'Two murders. Just like the movies,' someone was saying-a short-haired man with a coke spoon dangling around his neck.
Up at the lounge bar, Peter Macdonald talked to his girlfriend, Jane Cooke. He also served up galIons of planter's and boom -boom punch; rum toddies; Jamaica coffee; swizzles; fog-cutters-and an amazing quantity of good old-fashioned neat whiskey.
'I know how paranoid this sounds,' he said to Jane, 'but the police didn't seem to want to listen.
'That constable took your statement. He did, didn't he?'
'Yeah. I guess. But he seemed to have the whole thing wrapped up, Janie. Colonel Dred! Colonel Dred! Forget everything else. The tall blond man. The fancy rifle. Jesus, I don't know. I hope they're right.... It's just that they weren't very professional about it. It was like Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour in there.
'Ahhh, Pee-ter, mon.'
The lilting voice of the lounge calypso singer drifted across the room.
Then the singer whistled into his microphone. He tapped the mike with a long, effeminate fingernail. Blew softly into strange, snaky bamboo pipes.
'No need be afraid of Leon,' he whispered to his white audience. Couples out of John O'Hara and John Marquand. Lots of bright WASPY green in their o@tfits-green and Bermuda pink.
He sang to them. 'San Dominic' woman's love day say... is lak a momin' dew.... Jus' as lakly it fall on de horse's turd... as on de rose.'
The singer laughed. A pretty imitation of Geoffrey Holder.
A few people in the dark, red-lantemed bar started to clap.
Peter Macdonald pulled at a bicycle bell hidden somewhere in the liquor bottles over the bar. 'I wan' tcr, sing yo peoples lubbley song 'bout sech a oom@n,' the singer went on. ''Bout her rose. An'... well, you know it, my friends... de unworty objet ub dat gal's affection. Me own rival. A real shit!'
At the same time, Chief of Police Meral Johnson walked down damp stone stairs, then along a row of cells in the dimly lit medieval basement of the Coastown jail.
-Walking behind him was a lineup of seven policemen and clerks. Nearly everyone in the Coastown jail at that late hour. The somber parade turned down another row of cells. Then another. At the end of the third row, a tall, perspiring constable waited beside an open, steel-plated door. Inside the cell, the chief of police could already see the white man who shot Leon Rachet the previous morning.
The mysterious, middle-aged white man was lying on his cot with both arms spread wide. His hairy bare legs dangled off one end of the bed. A puddle of urine and blood ran out of the cell, right down a big drain in the dirty corridor.
While Dr. Johnson had been out at the Plantation Inn, the man had been murdered.
Killed in his bed. In jail. By a sugar-cane machete.
The crude knife was sticking out of the dead man's hairy belly-a red wool cap hung carefully on its hilt.
'Monkey Dred,' Johnson whispered.
'Pee-ter! Pee-ter!' The calypso singer's sweet voice drifted across the Cricket Lounge.
'Tell me dis one ting, mon?... What be de difference be-tween Ifishmon wedding an' Irishmon wake?'
Sulking, a little embarrassed, Peter resisted. He didn't want to be a part of the show tonight. Not tonight. Not with the image of the mutilated nineteen-year-olds crawling through his mind like bloodwonns.
'So what's the difference?' someone called out from the dark bar.
Peter looked at Jane and could see the samewhat? distaste? nausea?
'One less drunk?' The chestnut-haired man finally gave in; yanked the asinine bicycle bell, feltvery strangely, dumbly-a little homesick.
May 3, 1979, Thursday Tourists Flee Resort Hotels!
'Go from Slush to Lush!' Magazine Ad for San Dominica
Nine murders were reported around the resort island on the third day.
Two knifings; two pistol shootings; a forced drowning; four machete killings.
Sophisticated TV news crews began to arrive on San Dominica in the early afternoon: hippie cameramen, soundmen who looked like NASA engineers, 'California Dreaming' directors, assistant directors, reporters, and commentators. Crews came from ABC, CBS, NBC. they came from local stations in New York City, Miami, and Chicago. Apparently the machete murders were an especially popular item in Chicago and New York.
Reporters and crew members were given hazard 75 dangerous pay just as they received for covering combat assignments, urban riots, or madmen on the loose.
Newspaper correspondents-quieter types, less lose Angelese-started to arrive, too.
they came from the States, of course, but they also began to come in from Western Europe; from Africa and Asia; and especially from South America. The Third World countries were particularly well represented.
The newshounds smelled a revolution! Meanwhile, police and army experts were predicting that the sudden, mind-boggling violence would either die down completely-orflare up all over the Caribbean. So far-even with Colonel Dred as an obvious target-it was a hell of a mystery.
CHAPTEREIGHT
We had learned long before we ever saw the Caribbean that beautiful scenery provides the most chilling
