"It was just a thought, Eddie."
"Well blow it out your a.r.s.e. Let"s get back to the hotel. First Qantas out of this s.h.i.thole tomorrow, we"re on it."
Gembogi watched the men drive away. When he was sure they had left, he ran to the picnic table. He saw instantly that Wahgi was dead. The car had stopped at the petrol station across the street and he hurried across the road toward it. While one of the men pumped fuel, he slipped inside the station and in a frantic, hushed stream of words began relating what had happened to the silent attendant. The man was a Huli and therefore, however distant, a kinsman.
The knock at the hotel door the following morning prompted McMurray to grab his pistol and station himself flat against the wall to one side of the portal.
Nodding to his partner, Parker approached cautiously and without a word put his eye to the peephole set in the door. The tiny fresnel lens showed a small black woman clad entirely in white standing on the other side. She was holding an empty laundry basket.
"What is it?" Making a disgusted face, Parker whispered to his colleague.
"It"s a maid." Nodding sourly, McMurray put his automatic pistol back in its shoulder holster.
The woman on the other side responded matter-of factly
"You are checking out this morning, sir. We have a big tour group coming in, and I need to take away your dirty linen."
"But we"re not ready to ... oh, all right!" He unlatched the door.
"But be b.l.o.o.d.y quick about it!" To McMurray he muttered, "We don"t need any of the help complaining to management that we"re keeping them from their job." Curtly, he pulled the door inward.
The maid entered in. Calling her diminutive would have nattered her.
She was maybe four foot six, but perfectly formed. Cradling her basket, she headed toward the beds as Parker closed the door behind her, enjoying the sight of her compact a.s.s twitching from side to side beneath the tight white maid"s uniform.
A dozen very short, very muscular men burst through the half-open door like circus midgets shot from a single cannon. They had wild kinky hair that spread out from the sides of their heads, skin dark as bittersweet chocolate, and builds like pocket linebackers.
They also wielded knives and machetes like the exploded components of a berserk threshing machine.
Parker was hacked to bits before he could react.
McMurray went down with his hand on the stock of his machine pistol, before he could find the trigger. A fire-hardened bamboo arrow caught him in the throat and went completely through his neck. A foot of it emerged from the back. He had time enough to marvel at the incongruity of it. A b.l.o.o.d.y great arrow! In this day and age!
"Who .. . ?" he gasped before the blood welling up in his throat choked off any further speech.
He did not recognize the young man who came forward to stand over him.
It was doubtful he would have made the connection even had he seen his face the night before.
"You killed my friends. Wahgi and Kuikui." He gestured at the watching coterie of small but ferocious men who filled the room. The maid had left to stand watch outside.
"This is payback for what you did to them. A friend who worked at the petrol station where you stopped last night after doing your killing owed my village some old payback. We got on his motorbike and followed you here. Madani, who works for the hotel, is Enga, not Huli, so we now owe her tribe big payback. For compensation we will give her village ten pigs for her help this morning in sneaking us into the hotel."
"Ten .. . pigs .. . ?" McMurray choked. He was fast bleeding to death.
He did not get the opportunity to do so. The oldest man in the group; short, white-haired, but straight as an arrow, approached and with a single swing of his b.l.o.o.d.y machete, cut the European"s head half off.
He apologized to his companions for not making a better job of it. He was not as strong in the arms as he used to be, he explained.
As they were making preparations to leave, something began beeping within the briefcase. Opening it, Gembogi removed the strange telephone. Remembering how Wahgi had used it, he pushed the appropriate b.u.t.ton.
"Parker?" a voice inquired.
"You should be leaving with the case in an hour or so. Don"t leave any tracks.
I know you"re not in London or New York, but there"s no reason to make things easy for the local police, no matter how primitive they might be, verstehen? You never know--one of them might even know how to spell Interpol. I"ll be expecting you tomorrow at the airport." The voice paused briefly.
"Parker, are you there?"
"It looks valuable." Curious, the wiry elder examined the phone.
"Who said that?" The voice on the other end became alarmed.
"Parker, who"s in there with you and McMurray?"
"What should we do with it?" Another man was using a bedsheet to wipe blood from his machete.
"It may be valuable, but it killed Wahgi and Kuikui."
Raising his arm and ignoring the sudden stream of frantic babble that spouted from the device, Gembogi brought his own blade down sharply.
