Lasko Tangent by Richard North Patterson

Author:Richard North Patterson
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Thriller
ISBN: 9781568958309
Publisher: Arrow/Children's
Published: 1979-04-15T05:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

By two the next afternoon, my airplane hovered over St. Maarten. It was green and white, surrounded by vivid blue. I wished it were winter, and vacation.

I felt the searing heat as soon as we landed. By the time I got my bags and checked through customs, I was moist and enervated. I walked toward a line of cars parked expectantly at the end of the airstrip. The nearest one was an old Oldsmobile. The driver leaned against it with elaborate casualness. I don’t give a damn for you, his face said, but you’re a living.

I didn’t give a damn either. “Give me a lift to Philipsburg?”

He nodded and tossed my bags carelessly into his trunk. I opened my own door. Welcome to friendly St. Maarten.

We drove in silence through low green brush on a choppy slash of dirt and rock, past huts of wood and corrugated metal. It wasn’t hard to see: tourists arrived each winter like migratory birds and were chauffered past the huts, chattering about the white sand and blue water. They didn’t see the stony faces or shabby huts; if they had, they wouldn’t have chattered. The ones that saw felt guilty, and went to Palm Springs next year. And the natives despised them all and took their money. And despised them more. Which was stupid, in a way. Looking at the black rock, you knew the natives needed the tourists, not the other way around. We passed another hut, with a sad skinny goat tethered to it. Like a lot of things, it was tough to get moral about it, either way. But I was probably going to Palm Springs next year.

We came up on Philipsburg. It was not a likely spot for a Lasko enterprise. The town was mostly one-story stucco, with some metal and wood signs that needed paint, scattered along a few cramped streets. It had a desultory, absent-minded look, as if it had been thrown together a little at a time. The asphalt streets were crowded by trucks, jeeps, and some cars, most of them old enough to enhance the junkyard ambiance. The streets themselves were quiet and veined with cracks and lent the parked cars and trucks an abandoned quality. A few palms stood on scattered patches of grass, along with some leafy shade trees I couldn’t identify. The main thing was the heat; it was so wet you could almost see it. It seemed to have seeped into the wood and the metal and the cracks in the sidewalk. And into the movements of the few islanders—a listless amble. I felt a little like that myself.

The driver dropped me at the Government House, where the police were. This neighborhood was better—some large two-story white frames, freshly painted. The government building had a red tiled roof and a long covered porch. I pulled back the screen door and stepped into a pale green reception room presided over by a serious young black man in gold-framed glasses. I put down my luggage and asked for Inspector De Jonge.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.