Painkiller Read online

  When he woke up, Cooper thought about that. He had always wondered how nuclear bombs were set off. Whether somebody working on a military base in Kansas could somehow make a mistake with a cigarette and wipe out half the country in the process. He called for and downed another painkiller, then read that exposure to non-weapons-grade U-238/U-235 had been documented to cause “extreme radiation sickness associated with direct and/or invasive contact, occurring during industrial accidents at nuclear power plants and, in fewer cases, reactor meltdowns aboard nuclear-powered submarines.” The intel on personnel exposed to submarine reactor melt-downs was difficult to come by, the report said, since most such meltdowns resulted in an imploded submarine and an all-hands-lost scenario. Still, the report contained photos of a pair of bodies recovered from just such an incident. The victims pictured displayed burn wounds similar to those on the body from the beach.

  Cooper tossed the DI report on the white sand of the Conch Bay beach and sat upright in the chair. He thought about what it might feel like, eating bouga toad and puffer venom, being buried alive, winding up sometime later in a nuclear power plant or submarine and surviving an otherwise fatal meltdown long enough to be shot multiple times in the back while leaping from a tall building and breaking every bone in your legs-while loaded up on heroin. Go for a swim, wash up on a jetty, get pawned off on a spiritually bankrupt alcoholic with a gambling problem, only to be examined by a murderous, fugitive breast-implant surgeon. Cooper figuring by now that Eugene had probably ordered the body incinerated, that poor bastard’s journey concluding in a furnace one story beneath the streets of Charlotte Amalie-radiation going up the chimney and into the breeze. At least this time, he thought, no voudoun bokor’s going to pull the guy from the grave and put him back on the Haitian black-magic hamster wheel.

  He thought that it wasn’t too much of a stretch to put himself into this kid’s head. His Central American friends might not have fed him any coup poudre potions, but he’d known a state of being about as close to hell as he figured life allowed, and didn’t find being passed off as dead to the general public an entirely alien concept.

  He and I share something, Cooper thought: not a fucking soul seems to have given two shits about either of us.

  My problem, he thought, is that I’ve exiled myself to this island, where I’ve got nothing better to do, or too much better to do, or too much fucking time on my hands to do all the things that are better to do, since I know I’ll get around to doing them all sooner or later. He couldn’t think of any other reason a rational human being would do anything more in the case of the twice-dead zombie from Roy’s beach-nothing besides tossing the ninety-seven-page DI report in the sack of garbage Ronnie collected daily from the club’s wastebaskets, and going for a swim. Problem with doing that, he thought, is that the fucking ghost that Roy pawned off on me will wind up sticking around. He’ll keep me from wreck-diving, bodysurfing, tanning, eating, boozing, and toking my way through the pain from this festering wound of mine, a pain I’ll never kill-best I can do is medicate it, so the goddamn medication had better work.

  And thanks to Roy Gillespie and his voodoo handoff, I’m getting no relief.

  “Fuck,” he said, pulled off his tank top, kicked away the Tevas, and went for a swim.

  11

  Knowing not a single decent combination of commercial flights existed for the Tortola-to-Haiti route, Cooper grudgingly pulled into Port-au-Prince aboard his Apache, navigating the squalor of the port at five knots. Sure, he mused, stick to the cruise ship docks, the container port, and it looked like any other Caribbean bay, but shoot for a slot to moor a private boat and you’d discover the truth: pick the wrong spot and the Apache would be hauling coke to Dade County within the hour.

  He searched for the U.S. Coast Guard pier, which he knew to be in the general vicinity of the container docks, which themselves hadn’t been used in years. The pier wasn’t labeled, so it took him almost half an hour to find it. When he did, he coasted in sideways, needing no engine-thrust adjustments following his final throttle kick.

  In the main building, he tried out some papers that said he was a Department of Homeland Security liaison working for the DEA. Throw enough agencies into the mix, he found, and you generated enough confusion or fear to get you in just about anywhere. He told the Coast Guard officer he was here to meet with a consular officer at Government House; the officer nodded at the papers and waved him through. Cooper figured he looked to the officer exactly the way the man expected a DEA man would-white polo shirt, worn blue jeans, blank, navy blue baseball cap. Or, he thought, maybe the guy lets anybody in who’s stupid enough to come here.

