Twenty-Seven Bones

6

The bad taste from the interview with Mrs. Wanger stayed with Pender for hours. He’d gotten the information he needed, all right-they’d found a circled ad in the back of the July Soldier of Fortune with a St. Luke post office box for a return address. Mrs. Wanger had also produced phone bills for July and August, with several calls to a number with a St. Luke area code. But all he’d given her in return were the usual lame assurances and equally lame advice-call somebody, you shouldn’t be alone. The least he could have done was stay with her until that somebody arrived.

Instead he split-plane to catch. Whoopie ti-yi-yo…your misfortune and none of my own.

The second leg of Pender’s journey took him from Miami to Puerto Rico. One look at the ancient prop-jet waiting on the auxiliary runway at the San Juan airport, and Pender decided to change his seat assignment from a window to an aisle. Enjoyable as it might have been to see the Caribbean from the air, he didn’t want to have to watch it rushing up to meet him if they had to ditch in midocean, as seemed not at all unlikely.

But the weather was clear, the flight was smooth, and the only problem he encountered was a dearth of Jim Beam on the drink cart. Pender was forced to purchase a miniature bottle of Jack Daniel’s (not bad, but it didn’t stand up to ice like Jimbo) from a stewardess with long brown legs he wanted to shinny up like a monkey.

The island first appeared as a lone dot in a wide azure sea. Soon Pender was able to make out the dark tangle of rain forest crowning the north-central hump of the island, the flat patchwork of canebrake and pasture in the middle of the island, and the low mangrove swamps to the east. As the plane dipped its left wing into a bank that was far too steep for Pender’s liking, he looked back and caught a glimpse of the neat half-round bight of Frederikshavn Harbor and the red-tiled roofs of Dansker Hill.

The airport was located in the northeast corner of the island. Although there were only a dozen passengers on the little prop-jet, at least three times that many people crowded the corral at the edge of the tarmac to meet the plane. Julian Coffee, impeccably dressed as always in a spotless white guayabara shirt and twill trousers, was at the back of the crowd, but it parted magically to let him through.

“Good afternoon, Edgar. Welcome to St. Luke. Did you enjoy your flight?”

“Yeah-and I loved the landing.” He turned to look back at the truncated runway. “Short, you’re in the drink; long, you’re in the trees.”

“The St. Luke airport is not currently for the faint of heart,” agreed Coffee, leading Pender into the terminal, which was basically a cavernous lean-to. “But according to rumor, all that mahogany will be coming down one of these days-then they’ll level that near hill, extend both runways for the big jetliners, and we’ll be in a position to duke it out with the Virgin Islands for the tourist trade.” He sounded pleased by the prospect.

Coffee’s car, a cream-colored vintage Mercedes-Benz, heavily upholstered and polished to a buttery sheen, was parked at the curb, in the red zone. The airport road looped back to the Circle Road, the island’s only major artery. Pender yelped and braced himself against the red leather dashboard as Coffee began driving down the left-hand lane of the two-lane highway.

“We drive British style on St. Luke,” Coffee explained coolly. “No one’s quite sure why: we haven’t been owned by the British since the Napoleonic Wars.”

“But the wheel’s on the left,” Pender noted, as they slowed down behind an ancient pickup truck. “How do you pull out to pass?”

“It helps to have a passenger. If not, you hit the horn. If you hear somebody else hitting a horn, you don’t go. Not that anybody’s in all that much of a hurry.”

“God forbid,” said Pender.

Coffee grinned. “You’re livin’ on island time now, me son,” he said. “You’d better get used to it.”