Twenty-Seven Bones

“Dying breath?” said Lewis incredulously, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Bennie wasn’t creeping up on him with the sap. “That’s why you killed all those people, to get their dying breaths? It’s insane. It’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Why?”

“Because…it just is, that’s all.”

“How do you know? How do you know the soul isn’t contained in the dying breath? Ever tried it?”

“No.”

“I have. We have. Time and time again. Think about it, Lew. Make a little room in your mind-just a postulate. Say it’s true. Say some ancients discovered it accidentally. Like I did, like Phil did a few years later. Are they going to broadcast it? It’d be wholesale slaughter-no one would ever die of old age.

“So instead, they codify it, they ritualize it, they hierarchize it. All over the world, there are cultures that ritualize the dying breath. The Ibos, the Ijaws, the Niassians, several Amazon tribes. Don’t be a fool, Lewis. Let us show you the way to the fountain of youth and strength and health, and everything that money can’t buy. All you have to do is come with us tonight and take that first sip. We have to give the police a straw man anyway. It’s either that or the gallows-what do you have to lose?”

Lewis was spooked. Every time he looked away from the shadow puppets on the wall, then looked back at them, they seemed to be in a slightly different position. He could hear the Epps whispering in the corner bedroom. He hadn’t had a drink in two hours, but felt almost as if he were tripping. The world was slightly atilt. Definitions were shifting. What was real and what wasn’t. What was possible and what was impossible.

On the surface of it, Emily’s story was insane. But as she’d pointed out, there was no logical way to disprove it. He’d seen the video, he’d seen the severed hands. But the dying breath? The soul? Lewis remembered reading about an experiment somebody had done once. They’d gone into a hospital or a nursing home or something, and somehow contrived to put dying people on an incredibly sensitive and accurate scale. Weighed them just before and just after death. The bodies were always lighter afterward. Not much. A few milligrams-but more than would have been accounted for by the weight of expelled gas alone.

Which didn’t prove that the soul or spirit or the sahoohey fatooey or whatever Emily called it actually existed, or if so, whether it was exhaled along with the last breath, or conferred any sort of benefit upon the recipient, much less represented the fountain of youth, health, and everything else money couldn’t buy.

But while in the long run, the implications were indeed staggering if the Epps’s theory turned out to be legitimate, in the short run, thought Lewis, it didn’t matter whether it was legitimate-what mattered was that the Epps obviously believed it. And motivated by that belief, this vaguely creepy couple had become two of the most prolific and successful serial killers in the history of homicide.

They’d been doing it for fifteen years, Emily had told him, without so much as a cross word from the authorities. Lewis believed her: in addition to the video, she’d shown him the Polaroids of Andy Arena, Tex Wanger, and Frieda Schaller stretched out on the cross in the cave.

He even recognized the cave: irony upon irony, it was under Apgard land. Steep, useless, unsalable land half a mile inland from the Carib cliffs, land from which the mahogany and the other valuable hardwoods had been clear-cut two hundred years ago, leaving behind only high second growth, the valueless turpentines, and a single elephant’s ear tree.

Lewis, who was a bit claustrophobic, had only explored the caves once, as a teenager; a few years later the Guv had had the entrance sealed with a boulder when the cavers first started showing up. Liability issues.

And now, the Epps had turned it into a…what? abattoir? torture chamber? And they wanted him to join them. To partner up. Lucky him.

Hokey, Hokey, Hokey, thought Lewis: why didn’t you just let me cut down the goddamn trees?

Phil proved a harder sell than Lewis. He’d already signed off on the general outlines of Emily’s plan, but had assumed they would only be using Apgard as an alibi, in the unlikely event they were even questioned. Success had bred confidence over the years, and with the added camouflage of age, he felt more cop-proof than ever.

