Legend of the Gypsy Queen Skull: The Devil's Triangle - Book 1 (5 page)

Though not nearly as accomplished in affairs
of the heart; she’d had a whirlwind affair with a much older, and
very married professor, resulting in her pregnancy. Although
painful as it was to give away her baby, she knew she wasn’t ready
for the demands of motherhood.

~*~

Sitting a few feet away from Heinz, perched
in the kitchen’s bay window sill, was Tinnie’s cat, Muenster. He
was a large black stray she’d adopted a year ago, after he started
following her home from school. The collar he was wearing at the
time had a tag on it that simply read
Muenster Cheese
. There
was no mention of a phone number or an address. Nor did the vet
find a microchip implanted in him when she scanned him.

Tinnie had posted lost-and-found fliers of
Muenster throughout the neighborhood, but no one ever claimed him.
In the meantime, the two became inseparable, and Muenster soon
became an official member of the family. At first she tried naming
him her movie idol,
Bruce Lee
, after the martial arts
legend. But the finicky feline would only answer to the name
Muenster, and so it stuck. To this day wherever Tinnie went, he
went as well.

~*~

Muenster, swishing his long white-tipped
tail back and forth, sat fixated on the birds outside. They were
just a few feet away from the window bathing in the stone bird bath
as his tail began to puff up. Tensing his shoulders and lowering
back his ears, he started snapping his lower jaw, cackling at the
birds. Like a ticking time bomb, he seemed poised to explode
through the window at any moment to get at them.

Not heeding any of the obvious feline danger
warning signs, Paul reached over and stroked his back.

“Hey buddy, you watching the–” but before he
could finish, his hand was already receiving the business ends of
Muenster’s claws and fangs.

“Holy son of a–!” Paul shrilled out in pain,
coddling his bleeding hand.

Fully puffed-up and hissing, Muenster zoomed
into the next room for safer ground under the formal dining room
table.

“Dad! What’d you do?” Tinnie cried out,
running after her cat.

Manny, ever vigilant, sprung up from his
chair and quickly wrapped a paper napkin around his dad’s wounded
hand.

“Pops, ya gotta be quicker than that,” he
joked.

~*~

Manny was the epitome of a good kid and was
always the first to offer a helping hand. Originally from Mexico,
he was muscular for a teen his age and had long, wavy dark hair.
Like his mom, he could go and go, and loved most sports, but
wrestling for his junior high school was his thing. He also served
as a great sparring partner for Tinnie whenever she would prepare
for her next martial arts tournament. Having recently received his
lifesaving certification, he was looking forward to working as a
lifeguard at their local water park next summer.

Margie and Paul adopted Manny when he was
only three from a Catholic orphanage in south central Mexico, near
the Yucatan Peninsula. The nuns who lived there didn’t know much
about him but believed he was of Mayan heritage. When he was just a
baby, he’d been left on the orphanage’s doorstep one night, wrapped
in a blanket with a note pinned to it that simply read
Manuel
.

The nuns were happy their Santito Manuel had
found a home but were understandably heartbroken. When he walked
out the front gate with his new parents and turned and waved
goodbye, they all broke down in tears. Even now, every year on his
birthday the sisters still send him a card with La Santa Madre,
the Holy Mother
, printed on it.

~*~

Manny, putting his new first aid skills to
work, held his dad’s hand up above his heart as he walked him
toward his mom.

Meanwhile, Heinz was winding everyone up,
repeatedly clicking on an audio laugh track on his notepad.

Ah, Ha-Ha-Ha! Ah, Ha-Ha-Ha!
the loop
bellowed out over and over.

“Enough!” Margie scolded him, as she pulled
a bottle of bourbon out of an overhead cabinet.

Heinz giggled under his breath before
turning his attention back to his article.

“Over here,” Margie said in her sweet voice,
waving Manny and Paul over to her.

Standing at the sink, the teen helped his
mom unwrap his dad’s hand while Paul bit his lip. Wrinkling his
forehead the father of three squeamishly asked, “Are you sure this
is necessary?”

“Uh-huh,” she replied, unscrewing the cap on
the bottle.

Holding his hand over the sink, he squeezed
his eyes shut.

“Knock yourself out,” he mumbled, turning
his head away.

