War Lord

Two

St Barts was the name of the place in the West Indies. I checked it out online and liked what I saw. Blue water and white bikinis.

I was on the edge of jumping in, the onscreen arrow poised over an orange button that pulsed ‘Book now, Book now’, when I heard a knock on the front door. I checked the time. Arlen wasn’t due over for at least another half hour, unless he’d clocked off early. I got up, opened the door, and went into shock, paralyzed from the eyeballs down.

The person standing in front of me could not be real. Was I hallucinating? My heart thumped loudly from an unusual place, like it had taken up residence somewhere between my ears. This could not be possible, could it? I spent a bunch of pregnant seconds standing in the doorway questioning my memory — the Mexican standoff, the shootout, the funeral, the grief — because the woman framed in the doorway, with her dark chocolate hair, green eyes, the lips, I knew her. ‘Anna?’ I tried to get the word out but it got stuck somewhere in my throat like a cork pushed down into the neck of a wine bottle.

‘You going to ask me in or should I just stand here for another minute looking at your open mouth?’ she asked.

I let the door swing open. The apparition came in pulling a bright red overnight case behind her, a family-size bucket of KFC in her other hand. She was an inch shorter than I remembered and her scent… there were only echoes of familiarity with it.

‘Jesus…’ She turned, looking around the room. ‘You honestly live here?’

A few things weren’t marrying up as they should have, like her height and the perfume she used and that last comment. This Anna had never been to my place before. And then the clouds parted and I snapped out of it. ‘Nice of you to call ahead, Marnie,’ I managed to extract from my larynx.

‘Well, we didn’t part on the best of terms and I thought you’d tell me to get lost if I gave you advance warning.’

Actually, the language I’d have used for the terms we parted on might have been a little stronger than that. ‘You look different’ I said, changing the subject.

She took a length of hair and examined it up close, which made her briefly cross-eyed. ‘I got sick of all the blonde jokes, so I went back to my normal color. Sorry if I startled you. Everyone’s been telling me how much I look like… you know.’

Yeah, I knew. Marnie Masters was fifteen months younger than her sister, Anna. I wasn’t in Marnie’s good books. She blamed me for Anna’s death, so that made two of us. When I last saw her, which was at the wake, she was crying, yelling at me to get lost while throwing plates, wine glasses and pastrami sandwiches in my direction — whatever came to hand. I’d slunk away and we hadn’t spoken since.

‘You look different too,’ she said. ‘Still got those rugged good looks, but…’

‘Only they’re getting more rugged.’

‘You look — I don’t know…’

I rubbed the bridge of my nose and felt the swelling beneath my fingertips. ‘I’ve had a nose job since I last saw you.’ I didn’t think it worth mentioning that it had been performed by a truck’s steering wheel in the Congo.

‘I’d ask for a refund.’ Marnie smiled. ‘Anyway, I’ve had time to think through what happened. I came to realize that I owe you an apology.’

‘Forget about it,’ I said.

‘No, hear me out. Anna wanted to be a cop. That was her dream, her choice. She knew it came with risks, and the risks added to the job satisfaction. I’m saying I know you didn’t kill her, Vin. It just happened, just one of those things. I don’t hold you responsible. I did, but now I don’t. I shouldn’t have said those things to you at the funeral.’

‘I haven’t eaten pastrami since.’

‘I’m sorry. I was in shock. I loved my sister and she was gone and you were the only person I could blame. There was no one else closer to her than you.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I could have put all that in an email, but I thought I owed it to you to come here in person. I’m not proud of my last performance.’

I didn’t know what to say. I was a little in shock myself. One minute I was surfing soft porn lying around on a beach on St Barts and the next I was looking at Anna reincarnated, full of forgiveness, a bucket of fried chicken in her hand. Surreal was the word that came to mind. I must have been looking at that bucket because she glanced down at it then lifted it onto the table.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not here to throw fried chicken at you.’

‘That’s a relief,’ I said.

‘Anna loved you, by the way. But you know that.’

I did know that.

