Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

The closet was only a few feet from the side of the bed. P waited until D’s head was turned away, then emerged from the closet, revolver in hand. E’s eyes were glazed. The back of her hand still rested against her brow. P raised the revolver, brought the butt down against D’s occiput so forcefully that one of the plastic grips broke off the handle.

D slumped across E. She rolled out from under him. P rolled him over. He had either been feigning unconsciousness, or recovered quickly. He grabbed the gun by the barrel. As the two men grappled, E, thinking quickly, seized D’s scrotum and squeezed. He shrieked. P wrested the gun back, cocked the hammer. D curled up like a pinch bug, holding his privates and whimpering.

P was by then enormously aroused, as much by the fight as by the previous voyeurism. He had never felt so savage, so animalistic, so primitive. He told E he wanted to do to D what D had done to her. She was surprised, as he’d never shown bisexual inclinations before, not even when he and B had sex with her simultaneously.

But she was also aroused. They stuffed one of E’s stockings into his mouth. They rolled him over onto his stomach, tied his hands to the headboard with a rope, then tied one end of another rope to one of his ankles and looped it under the bed and around to the other ankle, securing his legs in a spread-eagled position.

P didn’t bother to disrobe. He just pulled down his pants, then started to pull them back up when he had finished. E stopped him, told him it was her turn, and positioned herself atop D, straddling him with her thighs. Her husband positioned himself atop her-an E sandwich-and entered her from behind. They climaxed together. All that remained now was the dying, and the dying breath….

Once again, Emily finished reading with one hand pressed between her legs. She put the manuscript down, reached into her bedside drawer, took out her lipstick-sized vibrator. She heard a chair scraping the floor in the next room; out of the corner of her eye she saw Phil peering over the wall.

“Oh, oh,” she said in a breathy falsetto. “I think I’ll masturbate now, with my nightgown pulled up to expose my overdeveloped female attributes. I do hope no one is watching.”

Sugar Town. Dirt streets and porticoed wooden sidewalks. Women balancing bundles of laundry on their heads on their way to the washhouse, loafers drinking rum on the bench under a Ginger Thomas tree, old men slapping dominoes down on the wooden tables in front of the bars on Wharf Street. Yellow dogs lolling in the yellow dirt, oblivious to the scruffy chickens crossing the road to get to the other side. Young men selling conch out of the back of old pickup trucks, women in bright headkerchiefs peddling eggs, or limes from the public grove.

Vijay parked his patrol car, a Plymouth that had seen better decades, outside the washhouse, and led Pender down a narrow, walled alley. The fences on either side were six to eight feet high, built of various materials-corrugated tin, rusty chain link, old shipping crate sides-overgrown with flowering crimson bougainvillea or pink Mexican creeper vines. Every four or five paces there were doors set into the fence, some flush, some crazily askew, each one a different color, bright yellow, stoplight red, parrot green, vibrant purple. Vijay, counting doors, rapped at the seventh door on the right-a violet one.

“Good mornin’, Mrs. Jenkuns,” he called loudly.

“Who deh?”

“Police officers.”

“Come true, but don’ vexadahg.”

“What?” whispered Pender.

“She say, come through, but don’ vex the dog,” said Vijay, the tip of his pink tongue exaggeratedly scraping the bottom of his front teeth on through and the.

“After you,” said Pender.

Poinsettias, red and green as Christmas, grew in the postage-stamp yard. The dog chained to a post in the corner, yellow as every other dog in Sugar Town, with malevolent yellow eyes, barked furiously, hackles raised.

The house was your basic Sugar Town shack, with mismatched wooden walls and a semiopaque green corrugated plastic roof fitted out with old PVC half-pipe gutters and downspouts, and barrels beneath the downspouts to catch and hold rainwater. To Pender, the wrinkled brown raisin of a woman standing in the doorway looked far too old to be the mother of a twelve-year-old…Sixteen, Pender corrected himself. The dead don’t age, but Hettie would have been sixteen by then.

“Good morning, Mrs. Jenkuns.”

“Good morning.”

“My name is Ed Pender, I’m helping out Chief Coffee on this investigation.”

“What investigation would dot be?”

“Your daughter’s murder,” said Pender patiently. But he hadn’t interviewed many West Indians in his career-he’d misread her sarcasm for dull-wittedness.

Vijay got it, though. “Eh, eh, none a dot,” he told her. “We turn every stone to find dot gyirl.”

The old woman ignored him; she kept her eyes fixed on Pender. “You got a nex’ deadah, eh?”

Vijay started to translate; Pender cut him off-he’d understood her well enough: you have another victim. “Vijay, I think I can find my way back to headquarters. Why don’t you go home, get some sleep-I don’t want to be responsible for you falling asleep on duty tonight. I think they shoot you for that.”

“Dey do dot, ain’ be a policeman lef’ alive on the island,” muttered Vijay on his way out.

The bogeyman come to life on St. Luke. A real live Machete Man, but this one hacks off his victims’ hands instead of their heads. And the Sentinel wasn’t going to be printing a word of it until wishy-washy Perry Faartoft got the okay from the chief of police, who’d probably get it from the governor, who’d get it from the Chamber of Commerce, of which Lewis was a member.

That’s how things worked on a small island, thought Lewis, waiting by the pool for Dr. Vogler on Wednesday afternoon. He had of course seen the ramifications immediately; suddenly, killing Hokey had gone from a vague, scarcely articulated idea to a very real possibility. There might never be another opportunity like this. When the wife dies or disappears, Lewis knew, the husband is always the first suspect. And unless he can come up with an airtight alibi, he might be the only suspect.

Which is where having a serial killer on the loose comes in handy. If the wife is just another in a series of victims, and the husband has an absolute vacuum lock of an alibi, the cops aren’t going to look at him twice, especially with a news embargo in place. They couldn’t accuse him of being a copycat killer if he had no way of knowing about the original in the first place.

But vacuum-lock alibis don’t grow by the side of the road, and time was of the essence. A lot of things could go wrong. The news might leak out any day, or even worse, the cops might catch the killer before Lewis could make his move. It would have to be soon, then, maybe even as soon as-

No. Dammit, there was someone who knew that Lewis knew about the Machete Man: the reporter, Bendt. Which didn’t rule out the scenario entirely. It just meant that if he killed the one, he’d have to kill the other-a complication, but perhaps not insurmountable, once he’d figured out the alibi part. Because while he didn’t know for sure whether he had it in him to kill even once, it seemed to him a second murder would be less distressing, not more.

Just then the houseman, Johnny Rankin, a short, dark, white-jacketed man with a long narrow face, threw open the French doors. “Excuse me, Mistah Lewis, Dr. Vogler is here.”

“Thank you, Johnny. Send him out. And bring us some iced tea, if you would.”

The second session took place by the pool, with both the doctor and the patient on chaise longues, sipping refreshing cold beverages. Not your usual analytic setup, but Lewis had the feeling that for what he was getting per session, Vogler would have agreed to hold it in the pool, if Lewis had so requested.