“Love ya hun,” she said, stomping down on
his foot as she poured the searing whiskey over his hand.

Dropping down to a knee, he squealed, “Make
the bad lady stop!” as Manny caught him under his armpits.

“And today’s lesson was?” Margie asked as
she looked down at him, still holding onto his wrist.

“Don’t pet puffy-tailed kitties,” he
gasped.

“Good boy. Now go sit down…. Waffles
ready!”

~*~

When everyone was seated, the family all
bowed their heads and held hands as Paul led them in a breakfast
prayer.

“Lord, we are truly thankful for all of the
wonderful gifts you have given us in our lives. Our beautiful
children... My trophy wife.”

Bashfully grinning, Margie affectionately
squeezed his hand.

“Our vicious black cat,” he continued as
Tinnie bit her lip and kicked his chair.

“These awesome waffles, and our trip to the
Bahamas.”

“Amen,” they all replied, except for Margie,
whose eyes popped wide open. Holding Paul’s hand in something of a
death grip, she stared at him but he avoided any eye contact with
her. Instead, under the table he wrestled his hand away from her,
all the while fronting a forced smile.

“When do we leave, Dad?” Manny eagerly
asked.

“It’d better not interfere with my Kung Fu
test,” Tinnie sharply added.

“Boats and ho’s,” Heinz said with an
ear-to-ear grin as he methodically nodded his head. Dropping her
jaw wide open, Tinnie flip-smacked him with the back of her
fingers. Giggling, he was amused at how easily he could antagonize
her and then took a bite of his waffle.

Margie, now glaring at Paul said, “Honey,
didn’t we talk about this? No extra expenses since we both got a
p-a-y-c-u-t.” When Margie was upset she tended to spell.

“Mom, we know how to spell,” Tinnie was
quick to remind her.

“You got docked at work?” Heinz blurted
out.

“We’re fine,” Margie replied. “We just need
to stick to a budget,” she said, glaring at Paul again.

~*~

After breakfast, Paul and Margie were
standing side-by-side, doing the dishes in the sink, when she
handed him another plate to dry and asked, “When were you going to
tell me?”

“I didn’t want to say anything until I had
done some more research.”

“And what exactly does research have to do
with the Bahamas?” she asked, getting a little impatient.

“Let’s just talk about this later.”

“When later? … Exactly?”

“After I get back from the library,” he
responded.

Turning to her, he placed a hand on the side
of her shoulder and reassuringly added, “I promise we’ll talk about
it.”

Just around the corner, in the dining room,
Heinz stood nodding his head. Turning around, he pushed his
black-framed glasses up on his nose and grinned.

Sounds like the old man has something up his
sleeve… and I’m gonna find out what it is.

Summer, 1689 ~ Lexington Warship ~ Barbary
Coast Waters

On the Lexington’s main deck, Captain Darcy
was checking his nautical map when a lookout excitedly shouted down
from the crow’s nest and pointed out to sea.

“Captain! Five o’clock… three vessels on the
horizon!”

Darcy reaching into his weathered jacket
withdrew his spyglass. Flipping it with his wrist, he snapped the
telescopic brass tube, extending it to full length. Adjusting the
lens, his eye bore down on the trio of distant ships as they
gradually came into focus.

“Triangular sails sir! Barbary corsairs!”
the young seaman shouted.

“Aye,” Darcy acknowledged.

Collapsing his telescope, he turned to his
second in command, Jonathan Fairfield.

“Lieutenant, hard about.”

Fairfield’s eyes widened as he grinned back
at his captain. Finally, they were in pursuit of some real Barbary
pirates.

Fairfield nodded to his captain, then turned
and bellowed up to the bridge.

“Helmsman, hard about, starboard!”

“Aye aye sir.”

“Ensign, signal flare!” Darcy ordered
aloud.

Moments later he heard the ensign announce,
“Fire in the hole!” as a flare skyrocketed up into the air, where
it exploded into a starburst pattern, high above the Lexington.

Soon, the rest of the trailing convoy ships
merged into a single file battle column behind their flagship.

“Well, at least they know how to follow
basic drill orders,” Lieutenant Fairfield dryly commented to the
captain, in regard to the other ship commands.

