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surface, gasping, his chest heaving for air. The first rays of dawn were rising through the rainforest. Birds shrieked. We were on the far side of the ruins, which loomed behind the lake in a forbidding mountain of carved windows and shadowy porticos.
    “ I’m here,” I said in his ear. “I followed you the whole way. Where is this place?”
    To my disappointment he still didn’t react to my voice. He treaded water instead, spotted a stone hut near the shore, and swam toward it until he reached solid ground and grabbed two jagged rocks, one in each hand. I knew what he was thinking. Weapons.
    Dripping wet, the prisoner left the shore and pushed through the ferns to peer inside the hut’s one small window. Through the modern glass panes we could see a sleek metal table with a camp chair, a metal cot, a pitcher and basin, and a cabinet with doors that was probably used for storing food or weapons, or both. The place looked like the hunter’s personal little Motel 6.
    But the outer door was locked. With a weary sigh, the prisoner slipped into the smothering foliage and picked up a coconut from the ground, looking in all directions.
    Something scrabbled in the green. Fur flashed behind bars. The prisoner parted the fronds and uncovered a trap with a long tailed monkey that looked as if it weighed about fifteen pounds. The silvery reddish brown monkey stared at him with frightened, almost human eyes and gripped the bars with its hands and feet.
    No water. The sun had already reached the trap. The monkey held its mouth open from heat exhaustion or terror or both. I wondered if it had been in there all night.
    The trap was a common live-catch model, but I couldn’t see primitive local people putting it there. The prisoner looked over his shoulder and opened the unlocked door, still holding one of the rocks. Horrified, I wondered if he was going to kill the monkey when it ran out and use it for food, but he let it escape and it scrambled up a palm tree.
    The prisoner braced his legs and began to pound the trap, swinging as if he were possessed. Birds flew screaming from the trees. He broke the hinges, smashed the door off, and bashed the sides in until the bars split and bent down at crazy angles. When he finished, he sized up his masterpiece and placed the rock inside in the middle of the trap floor. A calling card. He couldn’t have made his message any clearer if he’d written Fuck You and Your Special Island Paradise.
    He took one more long look at the wreck, picked up the trap door, walked to the lake, and sent it sailing into the green water. The door floated for a few seconds before it sank into the depths.
     
     
    * * *
     
     
    I lay in the dark for hours after I returned to my bedroom, obsessed with the rock the prisoner had left in the trap. Somebody was going to come after him for that one.
    Eventually I gave up on sleep, googled monkeys, and found a photo on Wikipedia that looked like the silvery brown creature I’d seen. A macaque. At least ten subspecies lived in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and islands in the Pacific. That didn’t exactly narrow anything down.
    The device gleamed in the moonlight. It took everything in me not to pick it up again.
    I drank my cold tea and pulled the blanket around my shoulders. The wind shook the trees against the house as if it were an evil force, but whatever terrors nature could come up with, they could never equal the darkness inside the human heart. I had to find out the name of the island. I knew it was a real place.
     
     
    Chapter 9
     
     
    “ You want to go out for breakfast?” Mike asked me when the sun came up. He leaned against the kitchen counter with the same concerned look he’d had the night before. The short haircut really did make him look like a cop. He already had the nosiness. All he needed was a gun and a pair of aviator sunglasses.
    I poured myself a cup of black coffee, careful to keep my wrists inside my sleeves. They looked even