The Bone Hunters (16 page)

28 May

Aboard
Island Time

Devil's Backbone

North Eleuthera

Bahamas

Macaulay secured the mahogany hatch cover and lowered himself into the cruiser's tiny cabin. The height of the compartment was only six feet and he had to walk bent over before slipping into one of the seats at the galley table. Drenched from the cold rain, he gave an involuntary shudder.

“I called Barnaby,” said Lexy at the stove as she poured a mug of hot coffee for him, “and told him we would resume the preliminary search in the morning and get back to Dunmore Town before dark tomorrow.”

She had lit the cabin with two lanterns and Macaulay felt good to be down there. He reached for the bottle of Jack Daniel's in one of the secured shelves above the galley table and laced his coffee with a good pour.

“Hey, don't waste that,” she said. “I need it to season my fish chowder.”

“I'm not exactly wasting it,” he said.

During one of the afternoon search patterns, a four-pound pompano had struck at one of the side winder
lures and Lexy had reeled in the fish, cleaned and filleted it, and put it in the refrigerated locker.

“Your friend Chris Kimball certainly knows how to provision a boat,” she said. “Incidentally, he's a very good-looking man.”

The revelation only made Macaulay more moody.

He watched as she sliced the pompano fillets into thick chunks and added them to a cast-iron stewpot already containing diced potatoes, carrots, garlic, an onion, celery, and a pound of frozen scallops. She sprinkled in some Old Bay and other seasonings, added a pint of chicken stock, and a third of the bottle of Jack Daniel's.

As he watched her prepare their meal, he thought again of how much he had missed her after she went away. Standing there at the galley stove in the lantern light, she had never looked more beautiful to him. Her slender body had tanned easily, and the newly golden skin and thick auburn hair set off the white bikini to perfection. Stirring the pot, she looked back at him.

“You're looking pretty morose considering we had such a good first day,” she said.

He sipped his coffee silently and listened to the rain hammering the deck above them.

“I haven't been very good to you lately, have I?” she said, searching his eyes.

“Not for one year and sixteen days,” he said with a wry smile.

“I'll make it up to you with this chowder,” she said, glancing at the bottle of Jack Daniel's. “Can I share some of that?”

He poured her a healthy shot and recharged his own empty mug.

A few minutes later, the wind shifted to the northeast and began dragging hard at the mooring lines. He went back on deck to make sure they were holding. The rain showed no signs of abating, and the severity of the wind gusts remained unchanged. Back in the cabin, he reviewed the data from the first day's search and began noting all the potential locations that warranted a refined search.

By the time she was finally ready to ladle the chowder out, its superb aroma had filled the cabin and made him ravenous. She served it with a small loaf of French bread she had found in the freezer and toasted with butter in the broiler oven. Macaulay opened a bottle of cabernet sauvignon.

“It's fun riding out a storm with you, Steve,” she said after they ended the meal with two Almond Joy bars.

“Not just the storms, I hope,” he said.

“You're a stalwart,” she said, her violet eyes gazing into his across the table. “Old school, a classic . . . a throwback.”

“You already threw me back once,” he said.

“You know the reason I went away,” she said. “At least I thought you understood.”

“The words didn't matter,” said Macaulay. “The only reality was that you were gone.”

“I felt like I was becoming an extension of you instead of my own person. Of all people, you know how important my work is to me. There are so many things I want to accomplish. . . . Actually, it's a need. I'm not sure where it came from. My mother dying young was part of it. All I knew was that I couldn't give up my work, even for you.”

“I didn't ask you to,” he said.

“It wasn't what you said or didn't say,” she said. “It was how you acted after we got back from Maine . . . as if I was a bird with a broken wing that needed your daily support to survive.”

“I never thought I would see you again.”

“Well, here I am.”

“Yeah,” he said, turning away so she wouldn't see the need in his eyes. “We should probably get to bed early. There's a lot to do tomorrow.”

When he stood up from the galley table, it suddenly occurred to him there was only one comfortable berth in the forward cabin. He would have to convert the galley table into a dog bed. He looked back to see her staring up at him.

“I feel like I'm still coated in salt from today,” she said, getting up too.

Stripping off the bikini, she picked up a plastic bottle of dish soap from the small steel sink and headed up the steps to the hatchway.

“You're welcome to join me,” she called back to him.

