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  Painkiller

  Will Staeger

  A TV and film executive, Staeger displays a real knack for creating cinematic scenes in his engaging first thriller. Cooper, a burnt-out former CIA operative living in a cheap bungalow on the British Virgin Island of Tortola, isn't too happy when "Cap'n Roy," the local police chief, dares to call him at 6 a.m. (Indeed, he gets out of bed and smashes the window in his front door with a baseball bat.) A badly burned, broken and tattooed male body has washed up on the beach, and Roy wants Cooper to dispose of it without disturbing the tourists. Given the corpse's unusual wounds, a shady expat coroner in the U.S. Virgin Islands agrees to conduct an autopsy. The tattoo entices Cooper into digging further, and he soon unearths evidence of a huge buildup of weapons in China. At the same time, Julie Laramie, a low-level agent working for the CIA, stumbles across the same Chinese plot, only to have her superiors threaten to ax her if anything leaks. It's only a matter of time-plus a few more highly visual action moments-before Cooper and Laramie have to secretly link up and trust each other to save the world.

  Will Staeger

  Painkiller

  The first book in the W. Cooper series, 2005

  FOR NADINE

  (the list of reasons runs longer than this book)

  1

  He couldn’t remember coming here; he didn’t know where he was. Jagged leaves, black in the wet night, whipped his cheeks as he ran. Sores bled beneath a torn jersey. A gust of wind knocked him off balance, and he slipped, fell, and rose again. Hurling his diseased body through the jungle, he couldn’t find sufficient oxygen to fill his lungs; few of his muscles obeyed the orders from his brain. None of this mattered.

  All that mattered was the pain-and the need to escape it.

  Rifle shots cracked, the equivalent of snapping twigs in the roar of the hurricane. Figures emerged from the jungle behind him-rain-soaked wraiths shouldering heavy firepower. Voices barked, and with sudden brilliance a flare arced into the sky. Its parachute caught and held, bathing the fleeing man in daylight.

  He may have registered a thought-memories of home, of yesterday, of five years ago. Of Simone. In that instant, it might all have come back to him; it might not. In the next, he fell, dropping eighty feet in the darkness. His legs churned on, pumping, until the rocks at the base of the cliff drove them into his pelvis.

  Flashlight beams pierced the sky-rotating, descending, settling on his broken remains. It was only a matter of seconds before he was moving again. Propping his upper body on shattered elbows, he lunged forward, fighting the surf as it pummeled him. He climbed across one boulder, then the next, until, sluglike, he pulled himself onto the wooden planks of a dock. Clawing at the rain, his bloody fingers stretched, reaching for the vision that appeared to him at dock’s end. Moored against the farthest piling was a rowboat-an eight-foot dinghy, slapping and banging itself to pieces, restrained only by a fraying rope that wouldn’t survive the hour.

  A star-shaped muzzle blast burst from the lip of the cliff. Another pulsed beside it, and in seconds the brittle pier was chewed to pieces by a fusillade of armor-piercing shells. He was nearing the end of the dock when one last bullet struck him in the back, and the pain that had propelled him ebbed. His struggle slowed, then ceased.

  The hail of gunfire subsided; the airborne flare splashed into the sea. The flashlight beams pulled skyward and vanished. Finally, as the torrent raged around him, the man slumped, incapable of completing his escape.

  2

  Six o’clock in the morning and already the phone was ringing. There was no answering machine, and anybody with the number knew the rule: emergency use only. This meant the caller would persist, so if Ronnie didn’t get up and answer it, the phone might ring all day. Pulling his spindly legs off the cot, he organized his hair with a zigzag jerk of the hand, established a ponytail with the aid of a rubber band he kept around his wrist, and pulled on a military green baseball cap that said CONCH BAY, BVI.

  A thick rain pelted the metal rooftops of the beach club, where gray daylight had begun to offer the palm trees some definition. In thirty, maybe forty minutes, the sky would be blue, the sand dry-the island drying out like a wet paper bag in a hot oven-but as Ronnie emerged from his trailer, the rain had yet to abate, and it dumped on him. He ducked into a cubbyhole behind the open-air kitchen, where the phone continued its insistent ringing until he answered it.

