Season of the Machete Read online

  “Please help us,” Jane whispered again.

  Pressed unbelievably hard against the damp tile wall, feeling her much cooler perspiration mix with the warm shower room water, she had an image that made her tremble. A clear picture of the two men coming into the shower. Firing at her and Peter. Firing at the woman. Firing at the little girl. BIZARRE SHOWER ROOM MASSACRE!

  They could all hear the two men outside in the dressing rooms. Loud voices. Curses. Women screaming. Lockers slamming and opening.

  “I think I’m having a nosebleed,” Jane said.

  Then it didn’t matter. Nothing did. The two killers were inside the shower room.

  Thinking about hand-to-gun combat, Peter listened to the black woman.

  “What do you want in here?” she said to the two men. The same thing she’d asked him and Jane.

  Neither of the Turtle Bay killers answered her. Then a man’s shoes clicked down hard against the tile floor. Cleats. Coming back to check for himself. So weird not being able to see the bastard. Gun drawn?

  Every muscle in Peter’s and Jane’s bodies began to clench. Across from them a wet mop was leaning against the wall. Weapon? … Weapon.

  Peter felt unbelievably protective suddenly. Full of rage. Ready to hit the black butcher boy with the mop. Make a try for his gun. One shot at the guy in the front. Impossible odds.

  Then the second man called out. Something in Spanish. Vamonos.

  Both men left, and there was screaming outside. More doors slamming.

  Jane hung up on the wall like a wet tissue. Blond hair down and dirty like a mop. Her nose bleeding.

  Peter sank down to a full squatting position. Fetal position. Scared shitless position. He saw that the black woman in the shower with them was quite young. Twenty. Twenty-one. All ribs and sharp bones. The little girl was very, very pretty. Crying now because her mother was crying.

  “Jesus, we’re sorry,” Peter said.

  He and Jane waited a few minutes, made the woman promise to tell the police, then they left the dressing room.

  Out in the concrete halls they didn’t see either of the black killers. The building was jammed with people, though. Unbelievable shouting was blasting up and down the concrete tunnels. People were crying.

  Finally they found the stairway out. They pushed and shoved their way through a wide-eyed crowd trying to find out what had happened. “Is it another machete murder? …” At the top of the stairs, Jane grabbed Peter hard around his chest. “Hold me, Peter,” she said. “Just hold me for a minute.”

  Then, for the second straight day, the police of San Dominica took descriptions of the Cuban and Kingfish Toone.

  “No blond Englishman?” the constable asked.

  “He was there,” Peter said. “We just didn’t see him this time.”

  The black policeman smiled. “We didn’t see him last time, either.”

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  Friday Evening

  That night in Las Vegas, the whole San Dominican operation continued toward a major blowup at breakneck speed: Great Western Air Transport reestablished contact with the Forlenza Family for the first time since Lathrop Wells.

  At ten o’clock a long-haired fat man—somebody’s bright idea of a professional gambler type— followed Isadore Goldman’s chauffeur-driven Fleetwood out of the glittering Flamingo Hotel. Toward “downtown.”

  The fat intelligence man’s name was Tommie Hicks, and he was a 1968 Stanford Law School graduate. Beyond that, he’d been one of the original CIA representatives at the farmhouse in Lathrop Wells.

  Hicks followed Goldman two cars back down Sahara Boulevard. Into the Strip proper. Past 9:58-83 degrees on the Sahara clock. Past the Sands and three hundred other gaudy hotels.

  To Caesar’s Palace.

  Once ensconced inside the gambling mecca, Izzie Goldman began to play high-stakes blackjack. The old man was what the croupiers call a George player: a very classy high-roller.

  In his first hour at blackjack, Goldman won what is a comfortable year’s salary for most people–just over $34,000. Then the old man proceeded to lose more than $40,000, playing baccarat.

  Since Tommie Hicks himself made $28,000 a year, the turnaround fascinated the hell out of him. Several times during the evening he fantasized walking up and taking away the old gangster’s chips for safekeeping.

  Just after 1:00 A.M. Goldman finally got up from his chair at baccarat. He headed for one of the men’s rooms.

  CAESAR’S it read on the swing door.

