‘I appreciate you guys have to make a living too,’ Ben said. ‘But this is one occupational hazard you don’t want to have to deal with. So I think you ought to turn around and head back to the bar you just came from, call your boss and tell him he shouldn’t send you on jobs where you’re so badly out of your depth.’
Two seconds of silence. Then the survival knife was out of Beard’s belt and swinging through the air.
Here we go, Ben thought. The downward slash. Hallmark of the truly amateurish knife fighter, the guy who’s learned all he knows from third-rate movies, has got lucky once or twice while dealing with people even more clueless than him, and is confirmed in his vision of himself as a formidable urban warrior. It would have been much too easy to twist the knife out of Beard’s hand, break three of his fingers in the loop of the hilt and then embed the thick blade right in the top of his skull.
Ben didn’t do that. Instead he twisted it out of Beard’s hand, broke three fingers in the loop of the hilt, used Beard’s ears as handles to drive his face down into his rising knee and then sent the blade whirling with a meaty thunk deep into the right thigh of the guy who was coming up flailing the chain.
With a scream that drowned out Beard’s, the man let go of the chain and clapped his hands in a gibbering panic to where the knuckleduster hilt was protruding from his leg. The chain’s momentum carried it hissing though the air a couple of feet, until it connected with the face of his associate with the bolo knife.
Hard. Ben heard the crack of bone over the thwack of the impact. The bolo dropped to the ground as its owner keeled over like a felled tree, clutching at his shattered nose and cheekbone, either too shocked to make a sound or choked by the broken bits of teeth in his throat.
The fight had lasted about three seconds so far. Ben stepped over the writhing, groaning Beard towards the last of the attackers who was still standing. The guy swung his baseball bat a couple of times, but his heart wasn’t in it. ‘Fuck,’ he muttered in a hollow voice, then turned and ran like hell, still clutching the bat. Ben watched him go. He was a much better sprinter than he was a fighter.
Taking a draw on his cigarette, Ben walked over to Bolo and stamped on his face, twice. A few feet away, his friend Mr Chain was making a high-pitched agonised keening as he tried to yank the knife blade out of his thigh. It had missed the femoral artery by an inch or two but there was still a lot of blood spilling across the concrete. Ben decided he’d had enough of the guy’s noise, and shut him up with a kick to the head that sent him slumping over sideways and bounced his skull off the ground.
Beard was trying groggily to get up, raising his body off the concrete with his left hand, the broken fingers of his right tucked tight between his legs. Ben’s boot swiped his left arm out from under him and rolled him over on his back. Beard stared up at him in terror. His nose was split open and bleeding almost as profusely as Chain’s leg.
Ben crouched down next to him and flicked cigarette ash on the guy’s face. ‘Just you and me now, Beard,’ he said. ‘I reckon as you’re the leader of the gang, that qualifies you as its spokesman too. So speak. Who sent you?’
‘I … I don’t …’ Beard gasped.
‘You’re not really going to give me the “I don’t know” routine, are you?’
‘Listen, mister … I swear …’
‘Fine,’ Ben said. He dug the Zippo back out of his jeans pocket. Flipped open the lid and thumbed the wheel. The spark ignited the fuel inside to produce the warm flickering orange flame and that smell Ben loved.
The flame from Beard’s beard as its rigid spikes went up like a magnesium flare was considerably brighter, and the stink of burning hair and skin far less pleasant.
Beard shrieked in terror. None too gently, Ben used the man’s denim jacket to beat the fire out.
‘Didn’t your mother warn you about using too much hairspray?’ Ben said. ‘That stuff’s flammable.’
‘You crazy sonofabitch!’ Beard screamed.
‘I think I asked you a question,’ Ben said. ‘Not going to ask you a second time.’
Beard’s eyes bulged in his scorched, blackened face. ‘I don’t fucking know! This guy offered us ten grand cash. Gave us your picture. It’s in my pocket.’ He pointed wildly with his good hand.
Ben yanked the photo out. It had been taken from inside a car, and showed him walking towards it. His Jeep was in the background, parked on the side of the stretch of road alongside Seven Mile Beach. Easy enough to figure out who his photographer had been: one of the two men in the black Chevy Blazer.
‘Some guy hired you? That’s all you know? A guy in a bar?’
Beard nodded desperately.
Ben showed him the lighter again. ‘Sure? You still have a bit left on that side. How about I even you up?’
‘No! Yes! I swear!’
Ben nodded. He supposed that a man with a burning beard would always tell the truth. It sounded a little like a Chinese proverb.
‘Get yourself another job, mate,’ he said, and walked to the Jeep.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Cayman Kai was a cove on the wooded north side of the island, close to Rum Point beach. Nick Chapman’s home had been a simple, elegant white bungalow with a broad veranda, surrounded by trees and privately situated at the side of a narrow coastal inlet with its own boat dock.
The place was all in darkness. As Ben got out of the car, he could hear music and laughter wafting across on the breeze from the nearby restaurant on Rum Point. He glanced around him: nobody was about, and the nearest neighbours were a good distance away beyond the whispering trees. He tried the front door, then the back. Finding them both locked, he turned his attention to the window catches: exactly the flimsy low-security kind of affair he’d have expected to find on an island with one of the lowest crime rates on the planet. In moments, he was inside.
The window he’d come through was that of the master bedroom. Ben stood perfectly immobile and utterly silent for a long time in the shadows, listening to the sounds of the house, hearing no sign of movement from anywhere. He reached into his pocket for the mini-Maglite he’d bought earlier in George Town, and cast the strong, thin beam of light around the room.
A mosquito net shrouded the double bed. A vase of dying flowers stood on the bedside table. On one white wall hung a large framed Escher print, the one with the never-ending staircase. On the opposite wall hung a picture of Nick and his team standing grinning next to a Cayman Air Charter Trislander on a grassy airfield. The aircraft had a pearly white new paint job and everyone looked ready to burst with excitement. This must have been CIC’s inaugural launch. Nick himself looked tanned and fit and immensely proud.
Below that one was a photo portrait of Hilary, aged about fifteen, together with another from her graduation day.
Ben felt strange, and a little ashamed, to be breaking into the home of his dead friend. He left the bedroom and moved on through the house, treading quietly and cautiously, darting the torch beam as he went.
The police didn’t seem to have turned the place over too roughly looking for clues. Everything was more or less tidy, down to the perfectly-squared rugs on the tiled floors and the ordered arrangement of cushions on the living room sofa. Most of the walls were covered with photos of the bright golden-yellow Sea Otter and other aircraft, as well as a collection of spectacular aerial shots of the island that showed the depth of Nick’s passion for the place.
Satisfied that he was completely alone, Ben spent some time in Nick’s study, holding the shaft of the mini-Maglite between his teeth to sift through the papers in the drawers of the large antique desk, in the hope that he might find something the cops had missed.