The Big Deep: Caribbean Noir, #1

By VALERIE MARCLEY

Noir - dark, dangerous. The Caribbean - an exquisite paradise that hides sordid secrets. The two nimbly pair in The Big Deep to introduce enigmatic Phillip Blackwell, an exile who finds corruption, conundrums and evil as he sails down the Antilles chain. A decent man recruited by those less so to solve what they can not. In The Big Deep, Blackwell is hired by a rusty debauchee to find his missing young wife and uncovers murder and treachery. The reader is taken from a glamorous mountain top night club and gothic plantations to the island whore house. Blackwell's milieu is stocked with eccentric sailors, women damaged or lethal, the corrupt and the sadistic and an exceptional woman whom he loves but cannot have.Blackwell's milieu is stocked with eccentric sailors, women damaged or lethal, the greedy and an exceptional, unattainable woman. The first of a Noir series, Blackwell will encounter new risks as he navigates the waters and secrets of the West Indies. With his ruminations of sailing as a metaphor for a purer life, we find hints of Blackwell's own cryptic background. The Big Deep, is Noir fiction written with Raymond Chandler hovering and incorporates some of his bon mots peppered in tribute among the author's.

The first in the Phillip Blackwell Caribbean Noir Series. Paperback and Ebook, 276 pages, includes a sample of another of the author's works, Alizé, A Caribbean Love Story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: VALERIE MARCLEY
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781090620255

VALERIE MARCLEY

Dubbed a classic free spirit, Valerie Marcley worked for ten years as professional crew on private yachts in the Caribbean and knows the islands well. She continued her love of traveling which included volunteer stints on a cinnamon farm in Costa Rica and at a monkey rescue in Cornwall, England (yes, you read right).  Now a landlubber - but near the sea, she has recently been producing performance festivals in the Northeast.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Around 3 am. the trades started. Their explosive winds ricochet down the mountain ravines to sucker punch the bays, ceaseless and without mercy. Nerves jump, skin itches. Every booze party ends in a fight. Screams echo. Hyena laughter shreds the night. Meek wives turn cold blooded, caressing the blade of the family machete, studying the old man’s neck. Sleep is impossible. Your boats flails on its anchor chain. You think about loneliness and revenge.

The winds dislodge the worst in you. The quirks you’ve carefully hidden.

What can you do?

Drink.

I SCRAPED THE OPEN enormous weight of my eyelids and heard them groan. I wasn’t keen on seeing what I was waking up to; where in my stupor I had disintegrated the night before and worse, who I might be escorting. My cheek nuzzled the beach. My mouth felt dead and full of sand. It was. Grit spilled from the corner of my lip where a lazy tributary of drool perched. I rolled over, forearm shielding my tender eyes from the lacerating razors of the cruel Caribbean sun. I lay paralyzed under a coconut palm near my beached dinghy, legless from a lifetime allotment of rum the night before. I had done it again.

I spritzed out sand. Water. Please. Lots of water and coffee - strong, hot, ruthless and depraved coffee.  

Ah, hell. Someone was poking me.

Your dinghy gone, a scratchy voice said, Kiwi Bill take your dinghy last night. Gimme cigarette.

The crane fairy wasn’t around to kindly levitate my sorry corpse so I scrambled to a sitting position and leaned against the coconut palm. As long as I’ve been on this island Annie has been on the beach like a piece of parched driftwood. She was a scrawny 90 lbs. and tanned like tobacco. She squinted, constantly scanning every direction for an imaginary bad man. Annie’s mind was missing parts, but I liked her. Her little head looked like one of those dried apples with faces whittled and withered to pucker mode, scaring tiny children. With my body depleted of moisture, I must look like her twin.

She poked me again. Bill say he leave the dinghy at the marina. Gimme cigarette.

Annie. Have mercy. You know I stopped smoking. Help me up. I grasped her forearm. As I rose into the next level of atmosphere my head blossomed into quivering pain. I grasped the palm trunk, my new best friend.  All I wanted was get back to my sweet sailboat, douse the ball of pain on the end of my neck into the sea, make a pot of coffee and crawl into the coffin I wish I kept on board. Now I had to shuffle my hemorrhaging eyeballs through the blistering blaze to fetch my dinghy in the next bay. The task seemed beyond impossible. New Zealand people are great partiers and last night, as best I remember, I had a lot of fun with Bill. Usually I didn’t mind him borrowing my dinghy, but today was not that day.

Why did he take it?

He got a day job. His dinghy engine dead.

Yep. OK.

Bill expounded wacky theories in stupefying detail. Maybe one applied for borrowing my dinghy and leaving me comatose with no way to get out to my boat if I did happen to cuddle consciousness. He was the reason I was so polluted in the first place, buying an abundance of nectar. I would have thought he was in the same sorry state. But he apparently recovered enough to use my boat to ferry out for day work on a visiting yacht; which could easily be reached by VHF radio and very probably had its own dinghy with which to fetch him. I was too involved sussing out how to walk and would decrypt his Kiwi reasoning at some later time. I slipped two fingers into the watch pocket of my shorts, extracted a couple of bills and placed them into Annie’s hand. Then following a gust of my own fermenting, limped off the beach.

I could jump into the water to cool my pulsing head and maybe, just maybe, I could swim out to the boat and somehow climb aboard.

A familiar jeep stopped close. I groaned again, but this time silently.

Hey, Nika.

Hey, Blackie. Rough night? She turned to look at me, leading with her spectacular breasts. I didn’t want to look at her. You don’t look so good, amigo.

All nighter. Took the piss outta me. My face keeps slipping.