  “Conch Bay,” he said. In Ronnie’s Liverpool brogue, the words came out Kunk Bye.

  The voice on the other end of the line spat out a request. In hearing the caller’s aim, Ronnie took a look behind the garden, where he could see, even in the dim morning light, the stark outline of bungalow nine. Nine was built of cinder blocks and painted a luminescent hue of yellow; windows and doors screened, it appeared older, shorter, and more eroded than its brethren, squat and fierce in the face of their more recent construction. It shared with the others the architectural feature of a boxy porch standing six steps above the garden-high enough for a view of the lagoon.

  Completing his second stroll through the rain, Ronnie ascended the stairs and banged on the door.

  “Cooper!” he said, and took a step back.

  It took a while, but when it did, the reply came in a baritone, the voice sludge-thick with hangover phlegm.

  “Keep out.”

  Ronnie grinned. “Brought you a gift, Guv. Mutual friend of ours. You wanna guess who it is? You get it right, she says she’ll come in.”

  Another silence.

  Then the voice said, “The new one. Dottie.”

  “Nah,” Ronnie said, talking fast, “just pulling your leg, old man.” He took another backward step. “You got a phone call. It’s Cap’n Roy. Says he’s got a problem-‘emergency situation,’ he says. Gotta run now-”

  Ronnie made his move, ducking and spinning, arms flailing for protection, but Cooper covered the distance from bed to door in one long step. Fully naked, pivoting at the hip, the permanent resident of bungalow nine got his full weight behind the Ken Griffey Jr. Autograph-Special Louisville Slugger and smashed the front door’s jalousie panes to splinters, the bat bursting through the window’s mesh screen and sending shards of glass flying across the porch.

  “Run, boy,” Cooper said, and watched through the fresh hole in the door as Ronnie shot down the stairwell and darted off through the garden. He noted with satisfaction there appeared to be blood on one of the boy’s shoulders.

  Cooper dropped the Louisville Slugger and listened, eyes closed, to the chock-chock of the bat as it settled on the concrete floor of the bungalow. He rolled his shoulders, cracked his knuckles, and pulled in a deep, slow breath, inhaling the pungent scent of the rain.

  Blinking against the morning headache, he dug a pair of shorts from a mound of clothes, looked at his Tevas, decided, defiantly, to go without-Cooper thinking he’d show the little pissant that the broken glass lying around the porch didn’t faze him. Hell-the first week he spent here, he’d watched the gardener they had that year, a local kid maybe fifteen years old, working all day in bare feet. Walking along those gravel paths with the sharp stones, and the kid hadn’t even brought a pair of shoes with him. Cooper thinking at the time that he, given enough practice, could probably do the same thing. And thinking now, a few years in-a few years of walking shoeless over those same stones-he’d developed calluses thick enough to dance the jig in a shark’s mouth, were the mood to strike.

  Anybody visiting the Conch Bay Beach Club didn’t need an owner’s manual. Rent a mooring in the bay, consume a savory meal beneath the palm trees, throw back some rum punch at the bar. Bake your skin, snorkel amid rainbows of sea life, sleep with sand in your sheets, wake up to the cries of goats and roosters. No roads, no cars, two minutes of hot water in the shower, and
no lights after midnight. It was these and other factors-the fish, the sea, the beach, the rum, the women, casinos, conch fritters, palm trees, blue sky, rain, trade winds, hurricanes, the oppressive heat, lethargic pace, and near-total lack of local white people-that had caused Cooper to adopt Conch Bay as his permanent residence. He’d decided on a bungalow set back from the beach, a swath of fat-leaved foliage dividing it from the portions of the resort equipped with such amenities as air-conditioning, indoor showers, and newlyweds.

  He came down the stairs in nothing but the shorts, baggy blue swim trunks sagging to the knee. He didn’t duck or hurry. The rain felt good; it was already eighty, eighty-five out. Cooper stood about six three, and there wasn’t so much a tan as a dark weathering to him-his skin looked like the peeling hull of an old boat. Scar tissue creased his cheekbones, his nose had been flattened by a couple dozen breaks, and he had the eyes of somebody who’d checked out a few decades back.

