Painkiller

54

The splash of water shocked him awake.

He knew immediately it was Caribbean water-lukewarm, with that mild, briny taste he knew all too well. He’d swallowed enough of it in the course of his free-diving escapades to fill a lake.

Cooper opened his eyes to a strange face-gaunt, harshly feminine, skin a wrinkled mahogany-and assumed he was having one of his nightmares. In his dreams, he would occasionally see faces he didn’t recognize. He knew that he’d once known these faces, that he’d seen them before, and the dream was merely a visual playback of the memory that failed him during conscious thought. Usually, afterward, he could remember the faces from that dream permanently, so that, nightmare by nightmare, he was piecing together some of the missing portions of his life following his escape from the dungeon cell.

Cooper was trying to place himself in the dream, to figure out what this face meant and where it fell within the chronology of the usual three nightmares, when he realized that he recognized the face too keenly. He had seen it recently against a bright white pool, a background of bright sand and thatched-roof cabanas-

The face leering at him was Muscle-head’s maid, and he wasn’t anywhere near the comforting familiarity of his dreams. He was on the floor of the missile cavern beneath Mango Cay.

The maid had changed both her uniform and demeanor since their brief encounter by the pool. She was staring into his face with a sort of fanatical hatred, barrel of a MAC-10 pressed under his chin. She wore an olive green tank top that displayed naked shoulders and biceps easily bigger than his. The gun was secured with a strap slung over her right shoulder.

“Shithead, up!” she spat in a Haitian Creole drawl. Cooper thought immediately of Alphonse. “On the feet!”

She thrust a wrist beneath Cooper’s right arm, lifted him effortlessly, said, “Against the wall!” and, using the muzzle of the MAC-10, pushed him backward against a web of scaffolding that Cooper figured she must have meant by “wall.”

Through with Cooper for the moment, Lana crouched, lifted a second bucket of seawater, and dumped its contents on Laramie’s face. Flat on her back as Cooper had been a moment before, Laramie shot immediately upright, gasping for air and clearing her eyes with both hands. She too got the muzzle of the MAC-10 against her chin.

“Fuck you!” Laramie yelled, lashing out in a reflexive burst that brought a smile to Cooper’s face.

Lana shifted her weight from one leg to the other and kicked Laramie in the side of her head, reached out before Laramie could fall, and threw her against the scaffolding beside Cooper. Cooper grabbed hold of Laramie’s shirt to hold her up.

Spike Gibson came into Cooper’s field of vision and threw an olive green duffel bag at him. Cooper caught it with his free hand; it clinked as he snatched it. The bag was heavy, maybe eighty or ninety pounds.

Gibson ignored the captives and spoke instead to Lana.

“Deng knows. He’ll do nothing, so I’ve unlocked all the doors. All alarms are deactivated. Get in, bring me another two hundred mill, and get off the island. The U.S. Navy appears to be interested in us now-there’s a destroyer fifteen miles east of Martinique and coming around. He does anything but break Hiram’s record,” he said, pointing at Cooper, then Laramie-“shoot her in the leg, then arm, and so on. See if that motivates him.”

Gibson jumped behind the wheel of his cart, looked at Cooper, and said, “See you around, Albert.”

Then he drove off.

Gun dangling from her shoulder, Lana positioned her own cart beside the nearest missile-38-and flipped the lever that summoned its silo elevator. She opened the cage door, returned to the cart, transferred a harness and rope to the elevator, and approached Cooper and Laramie.

Cooper could see that in addition to the assault pistol she now held a black rod.

“Get in,” she said, and poked Cooper with the cattle prod. He jumped-fucking thing hurt, stinging him with a bone-jarring jolt. He pushed Laramie into the elevator, looking for an opening as he did it, but the maid didn’t offer up any noticeable vulnerability.

Lana yelled to them from below as they rode the elevator up the length of the missile.

“Maintenant you open the bag! Listen and I tell you how to use!”

When they hit the twenty-foot mark, Lana flipped a switch at the base of the silo, and the elevator jerked to a stop. Cooper listened, sort of, as she rattled off a how-to guide on the removal of your average nuclear warhead from a Trident missile. He wasn’t sure whether she was through with the instructions when the chukka-chuk-chuk and ping-ping-peow of bullets from the MAC-10 whinging past him gave Cooper a rough indication she’d completed the tutorial.

