She walked toward him, swaying her hips. She was taller than he was by some inches. As she came close to him, she could see over his right shoulder. Two figures stood behind him, no more than thirty feet away and exposed in the fullness of the New Year’s Eve moon.

Watching her, Joe put the remainder of the cake into his mouth. “Want some?” He held two fingers of icing next to her face. “Might as well. Fat won’t matter when you’s dead and you’s going be dead in a minute, you don’t tell me what’s going down.”

He had allowed Peta, encouraged her, to come close enough to implement Ray’s lessons. Praying that he had not yet released the safety on his weapon, she struck fast, kneed him in the crotch, and when he doubled over in pain, jabbed her thumbs into his eyes, then struck with the edge of her hand to the back of his neck. The gun clattered to the ground, along with his bottle of Carib. Clutching his balls and whimpering, Joe buckled and fell facedown into the dregs of the beer that had trickled from his bottle.

Thinking of the danger to Arthur, Frik, and Ray, and to herself, Peta did what she had to do.

He’s a goat, she told herself again.

In an act punctuated by the repeated clatter of a hard object against metal, she picked up Joe’s submachine gun and smashed his skull.

“I—”

“We saw what happened, Peta,” Ray said. “Thank you.”

“You all right, kid?” Frik asked.

An irreverent thought flashed through Peta’s mind. These two men were having fun. Educated, well traveled, experienced, they were not much more than altered, older versions of what William and Joe might have become. Ray, a demolitions expert turned stuntman, had come to Grenada to shoot some scenes for a Hollywood movie, and had stayed on when the revolution heated up. The truth was that he’d rather be shooting a gun than a film. As for Frik, the stocky expatriate South African was an oil magnate whose wealth was exceeded only by the size of his ego. Like Joe, he saw himself as irresistible to women. He acted as if he were Hemingway incarnate, and looked the part, especially when he had a crossbow slung over his shoulder.