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"Thank you, no!" David spread his arms and herded them through the bedroom door. He locked it behind them.
"We be upstairs if you need us, madam," Jimmy shouted through the door. "The intercom nah work, so yell real good!"
David plucked Loretta from her tote and set about fixing her formula. Laura fell backward onto the bed, feeling a sapping rush of stress fatigue. "Alone at last," she said.
"If you don't count thousands of Rizome associates,"
David said from the bathroom. He emerged and set the baby on the bed. Laura roused herself to one elbow and held
Loretta's bottle.
David checked all the closets. "Seems safe enough in this bedroom. No other ways in or out-this is great old wood- work, too." He pulled his earpiece loose with a wince, then set his videoglasses on a bedside table. He aimed them care- fully at the door.
["Don't mind me,"] Emily said in Laura's ear. ["If David wants to sleep in the raw, I'll edit it."]
Laura laughed, sitting up. "You two and your in-jokes,"
David said.
Laura changed the baby and got her into her paper paja- mas. She was doped with food, sleepy and content, her eyes rolling under half-shut flickering lids. Sweet little hand-clenching motions, like she was trying to hold on to wakefulness but couldn't quite remember where she put it. It was fu
They undressed, and he hung his clothes in the closet.
"They still got the old guy's wardrobe here," he said. He showed her a tangle of leather. "Nice tailor, huh?"
"What the hell is that? Bondage gear?"
"Shoulder holster," David said. "Macho bang-bang stuff."
"Terrific," Laura said. More goddamned guns. Tired as she was, she dreaded sleep; she could smell another night- mare waiting. She plugged her gear into a clockphone from the biggest bag. "How's that?"
["It ought to do."] Emily's voice came loudly from the clockphone's speakers. ["I'm logging off, but the night shift will watch over you." ]
"Good night." Laura slid under the sheets. They nestled the baby between them. Tomorrow they'd look for a crib.
"Lights, turn off."
Laura came sluggishly out of sleep. David was already wearing jeans, an unbuttoned tropical shirt, and his videoglasses.
"The doorbell," he explained. It rang again, plonking through its antique melody.
"Oh." She looked gummy-eyed at the bedside clock. Eight
A.M. "Who's online?"
["It's me, Laura,"] the clock said. ["Alma Rodriguez."]
"Oh, Mrs. Rodriguez," Laura said to the clock. "Um, how are you?"
["Oh, the old man, his bursitis pretty bad today."]
"Sorry to hear that," Laura muttered. She struggled to sit up, the waterbed rippling queasily.
["This Lodge, it's pretty empty without you or the guests,"]
Mrs. Rodriguez said brightly. ["Mrs. Delrosario, she says her two girls are ru
"Well, why don't you tell her that, uh .. Laura stopped, suddenly stu
["Are you all right, Laurita?"]
"Sure, I guess " She looked wildly around the strange bedroom, located the bathroom door. That would help.
When she returned she dressed quickly, then slipped on the shades. ["Ay, it's strange when the picture moves like that,"]
Mrs. Rodriguez said from Laura's earplug. ["Makes me seasick!"]
"You and me both," Laura said. "Who's David talking to out there? The so-called servants?"
["You won't like it,"] Mrs. Rodriguez said drily..["It's the witch girl. Carlotta."]
"Jesus, now what?" Laura said. She picked up the squirm- ing, bright-eyed baby and carried her into the living room.
Carlotta sat on the couch; she had brought a wicker basket full of groceries. "Chow," she a
"Good," Laura said. "How are you, Carlotta?"
"I'm jus' fine," Carlotta said su
Real nice place you have here, I was just telling your mister."
"Carlotta gets to be our liaison today," David said.
"I don't mind, since Sticky's pretty busy," Carlotta said.
"Besides, I know the island, so I can tour y'all around. You want some papaya juice, Laura?"
"Okay," Laura said. She took the other armchair, feeling restless, wanting to run on the beach. No chance for that though, not here. She balanced Loretta on her knee. "So the
Bank trusts you to show us around?"
"I'm wired for sound," Carlotta said, pouring. A light pair of earphones circled her neck, trailing wire to a telephone on her studded belt. She wore a short-sleeved cotton top, with eight inches of bare freckled stomach between it and her red leather miniskirt. "Y'all gotta be a little careful of the food around here," Carlotta said. "They got houngans on this island that can really fuck you up."
" 'Houngans?' " David said. "You mean those designer drug people?"
"Yeah, them. They got voodoo poisons here that can do stuff to your CNS that I wouldn't do to a Pentagon Chief of
Staff! They ship those mad doctors in, high bio-techies, and kind of crossbreed 'em with those old blowfish-poison zom- bie masters, and they come out mean as a junkyard dog!"
She passed Laura a glass of juice. "If I was in Singapore right now, I'd be burnin' joss!"
Laura stared unhappily into her glass. "Oh, you're fine and safe with me," Carlotta said. "I bought all this in the market myself."
"Thanks, that's very thoughtful," David said.
"Well, us Texans gotta stick together!" Carlotta reached for the basket. "Y'all can try some of these little tamale things, 'pastels' they call 'em. They're like little curries in pastry. Indian food. East Indians I mean, they snuffed all the local Indians a long time ago."
["Don't eat it!"] Mrs. Rodriquez protested. Laura ignored her. "They're good," she said, munching.
"Yeah, they chased 'em off Sauteur's Point, Leaper's Point that means," Carlotta said to David. "The Carib Indians.
They knew the Grenada settlers had their number, so they all jumped off a cliff into the sea together, and died. That's where we're going today-Sauteur's point. I got a car outside."
After breakfast they took Carlotta's car. It was a longer, truck version of the Brazilian three-wheelers, with a kind of motorcycle grip for manual driving. "I like manual driving,"
Carlotta confessed as they got in. "High speed, that's a big premille
"You think it's safe to leave the household slaveys with our gear?" Laura asked David.
David shrugged. "I woke 'em up and put 'em to work.
Rita's weeding the roses, Jimmy's cleaning the pool, and
Rajiv gets to strip the fountain pump."
Laura laughed.
David cracked his knuckles, his eyes clouded with anticipa- tion. "When we get back, we can hit it a lick ourselves."
"You want to work on the house?"
David looked surprised. "A great old place like that? Hell, yes! Can't just let it rot!"
The highway was busier in daylight, lots of rusting old
Toyotas and Datsuns. Cars inched past a construction bottle- neck, where a pick-and-shovel crew were killing time, sitting in the shade of their steamroller. The crew stared at Carlotta, gri
one of them crowed, waving.
Suddenly a canvas-topped military truck appeared from the north. The crew grabbed their picks and shovels and set to with a will. The truck rumbled past them on the road's shoulder-it was full of bored-looking NMM militia.
A mile later, they passed a town called Grand Roy. "I stay at the Church here," Carlotta said, waving her arm as the engine sputtered wildly. "It's a nice little temple, local girls, they have fu