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  AMOK!
View a video reading of Amok here. "Robert Holland’s AMOK! is a work of art. I love the
way he chose to write this book from two different perspectives.
It really allows you to take in the entire plot and it also
helps you to visualize the setting. I live on Martha’s Vineyard
and at times I found that as I passed different locations
I would think about what trouble Charlie and Pete had gotten
into there. — Jesse Thomas, age 14 "Amok! is a wonderful book. It is a great addition to hte Charles Oliver Jones triology. The book was very suspenseful and kept me reading all night. This my favorite book by Robert Holland because it was filled with everything I need in a book. Pete and Charlie get into another mess and every page is a cliff hanger, tempting you to read more." — Benjamin Lentoni, age 12
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The water had finally turned cold and the bluefish and stripers, the albacore and bonito had migrated away to warmer waters. The island population had shrunk back to its normal fifteen thousand or so and everywhere you went people smiled and stopped to talk, almost as if they were getting to know each other all over again. The end of summer, for those of us who live year-round on the Vineyard, is, I think, kind of like coming back from a three-month-long trip.
But that’s mostly for adults. The rest of us operate on a school-year pattern that pretty much matches up with the arrival and departure of the summer people, so once again, the kids and the adults are sadly out of synch.
And then, as I thought about it, I realized that our teachers were also on the same schedule. What had seemed like such a neat little theory suffered yet another blow when I remembered that parents’ lives are also governed by school schedules.
I crossed to my office, stopping to look out over the lawn at the bare trees and up at the mackerel sky that usually meant weather was on the way. Another Saturday morning, the last one before the state championship, but it was more than that. It was another day chalked off on my way to leaving the Island for college. Though I hadn’t told Pete yet, I knew where I was going, but I wanted to wait until we finished football for the year. Next Saturday night, win, lose or draw, I’d tell him I had decided not to go to UConn.
After all the tours were over, all the interviews completed, I had only submitted one application for early admission. I wanted a college and not a university and Bowdoin also had the distinct advantage of being very near the salt water.
I also took considerable comfort in having been accepted, although not officially, because it was still too early, at the college where my father had gone. Better still, I wasn’t just what they call a legacy. I’d earned my way in with grades and athletics.
I picked up my mug of coffee from the desk, walked across the office and looked out the windows on the other side. Now, with the leaves gone, I could see out over the marshes, which for me have always been one of the great magic places on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. They are where life in the sea begins. And in a way they symbolized the new beginning I would undertake in late August next year when I migrated from the Vineyard to the mainland to begin what would be my adult life, or to complete the metaphor, I was moving from the marshes to the open sea.
I sipped my coffee and smiled. For the first time in six months I wasn’t in the middle of some crazy case. All I had on my plate was football, my studies, and Mary Jane Upson. Maybe for some guys that would be a pretty full meal, but considering what I’d gone through with mobsters, spooks, and terrorists, the plate seemed pleasantly empty.
I really didn’t think of myself as a private investigator anymore; just good ol’ Charlie Jones, wide receiver, outside linebacker, and student, who all too soon would be a freshman in college.
And then someone knocked on the door.
“It’s open, come on in,” I called.
I don’t know what I expected, but the guy who walked in was certainly not on my list. He smelled like trouble and I slipped a hand into the pocket of my fleece vest and wrapped my fingers around one of the throwing stars I kept there.
He was short, wide, of dark complexion, and he wore a suit beneath his black cashmere topcoat. I guessed his age as somewhere north of sixty-five. “You Charles Oliver Jones?” he asked, and his voice was deep and harsh, and I thought I’d been dropped into the middle of a Sopranos episode. I nodded. Up. Guys like this, you nod up. It let’s ’em know who the big dog is. “What can I do for you?”
“We need to talk.”
“Sure. Have a seat.” I pointed to the chair in front of my desk.
He sat down without taking off his coat and I dropped into the chair behind the desk.
“Coffee?”
He waved his hand to signify he didn’t want any, then leaned forward toward the desk. “You caused me a lot of trouble.”
“You got a name?”
“No names.”
“Then I guess this conversation is over,” I said. “I don’t talk to people without names.”
I was doing everything I could to sound as tough and as nasty as he looked, and not let him know that my knees were knocking. I knew I was talking to a major league mob guy, maybe a consigliore, maybe higher.
So far, with these guys, I’d come out on top but only because they hadn’t been concentrating on me. Now, apparently, they were.
“You got no choice. You’re talking to me.”
“How about I just throw you out of here?”
He grinned. “I’ll give you this, you got a lotta sand for just a kid.”
“So did William Bonney,” I said.
“Who’s he?”
“Billy the Kid.”
He snorted out a laugh. “They told me, they said, that kid is like no kid you ever saw. But I didn’t believe ’em because a kid is just a kid. He ain’t been around. He ain’t seen nothin’ I said.” He swept his hand through the air. “And he lives on a tiny little island.”
I jumped in. “And your solution would be to get to me when I’m off island and I can’t see you, or the guys you hire, coming.”
“The truth is, I got no beef with you. You went head to head and you come out on top. I like guys who do that, even when I come up short.”
Nothing can soften you up quicker than a compliment.
“Somehow I don’t think you came all the way from Boston to give the devil his due.”
He laughed. “Smart too. Smarter by a lot than the guys you took down.” He sat back into the chair, opened his coat, and smiled. “Why I’m here got nothing to do with any of that. Water under the bridge. Taught me a lesson about who to do business with. I’m here because I want to hire you.”
“To do what?”
“I bought a place down here.”
That’s when I knew I was talking to Angelo Orsini, the reputed head of the mafia in Boston. I knew because two months ago my mother had sold him the Wasserstein place out in Chilmark for just about ten million.
