CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO
Ruby pressed her back against the rough concrete wall, staring at the dumpster in the dim light of the alley. She couldn’t see the body she had glimpsed inside, and tried to convince herself that it wasn’t really there.
Tried and failed.
Glancing to the left and right, she didn’t see anyone within view.
Just a few feet beyond the dumpster the alley opened onto a side street lined with warehouses and storage units. It was little used even during the day, and at this time of night would be abandoned.
Except the figure she had seen had moved in that direction.
Summoning her courage, she got into a fighting stance, raised her fists, and crept over to the opening of the alley.
You used to have quicker reactions than that.
A glance either way showed no danger close by. A long look revealed that the figure had disappeared.
He could have gone several different ways, and wouldn’t have needed to move at more than a fast walk to get out of view.
Whoever he was, he was gone.
Licking her dry lips, she moved back to the dumpster.
The dead man looked to be in young middle age, perhaps late thirties. Short and slight of build, he had dark hair cropped close with a slightly receding hairline. He wore light slacks and a polo shirt. Ruby would have pegged him as an accountant or a middle manager on holiday.
Except accountants and middle managers don’t end up dead in dumpsters on the bad side of town with their throats slit.
“I gotta call the cops,” she whispered.
As soon as she said that, she knew she couldn’t. Cops meant questions, questions she didn’t have good answers for. Like why she was living in a run-down house with no record of her residence there. Or why Neville paid her in cash. Or why she didn’t have a local bank account even though she had been living in the Bahamas for a year.
Or why a certain senator from New Jersey had lost a briefcase full of sensitive information on Ruby’s watch. And lost her life too.
And really, what can you do to help? The guy’s dead, and you didn’t see enough of that person who ran off to identify him.
Ruby took one more long look at the dead man, then shut the dumpster with a clang.
You’re a louse, Ruby.
She picked up the garbage bags and paused. On the ground next to the dumpster was a small brass disc, like a coin but with an odd design.
Ruby knelt down and saw the face had a triangle and some words she could just make out:
To thy own self be true
Unity
Service
6 months recovery
What was this, an AA token? Obviously not from one of their customers.
Ruby stood and took another glance out the alley. No one. On a far street, a bus whooshed by, probably taking hotel workers to the early shift to vacuum carpets and cook breakfast for rich tourists.
Ruby grabbed the trash bags, hurried to the other end of the alley, and threw them in the other dumpster.
She all but ran back to the back door of the Pirate’s Cove, slamming it shut and locking it behind her.
“You took your time,” Neville said, switching off the lights behind the bar.
“One of the bags split,” Ruby mumbled. Then, in a voice she could not quite keep from cracking, asked, “Where’s Kristiano?”
“He left already.”
Without another word, Ruby grabbed her bag and hurried out the door.
Ruby sat on the porch of her bungalow, swigging from the bottle of rum she had bought from her tips. The eastern horizon was just lightening with the first pale glimmer of predawn, dimly illuminating the sea.
The ramshackle bungalow sat atop a low hill east of Nassau overlooking the beach and the Caribbean. Scattered among the hills were more bungalows, most shared by several native families, and a tidy row of tourist rentals lining the edge of the beach. Between the bungalows and the tourist rentals ran a four-lane highway. She called it “the tracks,” and she was on the wrong side of them. This neighborhood was almost entirely made up of poor Bahamians. That’s why the rent was so cheap.
Yes, the roof leaked. Yes, the bathroom was moldy. Yes, she had had to hire the Ufologist, a skilled plumber when he could concentrate enough to work, to save her from several leaks, drips, and Noah’s floods, but it was spacious, it was quiet, and it was away from everything else in her life.
The leaky plumbing and the mysterious ecozones thriving between her bathroom tiles were the last thing on her mind, however. She couldn’t get the sight of that body out of her mind. Some poor guy thrown in a dumpster like a piece of trash. Sure, he could have been a piece of trash in life. Gotten mixed up in something decent people would avoid. But no one should end up in a dumpster.
The memory of him lying amid the trash bags, empty beer bottles, and fast food wrappers made her shudder and take another slug from the bottle.
How could she just leave him there like that? And yet how couldn’t she? If she reported it, the cops would be all over the place. After finding out she was working for cash under a fake name, they’d get busy digging up her past, and she couldn’t let that happen.
Because if they found out about the senator, they might contact her next of kin. Or worse, the State Department.
The guy’s dead,
she told herself for the hundredth time.
You can’t help him. You can barely help yourself. Lay low and be thankful you still have something resembling a life.
But that poor man …
The worst of it all was the guy looked a bit like her dad.
Mom had died when she was a toddler, and Ruby had no siblings, so she and Dad had been “Team Wayne” all her life.
Not “Team Steele.” That name had come later, in the Bahamas.
Dad had been a boxer when he was young and a Ju-jitsu teacher before Ju-jitsu got trendy; Ruby had grown up a fighter. She’d started sparring at ten, and got into her first real fight at sixteen when a boy from her school thought date rape would be reasonable compensation for buying her dinner. She broke his collarbone and got suspended. He wasn’t punished at all.
After that, her training took on an edge. She grew more serious, and her innate talent came to the fore. By the time she turned twenty she was doing the MMA circuit with Dad as her coach and trainer. Ruby won more than she lost, and pretty soon wasn’t losing at all. Team Wayne started getting places.
Regional titles turned into national titles. An international title was the next step.
Until Vegas.
Ruby kept on drinking.
She wondered if Dad was still trying to track her down. He must have asked every friend, every fellow fighter, but none of them would have been able to tell him where she had gone. He had probably even hired a private detective.
Did he think she was dead? No, that would have been giving up, and Dad wasn’t the kind to give up.
Too bad that didn’t run in the family.
She kept drinking.
The sun peeked over the horizon, dazzling her eyes, making her feel dizzy. Shading them, she could see the brilliant blue water and the clean beach, all but empty at this early hour. Another day in paradise.
Then she looked at her more immediate surroundings. She sat on a creaking chair on a dilapidated porch. On the hilltop and slopes around her stood bungalows roofed with corrugated iron, their doors firmly locked, windows dark with sleep.
The Bahamians kept their homes clean and tidy, so the real sign of poverty was what they lacked—few satellite dishes and all of them homemade, no fresh paint, no paving on the roads, no cars.
Ruby took a last, long pull on the bottle, set it by her chair for when she needed it, and stumbled inside to bed.
She hoped she had drunk enough not to dream.
The title fight. A cheering crowd and TV cameras. Ruby is facing off against Teresa Klein, the champion.
Five minutes in. Klein has tried to pin her three times and Ruby has twisted out and gotten up, fighting back hard. Instead of a floor game, Klein switches to punches and kicks.
Fine by Ruby. That’s her specialty.
Klein comes on strong with a flurry of blows. Ruby strikes hard, pulls back. Strikes hard, pulls back. Wear her down. Take the hits you know you can take and strike back harder. Duck right. Duck left. Block. STRIKE.
Klein’s getting tired. Fewer of her strikes hit and they hurt less.
What was that? A blur as Klein’s right glove comes in. A loose lacing?
Hell with it. She’ll be out in the next thirty seconds.
Then you’ll be world champ.
Team Wayne!
Ruby woke with a start, blinking back the past in the hard light of day. She woke to a headache, cotton mouth, and a good five seconds of blissful forgetfulness until the events of the previous night came crashing back into her consciousness.
Muttering a curse, she stumbled into her bathroom, ignored the drawn face in the mirror, and took a long drink of water from the groaning faucet chased with a couple of ibuprofen. A long, hot shower completed her physical recovery.
She left her bedroom and its heaps of unwashed clothes, including a discarded pair of men’s underwear from her last bedwarmer, and went to the tiny kitchen with its chipped counter and ancient appliances. The wall clock said 2:15 PM.
A big glass of orange juice got her fully awake. Breakfast would have to wait. Other than a half-full jar of mustard and an ancient pizza box she didn’t dare open, there was no food.
She moved to the living room with its cool floor, painted many years ago a sky blue that was now chipped to show the concrete beneath. A lumpy sofa and armchair were the only furniture other than an old television she hardly ever watched. In front of a full-length mirror, the only major item she had purchased for the house, she did her morning workout. Stretching. A hundred burpees. A hundred sit-ups. A dozen one-arm pushups on each arm. More stretches.
Then came her favorite part—twenty minutes of sparring at her reflection, jabbing at her face, punching the image in the gut, giving the selfish, failed woman in the mirror a perfect roundhouse kick to the head.
She liked going for her reflection’s head. With the force she could land those kicks, she could kill herself. She wasn’t flexible enough to actually kick her own head, of course. Maybe she should take up yoga.
Getting into a halter top and jogging shorts, she headed to the beach for her jog. She passed down a narrow dirt lane that wound through small hills covered in lush vegetation, palm trees swaying in the morning breeze. Here and there stood other bungalows. A few Bahamians strolled along the sidewalks. The local fishmonger pushed a cart piled high with the night’s catch. Her neighbors. She knew none of them and did not greet them as she passed.
When she first moved here everyone had stared. She was the only foreigner in the neighborhood except for a Dutch hippie couple who had been here for ages and an American drug addict who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. A few guys tried to hit on her. One guy tried to mug her and she broke his arm. They stared even more after that, but left her alone and finally stopped thinking about her. She became part of the scenery.
Now she was as invisible as she could hope to be.
Ruby got to a straightaway and sprinted the last hundred meters to the beach, crossing the four-lane coastal road and not even looking to see if any traffic was coming. They could get out of her way. She passed through the line of development along the beach, nearly bowling over a sunburned family out for their daily dose of skin cancer, and got onto the sand.
She turned left, breathing in the sweet salt air. Two miles down the coast was breakfast. Two miles down the coast was the first of the day.
Ruby sped up.
Because there were no hotels on this stretch, the beach wasn’t the crowded hell that some parts of the Bahamas had become. Still, she saw too many people. Out of shape tourists lounged on the sand in little clusters, a few wading into the shallows with squealing children. Locals made their way through the crowd, selling shell necklaces, parasols, and other junk made in China. A couple of surfers rode a wave.
Ruby got on the damp sand close to the water so she could run more comfortably and not have to dodge people every twenty feet. Up ahead, a Bahamian with a kite shaped like a giant hawk was making it swoop and dive, expertly maneuvering it by two lines attached to the body of the kite tethered to a pair of red plastic handles he gripped in his dark hands. A tourist family had stopped to stare. Fat dad. Thin, bored-looking mom. Ten-year-old boy bouncing up and down with delight.
The local man handed the boy the grips and leaned over to give him instructions. Ruby got ready to dodge if the thing divebombed her.
To her surprise, the kid managed it well. As she approached, she could hear his dad giving him all sorts of useless instructions like he was some hawk-shaped kite expert. The Bahamian took a step back, put a swift hand into the woman’s purse, pulled something out, and put it in his own pocket.
It was over in less than a second. Ruby glanced around. Nobody else had noticed. Certainly not the woman or her husband, who was now regaling his son with a story of flying kites as a kid.
Ruby passed by, glancing over her shoulder. Should she say something? If the guy caused trouble she could take him. He was tall, lanky. He had the reach but Ruby had the speed, training, and strength. But if he caused trouble the cops might come. Even if he didn’t, these folks looked like law-and-order types. They’d probably call the cops and want her to stay as a witness.
No. She couldn’t risk that. She looked ahead and kept on running.
You really are a piece of trash, you know that?
Trash made her think of the dumpster.
I need a drink.
She sprinted the last half mile.
The Waving Palms was a little seaside place with a big veranda covered by a roof made of palm leaves. She supposed a lot of places like this back in the States would have had a proper wooden or steel roof covered with fake palm fronds, but with the number of tropical storms that lashed the islands, it was easier and cheaper to make it authentic and rebuild it quickly.
The lunch rush had already finished and she got her favorite table. It was at the corner of the veranda facing the sea and if she angled her chair just right, she couldn’t see any of the other diners. That suited her fine. Solitude was what she needed right now.
A Bahamian waitress in a bright white dress and matching smile came up to her table. “Hey, Ruby, kick any ass yet today?”
“Not yet, Sanyjah.”
“The usual?”
“Oh yes.”
The tone of her voice made Sanyjah bring the rum first.
“Your breakfast will be right out,” the waitress said softly.
A good friend, Sanyjah. Understood without judging.
Ruby took the bottle lovingly in her hand. Bahamian Gold, the best rum on the islands. Rum was her one luxury, and no one made it better than the islanders. While she always drank top shelf stuff, Bahamian Gold was what you called “back of the top shelf” liquor. The kind of liquor the bartender doesn’t advertise. The kind of liquor you had to know enough about good booze to ask for.
She poured a couple of fingers’ worth into a glass and took a sip. Her tongue savored the smooth taste, and her body eased away from tension and worry as a warmth spread out from her stomach to all her limbs.
I wonder who killed that guy. He didn’t look like the kind of person to be in that neighborhood.
Damn it, stop thinking about him!
She took another sip. It still tasted good, and the warmth deepened, but a hard knot of tension deep inside her would not be soothed.
God, I wish I could get drunk.
But she couldn’t. Two shots was all she could have. She had work tonight. The only thing she could do about the memories was to spend the day working out, hoping exercise would make her feel better.
It would, a little. Not enough. No, she’d be stuck with the image of that poor guy in the dumpster until her shift was over and she could bring another bottle home.
But what if Kristiano or someone else had found the body? What if she came into work to find the cops swarming all over the place?
And even if they weren’t, could she work her entire shift knowing what lay just outside the back door?
The Pirate’s Cove was in full swing when she made it to work at nine. All the regular drinkers sat in their usual places, and all the usual conversations swirled around her as she entered.
People greeted her as they usually did, and she replied automatically, smiling and trading all the predictable jokes. Her eyes kept straying to the back door.
Kristiano gave her a smile as she got behind the counter.
“Doing good today?” he asked, putting a huge arm around her shoulders.
“Good enough.”
Neville leapt out of the back office. He had on his pirate hat and eye patch as usual, and had added a plastic cutlass and a real parrot. The parrot’s name was Flynn, as in Errol Flynn.
Captain Blood
was Neville’s favorite movie.
