Circle of Bones (10 page)

Even over the ever-present rumble of the engines, they heard the grinding noise followed by a clunk as the wheel turned on the outside door, then light flooded the compartment, blinding them all. Woolsey squeezed his eyes shut against the glare then gasped for air when McKay released his throat. The big man scrambled back into the shadowy recesses of the hold. Woolsey, still closest to the door, curled up on the floor and tried to cover his head with his arms, protecting himself both from the light and the likelihood that the French soon would rain blows to his body. He waited, but no one touched him. Several different voices were shouting in French, then Woolsey heard a thud as a body hit the floor not far from him, and the hatch door slammed shut.

He understood now why no one had spoken when he was thrown inside. It was bloody quiet after all that row stopped when the hatch closed and they were plunged back into darkness. The advantage would go to the one who had the most knowledge, and he didn’t want to speak to give away his location. His breathing sounded so loud, he did his best to hold his breath.

The quiet seemed to stretch on for hours, though it was in fact only a minute or two. The silence was finally broken when the recent arrival groaned. Woolsey heard the man’s clothes rustle as he got to his feet, then footfalls as he walked to the far side of the compartment, confident as though he could see. Then came the sound of wood cases sliding on the floor and the clink of metal tapping on glass. The man was digging through the cases of wine. What the devil could he be doing?

Then a voice exclaimed, “Ahh!
Voilà
,” and there was a click and the thin beam of a torch lit the compartment as well as the man who now held it.

“I thought you three would be here,” Captain Lamoreaux said, his face smeared with blood. 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Pointe-à-Pitre

March 25, 2008

6:15 p.m.

Riley pushed open the door to the Customs House and charged down the steps to the street, leaving the door to slam behind her. How had this day that started out so great turned into such a complete mess? Under her arm, she carried her portfolio that normally contained her ship’s papers, passport and money. Clutched in her hand was the sheaf of papers marked up with various official stamps, one of which was a receipt for her confiscated passport, and another demanding her presence at a hearing the following week.

The sun was gone and the sky over the outer harbor had turned a dark, iridescent blue. To the east, a cluster of ash-colored clouds was rimmed with molten red. She hadn’t realized they’d kept her inside the office that long, but the French desk jockeys in there couldn’t get it through their heads you don’t smuggle illegal aliens into a country one at a time. It had probably been so long since they’d had any sort of real international crime on this island they just couldn’t wait to charge her with something. The Gendarme had looked at her over the top of his half glasses as if he was inspecting bad meat when Beaulieu had called him in and asked him to write up the paperwork. 

That was when she’d told the Gendarme she wanted to report that this
Bob
had stolen her handheld radio, and he’d smirked at her. Smirked! What? Did they think she was making the whole thing up?

When they were kids, her older brother Michael was the only one who could ever get away with teasing her or laughing at her. Anyone else usually wound up with a bloody nose. Michael knew how teasing infuriated her, but he counted on the fact that she could never get mad at him — and he used that, the little bugger. 

Being back in the Caribbean reminded her of the Barbados years. St. Winifred’s was the name of the school. She must have been eight years old and Michael nearly ten. She was a skinny kid but already taller than her older brother and growing so fast her mother had bought her school uniform a size too large. Two boys followed them from school to where they were to catch their bus. They started calling Mikey names like Midget, Fathead and Fish Face. She was going to ignore them until they called her Faggy Maggy in the Baggy Pants. 

She knew even back then to go for the leader. She turned around and walked up calm as could be. She asked the bigger boy his name. He preened and looked to his friends for encouragement, but before he could answer, she slugged him right in the nose. He staggered and fell, but got right back up and charged her, going for a head butt. She dodged him, and he tripped over the leg she extended. Then her brother grabbed her hand and the two of them ran down the street and onto the bus. They hurried to the back seat and looked out through the exhaust at the red-faced boy on the ground wiping at his bloodied nose. 

