Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

His blond beard was grizzled now, as was the long hair he wore tied back with a Confederate flag headband, and the thousand-yard stare had degraded into a complex of PTSD tics and twitches, but he still wore camouflage at every opportunity, and his alcohol-fueled rage binges, though more widely spaced, were still the stuff of island legend.

His business, which he ran out of a house converted from an old sugar mill, tower and all (all that remained of the original Piersson family holdings) was partly legitimate. He was a licensed firearms dealer, and most every cop on the island had bought his or her off-duty and throw-down pieces from Bungalow Bill. But most of his profit came from a brisk trade in black market things-that-go-boom. Import and export: they didn’t call it Smuggler’s Cove for nothing.

Lewis parked the Rover in the driveway, unfurled his umbrella, crossed the dirt yard, and rapped on the dark red door set in the side of the stone mill tower.

“Who’s there?”

“Lewis Apgard.”

“Hold your hearses.”

Lewis heard locks being unlocked, bolts unbolted, chains unchained. The door opened. Bungalow Bill, dressed in tan Desert Storm camo, stepped back, waved Lewis in, locked, bolted, and chained the doors behind them. “Good afternoon, Apgard. Sorry to hear about Hokey.”

Sober, thank God. “Good afternoon, Mr. Piersson. Missed you at the funeral.”

“I don’t do funerals. Let the dead bury the dead, that’s my motto.”

Not a very practical approach, thought Lewis-we’d be up to our bumsies in corpses. He furled his umbrella, trying not to drip water on his loafers, and leaned it against the back of the door. There was no furniture, no merchandise on display-just a cement floor surrounded by curving stone walls. The mill tower had been capped by an octagonal skylight that gave a bluish cast to the conical room. The sky was gunmetal gray overhead; the rain rattled against the glass.

“And what can I do you for this afternoon, Baby Guv? Need some protection? This Machete Man thing has been damn good for business-handguns have been flying out of here since Hokey died. No offense.”

Chappie, the boom’s just about over, Lewis wanted to tell him. “None taken. And I still have that thirty-eight you sold me a few years ago. I believe I’m going to need something a little bigger for the job I have in mind. Dynamite, I suppose.” Lewis explained about the cave, but minimized its extent and fudged the location.

“Ever worked with dynamite before?” asked Bungalow Bill.

“Negative.”

“Then you ain’ want to start now.” Piersson’s speech pattern was part white West Indian and part patois, with a heavy overlay of stateside southern, both black and white-the lingua franca for the grunts in the ’Nam. “It ain’ as easy as it looks in the Roadrunner cartoons, buoy: red stick, sizzling fuse, ka-boom. You need electric blasting caps, crimpers, det cord. Lots and lots of det cord, ’cuz that there umbrella won’t do you no good when it’s raining limestone boulders. And forget timers-if the shit don’t blow right away, the last thing you want to be doing is humpin’ down the mother-humpin’ hole after it to find out why not.”

“What do you suggest, then?”

“I suggest you hire a pro.”

“Out of the question-I don’t want anybody knowing the cave was there in the first place.”

“Well if you can’t do it the right way, and you don’t want to do it the wrong way, all that’s left is the Army way. We blew a shitload of tunnels in ’Nam. And it juuust so happens…Wait here.”

Not that Lewis had any choice-Piersson took the key from the front door dead bolt with him, and locked the door on the opposite side of the tower behind him. When he returned he was carrying a small wooden crate bearing the label Armaturen Gesellschaft m.b.H., ARGES SplHG 90, qty 24, with the words DANGER: HIGH EXPLOSIVES stenciled in English, French, and German on the top and sides.

“Couple of these ought to do the trick,” he told Lewis, as he pried the top off the crate with a small longshoreman’s hook. “NATO quality, lightweight plastic body, 190 grams of plasticized PETN-that’s a demolition load, twice the normal amount-fuse delay 3.5 to 4.5 seconds-don’t count on the 4.5-and an effective radius of ten meters-give it fifteen just to be on the safe side, and whatever you do, don’t stand in front of the hole.”

“Sounds good to me. But what the fuck are we talking about?”

“Hand grenades. Pineapples. Chuck and ducks. Pull the pin, toss it in, 3.5 to 4.5 seconds later, boom. No damn cave, no damn Cong.”

“There are no Viet Cong on St. Luke,” Lewis pointed out.

“You never know,” said Bungalow Bill.

The best way to approach a slam dunk crime scene is not to treat it as one. Take nothing for granted. But by late afternoon no clear signs of a third party to the events in the lime grove had been found, and everything else seemed to be falling into place.

Layla and Dr. Parmenter had examined Shea’s entrance wounds, verified the powder burns as consistent with a point-blank discharge, traced the trajectories of the bullets and found them consistent with an entry from below and slightly to the side.

The recovered shells, two from inside Shea’s body and a spent, flattened through-and-through found on the blanket, had all been fired by the.22 pistol found in Angela Martin’s hand, the pistol in turn had been identified as Angela’s by the other Wharf Street whores, and thanks to the Saturday night special’s shoddy Korean manufacture, even the antique 1970s-vintage spectrophotometer in Layla’s lab had picked up traces of gunshot residue on Angela’s left hand.

Nor could Pender fault Layla Coffee’s proposed scenario. To wit: lying atop Martin, Shea had reached across their bodies to pin her outstretched right arm with his right hand and chopped downward with the machete in his left hand, leaving her left hand free to fumble for, and fire, the gun in her purse. This clumsy positioning, with his body angled awkwardly to the left, would have accounted for the first bullet exiting just below the rib cage; when he turned to his right, the next two shots would have been angled lower and hit the hipbone from the inside.

But even so, by close of business Monday, Pender remained unconvinced, or at least uneasy. “Twenty-five years hunting serial killers,” he told Julian privately, in the chief’s office, “and I’ve never yet seen a perp and a vic kill each other at the same time. And I interviewed Shea Sunday morning, after the Bendt murder-he seemed kosher to me.”

“Did he have an alibi?” asked Julian, somewhat testily, it seemed to Pender.

“No, but according to Holly Gold, Shea was the first one to reach the Crapaud when she blew her whistle. If he were the killer, wouldn’t he have been more likely to stay away entirely?”

“Unless he thought getting there first would make him look less guilty. In which case, it seems to have worked. On you. And what’s your alternative? The Machete Man waits in the lime grove, jumps on Shea’s back, chops off Martin’s hand, then finds the gun in her purse and shoots Shea from underneath, with the barrel angled upward? And what’s Shea doing all this time, jerking off?”

“No, he…Or…” But Pender couldn’t come up with anything less far-fetched than the theory he’d worked up the previous evening. “What if there was more than one perp? One to hold the gun on Shea, one to-”

“Edgar.”

“-chop. What?”

“It’s over-let it go.”

“Julian, I have this hunch-”

“So did Quasimodo.” Coffee opened the humidor on his desk, handed Pender a Monte Cristo. “Go home, smoke this. Enjoy the rest of your time on the island. Get laid. Go swimming. Go snorkling on what’s left of our coral reef. Get a tan.”