Season of the Machete by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 0446600474
Publisher: Vision
Published: 2006-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The effect that we wanted most on San Dominica was helpless confusion. A feeling like darkness and light being turned on and off at our will. Things suddenly being dangerous that weren’t supposed to be dangerous…. More important, there had to be no way to chart any of it. No known patterns.

The Rose Diary

Wylde’s Fall, San Dominica

Between seven Sunday morning and the late afternoon, nothing happened on San Dominica that hadn’t been happening for the previous thousand years or so. The more than 150 beaches were pearly white, striking, and perfect; the royal blue skies were clear and pure—a 1,000 percent improvement on any metropolitan sky; the sunshine was uninterrupted.

And while nothing terrifying was happening, the Americans and Europeans still on the island had time to sit back and think about what had happened. Not least of all, the sixty-one members of the government assembly had time to consider their unlucky alternatives for the future.

At four in the afternoon, Colonel Dassie Dred stood on the verge of worldwide fame.

Looking down from the second highest and most beautiful waterfall in the Caribbean—Wylde’s Falls—he could see a barefoot black boy and a white couple making the popular walking tour up the many-tiered water shoots.

The three people sloshed through the most beautiful, black, freshwater pools. They splashed together in cascading ten- and twenty-foot-high falls; occasionally shouted to one another over the crashing roar of the blue water; stopped once for a misty camera shot.

When the young guide finally turned the rocky comer beneath his hiding place, Dred extended his hand through a clump of bushes. The small boy allowed himself to be pulled up, leaving the white couple looking up at the leering face of the revolutionary. “Yo’ go home now,” Dred said to the boy. “Nemmine be lookin’ back.”

As he spoke, two of his men jumped through banana leaves into the bubbly pool below. One man came swinging a cane machete sideways like a baseball bat.

The long knife caught a screaming, thirtyish-looking woman across the front of her Town & Country summer blouse. The hard blow upended her in a clumsy three-point fall.

The second, stronger soldier brought his knife straight down. The woman’s blond, bankerish-looking husband stood still for a moment, then he split from the shoulders down and toppled over Wylde’s Falls.

Meanwhile, down at the park’s entry gates, a handful of tourists and lounging guides were watching the day’s final climbers make their way down the tricky falls. As they watched two couples and their guides climb down slowly, a body—a swimming woman, it looked like—shot headfirst around a high curve in the swift water. The swimming woman disappeared again; then toppled over a smooth lip of the black rock; then caught sideways up against a jutting boulder shooting bubbly white water high in the air.

A man split like broken scissors came down next. The body made it around the jutting rock, bounced down several small falls, skimmed past the terror-stricken crowd at the gates, then disappeared without a sound into the sea.

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