  Tommie Hicks followed Goldman one swing behind. He understood perfectly well that he was no more than a centurion at this particular game.

  The CIA man took the shiny urinal to the left of the old man.

  Funny thing—Tommie Hicks found that he didn’t have to go. Not a drop. Kind of humorous, actually. Something slightly ludicrous about sleuthing a five-foot-two, seventy-four-year-old man, anyway.

  “Didn’t I meet you at one of Harry Hill’s parties?” he asked as the old man tinkled.

  A black man—pimp—looked their way from three urinals down the line. The black stud smiled big ivory-and-gold teeth.

  Izzie Goldman stared over at Hicks. He shrugged his small, rounded shoulders. “Not me, Abe.”

  The old gangster finished urinating and zipped up. He walked over to the fancy sinks. Goldman pushed his gold watch up on his skinny arm and started to wash his hands.

  The pimp splashed on some English Leather. Then he walked out of the bathroom without washing his hands.

  “Schvuggs like the smell of it.” Goldman nodded at the closing door. He put both hands up to his head; seemed to be stretching the neat part in his white hair. “Mr. Hill has a problem, I take it,” he said, still chewing on a soggy cigar.

  “Not so much Mr. Hill. There’s a problem with our other two friends.”

  Isadore Goldman hit the whooshing faucets. He vaguely remembered this fat cow from the farmhouse in the desert. “A little problem, I hope.”

  “So far, very little … but we want your approval to get rid of both of them if the problem continues.”

  Goldman squinted at himself in the water-spotted mirror over the sink. Prune, he thought. Small prune, but prune.

  He shrugged his shoulders at the younger man standing behind him. “You should know enough not to ask me…. But I’ll tell you one thing to make your trip out here worthwhile. I would be very surprised if clever people like these Roses couldn’t handle any little problems that come up.”

  Tommie Hicks smiled in the gilded mirror over the old man’s head. “We were very surprised,” he said, “that some problems did come up.”

  Turtle Bay, San Dominica

  At eight o’clock that night Macdonald stepped off a sputtering, wheezing double-decker bus heading north from Coastown. Sweat-stained alligator shirt thrown over his shoulder, he started down the neatly raked gravel driveway of the Plantation Inn.

  Having persuaded Jane to stay with friends in Coastown for the night, he was all alone with the problem of being an unwanted only witness.

  Apparently the local police weren’t going to help…. The people at the U.S. embassy weren’t exactly rolling out the red carpet for him, either…. Neither were the newspapers.

  Why not? That was the $64,000 question. Why the hell not?

  Plowing across the dark, deserted Plantation Inn beachfront, Peter started to wonder if all real-life crime investigations might be just as frustrating as this one. A lot of bungling around in the dark. Dumb-bunny screwups all over the place. No quick solutions. Not ever.

  As he saw the outline of the beach cottage where he and Jane lived, his mind leaped back to the two black killers in Coastown. If those two were homegrown revolutionaries—Dred’s people—then he was Cary Grant II.

  Paranoid now—careful, anyway—he stopped walking. His heart started to pound in a way it hadn’t since the day he’d left the lonely hill country of South Vietnam. From the cover of thick-leaved banana trees, he studied the
silent black world like a Special Forces sergeant….

  Little pink honeymoon bungalow. Shadowy roof. Louvered windows. Wooden door looking as if it had been put up crooked because of the shifting sand. Dark, spooky Caribbean. Nice spot for an ambush….

  After watching the place for a good ten minutes, seeing no apparent trouble, nothing moving except dark palm fronds and cirrus clouds, Peter began to walk toward his home.

  Halfway up the pebble-and-seashell walk, he saw a dark shape thrown across a white patio table. Moving a step closer, he recognized Max West-erhuis’s Afghan, and he moaned out loud…. The beautiful, long-haired dog had been cut in half.

  The machetes.

  “Oh, Jesus God,” he swore loudly. Trembled. Nearly got sick. It was the first time he’d actually seen the work of the razor-sharp knives.

  The body of the thoroughbred dog—Fool’s Hot Toast—had been cleanly separated across its thin rib cage. Ants and black flies were eating at the bloody crease as if it were a long, horrifying serving table.

