Pop Goes the Weasel (38 page)

Suddenly, bright light shone in my eyes. The car had exited the brush after two or three miles that had seemed much longer
on the twisting road. We were entering lush hills that looked something like the American South back in the fifties and sixties
—maybe Georgia or Alabama. Children in dated clothes played in front of small run-down houses. Their elders sat on uneven,
slanted porches and watched the occasional car drive past.

Everything looked and felt so surrealistic. I couldn’t focus.

We turned onto a skinny dirt road with a thick, high corridor of grass running between deep tire ruts. This had to be the
place. My heart was pumping loudly and sounded like a tin drum being pounded in a tunnel. I felt every bump in the road like
a hard punch.

Beatitude? Who is the woman they’re holding? Can it possibly be Christine?

Sampson checked the load in his Glock. I heard the mechanism slide and
click
and glanced his way.

“They won’t be happy to see us, but you won’t need the gun,” Anthony turned and said. “They probably know we’re coming. They
watch the local roads. Christine Johnson might not be here now, if she was ever here at all. But I knew you would want to
see for yourself.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My mouth felt incredibly dry, and my mind was a blank. We were still involved with the
Four Horsemen, weren’t we? Was this Shafer’s play? Had he known we’d eventually find this place in the hills? Had he set a
final trap for us?

We arrived at an old green house with tattered white cloth over the windows and a burlap bag for a front door. Four men immediately
came outside, all of them sporting dreadlocks.

They walked toward us, their mouths set hard, their eyes blazing with distrust. Sampson and I were used to the look from the
streets of Washington.

Two of the men carried heavy field machetes. The other two wore floppy shirts, and I knew they were armed beneath the loose-fitting
clothes.

“Galang. Go back, mon,” one of them shouted loudly at us. “Nah woman here.”

“NO!”

Detective Anthony got out of the car with both hands held high. Sampson, Jones, and I followed his lead.

We could hear the beat of traditional drums coming from the woods directly behind the main house. A pair of lounging dogs
raised their lazy heads to look at us and barked a few times. My heart was thundering faster now.

I didn’t like the way this was going down.

Another one of the men called to us, “I and I would like you to leave.”

I recognized the figure of speech: the double pronoun represented the speaker and God, who live together in each person.

“Patrick Moss is in jail. I’m Detective Anthony, from Kingston. This is Detective Sampson, Detective Cross, and Mr. Jones.
You have an American woman here. You call her Beatitude.”

Beatitude? Could it be Christine?

A man wielding a machete in one hand glared and spoke to Anthony. “Galang bout yuh business. Lef me nuh. Nah woman here. Nah
woman.”

“This
is
my business, and we
won’t leave
you alone,” I said, surprising the man with my understanding of his dialect. But I know Rastaman from D.C.

“Nah woman here. Nah American,” the man repeated angrily, looking directly at me.

Andrew Jones spoke up. “We want the American woman, then we’ll leave. Your friend Patrick Moss will be home by tonight. You
can deal with him in your own way.”

“Nah American woman here.” The original speaker spat defiantly on the ground. “Turn around, go back.”

“You know James Whitehead? You know Shafer?” Jones asked.

They didn’t deny it. I doubted we’d get any more from them than that.

“I love her,” I told them. “I can’t leave. Her name is Christine.”

My mouth was still dry, and I couldn’t breathe very well. “She was kidnapped a year ago. We know she was brought here.”

Sampson took out his Glock and held it loosely at his side. He stared at the four men, who continued to glare back at us.
I touched the handle of my gun, still in its holster. I didn’t want a gunfight.

“We can cause you a whole lot of trouble,” Sampson said in a low, rumbling voice. “You won’t believe how much trouble is coming
your way.”

Finally, I just walked forward on a worn path back through the tall grass. I passed by the men, lightly brushing against one
of them.

No one tried to stop me. I could smell ganja and sweat on their work clothes. Tension was building up inside me.

Sampson followed me, no more than a step or two behind. “I’m watching them,” he said. “Nobody’s doing anything yet.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I have to see if she’s here.”

AN OLDER WOMAN with long and wildly frazzled gray and white hair stepped out of the front door as I reached the scarred, unpainted
steps. Her eyes were ringed with redness.

“Come with me.” She sighed. “Come along. You nah need no weapon.”

For the first time in many months, I allowed myself to feel the tiniest flash of hope, though I didn’t have any reason to,
other than the rumor that a woman was being kept here against her will.

Beatitude? Something to do with blessedness and happiness? Could it be Christine?

The old woman walked unsteadily around the house and through light bushes, trees, and ferns out back. About sixty or seventy
yards into the thickening woods, she came to half a dozen small shacks, where she stopped. The shacks were made of wood, bamboo,
and corrugated metal.

She walked forward again and stopped at the next-to-last shack in the group.

She took out a key attached to a leather strap around her wrist, inserted it in the door lock, and jiggled it.

She pushed the door forward, and it creaked loudly on a rusty hinge.

