Painkiller Read online

  His name was Spike Gibson.

  Gibson gave General Deng a halfhearted bow.

  “Lou bahn,” he said, Mandarin for boss.

  Deng nodded at his middleman and kept walking, barefoot in the sand. “You have taken care of our guests, I gather,” he said.

  “Eleven strong, most of them relaxing in the cabanas. The first six came in last night, the other five an hour ago.” The oddly disproportionate muscles in Gibson’s chest were nearly splitting the fabric of the tropical print shirt he wore, but when he spoke, his neck stretched even thinner than its normal, scrawny state.

  Deng looked sternly about the resort.

  “I don’t see any of them utilizing the facilities,” he said. “This is not what I ordered.”

  Two steps behind, Li peered past Deng to take in the pool, the bar, the racks stacked full of plush towels, the rows of portable lounge chairs, the cabanas, the bartender, the maid. The sun was oppressively hot; Deng and Li had each already begun to sweat.

  “Our guests are a little shy, General,” Spike Gibson said, telling a bald-faced lie. “Most of them are staying inside-looking to keep cool.” In fact Spike Gibson had instructed the men they were not allowed on the beach for longer than five minutes at a time.

  Deng grunted. “Tell them that while they’re here, the point is to appear that they are vacationing. Tell them I expect all of them to take full advantage of the resort and all its amenities.”

  Gibson said, “Of course, Comrade General. As you want it.”

  “And your other projects?”

  Gibson returned Deng’s gaze without speaking.

  Deng didn’t budge. Gibson shrugged.

  “All is well,” Gibson said.

  Deng turned and walked onto the poolside tile, Admiral Li in tow. Gibson summoned the maid, asking that she show the leaders to their rooms.

  Passing Gibson, Li caught the security director’s eyes and kept hold of them as he crossed the poolside patio. Just before turning the corner, he bowed officiously, the act meant to emphasize that Li was the honored guest, and Gibson, his subservient host. Gibson jerked his chin at Li-a bow in Gibson’s language-and watched as he walked away, Li’s wet tennis shoes squeaking on the tile as he went.

  26

  Deciding he needed a break from the stakeout routine, Cooper took a drive to the bar where it might have appeared, to the untrained eye, that the albino’s dark-skinned girlfriend was working as a cocktail waitress. He parked the Taurus around the corner from the place around six-forty-five, which gave him a good two hours before Jim came to collect his woman for another night of rapture.

  The minute he came through the door, Cooper, private-eye-for-the-dead, confirmed the obvious: the girl was working there, all right, but not as a cocktail waitress. The only legitimate employee in the place was the bartender. He stood behind the bar, facing a pair of rummies, who sat on two of the pub’s four stools. The joint was a dump-a couple of naked bulbs dangling above the bar, some reggae playing on a boom box behind it, a handful of seats and tables in the narrow corridor between the bar and the opposing wall.

  Seated at one of the tables were four girls. One of them was Jim’s woman; all four wore skirts that bottomed out around mid-ass and tops about as modest as Saran Wrap. They wore cheap jewelry that dangled from ears, wrists, ankles, and waist, Cooper figuring there were some dangling from places he couldn’t see too. There was the rich scent of weed, wafting to him from the hazy cloud of smoke over their table, starting to give him a buzz just from standing in the doorway.

  Cooper took one of the vacant stools at the bar and ordered some bourbon. When the bartender finished pouring the watered-down, unlabeled selection of his own choosing, Cooper said, “How much for more?”

  The bartender looked him over, shrugged, and said, “That depend on what you want, mon.” He had that accent, Jamaicans always sounding to Cooper like they were ready to party. Every little thing goin’ to be all right.

  Cooper put a hundred-dollar bill on the counter and said, “I like the skinny one.”

  The bartender’s eyes gleamed, staring down at the bill. Cooper could sense an inner turmoil. He guessed the man was thinking how to make a buck off him, since Cooper was obviously loaded, laying down a C-note like it was nothing. But the man didn’t want to lose his top client, either.

  The bartender-pimp completed his inner battle and said, “That get you two hours.”

  Cooper frowned, giving him an acting job, Man, tough decision, all that money. “All I get is two hours then?”

  The bartender-pimp flipped his hands upside down and shrugged again. “Understand, any other time you get more than that, but Rhonda here, she got a regular kind of thing, mon. Friend of hers coming by ’round nine o’clock.”

  Cooper nodded. He said, “Rhonda.”

  “We got a deal, mister? Or you want another maybe.”

  “No,” Cooper said, “Rhonda’s my kind of girl.”

  Rhonda didn’t say or do anything different from what she’d been doing since Cooper had come into the bar: eyes closed, she pulsed slightly to the music, sitting on her chair, toking absently on the joint each time it came around to her.

  The bartender-pimp swiped the hundred bucks off the counter.

  “Nine o’clock,” he said. “Don’t be late, mon.”

  Coming across the busy lobby of the Crowne Plaza around seven-thirty, Rhonda’s skirt showed an under-crescent of her skinny ass with every step, first one side then the other. She was so stoned that Cooper gleefully anticipated at least an “Excuse me, sir” from the concierge-or somebody on the hotel staff-but sadly, they made it through the lobby, into the elevator, and all the way into his room without incident.

  In his suite he watched her shed the halter top and unzip the miniskirt. Lying on the bed then, eyes half-shut, one knee raised, arms splayed out with her palms outstretched, Rhonda telling him to come and get some, Cooper thought that the sight might have been appealing to him had his tastes run to anorexic, comatose preteen boys. Holding back from tearing off his clothes, he took out his wallet and fanned about fifty bucks in fives and tens on the table beside the bed. He was obvious about it, crumpling then unfolding the bills to help release her from the anticipatory trance she had going.

  “Nice as that looks, Rhonda,” he said, “I’ve got something else in mind.”

  Rhonda had her eyes open now, the girl counting the money he was showing. “What that you lookin’ for den, mon,” she said.

  “Tell you what. Why don’t I just ask you some questions,” he said. “Any answers you give sound true to me, I’ll pay you five or ten bucks. We’re done and I feel like you haven’t been making everything up, you get a fifty-dollar bonus. After that, I take you back to the bar and the albino comes and picks you up just like he did yesterday, and the day before that. Two or three weeks go by and I find out you can keep a secret, nobody knows we did anything but fuck like bunnies up in here, there’s another five hundred bucks coming your way free of all commissions to your pimp daddy bartender.”

  She didn’t say anything, just stayed splayed out on the bed, lips moist and parted.

  “How’s that sound, Rhonda,” Cooper said.

  Rhonda shuffled her feet to push herself back up against the headboard. She pulled on the halter top, zipped up the miniskirt, brought her legs up against her body, and clasped her arms around her knees. Eyes no longer hiding under their lids, Rhonda looked at him, fully alert.

  “Yeah, mon,” she said, “that sound pretty good to me.”

  According to Rhonda, Jim had gone through two of the other girls in the bar-spend a few weeks tagging one, take another for the same price, switch back once in a while, depending on the mood. He always did it the same way-come in, get a drink or two, bring the girl back, pound away like a madman for something like five hours, this guy a sexual piston, sleep a couple hours, wake up, call a cab, kick the girl out. Rhonda told him there had been the occasional visit from a friend, sometimes
expected, sometimes not, somebody swinging by once every two or three days. This Cooper knew: Jim’s supplier. He asked her what she thought he did to make his money; Rhonda said she knew he didn’t ever leave to go to any particular job, Jim having her stick around well into the day a few times, and all he ever did was buy more dope and come back inside and smoke it.

  He asked if Jim kept anything around the house that had something to do with a career of any kind; Rhonda thought it over before saying there was nothing she could remember, except that she’d seen him fiddling with a chain.

  “You know, mon,” she said, “pendant and chain, but the kind a man keep,” and Cooper thought of something and said, “You mean dog tags?” and she said that was it.

  He asked if she knew where he kept them, and she said he had a jewelry box-she’d seen him taking it in and out of the top drawer of his dresser. Cooper asked about his real name, or at least the name he used with her, and she said he went only by Jim. He asked if she’d ever seen his full name on anything, maybe on a utility bill, and she told him he never left anything out for her to look at. When he asked whether she’d ever seen what it said on the dog tags, she said she hadn’t.

  The only other interesting revelation, in which Rhonda made about a hundred bucks, was that whenever Jim was paged, he announced it was time for Rhonda to leave. It had happened twice, late at night both times, Jim pulling out of her, checking the pager, telling her it was time to go, let’s get you a cab, then walking out the door with her and driving off in that van of his before the cab arrived. When Cooper asked how late at night this was, she said it had happened sometime after 2 A.M. each time.

  He took Rhonda back to the bar around eight-forty-five and hung around until Jim showed up. Cooper watched Jim sip some rum and Coke from a straw, reach over and do one of those brother-man handshakes with the bartender-pimp, the kind Cooper could never keep up with, always something new with these guys-then Jim took Rhonda by the hand and led her out to his van. It looked to Cooper as though Rhonda actually gave him a wink as she walked out the door, but with those swollen, bloodshot eyes it was hard to tell for sure.

  Cooper stuck around for another half hour, left a five-dollar tip for the one-dollar beer he’d been sipping, and trudged out to the Taurus, thinking if he kept having to sit in that goddamned car he was going to have to get out and run a couple hundred laps on the quarter-mile beach when he got home.

  27

  The next time Jim left to pick up Rhonda for the night, Cooper climbed out of the Taurus and made his way up Jim’s porch. Seeing no visible sign of an alarm system, he went ahead and took the grave risk of breaking and entering a home in Kingston, Jamaica, and upon snapping open the lock was promptly assaulted by the smell of reefer. Coming in, Cooper thought that the guy had to be smoking morning, noon, and night with the odor as thick as it was in the house. Maybe he would grow dreadlocks by the time he left.

  The house was poorly kept, with rumpled dirty laundry obscuring much of the floor in the front hall. Cooper moved into the kitchen, which told the same story, crumbs and half-eaten fast food on the counter, a couple weeks of crusty dishes stacked in the sink. There were no pictures on the fridge, and only American cheese, Wonder bread, peanut butter, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, whole milk, and three cans of Bud inside it. Working through a pair of closets, he found the usual Caribbean attire.

  The bedroom was the center of Jim’s world, all the necessities packed in there-the weed spilling out of a plastic bag on the side table, some joints beside it, a Magnavox TV, a boom box, a full-length mirror angled against the wall. On the unmade bed he found a remote control, a dank towel, and a cigarette lighter. The dirty laundry scheme for this particular room included underwear, socks, and T-shirts; Cooper couldn’t find a single photograph of Jim, and nothing at all hung on the walls.

  He went through the drawers: low on clothes, a few magazines, neatly stacked-Penthouse, Hustler, Oui-Cooper thinking the Oui must have been tough to get, living in Kingston. He found a pistol under a pair of jeans, a basic revolver, Smith & Wesson.38 Special. It was loaded. Another drawer had a box of bullets and a knife, a big serrated hunting knife in an olive green sheath. Military issue. He found no jewelry box, nor anything like one.

  In the drawer of the side table, Cooper found some cash, a spare set of keys, a gold chain, some women’s hair clips, a scuffed Yankees cap-but still no jewelry box. It began to occur to Cooper that Jim didn’t use condoms, not unless he kept them hidden in one hell of a hiding place.

  He opened the closet, where he found the other half of the various pairs of shoes that Jim kept distributed across the rest of the house. Sweat suits, shorts, belts, shirts, a rolled poster-Cooper unfurling it to find a Sports Illustrated photograph of Tyra Banks in a bikini-boxes stacked in the bottom of the closet, some of them shoe boxes, Cooper pulling out the most accessible one and opening it, finding the only sign of life yet, a short stack of old snapshots, mainly of Jim on the beach with different black girls. Cooper moved a pair of broken sunglasses out of the way and saw something he thought Rhonda might consider a jewelry box: a bare pine cube about six inches across, lid secured with a hook and eyelet.

  Inside were some identification cards, all with Jim’s picture but under a variety of names-driver’s license, a couple U.S. passports, some local picture IDs Cooper didn’t recognize. The names on the cards were Allan Rodriguez, Robert Jackson, James Haggood-Cooper thinking that could be the real version of Jim.

  He spotted the flimsy chain peeking out from under the identification cards and pulled. The U.S. Navy dog tags that came out of the rubble displayed the engraved name of TRAVIS JAMES MALLOY.

  Cooper took a moment to memorize all the names and numbers on the cards and the tags. He replaced them in their original order and walked out, trying to decide whether to refer to the man as Jim the Redheaded Albino Black, or whether he should switch up and just call him by his real name of Travis.

  Jim, he thought, suits the man better.

  He drove back to the Crowne Plaza, slept for ninety minutes, brewed some coffee at the minibar and drank it black while he shot for and caught a wireless signal with his PowerBook. He logged on to one of the seven secure law enforcement databases to which he had access and, twenty minutes later, made the discovery that Travis James Malloy packed quite a resumé.

  A three-year-old picture of Jim, or Travis, stared out at Cooper from the computer screen, where, beside the picture, there ran a list of warrants, charges, and indictments that took him three minutes to read. Malloy was wanted for murder, rape, sodomy, sexual battery, armed robbery, aggravated assault, child molestation, and absence without official leave.

  U.S. Navy AWOL.

  Cooper saw that until four years ago, when the authorities had quit charging him with new crimes, Malloy had been a card-carrying member of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted. He’d fallen off the list after no leads had been found. Cooper read the rest of it, noting the sites of the alleged murders and rapes, figuring it meant that Malloy’s idea of a tour in the navy was to use the various ports of call for a serial rape-and-murder spree. He wondered whether there had been a similar series of murders and rapes in Kingston these past few years, but culling through the local missing persons and homicide case files didn’t jump out at him as a productive use of his time. You’re either a serial killer or you’re not, and he figured it for a good bet Travis James Malloy was a prolific one.

  Cooper was getting to the end of his rope. Camping out in a rental car in Belle Acres, watching a ten-time serial killer screw a drugged-out anorexic hooker night in, night out-Christ, enough. He decided that if this guy didn’t give him something to go on in the next few days, he’d pay a visit to the U.S. embassy, ask a couple of marines to follow him back to Jimbo’s love nest, and retire from his position as private-eye-for-the-dead.

  He downed the last of the coffee, gathered his gear, and headed out for another night of sex-machine surveillance.

  That night Jim was
paged twice.

  At least that was how many times he took off in his minivan, destined for two pay phones in separate neighborhoods. He hadn’t sent Rhonda home either time, just slipped out, made a phone call, returned, and come back out an hour later to repeat the routine. Afterward, Cooper assumed his position in the Taurus outside the house while Jim slipped back inside and things returned to normal.

  Cooper checked the clock on the dash-almost midnight, and midnight in Jamaica meant either eleven or midnight in Langley, he could never remember. Depended on the time of year. Either way, when two shots with his sat phone got nothing but her answering machine on the home line, Cooper made a third call to retrieve the number he was looking for, then tapped out the digits to Julie Laramie’s cell phone.

  When Laramie answered, Cooper said, “How we doing, Lie Detector?”

  Cooper could hear road noise from Laramie’s end of the line.

  “Hello, Professor,” she said.

  Cooper thought that she had to be wondering what he meant by that, why he was goofing around with her at all, but she wasn’t asking about any of it. Laramie: cool as a cucumber.

  “You couldn’t be coming home from the office this late,” he said.

  “Ah, but I could be. And am.”

  “You skip dinner?”

  “I had a salad from the commissary, if you must know.”

  “A salad person.”

  “Sometimes.”

  Sometimes, my ass, Cooper thought. “What about breakfast,” he said. “You eat a big breakfast?”

  “Only coffee,” she said. “Maybe a banana.”

  “Banana.” Cooper said the word as though it summed up all.

  “I take it you’re not a salad eater.”

  “No.”

  “Or a fruit person.”

  “Nope.”