Gazing out at the distant pirate ships,
Darcy pulled a couple of Cuban cigars from a leather pouch and
handed one over to his lieutenant. Striking a match, Fairfield lit
the captain’s cigar first, then his own, before tossing it
overboard. The two men took long draws off of their Havanas,
blowing out large clouds of smoke, filling the air with their
hearty aroma. For the better part of an hour, they patiently
watched as they slowly gained on the corsairs.

When his cigar had finally burned down to a
nub, Fairfield took one last drag and tossed it into the sea.
Exhaling the smoke out of his nostrils, he locked eyes with the
captain and solemnly nodded. They both knew they were going to get
bloody on this one.

~*~

Darcy had dealt with cutthroats of this ilk
before. It was years ago, during his last Caribbean tour. He and
his crew were conducting shipping lane patrols to intercept and
confiscate pirate ships from the West Indies.

These hijackers made their living sacking
Cuban molasses ships, usually murdering their crews, and then
trading the stolen cargo for refined barrels of rum in New York.
From there, they’d sail up the coast to the Port of Boston, where
they’d make a killing reselling these barrels to Dutch
exporters.

If there was one thing the captain had
learned from those skirmishes, it was that pirates would never give
up without a hell of a fight. Sure, these outlaws might try to
outrun you at first, but if you cornered them, they’d surely turn
and hit you with everything they had.

These corsairs were no different. Surrender
was not an option for them. They knew if they were captured alive,
it would be the executioner’s chopping block or a noose hung from
the yardarm for them.

~*~

Minutes later, as the Lexington drew within
a couple of miles of the pirates, Darcy said with a sinking tone in
his voice, “Oh no…” and lowered his spyglass.

“What’s up capt’n?” Fairfield asked.

“Slave galleys.”

“How can you tell?” he asked as Darcy handed
him the spyglass.

“Look closer, and you’ll see they’ve got
oars jutting out from their sides. Also, they’re on a heading
straight for Algiers.”

Both men were well aware the port city was
the heart of the North African slave market and a thorny subject
between the Sultan and the crown.

“Their hulls are riding low, too,” the
lieutenant observed. Most likely they were overloaded with Northern
European slaves.

~*~

Recent reports had told of Barbary pirates
like these raiding fishing villages as far north as Iceland. Nordic
men were a hearty breed and made good laborers. The women too, with
their fair skin and blue eyes, were coveted treasures for any slave
owner. Wealthy sheiks would often get into bidding wars over some
of these exotic beauties in hopes of adding them to their harems.
For these reasons Nordic slaves would command premium prices at
auction.

~*~

Closing in on the Barbary pirates, Darcy’s
original plan was to pull up alongside them and blast their hulls
with cannon fire until they sank. But now, the game had changed. He
couldn’t sink vessels with innocents onboard. After all, they
weren’t animals like these corsairs.

“There’s probably slaves chained to those
oars, so we can’t pull their plug outright,” the captain said
turning to his lieutenant.

“Aye captain,” Fairfield replied in a deadly
serious tone.

~*~

Although he was a blue-blooded parliamentary
officer, Lieutenant Jonathan Fairfield reveled in his families’
royal naval tradition. He was one of the few who respected the
crown and avoided any untoward relationships with parliamentary
bureaucrats.

The Fairfield family had proudly served with
distinction in His Majesty’s navy for generations. Their affluence
alone was enough to persuade a ranking Lord to commission him with
no strings attached; a rare feat in today’s political
landscape.

~*~

“No shots to her hull and go easy on
strafing her deck,” the captain ordered. “We’ll blast her sails and
masts instead. Disable ’em, but not sink them. Aye?”

“Aye,” the lieutenant answered.

“And get the decks sawdusted.”

“Aye-aye sir,” Fairfield replied, snapping
to attention and crisply saluting him before he spun about on his
heels.

The lieutenant then hastily went about
disseminating the captain’s orders to all of Lexington’s gun
batteries and boarding parties. The crew was itching for a fight,
but they weren’t too keen on boarding a hostile ship without first
strafing her deck with ample rounds of grapeshot. The shotgun-like
blasts were perfect for cutting down naval infantry and made
boarding an enemy ship much easier.