Painkiller

24

One day a nineteen-year-old named Travis Malloy was a private in the U.S. Navy; the next day he wasn’t. It had been as simple as that.

With the ship leaving Kingston after his three days of leave, Malloy just didn’t get back on. He didn’t have a choice: get back on and they’d have busted him, Malloy getting word they’d found him out. And who cared? Malloy didn’t need the navy anyway, the whole deal a sausage fest, thousands of homos sleeping side by side in bunks a regular guy like Malloy wouldn’t even share with a woman.

Now he could share his bed with any woman he pleased.

Travis Malloy had strange, pale freckled skin and short, shockingly red hair. Technically, Malloy was of African-American descent, but aside from a slightly blunted nose and the thick texture of his hair, Malloy was an albino. He fit no single previously defined ethnic category.

Light-complected though he happened to be, Malloy preferred women with skin so dark it gleamed. Get a whore like that, and he’d ball her all night. Yeah, he could sure ball ’em all night, Malloy banging away like the girl was lifeless, which made sense, since by the time he had the girl in bed, she usually was. Malloy mostly asphyxiated them, though sometimes broke their necks, generally doing it as he pulled them through the doorway of whatever room he’d procured for the night-paying in cash to keep his identity a secret. Having performed this morbid act in nearly a dozen ports of call, Malloy figured somebody would eventually make him, so when he finally got word they’d caught on it didn’t surprise him at all. Malloy overheard some idle talk from a couple of the navy fags during leave in Jamaica and bolted immediately.

Kingston was his favorite city in the world anyway, a town overflowing with dark-skinned prostitutes, Malloy finding they were a dime a dozen here, about all Malloy was looking to pay, anyway. He could get all he wanted, pick hookers up everywhere he went-lost souls, wanderers, enough of them here that Malloy had to be careful not to kill too many, since he found he wanted to stay. He met one girl, just the kind he wanted, her mind blown to kingdom come from so much weed Malloy got high just sucking on her lips. She was into some sort of freaked-out religion, a form of voodoo. Initially, the only reason this mattered to Malloy was that she and her religious practices represented an easy way for him to score weed-some good shit in fact. He found the dope was a part of the religion. They smoked it during the ceremonies.

During the time he was balling the voodoo girl, Malloy did pick-up day labor to pay the bills, using a fake name so the navy wouldn’t send the marines after his AWOL ass. He found plenty of jobs, Malloy discovering that labor laws weren’t quite as stringent in Jamaica as in the States; he was, however, getting a little tired of the day-to-day grind, waiting around before the crack of dawn, hoping the labor truck would cruise by with enough empty seats for him to squeeze in. Get work, and you had enough money for drugs and parties; get passed over, and you starved.

From this desperation was born in Travis Malloy an idea, an entrepreneurial scheme that occurred to him mainly because he misunderstood something at work.

Malloy overheard his foreman saying something about the good old days of slavery, a time when you could buy your labor and the labor wouldn’t talk back. The foreman had been telling a joke, his way of complaining about some local hooligans who were trying to form a labor syndicate, but to Malloy the man’s comment contained a different and deeper meaning.

That night his voodoo girl took him to one of her parties. It was a wild one this time, crazy, the whole deal taking place in a vacant warehouse. The thing Malloy noticed was a group of guys, skin dark as asphalt like his girl-maybe six or seven of them, guys so doped up they were comatose the whole time he was there. They stood in corners, sometimes swaying to the music but never doing anything more than that.

It gave him one hell of an idea.

Malloy suckered three of them, one by one, into coming outside. He gave each a line-something about the sweet pussy he could arrange for them in the joint next door-and once outside, he bound, gagged, and shoved each of them into the back of his van. He stopped at three-any more than that, and even the stoners at the party would have noticed these losers missing. Plus, three bodies were all he could fit into his van without stacking them. He figured three would be plenty anyway.

The next morning he drove up to the quarry where he’d been working and found the foreman he’d overheard the day before. He pulled the foreman aside.

“I heard you talking about slavery yesterday,” he said.

The foreman, a thick-limbed West Indian with a gut like Santa Claus, looked Travis Malloy up and down.

“What about it?” he said.

Malloy asked, “Ain’t you the man does all the hiring here?”

“Most of it.”

“What about some shit needs doing, nobody needs to know about it? Anybody ever want you to find people can do that kind of work?”

After a moment, the foreman said, “Maybe.”

Malloy said, “Probably something you might need, you got a job like that you need to fill, is disposable labor. The kind you can use up and throw out when you’re finished.”