She ran her fingers through chocolate-colored hair, then flicked her head a little to reposition the bangs. ‘It’s been a hell of a trip.’ She took in my interior-decorating skills again. ‘Who does a girl have to blow to get a drink around here?’ Marnie might have looked like Anna, but she didn’t talk like her.

‘Well, that guy’s not around, but I’ll see what I can rustle up.’ I headed for the kitchen. ‘There’s Jacks or single malt,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘I might have a couple of beers.’

‘Beer, please,’ she said.

I looked in the fridge and saw a pair of Heinekens, the right number. ‘Glass?’ I called out.

‘Thanks.’

I took the tops off the bottles, delivered hers with the glass and then poured it for her.

‘Friends?’ she said, holding up the glass.

I clinked it with the bottle, said, ‘Friends,’ and took a swig.

‘So, you really got a bit of a shock when you opened the door, right?’

I was going to say that I’d thought I was looking at a ghost, but I changed my mind. ‘Yeah.’

‘When we were in our teens people used to think Anna and I were twins.’

I could believe it. The similarity would once have been uncanny, but now it was spooky given that Anna was dead. I moved it along. ‘Not that I believe in these things, but it’s a coincidence that you should arrive just now.’

‘Really? Why’s that?’

I spun my laptop around and touched the space bar. The screen lit up showing a woman lying face down on white sand.

‘Did I interrupt you in the middle of something?’ she asked with a raised eyebrow.

I backspaced and the girl in the white bikini bottoms was now standing on the shoreline, her top around her neck, hanging in her cleavage.

Marnie sipped her beer. ‘You were saying something about a coincidence?’

I skipped through another half dozen pages showing the white bikini girl in various semi-nude poses.

‘I can come back, if you like?’ Marnie said sarcastically. ‘How long do you need? A minute or two?’

Finally, an image opened of the white prow of an old fishing boat against the blue of the sea and the sky.

‘Hey, I know this website. That’s home — St Barts. You were checking this out?’ Marnie asked.

‘I was about to book a trip, head over, get in some diving. That was Anna’s plan. She was gonna come to St Barts and spend time with you. At the funeral, I never got around to telling you that.’

‘I guess I never gave you the opportunity.’

No, she hadn’t.

‘It’s kinda freaky that I should suddenly just turn up on your doorstep then,’ she added.

Like I was saying.

Another knock on the door. ‘Excuse me,’ I told her and opened up on Arlen armed with a six-pack of Heinekens. I was about to tell him to come on in when he said, ‘Hey, Marnie,’ pushed past me and went straight over to her. I stood back and watched as they air-kissed and embraced and asked each other how the other was, and so forth. I gathered that Arlen and Marnie had become Facebook friends since hitting it off at the wake, after I’d been given my marching orders.

Once the pleasantries were out of the way, along with a repeat of the conversation about how much Marnie now looked like a certain someone else, Arlen went over more old ground about the trip to St Barts, which, if nothing else, at least confirmed that I wasn’t making it all up, and also gave me the chance to relieve him of one of his beers.

Eventually, when Arlen realized that I was also in the room and steadily working my way through his booze, he excused himself to Marnie and presented me with the 988. ‘This is filled out on my end and ready to go.’

Except that Marnie was here now and a big part of the reason for going on vacation was null and void. I checked over the form.

‘Today you’re on Air Force time,’ my supervisor and closest pal said. ‘Sign it and tomorrow you’re on yours — do you good, buddy.’ He picked up his beer. ‘I was thinking we could take Marnie out for dinner, but I see you’ve already got it worked out.’ He nodded at the bucket of KFC on the table.

I glanced at her. ‘You want me to reheat?’

‘Maybe you should sit down,’ she said. ‘Both of you.’

The way she said it told me that it wasn’t because the chicken would need more than a minute or two in the microwave. In my job, when folks tell you to sit down it’s usually because they’re gonna tell you something that’ll make you want to jump to your feet, but I took her advice and a chair, along with Arlen’s last Heineken.

‘So what’s in the bucket, Marnie?’ Arlen asked her.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t hot. Now that I was looking at it more closely I saw condensation had formed on the sides. A droplet of water slid down into a small puddle that had formed around the base. Arlen sat and frowned at the bucket, waiting.

