February Heat

      By Wilson Roberts

      FOR DIANE ESSER

      AND

      PETER WHIMS

      WTHOUT WHOM I WOULD NOT HAVE HAD A CHANCE

      Cover Image © Wilson Roberts

      Wilder Publications, Inc.

      PO Box 632

      Floyd, VA 24091

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or transmitted in any form or manner by any means: electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express, prior written permission of the author and/or publisher, except for brief quotations for review purposes only. February Heat is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. And resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales or institutions is entirely coincidental.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-5154-0221-3

      FIRST EDITION

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      ONE

      I WAS ASLEEP when the phone rang. Fumbling for the receiver I heard the night sounds of the Caribbean, waves softly breaking on the rocks at the bottom of the bluff below the house, trade winds rustling the surrounding fan palms, the whistling of coquis rising above the songs of the other tree frogs in the damp jungle a few feet from my window. Half awake, I forced myself into a sitting position. Reaching for the phone I knocked over the beer I had set on the nightstand before falling asleep. It shattered on the tile floor, warm beer splashing around my feet and ankles. I was hung over after celebrating the West Indies 2-0-1 victory over Australia in the cricket World Series Cup competition with a few friends at the Quarterdeck. St. Ursula, after all, is a British territory.

      Squinting at the clock, I grunted into the phone. “It’s two-thirty-five.”

      The woman’s voice on the line was thin, frightened. “Frank? Frank James?”

      I grunted again.

      “This is Liz Ford. From the St. Thomas ferry.”

      “It’s two thirty-six now.”

      “Someone just tried to kill me.”

      The sounds of the waves and the coquis’ whistles faded, drowned in the sound of my breathing and the constant hiss of St. Ursula’s telephone lines. Staring at the rumpled sheet draped over my legs, I took a deep breath and rubbed my eyes.

      Had I more awake I would have told her to call the police and gone back to sleep. Now, with all that has happened, I’m glad that I didn’t.

      “Tell me about it.”

      “Somebody tried to kill me.

      “Who?”

      “I don’t know anyone else on this island, and I barely know you, but I need help.”

      “This isn’t a joke.” It wasn’t a question.

      “I’ve got bullet holes in my bed.”

      “Any in you?”

      “Will you come over here?”

      “I’m on my way.”

      I hung up. Forcing myself out of bed, careful to avoid stepping in glass shards from the shattered bottle, I put on my shorts and a tee shirt, slid into my flip-flops, grabbed a fresh beer and headed for the door. Rumble, my Jack Russell Terrier, snorted from his sleep on the couch, moving his legs as though running. Stopping at the doorway, I looked at him, then walked over and patted his belly. The dog responded with a few more snorts, ran his sleeping legs, then turned, burying his snout between the cushions.

      Outside, the air was warm, damp, the coquis still whistling from the bush, the waves slapping against the rocks far below my house.

      I breathed deeply. Looking up at the stars I walked to my ‘73 Gurgle Xavante. It was the first car the Brazilian company built using the Plasteel system, a combination of plastic and steel, its body resistant to the corrosive island environment and equally resistant to the many collisions it had borne on St. Ursula’s narrow roads and blind curves, the Plasteel body deforming temporarily but not smashing under pressure or shocks. It started with the first turn of the key. I lit a cigarette and headed out the drive, turning right onto Ocean Road. I don’t smoke often. In fact, I’ve managed to limit myself to three a week, five when I get stressed. This looked as though it could be a two-cigarette night. Juggling the beer and the cigarette, I drove toward Liz’s hotel, the Caribbean a few feet away on the right side of the road, wondering about Liz Ford and what I was getting into.

      I HAD MET HER less than ten hours earlier aboard the ferry, The Yellow Bird, as it churned its way back to St. Ursula from St. Thomas. I go to St. Thomas every month or six weeks, to shop and check the post office box I keep there. Although life in the British Caribbean is quieter and less cluttered than on St. Thomas, untroubled by the heavy development and crime they have on the U.S. island, our mail delivery is terrible. A letter mailed from Boston will reach me on St. Ursula in six to eight weeks. Chances are it will get to St. Thomas in less than four. Not that it really matters. I get less than five letters a year. Everything else is junk mail or rejections from poetry editors.

       It had been an uneventful day on St. Thomas. I rode around the island in a rented Jeep with the windshield down, enjoying the sun and the tropical air on my face, exchanging verbal abuses with taxi drivers and tourists from the cruise ships in the harbor, all of them fighting for space in the gridlock along Veteran’s Drive.

      I was cut off by a two-tone blue Dodge taxi van, headed in the direction of the airport, filled with people and luggage. Jarred halfway into the Jeep’s passenger seat by the sudden stop, I was crawling back behind the wheel when the van’s driver rolled down his window cursing and gesturing with closed fists. He slammed the taxi into gear and spun out, leaving smoking tracks of rubber on the pavement. Frightened tourists stared from the van’s side windows.

      “Hey asshole,” a kid watching from the sidewalk yelled, giving me the finger, never moving from the shade of the coconut palm he leaned against, one foot flat against the trunk. He looked about sixteen and wore a brightly colored wool hat and a tee shirt with the slogan:

       I SLEPT ON A VIRGIN

       (Island)

      Across the distance between us I could see the anger in his face as he stood, probably waiting for a ride to take him home to one of the shoddy and decaying housing projects packed into the hot upper valleys of the island where the land is poorly suited for vacation homes and resort hotels. He didn’t care about the van driver cutting me off, or my innocence of any moving violation. What surely mattered was the apparent wealth my shiny rented Jeep meant to him. The van driver had been a West Indian working to make ends meet. For all the kid knew, I was just another tourist, doing nothing but spending lots of money on trinkets, booze and more food than I can eat. I wasn’t, but the kid had no way of knowing that. All he knew was how vast the discrepancies were between rich and poor in the Caribbean. That knowledge was written in the tight lines of his face.

      On St. Thomas it’s always open season on tourists. The main business in the American islands is separating them from their bucks, selling West Indian trinkets made in the sweatshops of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mexico, anywhere but the Virgin Islands. The kids who attack tourists outside restaurants and bars, or on the island’s narrow, twisting back streets, stealing their wallets and purses, sometimes injuring them in the process, are responding to the prevailing economic conditions of the islands just as accurately as the merchants. The real difference lies in their use of methods the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t sanction.

      St. Thomas is beautiful and it’s filled with fine people, but