There was a scowl of concentration on the smaller pirate’s face as he continued fighting, dancing rings around Szandor in an attempt to wear out his adversary. Sadly for Flick, it seemed that Szandor had attained that place on the plateau of suffering where pain no longer made a difference. His movements might be clumsy, but they showed no evidence of flagging, even as fresh blood continued pulsing from the deep gash on his thigh.

  The wound was killing him, Kidd knew, but Szandor seemed determined not to fall before he settled with his sprightly foe. He aimed a roundhouse swing at Flick’s bald head, a move so telegraphed that a blind man could have seen it coming, but when Flick attempted to sidestep the slash, Szandor reversed himself with stunning speed and rammed his long blade home between the smaller pirate’s ribs.

  Flick stiffened, biting off a scream, and brought up his free hand to seize the blade where it protruded from his abdomen. Szandor was trying to withdraw his sword and strike again, to finish it, but Flick would not release the blade, in spite of fresh blood spilling from between his lacerated fingers. Stepping closer to his enemy, he seemed to drive the long blade even deeper, through his vitals, in his grim determination to strike back.

  Szandor gave up, released his sword and was about to step back out of range, but he had stalled too long. Flick’s sword came whistling down with all the little pirate’s weight behind it, biting deep into the flesh of Szandor’s shoulder where his neck joined with his trunk. A startled grunt escaped from Szandor’s lips, immediately followed by a jet of crimson blood that struck Flick in the face and dribbled down his chest.

  As Kidd and company looked on, the two men fell together, slumping to their knees, like lovers locked in an embrace, before they toppled over sideways, linked by the sharp blades that pierced their flesh. Both clung to life for several moments longer, but there was no power on the island that could save them now, no medicine or magic that could heal those massive wounds.

  A groan went up around the killing ground, as disappointed gamblers realized all bets were off. Both men were dead, their deaths so nearly simultaneous that no one could have named a winner if his life depended on it.

  Two men gone, and while the bout had been exhilarating, Kidd could not help thinking that he had no ready means of filling vacancies these days. Of course, they ran across the odd rogue every now and then who jumped at a chance to join the band, but they were few and far between. Most killers with that kind of nerve were operating on their own, freelance, or working for the syndicates that smuggled weapons, drugs and men among the islands, or to the United States.

  Kidd was about to rise up from his throne when Billy Teach stepped up beside him, resting a hand on his shoulder. Kidd turned to face his first lieutenant, scowling at the hand until it was removed.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, Cap’n, but we’ve got another prize comin’ our way.”

  “Says who?”

  “Our man in Puerta Plata. Morgan.”

  “Well,” Kidd said, “he hasn’t failed us yet. We’d best be getting ready to receive more guests.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “And, Billy?”

  “Sir?”

  Kidd nodded to the corpses stretched out on the ground within a few short paces of his chair. “Have someone haul that rubbish out beyond the reef, will you? Sharks have to eat, the same as anybody else.”

  Chapter 10

  The sailor’s name was not Enrique. Standing on the pier beside the Melody, Howard Morgan introduced the slender, twenty-something man as Pablo Altamira, and it hardly seemed worth Remo’s time to ask for ID to verify the name. Remo didn’t overlook the stylized tattoo of a sailboat on the web of skin between the young man’s thumb and forefinger.

  Among Latino gangs of the Caribbean and South America, he knew, that symbol indicated that its bearer was involved in smuggling, typically of drugs.

  So far, so good.

  Tattoos aside, it would have taken psychic powers to peg Pablo as a bad guy at first glance. He had movie-star looks and wore his hair long, tied back in a ponytail that hung below his collar. Perfect teeth flashed in a smile as he was introduced to Remo first, then Stacy and finally Chiun. The old Korean, for his part, merely glared at them all from the helm, like an unpleasant sea captain forced out of retirement. Their so-called guide was casual but stylish in a chambray shirt, new Levi’s jeans and a pair of spotless deck shoes worn without the benefit of socks.