“Vite! Allez-y!”

Cooper attempted both to interpret and remember what he’d been told-thick accent like hers, he thought, wasn’t exactly ideally suited for giving highly technical instructions. His time spent with Alphonse helped, but he still only understood about forty-five percent of what the well-muscled maid had to say.

Among the tools was a flashlight, which he handed to Laramie. As told, he installed a rubber plate to use as a shelf and set the other tools on it. Working quickly, he used a distant cousin of a Phillips-head screwdriver to remove the screws securing an access panel and opened the panel when he had the screws out. He grabbed two saws and a hammer and chisel and looked at Laramie.

“Do me a favor and keep as far back as you can,” he said. “Just point the flashlight.”

Laramie gave him a look, which he took for indecision on whether to be offended he thought he could handle the work and she couldn’t, or flattered that he refused to expose her to unshielded plutonium, or enriched uranium, or whatever it was the warhead contained.

Cooper got to work, thinking that this is where his decision to take possession of Roy’s body from the beach had proved a moderately bad call. Leading him here, inside a Trident missile, digging for radiation sickness at the order of a muscle-bound maid. Once he thought about this for a bit, he made the guess that somebody else had probably been doing this kind of work before him, and probably under the same exact threat. Gibson’s words had been clear enough: he does anything but break Hiram’s record…Hiram, he thought, being the supposed bartender he’d recently shot. Hiram must have had his own radiation diggers, and maybe some time back, one of them had drawn some similar radiation-exposure duty inside the nuclear power plant he and Laramie had used as a hiding place. Considering that the power plant appeared somewhat weathered and worn, he assumed it generated its energy with the less modern U-238/U-235 uranium fuel rods, and that an accident could easily have happened while the radiation digger was doing the work. Result: odd burn marks, severe pain, a hell-bent escape for daylight, and a few gunshots in the back from Gibson’s goons. Thanks, Marcel, for all your hard work.

And there you have it. With the help of my associate, the renegade entry-level analyst from Langley, the private-eye-for-the-dead has just solved the second murder of poor, sweet Simone’s zombified fiancé.

Hell, he thought, maybe I’ll give Marcel’s widowed fiancée a call and let her know everything’s turned out just fine. That there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for Marcel’s misfortune: exhumed following an overdose of coup poudre potion, he was brought back to the living with conconbre zombi serum and sold by your town wizard to a redheaded, serial-killing albino black named Jim Beam, who, in turn, sold him to somebody named Spike-short for Spencer-Gibson. But if it’s any solace to you, Simone, Marcel probably commanded a minimum of a couple thousand bucks on the open market, at least judging from the size of the bag of money Jim had taken in exchange for the wino from East Queen Street.

Breathing lead dust and soaking up radiation inside the access panel, Cooper gave some additional thought to Gibson. With the man out here running Deng Jiang’s missile factory, probably thinking after ten years of the assignment he could certainly get used to island life. Maybe even thinking he wouldn’t mind securing a ninety-nine-year lease of his own. Maybe Gibson does the math, he thought, figures out how to snake a few of the warheads, and determines he can get somewhere around that two hundred mill he was telling the maid about each time he pulls a nuke out of its ICBM.

He couldn’t see the whole docking bay from his cubby inside the missile, but it had looked to him, on the way up the elevator, that Deng’s submarine was no longer parked in the underwater lagoon. Maybe the bullets from his UR-14 hadn’t struck premier pay dirt, and the big fella had headed home. Cooper reached instinctively for his SLK, and the camera, homing device, and other goodies he had in it, but no such luck. Be good to find that camera with the pictures I took, now that they’d learned what they’d learned-Cooper figured even Peter M. Gates could put the pictures he’d taken of Premier Deng and his boys to use.

About an hour in, he gave the warhead-MIRV pairing one more whack with the hammer, and the twenty-fourth and final rivet fell from its anchor, pinging its way down the interior of the missile.

As instructed, he stepped out from the hole and signaled to the maid.

“The harness!” she screamed. “Maintenant!”