Dying for Revenge (10 page)

She smiled but I saw the need in her brown eyes, saw the pain in the corners of her lips.

Lips that were painted red. Lips the color of blood. The hue of pain.

I’d been raised in brothels. Where people exchanged pain for momentary pleasure.

At times I wondered how much of me was like my unknown father.

And how much was like my mother, the woman whose commerce was pleasure.

I chastised the womb I had come from for being the womb of a whore, but I had failed to realize that I had inherited half of my mother’s DNA, that whatever was inside of her was inside of me, along with whatever was inside my old man. By nature or nurture, this was who I had become; fighting it was futile.

Jewell said, “I’ll go home to my husband in a little while. And I’ll never see you again. So before I go back to my unhappy existence, I want to have something for me, for myself, a stolen moment.”

I put my hand on Jewell’s beautiful skin, touched her like I was a miracle worker, some sort of a healer, then moved my hand to her narrow hip, squeezed her modest backside, pulled her closer to me.

She trembled under my touch, trembled like I had never touched her before.

She was exposed now. It wasn’t the undressing that made her naked. It had been the tears.

Jewell took to her knees. Her painted mouth found my weakness and made it rise until it became strong. Her hunger was strong, more powerful than before. She made me moan like I was dying.

Jewell looked up at me and smiled her wide celebrity smile, the same enthusiastic smile that lived on billboards around the city. Her peekaboo bangs loosening, looking wild and postcoital, her voice tinted with the timbre of much-needed attention and her skin tanned with the glow of extreme orgasms.

She whispered, “Do that freaky, nasty upside-down thing to me again.”

I did what she asked, took her in my arms, flipped those stones as if she were as light as a feather, gave her my tongue and lips as she moaned and took me in her mouth again, anxious to please her the way she wanted to be pleased, anxious to fall inside her and forget about my problems.

Not long after that we were on the carpeted floor. I no longer saw Jewell. I saw Detroit; it was her I tried to kill with my every stroke. It was the woman from Detroit I was giving my unbending rage.

While the woman under me put her nails in my flesh and moaned like she was dying, while she held on to me and begged me to go faster and deeper and not stop, three things remained on my mind.

X.

Y.

Z.

Six

the woman chaser

Still in Antigua
, the front door to paradise.

Her heartbeat was back to normal. She was on the beach at Sandals.

Lounging in an area populated by colonists who were pretending they were no longer colonists.

Sandals was the grand resort, couples only, same-sex or traditional marriages, all inclusive, security at every entrance, and property that stretched along at least a mile of top-shelf beach. Hundreds of women who looked like her were all around her. No way the police would come here and disturb paradise. Dickenson Bay was as it had been described in the brochure. Silky white sand, incredibly clear turquoise water that went on forever, and never-ending golden sunshine like a gentle lover.

After the shoot-out on All Saints Road, she had lain low, had gone back to her room at Antigua Yacht Club, never left the area, didn’t go any farther than Mad Mongoose and Seabreeze Café in the daytime, never ventured beyond English Harbour at night, hardly able to relax, overwrought and fearful.

Until today.

She had rented a Jet Ski and ridden out to the quay that was no more than a mile outside the strip of beaches. Other Jet Skiers were out, but she rode awhile, working on her skills, separated herself from anyone who was trying to follow her. On the back side of that quay, where no one Jet Skiing or riding on one of the catamarans could see her, she had dumped her .22 and all the goods she had stolen in the name of making a hit look like a robbery. After the problem on Rhodes Lane she hadn’t had the time.

She had been trapped with the stolen goods and guns in her room.

Now that was off her chest. Now she could breathe. Now she could relax.

Her mind on New York. On Carrie. Samantha. Charlotte. Miranda.

Her mind on red carpets and diamond mink eyelashes.