  Peter hurried past the dog and went inside. He collected clothes, money, a Colt .44 revolver hidden away in his T-shirts. His personal memento mori.

  He caught his breath. Thought about where to hide. Had to decide about whom he could talk to, whom he could trust. Figure out a way to get off San Dominica altogether.

  Most of all, he wanted to lead them away from Jane. Make it clear to them that their problem was with him. The Witness.

  Wondering why they’d gone to the bother of killing the dog, wondering if they were watching him, and who the hell the tall blond man was, anyway— Peter Macdonald jogged back toward the brightly lit inn. He passed quickly through the portico— back into the dark rear parking lot. He called Jane in Coastown. Got no answer at her friend’s place.

  And then, at 8:45 on May 4—having damn little idea what he planned to do with it—Peter stole the hotel manager’s BMW motorcycle for the second time that week.

  As he slowly, quietly, rode the bike up the drive, a tall man stepped into the shadowy road now filling up with dust.

  Damian Rose watched Macdonald get away— and he let him.

  Peter Macdonald was right about on schedule.

  Everything was.

  The machetes were every bit as effective as he thought they’d be that first afternoon at Turtle Bay.

  If there had been any doubt that he and Carrie were worth $1 million going into the operation, there wouldn’t be after it was over. The two of them were going to be as famous as Charles Manson and Company—and marketable to boot.

  May 5, 1979, Saturday

  Declare War On Monkey Dred

  On the fifth day, San Dominican prime minister Joseph Walthey held an emotional press conference to announce that the terrible machete murders could now definitely be attributed to Colonel Dred and his very small group of dissidents.

  Standing before news microphones with his wife, with the U.S. ambassador and his wife, Joseph Walthey revealed that at seven o’clock that morning a battalion of San Dominican and U.S. troops had entered the jungles of West Hills. A confrontation with Colonel Dred was expected before the end of the day.

  In the meantime both Robert F. Kennedy Airport in Coastown and Kiley Airport in Port Gerry had been transformed into angry beehives of abnormal activity. A spokesman for the airlines said that even at the accelerated flight departure rate, it would take at least another four days to accommodate all of the people who wanted to leave San Dominica, the Virgin Islands, Jamaica, and Haiti.

  Small curiosity. While thousands were departing from the islands, a few hundred rabid ambulance chasers arrived to witness the machete terrors.

  During the first four days, more than 250 people came to San Dominica to witness the bizarre scene. Simply to be there. To watch death in action. Maybe even to get a photograph or a sound track.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “I have no moral reactions anymore,” Damian said. “Sometimes, though, I feel a kind of icy, grand compassion.”

  The Rose Diary

  May 5, 1979; West Hills, San Dominica

  Saturday Morning. The Fifth Day of the Season.

  Peter was beginning to get his second worm’s-eye view of those sneaky, dirty little wars that had come of age—or at least back into vogue—during the 1960s.

  For a terrifying few minutes he had a pretty clear vision of man’s inhumanity to man. Of the bizarre contrivances some men will use to gain an advantage. The horror of being alone and unknowing in the middle of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Of being an absolute nobody in the greater scheme of things. A zero on the world’s Richter scale. A gook.

  A thick, dark liquid was dripping dead center on his chest. Motor oil, he realized after a few fuzzy-eyed seconds.

  A train was coming!

  A train was getting close to his hiding place in the West Hills’ jungle. Colonel Dred’s turf.

  A train? Peter considered. Hiding place? He was going buggy.

  He rolled over sideways and peeked through reeds of tall grass; tried to clear his sore throat of pollen and dew. Two lizards walked by at his eye level, one following the other. They seemed to be well acquainted. To be good friends, maybe lovers… The two lizards stopped and played in the grass like small dinosaurs. Quite gregarious little monsters. Red bubbles throbbed under their green-and-blue chins.

  Macdonald slowly rolled out, away from the BMW. He sat in the grass and picked grass and stones out of his arm and watched the sun as it peeked through trees dripping heavy moss. The sky was flaming over the leaf cover. Hot, hot, today.

  Hiding out, he considered once again, trying the feeling out like a new sports coat. On the run.

