Pirate Latitudes

Foster, a fattish man of fifty, snorted and sniffed and rolled away. Hunter jammed the pistol barrel up one nostril.

Foster blinked and opened his eyes. He sat up in bed, not saying a word.

“Be still,” his wife muttered sleepily. “You toss so.” Yet she did not wake up. Hunter and Foster stared at each other. Foster looked from the pistol to Hunter, and back again.

Finally, Foster raised a finger in the air, and gently eased out of bed. His wife still slept. In his nightgown, Foster padded across the room to a chest.

“I shall pay you well,” he whispered. “See here, look.” He opened a false compartment and withdrew a sack of gold, very heavy. “There is more, Hunter. I shall pay you whatever you want.”

Hunter said nothing. Foster, in his nightshirt, extended his arm with the sack of gold. His arm trembled.

“Please,” he whispered. “Please, please…”

He got down on his knees.

“Please, Hunter, I pray you, please…”

Hunter shot him in the face. The body was knocked back, the legs thrown up in the air, the bare feet kicking space. In the bed nearby, the wife never awoke, but turned sleepily and groaned.

Hunter picked up the sack of gold and left as silently as he had come.

…

POORMAN, BELYING HIS name, was a rich trader in silver and pewter. His house was on High Street. Hunter found him asleep at a table in the kitchen, a half-empty bottle of wine before him.

Hunter took a kitchen knife and slashed both Poorman’s wrists. Poorman awoke groggily, saw Hunter, and then saw the blood pouring over the table. He raised his bleeding hands, but could not move them; the tendons had all been cut, and the hands flopped lifelessly, rag-doll fingers, already turning grayish-white.

He let his arms drop again to the table. He watched the blood pool on the wood and drip through the cracks to the floor. He looked back at Hunter. His face was curious, his expression confused.

“I would have paid,” he said hoarsely. “I would have done what you… what you…”

He stood up from the table, weaving dizzily, holding his injured arms bent at the elbows. In the silence of the room, the blood spattered with an odd loudness on the ground.

“I would have…” Poorman began, and then rocked back and fell flat on the floor.

“Ye, ye, ye, ye,” he said, fainter and fainter. Hunter turned away, not waiting for the man to die. He went back into the night air and slipped silently through the dark streets of Port Royal.

…

HE ENCOUNTERED Lieutenant Dodson by accident. The soldier was singing a song, stumbling drunk through the streets with two whores at his side. Hunter saw him at the end of the High Street and turned back, slipping down Queen Street, turning east on Howell Alley, just in time to meet Dodson at the corner.

“Who goes there?” Dodson demanded, speaking loudly. “Know you that there is a curfew? Be gone else I shall clap you in the Marshallsea.”

In shadow, Hunter said, “I have just come from there.”

“Eh?” Dodson said, tilting his head toward the voice. “What means your churlish speech? I shall have you know-”

“Hunter!” shrieked the whores, and they both fled. Deprived of their support, Dodson fell drunkenly down into the mud.

“Damn you for uncertain quim,” he grunted, and struggled to get up. “Look at my uniform now, damn you all.” He was covered in mud and manure.

He had already gotten to his knees when the words of the women suddenly reached his alcohol-fogged brain. “Hunter?” he asked softly. “You are Hunter?”

Hunter nodded in the shadows.

“Then I shall arrest you for the scoundrel and pirate that you are,” Dodson said. But before he could get back to his feet, Hunter kicked him in the stomach and sent him sprawling.

“Ow!” Dodson said. “You hurt me, damn you.”

They were the last words he spoke. Hunter gripped the soldier by the neck and pressed his face into the mud and dung of the street, holding the squirming body, which struggled with increasing force and, finally, toward the end, with violent wrenchings and twistings until at last it did not move.

Hunter stepped back, gasping for breath with the exertion.

He looked around the dark, deserted town. A marching patrol of ten militiamen went by; he stepped back into the shadows until they had passed.

Two whores came by. “Are you Hunter?” one asked, with no sign of fear.

He nodded.

“Bless you,” she said. “You come see me, and you’ll have your way without a farthing spent.” She laughed.

Giggling, the two women disappeared into the night.

…

HE STOOD INSIDE the Black Boar tavern. There were fifty people there, but he saw only James Phips, dapper and handsome, drinking with several other merchantmen. Phips’s companions immediately slipped away, showing aspects of terror on their faces. But Phips himself, after an initial shock, took on a hearty manner.

“Hunter!” he said, grinning broadly. “Damn my eyes, but you have done what we all knew you would. A round for everyone, I say, to celebrate your new freedom.”

There was utter silence in the Black Boar. No one spoke. No one moved.