Fran’s duty to share his information with his neighbors, and if so, how much? He’d almost spoken up in the meeting. The only thing that had stopped him was the possibility of being scooped himself. There were no St. Luke natives at the Core-everybody had relatives on other islands, or back in the States. Whom they’d be sure to tell.
And now that his neighbors had reason to be on their guard anyway, what good would it do any of them to know the particulars? It wasn’t like the guy was going to be running around waving his machete. By the time you saw the machete, Fran suspected, it was probably too late to save yourself anyway.
7
Lewis left the Great House on foot, wearing a black watch cap over his bandaged scalp, black jeans, a black nylon jacket zipped up the front over a black T-shirt, two golf gloves, and a pair of Topsiders he would be disposing of along with the other clothes when he was done.
His first stop was the overseer’s house. He let himself in-Lewis had keys to all his rentals, or at least to all the ones with locks. As promised, the machete was hidden in the same hollow of the masonry wall in which Lewis used to hide his porn when there was only one bedroom, back when he and Hokey had lived there as newlyweds. He’d been expecting something fancy, maybe from Indonesia, but it was only the steel-bladed, wooden-handled, utilitarian affair carried by every
He also found the short-handled sap with which Bennie had brained him Wednesday night, and a miner’s helmet with a dual laser/LED lamp attached. He donned the helmet over his watch cap, slipped the truncheon into his pocket and the unsheathed machete through his belt, and set out across the sheep pasture in the direction of Estate Tamarind, on the far side of the southeasternmost finger of the rain forest ridge.
The moon had dropped behind the ridge when Lewis reached the high wooden fence at the end of the pasture. He slipped sideways through the narrow stile. The path began to rise almost immediately; Lewis switched on the white LED beam as sharp-smelling turpentine trees closed out the sky.
The forest path had been cleared in the 1700s as a thoroughfare for the wagons hauling Apgard cane up the hill to the windmill at the summit of the ridge. As a boy, Lewis used to play at driving imaginary slave-, mule-, and ox-drawn wagons with his great-great-grandfather’s old bullwhip. As a man he’d used the path on his Peeping Tom expeditions to the Core.
The fingernail moon was just setting behind the sea when Lewis reached the stone ruins at the summit. The blades and works of the windmill itself were long gone, but the stone tower still stood. Say what you would about those old slave-driving Danes-they knew how to build.
Lewis switched off the LED and used the red laser and the starlight to guide him down the other side of the ridge, then switched off the laser as the lights of the Core winked into view through the trees.
8
Holly’s cabin was about the size of a double-wide trailer, with a plank floor, plywood walls left open around the top for ventilation (fine-mesh plastic screening kept the bugs out-and in), and a corrugated tin roof. The bedrooms were on either end. The middle room served as kitchen, dining, and living rooms-some long-departed, ingenious Peace Corps carpenter had fitted it out with counters that folded up and a table that folded down.
There was neither running water nor electricity in the cabin. Holly did most of her cooking in the big, open- sided communal kitchen down by the lane, which had both electricity and water, plus a big iron restaurant stove, an enormous refrigerator (all contents labeled with the owner’s name, and woe betide the poacher), two industrial- sized sinks, and two long trestle tables.
But the Golds usually ate as a family, back in the cabin. Mealtimes, therefore, involved considerable schlepping, of which Dawn did a major share, sometimes cheerfully and sometimes with a sigh, a toss of her tawny plaits, and a put-upon trudge. Marley was the family dishwasher-it occasionally gave Core newcomers a start to see him sitting on a high stool, with a dishrag in one foot and a plate in the other, but they always got over it.
Holly had to leave for work right after dinner. Her remunerative weekend nights at Busy Hands still provided the bulk of her income. Usually she let the kids stay in the cabin by themselves, and arranged for either Dawson or