“Welcome to the Island, Mr. Orsini.”
He shook his head. “You’re quick, huh? Probably going to a real good college in the fall.”
I nodded.
He waved his hand again, as if by doing that he pushed things that weren’t important aside.
“My wife wanted to live where she could see the water. She wanted to live quiet. I like to fish. I got a boat. She likes to go out on the boat, sit on the beach, read novels, have the grandchildren down for part of the summer. So I handed over things to my brother.”
I nodded. I’d heard it before. Retire and live the idyllic life on Martha’s Vineyard. Usually, they lasted one winter. But there was something about Angelo Orsini that made me think he and his wife might just last a lot longer. In just the short time he’d been in the office, he had changed. He’d been a crime boss when he came in and now he looked relaxed and it was clear that he had a lot he wanted to put behind him.
“We moved here in October. I like it. Nobody comes calling, no surprises. Enemies I got? They couldn’t find our place. They get lost, they don’t have a Dunkin’ Donut to use as a landmark.”
“Pretty peaceful most of the year. Gets kind of woolly in the summer, though.”
“I like it when they leave.”
I smiled. “We all do. On the other hand, we’d miss the money and the excitement that comes when they return.”
“Yeah, yeah, I can see that.”
I sipped my coffee. “Sure you don’t want a cup of coffee?”
“Had my fill. One cup a day, the doctor says.”
“Which brings us back to my original question. What can I do for you?”
“You got a crazy man on this island.”
“What kind of crazy man would we be talking about?”
“An amok.”
Now that was news. It surprised me that he even knew what that was, but then he had been a top mob boss for thirty years or more and a guy like that had to be smart.
“Like the Malay amoks?”
“Same thing.”
Amoks among certain Indonesian populations are men who suddenly pick up a weapon and run around killing as many people as they can. No one is certain why that happens, but it does. Some say it’s a virus. Some say it’s a genetic deficiency. Others think that it’s the result of having had to live in society as a virtual slave and running amok is a way of committing suicide because they almost always end up dead. What we are sure of is that they are real and they can inflict an incredible amount of damage in a very short time. Having one loose on the Island was definitely not on my list of good things.
“You’ve seen him?”
He nodded. “Three times.”
“Then he can’t be a true amok,” I said. “It’s not the way they work.”
“I traveled some. I was in Hong Kong one time, doing a little sightseeing, and I was standing next to a guy and I looked into his eyes and I saw them change. One second they were alive and the next instant they were dead. The eyes of a killer, a psychopath, and I seen plenty of those in my life.
“Suddenly, this guy pulls out a machete and hacks the head off another guy standing a couple feet away. Then he hacks into another. We’re talking a crowded Hong Kong street and suddenly there’s blood and screaming people and nobody to stop him.” He grinned. “Like anyplace else, there’s never a cop around when you need one.”
“What happened?”
“I got out of there. I just shoved my way through the crowd and ran in the opposite direction. Later, it said in the papers he killed fifteen people before the cops got there and shot him.”
“From what I’ve read about amoks,” I said, “once they go off, they don’t return to normal even if they’re captured.”
“Yeah. That’s what they say. But maybe it ain’t so. This guy. I saw his eyes. In Menemsha, this summer, when we was renting.”
Which meant he had been here when Pete and I took out the mob guys in Menemsha and one of them died when the statue of the sword fisherman fell and ran a harpoon through his chest, and then later, when I had the run in with the enforcer in the real estate office in Vineyard Haven. But maybe he had retired by then. “And you’ve seen him since.”
He nodded. “From a distance. Only enough to know he’s still here.”
“Where?”
“That’s the part about which I am concerned. It was outside my house, maybe a hundred feet away, and then he spotted me and run off into the woods.”
“When did you see him last?”
“This morning.”
“Where, exactly, did you see him?”
“Right off the back of the house in the edge of the woods.”
“Was he standing in the open?”
“In the woods, but where I could see him.”
“Why would you come to me?”
“I’m retired. I don’t have the resources I once had and even if I did, I wouldn’t use them here. I want peace and quiet and guys like that, even if they’re only exercising their right to protect me, it only brings the newspapers and the TV people and I don’t want that. I want to be a quiet, peaceful, good neighbor kind of guy. What I don’t need is any kind of publicity. So who do I turn to? The local cops? No. I turn to a guy here who is good enough to have come out on top of me twice and smart enough to catch a bunch of terrorists which nobody else even knew was in the locale.”
I nodded, thinking hard. Did I really want to get into this? Did I really want to work for Angelo Orsini? Did I really want to tangle with an amok? No question about it. I was in. “I can look around,” I said.
“How much you charge?”
“No license. I work pro bono.”
“Like a lawyer doing good for the community.”
I grinned at the sarcasm. “Yeah, something like that.”
“You’ll let me know what you find.”
“Leave me some phone numbers.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a card, which was a great relief because usually when guys from that kind of business reach inside their coats they come out with something in blued steel that carries a lot of rounds.
He set the card on the desk and grinned. “You’re a cool customer, all right. Most guys, I reach inside my coat they duck or try to run.” In a motion a good deal quicker than the human eye can follow I fired a throwing star six inches past his head and into the far wall of the office.
“I wasn’t alone,” I said.
He turned and looked at the star sticking out of the wall, nodded, and when he looked back he was smiling. “I like that. Some kind of ninja thing, huh?”
I nodded and then grinned. “I’m not old enough to get a permit to carry a gun.”
“But you can use one, can’t you.”
“I’ve been shooting since I was a kid.”
“Nice to know some fathers are bringing their kids up right."
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