“Men, women, children. Yes, I’ve dealt with them before. They smoke a lot of ganja. Practice their hybrid religion, worship the Emperor Haile Selassie, y’know. A few of them are small-time thieves. Mostly, we let them be.”
Everyone in the car grew quiet as we hurried along the coast road toward Runaway Bay and Ocho Rios. The storm had passed quickly, and suddenly the island’s hellified sun was blazing again. Sugarcane workers with machetes on their hips were tramping back into the fields.
Past the village of Runaway Bay, Detective Anthony turned off the main road and headed up into the hills on Route A1. The trees and bushes here were a thick jungle. The road eventually became a tunnel boring through vines and branches. Anthony had to turn on the headlights.
I felt as if I were drifting through a mist, watching everything as if in a dream. I understood that I was trying to protect myself, but I also knew it wasn’t working.
Who was Beatitude? I couldn’t make myself believe that Christine was alive, but at least there was a chance, and I clung to that. I had given up weeks before. Now I allowed myself to remember how much I loved her, how much I missed her. I choked hard and turned my face toward the window. I went deep inside myself.
Suddenly, bright light shone in my eyes. The car had exited the brush after two or three miles that had seemed much longer on the twisting road. We were entering lush hills that looked something like the American South back in the fifties and sixties —maybe Georgia or Alabama. Children in dated clothes played in front of small run-down houses. Their elders sat on uneven, slanted porches and watched the occasional car drive past.
Everything looked and felt so surrealistic. I couldn’t focus.
We turned onto a skinny dirt road with a thick, high corridor of grass running between deep tire ruts. This had to be the place. My heart was pumping loudly and sounded like a tin drum being pounded in a tunnel. I felt every bump in the road like a hard punch.
Beatitude? Who is the woman they’re holding? Can it possibly be Christine?
Sampson checked the load in his Glock. I heard the mechanism slide and click and glanced his way.
“They won’t be happy to see us, but you won’t need the gun,” Anthony turned and said. “They probably know we’re coming. They watch the local roads. Christine Johnson might not be here now, if she was ever here at all. But I knew you would want to see for yourself.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My mouth felt incredibly dry, and my mind was a blank. We were still involved with the Four Horsemen, weren’t we? Was this Shafer’s play? Had he known we’d eventually find this place in the hills? Had he set a final trap for us?
We arrived at an old green house with tattered white cloth over the windows and a burlap bag for a front door. Four men immediately came outside, all of them sporting dreadlocks.
They walked toward us, their mouths set hard, their eyes blazing with distrust. Sampson and I were used to the look from the streets of Washington.
Two of the men carried heavy field machetes. The other two wore floppy shirts, and I knew they were armed beneath the loose-fitting clothes.
“Galang. Go back, mon,” one of them shouted loudly at us. “Nah woman here.”
Chapter 122
“NO!”
Detective Anthony got out of the car with both hands held high. Sampson, Jones, and I followed his lead.
We could hear the beat of traditional drums coming from the woods directly behind the main house. A pair of lounging dogs raised their lazy heads to look at us and barked a few times. My heart was thundering faster now.
I didn’t like the way this was going down.
Another one of the men called to us, “I and I would like you to leave.”
I recognized the figure of speech: the double pronoun represented the speaker and God, who live together in each person.
“Patrick Moss is in jail. I’m Detective Anthony, from Kingston. This is Detective Sampson, Detective Cross, and Mr. Jones. You have an American woman here. You call her Beatitude.”
Beatitude? Could it be Christine?
A man wielding a machete in one hand glared and spoke to Anthony. “Galang bout yuh business. Lef me nuh. Nah woman here. Nah woman.”
“This is my business, and we won’t leave you alone,” I said, surpri
sing the man with my understanding of his dialect. But I know Rastaman from D.C.
“Nah woman here. Nah American,” the man repeated angrily, looking directly at me.
Andrew Jones spoke up. “We want the American woman, then we’ll leave. Your friend Patrick Moss will be home by tonight. You can deal with him in your own way.”