Painkiller

33

When Cooper’s eyes opened in his bungalow, he did not feel as though one of his dreams had awakened him. Ordinarily he felt that way-he would burst awake sucking wind, soaked in sweat, gasping for oxygen after drowning in the river, or grasping at the locked dungeon door. Tonight, though, there was no such desperation. One moment he had been lost in the void of drunken slumber; in the next, he was awake, silent, and sober.

It might have been the sound of a twig, broken unnaturally; possibly it was a series of actions-breathing, walking, moving-audible only when performed by heavy mammals or the occasional oversize reptile. Whatever it was that had awakened him, it was not organic to the island, to the resort, or, for that matter, to life as he had lived it for what would soon approach two decades.

In a place even Ronnie could not find, Cooper kept something in addition to the Louisville Slugger. He had not used it once during his time in the Caribbean, but tonight, he knew, would be different. He found and withdrew the TEC-9 assault pistol from its hiding place and, checking over his senses, found himself to be strangely sober. It was as though he hadn’t tasted an alcoholic beverage in years, when in fact he had been blistering drunk when he’d passed out for the night a mere couple hours back.

He left his bungalow through a gate attached to the outdoor shower, neither noticing nor caring that he was stark naked as he did it.

Then Cooper was out in the night.

Shreds of moonlight allowed him to identify the black-clad shapes, hard shadows against the more inconsistent lines made by the palm fronds, the shadows creeping along the side of his bungalow. They were headed for his porch.

Wraiths, he thought. Always wraiths.

Without sound, in no rush, he strolled casually along the stones of the garden path and, with a cap-gun set of cracking spits, tagged two of the three wraiths with unerring head shots, reflexively averting the potential complications of body armor.

Wraith number three contorted his shadow into a turn-and-shoot motion and got a bullet headed in Cooper’s direction. Despite the wraith’s speed, his shot only lashed a burning stripe of pain across Cooper’s right shoulder. Otherwise it failed to affect the more deliberately aimed round from Cooper’s gun, and then there were no more wraiths, and in their place only unseen lumps in the unlit garden.

Cooper grabbed at his right shoulder and found his arm to be functioning. He continued his self-check, finding his entire body, notwithstanding the shoulder, remained in whatever moderately good health in which it had found itself prior to the incident. Then he took another form of inventory, realizing, among other things, that he now stood nude in the garden, and that the sound of gunfire must already be delivering every last one of the club’s occupants for a look-see. He slipped into his bungalow through the back, redeposited the gun in its hole, pulled on some Adidas shorts and the Tevas, found a bandage and some athletic tape, strapped the bandage over the shoulder wound, covered the dressing with a T-shirt, found his sat phone, and went back out by way of the porch.

As Cooper had known he’d be, Ronnie was already waiting for him on the path below the stairs. He came down and they talked for a minute, Cooper making some suggestions on what to tell the guests who would probably be swarming the bungalow in seconds.

Once they’d agreed on what Ronnie should tell them, Cooper noticed Dottie standing quietly on the path a few yards back from his porch, arms folded across her breasts, which, unfortunately, he wouldn’t have been able to see anyway, since she seemed to be wearing a tank top. She also seemed to be wearing a bikini bottom, or maybe just panties-either way, the Dottie-spotting, coinciding as it did with Ronnie’s zippy arrival, confirmed his suspicion. She’d been in the putz’s room when the firecrackers had gone off.

“Oh, look,” Cooper said, “Dottie.”

Ronnie shrugged and turned to head off the resort’s guests at the pass.

From the confines of bungalow nine, Cooper dialed Cap’n Roy’s home number with his sat phone.

“Yeah, mon,” Roy muttered.

“Roy,” Cooper said, starting right in, “I’ve got three dead commandos in the garden outside my room.”

It took a minute, but then Roy said, “How they get there?”

“I haven’t really thought it through, but I feel pretty safe making the wild guess they came to see me after I talked to the wrong person, or took a look around the wrong place, while working in my capacity as detective-for-the-dead.”

“What you talkin’ ’bout, mon?”

“What I’m talking about is, I’ve been asking around about that twice-dead zombie from your Marine Base beach,” Cooper said. “I assume you knew our boy was a zombie before handing him over to your unsuspecting friend the spook, by the way. His name, in case you wondered, was Marcel. Marcel S.”

Roy didn’t say anything for a while. When he did, he had that clarity in his voice that Cooper took to mean he’d sat up in bed, maybe even rolled his feet off the edge of the mattress and planted them on the floor while he thought things through.

“That right?” Roy said. “Marcel?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where he from, then? You know that too?”

“Haiti,” Cooper said. “Kid was also engaged when he died. Additional fun fact.”

Roy cluck-clucked with his tongue. Cooper envisioned him shaking his head while he did it-What a shame, Roy thinking over there in Road Town, dat poor fella, then.

“Anyway,” Cooper said, “reason for the call, Roy, is one, to inform the authorities that I’ve just shot and killed three individuals who, in seeking to off me in the peace and quiet of my bungalow, wore body armor and carried automatic weapons.”

“‘Off you,’ eh?” Roy said. “And how ’bout two?”

“Thought you’d never ask. Mainly I wanted to see what you thought about the idea of my stuffing these boys into some SCUBA bags, dragging them out to my Apache, and paying an early morning call on that pair of makos and their barracuda pals in Eastman’s Cove.”

Cooper waited. It didn’t take long.

“Hungry sharks,” Roy said, “be a menace to us islanders.”

Cooper held on for any further pronouncement; receiving none, he broke the connection.

Cooper returned from Eastman’s Cove just before dawn. Heading inside, he retrieved a pinkie-thick joint from the drawer of his reading table, fired it up, and mourned the passing of the three commandos in a more mellow state of mind from one of the chairs on his porch.

Pondering their connection to his recent adventures, he concluded, about two-thirds of the way through the blunt, that since it couldn’t be Jimbo, couldn’t be Barry the witch doctor, and probably wasn’t within the means of either the Cat in the Hat or the parrot-voiced quack from Hôpital H. L. Dantier, it was almost undoubtedly somebody on that fucking island.

The island hosting the convention of Communist dictators, who must, he decided, have appreciated his visit to such a degree that they’d sent him the thoughtful gift of the three somewhat ineffective G.I. Joe impersonators.

While he smoked, Cooper waited patiently for his muscles to calm. The part of his dispatching of the commandos that he didn’t particularly want to acknowledge was that his muscles-particularly one of his quadriceps, just above his right knee-had been trembling since the bullet nipped him. Been a while, he supposed, since I’ve been shot-not, however, long enough for my nerves to be shot too.

He tried to focus on something else. He could hear the water breaking against the reef in the distance; there was a warm breeze that brought with it the smell of the sea, and palm trees, and a flower he couldn’t place.

When his muscles firmed up he killed the joint, ducked inside, and went back to sleep.