The foreman stared at this strange-looking, light-skinned, vaguely African-American freak with the short-cropped red hair.

Malloy said, “If you’re interested, I got some contacts could hook you up with somebody provides that kind of labor pretty cheap.”

After another short while the foreman said, “I’ll think about it.”

Malloy told the fat-ass foreman to have somebody call him. Scribbling his beeper number on a brown paper lunch sack and handing it to the man.

The acquisition of the three stoners presented a small problem: it kept Malloy apart from his voodoo girl while he waited it out. He had to keep the three guys tied up in his house, couldn’t risk bringing the girl by and having her find out. Lucky for Malloy, who couldn’t afford to feed his captives, the wait only lasted a day and a half. The page came directly from the foreman, who asked whether Malloy would be able to come and meet with the foreman’s associates, so they could discuss that concept of his, what did he call it?

Malloy said, “Disposable labor’s what I called it,” and agreed to meet.

He had to go out to a rural park in the middle of the night, but he took a gamble and brought his three captives along in the van. This allowed him to close the deal on the spot-no questions asked, hand over the trio of starving drug addicts for two-fifty cash, more money than Malloy could have made working in the quarry for five or six weeks.

A few months later, about the time his finances were running low again-Malloy thinking about going back out to wait for the day-labor truck-he got another page. It was a new voice, not the foreman and not the people the foreman had brought him to. The voice asked whether he had access to any more of the sort of labor he’d provided to an acquaintance of his. Malloy said that he did and asked how many they were talking here. The voice said two, or maybe three. Malloy thought for a moment before saying, “Going rate’s five hundred a head.”

The voice told him that wouldn’t be a problem.

Malloy had some difficulty this time, had to cruise the hard-core party scene for a few days before he found some suitable addicts. He even had to work the Kingston homo scene to get his third man, but his navy days gave him some experience with that, so he got it together and delivered the goods just the same. Five hundred bucks a head, cash, and Malloy was fucking loaded.

As word got around there was a serial killer preying on homosexual users in the Kingston underground party circuit, it wasn’t long before demand had outstripped his basic supply. A few calls from such sources as the contractors of a South American airport expansion, some shadowy weapons manufacturers, and a pair of rogue strip-mining investors made it clear to Malloy how much fucked-up shit was going down. He had raised his price to fifteen hundred a head by the time his girl taught him more about the voodoo ceremonies, telling him some of the traditions, including the one in which local medicine men drugged up the town retards, rattled off some mumbo jumbo, and turned them into zombies. Fucking real-life zombies, some in Jamaica, a hell of a lot more up in Haiti. Malloy was a businessman, and he saw in this new product source an opportunity to lower his risk, accountability, and cost. The logic was pretty simple: find some people other people thought were already dead, and you had yourself some truly disposable labor.

Malloy soon had to off the voodoo girl, figuring she’d have too much on him if he didn’t, but once she was out of the picture, Malloy got back into a rotation of dark-skinned hookers, fresh ones, boning ’em all night like he used to-putting some of his ingeniously earned money to use. In fact, he was taking care of a frail one, bony, rocking her from behind in something like his fourth hour, when dawn broke one morning outside the rental house he kept near Belle Acres, one of the rare middle-class neighborhoods in Kingston.

Parked discreetly on the street in front of Malloy’s house was a green Ford Taurus. Since Malloy couldn’t see the car while balling his girlfriend inside the house, he obviously couldn’t see the man inside the car, either; seated behind the wheel of the Taurus was a gruff, deeply tanned American with bloodshot eyes and a few days’ stubble.

Bored out of his skull and half asleep, Cooper wondered when the hell he would see something that would indicate what the sexual dynamo inside the house did for a living, and why a witch doctor in the Haitian badlands would have kept this freak’s pager number on a blank business card behind his desk.

The Verizon account inquiry CIA made through the company’s USVI-based regional headquarters had kicked back a name and billing address. The name on the account was James Beam, which joke Cooper appreciated immediately; the address turned out to be only that, matching a shit-hole local equivalent of a Mail Boxes, Etc. store. Cooper had first parked his Taurus near the store, begrudgingly arriving by way of American Eagle to San Juan and then American, no Eagle, on to Kingston. He had no idea what he was looking for, but hadn’t partaken of the utter boredom of a good old-fashioned stakeout in years. It hadn’t seemed so bad, Cooper sitting on the Conch Bay beach thinking about doing it, but after seventy-two hours of observing box number nineteen through the facility’s dirt-spattered window, chubbing up on a variety of Blimpie sandwiches while planted in the driver’s seat of the Taurus, he began to think that there might be a better way of going about this. Pulling around the corner every four or five hours to take a leak in the alley behind a grocery store, heading downtown to pass out in a room at the Crowne Plaza when the mail center’s closing time came around, only to start the routine from the beginning again.

