Extra Dirty Read online

  What did not change was the tidiness of the homes. Unlike poor areas back in the States, there were no cars up on cinderblocks, no broken bits of furniture or discarded plastic toys. The Bahamians, no matter what their income level, kept their homes and yards clean. Only the crowding, the faded paint, and the depressed look on people’s faces hinted that all was not well.

  This was Ruby’s neighborhood. She had fled to the island with virtually no money and a questionable legal status. Moving to this neighborhood not only proved affordable, it was anonymous. Her landlord took payment in cash and her name did not appear on any utilities.

  She was the only outsider in the neighborhood except for a Dutch hippie couple, who had been in the Bahamas for so long they had practically become locals, and an American drug addict who everyone ignored.

  They ignored Ruby too. She did not make friends with her neighbors and had smacked down a couple of the guys who had tried to rob her when she first moved in.

  Now everyone left her alone. She had become part of the scenery, as anonymous and uninteresting as the palm tree in her back yard.

  She preferred it that way.

  As she got out of the cab, her neighbor’s curtain twitched. Mrs. Strapp, the local gossip, was the only one on Ruby’s street who still kept an eye on her. And she never stopped keeping an eye on her.

  Ruby could see her fixed stare from behind the razor-thin gap between the edge of the curtain and the side of the window pane. Mrs. Strapp thought she was being subtle, but her hands shook a bit from age and that always created a telltale rustle of the curtain.

  Blowing her a kiss, Ruby entered her house, keeping her own curtains drawn. She liked her privacy and wished Mrs. Strapp would move somewhere else. Pluto maybe, even though it was no longer a planet. At least everyone else on the block hated her too. Ruby doubted they listened when Mrs. Strapp gave them an hour-by-hour account of Ruby’s movements.

  As soon as she closed the front door behind her, something leapt out of the shadows of her living room and landed on her shoulders. Furry arms wrapped around her neck.

  “Hey Zoomer!” Ruby said, scratching the Capuchin monkey on his back. Technically owned by her boss, Zoomer was virtually the communal property of the entire bar, going home with various staff members and regulars. Being less than two feet tall and only weighing about six pounds, he made an excellent accessory for a girl on the run, especially since Ruby didn’t wear jewelry. That would only attract unwanted attention in this neighborhood. Zoomer’s body and limbs were black, but his chest and round little face were tawny, almost white by comparison. His circular face, fringed with fur, spread wide in an exaggerated imitation of a human smile.

  “Hey, buddy, did you miss me?”

  Switching on a light, Ruby carried Zoomer to the kitchen, where she set down a bowl with nuts and a couple of bits of sugarcane. Zoomer hooted and stood on the floor, looking up at her expectedly.

  “What?”

  Zoomer clapped.

  “Oh, you want some rum.”

  Zoomer hooted and did a back flip.

  “Sorry, buddy, but this is becoming a dry house. Speaking of …”

  Ruby moved to a cabinet fastened with a combination lock. Regular child locks afforded no barrier against Zoomer’s primate determination. She unlocked it and pulled out a bottle of Bahamian Gold, the best rum on the island, and that was saying something.

  Zoomer, misreading her intentions, clapped and hooted, standing as tall as he could and staring up at the bottle with an expression approaching religious transcendence. Ruby looked down at him with sympathy.

  “This is going to hurt me as much as it’s going to hurt you.”

  She moved over to the sink, unscrewed the bottle, and tensed as that beautiful aroma filtered into her nostrils.

  Maybe just one, just as a sendoff.

  NO.

  She started pouring the contents down the drain.

  Zoomer screeched and leapt onto the counter. His little hands grasped the bottle and, with a strength born from life in the jungle, tried to yank it away.

  But not even a grown man could have moved Ruby’s arms, not after all the training she’d been through. The stream of caramel-colored liquid poured relentlessly down the sink.

  So Zoomer tried a new tactic—he got in the sink and put his face in the stream, opening his mouth to take all the booze like some frat boy at Mardi Gras.

  “Stop!”