  “Pablo knows all the islands hereabouts,” Morgan was telling them, while his companion smiled and nodded in agreement. “You’ve my word that he’ll show you things the average tourist never sees.”

  “I’m counting on it,” Remo said. “How much?”

  “A very modest twenty-five per day, U.S.,” said Morgan.

  “Very modest,” Pablo echoed.

  “It’s a deal,” said Remo. “When can we get under way?”

  “Immediately, if not sooner,” the travel agent answered.

  “Great. Let’s do it, then.”

  Remo endured another flaccid handshake, slipping Morgan a fifty-dollar tip that put some extra wattage in his smile. “Most generous, I’m sure,” the travel agent said. “If I can ever help you with your travel needs again, don’t hesitate to call.”

  “We’ll definitely be in touch,” said Remo, who read the insincerity in Morgan’s behavior like he read the white letters on a red stop sign.

  Pablo stood with them and watched as Morgan made his way back down the pier. When he was beyond recall, the newest member of their crew turned on another gleaming smile and nodded toward the Melody.

  “Shall we be going, then, señor?” he asked.

  “Suits me,” said Remo, turning to include his “wife” in the exchange. “You ready, darling?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” said Stacy Armitage.

  Remo spent several minutes showing Pablo around the Melody, from her controls to such essentials as the galley, heads and sleeping quarters. The new member of their crew said little, but Remo had the feeling that he was sizing things up, taking the measure of the multimillion-dollar cabin cruiser and her passengers.

  Toward what end?

  It was a gamble, trusting Howard Morgan to produce a member of the pirate gang. Hell, Remo wasn’t even sure there was a pirate gang, at this point, in the sense of one cohesive group that watched the ports and preyed on boats repeatedly. For all he knew, the death of Richard Armitage and the abduction of his wife could just as easily have been a one-time thing, or perpetrated by a loose-knit group that roved among the many islands of the blue Caribbean, killing time here and there between raids, living off the proceeds of their latest depredation until cash ran short again.

  Still, there was the tattoo on Pablo Altamira’s hand if that meant anything. Not much, Remo decided, as he thought about the countless Latin gang members in North and South America who sported tattoos on their hands. More to the point, while wanna-bes would seldom go so far as getting a tattoo, the marks were seen on many ex-gang members who had left a life of crime behind them, but who never had the inclination or the cash to have the brands removed.

  So, he had nothing yet, except a young man without references beyond one dipsy travel agent, who was on the payroll now, for good or ill. If he turned out to be a spotter for the hypothetical buccaneers, so much the better. And if not…well, hiring him would mean that they had blown their chance to act as bait.

  It troubled Remo that so much hinged upon his chance meeting with Ethan Humphrey in a bar, some fourteen hours earlier. The old man was eccentric, granted, but his personal enthusiasm for the sea rovers of yesteryear didn’t mean he was presently involved in hijacking or worse. If that were true, then it would naturally follow that dragons were slain at Renaissance festivals, while Civil War “recreation” groups would be marching on Atlanta and Gettysburg, armed to the teeth.

  Pablo met Chiun, after a fashion, in one of the main cabins, where Chiun had staked himself out, staring at the grainy image on a twenty-inch wall-mounted LCD television screen. He wasn’t squinting—Remo, in his whole life, had not known a man of any age with keener eyes—but Chiun was leaning forward slightly, hands braced on his knees, as he sat in a modified lotus position.

  “What’s on, Little Father?” Remo asked him.

  “Butt Master,” Chiun replied, his tone somehow combining fascination and disgust.

  Remo stepped closer, peering at the screen. Three shapely women dressed in leotards stood with their backs to the camera, bent forward at the waist, as if to moon their audience. Their thighs were working, in and out, some kind of bellows action, as if each of them were holding an accordion between her knees. Instead, as Remo finally made out, their legs were clutching strange devices that resembled giant, twisted paper clips.

  “Didn’t Suzanne Autumns sell those things years ago?” Remo asked. “Isn’t she the one who got bonked in the brain when one of her models lost control of the thing and it flew out from between her thighs?”