“Remember that day?” she whipered. She saw Mikey’s face in her mind, the glasses sitting crooked on his big ears, the watery blue eyes behind the thick lenses, the thin blond hair spreading out from his crown making him look like the barber had used a bowl to cut his hair. She always pictured him as she had seen him that last time, standing ramrod straight at his full five-foot four in the doorway of their apartment in Paris, the strap of his laptop case crossing his narrow chest bandoleer-style, and that lopsided grin trying to reassure her he would be fine. She grew older, but Mikey was eternally eighteen just as he had been that fall when he left home for Yale.

I’m not going to let them do this to me, Mikey. It’s like when we were kids, Brother. It’s time to fight back.

If the authorities weren’t going to help her get her radio back or do anything about
Bob
, she was going to have to find the man herself. She had that meeting next week for Mercury Security in Dominica. This was the first time they had entrusted her to handle an entire project, from bid through installation, and she wasn’t going to mess it up. Swinging her arms and taking long strides up the street rimming the edge of the inner harbor, she rounded the corner and nearly ran into the Creole ladies who were packing up their Scotch Bonnet peppers and greens at their roadside stand.

“
Pardon
,” she said to each woman, popping her P’s in the explosive French way and clutching her canvas briefcase. 

The tall street lamps around the inner harbor clicked on and lit the quay with a sickly yellow light. She stopped in her tracks, stunned for a fraction of a second, before she began to run. 

“Hey, stop that man!” she yelled. “
Arretez! Allez, quelqu’un
!” A fat man was in her inflatable, attempting to unscrew the clamps that held the outboard to the transom, and though she was yelling at people to stop him in both French and English, not a soul moved to help her. As she ran, she called out to the group of young boys standing on the quay in front of her dinghy, the red ends of their cigarettes glowing in the dying light. She waved her arms, portfolio in one hand, papers in the other, pointing at the man’s large behind that now obliterated her view of the engine. 

The boys turned and looked at her with round white faces and narrowed eyes. The man in her boat, meanwhile, gave up on the outboard and stood up. He glanced in her direction, his fleshy lips in an exaggerated pout, then he grabbed the oars and leapt to the seawall with remarkable agility for a man his size. By the time she jumped onto the quay, he was gone, having disappeared across the street, into the crowd of people gathering on the Place de la Victiore for the evening social hour.

She spun in a circle and flung her arms down at her sides, looking for someone or something to kick. It took all her will power not to violate her resolution about cursing. She wanted to let loose with every blue word she’d learned in the Corps.

When her temper felt more or less under control, she motioned aside one of the boys in the group and questioned him in French, asking him if he knew the man, if he had been acting as a lookout. She pointed out to him that the cable she used to secure the outboard and lock the dinghy to the rusted chain on the seawall had been cut. Surely he had seen the big man cutting the cable and known something was wrong.  She asked him why, as a good citizen, he didn’t do something to stop the thief. 

The youngster shrugged and blew air through his pooched-out lips. He told her it was none of his business, that if she had a problem, she should call a
flic
or gendarme, not bother him. 

She turned away from him, throwing her arms into the air to blow off steam so she didn’t grab the little twit by the throat and pinch his pouty lips right off. Here she was, just a good citizen minding her own business, trying to help someone out, be a good samaritan, and the result was the someone she’d been trying to help —
Bob
— had stolen her radio and caused the authorities to take her passport. And now, in the middle of the city, under the eyes of half a dozen people, a thief had nearly taken her outboard and hadn’t had a problem stealing her only set of oars. She turned back and had begun to lecture the youth on his civic duty, when someone tapped her shoulder and she heard her name.

“Riley?”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Pointe-à-Pitre

March 25, 2008

6:55 p.m.

Riley swung around, then blinked. “Diggory?” 

For a moment, she wondered if she were dreaming. Perhaps she had fallen asleep on the passage across from Antigua, and she would wake and be aboard
Bonefish
and neither
Bob
nor Beaulieu nor her missing passport — nor any of the day’s events including this moment —would be real.    