  After another minute massaging hopeless thoughts, Peter got up and started to make a fire. Gathered leaves and a few sticks, twigs, grass reeds, anything dry. He went over to the motorcycle and pulled out the German’s dandy cross-country kit…. In a few minutes he’d make instant Nescafé coffee. Powdered eggs. Some kind of dried, salty beef.

  Crouched over the small fire, the young man gulped down the equivalent of four eggs, the worst coffee he could imagine, mystery meat, and a chocolate bar that came all the way from West Germany chust for such an occashun.

  While he finished the quick meal, Peter thought about Jane. He considered going into Coastown to get her. Decided against it. She was better off as far away from him as possible. Probably as far away as possible from the San Dominican police, too. For the moment Jane was fine where she was. Which was more than he could say for himself.

  After he finished breakfast, he went back to the BMW’s shiny black leather saddlebags. He took out a West Point T-shirt and unwrapped the Colt .44.

  It seemed strange, unreal, as he held the old gun. He turned the chamber and saw all eight shells. He examined the gun further, remembered the army shooting ranges at West Point that were hidden in massive gray-stone buildings on a hill above the football field, Michie Stadium. He remembered a seedy shooting range inside a steaming, tin-roofed building in the Cholon section of Saigon.

  Peter slowly raised the long-barreled Colt. Aimed at a mottled banana tree leaf. Aimed at a tiny chattering yellow bird. Aimed at a small green coconut. Finally at a small black snake slithering up a gom-mier tree.

  The tree was a good thirty-five paces away. Thirty-five yards. What pistol enthusiasts regard as trick or showboat shooting.

  Looking like an old-fashioned duelist, aiming ever so carefully, Peter squeezed the trigger gently.

  The distant head of the black snake exploded as if it were rotten inside. The rest of the snake dropped from the gommier like a loose vine.

  In a way, the neat shot pleased and surprised him. He really hadn’t expected the showpiece revolver to be so well balanced. As for the shooter—well, he knew all about the other shooter.

  “Hoo boy!” Peter said out loud to the deangerous West Hills. “Now what, hotshot?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The John Simpson Roses. Strange, blue blo
od family. Damian’s fourteen-year-old brother was caught cheating on a bloody exam at the Horace Mann School. Teenager swallowed half a beaker of sulfuric acid. Didn’t die because the dose was so high he vomited it all up. He was crippled from his neck down, though. In an institution ever since. Damian’s mother living in an institution year-round, too. Father rides round and round Manhattan and London in a big black limo provided by a multinational bank. Damian planning to kill his father in the limo one day….

  The Rose Diary

  Mercury Landing, San Dominica

  Saturday Afternoon.

  The shoreline at Mercury Landing was pretty and very secluded.

  Black cliffs rose high on either side of a silver of gleaming white sand. There was a glen of royal palm trees. Yellow birds. Flocks of parrots, as in an open-air pet store. A big red sun over the sea like God’s angry eye.

  There was a big white house over the sea, too. And on one side of the house, a dark green sedan was hidden in the shadows of casuarina trees.

  There could be no doubt about one thing: San Dominica was a paradise on this earth.

  Down on the beach at Mercury. Landing, a man and woman were walking in the nude. Without her clothes, Carrie Rose’s legs seemed a little too long, a little bowed. Her feet were slightly too large and too flat.

  These were nitpicks, however, because the slender young woman was quite beautiful without clothes.

  Walking beside her, Damian was almost as impressive to look at. The tall blond man wore nothing, but he had an expensive terry-cloth jumpsuit draped over one arm. He had broad shoulders and well-muscled legs. A hard, flat stomach. Pretty blond hair.

  A long, sun-tanned cock hung out of the light, curly hair between Damian’s legs.

  “The killing should all be over now,” Carrie was saying to him, with the little midwestern twang always in her voice. “It’s taking too long, Damian. A week is too long.”

  Damian just smiled at her. He glanced out at a boat coming over a distant reef. A gray smudge on a wiggly black line. “You just want the tension you’re feeling to be over,” he said in a soft, detached voice. “It isn’t taking too long at all. It’s perfect so far. This island is as insane and paranoid as a madhouse…. Besides, in two days or so you get to leave. You can even start to spend all our money. Buy yourself a few cars or something, Carrie.”