Warren Murphy: The Seventh Stone

He planted a foot and very slowly, with the gun ready, he turned. And there was Reginald Woburn III, smiling as foppishly as ever, trying to clean off his clothes.

"Oh, c'mon," said Reggie. "You're so serious. Don't take me so seriously, for God's sake. We'll tell Dad I shot the beast and you'll get your money and I will get my family off my back for a while. All right?"

"Sure," said Rafe, wondering how he could have been so wrong. That night, he had a drink with his client, toasted the hunt even though the head was too shot up for a good trophy, toasted the Pygmies and toasted Africa, which Reggie assured everyone he was never going to visit again.

Rafe Stokes went to his tent for the best night's sleep he ever had. It never ended. Just after the hunter began to snore, Reggie went into his tent with a dinner knife and sawed through his throat, then buried the blade in his heart.

It was delicious. Just as they were getting back to civilization, Reggie realized he didn't need the Pygmies anymore to guide him to the airport. So he took them as little snacks, popping their heads open with a pistol. If you hit them in the back of their heads, he realized, you could get the brains to fly out like a bowl of oatmeal getting a shot put plopped into it. Delicious. It was better than polo, better than cooling drinks on white verandas, better than the great summer balls of Newport, better than hashish in Tangiers. Better than sex.

It was what he had been born to do.

His father knew instantly that the change had occurred.

"Your highness," he said.

Reggie put out his right hand; palm down, and his father fell to one knee and kissed it.

"It would be fortunate if this Korean is the right Korean," said Reggie. "But we are going to have to make certain."

In his newfound wisdom, he had understood the seventh stone. One had to use time. That was what the years had given them. Time.

First they would find out if the Korean was the one, and then they would use all the years of hiding to perform the one way that would have to kill him. It was right and just. A king should never bow to an assassin, otherwise even his own royal footprints would not be his own.

The only thing Reggie now disliked about Palm Beach was that it was in America. If you killed someone, it wasn't like Zaire, where things could be arranged properly among civilized men. In America, they reacted toward killing like hysterics. They would lock you up and he couldn't afford time in jail for an American kill. But once you had the blood of men on your hands, elephants, deer and goats would never do again. He would have to be careful about his newfound pleasure until after he finished the Korean, if it was the right Korean.

He thought about this while looking at Drake, the butler. He wondered what Drake's heart would look like pumping pitifully outside the chest cavity.

"What do you want me to do with your dinner knife, Master Reggie?" asked the butler, seeing it pointed in his direction.

"Nothing," sighed Reggie. Palm Beach was in America.

He went back to the photograph of the stone. The pattern was clear now after so many centuries. Sword, fire, traps, one thing after another. Reginald Woburn III imagined how Prince Wo's followers must have been discouraged as each method appeared to fail. But they hadn't failed really. There were just six ways that showed what wouldn't work.

The seventh would.

Chapter Four

It was one of those painfully beautiful Bahamian mornings on Little Exuma, the first sun kiss of the horizon in purples and blues and reds like some lucky watercolor accident by a child with the sky for a canvas.

Herons perched on mangrove roots and the bonefish darted from flats to swamp just a little bit more safely that morning, because Bonefish Charlie was dead, and the first thing the constable said was not to let the tourists know.

Bonefish Charlie, who had guided so many tourists around the shallows of Little Exuma to catch the jet-fast game fish with the sharp teeth and fighting heart, let the water wash his eyes and did not blink, let the water wash his nose and made no bubbles, let the water clean his mouth and small fish swim around his teeth.

Bonefish Charlie had been maneuvered into the twisted mangrove roots in such a way that for a short while that night, as the tide rose, he could breathe. And then, as the tide rose just a bit more, he could only breathe water. Bonefish Charlie, who the natives had always said was more bonefish than man, wasn't. The proof positive was wedged into the roots as the tide went out. Bonefish thrived under the mangrove roots when the tide came in and Bonefish Charlie hadn't.

"It ain't a morder," said the constable in that strange chopped British accent of the Bahamas, part British, part African, part Carib Indian, and part anyone else who traded and pirated in these waters over the centuries. "Not a morder and don't you be tellin' de white people."

"I tell not a soul. May my tongue cleave to the roof of me mouth until it touch bone," said Basket Mary, who wove and sold baskets to the tourists down by Government House.

"Just don' tell de whites," said the constable. Whites meant tourists, and anything smacking of murder was bad for the tourist business. But the constable was her cousin and he knew that it was too much of a horrible incident for Basket Mary to keep to herself. She would, of course, tell it to friends until she died. She would tell how she had found Bonefish Charlie and what he looked like with "the fishes who was always his friends swimmin' in his mouth like they found a coral in his teeth."

And then with a great understanding laugh she would add that it probably was the first time his teeth were ever clean.

All people died sooner or later and better to laugh in the Bahamian sun than to go around like whites on the grim business of changing a world that never really changed anyway. There would be other bonefishermen and other sunrises and other men to love other women and Bonefish Charlie was a good man so that was that. But, for the morning, it was a grievous and dangerous thing to talk about among the natives, wondering who had killed Bonefish Charlie because the last place in the world he would have drowned accidentally would have been in the mangrove roots he knew so well.

It instantly replaced the news that there was a new owner of the Del Ray Promotions, owners of the new condominiums being put up for white folks. Strange fellows. Seemed to know the island a bit. Some of the friends of Basket Mary said there had been a family here like them with that name some time ago, but they had left to go to England and other places. Stuck together, they did, and some said they were here when the slaves were brought in, but of course it was not nearly so interesting a subject as the death of Bonefish Charlie in his mangrove swamp.

Reginald Woburn III met the apologetic constable at his office and heard with horror that his bonefishing guide would not be able to take him out again that day.

"Bad heart, Mr. Woburn, sir," said the constable. "But we got others just as good. You bought a good place here and we are glad you are here. We are a friendly island. We got the friendly beaches. We got the sun."

"Thank you," said Reggie. Fellow sounded so much like an advertisement, he thought. He waited until the constable was gone and then retired into a room without windows. He flicked on a harsh single-beam light set in the ceiling. It illuminated a great round stone resting on a green velvet table. He shut the door behind him and locked it securely, then approached the table and fell to his knees where he lovingly gave one strong kiss to the carved stone from a kingdom where his ancestors had ruled.

Somehow the message was even clearer when he read it from the stone itself. His time had come. He was the first son of the first son of the direct line of his family. If the seventh stone were correct, the Korean's head would go like a ripe plum from a thin vine.