Randy White - North of Havana

He was moving the light over a dead man. Pasty white face with dark stripes painted under the eyes, down the chin. Long arms and body, his knees drawn up to his chest as if frozen in a spasm. Probably late teens with a buzzed tough-guy beard, barefooted, wearing cheap white pants and guayabera shirt that showed two soaked red splotches. There was a third-more like a black puncture-where his jaw and neck met.

I wanted to say I wouldn 't have shot.

Instead, I listened to Geis tell me, "He's an Abakua. See the face paint? The assholes wear face paint. Like a bunch of fucking savages. And the beads."

Red and white beads as a necklace. One bead of each color pierced into the dead man's nose, his ears. Same beads that Taino wore; follower of the god Chango.

Now Geis was going through his pockets. "I used my knife on him. Got a good angle on the first try but hit him a couple of more times just to make sure. A Glock. Pretty nice knife. I'll show it to you when we get time."

I didn't want to see it. I didn't want to see it because I had an old Glock attack knife hidden away with some other things in my stilthouse on Dinkin's Bay. If they were alike, I didn't want to know.

I watched Geis, feeling a growing animus toward him and everything about him… or maybe it was just fear reconstructed into anger. I asked him, "Do you rob everyone you kill?" but said more with my tone of voice.

He was taking two dirty one-dollar bills from a leather billfold, then looking at the photographs: an elderly man and woman beneath a tree; head and shoulders of a teenage girl with a chubby face. Said, "Goddamn right. Think I do this shit for free?" as he removed something from an inside compartment beneath the photos-an aluminum condom packet. He seemed pleased by that. "The little bastard was already screwing around on his girlfriend. But this I can use. Even rubbers are tough to find in Havana."

He switched off the light and stood. Used the thermal scope to scan the area again-nothing-before he said, "A guy's got to be thorough, right?" Finally reacting to the tone of my question. "When they found Aledia Malinov-sky, she was picked clean. All she had was her clothes and her shoes. Unless you count the hole in the back of her head."

I was walking toward the casuarina forest. The bay would be through those trees, over a long stretch of coastal ridge. Less than a mile away. If the Abakua were here, Taino was here.

Behind me, I heard Geis say, "That's why I enjoy our little talks. I know you can relate."

I could see No Mas…

An old white-hulled Morgan sailboat floating at anchor, port side to me, a couple of hundred yards off the shallow mangrove hedge, right where it would have been anchored in Dinkin's Bay.

No doubt about it… Tomlinson had sailed her here. Only he would return to such a precise water place; his homing instincts as accurate as a satellite-positioning system.

Unlike on Sanibel, the interior sand ridge of Cayo de Soto extended to the bay and was elevated above it. Geis and I lay on our bellies in the thick cover of Brazilian pepper bushes and oak. I had a pretty good view of the brackish lake and the clearing below. Other than the shape of the bay, and No Mas suspended on dark water, there was nothing else familiar about it. Where the marina should have been was the burned-out scaffolding of what had once been a large building. The foundation was of rock; had faded paint showing through the char.

It had burned years ago.

Behind it and to our right were three stone huts, the roofs of all but one torn away. The clearing, overgrown with weeds, expanded toward the water, where there were the remains of a deep-water dock. Two large vessels were tied there, both cruisers. A much larger yacht was moored off what had once been a loading platform.

Not that my brain recorded all this immediately. No. When Geis and I had topped the ridgeline, the first thing I saw-and watched for several minutes before noticing anything else-was the people below. All the activity. What they were doing.

Taino needed light. He had had his people build a massive fire at the center of the clearing. There was a second fire blazing off to the left in what I at first thought was the toppled debris of another stone building… but then realized was a cemetery. A lot of plaster crypts showing above the weeds. Easier to see when one of Taino's men-there were four or five working in the cemetery-called for more light and the cruisers swung spotlights on them.

What the men were doing was going from crypt to crypt, using a sledgehammer to break the plaster away. Then they'd use a crowbar or stout limbs to pry open coffin lids.

It was a slow process. They had to feel around inside the coffins, holding up pieces of this and that. They would throw the pieces aside, then fish their hands into the coffins again. The men were not happy in their work. They had rags tied around their faces-to keep out the odor; keep out the germs or the imagined spirits.

Why, on a remote island, would there be a cemetery with airtight crypts?

The abandoned leper colony…

Geis had watched them for a time, then whispered, "They haven't found him yet." He meant Columbus; the medallions.

I whispered, "No, and they won't."

Of course they wouldn't. They'd been led here for no other reason than that Tomlinson had found a place on a map that had called him home. When they completed their search, when they realized that Tomlinson was useless, they would get rid of him. He had witnessed too much. And Dewey, too-if they hadn't killed her already.

"I don't see your friends. Don't see Rita or Adolfo, either." Geis was looking through a small pair of binoculars; had been looking for quite a while. "That's bad for you, but maybe worse for me."

What did he mean by that?

He passed the binoculars across-apparently, he wanted me to find out for myself.

I removed my glasses and refocused the binoculars. First checked the men working in the cemetery. Cool December night, but they had their shirts off, sweating. They'd been at it for a while. Maybe most of the day, judging from the piles of plaster that covered the field. I tried to gauge how many more crypts they had to open before they were done. A dozen, perhaps. An hour's work; not much more.

If Tomlinson and Dewey were still alive, I had to find them and get them out soon.

I looked at the six men standing in the center of the clearing, the light of the fire illuminating their bodies in vertical halves. Taino was there. He was wearing a white robe over slacks and a white cap. A big man surrounded by other men; two dressed similarly, and I guessed they were Babalaos, like Taino. I recognized two of his assistants-Orlando and Molinas-everyone dressed in white, wearing their beads. Watched Taino throw something onto the ground. Wooden discs, they looked like, dark on one side, white on the other. He threw them near what appeared to be the statuette of some Catholic saint… also a black statuette shaped like a child's doll. I could see that Taino was talking while he studied the discs.

I checked the three stone cottages. There was a light showing through the gun port-sized window of one. The others were dark.

No sign of Dewey or Tomlinson. Didn't see Santiago, either. What had happened to the boy?

Was it possible they were still aboard No Mas?

I checked the boat. No one above deck; no lights showing below. Looking at No Mas, seeing it close-up and in such a familiar setting, catalyzed in me an uncharacteristic spike of emotion, and I swept the field glasses away.

Geis said, "He's not the reason the Abakua are here. It's because whenever there's an important Santeria ceremony, they always carry along a few to stand guard. That's how I knew. So heathens like us won't sneak in and peek. They couldn't go looking for something like Columbus without doing it up right. Making offerings to the gods, throwing the coconut shells to get direction. See those bowls sitting around? They've got blood in them. Gifts, like liquor and tobacco. They'll keep filling them up and dumping them until the gods finally come through."