"Daddy always told me to stand up for my rights."
That did it. Chauncey had had enough. Instead of letting the Mauser do the work, he brought his knee up fast and furious. It caught me full on the chin. Lights went on and off, and cheap little skyrockets spanked the night air with miniature explosions. My head snapped back, and the fun-in-the-sun Caribbean world suddenly got real ugly.
Chauncey launched a second round while I was still reeling from the first one. His second effort featured the toe of his expensive, tasseled Italian loafer square in the old bread basket.
Two were enough. With no prior planning, I pitched forward, face first, in the frothy surf, gasping for anything that contained even a trace of oxygen. Even with salt water searing the hell out of my already tortured eyes, I could see the little bastard gloating.
His fingers curled into my beard, and he jerked my head up out of the water. "Get smart, fart face," he growled.
If I could have gotten the words out, I would have apologized for wearing him out.
"Call your boss. Tell him somebody already laid claim to his goddamn tin cans." He dropped my head back into the water and took a step backward. "Oh yeah, I almost forgot. My associates and me got a little present for you."
Chauncey sloshed his way back out of the water and disappeared into a grove of palm trees. When he reemerged he was carrying a soggy brown paper bag. He set it in the sand some 20 or 30 feet from the edge of the water, tucked the Mauser in his belt, glowered one last time and disappeared up the beach in the darkness.
Show time was over, and all I had to prove I was there was a pair of formerly serviceable lips, one hell of a stomach ache and wet clothes. When I was finally convinced he wasn't hunkering up there in the shadows just waiting to blow holes in me, I started to scrape my act together.
Curiosity, they say, killed the cat, but yours truly is a slow learner. I had to see what Chauncey had in his sack. In the dim refracted lights coming through the maze of palms from the patio of the Ciel, I got a look at it — too good a look.
The sack was soaked through, and the bottom fell out when I tried to pick it up. Poqulay's head rolled out sideways and dropped into the blood-soaked sand. Stuffed in his gaping, bloody mouth were the $5000 I had just given him.
If and when I finally decide I've had enough of the lonely life and decide to break ranks with my fellow bachelors to take a wife, I want the lady of choice to have the cool under fire attitude of a Hannah Holbrook. Hannah, bless her checkered soul, rose to the occasion.
"Quit bellyaching, Elliott," she admonished, "and lay still."
"How bad is it?" Maggie inquired from the corner of the room.
I was just as anxious to hear the answer as anybody.
"Well," Hannah appraised, "he's got a couple of loose teeth in front, and with those lips he won't be playing the trumpet for awhile, but he'll live."
With all that warm reassurance, I couldn't help but want to open my eyes. When I did, I realized we were in a room at the Ciel. Everything looked familiar. Sylvia and the travel writers call it quaint, but to me, it's just plain old.
"Coming back to our little corner of the world?" Hannah inquired.
I nodded. When I did, I felt my lips flap around and decided to quit.
"Mind telling me who is Gibby?"
"Gibby?" I repeated. "Don't know what you're talking about." It was a lie, of course, but what the hell, people with broken faces ought to be allowed to blurt out just about anything.
"That's twice now," Hannah said coolly. "You were mumbling the same thing back at the Sea Breeze in Clearwater."
Before the subject could be pursued further, Queet emerged from the shadows of the room and grinned down at me. He was all gold teeth and gold chains in the dimly lit room. "Who was it, mon?"
"Somebody who is highly pissed about us bribing Poqulay to show us around Deechapal. His name is Packer, Chauncey Parker, Bluebell's boyfriend."
"Don't worry about Poqulay, mon," Queet assured me. "We covered it up with sand. The crabs will do a number on it. It'll take the local authorities days to identify what's left." He paused for a moment, grinned and patted his pocket. ''Incidentally, I got the money, too."
With Queet's help I pushed myself up on my elbows and contemplated the wondrous world of standing up. The pain stabbed me right between the eyes, and I plopped back down. I made a vow to plant one of my size twelve brogans in Chauncey Parker's family jewels if I ever caught him without his Mauser.
Sensing that I wasn't ready to take on the world just yet, Queet eased his muscular frame down in the chair next to the bed and turned on the light on the nightstand. I wondered what Mama would say if she could see her little boy now. With one quick knee to the mouth Chauncey Packer had managed to straighten out the lifelong problem of my overbite. I had a hunch Mama would be proud.
"You'll feel better after you've seen this," Queet assured me. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a yellow Kodak packet and started sorting through a stack of photographs. He handed me one of them. "What do you think of that, mon?"
It was a picture of the carnage at Deechapal. From the angle it looked as though he had taken it from the deck of Poqulay's patrol boat. It was a wide angle shot and included a number of the bloated cadavers strewn about the beach area.
Another wave of nausea swept over me.
"See it?" Queet questioned.
I studied the photograph again. Bingo! There it was — a long, silvery metal object.
Hannah had scooted herself down on the bed, leaning on one elbow. She reached into her purse and fished around until she located a small brown leather pouch with a snap on it. From that she produced a magnifying glass about the size of a half dollar and handed it to me.
"How big is it?"
It was difficult to judge, but there were two bodies in the same frame. One appeared to be that of a woman; the other looked as though it might have been a man. The metal object appeared to be about a third larger than the woman. Size relationship with the man's bloated body was a little harder to make.
It appeared to be an oblong metal cylinder, and from its configuration it looked as though it had been at least partially opened. From the angle that Queet had taken his picture we could see that the apparatus had some sort of an inner lining. There were gadgets, maybe some controls and dials, at one end, but I couldn't tell what was at the other.
"Well," Hannah sighed, "what do you think?"
I laid the snapshot down and closed my eyes. "Damn, I don't know what to think. You tell me Zercher is running his drug operation under the guise of a salvage yard. If that's the case, maybe this is nothing more than one of his props, or maybe it's actually a piece of salvage one of the locals recovered."
"Or," Hannah pushed, "maybe it's one of the cylinders. Remember, Elliott, we still haven't located the cylinders, and we've been looking just exactly where the log from the Bay Foreman claims they're located."
"Is that before or after Packer screwed things up by trying to blow a hole in the wreckage of the Garl?"
Hannah shrugged. "There's only one way to find out."
Despite a throbbing headache and tender stomach, I tried to concentrate on what Hannah was saying. Finally I gave in. "I suppose it's possible."
Maggie had decided to tough it out by slumping down and curling up in the room's only comfortable chair. "I'm getting lost," she admitted. "When, in the sequence of events, would the Deechapal disaster have occurred?"
Hannah looked up from the photograph and stared across the room. "You may have something there, Maggie."