  Ruby turned the bottle right-side up, holding it above her head to keep it out of Zoomer’s leaping reach like some odd imitation of the Statue of Liberty.

  Zoomer jumped onto her shoulders and tried climbing up her arm.

  “Don’t be a pain in the ass!”

  Ruby opened the window and started pouring the rum onto the grass below. Zoomer screeched again and leapt out the window, trying his frat boy move once more.

  The kitchen window faced Mrs. Strapp’s kitchen window, and those curtains started twitching big time. Ruby hoped her neighbor was old enough not to figure out how to use the camera on her phone. This would not look good on YouTube.

  Trying to keep the monkey from drinking itself to death, she flicked the bottle, making the stream of rum fly far out into the yard. Zoomer leapt right after it. Ruby flicked it another direction, but Zoomer was too fast for her and once again managed to catch some in his mouth.

  And then the last lovely droplet fell, wasted, to the ground. Zoomer let out a Kafkaesque cry of existential despair.

  Ruby wasn’t finished yet. Her liquor cabinet had a second bottle of rum, a bottle of whiskey, and a half-full bottle of vodka that had been a gift from a Russian sailor, a particularly unimpressive one-night stand she had dubbed Ivan the Terrible.

  To save Zoomer from the sight, she closed the window on him.

  Zoomer leapt onto the windowsill, his humanlike hands pressed against the glass, his panting breath fogging the area in front of his panicky face, as one by one the contents of those bottles went down the drain. Beyond him, Ruby could see Mrs. Strapp openly staring from her window, her curtain thrust aside, all attempt at subtlety gone.

  Ruby threw the bottles in the trash and opened the window. Zoomer flew in, a meteor of fur, and began scampering around the kitchen, looking for any trace of booze.

  “What the hell is going on over there!” Mrs. Strapp demanded.

  “Spring cleaning.”

  “It’s autumn.”

  “Really? It’s hard to tell in the tropics.”

  Ruby slammed the window shut.

  Ruby turned to find Zoomer sitting on the counter, arms crossed over his chest, glowering at her.

  “Sorry, my little friend. I’m sure you’ll get some at the bar tonight.” Ruby paused, wondering how she was going to sling drinks through an eight-hour shift and not sneak her usual sips. “And I don’t get any.”

  This was going to be harder than a prize fight.

  * * *

  A lot of people said that The Pirate’s Cove had seen better times, but Ruby was not convinced there had ever really been any better times. Maybe the paint had been fresh once. Maybe the plaster coral on the walls hadn’t been chipped. Maybe the rigging hanging from the ceiling hadn’t been garlanded with dust so heavy it resembled Spanish moss. Maybe the lights had all worked. Maybe, just maybe, the oversized treasure chest and pile of gold doubloons taking up the center of the room had once looked flashy instead of just sad.

  But that’s not how any of it looked these days. The Pirate’s Cove was now a dark, grimy little bar for professional drinkers on the bad side of town, a few doors down from a strip club that doubled as a whorehouse. A mixture of expats and locals, and the occasional lost tourist, came here for the cheap drinks and the surprisingly friendly crowd.

  The people were The Pirate’s Cove’s saving grace. Sure, they were drunks, but they were nice drunks. They were Ruby’s drunks, and the closest thing she had to a family.

  And like a family, they were equal parts loving and annoying
. Desaray was slugging beer and complaining about the tourists at the resort where she worked, Perry and Reece were getting hammered as usual, and the Ufologist was lecturing about cattle mutilations to anyone who would listen, which meant no one. At least no human. Zoomer squatted on the counter eating nuts soaked in rum while staring at him with wonder.

  Ruby stood behind the counter with Kristiano Rolle, a musclebound local who worked as the bar’s other bartender. If the ancient Greeks had made their statues out of obsidian, they would have looked like Kristiano. He had an open, perpetually smiling face that showed his true teddy bear nature.

  The Pirate’s Cove wasn’t a particularly large bar, but it needed two bartenders per shift because its clientele liked to keep the drinks coming.