  A moment later Suzanne Autumns herself appeared on-screen, looking twenty years older than she had ten years ago—and not much prettier. A Farrah-style hairdo, as outdated as her acting career, couldn’t fully disguise the surgery scars on Autumns’s scalp. “Now with rubber Thigh-Grip-Ers, so they’re safer than ever!” she recited from a cue card.

  “She talks like she has marbles in her mouth,” Remo said.

  “Butt Master is still better than Pec Man,” Chiun informed him solemnly.

  “He’s right, señor,” said Pablo, chiming in for the first time without a pointed invitation to speak. “I’ve seen the Pec Man ads. They suck big time. And they have Lady Pec Man, too. The things those women do with—”

  “I believe we get the picture, Pablo. Thanks for sharing.”

  If the young man took offense at being interrupted, it did not show on his smiling face. “When shall we start?” he asked Remo.

  “Sooner the better,” Remo told him. “Right, Chiun?”

  The Master Emeritus of Sinanju frowned and said, “Tell him to take us where we’ll get decent reception.”

  Pablo appeared to know his business when it came to casting off and piloting the cabin cruiser out of port. In fact, there wasn’t much to handling the cruiser, with its GPS positioning, automated piloting and other electronics that Remo had been instructed not to fiddle with. In fact, he had been keeping the thing under manual control since they took her out. Pablo engaged the electronics as a matter of course and soon had them on their way. Remo glanced at the controls, found all the blips and messages benign enough, as far as he could tell, and left him to it. If the course was not correct, he’d know, electronics or no.

  The act of taking on a crewman for a boat the size of the Melody was more to give the passengers some extra leisure time than to preserve their lives at sea.

  Some would have called the new addition to their crew a status symbol. Remo preferred to think of him as an investment in success.

  The first day out from Puerta Plata they sailed east by southeast, roughly following the coastline, barely keeping it in sight, until they reached the Mong Passage and nosed due south. They had a distant glimpse of Puerto Rico, green on the horizon to their east, or left, but Pablo or his electronics seemed to know where he was going as they passed by the U.S. territory and sailed on, turning east again only when they were well into the Caribbean proper, the vast Atlantic safely behind them.

  “Señor Morgan tells me joo are interested in pirates, sí?”

  “Could be,” said Remo. “You know about that kind of thing?”

  “Oh, sí,” said Pablo. “Anyone who grows up round this place knows pirate stories.”

  Remo noted that the young man didn’t mention knowing pirates, and he wasn’t sure if that should be a disappointment or relief. He experienced another moment of regret for letting Stacy Armitage aboard the Melody, but he suppressed it quickly, concentrating on the job at hand. That was when he noticed the scampering of small feet coming up to the bridge. Either the Melody had vermin or…

  “You can show us where the pirates of old did their business?” Chiun squeaked as his head popped into view and he scampered up top.

  It seemed to Remo that their pilot’s grin was brighter than it should have been as he replied. “Oh, sí, señor. This time mañana, next day at the latest, joo see where the pirates lived. I think joo not be disappointed.” Was there something in his voice, his eyes, besides the goofy smile? Or was Remo looking for some evidence of guilt and finding it where none in fact existed?

  Before the summer afternoon began to fade, Stacy had already passed judgment on the new addition to their crew. “He’s dirty,” she told Remo as they sunbathed on the forward deck. “I feel it. Everywhere I go, he’s watching me.”

  Remo considered the bikini bottoms she was barely wearing and the bikini top she had discarded entirely, and couldn’t resist a smile. Her normal clothing flattered her, of course, but it didn’t do justice to the supple body hidden underneath. A blind man would have dropped his pencils on the street corner if Stacy Armitage had passed by close enough for him to smell her sun-warmed, nearly naked skin.

  “He has good taste,” Remo said.

  “I’m being serious,” she told him. “He may not be the one who set my brother up, but I don’t trust him.”

  Remo had to ask. “Who do you trust?”

