kitchen had all belonged to deadbeats and skip-rents, he added-Pender was to help himself. Pender thanked him, asked him where he could pick up the key to the A-frame.
“No key required,” Apgard replied. “Didn’t seem to be much point putting a lock on a door of a house with plastic screens for walls.”
That last comment continued to resonate with Pender as he left the Great House, bound for the strip mall to stock his new digs. Screen walls, no locks. He decided maybe he’d accept Julian’s offer of a gun to go along with the squad car. Something with double action for a quick double tap. And big. A forty-five at least. Three-fifty-seven Magnum would be even better, Pender decided. Guy’s swinging a machete at you, you don’t just want those first two rounds knocking him
5
You don’t avoid authority successfully for over thirty years by hanging around crime scenes. The previous night Dawson had donned her backpack and lit out for the forest before the police arrived, and had stayed there until the coast had cleared back at the Core.
Or until she thought it had cleared, anyway. The Core seemed to have returned to normal-there were no cops on the hillside-but when she walked down to the kitchen to get her homemade yogurt out of the communal refrigerator, there was a green-and-white police cruiser parked alongside the usual collection of junkers, under the flamboyant tree at the end of the lane.
Her heart started pounding. Fight or flight. Flight or flight, more like it. She spooned a couple of dollops of yogurt into a cereal bowl from the drying rack, sprinkled some wheat germ on, and hurried back up the hill. But not fast enough. She heard a man shouting her name, turned, and saw Pender strolling toward her down the dappled lane. “Dawson!”
My God, she thought-who dresses that man? Yellow-and-green Hawaiian shirt, blue-and-white-plaid Bermudas, orange-and-white flip-flops. His legs were nearly as white as his Panama hat. “Hey, Ed.”
He caught up to her. “Did you hear, we’re neighbors. I just moved into that A-frame at the end of the lane.”
“Welcome to the Core,” said Dawson.
“Thank you. Which one’s your house?”
“That Quonset at the top of the clearing.” She pointed.
“Looks nice and cozy.”
“Cozy-that’s the word.” The floor of the round hut was less than twenty feet across.
“Listen, I was wondering if I could ask you something.”
“I suppose.”
“It’s just, I don’t really know very many people here. And I still owe you for saving my keister the other day. So I was hoping maybe you’d let me take you out to dinner tonight.”
“It’s really not necessary,” said Dawson.
“I know-but it’s a damn good excuse for asking you out,” said Pender. “You’re not going to make me have to think up another one, are you? Because I will if I have to.”
That threw Dawson for a loop. The truth, she thought-what a concept.
Pender wanted to try local cuisine. Dawson suggested the Raintree Room, just outside of Frederikshavn, about a quarter of a mile up the dundo road. Dundo meant darkened, she explained, for the way the forest canopy closed out the sky.
The dundo road-Hettie Jenkuns. “Is there a cemetery up that way?” he asked Dawson. They were in his police cruiser; he’d turned off the two-way radio.
“The old slave burying ground.”
“I’d like to take a look.”
“Just keep driving. Watch for a turnoff on the right, after we pass the public grove.”
THE GOVERNOR CLIFFORD B. APGARD, SR. PUBLIC GROVE, according to the roadside plaque erected by the St. Luke Historical Preservation Society. A few acres of gnarled lime trees-little Key limes.
No plaque marked the turnoff for the slave burying ground-just a rutted dirt track, and even that narrowed until the cruiser could no longer pass. Which meant the Machete Man had to have known this place existed beforehand, thought Pender-he hadn’t just stumbled on it. Which meant in turn that he was either a local or knew something about local history.
Of which Dawson was a fount. Pender followed her down a footpath that opened out onto a level clearing with an enormous baobab tree in the middle. “They say in the old days they used to hold Obeah rituals up here,” she told him. “You know, torches and drums and dancing, maybe sacrifice a chicken under the Judas Bag tree.”
“The what?”
“Judas Bag. That’s another name for the baobab, on account of those.” She pointed to one of the foot-long oval bags dangling from the branches of the tree. “Each one’s supposed to have exactly thirty seeds-you know, like the thirty pieces of silver Judas got for ratting on Jesus.
“It’s one of the longest-lived trees in the forest, and also one of the most useful. The trunks are hollow, so you can get water from them, you can make paper, cloth, and thread out of the bark, and they say you can eat the fruit-I’ve never tried.”
The weeds had already obscured Hettie’s temporary grave, as they had the older, more permanent graves, only a few of which were still marked with faded headstones or half-toppled wooden crosses. Cute place to hide a body, thought Pender. The old needle-in-a-haystack trick. Bones in a boneyard, two bits.
And according to what Dawson had told him the other day, the rocks and ledges at the base of the Carib cliffs were supposed to be sort of a boneyard as well. So was it possible the bodies had been placed there, rather than simply washed up by happenstance?
Damned if I know, thought Pender-he was starting to feel the flop sweat again.
6
Before he left the Great House Saturday evening, Johnny laid out Lewis’s black suit for Hokey’s funeral Sunday, folding the trousers over the dowel of the dumb valet and slipping the coat over its rounded mahogany shoulders. Lewis was in the shower, washing away a late-afternoon hangover. He’d kept on drinking after Pender left, and eased his nerves further with a pipeful of chronic. Maybe more than one-his subsequent nap had lasted through suppertime.
After another slug of overproof to wash down a handful of aspirin, then a hot shower, using one of Hokey’s shower caps to protect the bandage on his head, Lewis was feeling more himself. Before leaving the bathroom, he opened the window to air it out-in this climate, new life-forms had been known to spring up overnight.
When Lewis returned to the bedroom, the suit on the dumb valet gave him a turn. It looked a little like the Baron Samedi effigy they used in voodoo ceremonies. And he hadn’t worn black since the Guv’s funeral. He remembered reading somewhere that the Chinese or the Africans or somebody wore white for mourning. Wouldn’t that cause a stir at First Lutheran tomorrow, thought Lewis.
He had to get through the night first, though. Hopefully without leaning quite as hard on the Reserve, he promised himself as he changed into a pair of Bermudas and a crimson-and-blue rugby shirt. But the worst was behind him, and he’d come up with a plan in the shower. Might as well take advantage of the Epps’s absence to go through the overseer’s house, find out what he could about his new…what was the word? collaborators? conspirators? partners?
Because as soon as the deal had gone down, Lewis had begun to have second thoughts, if not about the deal