Wanna ride?

I hesitated a little too long. She crunched the jeep into gear.

Wait. Yeah. Ride. I gingerly climbed in. She didn’t move, still waiting for me to look at her. She knew her impact on a guy and enjoyed it - I was suffering enough. Ok, I give up, I looked. Long hair like honey, slanting hazel eyes and savory warm flesh oozing damp female. A fine butt and legs, nearly six feet of standard heart-breaker. I wanted nothing to do with her. I was dizzy enough already. One thing hard to ignore though, that body with its acreage of cleavage. She had a 38. She also had a gun.

What’s this? I asked needlessly.

A neat little semi-automatic pistol lay on the console between the seats.

It’s a gun, Black, she answered needlessly. She paused a beat or two. I’m going to shoot fish. Want to come?

Nika and I mauled each other a few times. She sought, I hid. I didn’t have the stamina. She was gorgeous. She was nuts. We marinated on her very sleek, very costly sailboat. As best I can remember, she was feral and insatiable. She was the reason the cage was invented.

Shooting fish?

Yeah. You should come, honey.

Sure, Nika and a gun, a Sunday in the park.

After requesting the marina, I stayed mum. She drove like one possessed. I grabbed onto the roll bar and my gut. Mercifully the route was around the flat edge of the island, not too many potholes, no uppity mountains.

You got any water in this thing? She reached in back and brought up a warm beer. Why not?

She pulled up to the shack that served as the marina office. Thanks, kid, I said.

She sat back and again looked at me with those long-range eyes, savage and desolate.

Black - I heard my father summons you.

That was a conversation stopper.

I also heard there’s pay involved.

The dialogue just got perky.

’bout what?

He may want you to find my mommy, she acidly referred to her father’s young wife, a blow-in who followed her nose and sparking loins up the mountain to the old man’s money. Dundee left a note. If you want, I can drive you up to the driveway. You can walk the rest.

One of the reasons I imbibed a tad too much last night was because I had gotten spunky and addressed my  dwindling finances. I’d been patiently waiting for a buck to rub itself sweetly against my cheek. My hidden stash had dwindled pitifully and the next installment - I never knew exactly when it would arrive - was late, very late. Yeah, I know - go out on a drinking spree when money’s tight. But then rum is cheap down here, real cheap, and so am I. Plus I’m easily entertained.

But Nika’s father? Commerce? Under his employ? He had once watched from his veranda while his man Dundee beat me into a piquant sauce. I guess he didn’t want me amusing myself with his daughter. Hey, all he had to do was ask, I didn’t want to play with her in the first place, I rather liked having skin. These were three people from whom it was best to flinch.

I hesitated. Dundee was the biggest West Indian I had ever seen, and the strongest. He was some kind of majordomo to the old man, the perplexing Mr. Grossman, who was never without him. Currently I had given myself enough of a beating - I was wary and Nika could tell.

It sounds like legit. He needs someone smart. And maybe not today but you are, or can be, the smartest guy in South End, if not the whole island. Look, you know I don’t go near the place, but if you want, I’ll sit in the jeep and wait for you. If you come running with your diaper on fire, we can split quick. Go try to become human and I’ll pick you up at 7 tonight.

I nodded feebly. She was being unusually nice. Again, she asked me to come gun fishing. I was pretty sure if I did, there were other plans for me. I already smelled like bait. I needed the day to clean up and recover and try not to stew about what Grossman wanted of me.

Chapter 2

Iwas neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn’t care who knew it. I felt close to crisp in my one semi-clean button-down shirt and khakis, raiment of another life.

Nika the cat and I drove up the mountain. The views were stunning, the big island lush and green across an indigo channel dotted with white caps and dancing sails. The blue thoroughfare endless and vast, spilled over a far horizon hiding invisible islands. She dropped me at the end of the rough dirt road that swept upward to Morne D’or, her father’s plantation and her childhood home. I felt fairly lucid and while not a ball of fire, savvy enough to cut it for whatever Grossman had in store. For company I carried a nice heavy flashlight. The road would be dark when – not if - I returned.  Should anyone wanted to join me for a stroll and a dubious tête-à-tête, it makes a nifty cudgel.

Nika said she would wait as long as it took. Touching, she may even be concerned.

I trudged upwards for half a mile passing ravines, cascades and through what in the olden days used to be called jungle, green vines on each side met in supplication high over me. Like an over-inflated balloon on a slender string, my quivering head trailed as I slogged. The sinking sun barely cracked through the thick vegetation. I hadn’t time to notice the house during my brief stop here and I couldn’t see very well afterwards. Nika said I should go to the door around on the left. The main house built a couple of centuries ago had been destroyed by a hurricane years back. Her father lived in an expanded stone wing. He had married into the plantation owner's family, French colonials who worked their slaves for sugar, rum and lastly bananas. Nika - Veronique - may be the last of them, I wasn’t sure. From what I’ve heard and experienced - that may be a good thing.

Gothic ruins etched by the setting sun startled me as I emerged from a bamboo grove. What had no doubt been a magnificent bastion was now a mournful remnant. Vertical fragments sprouted skeletal arms, entombed, begging for help. A portion of staircase struggled up through choking vines to disintegrate into a sheer drop. The sun fought its way through the spooky lattice of plants, stabbing the sultry air. Shards of dusky light made it appear that the rubble of the ruined manor was smoking. One could imagine Mr. Rochester glowering from the grieving shadows, while mad Bertha, free of the attic, shrieked through the ramparts with a match.

I found the side door but stood and waited a few minutes to catch my breath, mop my brow and just listen.