State-of the-art it might be, but the satellite phone was no match for a honed machete. It splintered into fragments of metal and plastic.
As they were about to leave, Gembogi picked up the briefcase.
"And this, what should we do with this?
Destroy it also?"
The old man regarded it narrowly.
"It killed Wahgi and Kuikui, too--but you said it was worth a million kina?" The young man nodded.
"Then we will keep it, and hide it until we can understand how to make it work for us. Just like we are learning, to make other things from the outside world work for us." Turning, he shook his woolly white head as he walked toward the door.
"These white people make many magical things work for them, but between you and me, man to man, I will still take a good machete over a device that talks through the air any day."
by Norman Partridge
Norman Partridge was awarded the Bram Stoker Award for best short story collection for Mr. Fox and Other Tales. Since then he"s released two more collections and three novels, the most recent being Ten Ounce Siesta. He also edited It Came From the Drive-in, an anthology that paid homage to the B movies of the 1950s. He currently lives in California.
THE desert, just past midnight. A lone truck on a scorched black licorice strip, two men--Anshutes and c.o.ker--inside.
Outside it"s one hundred and twenty-five degrees under a fat December moon. Frosty weather in the twilight days of global warning . : . and just in time for the holiday season.
Sure, driving across the desert was a risk, even in such balmy weather.
Not many people owned cars anymore, and those who did avoided the wide white lonesome. Even road cops were smart enough to leave the Mojave alone. It was too hot and too empty, and it could make you as crazy as a scorpion on a sizzling hot skillet. If you broke down out here, you ended up cooked to a beautiful golden brown--just like Tiny Tim"s Christmas goose.
But that wasn"t going to happen to c.o.ker. He was going to spend New Year"s Eve in Las Vegas. The town that Frank and Dean and Sammy had built all those years ago was still the place he wanted to be.
h.e.l.l on earth outside, air-conditioned splendor within.
If you had the long green, Vegas gave you everything a growing boy could desire. AC to the max, frosty martinis .. . maybe even a woman with blue eyes that sparkled like icebergs.
Let the swells fly into town in air-conditioned jets, c.o.ker figured.
He"d take the hard road. The dangerous road. The real gambler"s road.
He"d ride that scorched highway straight down the thermometer into double digits, and the AC would frost everything but his dreams. A little business, a couple lucky rolls of the dice, and his life would change for good .. . then he"d leave town with a jet of his own. Slice it up like an Eskimo Pie, and that was cool, any way you figured it.
It was all part of the gamble called life. Like always, Lady Luck was rolling the dice. Rattling the bones for c.o.ker and for his partner, too, even though Anshutes would never admit to believing in any airy jazz like that.
c.o.ker believed it. Lady Luck was calling him now.
Just up the road in Vegas, she waited for him like a queen. G.o.d knew he"d dreamed about her long enough, imagining those iceberg eyes that sparkled like diamonds flashing just for him.
All his life, he"d been waiting for the Lady to give him a sign. c.o.ker knew it was coming soon. Maybe with the next blink of his eyes. Or maybe the one after that.
Yeah. That was the way it was. It had to be.
Really, it was the only explanation.
Check it out. Just two days ago c.o.ker and Anshutes had been on foot.
Broiling in Bakersfield with maybe a gallon of water between them, seven bucks, and Anshutes"357 Magnum .. . which was down to three sh.e.l.ls. But with that .357 they"d managed to steal five hundred and seventy-two bucks, a shotgun, and an icecream truck tanked with enough juice to get them all the way to Vegas. Plus they still had the Magnum .. .
and those three sh.e.l.ls.
Now if that wasn"t luck, what was?
One-handing the steering wheel, c.o.ker gave the ice cream truck a little juice. Doing seventy on the straightaway, and the electric engine purred quieter than a kitten. The rig wasn"t much more than a pickup with a refrigeration unit mounted on the back, but it did all right.
c.o.ker"s only complaint was the lack of air-conditioning. Not that many automobiles had AC anymore .. . these days, the licensing fees for luxuries which negatively impacted the sorry remains of the ozone layer cost more than the cars. But why anyone who could afford the major bucks for a freon licensed vehicle would forgo the pleasure of AC, c.o.ker didn"t know.
The only guy who had the answer was the owner of the ice cream truck.
If he was still alive .. . and c.o.ker kind of doubted that he was.