  In between serves, Ruby jotted down possible passwords, anything that occurred to her. Senator Wishbourne’s husband’s favorite teams, places in the Caribbean that might have interested her, the color of her car, anything. The list grew and grew, filled with improbable keys to unlock the mystery held inside that thumb drive.

  Kristiano glanced at her once or twice, but didn’t ask. Like everybody else, he had grown accustomed to her occasional strange behavior.

  “Another over here, please!” Reece called. A retired insurance salesman from New Jersey, he hung out with Perry, a local scuba and surf instructor one-third his age, although with a liver just as old.

  “Coming right up,” Ruby said, jamming the paper in her back pocket. She poured them both a glass of Bahamian rum, the smell making her mouth water. Her mouth had been watering all night. She kept eating nuts in an attempt to give her tastebuds something else to do.

  Reece and Perry raised their glass to one another.

  “What shall we toast?” Perry asked.

  “The Bahamas!” Reece shouted, too loudly.

  “We already toasted that.”

  “Um, palm trees?”

  “Palm trees? You’re drunk.”

  “So are you. How about we toast Ruby?”

  “Yeah, Ruby! Bartender, kick ass fighter, and amateur detective.”

  Ruby winced. She didn’t like being reminded of the body she had found in the dumpster a couple of weeks before. She ended up solving that murder so she didn’t get pegged with the crime. That didn’t make her an amateur detective, it made her a frightened woman on the run, fighting to keep out of jail.

  “Wait,” Perry said. “Ruby should have a drink too.”

  “You’re right,” Reece replied.

  Ruby’s mouth watered again. She grabbed a handful of nuts.

  “No thanks, guys,” she said.

  They stared at her.

  “What? No drink?” Perry asked.

  “We’re paying,” Reece said.

  “Yeah, um, my stomach isn’t feeling too good tonight.”

  “Oh, for a second I thought you’d gotten boring on us,” Perry said.

  “That’ll be the day,” Reece guffawed.

  Ruby blushed.

  Reece raised his glass. “To Ruby!”

  “To Ruby!” several of the regulars said in unison.

  Reece downed his drink and made a little choking sound.

  Uh-oh.

  Ruby took a step back.

  “Here we go again!” Perry said, vaulting off his bar stool (actually a barrel painted with the words “Yo Ho Ho Rum”) and moving out of range. Ruby stepped back.

  “Bathroom, Reece!” she ordered.

  Clutching his mouth, the retired insurance salesman staggered to the men’s room.

  The regulars cheered and applauded as terrible retching sounds came from beyond the door.

  “You’d think someone who can’t hold his liquor wouldn’t be such a heavy drinker,” Kristiano said.

  “Better get the mop,” Ruby replied.

  “Rock paper scissors?”

  “It’s the men’s room.”

  “So?”

  Ruby groaned. They did rock paper scissors. Ruby lost.

  Grumbling, she headed to the back room to grab the mop. She let out a yelp as Neville, her boss and the bar’s owner, leapt around the corner, complete with eye patch, pirate hat, and plastic cutlass.

  “Avast, me hearties! Did I hear the sounds of sea sickness?”

  “Reece again.”

  “A fine sailor, that lad, but he cannot hold his grog,” the pot-bellied Brit said, swishing his cutlass.

  “No, he can’t.”

  Neville poked her with his plastic sword. While Ruby didn’t know much about history, she was pretty sure pirates had metal swords, and did not have pot bellies.

  “Go swab the decks,” Neville ordered, “or I will send ye to Davy Jones’s Locker!”

  “If the smell doesn’t send me there first.”

  Just as Ruby came out from the back, Reece staggered out of the men’s room, a big grin on his face.

  “It’s a construction site in there. Looks like my stomach feels.”

  Neville swung his cutlass over his head. “The harbormaster be telling us to clean out the bilges or they will scupper us. The work will be done in a week’s time. Then you can get seasick in the cleanest bilges on the Seven Seas.”

  Reece managed to get back to his seat without any more mishaps as Ruby kicked open the door to the men’s room.