Marnie opened her mouth to speak, closed it, opened it again, then closed it. She didn’t know where to start — that much was clear. ‘This is complicated,’ she finally managed to say.

‘Just show us what you’ve got,’ I suggested.

Marnie hesitated and then peeled the lid off the bucket. A white fog of dry-ice vapor rolled up like a smoke ring beneath the lid and climbed above the table, followed by a wave of the stuff pouring out over the sides. I had to admit I was intrigued. So was Arlen, leaning forward on the table, up on his elbows. Marnie’s hand disappeared inside the bucket.

‘Some days ago, a woman I have recently come to know received this,’ she said, producing a plain white envelope. She handed it to me. It was cold and wisps of fog clung to the edges. I’d been expecting… Actually, I don’t know what I’d been expecting once I knew a drumstick was unlikely, but an envelope wasn’t it.

‘Open it,’ Marnie urged.

I did as she suggested and removed a sheet of paper. A line of default Microsoft Word black twelve-point Times New Roman type was printed on it. The line was italicized suggesting urgency and several words were in caps. The note read, FAILING to come up with $15 MILLION will TRIGGER delivery of his HEAD. You have 20 days. You will be contacted. No police.

And then Marnie lifted a human hand packed into a meat tray from the KFC bucket and placed it on the table.

Arlen’s jaw hit the floor.

The sight of it caught me by surprise too, as well as giving me a flashback to a scene I witnessed in the Congo of a man kneeling in the mud, screaming, as soldiers hacked off both his hands with machetes.

‘They run out of chicken?’ I asked her.

Marnie wasn’t amused.

I reached for the pen in Arlen’s top pocket and poked the tray with it, positioning it so I could get a better look at the hand, condensation fogging the plastic wrap with each passing second. Through an oval window in the frost, I could see that the hand itself was greenish brown, the fingernails rimmed with dried blood. A gold ring dressed its squat pinky. ‘So who’s the woman who was sent this?’

‘Her name’s Alabama. She’s a friend of Anna’s. Or, rather, her boyfriend was,’ Marnie said, looking away from the tray. She got up from the table and walked toward the kitchen, the sight of the severed hand obviously giving her some problems. ‘She’s a topless dancer in Vegas.’

This was getting more interesting with each passing second. It was also getting more confusing.

‘We should call this in to the local PD,’ Arlen decided.

‘But the letter… it says no cops,’ Marnie said.

‘This is a matter for police,’ he insisted.

I reread the note. Someone wanted money to supposedly stop a man being killed. Presumably the contact mentioned would specify the collection details. I wondered why the capital lettering on selected words. Maybe it was used merely for emphasis. ‘Why don’t you take us through the story from the beginning?’

‘Do you mind covering that first?’ she asked, her eyes flicking to the tray.

I considered whether to use something that wouldn’t leave my DNA on it. The tray and its contents would end up as evidence in a case sooner or later, but Marnie had handled it and I guessed this Alabama person had, too; and I doubted that KFC had provided the original packaging. So I picked up the tray with my fingers and gave the hand a closer inspection through the window of frost, now starting to melt, before returning it to the Colonel’s care.

Marnie relaxed a little once the lid was back in place. ‘Alabama Thornton — she’s a Vegas showgirl. Her boyfriend’s ex — Air Force. That’s his connection to Anna. According to Alabama, he met Anna in Germany, but I don’t think Alabama and Anna ever met. Anyway, from what I can gather, the boyfriend mentioned Anna to Alabama at some stage. When that arrived,’ Marnie said, motioning at the bucket, ‘Alabama didn’t want to involve the police, but she had to turn to someone so she called Anna. And along the way, Anna being my sister, Alabama was given my number. She called, and next thing I know I’m on a plane to Vegas, but I’m not Anna and I’m creeped out in a major way by dead things, let alone things chopped off people. I told Alabama about you, Vin, and that’s why I’m here.’

To drag me into it. It was amazing how Marnie managed to get the whole tangled mess out in one clean breath. ‘So you picked up the hand in Vegas?’

