On the Rocks Read online

  “I should get rid of the employee discount,” Neville grumbled.

  “You do that, I’ll kick your ass.”

  “You kick too much ass already. What if those Romanians had called the cops?”

  “After losing against a lone girl? I don’t think so.”

  Neville shrugged, then put a hand on her shoulder and another hand on the bottle.

  “How about you take a night off?”

  Ruby smiled. “You offering me a paid vacation?”

  Neville slumped. “No, I mean—”

  “I better take out the trash.” Ruby pulled the bottle from his hand, put it in her bag, and got back to work. She could feel Neville’s eyes on her. She didn’t look back at him. She didn’t want to give him a chance to start talking again.

  Without another word she emptied the bins and, with a heavy trash bag in each fist, kicked open the back door.

  The back alley was narrow and dark, and still retained much of the warmth of the tropical night. The saloon stood on a strip of cheap stores and bars. Behind that loomed a large warehouse whose wall made an unbroken slab of concrete for the other side of the alley. A dumpster stood at each end. Ruby marched for the nearest one, then stopped short.

  A dark figure in a tattered baseball cap detached itself from the shadow of the dumpster and disappeared around the corner.

  For a second Ruby thought it might be a mugger. Street crime was on the rise in Nassau. The way the guy moved off showed he wasn’t interested in sticking around. Probably had stopped here to take a piss like lots of people did. She could smell it every night.

  Ruby fantasized about sticking the guy’s face in his own puddle of pee like a poorly housetrained dog. She didn’t go after him, though. She saved her skills for the truly undeserving, not the merely disgusting or obnoxious.

  You’re still pissed off about those guys. Go home and have at least half a bottle of rum, she told herself as she set the trash bags next to the dumpster. She lifted up the plastic lid.

  And froze.

  Letting out a choked cry, Ruby stumbled back until she hit the far side of the alley, cold sweat breaking out all over her body and her heart hammering in her chest.

  A body lay amid the trash bags, its throat neatly slit.

  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!