He thought about the invitation for several seconds. As he turned to follow her, he bumped his head on the cabin ceiling. Slipping off his cargo shorts, he followed her up. She was standing by the railing near the stern and washing her hair. The shrill wind still showed no signs of abating. The rain was coming like a deluge. He felt little needles of sensation pricking the skin of his face and upper body.

She held out the dish soap toward him. When he reached for it, she took him in her arms. A moment later, her mouth found his. Her fingers began roaming his
body and he came alive to every touch. The next seconds became a confusing blur. Then they were lying together naked on the double berth in the forward cabin.

They made love quickly the first time, their mutual hunger overwhelming individual control. Afterward, they lay in each other's arms, the warmth of their body heat blending with the afterglow of pure sensation.

The second time was more intense. They chose to make it last, moving close to the edge of the abyss and then back away again. He wanted very much for it to be for her alone, to release the sweet intricacies of her body. She appeared to revel in the sure caress of his lips, tongue, and fingers. Lexy's eyes were slit partially open, seemingly drunk with desire as he stroked and caressed her. At the end, she kissed him with a raw hunger, as if his lips were a wonderful feast to be devoured before she finally surrendered to a last torrent of sensation.

They slept.

He awoke to a soft hissing of wind, a pale reminder of the tempest the night before. Waves gently lapped along the sides of the hull. They lay entwined together. Macaulay watched a trembling beam of sunlight as it stabbed through the porthole above them and lit up the glints of gold in her hair.

Her beautiful, complicated face lay in calm repose. He had again sampled the deep well of physical yearning that was submerged inside her dedication to her work. She had seemed almost embarrassed at the intensity of her pleasure. He sensed that it was very hard for her to allow herself to let go, to feel safe enough with a man to indulge her passionate desires.

At some point during the night he thought he had
figured it all out, everything that mattered going forward, but it was like one of those vivid dreams that one couldn't fully remember after waking up. He wondered what her own reaction might be.

When her eyes opened and took him in, he smiled down at her.

“I'm ready to perform an ancient massage technique that was handed down to me by a holy man in the Himalayas many years ago,” he said softly. “To my knowledge it's only known to four human beings on this planet.”

“I'll allow you to perform it,” she said, “after my first cup of coffee.”

Macaulay put the coffeepot on the stove and they went up on deck. The sun was still low above the sea, and the air was fresh and clean smelling, tinged from the islet with the scent of hibiscus and wild frangipani. The water beneath them was clear enough to see the bottom. Tiny fish darted in and out of small coral heads.

As he had seen in the brief flash of lightning the night before, thick mangrove trees on the islet grew right down to the edge of the water. There was no beach. To the east the ocean was a vivid bluish green under a cloudless sky.

They had gone back down to the galley and were sipping their coffee when Lexy heard the cawing screams of a flock of seagulls above the boat. Moments later, the loud explosion of a gunshot split the air.

Lexy quickly glanced out the edge of the starboard galley window as Macaulay grabbed the .45 from the shelf above the galley table and charged a round into the magazine. He stepped toward the hatchway.

“I'm not sure you'll need it,” she said. “It's a man and a bird.”

Macaulay went up on deck, holding the .45 behind his right hip.

An old white man in a faded shirt and jeans stood by the wooden mast of an old lapstrake sailing skiff. Its multipatched canvas sail was flapping loose in the light breeze as he glared up at Macaulay.

“You leave now, mon,” he said menacingly as Lexy joined Steve on deck.

It was hard to guess his age. Short and wiry, with skin tanned a deep leathery brown and clear blue eyes. Barefoot, he was wearing a sweat-stained straw planter's hat and ragged jeans. He was holding an old rifle loosely in his right hand. It looked like a Lee-Enfield bolt-action .303, the kind used by the British army a hundred years earlier.

“Don't you people come back,” he said.

To Lexy his accent had the same Bajan cadence she had heard from local people on Harbour Island over the previous few days, both black and white. It was a harmonic combination of standard English and African.

A male frigate bird was perched in the stern of the sailing skiff, the biggest one she had ever seen. He had the familiar red pouch on the throat skin below the lower mandible of his beak. He sat quietly gazing at them from a faded plastic cushion, apparently unperturbed by the loud gunshot.

“Do you own this island?” she asked.

“Ah'm finished talking,” said the man, putting his other hand on the rifle stock and lifting it up again. “You go or you find out sure.”

“This island looked uninhabited. . . . We just ducked
in here during the storm last night,” said Macaulay, slowly pulling the hammer back on the .45 behind his right hip.

