Beckles - Games: A Crime in Barbados

GAMES

A Crime in Barbados

By Kayio Bec kles

Copyright 2018 Kayio Beckles

All Rights Reserved

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

To Danielle, without whose encouragement and support at every step, this would not have been possible

Table of Contents

Prologue

Sunday, May 11th, 2003

Jeremy turned off the car radio because he couldnt concentrate on anything the announcer was saying. He had turned it on in the first place to listen to the cricket commentary - West Indies were playing Australia in Antigua - hoping it would help him relax. But he knew even then that it would have been futile. The only thing on his mind was his wife. Was she even alive?

He barely thought about the waitress. The news reports stated she was missing in suspicious circumstances but he had a few more details than that. The names of he and his wife were even mentioned in the broadcast.

He was sitting in his friends Mazda Lantis which was parked outside of Esso Black Rock, a service station and convenience store just off Spring Garden Highway, the major traffic artery leaving the capital, Bridgetown, heading North. It was two thirteen in the afternoon, thirteen minutes past the arranged meeting time.

The store was busy with its usual parade of university students, bus conductors and taxi drivers. Jeremy had been counting on the presence of a sizeable crowd when he agreed to meet at this location.

Why is this happening? he whispered to himself. Part of him was still clinging to the hope that everything that had happened in the last seventy-two hours was an elaborate prank at his expense. Things like this only happened in movies. It couldnt be real.

But he remembered the blood. The blood was real.

Tuesday, November 13 th , 2001

Even though it was November, Jeremy was surprised by how chilly the night had become.

He guessed that the temperature might be as low as twenty-two degrees Celsius, which was relatively cool for a Barbadian night. The fact that he was naked didnt help.

He walked slowly forward, shoulders hunched, hands slightly out in front, held in the way a man might if he was about to choke someone. Which, in a way, he was.

The lawn he was crossing was well maintained in the way that only the wealthy or the social climbing middle-class can afford. The latter category applied in this case.

Jeremy was very familiar with the layout of the house and land. He knew there wasnt a dog or an alarm system and was also very aware of the narrow corridor of opportunity between the motion detecting security lights fixed at all corners of the one-story house. If he was careful, he could walk in a straight line towards the house without triggering any of the two nearest lights. This was important since it wouldnt do for any neighbours to see a naked man creeping around in the dark. This was Rowans Park, St. George after all, an upper middle class development in the centre of the island. While instances of break-ins had declined in the previous few years, residents were still quite wary of possible intruders. And most definitely of the naked, creeping variety.

Jeremy was confident that he would not be seen as long as he was careful. He remembered a Marvel Comics character Nightcrawler - one of the mutant X-Men - who became almost invisible in shadows due to the indigo colour of his skin. Creeping around in the night, clad only in his naked, chocolate-coloured skin, made Jeremy feel as if he could be that mutant.

Like so many Barbadian houses, this one greeted visitors with a beautiful mahogany front door with a close to impenetrable dead-bolt lock. Except for a nervous spell in the early part of the 1990s when the creatively dubbed dead-bolt man was making a mockery of the security in the Parks and Terraces, the well-to-do in Barbados were relatively safe behind secure locks and bolts. Backdoors were a different story, however.

Jeremy surveyed the aluminium, louvered backdoor in front of him. The polycarbonate shutters were set in two segments one on top of the other. The lower segment was closed and Jeremy knew that pushing home the operating handle would lock these types of louvers. The upper segment was partially open.

It should have been an easy matter to simply open the upper shutters fully, reach in with his slender arm, unlock the door from inside and voil . But any insomniac will tell you that if a droplet of water falls in the kitchen sink at one oclock a.m., it might as well be a gunshot. So he had to be very, very quiet.

Moving stealthily, Jeremy opened the shutters so that they sat horizontally. This simple act took more than a minute due to the extreme care he took not to make any sound. Twice during the process he paused when he thought he was being too noisy. He then pushed his right arm through the space and reached down to the lock. He fumbled for the locking clip for a while, but he fumbled quietly.

Jeremy was aware of every sound in the area.

He could hear the crickets chirping in the grass of the empty lot next door. He had read somewhere that if you count the number of chirps a cricket makes in a specific period of time, you could work out the atmospheric temperature. Jeremy couldnt remember the required formula at that moment, but he didnt need it. He already knew that it was too damned cold for a naked man to be parading outdoors in St. George!

He could hear the sound of a radio in a nearby house and even made out that it was the annoyingly flat, mono sound of an AM station. After a few seconds he recognised the song being played: something about the different ways Barbadians (or Bajans as they refer to themselves) of the various social classes laugh - an early example of Calypso music.

Jeremy had time to hear a verse and a bit of the chorus before he found the locking clip and turned it slowly. It rotated without a sound.

Jeremy took a deep breath before setting about his next task: opening the door. He had never come across a door of any kind that opened completely quietly in his life, with one exception. As a child, he owned a Sony stereo with a double tape deck. Under each deck was a sticker that proudly proclaimed Silent Action - which he assumed meant that when you pressed eject, the lid was supposed to open smoothly and quietly. Like all reliable Japanese technology, it did just that, much to the fascination of the then twelve year old Jeremy.

He slowly turned the lock until he was sure that the latch was released from its cylinder. Once more there was no sound. Ironically, this was due to the lock being well lubricated and maintained, so that the occupants could sleep in peace knowing that their middle-class belongings and lives were well protected by correctly working security devices.

He put his one hundred and seventy-five pound frame flat against the door and pushed firmly but smoothly. It held for a moment before swinging in with a slight rubbing noise. He froze for one full minute, listening for any signs from inside the house that he had been heard.

No house is ever completely silent. Even if he hadnt already known, he could tell he was in the kitchen from the quiet hum of the refrigerator to his right. He detected a slight scratching sound above him - most likely insects or some other vermin living in the roof crawl space. There was also a dripping faucet, but nothing to indicate any other unwanted movement in the house.