I looked inside and saw a plain, neat, and clean room. Someone had written
The Lord Is My Shepherd
in black paint on the wall.

No one was there.

No Beatitude.

No Christine.

I let my eyes fall shut. Desperation enveloped me.

My eyes slowly opened. I didn’t understand why I had been led to this empty room, this old shack in the woods. My heart was
ripped in two again. Was it some kind of trap?

The Weasel? Shafer? Was he here?

Someone stepped out from behind a small folding screen in one corner of the room. I felt as if I were in free fall, and a
small gasp came out of my mouth

I didn’t know what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. Sampson put out his hand to steady me. I was barely aware of
his touch.

Christine slowly stepped into the shafts of sunlight coming from the single window in the shack. I had thought I would never
see her again.

She was much thinner, and her hair was braided and longer than I’d ever seen it. But she had the same wise, beautiful brown
eyes. Neither of us was able to speak at first. It was the most extraordinary moment of my life.

I had gone cold all over, and everything was moving in slow motion. It seemed supernaturally quiet in the small room.

Christine was holding a light-yellow blanket, and I could see a baby’s head just peeking above the crown of the covers. I
walked forward even though my legs were trembling and threatening to buckle. I could hear the baby softly cooing in the nest
of blankets.

“Oh, Christine, Christine,” I finally managed.

Tears welled in her eyes, and then in mine. We both stepped forward, and then I was awkwardly holding her. The little baby
gazed up peacefully into both our faces.

“This is our baby, and he probably saved my life. He takes after you,” Christine said. Then we kissed gently, and it was so
sweet and tender. We held on for dear, dear life. We melted into each other. Neither of us could believe this was actually
happening.

“I call him Alex. You were always right here,” Christine told me. “You were always with me.”

Epilogue
LONDON BRIDGES, FALLING

HIS NAME WAS FREDERICK NEUMAN, and he liked to think of himself as a citizen of the European community rather than of any
single country, but if anyone asked, he claimed to be German. His head was shaved close, and it made him look severe, but
also more impressive, he thought—an amazing accomplishment in itself.

He would be remembered as “quite tall, thin and bald,” or as an “interesting
artiste
type,” and several people
did
see him that week in Chelsea in London.
I want to be remembered. That’s important
.

He shopped, or at least window-shopped, on the King’s Road and in Sloane Street.

He went to the cinema in Kensington High Street.

And the Waterstone’s bookshop.

Nights, he would have a pint or two at the King’s Head. He mostly kept to himself at the pub.

He had a master plan. Another game was beginning.

He saw Lucy and the twins at Safeway one afternoon. He watched them from across rows of baked beans, then followed them down
the aisles filled with shoppers. No harm, no foul—no problem for anybody.

He couldn’t resist the challenge, though. The dice started to play in his head. They rattled the number he wanted to hear.

He kept walking closer and closer to the family, careful to keep his face slightly averted, just in case, but still watching
Lucy out of the corner of his eye, watching the twins, who were perhaps more dangerous.

Lucy was examining some wild Scottish salmon. She finally noticed him, he was sure, but she didn’t recognize him—obviously.
Neither did the twins. Dumb, silly little girls—mirrors of their mother.

The game was on again—so delicious. He’d been away from it for a while. He had the book money, his advance from the trial
tell-all, which he kept in Switzerland. He had bummed around the Caribbean after his escape by boat from Jamaica. He’d gone
to San Juan and been tempted to act up there. Then on to Europe—first to Rome, Milan, Paris, Frankfurt, and Dublin, and
finally home to London. He’d strayed only a couple of times on the whole trip. He was such a careful boy now.

It felt just like old times as he got oh-so-close to Lucy in the shopping aisle. Jesus, his physical tics were back. He was
tapping his foot nervously and shaking out his hands.

He’d have thought she’d notice that, but she was such a vacuous blond cow, such a cipher, such a waste of his time; even now,
as he got closer and closer, only a foot or two away, she still didn’t recognize him

“Oh Loo-cy… it’s Ricky,” he said, and grinned and grinned. “It’s me,
darling.
”

Swish. Swish
. He swiped at her twice, back and forth, as they passed like strangers in the aisle at Safeway. The blows barely crisscrossed
Lucy’s throat, but they cut it inches deep.

She dropped to her bony knees, both hands clutching her neck as if she were strangling herself. And then she saw who it was,
and her blue eyes bulged with shock and pain and finally with what seemed to be a terrible sadness.

“Geoffrey,” she managed in a gurgling voice, as blood bubbled from her open mouth.

Her last word on Earth. His name.

Beautiful for Shafer to hear—the recognition he craved—revenge for all of them. He turned away, forced himself to, before
he did the twins as well.

He was never seen again in the Chelsea neighborhood, but everyone would remember him for as long as they lived.

God, would they remember
.

That tall bald monster.

The one in all-black clothes, the inhuman freak.

The heartless killer who had committed so many horrible murders that even
he
had lost count.

Geoffrey Shafer.

Death.