  He poked around for Port-au-Prince’s version of a cab-an ordinary car, a publique, belonging to anyone, with the qualifying feature of a red ribbon dangling from the rearview mirror. Two blocks from the dock, he nabbed a Datsun minivan. He worked at ignoring the miserable conditions along the fifteen-minute ride through the city.

  H. L. Dantier General Hospital didn’t resemble any hospital Cooper recalled seeing: neither its stucco exterior or red-tile roof appeared to have been washed in the past ten years, and what might once have been called landscaping had evolved to unruly jungle. Cooper had a fleeting thought that Eugene Little would feel right at home here.

  On the second floor, a receptionist asked him to be seated in an adjoining waiting room until a woman dressed approximately like a nurse came out to get him. Cooper couldn’t place it, but there was something missing from her outfit: maybe it was the belt, or the shoes, but she looked incomplete, like an actress in a play afflicted by a poorly stocked wardrobe department. She brought him to a room that looked similarly incomplete relative to any doctor’s offices he remembered visiting. Not that he’d been to any in almost twenty years.

  After Cooper waited in the empty office for a little longer than twenty minutes, Dr. Reynold Benoit entered, Cooper thinking maybe he’d come from the restroom, the way the man held a rolled-up newspaper in his fist. Benoit ran about Roy’s height; his skin was a rich ebony, and he wore eyeglasses with the wire frame visible only at the top of the lens, the kind Cooper had seen nowhere else except on Robert Redford in 3 Days of the Condor.

  “How you do, mon ami,” Benoit said in a tinny, high-pitched voice that was alarmingly shrill. “As I told you on the phone, I’m here takin’ this meeting, but you coming from Monsieur Petit-huit, or ‘Ocholito’ as he call himself him now in PR,” he said, “that don’t mean much. Not to me. Not anymore.”

  “Our boy Little-eight,” Cooper said, “tells me you’re an authority on something I’m interested in finding out about. So I don’t really care what he means to you. I care more about you.”

  “One more thing, since we chattin’ frank,” Benoit said. “Maybe Petithuit tell you, peut-être pas, but what I know don’t come free.”

  Thinking his twice-dead zombie client was beginning to eat into his self-imposed monthly expense account allocation, Cooper handed Benoit an envelope holding three one-hundred-dollar bills. He’d figured on doing it the classy way, hide the money in an envelope-since he was, after all, visiting a hospital-but Benoit took it, tore the envelope open, and shamelessly counted the money a few inches in front of his face. He nodded and shrugged, unimpressed-but, Cooper thought, not quite to where the good doctor would think to kick him out. Perfect: he hadn’t spent more than he needed to.

  Benoit folded the money into a neat rectangle and slipped it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

  “What you want?”

  Cooper withdrew Eugene’s snapshot of the brand from the pocket of his jeans and flipped it like a Frisbee onto Benoit’s desk. Benoit peered at the picture when it landed but didn’t reach for it.

  “Amazing thing,” Cooper said. “Cousin of mine dropped dead at a barbecue a couple years back. Everybody from both sides of the family attended the funeral. Watched his casket drop six feet down. It was a nice service.”

  Benoit looked at Cooper through the Robert
Redford frames.

  “Turns out,” Cooper said, “couple weeks back, this same cousin of mine washed up on a beach looking like he’d lived a couple hard years since we saw him at the barbecue. Imagine that-somebody getting pulled out of his grave, brought back to life, used as some kind of drugged-up slave, then put out of his misery once he’s outlived his usefulness.”

  Benoit picked up the picture and tossed it to Cooper’s side of the desk. “Unless your family known for interracial marriage,” he said, “you as full of shit as Petit-huit.”

  “Maybe so,” Cooper said, “but I know from that brand that somebody here in the great land of Hispaniola fed my poor cousin some coup poudre, waited, hell, I don’t know, maybe a few days, shot him up with conconbre zombi, and put him to work. Might have put him to work in a nuclear submarine too, but that’s another story.”

  “Mon ami,” Benoit said, “don’t take this personally, but you one crazy motherfucker.”

  Cooper took the picture back.

  “You saw the brand?”

  Benoit looked at him. Taking his time.

  “Oui,” he said. “Je l’ai vu.”

  “Who uses it?”

  Benoit leaned back in his seat and shrugged. “You know as much as you tryin’ to make me think you know,” he said, “then I don’t need to be tellin’ you the wrong people hear I’m the one spilling the beans, there be more than three hundred dollars to be paid.”

  “Eternal damnation,” Cooper said, “staved off only by the periodic sacrifice of live chickens?”

  “Answer to the question you fishin’ for is the Bizango sect of the Petro voudoun. Our meeting now be overwith.”

  Benoit stood, extending his hand. Cooper rose and took it but clasped the doctor’s palm in a vice grip when the man tried to let go.

  “Where do you suppose one could run across a Bizango bokor?” he said.

  Benoit fought a wince then went with the flow, Cooper admiring the savvy with which Benoit pretended he had wanted all along to continue shaking.

  “Valley behind the hills east of Pignon,” he said. “Maybe this side of the DR, maybe not. Village called La Vallée des Morts.”

  Cooper clamped on. “How do I get there?”

  “Easy.”

  “Fire away.”

  “W-w-w,” Benoit said, “dot-Mapquest-dot-com.”

  Cooper smiled tightly, gave Benoit his hand back, and, working his way out of the H. L. Dantier General Hospital, admired the impressive method by which Benoit had told him to go fuck himself.

  He would actually have taken Benoit’s dot-com advice had he brought his laptop along for the ride. There had, however, been no reason to bring it, considering he knew all but Port-au-Prince to lack even the hint of a cellular signal, and microwave transmissions compatible with Cooper’s wireless modem to be entirely absent, islandwide. He detested logging on to the Internet with standard dial-up connections-waiting endlessly for a mechanical device to respond to commands was contrary to his character-and so he found a library.

  Working off a recommendation from the cabbie who retrieved him from the hospital a mere hour after his call, he found a place that resembled an American library in the same way Benoit’s hospital matched an American medical center. Even so, Pignon wasn’t tough to pinpoint on the maps the place kept in stock: it looked to him to be five or six hours north of Port-au-Prince by way of a highway called Route 3. Cooper saw that with the exception of a single dotted line-the border with the DR-none of the maps provided by the Rastafarian working the back room charted anything for a forty-mile stretch east from Pignon, on either side of the border. The north-central plateau, as the maps told him the place was called, appeared to deserve nothing more than blank paper on the otherwise detailed drawings. There was one notable exception to this: on the smallest map he was given, a lone French word had been scribbled across the plateau.

  Translating loosely, Cooper took the word to mean “badlands.”

  Cooper strolled around the corner from the library, took about ten minutes to find what he was looking for, knocked on a door, slipped the woman who answered a few words in his best Haitian Creole, flashed her 250 bucks in twenties and fifties, and with that amount, procured the rusted, lime green ’74 Chevy pickup she and the family kept parked out front. He could hear the whoops and wails of capitalist glee through the missing passenger-side window as he leaned into a throttle lag you could count in geologic time, the dying engine block coughing as it started out but gaining momentum as it went, Cooper mashing the pedal to the floor.

  He headed back into the city and found an open-air bazaar that, from all appearances, functioned as the local equivalent of a Wal-Mart. He maxed out a plastic bag with American candy bars, bottled water, local rum, a blanket and pillow, hiking boots, and a half-dozen T-shirts. It cost him eleven-fifty, Cooper figuring he was lucky the first merchant could break his twenty. For pit stop number two he hit the only gas station for miles, top-ping off the tank; despite encountering something of a language barrier with the station’s owner, he also managed to procure a short, battered oil drum he’d spotted beside the station’s twin mounds of trash bags. He filled the drum with fuel too, getting about thirty gallons in there, and secured it in the bed, utilizing, as a sort of poor man’s bungee cord, an extra plastic bag he’d procured at the bazaar.

  Thinking, Richard Petty I ain’t, Cooper floored it out of the parking lot, keeping at it until the Chevy reached the point at which its pace registered on the speedometer.

  12

  The Chevy’s radio actually worked, Cooper homing in on some spooky-funky Creole tracks with the radio’s bent tuner knob until the reception faded about an hour north of the city. Route 3 was the shittiest, most potholed road he’d ever driven. He remembered seeing sinkholes take out quarter-mile stretches of dirt roads in a documentary he’d caught on the Raid Galouises cross-continent racing competition, but outside of that, Route 3 took the crown.

  Further, he soon found you couldn’t let your attention wane while navigating Route 3.

  It happened twice. He saw nothing for eighty or ninety minutes-no man, no beast, no roadkill, just plain zero sign of life along an endless stretch of speed bumps. Then, suddenly, from around a blind turn, came a converted school bus. Bearing down on him like a bat out of hell, the bus hogged the whole fucking road, its driver playing chicken and ready to mow him down until Cooper skidded into the grass and took out a stretch of saplings to avoid the collision. For the second sneak attack, Cooper at least showed the good sense to careen off the highway the minute the bus came into sight.

  At dusk-losing faith in his ability to avert another transit bumrush-Cooper decided to heave to. He spied a suitable thicket and drove off-road straight into it, burrowing the Chevy into a bank of ferns. He turned off the tired old engine, threw on the emergency brake, got out, urinated, threw back two Snickers and half a bottle of rum, procured the blanket and pillow, lay back on the pickup’s red vinyl seat, and zonked-sleeping like a baby despite the incessant whine of mosquitoes nosediving for his flesh.

  He awoke a little before dawn, and after a lengthy struggle getting the Chevy back on the road, logged another five hours of uphill bus-dodging. The roadside foliage lightened, thinned, browned, then vanished altogether by the time he turned a corner and came into Pignon, a sudden rush of cheap housing and emaciated humanity on what had become a beige moonscape of multiple-drought-scarred dirt. Cooper made an immediate guess of forty grand-forty thousand starving Haitians in a shantytown assembled for less than one-tenth that many. He’d seen it before, but witnessing the open sewers, bloated stomachs, and families of twenty peering out at his Chevy from a single room was still a shock-and this, just on the main drag. He tried to recall some recent history to assign the blame-Baby Doc Duvalier’s brutal regime yanking a few billion on its way out? A bullshit American economic embargo? Didn’t matter-not to these people. Cooper thinking now that Eugene Little might have had it wrong: the body from Roy’s beach did
n’t have to be doing any hard labor to show signs of malnutrition and abuse.

  The kid just had to live here.

  He ditched the pickup in a roadside rut and kept the keys just in case, though he held little faith the truck would be there when he returned. Hell, he thought, I probably just made a donation-truck’ll be somebody’s home in a minute or two. Push it around the corner and you’ve got a roof ten times stronger than any I can see from here.

  A rainbow-hued bus-no doubt one of the Route 3 battle group, he thought-roared to a stop a half block up the road, dropped some people, took on more, and sped past him in a burst of dust and foul exhaust. The shantytown express-cheapest way to travel slum-to-slum, Cooper thinking the bus offered something in the order of a sixty percent chance of death by head-on collision per trip.

  He knew that people in a place like this would automatically tag him for one of maybe three classes of foreigner-missionary, doctor, or scientist. Anybody they’d seen before who looked like him had probably held such a role in society, so that was what they would assume him to be. Working with this notion in mind, Cooper hoofed it through the most crowded sections of the village, firing questions at anybody who didn’t look like they wanted to roll him for his shoes. He asked if anybody knew the way to La Vallée des Morts, where, he lamely attempted to explain, he’d been told a rare rhinoceros iguana had been seen. He’d come to study it-to verify its existence. It didn’t matter what he told any of them anyway, Cooper finding the Haitian Creole that had worked for him in Port-au-Prince didn’t do squat for him here. He was ready to toss the pointless ruse and start asking about Bizango zombie-branding techniques when he saw the answer to his troubles coming down a hill behind a set of lean-tos.