“ I didn’t think of that,” Broxton lied.
“ Sure you did,” Ramsingh said. He waited through another few seconds of silence then added, “Thanks. I doubt any of my men would have taken such a risk.” Then he looked in the rearview mirror and changed the subject. “The maxi behind ran the light, too, with a police car in front,” he said.
“ People don’t respect the law here,” Broxton said. “That’s part of your problem.”
“ We have a long way to go,” Ramsingh said. Then he turned into the yacht club, oblivious to the maxi that sped around him and continued north on Western Main road toward Drake’s Shipyard.
“ Fuzz is gone. Now we can move,” the Rasta driver said and he stepped on the gas.
Earl watched the scenery fly by, fascinated by the rain forest that edged up to the road. He imagined monkeys, snakes, big cats and cannibals inside the dense jungle and shivered as he thought of witch doctors throwing bones and voodoo priests jabbing pins in lifelike dolls.
“ Got snakes in there?” he asked the driver.
“ Got plenty, man.”
“ Poisonous?”
“ Real deadly.”
“ Monkeys?”
“ Most died off, some kind of fever.”
“ Cats, like lions and tigers?”
“ No man.”
“ How about voodoo?” He knew better than to ask about cannibals.
“ We got that.”
“ Shit,” he said, glad they were heading out of the country.
“ I hear ya,” the driver said, then he turned on the radio, cranked it up loud and started singing along with a calypso song.
For the next five or six minutes Earl stared at the lush, green vegetation as it whizzed by the window, wondering why they were leaving. The prime minister wasn’t dead yet. He turned from the window, leaned toward her and whispered, “Where we going?”
“ Grenada,” she said, whispering back.
“ But we haven’t finished it.”
“ Relax, Earl. We’ll be in Prickly Bay shortly after sunup. We’ll check in, go to town, be seen, talk to a few yachties and then we’ll board a plane and come back and finish the job. I don’t like doing it that way, but my father expects the boat to be in Grenada by tomorrow and that’s where it’s going to be, besides it’s a perfect alibi.”
“ Won’t they have a record of us leaving the country?”
“ You said you travel with a couple of extra passports, well I do too.”
“ But everybody here knows you.”
“ Earl, really,” she said. “Think about who I am and what I’ve been doing for the last several years. Don’t you think I can get by a customs officer without being recognized. Shit, I can be eighteen or eighty and I have a passport for every occasion.
The guard left the guard shack as the police car pulled up to the gate. His uniform was pressed and the visor on his hat was as spit shined as his shoes. He wore the uniform like he was proud of it, but his stomach spoke of too many beers when he was off duty.
“ Trouble?” he said, seeing the police car and looking in the window.
“ No, Cletus, I’m just going for a sail.”
“ Mr. Ramsingh, sir.” The guard stepped back.
“ Would you call the president and tell him I went sailing for a day or so. Tell him I’ll call him tomorrow and explain everything.”
“ I can’t call the president.”
“ Sure you can,” Ramsingh said. “Get your clipboard and I’ll give you his private number.”
“ I thought you were the prime minister,” Broxton said a few seconds later as Ramsingh put the emergency brake on in the parking lot.
“ The president’s the head of state, like the Queen in England, and like in England the prime minister’s the head of the government. I’m elected, he’s not.”
“ How’s he get the job?”
“ The prime minister appoints him. He serves for five years, that way his term overlaps the election. In theory he’s not beholden to the prime minister or party in power. He’s supposed to be above politics.”
“ Is he?”
“ Usually.”
The day was fading away as they made their way through the bar toward the dock. There were a few tourists and locals gazing toward the setting sun, hoping to see the green flash, a group of yachties playing cards at one table, a foursome playing bridge at another. Palm trees swaying in the breeze grew along the fence that guarded the north side of the club, a rich housing development bordered on the south and with the road behind and the gulf in front, the yacht club was truly cut off from the daily grind of Trinidad. It was a world unto itself.
“ My boat’s at the end,” Ramsingh said as they left the bar and stepped onto the main dock.
Halyards clinked against aluminum masts, wind generators hummed, a local was hammering a board into the dock, replacing one that had rotted away. These sounds Broxton understood, but there was another, like a west Texas coyote howling long and high in the distance. He stopped and cocked his head, curious.
“ It’s the wind blowing through the roller furled mainsails. Spooky sounding. I don’t like it,” Ramsingh said. “I don’t know why people have them. I can see a roller furled headsail, but what do you do in a blow if the gear jams or the sail bunches up and you can’t get it through that slot in the mast?”
“ I don’t know,” Broxton said. He didn’t understand a word Ramsingh was saying.
“ Exactly,” Ramsingh said. “Give me a main you haul up and reef at the mast any day. It’s the only way.”
“ Sure,” Broxton said, convinced the prime minister was talking to build up his courage, because Ram had to know by now that he didn’t know the difference between port and starboard.
“ There she is, Gypsy Dancer.”
“ That’s it?” Broxton said.
“ That’s her,” Ramsingh said.
“ You’re kidding? We’re not taking that out there,” Broxton said, pointing to the ocean.
“ Yes we are.”
“ It’s so small.”
“ Not so small. My wife and I sailed her around the world.”
“ Shit.”
“ She’s twenty-seven feet and she sails like a witch.”
“ Shit,” Broxton said again.
“ Not scared are you?”
“ Yes.”
“ You’ll get over it,” Ramsingh said as he jumped onto the boat. “You’ll have to undo the lines, take them off those cleats as soon as I start the engine.”
“ Sure,” Broxton said. He shivered when the small inboard sprang to life, but he unwrapped the line from the cleats and jumped on board. They motored from the yacht club and Ramsingh pointed Gypsy Dancer toward the setting sun. When they were in deeper water he turned the boat back toward the club.
“ Are we going back?” Broxton said, almost wishing they were.
“ We have to face into the wind to raise the main.”
“ Oh, yeah, I forgot. Want me to take the wheel?”
“ Yes,” Ramsingh said, and he stepped up on the deck when Broxton relieved him. At the mast he fed the main halyard into a self-tailing winch and cranked it up. The snapping sounds the sail made as it flapped in the wind reminded Broxton of gunfire and he shuddered.
