He was a good guy, the Great White Hunter. And yet. There was a reason why he'd made it onto my shortlist of three. He had an explosive temper. He had zero sympathy and zero empathy for anyone's weaknesses or shortcomings. He got along, he was friendly, he was socially adept… but you never felt any warmth talking to Morgan. Always the sense that he was perfectly capable of forgetting the rest of us and walking away at any moment, without so much as a glance over his shoulder. He'd left the truck a couple of times, in Burkina Faso and again in Ghana, for a few days. Mind you a lot of us had done that, when we needed a break from truck life… but he was the only one to leave alone.
But while I'd thought in the abstract that he was potential killer it was a total stomach-churning shock to realize that it was actually true. That he had killed people, friends and strangers alike… and then mutilated their bodies… It was so hard to reconcile this fact with the garrulous, gregarious Morgan we knew and loved despite his many faults. I tried to come up with reasons why I could be wrong, why it might not be him, how I could have misinterpreted everything. There weren't any. There was no other possibility. It was Morgan. He had hid it well, but he was sick in the head, like a rabid dog.
I wished some of the other truckers were with me. Seeing Morgan again gave me the irrational feeling that all the rest of them were just around the corner, camping next to the Big Yellow Truck. Maybe I should have contacted Hallam and Nicole and Steve after all, should have told them what I suspected. They might have come to Indonesia with me. They would have known what to do. They were good at that. But there would be no help, no advice. In some ways I was more alone than I had ever been. The nearest person who knew me was Carmel in Sydney, a good two thousand miles away. Unless you counted Morgan Jackson himself.
The rain fell so fast and strong that it sounded different from rain back home, not a pattering but a load roar on the roof. I decided to go e-mail the news to Talena. I rolled out of my bed and approached the door. Then I froze. It occurred to me for the first time in a way that actually meant something that I was in great personal danger. That Morgan had already come after me up on the Himalayan trail, and that it would be no great matter to find out where I was staying. And that mid-monsoon would be the perfect time to kill me, with zero visibility, everyone staying inside, another hour to hide my body before the monsoon ended. He could have followed me to my cabin, he could be standing outside with a parang right now, patiently waiting in the rain for me like the Great White Hunter he was.
I stood there, my hand outstretched towards the bar that guarded the door, sweating heavily, and not from the humidity. Maybe he wouldn't try anything. He was with friends. That helped. But then he was with friends, a truckful of them, when he had killed Laura.
I thought of Laura, dying on the beach trying to hold her belly together, and I began to grow angry. I had a name and a target for my fury, and it grew inside me like a fire that has found dry wood, physically warming me, blotting out the cold icy fear. She was the only woman I had ever loved, and he had gagged her and probably raped her and gutted her like an animal.
What am I supposed to do, stay in here all day? I thought, and I yanked the bar off the door and pulled it open with unnecessary violence. The rain poured into my cabin in what felt like sheets of solid water. I stepped outside, looking quickly around, ready for a fight, parang or no parang. There was no one there.
It was only twenty steps to Mekar Sari's covered patio, but by the time I got there I looked as if I had swum the distance. Femke was sitting on her hammock chair, breastfeeding her baby. Through the window I could see her Indonesian husband working to repair a broken chair.
"Hello, Mr. Wood, are you enjoying our rainy season?"
"Very much," I said. "I need to use the computer…?"
"Sure thing." She stood up gracefully, without interfering with her baby's meal, led me over to the corner of the patio where the computer stood, clicked on the connection icon on the desktop. I watched the connection window open, with the little icon of the telephone and wires. But instead of disappearing after a little while, a tiny red X appeared at the end of the wire.
"Scheisser," she said. "Sorry, Mr. Wood. The storm has damaged the phone lines."
"Oh," I said. "Shit."
"Maybe tomorrow," she said, "it usually takes them a day or two… "
"All right. Thank you anyways," I said.
"Wait," I said as she stood up, "could I write an email and put it in your outbox? So it would go out the next time you connected?"
"Certainly," she said, and opened up Outlook for me. "Just close it when you're finished."
"Thank you," I said, and sent a quick message to Talena:
Subject: To be opened in the event of my death or disappearance
His name is Morgan Jackson. He was on the Africa truck.
I thought the Subject: line was kind of funny. I was in that kind of mood.
When I was finished I saw that Femke had gone inside to check on her husband instead of returning to her hammock chair. I padded back across the wooden patio, dripping with every step. And just inside the patio screen I saw one of her husband's parangs, protruding from a wooden block.
I stopped and looked over my shoulder. Neither of them was looking. I reached down and took the cold wooden handle of the parang and pulled it free. It took a surprising amount of force. Her husband was much smaller than me but very strong. But I worked it free with a second violent jerk and walked back to my cabin.
Once inside I quickly dried the iron blade with a T-shirt and I examined it carefully. Like a machete, but curved like a scimitar. A blade maybe two feet long. The handle was well worn hardwood. It felt good to have a weapon. A sword. I imagined swinging it at Morgan Jackson. It was a pleasing image.
The rain lasted longer today, three and a half hours instead of two, and the sun was already sinking into the horizon when it let up, sudden as a thunderclap. I knew what I should do. What I should do was pack up and find a horsecart (cedak in local parlance) willing to drag my sorry ass down the muddy smear that was the road to Kotoraya. Then I should take a bemo back to Mataran and email Talena. And the next day I should ferry it back to Bali, head for Denpasar airport, and fly back to the good old U S of A, mission complete, Laura and Stanley Goebel's murderer identified.
But that is not what I did.
Chapter 15 Run Through The Jungle
I had an early dinner at Mekar Sari.
"Mr. Wood," Femke asked me, after serving a superb dish of gado-gado, "have you by any chance seen a parang anywhere near here today?"
"No," I said, affecting surprise.
She shook her head. "These people. They're terribly racist, did you know that? Because I am white, they think it is perfectly all right to steal from us anything that they can."
I made sympathetic sounds, feeling a little guilty, and went to bed before the sun had sunk into darkness.
Hypothetical question. Suppose you have identified to your own satisfaction, beyond any reasonable doubt, a serial killer who has murdered at least two people for sure, one them a woman you loved, and will probably kill again. Suppose you know that there is no chance of the authorities ever catching up with him, because you have no hard evidence and furthermore he was smart enough to commit his murders beyond the jurisdiction of competent authorities. Suppose further that you and the killer know each other well. Suppose even further that he must also know that you know, or at least be very deeply suspicious. And finally suppose that you encounter one another in a remote Third World village.