Painkiller Read online

  Out here on this barren hillside, Cooper kept coming back to one question: where had the kid caught the fucking fish?

  At dusk Alphonse motioned frantically for him to stop. Cooper didn’t particularly need the prompt, as he could see through the windshield, directly before them, that the earth seemed simply to end. He eased the Chevy to the edge, cranked hard right, and gave himself a view out the driver’s-side window.

  He could see, even in the twilight, a downward grade that looked to him like the view from the top of an Olympic ski jump. A few clicks down the slope he spotted a patch of green-had to be the lake, or the river, he thought, where Alphonse had caught the fish. Long fucking way to walk, he thought, for six skinny fish.

  “We walk from here be go,” Alphonse said, stating the obvious in his triple-broken dialect. “The village you looking for? C’est-li là, down that bottom.”

  Cooper threw the Chevy in reverse, backed into a thicket of dead brush, killed the engine, got out, pissed over the edge of the slope in a high arcing stream, returned to the pickup, dug into his bag, and came out with a bottle of rum. He noticed Alphonse staring, befuddled, the kid having watched his every move.

  “How ’bout a highball, Kareem?” he said, and reached out to offer his guide a sip from the rum bottle. When Alphonse didn’t move a muscle, Cooper cracked the seal and took a swallow. “Cab’s yours,” he said, and opened his bag to offer Alphonse something from the selection of candy bars and bottled water. Hungry enough to overcome his reluctance, Alphonse chose a pair of candy bars. Cooper pulled out a pair of T-shirts to use as a pillow and climbed into the bed of the pick up with a Milky Way, some water, and the rum. When he’d consumed all three, he leaned through the rear window of the cab, where Alphonse, still befuddled, remained.

  “Sleep tight,” he said. He rolled around until he got comfortable and dozed off, staring at a sky full of constellations bright enough to make the notion of a telescope seem absurd.

  They spent a full day on the downgrade, Cooper seeing insufficient plant life to fuel a brush fire until they came to Alphonse’s lake, a verdant swatch of plateau spanning, by Cooper’s guess, a quarter of a square mile. The green appeared to be fed by a spring-a trickle of water tumbling downhill inside a narrow crevasse-looking to Cooper like a scale model of your average whitewater rapids, the creek about two feet across where it pooled, six or seven inches wide where it ran at speed. Wordlessly, Alphonse strode past the miniature lake and led him downhill. The foliage dried up and vanished again within yards. Cooper knew how it worked: dry as a bone for a few years; then a hurricane swept through, and the floods that followed tore every hint of vegetation from the slope, leaving even less to dry out over the succeeding years of drought.

  They followed the creek as it zigzagged downhill, Cooper’s toes bruised and blistering inside his Port-au-Prince-issue hiking boots, the descent taking its toll. He checked his watch at two-thirty; it was bright and hot, a classic Caribbean heat but without the breeze, at least 105 degrees and sickly humid. Soon the pain of his blistering toes began to subside, and before he realized what this meant, Cooper looked up from the backs of Alphonse’s feet to observe the fact that they’d reached the base of the grade.

  Alphonse pointed into the hazy distance, Cooper noticing the kid did not appear remotely fatigued. Following his finger, Cooper could see, maybe two miles off, in a greener section of the plain they’d just reached, a settlement. There was a patchwork of farmlands, a few dozen shanties, the same creek dribbling its way through town; there were no visible roads coming in or out, just the half-green village, a bone-dry forest behind it, and the endless brownish landscape rising in all directions from the valley.

  The thing that appealed most to Cooper about this newfound testament to human survival was the hope that he’d be able to round up a watering hole, maybe find some unique local spirits-no doubt primitively distilled, he thought, but still home-brewed and pure.

  He found it in the form of an open-air shack on the outskirts of town, literally a lean-to with a counter crafted from a slab of driftwood, Cooper wondering where you found driftwood in the desert. There were a couple of stools standing against the slab, with some tables and chairs filling out the rest of the place. Four locals populated the joint, pretty much just hanging around-two at a table, one at the bar, and the fourth behind the driftwood slab. Maybe serving. All four appeared dressed for farmwork.