  She didn’t bother to ask if anyone was in there. She had become pretty much unshockable at this point.

  Turned out her only company was a big puddle of vomit right in the center of the floor. At least Reece had hit the remaining tile and not the exposed concrete the workmen had left today. That would have been harder to clean.

  She did not remain alone for long. The Professor, an older Southern gentleman with a white suit, white hair, and a red nose, hurried in and pushed by her.

  “Hey, I’m working here!”

  “Apologies, young lady, but time, and an enlarged prostate, waits for no man,” he said in his Southern drawl.

  “Too much information,” she muttered as he sidled on up to a urinal.

  A thunderous sound came from the urinal. Whatever the condition of the Professor’s prostate, it certainly didn’t stop him from the business at hand. “Aaaah! Much better. Reminds me of a poem by the famous Chinese poet of the 8th century, Li Bo. ‘Sunbeams stream on the river stones. From high above, the river steadily falls—three thousand feet of sparkling water—the Milky Way pouring down from heaven.’”

  “Thanks for the literature lecture.”

  “You would have been a wonderful student, Ruby. You are far more intelligent than you let on, and I would have enjoyed seeing you outwit and outfight all the spoiled daddy’s boys who tried to cheat their way through my class.”

  “Pee on the floor and I’ll kick your ass.”

  “I am still early enough into the evening’s drinking to have good aim, my dear.”

  The Professor finished up and left, singing, “One More Summer in Virginia.”

  She had barely returned to the bar after having rinsed out the bucket and put back the mop when she saw trouble come through the front door.

  It was some American tourist woman who had been in here the previous night. Aged about thirty, with trendy clothes and carefully tended long brown hair, she had come with a female friend of about the same age. Now she was alone, and had a haunted, sleepless look about her. She made a beeline for Ruby.

  Ruby turned to rearrange the bottles behind the bar. Once she was done with that, she glanced over her shoulder. The woman was sitting on one of the barrels, between Desaray and another hotel worker who was being lectured to by the Ufologist.

  “So when the alien grays mutilate cattle, it’s really just a cover-up for—”

  “Excuse me!” the woman said, raising her hand and trying to get Ruby’s attention.

  Ruby pretended not to see and went down to the other end of the bar to pour the Professor another mint julep. She took care not to turn in the woman’s direction. Maybe if she ignored her, she would go away.

  And Ruby
really, really wanted her to go away. She had a bad feeling about her. The woman stared at Ruby like she was her only hope of salvation.

  Go home. Problem solved.

  So many tourists landed themselves in trouble down in the Bahamas. They thought just because they were on vacation and had money to burn that they could do anything. Ruby had seen it a million times before.

  This woman and her friend were a prime example. Drunk when they came in, they had spent most of their three or four rounds bragging to each other about how daring they were to go slumming in the bad part of town. The regulars didn’t exactly like that kind of talk and proceeded to ignore them. What could have been a fun evening where they met some interesting and friendly Bahamians instead turned out to be a drunken night out in their own personal tourist bubble. The last Ruby remembered of them, the one who was here right now had been urging her friend to go down the street to The Tropical Twerker.

  “I’m telling you,” she had said, “back home the strip clubs love having amateurs get on stage. It’s a blast!”

  “Oh my God, Aaron would kill me!”

  “Who cares what Aaron would do? He’ll never know.”

  Ruby had moved off to help someone at that point and didn’t see them leave.

  So they had gone to the strip club down the street, got harassed and probably robbed, and now this idiot wanted help from the one white person she had spoken to that night. The middle-aged Englishman in the pirate costume did not count.

  No thanks, can’t help you. I have more vomit to clean up pretty soon. Much more satisfying.

  “Ruby!” Kristiano called.

  She turned. Damn. Her coworker stood with the tourist. Both were looking at her.

  “This lady would like to speak with you.”

  Ugh. No getting out of it now.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “You have to help me.”

  I knew it.

  “What are you having?” Ruby asked in her Aloof Bartender Voice.