Painkiller

43

They reached the waters off the western shore of Mango Cay around four-thirty. Cooper anchored where the water was deep, outside the reef that ringed the lagoon. There was no way he could get his Apache in over the reef, but he spotted a narrow channel where the water looked to be three or four feet deep, Cooper thinking the two float planes he’d seen last time had probably used the channel to enter the lagoon after landing on the open water. He lowered the Apache’s skiff into the water, and once he had it there, climbed in and offered Laramie a hand. She took it with a shrug, Cooper reading the shrug as Laramie’s way of saying she didn’t need the help, but since she appreciated the gesture she’d do him the favor of accepting his assistance. He knew, however, that she could use the help, since Laramie, having refused his offer of Dramamine at sunrise, had turned green around seven, falling into a repeating thirty-minute cycle as Cooper drove them southeast: lean over the railing at the stern, try to find the horizon, lose track of it as the boat planed over a swell, heave whatever was left of the seafood Caesar salad over the edge, feel completely better, stand, return to the seat next to Cooper at the bow of the boat, feel it coming on again and retreat to the rail at the stern. Eventually she’d settled permanently into the copilot’s seat, resigned to her useless state, a glazed, sickly expression on her face. After a while of watching her sit there, Cooper had asked Laramie what she planned to do with whatever evidence they retrieved from Mango Cay.

“What do you mean?”

Laramie had to yell over the roar of the MerCruisers and the wind.

“Say we find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,” Cooper said, “and swipe one. As evidence. You’ll take it where?”

Laramie shrugged, then realized he couldn’t see the shrug given the motion of the boat. “Nobody in Washington seems to care what I have to say,” she said, “so maybe CNN will.”

Cooper steered.

“Since we don’t know what we’re going to find,” he said, “and don’t have much of an idea what to look for in the first place, I’m going to recommend that when we get there, we abide by my tried-and-true, supremely sophisticated espionage technique.”

“That,” she said, “being what?”

“Cause trouble, fuck with people, and generally operate as a pain in the ass.”

Laramie thought about that, then said, “See what shakes out?”

“See what shakes out.”

After a few minutes of nothing but the roar and the roll, Laramie had looked over at him.

“Nice strategy,” she yelled.

With Laramie now loaded into the skiff, Cooper fired up the forty-horse outboard and steered them into the channel. Coming around a bluff, he could see there was a man waiting for them on the beach. From the size of the man’s upper body, it appeared to Cooper that this was the Herculean individual he remembered seeing in one of his photographs, pretty much the only person in the set of photos, outside of the bartender and maid, he hadn’t been able to ID.

Cooper went as far as he could go with the engine. When he heard the outboard begin to clip the coral at the bottom of the shallow lagoon, he tilted it out of the water, slapped the skiff’s oars into place, and came into the lagoon under manual power. Cooper was wearing a short-sleeve beige-on-black Tommy Bahama silk shirt, and wondered whether Laramie was impressed with his physique, rowing the boat into the cove like a local fisherman who’s been doing it for fifty years. When they cleared the coral, Cooper flipped the oars back into the boat, lowered the engine, and broke the glassy surface of the lagoon at a marina-friendly five knots or so.

As they approached, Cooper could see, as he hadn’t observed fully in the photos, that the man waiting for them on the beach wasn’t simply bulked up, but grotesquely muscle-bound-and yet the man’s neck seemed far too thin to secure the head above it to the thick musculature beneath.

Another man, much taller and darker-the bartender from the pictures-came down the white sand slope and took Cooper’s bowline, pulled the boat onto the beach, and tied the line to a nail protruding from the sand. He wore a white polo shirt and khaki shorts, with a small knapsack strapped to his shoulders.

Cooper came off first and Laramie followed, stepping unsteadily. Outside of their two-man greeting party, the resort’s beach and poolside patio beyond were empty. There was a single remaining float plane and three cedar deck chairs dotting the beach; the plane looked as though it had made a few too many drug runs.

