Age of Voodoo (4 page)

“Go on, then.”

“You look out of sorts, my friend, if I may say. Your expression—like you’ve had bad news. Who was it just phoned?”

“Double glazing company. I told them I live in a cave.”

“Ha ha. No, really.”

“Ghost from the past.”

“No wonder you’re so spooked. Want to talk about it?” Wilberforce was being sincere now. “A problem shared is a problem halved.”

Lex stared at his drink.

“Come on. We’re pals,” Wilberforce said. “You’ve been a regular for three years. We have those long chats after closing time, just two guys bullshitting, you know? I tell you everything about me and about the women in my life who drive me crazy and about my plans, and you... Well, you listen. You don’t give much in return, but I figure that’s just your way. So now I’m prepared to do the listening for a change. It’s only fair. I’ve never seen you like this. What’s going on in that rainy grey English heart of yours?”

“It’s...”

Lex glanced up at the picture of the Sealine F-series. Somewhere, Wilberforce had a sales brochure about the boat, so well thumbed it was falling apart.

All at once he felt inexpressibly guilty.

“It’s nothing,” he said. He stood. “I’m tired. I’m going to head home. Goodnight, Wilb.”

Wilberforce held out a hand to him. They shook, Wilberforce a little ruefully.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And thanks for earlier.” The posh boys. “I could have dealt with them, you know.”

“Of course. But I’m here to do the nasty stuff, so no one else has to.”

THREE

CROSSROADS

I
T WAS A
three-mile walk from the rum shack to his house. Streetlights were few and far between in Manzanilla, but on most nights under the bright stars, Lex had no difficulty seeing. Palms whispered on either side of the road, swayed by a humid onshore breeze. Now and then a taxi or a pickup truck swept past, very occasionally one of the puttering minibuses that were the island’s sole form of public transport and were as reliable as a horoscope.

He came to the crossroads where he would turn off the coastal highway and head inland, uphill, to his house.

As usual, the old beggar was there, sitting cross-legged beside the junction. With him were his dogs, a pair of mongrels of the type known locally as
cane dogs
—all breeds and none, the end-products of a dozen generations of casual back-alley couplings. They panted in the night heat, heads on forepaws, tongues lolling.

Lex lofted a hand as he went past. “Hey there, Gable.”

“Mr Dove,” replied Gable. He puffed on his corncob pipe, releasing a cloud of aromatic fumes. It wasn’t just tobacco he was smoking. “Gorgeous night, huh?”

“Yeah.”

One of the cane dogs wagged a listless tail while the other, wishing to add something to the conversation,
woofed
softly.

“Same to you, you lazy mutt,” said Lex.

Gable rose clumsily, supporting himself on a rusty hospital crutch. There was something wrong with his feet, though Lex had never been able to ascertain what. Some kind of birth defect, perhaps. Polio?

“Me don’ suppose...?”

Lex halted and fished in his pocket for some spare change. He handed over a wad of Manzanillan dollars, about M$70 in all, the equivalent of a fiver.

“Much obliged, boss.” Gable tucked the money away under his battered straw hat. “You a good fellow, Mr Dove. Don’ let anyone tell you otherwise, ’specially not you’self.”

“You have a nice evening, Gable.” Lex made to walk on, but the beggar reached out and grabbed his elbow with a bony but startlingly strong hand.

Lex tensed, old instincts readying him to retaliate.

He told himself to relax. Stand down. Gable was just a harmless tramp who lived at the crossroads, panhandling most of the day and sleeping in a camp he had made for himself in a nearby thicket, just out of sight of the highway. He wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a threat. Neither were his dogs, both of them too scrawny and nondescript to be intimidating.

“Mr Dove,” Gable said. All of a sudden his wizened, weatherbeaten face, normally genial, had turned deadly serious. His eyes no longer twinkled, but instead reflected the starlight in a pale, unnerving fashion. There was a sharpness in them that hadn’t been there previously, an
intelligence
. “You need to lissen up now an’ lissen good.”

“Gable...”

“No.” The grip on Lex’s elbow tightened. Both the dogs stood erect, ears up, and one of them bared its fangs and started growling. “Me said lissen. T’ings are rollin’, boss. Me ain’t jokin’. Bad t’ings for you. Sumtin’s started that has to be stopped, and you is the man to do it. But you ain’t goin’ to manage it alone. Help’ll be offered you, and when it come, you don’ turn it away, you knowum sayin’? Whatever your finer feelin’s, you don’ say no.”

“I have no idea what you’re—”

“Can’t you feel it?” Gable pressed his face closer to Lex’s. Lex smelled rum and ganja on the man’s breath, along with the musk of his body odour. The breeze from the sea intensified, pummelling the palm fronds overhead, and then dropped abruptly, leaving a profound hush. The second dog joined the first in growling, and their two deep rumbling vibratos rose and fell in eerie counterpoint. “Change on the wind. The end of a beginnin’ an’ the beginnin’ of an end. You’ll need to make the right choices, boss. What’s best for you, what’s best for others, though the two mayn’t necessarily be the same. You here for a reason, even if you don’ realise it. But you goin’ to learn, oh, yes. You goin’ to learn the hard way.”