He tried to avoid thinking about Marcel S. and Cap’n Roy while he sat in the car, working at different methods of throwing up a mind block when thoughts of them entered his head. One way that worked, he found, was to allow his mind to wander northward. To Langley, or at least to some suburb nearby.

To wherever it was that Julie Laramie lived.

He kept thinking about the way she’d spoken to him. She’d carefully and consistently taken a moment to think about anything she said before saying it, Laramie putting the extra time she bought into thinking about what to say or what not to say, maybe into calculating the reason he’d called her with his annoying probe in the first place. She’d handled the first call effectively, considering he’d caught her in the Professor Eddie mistake-well enough to tell him to go fuck himself, at least in her own way. Lot of people, Cooper thought, are coming up with highly creative ways to tell me to fuck off.

It’s funny, he thought: I spent the whole call trying to get under her skin, and in the end, she’s the one who burrowed under mine.

Early in the seventy-third hour of his stakeout of the mail joint, Cooper got his first look at Barry the witch doctor’s distributor of the undead. The guy who opened box nineteen was one of the strangest-looking human beings Cooper had ever seen-there was no doubt he was African-American somewhere back in the family tree, but his lunar skin and tiki-torch hair made for a brutal departure from that side of his family. To get a grasp on what he was looking at, Cooper decided he would have to make up a new racial-profiling term and called the man a redheaded albino black.

Cooper had pulled into traffic behind the guy’s sputtering Mitsubishi minivan and followed him home; a little later he followed him to a bar with an address on a particularly sleazy avenue called the Half Way Tree Road. Later still, Cooper followed ol’ Jim Beam-along with the dark-skinned girl he’d picked up at the bar-back to Jim’s house. The home was a two-bedroom job on a decent street, Jim doing all right for himself renting here-assuming he was renting, which Cooper figured he probably was.

Camped outside Jim’s place, Cooper’s knees were in danger of catching frostbite, so cold was the air-conditioning flow from the vents beneath the dash. The A/C was uneven, so that while his knees were turning blue, sweat ran in a constant stream down his neck, back, and ass. The subject of his stakeout didn’t emerge from the house for sixteen hours following the time he’d entered it with his dark-skinned date, though two events did occur during that time. Around 6 A.M., immediately following the Caribbean’s rapidly brightening dawn, a taxi crawled up the street, stopped in front of the albino’s house, and parked until the girl came out and got in. The cab drove off. Later, just after four, Cooper burning up the engine in the Taurus to keep the air-conditioning going, a young Jamaican arrived in a beat-up four-door Civic-the car reminding Cooper of Manny’s SJPD-issue detective mobile.

The visitor wore a shiny Adidas sweat suit, going with the full outfit even in the ninety-degree heat. He cool-walked it to the albino’s front door, and then they were pretty obvious about it: Jim answered the door, came out on the porch, handed the Jamaican some money, and the Jamaican handed Jim a bag of weed. Neither of them looked around or otherwise displayed any cause for concern, just standing out there on the porch doing a drug deal.

There, Cooper thought-that, in a nutshell, is what the Caribbean is all about.

The Jamaican cool-walked it back to his Honda and zipped off down the street. After dark, around nine, the albino started the circuit all over again, Cooper pulling out to follow the Mitsubishi minivan, actually moving some air through the Ford’s radiator for a change, following him to the bar, where the albino came out with the same dark-skinned girl and took her home with him again. Cooper took the opportunity to change clothes, procure more Blimpie sandwiches, relieve himself somewhere besides the tree at the end of the block, and refill the fluids in the Ford. He didn’t have too much faith in the car, its thermometer rising one notch closer to the red zone each day he spent in the afternoon heat.

For four days running, the albino followed this routine, almost to the minute. The lone deviation was that the dope supplier came every other day, which was still pretty frequent, given the hefty size of the Baggies the albino was buying from him.

Without some indication as to how the redheaded albino black worked, if at all, with Barry the Haitian witch doctor, Cooper didn’t know how long he could sit out on this fucking street watching some freak get off and get high. On the fifth day of his surveillance of Jim Beam’s home-presented with no sign of a break in the routine-Cooper gave up on his current angle and decided to try out one of the two leads he’d ingeniously unearthed from the seat of his rental car.