Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

Marley Gold was in the open-sided kitchen, sitting on a stool washing the supper dishes with his feet, by the yellow light of a single bug-bulb hanging in a wire basket from the tin roof.

“Good evenin’, Mr. Pender.”

He had two mosquito coils burning; Pender took off his hat and waved the smoke away. “Evening, Marley. I see they put you to work.”

“Everybody gots chores, sir.” The boy might have been a trifle offended.

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Pender quickly.

“Are you really an FBI agent?”

“I was. For twenty-seven years.”

“I got a book from the school library, Your FBI in Peace and War. Did you ever meet Mr. J. Edgar Hoover?”

It had been a long, long time since Pender had heard The Director referred to in such awed tones-must have been an old book. “Just once. He came by the Academy to look over the recruits. I was as bald then as I am now. He told me always wear a hat, son.”

Marley dipped a dinner plate into the suds sink, holding it between his big and second toes, swiped it clean with a dishrag held in his other foot, dunked it into the rinse sink, then slid it onto the stack. He pivoted around on his coccyx to face Pender. “Did you ever have a shootout?”

“Constantly. Rare was the day I got to finish breakfast without a gunfight breaking out.”

“Don’ mek naar wit’ me now.” Whenever Marley used a St. Luke word, the whole sentence came out in dialect. “You still got your gun?”

“My SIG Sauer is in the FBI Museum.” Pender might have answered differently if he hadn’t had a few drinks in him-he almost never boasted, sober. But it was only the plain truth, he thought; he was vaguely aware of wanting the boy’s approval. “Chief Coffee loaned me a nice little semiautomatic, though.”

“Can I see it?”

Pender reached behind his back, unsnapped the two-stage holster Hamilton had loaned him, removed the gun, shook out the clip and racked the slide to make sure the chamber was empty. Marley dried his feet on a dish towel, took the gun between his feet, pressed the textured grip between his soles, then pivoted in the other direction and slipped the long, flexible middle toe of his right foot around the trigger. He dropped it; Pender picked it up and placed it between his feet again.

“That little clicker there-that’s the safety,” said Pender. “You want it so the red dot is showing-yeah, that’s right. Don’t worry if you can’t pull the trigger, it’s got kind of a heavy-”

Marley managed to pull the trigger on his second try. Obviously the boy’s toes were strong as well as flexible.

“Good job,” said Pender, reaching around him and taking the gun back. “If it was loaded, though, the recoil would have knocked you ass over teakettle off that stool-you’d have to remember to brace your back against something.”

“I want to shoot it for real.”

Boys will be boys, thought Pender, reholstering. When he was ten, he was always bugging his father to let him fire the Luger the old Marine sergeant brought back from the war. “Not in the dark.”

“Tomorrow? After school?”

“Maybe. We’ll have to see how things go.”

“If you promise, I’ll tell you a secret,” said Marley.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Promise first.”

“How can I promise if I haven’t heard the secret?”

“I’ll give you a hint-it’s about Dawson.”

The mystery woman. The lady of the lagoon. Who’d been in and out of his thoughts, in various stages of dress and undress, from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. “Okay, you’re on,” said Pender. “But it better be good.”

The moon was dim, but the starlight was so bright that the bay rums cast shadows across the path from the Great House to the overseer’s. Lewis gave the black hole of the Danish kitchen a wide berth when he passed the landing.

Emily answered the door. Her blouse was cut low, her bosom pushed up high. She closed the door quickly behind him. “A reporter? You killed a reporter?”

“Is there a problem with that?”

“Yes, there’s a problem.” She led him into the living room, handed him a copy of that morning’s San Juan Star. St. Luke Sentinel reporter murdered…serial killer…Machete Man…as many as four previous murders…

“That’s what we wanted, isn’t it?” said Lewis. He could hear someone typing furiously in one of the bedrooms.

“No, it’s not what we wanted. A reporter dies, every newspaper in the country gets interested. Once the wire services pick it up, the heat’s really going to be on. There’ll be Feds all over the place.”

“Feds! Pah! There’s already one nosing around. That big bald fellow in the church this afternoon-he moved into one of the A-frames at the Core yesterday. Dumb as a sack of coconuts-he doesn’t suspect a thing.”

“Well, they won’t all be. We have to give them a Machete Man, the sooner the better.”

We? Have to nip that one in the buuuuud. “How are you going to do that?”

She told him-they were back to we.

“No,” he said firmly. “No more.”

“No more what?” They were standing two feet apart-casual but friendly conversation, according to the proxemics chart. She moved closer, broke the casual plane. She pressed up against him. She was wearing an underwire poosh-em-up, he realized-her huge titis were slopping over like pillows served up on a tray.

“No more killings.”

“What’s the matter, didn’t you enjoy the experience?”

“Of course not.” But he was starting to get aroused, remembering how it had felt the other night to be lying in wait, holding the power of life and death, wielding it. And the plan did make sense, in a twisted way. Give the police a dead victim and a dead suspect at the same time- thhhwooop: they’d be on it like a gecko on a fly, no questions asked. Not many, anyway.

Emily pressed closer, trapping his semi-erection against his thigh. “When a man and his dick disagree,” she told him, “I always believe the dick. And next time it will be even better-we’ve decided to give you the honors.”

“What honors?”

“That’s right, you don’t know yet, do you?” She stepped back. He found himself missing the contact. “Have a seat, Lew-there’s something I want to show you.”

“Knock knock.”

“Come in.”

“You’re no fun.” Pender ducked through the doorway of the Quonset. “You’re supposed to ask who’s there?”

Dawson was sitting up in bed-a narrow foam pallet-reading a Virginia Woolf novel by the light of a miniature oil lamp. Thigh-length white cotton nightgown embroidered with a yoke of tiny red flowers around the collar; she pulled the covers up to her waist. “I recognized your-oh, you mean for a knock-knock joke. Okay, who’s there?”

“Never mind-the moment’s passed.”

“Never mind the moment’s passed who?”

Pender’s mouth opened and closed. He cracked up. Dawson, a natural deadpan, cracked up too-Pender’s laugh was Stage Five contagious. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“Just a neighborly visit.” Actually, he was there in response to what Marley had overheard that morning: one hell of a good night kiss, sixty/forty she wanted to sleep with him. Odds like that, a man would have to be married, gay, or crazy not to give it a shot.

“Pull up a chair.”

As in purple velveteen beanbag. As in, set the way-back machine to 1969, Sherman. Pender stooped, slid the beanbag next to the footlocker Dawson used as a bedside table. On it was a compressed-air horn with a fat red trigger, a burning mosquito coil, the oil lamp, a cup of tea, and an ashtray with a half-smoked marijuana cigarette in it. He saw the roach; she saw him see it; he saw her see him see it.