“Riley, you look like you could use some help.” As she was trying to think through her confusion, unable to stop staring at those electric blue eyes, he turned his back to her and walked the boy back to his group of friends. She saw him remove a fat gold money clip from his pants pocket, the fabric pulling tight across his backside as he did. He handed one bill to each of the six boys and they all took off running. When he turned back around, he held his arms out and smiled.

God, he looked good, she thought. Tall and slender and dressed as if he’d just stepped out of a photo shoot for some very expensive Scotch. She shook her head. “You must be joking.”

“No kiss?” he said, forcing his lips out in a pout. “That’s all right. It has been a while. I know we have our date tomorrow, but I saw you from my table across the square, and I thought you looked like you could use a hand. You look fabulous – as usual. I like the haircut. It suits you.”

She could not believe it was really him. If this were a film, she thought, the soundtrack would be soaring about now. How long had it been? Ha! As if she didn’t know down to the day. She hadn’t seen him since that last day in Lima when he had walked right past her in the midst of the foul smoke and rubble. Neither of them had said a word.

God, her shoulder ached.

Back at Bethesda, she’d thought she would get a phone call, an email, a note. Certainly, he had been recalled to the capital, too. He had to be out there somewhere in the city answering their unending questions the same way she was. But as time passed, and they grafted layer after layer of skin onto her shoulder, she questioned whether she even wanted to recover.

And now, here he was smiling as though the past years had never happened.

She stepped back and put her hand to her forehead, as though to shade her eyes from the non-existent sun. “Dig, what did you say to those boys?”

“I heard you asking them about your oars, so I gave them each five euros and told them the first one back here with the goods would get a hundred euro note. I’d say it won’t be more than ten minutes.” He pointed to a small kiosk with a couple of sidewalk tables on the harbor end of the Place de la Victoire. “Shall we have a drink while we wait? I want to hear all about what you are doing with this boat.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the dinghy and took hold of her arm.

She pulled her elbow out of his grip. “Wait a minute. Stop. After the day I’ve had today, I can’t believe this.” She walked away from him, hands on hips, needing the room to breathe.

She’d wanted to meet him on her terms. She wasn’t ready yet.

“Riley,” he said, speaking her name in the familiar intimate tone he had used hundreds of times before.

She looked back at him. Even after all that had happened between them, she could feel places deep inside her moving. Parts of her traitorous body that had lain happily dormant were now thrumming with the expectation of his touch. But her mind was sending other signals. Danger! Flee! She took a deep breath to fend off the nausea crawling up her throat.

“Dig, I can’t do this, not now, not today — maybe never.”

“What?”

 “Let’s turn around, pretend we never saw each other. Start again tomorrow.”

He spread his hands, palms up. She glanced at the white skin on those palms, criss-crossed with hundreds of lines. She remembered what it felt like to have those hands sliding down her naked skin, the feathery touch of those long slender fingers. Those hands could make her do almost anything. Forget about the angular jaw, black curly hair, and the little dent in his chin she had once found so sexy. No, she could have resisted any of that. He had seduced her with those hands.

“Riley, I’ve never stopped thinking about you. You just left — disappeared. Now that I’ve  found you again, don’t push me away. Don’t make me into a ghost like your brother. You’re having a bad time of it, I can see that. At least let me help you.”

Oh, he was good. She had to grant him that. He told women what they wanted to hear. And he knew how to listen. The most talented chameleon she had ever met, but that was all part of the job, of course. As if he couldn’t have found her any time he wanted to. She shook her head and turned her back to him. Yeah, he was lying, something she normally found unforgivable, but part of her didn’t give a damn. In fact, very specific parts of her wanted to grab a cab and head straight to his hotel room.

 “Whatever it is, I’ll take care of it,” he said, touching the back of her neck, brushing his fingers along her hairline.