Cooper led Laramie up the beach to greet their muscle-bound host, extending a hand as he approached. The man shook.

“Welcome to Mango Cay,” he said. “How can we help you?”

“We,” Cooper said, “as in the royal ‘we,’ or ‘we’ meaning you and the baker’s dozen of so-called communist dictators you had staying here last week?”

Laramie looked at Cooper; Cooper watched as the bartender glanced sideways at his boss Mr. Muscle-head, doing it in a way, Cooper saw, that allowed him to check Muscle-head’s expression but still keep Cooper and Laramie in full view.

Muscle-head smiled and said, “Dr. Einstein, I presume.”

Cooper nodded. “Warmer here than in Paris,” he said, “don’t you think?”

Since it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume somebody who had taken the time to track his registration could also track his return course, Cooper decided to go ahead and flip Gibson’s ID of the Apache’s registration info into a confession: the man may as well just have told him he was the one who’d sent the commandos to visit him outside his bungalow at Conch Bay.

“Well, Albert, my name’s Spike Gibson. I have no need to hide my identity. Buy you a drink?” He motioned to the poolside bar.

Cooper extended his elbow for Laramie to latch onto, which she did. They walked together up the beach to the pool and sat in two of the stools against the bar. Gibson took the stool beside Cooper; Hiram went behind the bar.

“Choose your poison,” Gibson said.

“Maker’s Mark, rocks.”

“And the lady, whose name we didn’t get?” Gibson looked at Cooper. “The royal ‘we,’ ” he said.

Cooper started in on an answer then stopped when Laramie put her hand on his forearm. The way her hand felt gave him that familiar twinge, which he chose to ignore for the moment, considering that what he was doing required at least nominal concentration.

“My name’s ‘EastWest7,’” she said, “and I’ll take something sweet please.”

Gibson nodded. “Odd name. Hiram-painkiller.”

Hiram, his voice gruff and thick, the accent falling somewhere between that of Barry the witch doctor and the screeching ghost of Marcel S., said, “Maker’s Mark. Painkiller. Shake for Mr. Gibson.”

He made the drinks and served them.

“Creatine shake,” Gibson explained.

“For the workouts?” Cooper said.

“For the workouts.”

Gibson drank, but Cooper did not. Laramie watched Cooper hold the glass, twirl it, push and pull it, but never drink from it. She followed his lead and left the painkiller on the bar, observing the posture and behavior of Cooper and Gibson while she fiddled with her glass.

“The way your shirt drapes in the back,” Gibson said, “I can’t tell for sure. Browning?”

“Correct. You, I’m betting Glock.”

“Absolutely.”

Given the size and weight of his knapsack, Cooper figured Hiram for an Uzi or MAC-10 but didn’t verbalize his guess.

After another sip of his shake, Gibson said, “This resort is private property, and while we don’t mind the occasional visitor, we would prefer that visitors not take photographs.”

Cooper nodded. “Unfortunately,” he said, “if I feel like taking pictures, there isn’t much you can do about it.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Cooper twirled his drink on the bar.

“Spike,” he said, “-or do you prefer Spencer?”

“Spike will do.”

“Well, Spike, as you might expect, we popped over here to ask you a couple questions.”

Cooper jerked his head toward Laramie. Laramie noticed that Cooper did not take his eyes off of Gibson as he did it. “To begin with, my friend here-‘EastWest7’-asked me to inquire as to the business purpose, or theme if you will, of the convention held here by the aforementioned dictators.”

Gibson gulped most of the remainder of his shake. Hiram watched. “We don’t divulge the identity, itinerary, or agenda, if any,” Gibson said, “of our guests.”

“I didn’t think you would answer that one. It was somewhat broad in nature. My question, however, is a little more specific.”

Gibson inclined his head.