“I habit it, mon,” he said. “Just me.”

Lexy caught Macaulay's eye and they silently agreed on what to do next. Neither wanted an incident reported that would attract the attention of the local constabulary or whatever passed for the local press.

“We're leaving right now,” she said. “Sorry to bother you.”

Macaulay turned and placed the .45 on the steering console and started the engines. He watched as the old man laid the rifle down on the thwarts as if he was too tired to hold it up any longer. While Lexy raised the stern anchor, Macaulay went forward to pull the Danforth.

The old man and the bird watched them silently as Macaulay shoved the throttles forward and they slowly made their way out of the inlet.

“The frigate bird looked friendlier than the hermit,” said Lexy.

28 May

Casa Grande Brugg

Harbour Island

North Eleuthera

Bahamas

Juwan Brugg arose groggily out of his Lunesta-induced stupor to the incessant chattering of a thin, shrill voice. It was coming from somewhere beyond the open French doors to the third-floor balcony.

He lay on his back and waited for it to stop. It didn't. The voice would pause briefly after a long prattling burst and then resume louder than ever. Feeling a growing sense of outrage, he rolled over onto his side and expelled a loud belch, waking up the young man sleeping beside him.

“Go back to sleep, my darling,” Juwan said to him gently before heaving himself off the ultra-king bed and stalking to the bathroom to relieve himself. When he returned to the bedroom, the shrill cries were unabated.

Walking to the open French doors, Juwan passed by the life-size cover of
Sports Illustrated
that he had once adorned after graduating from St. Paul's Academy in Nassau. The words below his sixth-form photograph read
At 7'2”,
Juwan Brugg
:
The Next Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

•   •   •

He stared at himself in the photograph for a moment. He decided there was a regal dignity to his close-shaven head and his sensitive brown eyes. Juwan had once thought of himself as a little man in a big man's body, particularly after he passed the seven-foot mark.

Although his magnificent body was muscled like a gigantic steer's and he had always attracted attention wherever he went in the islands, he would have preferred to be anonymous, to observe others without being stared at like some carnival freak.

He stepped out onto the fourth-floor balcony and looked across the three-acre stone-walled compound. Beyond the ten-foot walls, the Bahamian sea was a dark Prussian blue beneath a bright sunny sky.

His ears were drawn to the half dozen eucalyptus trees that fringed the two-story brick barracks and sleeping quarters of the guard detail along the northern edge of the compound. His eyes quickly found the source of the shrill caterwauling on an upper branch of the largest eucalyptus, about twenty feet above the spiky grass lawn.

An off-duty guard was trying to coax it to come down with a banana.

It was the red howler monkey owned by Major Subito, the deputy commander of his guard unit. At twenty pounds, the animal was fully grown. Over the years Subito had trained it to be a crowd pleaser by blowing kisses and playing peekaboo by covering its eyes.

Juwan went to the archery rack in the nearby sitting room and returned with his longbow and a four-foot arrow with a carbon shaft and pink-barred feathers. Standing at the edge of the balcony, he watched as the monkey
began waving and blowing kisses to the growing group of guards that had gathered below him to watch.

Juwan loved the longbow, much preferring it to the combination bows and crossbows he had used as a boy to kill wild pigs in the Exumas. When he drew it back against living prey, he felt like Mel Gibson in
Braveheart
.

Using the Mongolian thumb clasp, he slowly extended the leather cord back toward his ear and took careful aim. Holding the seven-foot longbow steady was a test of strength and his biceps bulged with the effort. He estimated the distance as approximately thirty-five yards. He raised the aim eight inches higher than the target.

The guards on the lawn were all chuckling at the howler's antics when they heard the loud thunk as the body of the monkey was hurled backward and impaled through its chest to the trunk of the tree. Not daring to look back at the third-floor balcony of the mansion house, the guards dispersed in every direction. The monkey let out one last woozy bleat as its arms sagged to its sides.

When Juwan returned to the bedroom, Varna was lying naked on his left side, his delicately chiseled, heart-shaped face in calm repose. Juwan kissed him on the right hip before tenderly pulling the covers back up over his chest to his neck.

Lately, his desire for him had become almost insatiable. Unlike with his many other conquests, Juwan had been faithful to Varna for almost two months, the longest romantic relationship he had ever enjoyed.