  The kitchen was dark and empty, its big, stainless steel fridge lurking beside a monster oven. Most hours there was a trio of heavyset West Indian women sweating it out in there, making conch fritters, swordfish sandwiches, or jerk chicken.

  Cooper picked up the phone. “Yeah?”

  “Eh, Cooper, dat you, mon?”

  The words came out fast, like the lyrics to a reggae track. Cooper knew the lyricist all too well-Captain Roy Gillespie, of the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force. Known locally as Cap’n Roy.

  “It’s six o’clock in the goddamn morning,” Cooper said.

  “And you telling me.”

  “Boy says you got something can’t wait. If in fact that’s the case, Roy, I’d recommend you go ahead and tell me what it is.”

  Cooper refused to call Roy by his nickname.

  “There something here I thinking you maybe wanna see, mon. We down the Marine Base way. Come by ’bout an hour. I know dat boat get you here quick.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, mon. The Police Force,” Roy said, “we be obliged to you, you make the trip.” Roy fell silent, waiting for a response.

  After two or three seconds, Cooper grunted and hung up on him.

  The island of Tortola got up early, its native population of roosters braying out wake-up calls from about four o’clock onward. Narrow Mitsubishi pickups began to speed along the roads as early as five, overloaded with locals making their way to work, everybody carpooling: load up, drop off, repeat. There existed no need for public transit in the British Virgins, since all transit was public.

  Tortola’s two hills rose abruptly from the sea, one on each side of Road Town. Most visitors came to the BVIs by plane through Beef Island’s Terrance B. Lettsome International-twenty minutes east of Road Town by way of a treacherously steep road and locally famous bridge, it possessed one runway, a recently remodeled terminal, and maybe twenty-five cabbies loitering beside a convoy of Mitsubishi minivan taxis. Come by boat, though, and you’d do it through Road Harbor, a quaint blend of colorful oceanfront shops, industrial piers, a single, oddly massive cruise ship berth, and a brand-new ferry terminal beside the old marina.

  Cooper passed the vacant cruise ship berth and eased up on the throttle, obeying the harbor’s five-knot speed limit. As he quieted the engines, the sounds of the marina floated to him-the ping of cable against mast, the slap of waves against hull. Cooper’s hull was a forty-one-foot Apache with twin 572-CID 850-horsepower blowers and MerCruiser drives, a championship racing boat he’d obtained at a price significantly below its market value a few years back. He moved out to the bow, flipping a pair of bumpers over the gunwale, returned to the pilot’s seat, kicked the Apache into reverse, gunned the throttle, and killed the engines. Gliding in like an old man of the sea. The boat touched delicately against the Marine Base dock, easing to a halt without so much as a squeeze of its bumpers.

  A lanky West Indian in a grubby white T-shirt was already there on the dock, busy dealing with the contents of an orange bucket. The man automatically took the bowline when Cooper tossed it to him; Cooper handled the stern line himself, hopping off and nodding his thanks. The man grinned, nodded back, and returned to his bucket.

  Another, shorter man approached the dock. The singular feature of this man was his rigid posture-back held ramrod straight, his chest and shoulders thrust stiffly up and out. Cooper had always thought Cap’n Roy looked like a guy with a stick up his ass, but what the hell, it worked for him, coming down the dock now in his uniform, the pressed white polo shirt bright against his blue-black skin, the gray slacks with the sharp crease, the shiny black cap with a checkered band, even the patent leather shoes. Roy offered an enthusiastic handshake as they came together; at five nine in his shoes, he had to look way up at Cooper, whose tall, slouching profile cut an S-hook against Roy’s stick.

  “Lemme-be-de-first wida warm welcome for the spy-a-de-island,” Roy said. He kept his left hand busy, using it to slap Cooper on the shoulder while conducting the business of the handshake with his right.

  “Roy.”

  “Yeah, mon, we got us some trouble. Lucky findin’ it when we did, know what I mean, mon? It still a while now till the Turquoise Queen show, all them tourists taking a look.”

  Roy walked across the dock, reached down, unlashed a line, and tossed it into a hard-bottom inflatable dinghy. He motioned for Cooper to step into the boat. When Cooper did, Roy gassed the fifty-horse Evinrude and nosed the little craft out from the dock, heading deeper into the harbor, around the yacht slips.