Then Gable let out an enormous gale of laughter, howling with hilarity at some magnificent jest which only he understood. He let go of Lex and waved him onward with the crutch.

“You go now, Mr Dove,” he said, still chuckling. “Dismissed. On your way. An’ don’ say me didn’t warn you. No, sir, don’ never say that.”

At the same time, both of the dogs relaxed, prone on the ground, as though obeying some silent command.

Lex peered at Gable for several heartbeats, nonplussed. He debated whether to remonstrate with him, force him to explain further what he’d been talking about. But what would be the point? A tramp, befuddled with booze and cannabis, could hardly be expected to make sense. The man had had a sudden brain-fart that had caused him to grab hold of a passerby and spout a stream of non-sequitur banalities. Maybe he was schizophrenic. Not beyond the realms of possibility, given his lifestyle.

Whatever the reason, it wasn’t worth getting worked up about. The sooner Lex ignored it, the sooner he could forget about it.

B
UT HE HADN’T
quite succeeded in doing that by the time he reached home. Gable’s odd outburst continued to prey on his mind. The right choices? Learn the hard way? It had the ring of prophecy about it. What did it all mean?

Nothing, he told himself. Nothing whatsoever.

Lex’s house was built along Spanish colonial lines, adobe-plastered, capped with rounded roof tiles, and laid out in the indoor-outdoor style. It had a central courtyard, wide open to the elements on one side, the other three sides surrounded by rooms without a dividing wall, just a waist-high partition. These constituted the main living area—kitchen, lounge, study. There were other, fully enclosed rooms in a wing that ran off perpendicular to the courtyard, plus a garage and storage space. The garden was lush with hibiscus and bougainvillaea, and the coarse lawn was studded with acacia trees and a tall tamarind whose fruit was an irresistible lure to the vervet monkeys. High in the hills here, where the trade winds blew harder, it was always a couple of degrees cooler than at sea level. The daytime views over rolling jungled slopes to the ocean were spectacular.

Lex poured himself a couple of fingers of neat rum and went out onto the verandah to sit and listen to the nocturnal chorus of chirruping insects and whistling tree frogs. It had been an unsettling evening. First Seraphina, the proverbial blast from the past. Then Gable with his peculiar rant. All Lex wanted was a quiet life. He thought he had found it, and he was determined to hang on to it as hard as he could.

A rustle in the shrubbery, and out onto the verandah popped Rikki. First a sharp, conical snout poking between two posts of the balustrade, then a lithe, cylindrical body with a striped back. The mongoose scuttered a few steps across the floorboards, then paused and peeked up at Lex with his tiny, fierce black eyes.

Lex tipped his tumbler at the creature in greeting. “Wondered if you might be putting in an appearance tonight.”

The mongoose moved a fraction closer, cautious, not timid. Finally he halted beside Lex’s chair and settled down to grooming his whiskers and fur.

He wasn’t a pet, but over the past year Rikki—named after the Kipling story—had become a kind of companion for Lex, a silent little familiar. In the late 1800s mongooses had been introduced to Manzanilla by the Spanish in order to tackle the island’s chronic snake problem. The place had been infested with cascabel, fer-de-lance and bushmaster, so much so that death by snakebite accounted for at least twenty per cent of fatalities among the population. A hundred mongoose breeding pairs had been released in the interior, and by the turn of the twentieth century snakes were all but a thing of the past. Enough survived to give the mongooses something to hunt and eat, but they were no longer the omnipresent danger they had been.

Lex welcomed Rikki’s presence on his property. It meant he never had to worry about where he set foot. He could walk around house and garden with no shoes on and be perfectly safe.

Also, he felt an affinity with the mongoose. A ruthless, efficient killer. Specialty: getting rid of creatures no one wanted, the ugly ones with venom and fangs and a bad temper. Lex could identify with that.

He finished his rum and drowsed for a while. The tumbler slipped from his grasp and clunked to the floor, rousing him briefly and sending Rikki racing for the shadows of the garden. He thought about going to bed, but the drowsiness overtook him again and he fell asleep right there on the verandah.

His dreams were never peaceful. They were always about restless things. Beings that should be dead but weren’t. The faces of victims. Mouths that yawned at him, sometimes soundlessly, sometimes uttering words in languages he only half understood. Accusing. Insisting. Demanding to be remembered, to be taken into account.

A few he recognised. The rest looked like strangers, even though he ought to know them.

A roll-call of evil. Dictators. Tyrants. Terrorists. Mass-murderers.

The deservedly dead. The righteous dead. Code Crimsons.

Yet they would not leave him alone.

Lex awoke, startled.

His phone was ringing.

If it was that bloody Seraphina again, already...

But the caller ID said Wilberforce.

“Wilb?”

“Lex. Thank God. You got to come. I’m in deep shit. For real.”

“Wilb, where are you?” Lex’s watch said 1.10AM.

“Outside home, in my car. I just pulled up. There’s these men waiting for me out front. I wouldn’t have stopped if I’d seen them in time. Now they’ve spotted me, and I’m screwed. Please. Help. Quick.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Great. Just hurry, because—”

There was the sound of voices other than Wilberforce’s, shouting, angry. A car door opening. A scuffle.

Then the line went dead.

Lex was on his feet, sprinting for the garage.