  “Right now? Myself.” She stared at Remo from behind big sunglasses, perhaps attempting to discover if his feelings had been wounded. When he gave no outward sign of injury, she frowned, whether from disappointment or concern, he couldn’t say.

  “That isn’t fair, I guess,” she said. “I should trust you.”

  “Don’t be so hasty,” Remo said, eyes closed against the sun’s glare. “I’ve been looking at you, too.”

  She let that pass, but there was just a beat of silence, hesitancy, before she spoke again. “What do you think of him?”

  He almost mentioned the tattoo on Pablo’s hand, but let it slide. She was keyed up already, and he saw no point in goading her. If she was right about the new addition to their crew, it would be risky pouring any more fuel on the fire of her suspicion. She might say something, do something, that would divert the young man from his plan, either by scuttling it or striking prematurely. On the other hand, if Pablo was entirely innocent, Stacy might scare him off with some rash word or deed.

  “I think we need to keep an eye on him,” Remo stated, “but discreetly. If he has his own agenda, we don’t want to spook him, right?”

  “I’d like to crack his skull and toss him overboard,” she said through clenched teeth, smiling at him all the while.

  “That’s my department,” he reminded her, “and it would ruin any chance we have of finding out if he’s connected to the men who killed your brother. Am I right?”

  She was about to make a face at him but caught herself, glanced back toward Pablo in the wheelhouse, keeping up her smile. “He’s watching me again,” said Stacy.

  “Good. That ought to keep him suitably distracted for a while, in case he has some kind of mischief on his mind.”

  “My God, it’s true! You men are all alike, with only one thing on your minds.”

  “I’d say that depends,” said Remo.

  “Oh? On what?”

  “The man, the moment and the inspiration,” he replied.

  Her voice turned coy, surprising Remo with the change, under the circumstances. “Would you say that I’m inspiring?” Stacy asked.

  “I never thought about it,” Remo declared, while pointedly avoiding even the suggestion of a glance in her direction.

  “Is that right?” He couldn’t tell from Stacy’s tone if she was getting angry now, or simply teasing him.

  “We’re here on business,” he reminded her. “Distractions could be fatal.”

  Remo felt her glaring at him after he had closed his eyes. The heat that radiated from her now had more to do with anger than the tropic sun above, or any fleeting passion that she may have felt. He felt an undeniable attraction to the woman lying nearly naked at his side, but Remo was at this point in his life enjoying the company of a woman who didn’t get all aroused by the mere presence of his body chemistry.

  It was an odd side effect of his Sinanju training. At first he thought it was the greatest thing in the world how women responded to him. They went gaga. They got all loopy. It got old pretty fast, having any woman you wanted.

  Eventually he learned that eating shark meat dampened the effect. That created its own set of problems. Like Chiun behaving as if he had the world’s worst BO and the fact that he wasn’t all that fond of shark. Later Remo gained some control of the effect himself, but it came and went. It was one of those Sinanju skills that he never quite got full control of.

  “How come you aren’t getting burned?” Stacy demanded.

  Remo shrugged. “I’ve got Native American blood. They don’t burn as easy.”

  “Because of their skin pigmentation, which you don’t show evidence of,” she accused.

  “I don’t know, then.”

  He smiled at Stacy’s muttering, as she rolled over on her stomach, offering her well-oiled backside to the sun. Once again, Remo found himself hoping that Pablo Altamira was one of the pirates they sought. Preoccupation with a raid to come might keep the young Dominican from making any moves on “Mrs. Rubble” that would ultimately lead to trouble on board the Melody.

  The last thing Remo needed at the moment was a mutiny inspired by hormones. He had enough to think about, with Chiun still out of sorts about the lack of soap operas and whatever other bugs were up his Emeritus butt these days.

  Their first night out of Puerta Plata, Remo sat with Chiun and Stacy at the table in the dining room, which could seat twelve, while Pablo took first watch. Chiun had done the cooking. Stacy seemed a little disappointed by the mound of rice and steamed fish on her plate.