She was on the crowded beach, resting on a beach chair, sipping a cosmo, hair slicked back, yellow bikini wet from Jet Skiing, suntan lotion on her skin, a novel,
The Winter of Artifice,
in her hand, a novel she’d picked up at Skullduggery Café. She tried to fit in with the crowd. All around her people were reading. Novelists she had never heard of. R. J. Archer. Thomas Greanias. Jeremy Robinson. Dale Brown. Lee Child. Douglas Preston. Matthew Reilly. The reading thing wasn’t working for her. Maybe if they made the book into a movie, some sexy actor playing the part in an R-rated film. No, make that NC-17. Something like
Lie to Me.
Movies, exciting, visual. Looking at words all day, too fucking boring.

She finished her cosmo and eased her novel down, put on more suntan lotion as she stared at the miles of people lounging behind Sandals, snowy-faced people who were paying between five hundred and two thousand U.S. a day to sit out on white sands and read novels while they cooked their pale flesh golden brown. Other tourists were buying T-shirts and jewelry from the local men and women who walked the white sands, strolled the beach from end to end selling their inexpensive wares.

The swarthy men in the islands fascinated her. Their accents intrigued her. Their energy so sexual and strong. The ones with the locks, the ones with the short haircuts, the ones with the long nappy hair, the ones in security uniforms, the ones working construction at the casino on the other side of Sandals, the ones tending to horses on the dusty road outside of Siboney. She stared at them all, tingling, wondering. A woman was entitled to two things. A husband. And a lover. The lover was most important. The darker, the more untamed, the more she tingled. Antiguans. Jamaicans. Men from Dominica. Barbuda. Men from Suriname. Guyana. St. Lucia. Even some black Brits. So many different types of exotic men from the Bahamas, Greater Antilles, and Lesser Antilles.

She had settled down, gave up having torrid sex with swarthy men when she married Matthew. The sex with her dark-skinned lovers had been taboo and remarkable. Before two months ago, she hadn’t been with a black man in almost five years. Two months ago in Barbados, her first relapse.

Everyone had secrets. No one had more secrets than women.

She was a cougar.

So many cougars were prowling in the jungle. Being a cougar was about being busy, having fun, looking great, and feeling great. A cougar wanted to have fun, was always on the prowl, always hunting, too long since the last kill. Relationship-wise, before Barbados, she hadn’t had a victory in too long.

Some days the need for a victory was too strong.

She had planned on grabbing a bite to eat at a restaurant called The Beach later, maybe lime in St. John’s at the club called Coast, or go dancing at Rush, or just tan awhile and then head back to Falmouth Harbour and chill out in her room, get a massage and relax before making that long flight back home.

Back to her husband. Her cheap-ass, always-getting-on-her-nerves husband.

The man she loved.

Her mind went back to the shoot-out on All Saints Road.

She cursed, tension rising as she shook her head, biting her bottom lip.

She had missed a shot.

She picked up a local paper she had bought at the market inside of Antigua Village, read the local headlines. This land appeared too congenial and utopian to imagine transgressions ever took place here.
The Daily Observer
said crime was getting out of control and the locals posted letters that said the police were incompetent. Bombing at the Mansoor building. Serial rapist. Home invasions. Roti King burglary. Payroll heists. Mother and sons guilty of murder. Black Antiguans outraged by snowy-faced policemen from Canada hired to fix their crime and murder problems, the white foreigners demonized as being the Four Policemen of the Apocalypse. From what she had read, maybe some help was needed. A Jamaican was stabbed on Redcliffe Street, a ten-minute walk away from the police station on Newgate Street, and the police didn’t show up for over two hours. An ambulance was called but an ambulance never came. Marijuana had gone missing from the police station. Car rentals had been robbed.

All of that information printed in the local paper made the island sound like Little New York.

Not that she wanted it any better than it was right now, not at the moment.

Yesterday dead bodies on a yacht and a shoot-out on All Saints had been the front page.

Like everything else that went bad in the islands, the Jamaicans and Guyanese were blamed.

She put the paper down, again shaking her head, biting her bottom lip, and cursing.

