The Unpublished PROLOGUE
“Seat belts? You don’t need any seatbelts. If this thing goes down we’ll all turn into a few acres of tree jelly,” said the kid laughing.
Clarence and I were in a beat up old single engine Cessna piloted by an eighteen-year-old kid from Australia named Skipper. We were in the air flying across Africa at dangerously low levels. There was no air conditioning and it was sweltering inside the tiny cabin that held the three of us and our luggage. We were en route from the tiny town of Vol headed for Mombassa where we would meet the boat.
It was an ill-advised journey and it would only get worse. The idea was to get aboard a tramp steamer, or something like a tramp steamer, and spend a week writing the screenplay we had been kicking around. It was a thriller featuring a detective named Ace Jackson who chases monsters. The whole thing had a noir kind of feeling about it with old school voice overs and fedoras but was set in modern day San Francisco and took place entirely at night and in the rain. We had broken the story down into a detailed outline and were ready to begin writing.
A man named Patrice Cavalla, who called himself a promoter but was actually some kind of low-level warlord, which was another name for criminal, had made arrangements for this part of the trip. It had all sounded swell that night in the bar. Besides, it was all so exotic. Tramp steamers and adventure in Mombassa where Roland the headless gunner had blown off Van Owens’s head. It was the island of war.
“God I’m hung over,” said Skipper.
I was sitting behind him and Clarence was squeezed into the passenger seat.
“I wish I was drunk right now,” said Clarence.
“There’s a bottle of gin under your seat,” said the kid.
“No thanks,” said Clarence. “I was just kidding.”
“Well pass it to me,” said the kid.