‘Yes.’

‘How’d you get it here?’

‘I drove.’

‘Long drive.’

‘Especially with that riding in the passenger seat.’

‘Whose idea was the KFC bucket?’

‘Mine,’ said Marnie with a shrug. ‘Nothing more innocent than fried chicken.’

She’d brought the severed hand across several state lines, so I couldn’t argue with her thinking. Driving wasn’t a bad decision, either: airport cops get sensitive about dismembered limbs in the carry-on. But there was a time limit specified in the note — twenty days, and now at least four of them had been soaked up.

‘What’s Alabama’s boyfriend’s name?’ I said.

‘Randy — Randy Sweetwater.’

‘So the hand belongs to Randy?’ Arlen said.

‘I doubt it,’ I said.

‘Alabama knows it’s not his. She already told me that.’

Arlen took back his pen. ‘Okay, but how do you know that, Vin?’

‘Skin tone. It’s dark — Mexican, perhaps — and Randy’s a white guy.’

‘And you know this because Mexicans don’t call their kids Randy or have surnames like Sweetwater?’

‘They’re good reasons, but in this instance, no. Actually, I think I’ve met the guy.’

‘You met him?’

‘Depends on how many Randy Sweetwaters are kicking around out there, but I flew with one of them in Afghanistan. Hitched a ride in his C-17. While we were refueling at a forward operating base, he accidentally dropped some package being ferried around for a colonel and, wouldn’t you know it, half a dozen bottles of Glenfiddich just fell out. Then Randy discovered a whole bunch of mechanical troubles that grounded the plane for several days. My kinda guy.’

‘So this package just happened to be full of single malt?’ Arlen said dubiously. ‘Sounds like something you’d do.’

I grinned. ‘Okay, officer, ya got me. Too bad the statute of limitations is up on this one. And anyway, smuggling booze into a Muslim country…’ I shook my head and tsked. ‘The colonel could have gotten into a lot of trouble.’

‘So is he the guy or not?’

‘The colonel?’

‘Jesus, Vin.’

‘Okay, okay… My memory’s hazy on the details of the episode — understandably — but I do remember this Randy Sweetwater saying that he was about to go to Nellis AFB, which, as we all know, snuggles up to Vegas.’

‘Sometimes I’m surprised you remember anything.’

That made two of us.

‘So, assuming the Randy Sweetwater you met is Alabama’s boyfriend,’ said Arlen, ‘and that this is not his hand, what’s Alabama worried about?’

‘Because Thing here is wearing Randy’s academy ring,’ I said, looking at Marnie. ‘Right?’

‘That’s right,’ she confirmed.

‘Well, like I said, this is a police matter,’ Arlen repeated.

‘And what are we, chopped liver?’

He had a point, though. Randy was ex — Air Force, and the ‘ex’ bit took him beyond our frame of reference. Technically, we couldn’t get involved. At least, not officially.

‘What’s Alabama expecting us to do?’ I asked Marnie. ‘What are you expecting us to do?’ I sensed discomfort from Arlen that I was including him in ‘us’.

‘To help her, obviously. The ransom — she doesn’t know what to do or who to turn to. And she doesn’t have fifteen thousand, let alone fifteen million.’

In this instance help could mean anything, except maybe assisting Alabama with a loan application for the ransom money. ‘And what about you?’ I asked Marnie. ‘What are you gonna do?’

‘Me?’ Marnie pointed at herself like I’d just accused her of something. ‘I’ve done my bit throwing you the ball. I’m going home. I’ve got a diving business to run.’ She looked at me and then at Arlen.

The initial Anna Effect experienced when I’d opened the door and seen her standing there had worn off. Marnie had Anna’s eyes, hair and bone structure, and even the tone of her voice was similar, but in every other way she was the kid sister. Anna wouldn’t have looked elsewhere to offload this. I reached across and again lifted Arlen’s pen from his shirt pocket and signed the 988 with it. ‘Sorry,’ I told him.

‘What for?’

‘You’re gonna have to absquatulate on your own.’