A tall native, his hair long, locks like ropes, came her way, smiling, swimming pants hanging a little low. Black T-shirt with yellow lettering on his slender frame. RUDE BOY followed by DON’T BE SILLY . . . She smiled at his smile. His mustache struggling to grow. Strong chest and toned arms. Nice. Suitcase by his side. Selling incense, jewelry made with sharks’ teeth, bootleg CDs and DVDs. Most of his movies were African movies. Films made in Nigeria. Nollywood, as they called it; the Nigerian Hollywood.
Beyonce
parts one through four;
Blood Sister
parts one and two.

None of his goods interested her. But she could tell that her goods interested him.

His stare made her self-conscious. She dabbed her forehead. Compared to his frame, she felt so out of shape. But the young boy stared at her mostly naked body with awe, like she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. That made her tingle. That made her smile. Made her happy.

He said, “A who an’ you ya?”

She adjusted her bottom, chuckled. “I don’t understand what you just said.”

“You come wid somebody?”

She loved the dialect. Not watered down by the British or American influence. She paid closer attention, trying to listen to the words, trying to capture and learn as he spoke. She’d been pretty good at mimicking the Brits, the Irish, Southerners, New Yorkers, Creoles, a few others. She found the islanders’ accents interesting, harder, challenging; not all were rooted in Latin, not all followed the rules of linguistics.

She answered, “I’m by myself at the moment.”

He nodded. “You does smoke? You does get high?”

She hesitated, licked her lips over and over, finally asked, “You have E on this island?”

“You wan’ me source some E fu you?”

“Maybe. Just checking out my options. I’ll let you know.”

She stared out at the Caribbean Sea as the handsome boy sat next to her on the sand, his body a wonderland, wondering how old the boy was as he struggled to do the small-talk thing. He was young; if his body didn’t reveal his youth, his awkward conversation did. He looked all of seventeen, young enough to make her feel like that old woman out of that movie with Dustin Hoffman. He had to be at least twenty years younger than she. He could’ve been younger than that. But he wore a wedding ring.

The forbidden said, “Yuh looking sweet, miss.”

“It’s
Mrs
.”

“Yuh looking sweet,
misses
.”

“Mrs. Robinson.”

She loved the sound of the boy’s voice, his patois, his swagger that said he was confident and virile, that he owned the world as he knew it. Wanted to listen and learn as much as she could.

He said, “Yo, baby, me nar lie, you looking fly.”

“Enough already.” She motioned at his wedding ring. “Where is your wife?”

“Me hab one wife, but if dat no bodda you, e alright wid me.”

She said, “Might
bodda
my husband. That crazy bastard. I’m married to a very jealous man.”

“You alright wid he?”

“What you mean?”

“He tek care a you like how you want?”

She laughed, sweat and suntan lotion scenting her golden skin.

She asked, “So what’s really on your mind?”

He smiled, rocked back and forth in the sand. “You wan’ me deal wid you case?”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“You want arwe go fuck?”

“Well, I know what that means.”

He smiled, his smile attractive and wide.

She said, “What’s the legal age for sex on this island?”

“I’m legal. Don’t stress. Jus’ cool.”

She smiled, found the young boy’s directness amusing. But she had heard about what went on in the islands, had heard about women coming in search of suntans and befriending the rent-a-dreds.

She hummed. “Go fuck where?”

“You hab somewhere fu me stay?”

“Maybe.”

“Uh-huh.”

She said, “And what do you plan on doing when we get in that room?”

“You wan’ me nyam out you subben?”

She smiled, chuckled a little. Never had a man just walked up to her and asked for sex.

“Me can fuck you right.”

She laughed. He did the same.

He asked, “British?”

“American.”

“You sound British.”

“American.”

She glanced around at all the people in bikinis and swimsuits, most tanning and reading novels. Cornwell. Grisham. Roberts. Young or old, fat as hell or rail thin, all of the women lay out like they were demi-god bitches. Nothing wrong with being half-god. More tanned girls were walking the beach with swarthy natives. She wondered how many women came to the islands to get their batteries recharged. She leaned forward, looked down the beach, spied beyond Antigua Village to the quieter, less populated beaches, her eyes looking in the direction of Siboney Beach Club. Less people. Very discreet.