The Bone Hunters by Robert J. Mrazek

Author:Robert J. Mrazek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

28 May

Casa Grande Brugg

Harbour Island

North Eleuthera

Bahamas

Juwan Brugg arose groggily out of his Lunesta-induced stupor to the incessant chattering of a thin, shrill voice. It was coming from somewhere beyond the open French doors to the third-floor balcony.

He lay on his back and waited for it to stop. It didn’t. The voice would pause briefly after a long prattling burst and then resume louder than ever. Feeling a growing sense of outrage, he rolled over onto his side and expelled a loud belch, waking up the young man sleeping beside him.

“Go back to sleep, my darling,” Juwan said to him gently before heaving himself off the ultra-king bed and stalking to the bathroom to relieve himself. When he returned to the bedroom, the shrill cries were unabated.

Walking to the open French doors, Juwan passed by the life-size cover of Sports Illustrated that he had once adorned after graduating from St. Paul’s Academy in Nassau. The words below his sixth-form photograph read At 7’2”, Juwan Brugg: The Next Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

• • •

He stared at himself in the photograph for a moment. He decided there was a regal dignity to his close-shaven head and his sensitive brown eyes. Juwan had once thought of himself as a little man in a big man’s body, particularly after he passed the seven-foot mark.

Although his magnificent body was muscled like a gigantic steer’s and he had always attracted attention wherever he went in the islands, he would have preferred to be anonymous, to observe others without being stared at like some carnival freak.

He stepped out onto the fourth-floor balcony and looked across the three-acre stone-walled compound. Beyond the ten-foot walls, the Bahamian sea was a dark Prussian blue beneath a bright sunny sky.

His ears were drawn to the half dozen eucalyptus trees that fringed the two-story brick barracks and sleeping quarters of the guard detail along the northern edge of the compound. His eyes quickly found the source of the shrill caterwauling on an upper branch of the largest eucalyptus, about twenty feet above the spiky grass lawn.

An off-duty guard was trying to coax it to come down with a banana.

It was the red howler monkey owned by Major Subito, the deputy commander of his guard unit. At twenty pounds, the animal was fully grown. Over the years Subito had trained it to be a crowd pleaser by blowing kisses and playing peekaboo by covering its eyes.

Juwan went to the archery rack in the nearby sitting room and returned with his longbow and a four-foot arrow with a carbon shaft and pink-barred feathers. Standing at the edge of the balcony, he watched as the monkey began waving and blowing kisses to the growing group of guards that had gathered below him to watch.

Juwan loved the longbow, much preferring it to the combination bows and crossbows he had used as a boy to kill wild pigs in the Exumas. When he drew it back against living prey, he felt like Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

Using the Mongolian thumb clasp, he slowly extended the leather cord back toward his ear and took careful aim.

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