Painkiller

7

Cooper beheld a cannabis leaf. Made of wood and painted the colors of the Jamaican flag, it overhung the entrance to a store advertising 99¢ palm readings. Above the cannabis leaf stood a second-floor apartment.

Manny came around the car but hung back at the curb.

“Don’t know her by name,” he said, “but she’d recognize me quick. Send Ocholito packing before we say bueno’ día’. You should go in alone.”

“Gringo like me?” Cooper said. “Probably make me for a cop while I’m standing out here.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, ese. Maybe you her kind of man. You know something? Ocholito likes ’em big. Whole lotta woman.” He grinned. “So doI. Anyway, gringo bastard like you visiting a Cataño fortune-teller-at least you a stranger. Probably confuse her. Strike up a conversation while she trying to figure it out, maybe you can get her to spill the beans. Tell you where Ocholito be spending his days.”

Cooper looked at the upstairs apartment. “Probably sleeping off a night of ganja-aided love, be my guess,” he said.

“I’ll stroll around back-his mamacita slip him the signal, I’ll be waiting with open arms.” Manny laughed. “Or maybe legs.”

“Come again?”

“You’ll see.”

Cooper left it at that and went in. His entrance triggered a string of bells dangling from the door, and he found himself overtaken by a fog of foul-smelling incense. He looked for and found the source: a plume rose from a smudge stick beneath the shop’s front window. The window may as well have been made of drywall, slathered as it was with black paint; an assortment of goods hung from its frame, Cooper making out dried plants, spice bags, bongs, a pair of what might have been charred whole chickens. A rack offered decks of Tarot cards and bones of varying sizes; lining the wall at the back of the room was an embedded countertop with a gap in the middle.

Cooper waited without speaking, and was beginning to think customers were of little concern to the palm readers of Cataño when a bloated hand split a pair of bead-strings behind the countertop and was followed into the room by an enormous woman in a knit halter top. The knots in the fabric of the halter top were stretched so thin that the fabric exposed more of her breasts than it covered. Beneath the counter Cooper could see the woman’s black leather miniskirt, a selection that would have been daring on an anorexic runway model. She had fair skin and plenty of it; ogling the sand-dollar-sized nipples poking through the halter, Cooper pegged the fortune-teller’s tonnage somewhere between two-ninety and three-ought-five.

She eyed him up and down, Cooper thinking she was debating whether to eat him.

“¿En qué puedo ayudarle?” she said.

“Bueno’ día’,” Cooper said. He stayed on with the Spanish. “I’m sorry to say I’ve become lonely-having bad luck with the ladies. I was hoping you could tell me what I’m doing wrong. Maybe see if romance is in store, or what I need to do to get it.”

“Fifty dollars in advance,” she said, “cash only.”

“What happened to the ninety-nine cents?”

“Different topic.”

Cooper found correct change. She snatched the bills, parted the curtain, and gestured for him to enter.

Behind the beads was a single swath of floor space crowded with opened boxes, cleared in the center to make room for the card table that stood there. The table, Cooper saw, actually featured a crystal ball. At the back of the room was a stairwell leading up, and a door, presumably leading out.

They got started side by side at the table, Ocholito’s mamacita asking for his palm, reading its lines in the dark, her fingers working over his wrist and forearm. Cooper felt the rush of endorphines from her skilled hands, thinking she knew what she was doing-focus on the heavy-handed massage therapy and you’ll wonder, a couple days later, what you did with your watch. I leave it out on the beach?

“I can smell her on you,” she said throatily. “Either you are modest, or a liar. You’ve had women recently, or they have had you. I can smell the last one’s pussy and there will be others soon.”

Cooper leaned in and sniffed his forearm.

She let her fingers wander above his elbow and probe the inside of his biceps. She leaned against him, close enough to bite a chunk off his nose, a wide breast pillowing against his shoulder. Her bulbous lips drifted past his face and brushed his earlobe. “Maybe you come looking for love,” she croaked in an addled whisper.

Cooper shivered. “Could be.”

“You couldn’t handle me in your wildest dreams, gringo.” She dropped her eyes to his palm. “Still, lucky boy, I see somebody be coming for you.”

“That so?”

“Somebody who give you what you need.” Her massage spread to his shoulder, then the back of his neck. She had strong fingers, the big woman’s one-handed technique giving him a hard-on, but something about her technique disturbed him.

“What is it I need, exactly,” he said, then realized the nature of his discomfort as she dug a clawed hand into the back of his neck and rammed a big-boned knee into his groin. He could feel both his testicles mash against the blow, her knee following through and toppling him backward. He’d have laughed had the blow not stolen his wind; grimacing, he flipped like a falling cat and found his legs before the floor found his ass. He had his gun out before he landed too, his Agency-issue FN Browning, Cooper pointing it at her with the palm she’d been reading. He didn’t need it, since the fortune-teller had already wheeled and begun to run, all relative terms considering her carrier-group maneuverability.

“Ocholito, ¡vámonos! ¡Policía!” she spat in the direction of the stairwell.

Cooper took an elbow and pivoted to extend a leg across her intended course; she caught his shin and toppled violently. He came around the table and stood over her, and as she withdrew what looked like a Swiss Army knife from the panties beneath the leather skirt, Cooper slugged her in the jaw. She went limp, a pond of flesh on the floor, and Cooper heard footsteps before observing the odd sight of an extremely short man in a red top hat charging mostly nude down the stairwell and out the door. Daylight burst into the room, blinding him, and as he felt his way out, the thought occurred to him that he had just witnessed the escape of The Cat in the Hat from the upstairs apartment.