  He got the evil eye immediately, Cooper feeling like a drifter coming into the saloon in a Clint Eastwood movie, only with bleeding toes and blistered feet. He ignored the looks and took a stool at the bar. Alphonse followed his lead as he shrugged off his backpack and settled on the seat, Cooper trying to remember a good line from an Eastwood film to offer these boys, but it’d been too many years since he’d owned a television. He opted for the mock-idiotic-tourist routine instead, though he considered it might be fair to say he was in fact an idiot for even coming here at all.

  Nodding at Alphonse, he said in drawling English, “Anything they got. Whiskey, rum-maybe something they make themselves.”

  Alphonse, playing the role, jerked his chin at the bartender and banged out a stretch of his patented triple-broken dialect.

  The bartender was bigger than the others, his skin a cup of strong coffee, forehead a little taller than you found on other West Indians, so that it gave the impression of a receding hairline. He smoked a cigarette with a long ash that dangled lazily from his lips. Everybody in here, Cooper realized, was smoking. He guessed the latest in filtered low-tar brands weren’t readily distributed in La Vallée des Morts. Secondhand smoke, going to kill him.

  The bartender pushed off from the post he’d been leaning on. He didn’t touch the cigarette in his mouth, leaving the ashes to fall. He pulled an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid from a box.

  “Deux?”

  Alphonse hesitated but forged forth. “Wi, deux,” he said, and the bartender put a pair of paper Dixie cups on the driftwood slab and filled them before returning to his post.

  Cooper looked around the place and got the other six eyes staring back at him, big, white orbs, sunk deep into dark, weathered sockets. The two at the table were young and sinewy, maybe even tough; clearly annoyed at the interruption, these boys formed the epicenter of the evil glare. Cooper put them in their early twenties. The guy seated at the bar was older, closer to fifty, with a short, gray beard that resembled lint balls stuck to his chin. Hunched over his drink, he stared back at Cooper with something like fascination.

  Cooper figured the appearance in this bar of a pale, well-fed blan wasn’t much different from a moose or a bear coming off a yacht and sliding up to the bar at the Conch Bay Beach Club. He saw no need to consider the communal evil eye they were giving him anything more threatening than a symptom of shock.

  He dug into his backpack and pulled out the props he’d stowed there, the driftwood slab as good a place as any to take them for a test drive.

  On a white sheet of paper, he’d sketched a depiction of the brand. He’d folded the rest of the sheet of paper behind the image, so that he had a rectangle about the size of a four-by-six photograph with the sketch residing within the borders. Also in the stack of goodies he pulled from the backpack was the full set of Eugene Little’s Polaroids he’d snatched on his way out of the morgue-the shot of the brand on the victim’s neck, a profile of the poor kid’s face, and a head-and-shoulders portrait too, Eugene’s photography pretty good in that it made the body appear half-alive. Sort of like a mug shot of the kid, only with his eyes closed. The face was bloated and pale, and infested with sores, but it still gave the general impression of the boy’s appearance: if the chain-smoking bruiser serving the firewater in Dixie cups had known the kid in life, he’d also know him as captured in death by Eugene’s specialized form of photography.

  Cooper set a ten-dollar bill on the slab beside the first of the props-the sketch. He caught the bartender’s eyes before jerking his chin at Alphonse.

&nbs
p; “Ask him to come over again.”

  This time it took nothing in the way of a prompt from Alphonse to get the bartender to approach. Thinking, Ah, the universal language, Cooper said, “Ask him if he’s seen this brand before. There a bokor in the neighborhood might be using it?”

  Alphonse semitranslated. Cooper watched as the bartender’s eyes drifted only briefly across Alphonse, the man keeping his focus on the ten-dollar salary he intended to earn. To influence him a bit, Cooper stuck a finger onto the folded paper, pointing at the sketch.

  “This, here,” he said as Alphonse finished the translation.