Of mixed racial extraction, Varna was Panamanian born, but his smooth mahogany skin hinted at mestizo. A superb athlete like Juwan, he had made the
Panamanian Olympian team as a gymnast with a specialty in the still rings.

Unlike the grotesque bodybuilders that Juwan had found intoxicating as a young man, Varna had a taut body, with finely toned chest and shoulder muscles. Juwan had once watched him suspend himself in an inverted Maltese cross that had lasted a full minute without the slightest movement.

Juwan returned to the balcony and again surveyed his domain. The silence was now languid except for the distant cries of seabirds flying majestically over the harbor. Beneath the soaring birds, a dozen superyachts, each more than two hundred feet long and bearing the flags of many nations, rode gently at anchor.

While he was taking stock of the new day, it occurred to Juwan that he was proud of Varna in other ways too. Varna now ran the one legitimate undertaking owned by Juwan in the islands. They had begun the Academy of Spiritual and Self-Healing together.

Now the academy students were housed on the southern side of his mansion compound. As Juwan watched, they emerged in pairs from their sleeping quarters. There were exactly twenty of them in each class, marching in perfect order.

Each one had signed a contract agreeing to total lifestyle transformation, including Varna's vigorous daily fitness regimen as well as nutritional and behavioral guidance. There were hundreds of applications for each coveted spot in the class and they received final acceptance only after undergoing mental stress tests and a full body examination.

Among the tenets of Varna's teachings were that each
man refrain from alcohol, smoking, and masturbation. Tattoos and body piercing were forbidden. There was group corporal punishment if any student was caught defiling his body. A second infraction led to humiliating public dismissal. Every man was body-waxed and oiled twice a week before the morning circle meeting, and their daily pledges were recited aloud during the subsequent promenade around the compound.

Graduates were then sent out into the world to recruit more self-healing spiritualists at an annual stipend of fifty thousand dollars, paid for by Juwan's other successful business activities. Hundreds of acolytes were already abroad in the islands and spreading the word. The thought of it made Juwan almost swell with pride.

Closing the curtains to the balcony doors, Juwan returned to bed. Although he wanted nothing more than to take Varna in his arms and make slow, passionate love to him, he turned away and closed his eyes, willing himself to sleep.

He was well aware of the image that he and Varna projected together to the men who worked in Juwan's various business enterprises. It was definitely an odd physical combination. Juwan remained on the lookout for anyone who had a hint of mockery in his face at the sight of a seven-foot-two man dancing with another man only five-four. The last one who had seemingly smirked had been dragged over the outer reef of the Devil's Backbone behind a shallow-draft Jet Ski and then served as chum to the striking sharks.

He could hear the academy students reciting their oath under the window as he fell back into a tortured sleep. The nightmare returned almost immediately, the
same one that always destroyed his sleep, except that it was real.

It had happened to him at the NBA All-Star game in Phoenix in the waning seconds of the final quarter. They had been hacking him all through the second half and the referees hadn't called a single foul.

When Juwan clotheslined the Knicks power forward, two of the referees had stepped in his face and called the flagrant foul on him. When he tried to demonstrate his innocence, they called two technical fouls on him.

In his mind's eye, he could see it all happening again as if it had taken place in slow motion. He had lifted the two referees into the air, each one of their scrawny necks encased in his massive hands. The eyes were bulging out of one of the faces as he pounded their two heads together like coconuts.

He had never meant for it to happen. Truly. As he was looking down at them lying there unconscious, the first thought that entered his mind was what were they doing there on the polished floor in the middle of the All-Star game?

He had narrowly escaped a long prison term for deadly assault. One of the referees had been in a coma for a week, but he survived. The other one had only suffered a serious concussion. Juwan had had plenty of those.

His deliverance had come with no help from the NBA owners, all of whom had joined ranks to write a condemnation letter labeling him a murderous thug and imposing a lifetime ban. It was only through the multimillion-dollar settlements lavished on each referee that he was able to leave the country and return home to the Bahamas.

In Nassau, he had been welcomed back as a national hero after Juwan's publicity agent uncovered evidence from unnamed sources that both referees were skinheads and harbored hatred for all black people. The Reverend Al Sharpton had joined him at a prayer service to celebrate his redemption at Harbour Island.

His last thought before descending back into the oblivion of the sleeping pills was that he would someday return to the NBA, to his teammates, to the finals championship, to the roaring screams of the adoring fans shouting,
“Juwan . . . Juwan . . . Juwan.”