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ulet and leaned back with a smile to listen as the couple shouted obscenities at each other. By the time the paramedics arrived, the man was breathing normally and the wife and child were sitting on the opposite side of the room. |
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The Dark Man's smile quickly turned brittle. It had been fun, but it wasn't enough. He hated them! Hated the man's pasty facehated the man's fat sow of a wife and hated his fat, snot-nosed brat. They reminded the Dark Man of the hypocritical, black-robed priests of his island. |
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Easing his head back against the wall, the Dark Man closed his eyes. It wasn't often that he allowed himself to relax, for it seemed that every time he did, his mind drifted back to the dirty little village of his childhood. |
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Once upon a time the Dark Man lived in a round mud hut high up on the side of a seven-hundred-foot mountain. The hut overlooked the Carambola Botanical Garden and the bay where years later they would open the Institute of Marine Sciences and a scuba diving resort. Back then, Roatan had been a wonderful place. In the summertime the mating cries of the giant iguanas on the next mountain sang his family to sleep. The summer rains fell like warm goose down and the trees were heavily laden with fruit and wild orchids. |
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The Dark Man's father had been called Joseph. Of course Joseph wasn't the name he had been given at birth. After the family moved to Roatan from Africa by way of Belmopan on the mainland, the black robes had changed his name to Joseph because they could not pronounce his real name. And like his biblical namesake, Joseph was a tall mana bean pole, rawboned and ugly, strong, quick with a smile and a helping hand. A part-time Hungan and a full-time fisherman, Joseph had been able to cure the children of swamp fevers and bring home ten more pounds of pompano or snapper than any other man on the island. |
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The Dark Man's mother had been a rare beauty, tall and regal like most of her people, with long silky-black hair and smooth honey-colored skin that had somehow managed to escape the ravages of disease and malnutrition. In a rare display |
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