“Where do we meet?” he asked.
“At the wheelhouse,” I said.
“Gotcha,” he said. “Luck, mate,” and he turned away. A second later he turned back. “Door’s locked.”
We got the door open in about five minutes, using a screwdriver we found with the cleaning supplies, and then Nicky shook my hand and disappeared in the darkness.
I wondered if I would see him again. I wondered if either of us would ever see Key West again. And when I stumbled as I took my own first step into the darkness, I wondered if I would make my legs work anytime soon.
I hung onto the screwdriver. It was big and flat bladed and the weight was re-assuring. I felt my way along the passageway to the office where I had met Cappy.
There was no light showing this time. I listened carefully at the door and heard nothing. I bent over the knob with the screwdriver. It took me a couple of minutes, fumbling around in the dark with what still felt like somebody else’s fingers, but I got the door open and slipped inside.
The room was empty. I pushed the door closed again and felt for the desk light I had seen the last time I was in here. I found it; the snake was gone—the whole coat rack was gone.
I found a large key ring in the desk and stuck it in my pocket. There was a lot of other stuff in there that might have been interesting another time—ledgers and other business stuff, and a lot of things that looked like charms, magic powders, and small vials of liquids.
It might have made Nicky very happy. I didn’t really feel like getting too close to any of it. I left it and turned out the light.
I slid back into the passageway and went from door to door. I listened for a minute at each one before trying the keys. It seemed like I was working through the entire key ring each time, but I did get all the doors open eventually. The screwdriver might have been quicker.
All the rooms were empty. I found crew quarters, cargo holds, the galley, machine shop, engine room—everything you would expect on a small freighter in the Caribbean, and not a sign of life anywhere. One of the holds was loaded down with cheap-looking luggage, bundles of clothing, paper bags filled with food. The kind of stuff Haitian refugees might carry into a new life.
But that was it. If Anna was on board this ship, she was somewhere above decks.
Either she was at the party or she was already over the rail, and it was hard to figure which was worse. In any case, it meant the same thing to me. I had to go up on deck and check.
The noise up there hadn’t let up at all. As I got closer I wondered why Cappy would put on a party like that for a crowd of people he intended to kill.
Maybe he really believed the dark voodoo stuff, and he was making a sacrifice to whatever evil spirits he worshipped. And maybe he enjoyed toying with them; go on, have a drink, by the way—you’re dead.
It didn’t seem likely to be any normal motive, whatever it was. It didn’t really matter a hell of a lot. I took a deep breath, stepped through the door and out onto the deck.
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust. Or more accurately, for my eyes to convince my brain they were telling the truth.
I was looking at a scene from hell. It was like one of those medieval paintings where everybody is half-naked and committing every possible sin, from drinking to what my grandmother used to call cavorting.
There were about a hundred people on deck. I counted only four that had to be Cappy’s crew. They stood at the edge of the crowd, holding cattle prods and making funny comments on the dancers.
The madly dancing rest were all over the deck, going crazy under the thundering umbrella of the drums. Some of them were spinning wildly in circles, with each other or alone. Some stood in place and stared at something nobody else could see. A few were having sex, others drank from rum bottles, and a few simply ran or danced around the whole crowd mouthing furious syllables that didn’t seem to belong to any human language. Most of them just seemed to be dancing to the sound of the drums, which rose over the whole scene like the sound track to a movie about eternal damnation.
At the far end of the deck, in an open space, four posts held a canopy about twelve feet off the deck. The posts were painted to look like they were wrapped with vines. Under the canopy an altar was set up. Rising up above and behind the altar was another post. A thick vine coiled around the post. As I watched, the vine moved; it was the python, hanging above the whole scene like a pale demon god.
The altar was piled high with baskets of fruit and other foods, and bottles of rum, cigars and pictures of saints.
And one other thing: Anna.
She was lying in the center of the altar. From this distance I couldn’t tell if she was dressed in a white robe or just draped in a sheet, but she was there, all in white, and her face was as pale and bloodless as the cloth that covered her.
She did not move, not even a twitch, in spite of the horrible carnival going on around her, and she looked as dead as a person can look.
As I stood there feeling like I’d been pole-axed, Cappy stepped up to the altar, raised a conch shell to his lips, and blew a trumpet blast on it.
He lifted the shell high over his head and shouted, “Ay bobo!” The crowd went crazy. They repeated the cry, “Ay bobo!” whirled faster, shivered harder. Two of them fell to the deck and lay there, twitching and bucking.
Cappy shouted a few sentences in what must have been Creole. Then he pointed the shell and shouted triumphantly. The crowd swayed, then ran to the rail and looked where he pointed.
I looked, too. From where I stood I could just make out the skyline of Miami, its lights and skyscrapers standing out against the dark sky, no more than half a mile away.