Chapter One

Haiti

 

The Mumbo looked resplendent in her top hat; thick black tresses that hung to her waist, were loosely woven with colorful silk ribbon. A dark cape, lined in scarlet satin, was fastened about her neck. She had thrown it back across her naked shoulders from where it hung sharply down, all the way to her ankles. Her skin shone like black, wet stone in the moonlight; sweat glistening from her sinewy flanks, and a belly like river-rock.

Her pale heels flashed to the rhythm of her hips as she strode up the hillside to where the man was trussed to the trunk of the tree.

She leaned into him, cocked her face, and through extended jaws, exhaled heat and moisture into the man's face. The Mumbo smiled, then took up his penis. Squeezed. Hard. The heady beat from the drums intensified. He cried out when she gripped his testicles, tried to turn away, anticipating the nauseating pain.

She thrust a hand around, pinioning his anus, restraining him. The Mumbo lifted his shriveled member and cradled it between the fatty rolls of her sex and, raising her hips, she dry-humped him. She threw back her head in ecstasy as she mocked intercourse, plowing him through the folds of her vagina. And then she acted out a wild orgasmic release.

The Mumbo gripped his penis more firmly; searched the white, wild eyes as she inserted the blade into his bowels, just above the pubis bone. The drums beat harder; maddeningly faster. He howled in disbelief and horror; screeching at the Caribbean night-sky as she tore the knife up. All the way. Until it nudged his breast bone. The entwined ropes of his entrails bulged out through the gash.

"You be me brother now," the Mumbo whispered into his tormented face. And she thrust her hands into the gaping wound; gripped his guts and spilled them out onto her naked belly like a basket of twisting eels. She felt the heat, the blood, and the juice, trailing down across her sex, dripping from her flanks. The man's lifeblood, pulsating over her. It was her life, now.

She turned to her congregation and raised her arms to the unified cry. The drumbeat was heavy and she stomped her feet; dancing naked in the dirt that was quickly turning to mud... bloody mud! Her hands circled about her head with strands of the man's small intestine, hanging from her fingertips, like purplish-gray Mardi Gras beads. "Re-tri-bu-tion," she screamed.

"Retribution," the gathered assembly chanted and the smoke from the fires bellowed.

 

Miami

 

"She's a bug? Is this broad nuts?"

Lindsey's editor peered over her shoulder, was eavesdropping on her computer screen.

"She's not a broad; first thing... and second... she's a Butterfly," Lindsey Rey stated emphatically. "And why don't you go read your own damned e-mails?"

"Yours are more interesting." He made a disgusting noise, sucking on a pencil. "Isn't a butterfly a bug? Or is it like a spider? Spiders are different for some reason, yuh know? Not enough legs, or too many. Something like that. What's a butterfly?"

"A woman."

"Woman?"

"Three women, actually: The Butterflies."

"She thinks she's descended from three women? Hasn't she heard that there has to be a guy somewhere in the mix? You know, someone to do the boinking. Am I right, Lindsey? Sheesh... she really must be nuts!"

"You got yellow paint on your teeth." Lindsey leaned back in her office chair, fending off the wave of exasperation while he moved around the desk to face her. "They were three sisters," she continued, "known as 'The Butterflies' ...and they were beaten to death in a sugarcane field. This woman claims to be a descendant of the youngest sibling."

His face brightened. "Three broads murdered in a 'cane field? Now I smell a story, god damn it! Okay..." He smacked his hands together. "Get your butt into a car and interview this broad. Where'd it happen? Lake Okeechobee? Somewhere around The Glades? How come I didn't hear anything about this?"

"Could be because it happened in 1960; six hundred miles south of here."

His face went blank. "Okay Lindsey; you lost me. Six hundred miles south puts it in the Caribbean! Am I right?"

"Ahhh... you took geography in school. I didn't know."

"Very funny."

"Look, 'The Butterflies' were three young sisters that banded together to oppose the dictator Trujillo and were clubbed to death, assassinated, for their beliefs; in a sugar cane field near Puerto Plata. This woman, the one who e-mailed me here, claims to be the granddaughter of the youngest sister," Lindsey repeated.

"Hold on now," he cautioned, raising an open hand to her face. "You are beginning to sound awfully serious about this."

Lindsey held up a three-page proposal. "I am serious. This woman has a story to tell and I for one, want to hear it."

"Did you say Puerto Plata? I've heard of that. That's some kinda fancy tourist resort-place."

"Let's just say it's a town with a tourist zone; a beach with resort hotels."

"Oh please. Spare me the semantics."

Lindsey shrugged. Whatever! "Look. I've written a proposal. Read it, then take it upstairs."

He rocked back on his heels and rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. "Lindsey... Lindsey... Lindsey... You expect me to go to the old man with this and ask him to sign a chit for airfare plus, what... a week; two weeks in a Caribbean resort town? You outta your friggin' mind? Why would I do that?"

"Because it's your job?" Lindsey said brightly, ever hopeful.

"Look. You're the one with the nice gams..."

"Yeah, another four inches and I would have been a super-model."

"Just slip into a short skirt and go see him. You'll probably get the company jet."

"Hey, you don't have to tell me how a woman gets ahead in this business. How do you think I landed the job in the first place? And there's no company jet!"

"Well I guess I figured it had something to do with your old man, working here for thirty years, like he did. The jet was a joke. Okay?"

"Yeah, I guess. Dad may have helped." Lindsey swiveled her chair around to gaze out the window. Her office was in the venerable old Miami Herald building down on the waterfront. She looked out across the sailboats anchored in the Venetian Causeway, over to South Beach where the gaudy hotels crowded the shoreline like randy circus clowns. To her right, a cruise ship maneuvered in the turning basin. This time tomorrow, the huge vessel, looking more like an obscene wedding cake than a ship, would be off-loading white-kneed tourists in Nassau.

"If you won't do this, I have vacation time coming. I'll go myself," Lindsey told his reflection in the glass. He was busily rubbing a forefinger across his teeth.

"You feel that strongly about it?"

"I have a feeling, that's all."

"Woman's intuition?"

"Writer's intuition," she replied, swiveling the chair back around to face him, lifting her feet from the floor and placing them on the corner of her desk.

"New pumps." She wiggle-waggled her feet.

"So I see..." he replied, trying to keep his eyes on the discrete side of her crossed ankles.

"You like?" she teased.

"Yes. Very much." Lindsey smiled when she saw him swallow hard. He took an involuntary glance at her legs; his eyes focusing momentarily at a spot above her knees where her tight skirt had slipped tidily up along her thigh.

 

Lindsey Rey knew it was the privilege of the attractive women but didn't hesitate, within reason, to use it to get what she wanted. She first became aware of the empowerment when, in her early teens, boys responded with a certain glint in their eyes; something they saved for her alone, and didn't bestow on her girlfriends: the chubby ones, the ones with stooped posture, no breasts or heavy asses.

She learned early that a coy smile or a touch to the forearm would get 'most anything: help with her homework or a ride downtown. Then, when she was older, and she had her own car, she could get it washed. And she could go to a dance-club and not worry about whether or not she had any money at the bottom of her purse.

When she discovered sex, she found she could cull out a cute one, and he would satisfy her blossoming feminine desires anyway she pleased, and she wouldn't even have to reciprocate. She still remembered her girlfriends discussing the finer points of oral stimulation; the conversation quickly degenerated to the merits of swallowing. Yeck! Lindsey didn't divulge that such disgusting behavior had never been demanded of her. It would be years later, that she was finally forced to concede. Finally do the deed: