Painkiller Read online

  Eugene pulled up abruptly.

  “Listen here,” he said. “I’ll need the rest of that money now.”

  Cooper’s thoughts, mired as they were in tattoos and ankhs, were making him uncomfortable. He was thinking that he’d seen a symbol like the ankh-tattoo on the victim’s neck somewhere before, and not just in a history textbook, or museum. Eugene wasn’t helping his malaise, Cooper watching the friendly neighborhood medical examiner shuffle around the body, rat-like, Eugene blinking like a pervert, sniffling between sentences while he sought a second handout.

  Goddamn that Roy.

  Cooper pulled out his wallet. “Here’s what we’re going to do, Ignatius. Run those tests you’re talking about. All of them-including ballistics, assuming you can find any bullets. Tell me what comes back. You do that, I’ll give you another hundred now as a down payment on a two-hundred-dollar bonus. Payable when I see the results. You still get the rest only if nothing hits the papers.”

  Eugene glared at him, sniffling. “To do the rest, the full autopsy, I’ll have to do that after hours, you understand? The tests on the bones, the burns, tissue samples, the soil samples from underneath the nails”-the tic snapped at him again-“I’ll tell you, Cooper, I get charged lab fees for that, we don’t do it all here. And there are going to be questions. Especially if I send anything to ballistics.”

  Cooper stuffed his last hundred-dollar bill and two of the fifties in Eugene’s pocket. Up close, he could hear a wheezing sound. It came from Eugene’s nose.

  “There’s your whole bonus,” he said. “That puts us back at three hundred more when I see the test results, and when I’m satisfied you haven’t squealed. That’ll make seven bills total-negotiation over.”

  He walked over to the counter, looked around until he found the Polaroid of the tattoo-the ankh, if that’s what it was-and took it. Even in the harsh, bright light of the flash captured on film, the symbol was hard to see against the victim’s dark skin. Cooper grabbed another few pictures that interested him before heading for the stairs, and the fresh air that waited beyond. On his way across the room he turned and took in Eugene, who stood watching him from beside the body.

  “Live slow, Ignatius,” he said, then walked out of the morgue.

  4

  Cooper was down deep. He’d been under for two minutes, holding his breath, and could handle another three if he felt like pushing it, just the way he’d seen in a National Geographic documentary about the South Pacific. It was there where it seemed armies of twelve-year-old boys swam as far down as ninety feet and stayed under for upward of seven minutes. They went down there to haul in illegal, mile-long nets laid by rogue fishermen selling their catch to multinational fish-packing firms. Cooper thinking, as he had watched the show, that child labor laws didn’t have much bearing on the people of the remote South Pacific, but man, those kids could swim.

  One lazy afternoon around twelve years back, thinking of the show, he decided to see how long he could hold his breath beneath the waves. He parked his boat over a wreck that was famous with the SCUBA set and dove, wearing nothing more than swim trunks, goggles, and his dive watch. No tanks, no fins. He made himself stay down for sixty seconds, then ninety, then two minutes, diving so deep that after a few hours of it-constantly popping his ears to equalize the pressure-Cooper felt as if his head would implode. That first night he came back to the Conch Bay Beach Club with a migraine that lasted a week, but he went right back out when he felt good enough to do it again.

  Couple months later and he was staying down like those South Pacific natives, feeling like the Man from Atlantis-scare the shit out of the occasional honeymooners, their eyes bugging out of their masks, mouthpieces blasting off in a cloud of bubbles as they bolted for the surface. Cooper the moray eel, popping out of a shadowy pocket ninety feet down.

  Today he had the Apache anchored a quarter mile off the northeast corner of St. John while he tooled around a wreck somewhere just over a hundred feet below the surface. The broken deck of the ship was rife with sea life-coral, anemones, sea urchins, French grunts, some angelfish. Hovering over the stern of the old wreck, he watched a group of parrot fish, some as long as three feet, poking through the coral, rooting out algae. If he kept himself still, he could hear them sucking down their meal. He didn’t like keeping still, though, because today, as had been the case for the past week, he found that if he kept himself still, he started seeing and hearing things. Intrusions.

  The tranquility he normally found on these dives had been violated this afternoon by a kind of jumpy fear, Cooper constantly looking to see whether Roy’s body from the beach would swim out at him from around the next outcropping of coral. He couldn’t shake the feeling-it was as though a kind of delusionary sixth sense was telling him the oddly burned and busted body was following him around.

  Following another shot of air, he came around the side of the wreck, getting a wide view of it in the clear water. Figuring the boat for a British vessel circa 1880, maybe a little earlier, he could see it had broken into three pieces, but the two masts remained intact. Cooper spotted the pug nose of the resident barracuda, the fish six, seven feet long, big enough to take him if the mood struck. The fish eyed him blankly before retreating, but then Cooper thought he saw another shape in the murky shadows of the cabin.

  It was Roy’s body from the beach, calling out to him with a raspy screech.

  You’re all I got, the bloated face said, you washed-up old fuck!

  Topside, Cooper pulled the anchor on the Apache, stripped off the swim trunks, popped a half-dozen Advil to battle the emerging pressure headache, and rode back to Conch Bay. As always, he made the ten-minute trip nude, blow-drying his sun-wrinkled hide in the forty-knot wind that whipped across the deck of the Apache.

  The sun was fat and orange on the horizon when he eased up, drifting to a stop, and tied his bow line to a white buoy about forty yards from the Conch Bay pier. Ignoring the loud gaggle of tourists dining at the beachfront restaurant, Cooper proceeded to piss from the side of the boat for something like three minutes before yanking on a fresh pair of shorts. He splashed the Apache’s dinghy into the bay, zipped into the dock, and waited stubbornly in his seat until Ronnie came out from the restaurant and wordlessly assumed the task of tying off the dinghy.

  At the bar, he waded through the fat, sunburned people waiting to order a drink, walked behind the counter, and poured himself a very tall Maker’s Mark on the rocks. The kid tending bar continued with the cocktails he’d already been mixing. Cooper gulped the bourbon like it was Gatorade, the chilled drink tasting smooth and spicy going down. It worked like a kind of VapoRub against his headache but did nothing to exorcise his new friend the ghost. After consuming a refill, in fact, Cooper watched as Roy’s body from the beach strolled up and took one of the stools at the bar, eyeing him with the same, flat look he’d seen in the eyes of the barracuda.

  Oh yeah, the ghost screeched from his stool, the truth shall set you free, mon.

  Cooper poured another bourbon for the road, told the bartender to have Ronnie bring him a ham sandwich, and walked barefoot down the gravel path to his bungalow.

  Inside, he lifted from the counter of his kitchenette the Polaroid snapshots from Eugene’s photo gallery and found the picture of the tattoo. He stared at it for a while, holding it at different angles beneath the yellowing incandescent bulb hanging over his kitchen table. The picture didn’t tell him anything except that he could see now it wasn’t nearly as put together, or neatly inked enough, to be an ankh. Cooper wasn’t even sure how he remembered what an ankh was, but he knew now he wasn’t looking at one. The tattoo was rougher-uglier. A crude, waved pattern rimmed the entire symbol, and a black orb-Cooper thinking it was probably a moon, or star-resided an inch or two from the top of the symbol’s main circular head. Whatever the hell an ankh was, he thought, it probably didn’t come with a moon.

  His bungalow had only the one main room, which came loaded with the kitchenette, plus a b
athroom that reached partially out back by way of its outdoor shower. Adjoining the kitchenette was a twin-size bed with no headboard, the bed somewhere around six inches too short for him, a problem he’d never felt urgently inclined to fix. Lurking between the bed and the door sat the room’s only other furniture: a squat, upholstered chair and matching ottoman.

  Cooper kept his PowerBook on the ottoman. Beside it, a tangle of wires and devices lay on the floor, some connected, most not. He took the picture and fed it into a scanner he kept plugged into the side of the laptop; when he had the image up on the monitor, he worked it over with his mouse pad, isolating the symbol from the splotchy underlying skin.

  He submitted the image as a search key within a classified online database to which he enjoyed unfettered access. The search engine took forty seconds to complete its hunt and delivered three hits. For each, the database software delivered a photo of the symbol it had found along with a body of text explaining its significance.

  The first match was in fact an ankh, explained as the ancient Egyptian symbol for life. The passage mentioned alternate names: Ansate cross, Cross of life. Pulling down some of the Maker’s Mark, Cooper noted that the ankh’s horizontal bar was much higher than the tattoo’s. The second and third matches, similar but still not identical to the tattoo, each contained the same description: “A symbol commonly used by practitioners of religious ceremonies involving ancestor worship and communication with animistic deities, e.g., voodoo.” A more general explanation of voodoo followed, which Cooper had no need for. Live in the Caribbean long enough, and you saw your share of it.You also learned pretty quick that nonpracticing West Indians were generally superstitious enough to steer well clear of black magic and its practitioners. Hell, he thought, maybe Roy had made a savvy move after all: run across a voodoo tattoo on a body washed up on the beach and I’d dump it off on somebody like me too.

  Roy passing the buck, though, didn’t do anything for the body on the beach, or its ghost either. Fucking kid dies a horrible death, and some two-bit local chief of police arranges to send him straight to the crematorium-no murder case, no investigation, nobody meting out justice-hell, nobody giving a flying leap.

  Eh, Cooper, dat you, mon? It’s me, your old buddy Cap’n Roy. We down the Marine Base way. Come by ’bout an hour and help me fuck over this poor bastard now that he done died.

  You’re all I got, you washed-up old fuck.

  Cooper jumped as three loud bangs sounded through his bungalow. The bangs were followed by a dull thump, then footsteps retreating down the stairs.

  Deciding, after due consideration, he was in no mood to chase Ronnie through the garden with the Louisville Slugger, he rose, opened the door, retrieved the wax-paper-encased ham sandwich from the floor of his porch, and more or less inhaled it while standing in the doorway.

  If he had to, he could do some digging. Nose around some of Puerto Rico’s botánicas, find somebody specializing in voodoo tatts-somebody who could tell him where somebody wearing this one might have hung out. He had a few people on his list who lived in that world; in fact there was a certain San Juan detective who might just do, a guy at least two or three notches further along than Roy on the corruption scale. Then again, Cooper didn’t like Puerto Rico all that much. And he liked the other voodoo hotbeds, Haiti and Jamaica, even less-life at Conch Bay suited him just fine.

  He closed the PowerBook, polished off the bourbon, and took a lukewarm shower under the stars on the back porch. The sex-starved housewives down at the bar always preferred it if you started the conversation smelling like a rose.

  Ordinarily, he would see the same three dreams: a trilogy. One would always follow the next, so that over the course of every few nights, he would get the whole story. Deviation did not occur.

  On the nights they came, he would fall asleep for two or three minutes, only to wake up shivering in a cold sweat. Getting the feeling that if he moved an inch, the draft of cold air against his skin would induce frostbite. Get out of bed, change his shirt, use a different pillow, then soak them both again over the course of another ten, fifteen rotations. He endured a sense of sheer exhaustion-it seemed the most difficult, irrational task to turn on a light or read a book…and always there was the determination to get back to sleep. In the routine, he found comfort. He knew what to expect; he knew what was coming.

  Tonight’s dream began on schedule, episode one of the trilogy, the story beginning again after the sixteen thousandth playback of episode three. He’d seen the latest incarnation of the concluding installment maybe two nights before Roy had called him about the body on the beach.

  There was darkness-black night, lasting for days on end. And there were scents-dank, musky, rich odors, the scents of mold, soil, mildew, rot, and the coagulating secretions of his own body. He heard the sound of a deadbolt opening, deafening after weeks of silence. He reached out, tried to grasp the massive door handle to hold the door closed, but they came in anyway and grabbed him. They moved him along; he was walking, but not easily, an utter lack of strength in his legs. There was light, but it was dim, like the vanishing light of the moon’s crescent in the last moments before a lunar eclipse-lunar eclipse, Cooper thought, as he remembered always thinking. Of course, he was wearing the blindfold. Light was seeping in around its edges.

  He found himself in a chair with no seat, tied to the frame, bound, ass poking through the seat hole, the rest of him dangling, vulnerable. In burning streaks against his naked ass, they whipped him. They whipped him as they always did. He heard the things they said as the stripes of agony writhed up through him-This is for the manhood of your country…We’ll take America’s cock-the commentary delivered in the comical accent, Cooper thinking every time of Speedy Gonzales. He felt pain in its purest form as the whip strafed him, every strike sending a rush of red through his head. The red bled into his vision, it bled everywhere, until there was no distinction between senses, the pain reaching first to extreme peaks, then descending gradually into comfort as he fell into a comatose state, in there dancing with death.

  Another dark time came. Days, weeks, longer, shorter, sleeping and waking blurred. A circuit of horrors: solitude, darkness, light, torture, solitude. And occasionally a serving of food, slipped through a rectangular hole in the door before the opening was slammed shut again. This, he knew, was where he would awaken, lift the blindfold, and, before eating his single, rock-hard tortilla, vow quietly to himself that the next time they came for the whipping, he would kill them all.

  And so he lifted the blindfold, a single line of light at the base of the door illuminating the tortilla lying on the floor. To Cooper, it seemed too bright. He didn’t remember it this way. He tried to speak, to utter his vow, but nothing came from his lips. They failed to move. He couldn’t speak.

  The light beneath the door brightened, bathing him in its soft glow. He felt a sudden pang of fear. Unsure how to proceed, he crawled painfully to the tortilla, snatched it, began eating. Chunks fell from his mouth as he ate. In desperate need of the calories, he reached for the pieces he had missed-

  And saw the burns on his torso. Whitish, waterlogged sores, covering him-stark, swollen mushrooms embedded in his raven skin. His sinewy legs were fractured below the knee, the ankles snapped grotesquely-

  Cooper opened his eyes.

  The ceiling fan in his bungalow spun lazily. A drizzle tapped the metal roof; he heard a gull caw from the garden. He could still taste the woman he’d brought back from the bar-fruity cocktails, cocoa butter, salt from the sea, the poisonous tang of cigarette smoke on her breath. She’d been twenty, thirty pounds overweight, and Cooper hadn’t minded at all.

  Maybe that ghost had been talking to Roy, Cooper thought, and that’s why Roy had called. Eh, Cooper, dat you, mon? There something here I thinking you maybe wanna see. Leaving out the other part: This dead bastard, he been talkin’ to me, found him on the beach and can’t get him out of my head. I thinking maybe we pass him onto you, mon.

  Ris
ing to find a pair of shorts, he reflected that it may have taken the entire eighteen years of his stay, but now he could chalk it up as official: he was a superstitious West Indian just like the rest, a belonger now, somebody who knew enough about the way things happened ’round here to understand you were better off following the signs if you could read ’em.

  To know that he was better off listening when some poor dead bastard happened to be talkin’ to him.

  There something here, that screeching ghost of a poor dead bastard telling him again, I thinking you maybe wanna see, mon.

  5

  Traveling light, only a single bag strapped over her shoulder, Julie Laramie came through the sliding glass doors of the United baggage claim at O’Hare trying not to appear as though she were looking for somebody. She wondered how she would look to him; whether she’d look the same, or older, or possibly better. This morning she’d pretended she wasn’t carefully picking out the jeans, the thin V-neck cashmere sweater, the leather jacket to wear over the sweater, the Doc Martens-she liked the boots because they matched the leather jacket and made her legs look thinner than they were. Laramie decided he would think she looked better. Why wouldn’t he? She did.

  Coming out onto the sidewalk, it occurred to her that what she was doing was ridiculous. She could have called anybody-pick any historian out of the phone book, or maybe just walk across the street to the nearest Beltway think tank, in order to get her questions answered. But as she’d told herself before dialing up Eddie Rothgeb, she wasn’t permitted to show classified documents to such people. Of course she wasn’t permitted to show them to Eddie Rothgeb either, but to Laramie, Eddie would always qualify as the exception, since she wouldn’t even have her job if it hadn’t been for him. Still, coming here involved other perils, and perhaps she should have considered them.