  The bartender’s eyes worked in their sockets, adjusting from money to sketch. They then ran up to Cooper’s face, back down, and, with a lightning-quick snatch, the bartender jerked the money off the bar and pocketed it. He looked at Cooper again, this time with a degree of defiance. Then he fingered the sketch and turned it in a short circle before pushing it back across.

  “Non,” he said. “Mwen regret sa.”

  Then he went back to his post. His cigarette had burned down and out, so he fired up another with a paper match and sucked at it, once again leaving the cigarette lodged permanently between his lips. Cooper noticed that there were now grubby fingerprints on the paper holding his sketch.

  He took out a second ten-dollar bill, popped it straight, and laid it on the bar in the same manner as before. He pulled the sketch from the bar, tried rubbing off the fingerprints, failed, returned the sketch to his pocket, and came out with the head-on mug shot.

  He said, “Ou ne konnen le témoignage des Bizango, eh?” then put the picture on the slab. “Then how about my cousin here-he ring any bells?”

  Alphonse regarded him with the same befuddled expression he’d displayed in the pickup.

  The bartender came over and snatched the money, but when he tried to finger the photograph, Cooper pulled the picture back.

  “Touchez-pas,” he said.

  The bartender snorted, looked at the photograph, shook his head, said, “Non,” and stood his ground.

  Cooper nodded and popped off another ten. Alphonse looked like his head was going to explode if he saw another bill hit the slab.

  “Maybe he could tell us,” Cooper said, pulling Alphonse back into the exchange, “if there’s anyplace to stay around here. Couple of beds, even some soft earth and a roof. Hot meal wouldn’t be bad, would it?”

  Alphonse nodded in appreciation of what he understood Cooper to have said-the first sign of fatigue Cooper had noticed in the kid, in any form, for the duration of the journey-and gave the bartender some version of what Cooper had told him. The bartender retrieved the third bill and answered the question; Alphonse semitranslated his response, which Cooper had already understood perfectly well.

  “Five houses down,” Alphonse said, “il dit there be an old lady là-bas, she give the beds. Pay that lady the money you be paying here, il dit could be she cook supper aussi.”

  Cooper put his props in a pocket, tossed back whatever the bartender had poured into the Dixie cup-it tasted like sake-and winked at Alphonse.

  “Come on, Kareem,” he said. “Let’s go seek some room and board.”

  The old woman recommended by the bartender offered them a vegetable stew, which, while it tasted like bat guano, Cooper gladly consumed after the exhausting trek down the mountain. Room and board set him back another twenty-probably ten times what he needed to pay, but Cooper thought he’d keep the free-spending tourist charade going. He’d long since learned that playing a role that wasn’t too much of a stretch for him-a foolish honkie spending beaucoup money-was about as good a way to elicit knee-jerk overreactions from native West Indians as any. Typically it also went a good way toward ensuring his well-honed interpersonal skills were usefully underestimated.

  Noshing on the foul-tasting stew, Cooper swallowed hard, regretting that he hadn’t procured a bottle of the bartender’s mellow Dixie cup brew before leaving the bar. He could have used it to wash down the food.

  They slept fully dressed on a bed of something like straw in the woman’s backyard, Cooper keeping his Browning tucked under the belt of his khaki shorts. He slept on his side. They had the blankets from Cooper’s backpack, but who needed them; it might have dropped to ninety-five for the night, but there still came no breeze. Cooper listened as he slept, something he’d learned to do a long time ago and didn’t have much use for any longer, at least outside of the times Ronnie was in the mood for practical jokes. He hoped he wasn’t too rusty-get caught in a deep sleep while an angry farmer tried to off him for his wad of ten-dollar bills.

  The first bite didn’t come until morning, when a small, wiry guy with the same deep eye sockets as the fellas from the bar gang arrived at the old woman’s house. When Cooper and Alphonse came out around six-thirty, the guy was already waiting for them, seated on a box the old woman used as a chair. Cooper was ready for the guy to make a move-didn’t look like it but he was, following Alphonse out of the shack-but there wasn’t anything to be ready for, at least not yet. The wiry guy said a few words to Alphonse that Cooper couldn’t hear, and Alphonse told Cooper that someone wanted to see him, and if they went with the guy he’d take them there.

