Twenty-Seven Bones

7

His real name was Bob Piersson. Like Lewis, he was the scion of one of the original Twelve Danish Families. They’d started calling him Bungalow Bill, for the bloodthirsty young tiger hunter in the song on the Beatles’ white album, when he returned from ’Nam in ’71 with the well-known thousand-yard stare.

His blond beard was grizzled now, as was the long hair he wore tied back with a Confederate flag headband, and the thousand-yard stare had degraded into a complex of PTSD tics and twitches, but he still wore camouflage at every opportunity, and his alcohol-fueled rage binges, though more widely spaced, were still the stuff of island legend.

His business, which he ran out of a house converted from an old sugar mill, tower and all (all that remained of the original Piersson family holdings) was partly legitimate. He was a licensed firearms dealer, and most every cop on the island had bought his or her off-duty and throw-down pieces from Bungalow Bill. But most of his profit came from a brisk trade in black market things-that-go-boom. Import and export: they didn’t call it Smuggler’s Cove for nothing.

Lewis parked the Rover in the driveway, unfurled his umbrella, crossed the dirt yard, and rapped on the dark red door set in the side of the stone mill tower.

“Who’s there?”

“Lewis Apgard.”

“Hold your hearses.”

Lewis heard locks being unlocked, bolts unbolted, chains unchained. The door opened. Bungalow Bill, dressed in tan Desert Storm camo, stepped back, waved Lewis in, locked, bolted, and chained the doors behind them. “Good afternoon, Apgard. Sorry to hear about Hokey.”

Sober, thank God. “Good afternoon, Mr. Piersson. Missed you at the funeral.”

“I don’t do funerals. Let the dead bury the dead, that’s my motto.”

Not a very practical approach, thought Lewis-we’d be up to our bumsies in corpses. He furled his umbrella, trying not to drip water on his loafers, and leaned it against the back of the door. There was no furniture, no merchandise on display-just a cement floor surrounded by curving stone walls. The mill tower had been capped by an octagonal skylight that gave a bluish cast to the conical room. The sky was gunmetal gray overhead; the rain rattled against the glass.

“And what can I do you for this afternoon, Baby Guv? Need some protection? This Machete Man thing has been damn good for business-handguns have been flying out of here since Hokey died. No offense.”

Chappie, the boom’s just about over, Lewis wanted to tell him. “None taken. And I still have that thirty-eight you sold me a few years ago. I believe I’m going to need something a little bigger for the job I have in mind. Dynamite, I suppose.” Lewis explained about the cave, but minimized its extent and fudged the location.

“Ever worked with dynamite before?” asked Bungalow Bill.

“Negative.”

“Then you ain’ want to start now.” Piersson’s speech pattern was part white West Indian and part patois, with a heavy overlay of stateside southern, both black and white-the lingua franca for the grunts in the ’Nam. “It ain’ as easy as it looks in the Roadrunner cartoons, buoy: red stick, sizzling fuse, ka-boom. You need electric blasting caps, crimpers, det cord. Lots and lots of det cord, ’cuz that there umbrella won’t do you no good when it’s raining limestone boulders. And forget timers-if the shit don’t blow right away, the last thing you want to be doing is humpin’ down the mother-humpin’ hole after it to find out why not.”

“What do you suggest, then?”

“I suggest you hire a pro.”

“Out of the question-I don’t want anybody knowing the cave was there in the first place.”

“Well if you can’t do it the right way, and you don’t want to do it the wrong way, all that’s left is the Army way. We blew a shitload of tunnels in ’Nam. And it juuust so happens…Wait here.”

Not that Lewis had any choice-Piersson took the key from the front door dead bolt with him, and locked the door on the opposite side of the tower behind him. When he returned he was carrying a small wooden crate bearing the label Armaturen Gesellschaft m.b.H., ARGES SplHG 90, qty 24, with the words DANGER: HIGH EXPLOSIVES stenciled in English, French, and German on the top and sides.

“Couple of these ought to do the trick,” he told Lewis, as he pried the top off the crate with a small longshoreman’s hook. “NATO quality, lightweight plastic body, 190 grams of plasticized PETN-that’s a demolition load, twice the normal amount-fuse delay 3.5 to 4.5 seconds-don’t count on the 4.5-and an effective radius of ten meters-give it fifteen just to be on the safe side, and whatever you do, don’t stand in front of the hole.”

“Sounds good to me. But what the fuck are we talking about?”

“Hand grenades. Pineapples. Chuck and ducks. Pull the pin, toss it in, 3.5 to 4.5 seconds later, boom. No damn cave, no damn Cong.”

“There are no Viet Cong on St. Luke,” Lewis pointed out.

“You never know,” said Bungalow Bill.