Ken Douglas - Scorpion

“ Sir,” the policeman said.

“ Mr. Broxton and I are going to use the car.” He offered the policeman a bright smile. The officer stood fast.

“ I’m supposed to drive it.”

“ Gary, I’m sixty-two years old. I know how to drive.”

“ Not the point. I’m supposed to drive.”

“ Look at me, Gary.” The policeman looked into Ramsingh’s hard gray eyes. “I’m the prime minister and I’m taking this car. Tell your sergeant that I gave you no choice. Then tell the president I’ll be out of touch for a day or so.”

“ Sir?”

“ Step aside, Gary.”

“ Yes, sir,” the policeman said, as he opened the driver’s door and moved out of Ramsingh’s way. Broxton jumped in the passenger side and in seconds they were driving away from the park, the concert, and the thousands of fans who never knew how close they came to witnessing the assassination of a prime minister and possibly becoming victims themselves.

“ Warren keeps his boat docked at the pier in front of Drake’s Shipyard. It’s a sixty-five foot sloop. Very fast. We’ll play hell trying to catch them. I don’t know if we can,” Ramsingh said, as they passed the maxi stand at Green Corner. They didn’t see Dani and Earl climb into the second maxi. They didn’t notice the maxi bolt from the curb. And they weren’t watching as it followed them down Western Main Road.

“ We can’t have her arrested,” Broxton said.

“ Don’t I know it,” the prime minister said.

“ What are we going to do?” This time it was Broxton asking the question.

“ Follow her and see where she goes. Play it by ear.”

“ How are we going to do that?”

“ I keep my boat at the yacht club. Not big and fast like Sea King, and the yacht club’s five miles this side of Drake’s so they’ll have a head start, but I’m a sailor, and Dani’s not. She’ll reef up, we won’t. We might get lucky.”

“ Reef up?” Broxton asked.

“ It’ll be dark soon. It’s blowing like stink out there. I know, I check the weather every morning, old habits die hard. She’ll be cautious and reef. That means she’ll bring most of her sail in.”

“ What if she’s in a hurry?”

“ She’ll be afraid of being overpowered. When the weather’s bad, you reef. Too much sail up and you can put your mast in the water, or worse you could roll the boat. It makes for a much safer and more pleasant ride if you reef when it starts to blow hard.

“ You think we’ll be able to catch her?”

“ Maybe, if she reefs, like I said. The wind will be at her beam, the best point of sail. She’ll cook. Seven, eight knots, even if she is reefed, but it won’t be fun with the kind of weather that’s out there. And there’s no place to hide in the Caribbean, too many yachties these days. There’s no such thing as a quiet or private anchorage anymore.”

“ She won’t hide,” Broxton said. “She knows I saw her, but she also knows I’d never do anything to hurt Warren. Plus she thinks I’m still in love with her. She’ll be convinced I’ll keep my mouth shut. No, she won’t run or hide. She’ll think she’s in the clear. It would be just like her to take a leisurely cruise up the Islands, drinking, dining and dancing in the most public nightspots all the way to the Florida Keys.”

They were quiet for a few seconds, then Broxton asked. “What do we do when we catch up to her?”

“ That’s a good question.”

“ She tried to kill you.”

“ We don’t know that for sure,” Ramsingh said. He stopped at a red light, looked both ways, then ran it.

“ She was with the man I saw in Margarita. That’s why I charged the stage. I’m convinced they had a bomb ready to blow.”

“ And you thought if you were on the stage she wouldn’t set it off?”

“ Yes.”

“ But what if it wasn’t remote controlled? What if it was on a timer?”

“ I didn’t think of that,” Broxton lied.

“ Sure you did,” Ramsingh said. He waited through another few seconds of silence then added, “Thanks. I doubt any of my men would have taken such a risk.” Then he looked in the rearview mirror and changed the subject. “The maxi behind ran the light, too, with a police car in front,” he said.

“ People don’t respect the law here,” Broxton said. “That’s part of your problem.”

“ We have a long way to go,” Ramsingh said. Then he turned into the yacht club, oblivious to the maxi that sped around him and continued north on Western Main road toward Drake’s Shipyard.

“ Fuzz is gone. Now we can move,” the Rasta driver said and he stepped on the gas.

Earl watched the scenery fly by, fascinated by the rain forest that edged up to the road. He imagined monkeys, snakes, big cats and cannibals inside the dense jungle and shivered as he thought of witch doctors throwing bones and voodoo priests jabbing pins in lifelike dolls.

“ Got snakes in there?” he asked the driver.

“ Got plenty, man.”

“ Poisonous?”

“ Real deadly.”

“ Monkeys?”

“ Most died off, some kind of fever.”

“ Cats, like lions and tigers?”

“ No man.”

“ How about voodoo?” He knew better than to ask about cannibals.

“ We got that.”

“ Shit,” he said, glad they were heading out of the country.

“ I hear ya,” the driver said, then he turned on the radio, cranked it up loud and started singing along with a calypso song.

For the next five or six minutes Earl stared at the lush, green vegetation as it whizzed by the window, wondering why they were leaving. The prime minister wasn’t dead yet. He turned from the window, leaned toward her and whispered, “Where we going?”

“ Grenada,” she said, whispering back.

“ But we haven’t finished it.”

“ Relax, Earl. We’ll be in Prickly Bay shortly after sunup. We’ll check in, go to town, be seen, talk to a few yachties and then we’ll board a plane and come back and finish the job. I don’t like doing it that way, but my father expects the boat to be in Grenada by tomorrow and that’s where it’s going to be, besides it’s a perfect alibi.”

“ Won’t they have a record of us leaving the country?”

“ You said you travel with a couple of extra passports, well I do too.”

“ But everybody here knows you.”

“ Earl, really,” she said. “Think about who I am and what I’ve been doing for the last several years. Don’t you think I can get by a customs officer without being recognized. Shit, I can be eighteen or eighty and I have a passport for every occasion.

The guard left the guard shack as the police car pulled up to the gate. His uniform was pressed and the visor on his hat was as spit shined as his shoes. He wore the uniform like he was proud of it, but his stomach spoke of too many beers when he was off duty.

“ Trouble?” he said, seeing the police car and looking in the window.

“ No, Cletus, I’m just going for a sail.”

“ Mr. Ramsingh, sir.” The guard stepped back.

“ Would you call the president and tell him I went sailing for a day or so. Tell him I’ll call him tomorrow and explain everything.”

“ I can’t call the president.”

“ Sure you can,” Ramsingh said. “Get your clipboard and I’ll give you his private number.”

“ I thought you were the prime minister,” Broxton said a few seconds later as Ramsingh put the emergency brake on in the parking lot.

“ The president’s the head of state, like the Queen in England, and like in England the prime minister’s the head of the government. I’m elected, he’s not.”

“ How’s he get the job?”

“ The prime minister appoints him. He serves for five years, that way his term overlaps the election. In theory he’s not beholden to the prime minister or party in power. He’s supposed to be above politics.”