“You ever get any boats around here, running forty-five, maybe fifty feet? I’m thinking specifically of an old Chris-Craft, kind of a shitty, rusting gray. Pretty sure it operates out of Jamaica. In fact, the boat I’m thinking of stopped a few miles west of here, and drifted for maybe two hours before turning around and heading back to Bob Marley’s homeland.”

Spike Gibson turned his head to the side and shook it a little. “This is the West Indies, friend, so we see quite a few boats come through here,” he said. “But some like that? Hell, I couldn’t tell you.”

“See, that particular boat was loaded up on the Jamaica side with a half-dead Kingston rummy, who, it seems, had been abducted and sold as a kind of modern-day slave, at least the way I’m figuring it. It’s funny-I find this to be an interesting coincidence.”

“Oh?”

“See, it just so happens that another guy, actually a resurrected, well, zombie, recently turned up dead for the second time-I know this sounds complicated, but I think I have it right-on a beach in Road Town. This would have been one day after a hurricane passed southeast to northwest across your resort and was downgraded to a tropical storm as it made its way up to the British Virgins. Road Town, of course, being part of the BVIs.”

“Of course.”

“The Road Town zombie appears to have died from an intriguing combination of causes: burn wounds caused by direct contact with non-weapons-grade uranium, and gunshots to the back. Put another way,” Cooper said, “what do an illegal nuclear power plant, zombie slave laborers, and a dozen disappearing communist dictators have in common? Besides you, me, EastWest7, and Hiram here with the assault pistol in his backpack, that is.”

A high-pitched girl’s voice peeped from the vicinity of the pool. To Cooper it sounded as though the voice had said, “Spike?”

Gibson excused himself and walked toward the pool. Between bar stools and cabanas, Cooper and Laramie caught glimpses of Gibson and what looked to Cooper like a sixteen-year-old girl talking, gesturing, and finally touching, as the girl handed Gibson a vial of tanning lotion and Gibson proceeded to take a full fifteen minutes to lube her sunburned body from head to toe. The girl was topless and didn’t shift her position-face-up-on the poolside recliner for the duration of Gibson’s massage, including the grip she had on what appeared to be a mai tai. When Gibson completed the massage, he slapped the girl on the side of the ass and came back over to his stool at the bar.

“I don’t really have an answer to your question,” he said.

Cooper nodded; Laramie said and did nothing. The resort’s maid floated past, dropping a short stack of bright white towels on a table near the bar. Cooper and Laramie noticed separately that for a member of the housekeeping staff, the woman leaving the towels on the chair was exceedingly muscular. Her appearance, from the black coffee skin to the sinewy neck, was strikingly similar to Hiram’s, though she was considerably shorter. Once she had deposited the towels, the maid moved off to busy herself with some other task on the opposite side of the pool.

Cooper said, “Mind if we have a look around?”

“Yes,” Gibson said, “we mind.”

“Private property,” Cooper said.

“Private property.”

Cooper stood. Laramie stood. Gibson stood. “Thank you for the drink,” Cooper said. “Are you still a signatory for Global Exports?”

Gibson smiled, said, “Nice having you,” and motioned toward the beach. Cooper and Laramie followed his cue, Cooper keeping his head turned at an angle that kept Gibson and Hiram in full view for the full stroll.

When they reached the boat, Hiram helped untie the line. He waded out to the boat, helped Laramie aboard, and stood, prepared to push the boat back from the shallows as Cooper faced Gibson.

“Spence,” he said, “at some point you and I will have a conversation about the boys who stopped by for a drink at the Conch Bay Beach Club.”

Cooper flung a leg into his skiff, and when Gibson didn’t say anything to him, Cooper said, “Live slow, mon,” and pushed the boat out into the lagoon without Hiram’s help. He got the outboard humming and sped across the lagoon, churning up enough sand and coral chunks to form a wedge of dirty water, the skiff painting a nasty stripe of brown across the otherwise pristine bay.