the Muy Capaz. There were dressed badly even by Badtown standards, in stained, ragged shorts, dirty beach shirts and tattered straw hats. Each man had a gun in his belt and a machete by his side. Several bottles of rum sat on the table.
The pirates had been playing Cuban Poker since midnight. At about 2 A.M., the secret door opened and four heavily armed men came in. Everyone in the room froze. The four men weren’t rival gang members—they were bodyguards. Their sudden appearance could mean only one thing.
Another man walked in a few moments later. He was six-foot-two, with the build of an ex-boxer and the scars of an ex-con. He was dressed all in white, and his hands, cracked and rough, were an odd shade of red, as if they were permanently stained with blood.
He was Charles Black, the boss of the Muy Capaz.
This was not good—and the four pirates knew it. For Black to show himself in public was a rare event. He almost never left the gang’s secret hideout. His presence here meant something was wrong inside the world of the Muy Capaz.
And that could be bad for everybody.
* * *
BLACK’S MAIN SOURCE of income was buying and selling large quantities of pot and coke. His suppliers were from Jamaica; the business was strictly cash up front. Whenever Black and his men needed an injection of funds to get resupplied, they did what pirates do: They robbed vessels at sea. Turning that booty into money, they bought the drugs wholesale, and then resold them to mid-level dealers, most right here in Badtown, for a good profit.
The problem was, Black and his men were pirates from skin to bones. Like their predecessors of centuries past, they had something in their genes that caused them to be quickly separated from any extra money they came across. Despite their reputation for moving like ghosts when it came to committing crimes at sea, they were terrible businessmen. When they made a score, they would take the profits and hit Badtown hard. And whether their visit lasted several days or even a week or more, after a bender of booze, drugs, gambling and paying for the boom-boom, most if not all of their ill-gotten gains were gone.
This was why the gang was almost always broke, forcing them to knock off more yachts, to get some more seed money, to buy more stuff from the Jamaicans, to sell again, to blow the profits again. It was a vicious cycle. And had it had nothing to do with voodoo or the full moon.
The problem flowed from the top. Black himself was prone to recklessness when he was in the chips, and to foul moods when the well went dry. In the past year alone he’d murdered six people, three inside this very bar, all over money matters.
There was no way the local police were going to arrest him, though. The only reason they came to Badtown was to pick up their bribe money.
* * *
BLACK WAS IN an especially bad mood tonight.
The gang was again low on funds. A raiding party he’d sent out the night before had spent nearly all of its profits over in Bimini. Doubling their sin, the same four men had not returned from a raid they’d gone out on earlier this night. Again, the big selling week was coming up, and gang’s coffers were seriously depleted. But even worse, the thought that his men might be holding out on him was enough to make Black’s blood boil.
He walked over to the table where his gang members were playing cards and viciously slapped the first man he saw. The man fell to the floor, his nose broken, his mouth bloody.
“When I slap you, you goin’ to stay slap,” Black roared at his astonished victim. “You understand? Or do you need more cut lip?”
The man didn’t reply; he just scrambled away.
Black took his seat, which was all he really wanted.
The pirate captain also commandeered the man’s meager pile of money and began playing poker, but clearly, he was distracted. He was constantly checking his watch, waiting for his raiding party to show up with some much-needed capital. But as each minute ticked by, that possibility seemed more and more remote.
Into this swirl of dangerous vibes stumbled a man named Petey Chops. He was small and rodentlike, and he’d spent more than half his life in jail for murdering a child. These days he was a low-level drug mule for Black’s