  “Shortcut,” Cap’n Roy said with a wink.

  He took them through the outlet stream, tilting the engine to power through the shallow water without grinding the propeller on the rocks. When they came around the breakwater, Cooper saw five, no, six locals, four of them in standard Royal Virgin Island Police Force dress, same as Roy, and two of them wearing what Cooper knew to be the Marine Base uniform: royal blue polo shirt and khaki shorts. The cops were gathered around a heap of soiled rags lumped together on the rocks, the cops keeping active-one taking notes, one with a camera, another shielding his eyes against the sun with his hand, keeping watch. To Cooper, the swirl of activity displayed all too familiar a rhythm.

  Cap’n Roy beached the boat on the rocks, shutting down the Evinrude and kicking it out of the water.

  “Need to do it on foot from here,” he said.

  The outlet continued, two or three inches deep, through a bed of rocks, snaking around the breakwater and out into the ocean. Behind them, between the breakwater and the harbor, lay open, overgrown brush, with industrial leftovers peeking through tall grass-the rotting hull of a boat, the rusted body of an original VW Beetle. Walking over the sharp rocks, wearing a yellow T-shirt that said LIVE SLOW across the back, Cooper was thinking that under ordinary circumstances, he’d consider pulling off his Tevas and crossing the bed of rocks barefoot, just to show these soft-skinned white-collar cops what he was all about. Out of respect for what he figured awaited him at the end of the outlet, though, he shrugged off the impulse. While he walked, Cooper contemplated a few different ways to reject the favor Roy was about to ask of him. The man was a sneaky bastard; Roy would figure a way to guilt, or possibly even blackmail him into it if he weren’t careful.

  Cap’n Roy led him to where his fellow cops were gathered on the beach. They faced the channel now, the breakwater behind them, and at this range, Cooper didn’t need the guided tour to understand that the pile of rags was not, in fact, a pile of rags.

  Wrapped in shredded clothes, frail and emaciated, with bloated, wrinkled skin that might once have been dark but had by now deteriorated to a bleached jaundice, the semiexposed torso of a man lay sprawled beneath a scrap of wood. The upper body was covered with what appeared to be sores, though it was difficult to tell-with the body soaking in the sea, the sores were pale and indistinct, little more than jagged, whitish mushrooms on the skin. Both legs were broken below the knee in compound fractures. Cooper tried to remember the name of the bigger bone below the knee-probably ei
ther the tibia or fibula-but whichever it was, the bone protruded grotesquely from the skin, the torn flesh whitish and waterlogged like the sores on the torso.

  Once Cap’n Roy observed that Cooper had enjoyed a thorough study of the scene, he straightened whatever bend remained in his spine and motioned to a thick cop wearing the Marine Base gear.

  “Riley here,” he said, “he come across the body first thing this morning.”

  Cooper knew Riley a little. Heavy in the face and legs with a flat stomach, he looked like a running back, his skin the color of caramel, a shade or three lighter than the rest of the gang.

  “Round about the break of dawn,” Riley said, taking his cue, “out checkin’ the moorings, I come ’round the point and think maybe the first thing to do be to clean up the mess, seein’ these rags here, thinkin’ they was rubbish. Then I heard the flies, shooed away the birds, and seen what you now seein’, mon.”

  Riley bent down and picked up a plank, which made Cooper notice the other pieces of wood, nailed together in groups, strewn across the rocks. Down by the water was a bigger grouping, big enough for Cooper to surmise the obvious-the body had come in on a boat. A small one, from the look of it.

  “Not much left, but I figure maybe he a tourist,” Riley said. “Hurricane take down his big boat, lifeboat don’t make it all the way in.”

  Cap’n Roy interrupted stiffly, “Ain’t a tourist though.”

  Cooper said, “Islander?”

  “He ain’t from ’round here.”

  Cooper thought Roy’s answer was a little quick.

  “Tell you what,” Cooper said. “Why don’t you sit on it. Wait it out a day or two. Maybe some poor St. Johnnie sends Riley here an e-mail, telling him our boy here didn’t come home from work. Ask around, find out if he was dealing. Couple weeks and you’ll have it all wrapped up.”