  Cooper agreed and brought up the rear as they walked into the heart of the village and on through to the side nearest the dead-brown forest. It was about a ten-minute walk. The guy concluded his assignment by delivering them to a shanty that, while still small, looked more like a house than any of the other dwellings in town. It was the last building this side of town, set back from the other homes with an actual yard. Cooper could see that their old friend the creek cut through the backyard of the place.

  The escort opened the door and stood aside to usher them in. Cooper stood for a moment in the doorjamb to let his eyes adjust, the transition a little difficult as he came inside. Once his eyes had made the shift, he could see that the shades inside the house were drawn. Only one or two lights were burning, Cooper thinking the light must be coming from candles until he heard the hum of an engine running somewhere out back, took another look at the lights, and saw that they featured sixty-watt bulbs in sockets with the lamp shades missing.

  Whoever it is who’s summoned us to his throne, Cooper thought, he’s running electricity off a Honda generator and has the shades drawn so he can show off. Imagine that-a guy so rich he can afford to run electric lamps inside during the bright daylight. Cooper wondered where the guy got his fuel.

  There were shelves built into each of the walls, loaded with handcrafted talismans and ornaments-basically a bunch of junk, but junk with one recurring feature: carved into or stamped upon each of the items, Cooper could plainly see a depiction of the mark somebody had branded onto the neck of the body Cap’n Roy had been so kind as to palm off on him.

  There were some books on the shelves too, titles he couldn’t make out, a couch and chairs, orange shag carpet, and in the center of the room, a metal desk of the sort used by Cooper’s fifth-grade math teacher. Behind the desk sat a man.

  The man was thick, bald, and bearded, his skin a notch or two lighter than that of his fellow citizens. The robe he wore looked African but probably wasn’t, his earlobes were adorned with at least a dozen earrings each, and he was busy laying upon Cooper his own version of the village’s patent-pending evil eye. At length, the man jerked his chin toward the couch and chairs.

  Cooper sat, choosing the couch. As he did he observed that as with Manny’s old buddy Ocholito, the man behind the desk had fingernails that were painted in high-gloss black. Alphonse took one of the chairs; Cooper could see the kid was spooked. Their escort closed the front door and stood inside with his back against it.

  “We never seen you before,” said the man behind the desk. He spoke in unaccented English, his voice deep, making Cooper think of Barry White on some old Motown television special. The accent made it sound like the guy had been born in Ohio, or Pennsylvania.

  Cooper said, “Correct.”

 
; “We don’t get too many strangers ’round here.”

  Alphonse flicked his eyes at Cooper, then back at the man behind the desk. Cooper thought about what it meant, this being the richest guy in town, the only guy with painted walls and fingernails plus a backyard generator, undoubtedly the only guy speaking fluent English on top of it. Pulling his mug shot photo, Cooper stood, walked over to the desk, dropped the picture on it, and came back to the couch and sat.

  “Friend of yours?” Cooper said.

  The man’s eyes flicked over to the snapshot, lingered, then refocused on Cooper.

  “What it is you looking for, you better off looking somewhere else,” he said.

  Cooper, getting tired of this room and the people in it, met the man’s dead-eyed stare with a bankrupt look of his own, thinking, Match this thousand-yard stare, priest-man. Cooper could feel Alphonse’s nervous energy beside him.

  “Are you familiar with the person in that photograph?”

  “I don’t know nothing ’bout what you asking.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “We have nothing for you,” the man said, “and you are not welcome to remain here.”

  Cooper nodded, rose, crossed the room, retrieved the picture from the desk, and returned it to his pocket. Standing beside the desk, he could see a few things that might otherwise have been hidden from view: papers, pens, pencils, a file drawer unit, what looked like a key-locked fire safe, a cellular phone-older, bulkier, but still a cell phone out here, at least seventy-five miles from the nearest tower. Its charger was plugged into an extension cord Cooper figured hooked up to the generator out back.