“AAAAR! What’s that off the starboard side? Is it a mermaid? No, me hearties, it’s me favorite tavern wench! I have good news for ye. The landlubbers from last night have sailed for the distant horizon, and have not told the town watch. We be having clear sailing till the morn!”
Kristiano laughed on cue. Ruby rolled her eyes.
“Um, OK,” she said.
“Now get to work!” he said, making a playful thrust at her belly with the plastic cutlass, apparently not being aware that a cutlass was a cutting weapon. “Raise the mainsail, paint the mizzenmast, polish the guns! We have a night of drinking to do. Look lively, or I’ll make ye swab the decks and drink the water from the bilges.”
“Go away or I’ll keel haul you,” Ruby said with a smile.
Neville shook the cutlass above his head. “Insubordination! Mutiny! I’ll make ye walk the plank!”
“Walk the plank! Walk the plank!” Flynn squawked. It was the parrot’s favorite phrase.
“Could I get another beer over here?” the Ufologist asked.
“Right away, sailor,” Neville said, fetching one from the cooler behind the counter. “But don’t be telling me St. Elmo’s Fire be spirits from beyond the stars. It is the spirits of drowned men, sure as my name is Captain Blood!”
Desaray raised her bottle to show it was empty and Ruby moved over to get her another.
“Thanks for helping out last night,” the Bahamian said. “You’re a good friend.”
Ruby smiled. She had a lot of good friends here. Totally bonkers, but good people.
“Did you upload the video?” Ruby asked.
“Yeah! I was waiting until you showed up.” She pulled out her phone. People gathered around. Zoomer scampered up Desaray’s back and hung on her shoulders to watch. He loved YouTube.
She pulled up the video on her YouTube channel, Bahama Brawls. The latest was titled, “Brawling British Brunette Kicks Ass on Four Guys.” Ruby smiled. She wasn’t British and she wasn’t a natural brunette. Desaray accepted her desire for anonymity without knowing the reasons why. The video already had 35,000 hits and 476 shares.
Everyone started cheering as the scene from the previous night replayed on the screen. Desaray had done well, keeping Ruby’s face out of the shot. That’s all she asked. She didn’t mind the videos, and she was glad to help supplement Desaray’s income. Somebody might as well get something out of the weekly fights that happened in this dump.
“Awesome, Ruby!” the surfer cheered.
“A scene reminiscent of the little-known pugilistic tales of Robert E. Howard,” the Professor said.
“I still think they should have been probed,” the Ufologist said.
Ruby’s eyes kept straying to that back door.
Nobody’s said anything. That means he’s still out there.
Damn. Lying dead and unknown in a dumpster.
Ruby sighed and tried to make conversation with everyone complimenting her on the video. Soon the crowd broke up and people drank and talked about all the usual things. Ruby worked on automatic, but the thought of that dead man not forty yards from her would not leave her alone.
Several groans from one end of the bar snapped her out of her thoughts. Reece, the insurance salesman, had tossed his cookies. Ruby turned to Kristiano, played a quick game of Rock Paper Scissors, lost, and went to fetch the mop.
“A bit early for this, isn’t it?” she grumbled at him as she moved around the bar.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
Perry, his surfer friend, gave Ruby a grin. “I’ll get him cleaned up.”
He led Reece to the bathroom.
Ruby mopped up the mess, cleaned off the counter where he had spewed on some napkins, and threw those in a plastic bag.
She stared at the plastic bag for a moment. Anytime this happened she’d throw the bag in the dumpster to get rid of the stink.
I could go to the far dumpster, the one by the strip club and whorehouse.
And ignore that guy a second time?
Then another, terrible thought smacked into her like a hard right cross.
Trash pickup is tomorrow morning. That dumpster is going to be emptied. If the workers don’t see him, he’ll go into the back of the truck.
His body would be crushed. Pulped. Thrown with the rest of the trash into the city dump.
Ruby sighed, calculating whether or not she could live with that knowledge and realizing she couldn’t.
Slowly she turned toward the back door, clutching the bag. As she moved for it, everything seemed distant, sounds muted, as if she was hiding in the back of her head like a frightened animal in a cave.
She pushed the back door open. No one was in the alley. A car drove past at one end, making her jerk from fright. From the strip club a few doors down, rock music thudded, the bass pounding like a heartbeat. She moved slow as an iceberg for the dumpster. More lights were on at this time of night and she could see it more clearly than the previous evening. She found no bloodstains in the alley or on the dumpster. She noticed that strange coin was gone, probably grabbed by some wino thinking it was real money.
She reached her hand to the lid, paused, and took a deep breath.
Squaring her shoulders and unconsciously getting into a fighting stance, she flung the lid open.
He was still in there.
She dropped the bag, screamed a scream she didn’t entirely have to playact, and rushed back in the bar.
“There’s a man dead in the dumpster!”