Ken Douglas: Scorpion

Dani checked her watch. Five to five.

“ Five minutes,” Broxton said.

“ End of the line,” she said.

Broxton looked up from the clock. There was a blockade across the street and police cars were parked in front of it, but there were no policemen in sight. They must all be with Ramsingh, he thought. He hoped they were watching the crowd and not the prime minister, but he remembered when Reagan was shot and how the Secret Service men had been looking the wrong way, watching their chief instead of scanning for potential assassins, and he shuddered. The Trini police force was no Secret Service.

She pulled up behind the blue and whites and he was out the door and running before she brought the car to a complete stop. She grabbed her purse and was only a second behind him. Neither of them had bothered to close their doors.

He heard Ramsingh’s voice booming through the square before he saw him on the podium. The crowd was huge but well mannered. “Police emergency,” he said, pushing into the throng. “Move aside.” It was the calypso concert all over again, only this time the giant man wasn’t breaking trail for him.

“ Emergency, emergency, please step aside,” it was Maria’s voice behind him. “Police emergency, please step aside.” Her voice carried the authority that his lacked and people started to move.

“ Move, move,” he said, squirming through the living, breathing crowd. He was sucking air like a race horse straining for the home stretch, struggling like a salmon swimming upstream, pushing people aside with his bad arm, oblivious to the pain, adrenaline sparking through him, giving him the energy of the Gods. He sliced through the throng like a heavyweight through school children.

Dani looked at her watch. Two minutes. Martel was pulling away from the grabbing woman, heading toward the stairs. She kept her eyes on his bald spot, the evening sun gleaming off it.

“ And it’s with the unswerving support of men like George Chandee that we have been able to get this far,” Ramsingh was saying, “And with his help and others like him, we’ll be able to lower this horrible fifteen percent VAT. A value added tax is wrong. It hits the the hardest. I’d like to drop it immediately, but unfortunately I can’t, but what I can do is lower it to ten percent, starting tomorrow and I can promise you that before the next election, not after, I will replace it completely with a graduated income tax that will hit all of the people of our country fairly. And if the rich and the well to do don’t like it, they are going to have a fight the likes of which they’ve never seen before.”

What was he saying? This was not the anti-drug, pro-American speech George had told her to expect. Ram was singing her song, echoing the words she’d used against him so often. She couldn’t believe it. He’d finally seen the light. Maybe he was a man for the future after all.

She moved the sight away from Ramsingh, toward Chandee, thought of the money, then moved it back. What difference could he make anyway? They would never let him get away with it. He’d be run out of parliament by the end of the month.

She relaxed her trigger finger and looked toward Martel’s shiny bald spot. The woman had him in her grip again and he was visibly agitated, struggling to get out of her grasp.

She saw movement in the crowd. “Damn you, Broxton,” she muttered. He was seconds from the stage, charging through the crowd like a mad bull.

Martel finally succeeded in pushing the woman away and she lost sight of him as he entered the building.

She put her eye back to the sight. Ramsingh and the money, she asked herself, or Chandee and the future? She had all the time in the world. Money or honor? Her finger tightened around the trigger.

The two policemen on the steps going up the podium had their eyes on Ramsingh with their backs to the crowd. Broxton burst through them, knocking them aside. Now there was nothing between him and Ramsingh, except George Chandee.

“ Ram!” he screamed. He slammed into Chandee, sending the attorney general careening into Ramsingh and knocking the prime minister aside as gunfire exploded in the square and blood exploded above Chandee’s heart.