“Why now?” he asked Emily. They were sitting on the edge of the bed, whispering with their heads together. Phil had of course overheard most of the conversation in the living room, and had noted with mixed satisfaction that Emily hadn’t had any more success conveying the experience of the dying breath than he had. “We’ve never needed outside help before.”

“I told you, I have a feeling about Lewis.” Emily touched her lower belly again. “You’re aging slower, thanks to the ehehas, but you’re aging, Phil. So is Bennie. You won’t be able to lug bodies around when you’re eighty or ninety or a hundred years old. Apgard is young, healthy, rich-I can’t think of a more useful ally. And if we don’t live forever, or decide we don’t want to, we have a responsibility to pass on what we know.” She nodded toward the typewriter and the sheaf of manuscript on the card table. “It’s like you said the other day, it would be an unholy shame if our secret died with us.”

Long pause, then: “Is that really the reason you’re bringing him in?”

Good grief, thought Emily: he’s jealous. Of Apgard. How sweet, how very sweet. She took his grizzled head between her hands, pulled it against her bosom. “Philly, I’d fuck that young man in a twinkling, and so would you. But that doesn’t mean I want to replace you with him, even if I could.”

“Promise?” Phil whispered into her decolletage.

“I promise.” She stroked his head for a few seconds, then pushed him away. “It’s Sunday night-where do we find our down-islander and our hooker?”

8

Sunday night is bargain night on Wharf Street. A garote can get laid a lot cheaper if he keeps his pecker and his pay in his pants all weekend. Ruford Shea, the man who’d been voted most valuable scrounger at the Core’s October tempura feast, had saved up all month, paid his rent on Tuesday, sent a hundred dollars back to his wife on St. Vincent on Friday, and by Sunday was down to seventy-five dollars. But by Sunday night, twenty bucks would fetch a blow job from any whore on Wharf Street and fifty would get you laid; either way he’d still have a minimum twenty-five left over to get him through to payday. Then next week he’d start saving again-no more whores, if he expected to make it home by Christmas.

When he left the Core in his plucky ’72 Toyota Corona-you could see the road through the floorboards-Ruford was still an undecided consumer. Once he saw Angela standing on the raised wooden sidewalk, in the shade of the portico outside the old Customs House (now the first souvenir shop the tourists saw when they came off the cruise ship), he knew he’d be lucky to escape with even the twenty-five in his pocket.

Angela, a tall, dark-skinned gal who could get a man hard with her eyes, had fled Montserrat after the eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano in ’97-you can’t walk the streets when they’re knee deep in ash. And unlike many of the Wharf Street gals, Angela permitted, even encouraged, kissing. Sometimes Ruford missed kissing his wife more than he missed the sugah down deh.

Ruford pulled over, right side to curb on the wrong side of the street. Angela sauntered over-and if she could saunter in those fuck-me heels and that ass-hugging, postage stamp vinyl skirt she was wearing, she could saunter in anything. Ruford reached over and opened the door. She slid in, then made a pretense of tugging her skirt back down over her stocking tops. They exchanged pleasantries-she didn’t remember his name, but she remembered his island. When he told her what he wanted, she cast a dubious glance toward the backseat of the Corona.

“Ain’ much room back dere fa dese long legs a mine, y’know mon.”

“It’s a balmy evenin’, why don’ we spread a blanket up by Lime Grove?” suggested Ruford.

“You ain’ be dot Machete Mon fella dey be tahkin’ ’bout.”

“Me a steppin’ razor,” said the little down-islander, “but me ain’ no Machete Mon.”

The Epps hadn’t worked whores since San Jose. Lewis was more of an expert-he knew where to find them, and when they saw the dark-skinned whore with the long, long legs get into the rust-eaten Toyota, he knew where they’d be going-the public grove.

Lewis did not, however, realize that the driver of the Toyota was one of his tenants until later. They had parked the Land Rover off the dundo road and hiked around, approaching the grove from the forest instead of the road. There was only the one couple on the grass under the trees. Bennie, a demon of stealth, sneaked up on them