Jon Evans - Dark Places

Yesterday's plan was sound, and sensible, and utterly cowardly. It was very convenient how my elegant plan for revenging myself on the man who had murdered Laura involved letting him walk away and kill two more girls. Very convenient how it got me the hell out of danger as soon as was humanly possible. Abandoning the two Swedish girls, perfect strangers or no, was the act of a contemptible coward, and I knew it. Even if I was sure that they were probably already dead.

What if they weren't? He couldn't plan for everything. Maybe something had gone wrong. Maybe he'd gotten sick. They might still be alive. And even if they weren't, the sooner I got there, the better chance of getting the authorities to catch him before he left Indonesia.

Even as I contemplated this a raindrop the size of a marble smacked into the sheet of paper, smearing the cheap ink. I looked up. Dark clouds roiled the sky. I could see flickers of lightning on the horizon. The monsoon was back, and this time, I could tell, it wasn't going to fuck around.

No time to lose, I thought, and five minutes later I was packed and paid for. Femke looked at me as if I was crazy when I told her I had to go to Kuta Beach right away. I guess I could understand why. It was already pouring as I began to slog along the rice paddies towards the road. Not quite running, but close.

I left the parang behind. I was through with that particular madness.

It cost me a lot of money to get to Kuta that day. I can't blame the drivers. I wouldn't have wanted to go anywhere in that weather either. The storms of the previous few days had been mere warmups for the main event. The rain hit so hard I thought it might leave bruises. Visibility was approximately three feet. The cedak driver who took me from Tetebatu to Kotoraya wore his arm out whipping the horse with his bamboo switch. The bemo drivers were only a little better off. At one point on the leg from Kopang to Praya the driver slammed on the brakes and swerved so hard that two wheels briefly left the road. The road was too slippery for the brakes to have much effect, and I thought for a second that I was going to be roadkill, but the driver weaved with superhuman skill through a herd of water buffalo that appeared suddenly out of the monsoon like dark omens.

In the end I made it. My watch told me it was five o'clock. This Kuta Beach was nothing like the one on Bali. It was simply a road that ran along the coast, with jungle on one side and beach on the other, and eight hotels clustered near the T-junction that connected to the rest of the island. I walked along the road to the nearest hotel. I didn't hurry. I didn't mind being soaked any more. I and all of my possessions had been soaked all day.

I checked into the Anda Cottages, which had no Morgan/Peter/Kerri/Ulrika in the register, went into my cottage, changed into my swimsuit, and hung the rest of my clothes out to dry. I didn't feel the desperate need for speed that I had felt when the day had begun. After seven hours of travel, there didn't seem any point in worrying about another fifteen minutes. And nobody was killing anybody in this downpour, of that I was pretty sure, not unless Morgan was going to break into their room and start swinging a parang wildly, and that seemed unlikely. His modus operandi was the ambush.

And besides the most likely scenario was that they were dead already.

I went to the common room to find out what was going on. I wasn't sure how I would bring up the subject. "So, anybody find a couple of murdered Swedish girls around here?" didn't seem like a winning conversation-starter. But then I saw faces that I recognized, Johann and Suzanne, the Dutch couple from Tetebatu, drinking Bintang-and-Sprite shandies. They waved at me and I joined them.

"When did you get here?" Suzanne asked.

"Today," I said. The waiter came by and I asked him for a beer and then, as I realized I hadn't eaten since the banana pancakes except for half a pineapple in Pao Montong, a dish of nasi goreng.

"You came here through the rain?" she asked.

I nodded and smiled sheepishly.

"We didn't think the roads were open," Johann said. "We were supposed to take a Perama bus back to the ferry today, but they said they could not go because of the monsoon." Perama was the Indonesian tourist authority, which provided air-con buses between major tourist destinations. A little more expensive than bemos, and without their gritty authenticity, but a whole lot more comfortable.

"The roads were pretty bad," I admitted. "I'm surprised I got here."

"Have you been in Tetebatu?" Suzanne asked.

I nodded and drank greedily from my Bintang, which tasted wonderful and felt much-deserved. "How are things around here?"

"They're good," Johann said, and Suzanne nodded her agreement. "Very peaceful. You can rent mopeds and bicycles and go up and down the road. An excellent road with nothing on it. The beach right here," he motioned towards the sea, "is not so good… "

"Coral pebbles, not sand," Suzanne clarified. "Difficult to walk on or lie down on."

"The surfers like it, though," Johann said, and he and Suzanne exchanged looks and laughed at some private joke.

"Lots of surfers here," Suzanne said.

"But down the road to the east, maybe two miles… "

"Oh, yes, there's a perfect beach," Suzanne said. "Wonderful. A big white… " She made an arc with her hands, searching for the right English word.

"Crescent," Johann filled in. "It must be nearly a kilometer long."

"But it's dangerous," Suzanne said. "You must remember, if you go there. The owner here, he says there's a terrible riptide in the middle of the beach, and people die there every year. Swept out into the ocean and drowned."

"There are no signs there, can you imagine?" Johann said. He sounded a little outraged. "No signs at all. It's disgraceful. But as long as you're careful, it's a perfect beach. And there's nobody there."

"A few locals with coolers on their heads, selling Cokes and pineapples, and that's it. No buildings, no stores, no hotels," Suzanne added.

"Sounds like paradise," I said. My nasi goreng had arrived and I attacked it with a will as they chatted to each other, nostalgically, in Dutch.

Five minutes later I felt a thousand times stronger. "Listen," I said, "I ran into an old friend of mine in Tetebatu, I think he was coming here, have you seen him?" I described Morgan and company.

"Oh, yes," Suzanne said. "The big man with all the tattoos. We had lunch with them yesterday. The girls seemed very nice. There was no Dutch man with them, though. I think he went east to Flores instead of coming down here. Just your friend and the Swedish girls."

"They went out to that beach, didn't they?" Johann asked her.

"They did," Suzanne said. "During the rain. When everyone else was staying in they went out to the beach. Your friend said that it was best then, that swimming in the rain was better because you didn't get so hot."

"And nobody follows you around trying to sell you a sarong," Johann added, and they both laughed. Sarong salesgirls were the bane of Indonesian travelers. I didn't laugh.

"Did you see them afterwards?" I asked.

"Let's see… did we?" Suzanne said, thinking about it. "I think we saw your friend last night, on the road."

"Yes, we did," Johann said. "But not the Swedish girls."

"That's right," Suzanne said. "Just your friend Morgan."

I sipped from my beer to cover my consternation. I felt so cold I nearly shivered. Morgan had taken Kerri and Ulrika to a deserted beach yesterday, a beach already known for death by drowning, with the monsoon thundering down and nobody else around. And he had been seen again, but they had not.

"I have to go," I said, putting my beer down half-finished. I was sure it was too late but that was no reason to delay. "I forgot something. I'll see you later."