Hustling into the alley, he found only a rusted Hyundai propped up on cinder blocks beside a Dumpster. He crouched, advancing gun-first around the Dumpster, then let his gun arm drop.

His back against the wall just past the Dumpster, Manny was lighting a particularly long joint for The Cat in the Hat. The Cat, whom Cooper presumed to be Ocholito, toked a lungful of weed and nodded his approval.

Cooper resheathed his Browning in the small of his back and took his first good look at the little man. Four foot nine at best, he wore a knotty beard that looked as though it would never grow all the way out, and like the taller man Cooper had seen conferring with Manny at the gallera, Ocholito was dark enough to make the cop look pale. The red top hat was half as tall as the man himself, and Ocholito wore a robe-satin, red like the hat, and unsecured, his manhood hanging unabashedly exposed to the Puerto Rican sunshine. Cooper now understood why Ocholito preferred, as Manny had put it, a whole lotta woman: in his own way, the four-foot-nine Ocholito was a whole lotta man.

Ocholito passed the doobie, and Manny sucked down a lungful of his own. Once he’d held it awhile, Manny said, “Mi amigo here, he’s looking for some answers nobody going to have but you, Ocho.”

“Oh yeah, c’est vrai?”

Ocholito’s voice was deep and oddly rough, like somebody with sand lodged in his larynx.

Cooper pulled the picture of the tattoo, thinking he ought to open a PI firm-we handle your problems when you’re already dead, just contact us in our dreams and we’re on the case. Hundred percent pro bono. Keeping his distance, he reached out to hand the snapshot to Ocholito.

“A kid who washed up dead in Road Town,” he said, “had that tattooed on the back of his neck. Voodoo symbol for death, the way I understand it. Had some tracks on his arms too. What I’d like to know is who uses the tatt-kid was running drugs, got caught stealing, I’d like to know who he was muling for. Somebody wearing that sign, maybe it makes him a banger-Eighty-seventh Street Voodoo Crips, I don’t know. Maybe you do.”

The Cat in the Hat glared at him, causing Cooper to observe that one of Ocholito’s eyelids was permanently wrinkled shut. The little man snatched the picture with manicured fingernails painted a high-gloss black and looked at the snapshot.

“Where your boy die again?”

“Body washed up on Tortola. Where he died? Anybody’s guess.”

The Cat in the Hat returned the picture and shook his head.

Cooper said, “Doesn’t mean anything to you?”

“Personne, nobody kill him,” Ocholito said in that sandy voice.

Cooper waited for further clarification. Getting none, he said, “Trust me, the boy was killed.”

“Nobody kill him ’cause he already dead.”

Cooper eyed the snapshot, seeing nothing more than he’d seen any other time he’d looked at it. “You’re telling me you can see from a picture of his neck he was already dead when they shot him?”

“That picture you showin’ me,” Ocholito said, “ain’t no tatt.”

“No?”

“Non. What you got in your hand, that be a picture of a brand.” Cooper wasn’t sure how he could tell, but he knew what was coming before Ocholito said his next words. “Et mon ami,” Ocholito said, “the brand you holdin’ be the mark of a zombie.”

Manny and Ocholito traded tokes. Cooper examined each man as he smoked, attempting to determine whether this might all have been a practical joke, planned months in advance by Manny, The Cat in the Hat, and Cap’n Roy.

“Assuming,” Cooper said, “I buy into that particular side of voodoo myth, I’d still like to know who uses the, uh, brand.”

“Nobody here.”

“Here, meaning-”

“Only place that shit go down for real, be Haiti, or maybe the DR. Pas ici.”

“Zombies,” Cooper said, “being in short supply outside of Hispaniola.”

“No, there plenty in Louisiana too,” Ocholito said and grinned. A gold tooth gleamed when he smiled. “But that about it.”

“Who in Haiti would use it?”

“Je ne sais pas.”

Cooper stomached his proximity with Ocholito’s naked member and stepped closer.

“Horseshit,” he said.

Ocholito’s expression and stance remained fixed, Cooper reading him immediately as a man who dealt with disrespect in ways that did not reside in the moment. Overendowed and not to be fucked with-outside of his exhibitionism and taste in women, Le Chat dans le Chapeau, Cooper thought, has it going on.

“I’ll give you some advice, mon ami,” Ocholito said. His voice had deepened to where he sounded like a Buddhist monk in song. “Journey you about to go on, maybe things be better, you stay home. You ready to pay the price?”

“Depends.”

Ocholito smiled again. “Maybe we bring you into the voudaison,” he said, “find you a loa. Mine, he give me powers most people only dream about. But the price be steep.”

“You asking me to sell my soul? Cosmic debt I’ve been running up pretty much drained that bank account.”

The Cat in the Hat emitted a Buddhist-monk chuckle. “We’ll see about that.”

Ocholito looked at Manny, giving him some kind of signal; needing no translation and too annoyed to negotiate, Cooper pulled a stack of fifties from his wallet and handed The Cat in the Hat four hundred bucks. Ocholito snagged the money with his high-gloss fingernails, and Cooper stepped off, giving Ocholito back his private space. The little man sucked down the last of the joint, held his breath for thirty seconds, exhaled, and nodded.

“Once you out of the country,” he said, “you out of the loop. So I ain’t your best source. Pas encore. But that picture you showing me be some version of the brand the bokor, black-magic witch doctor, burn into the skin of somebody fail to make the sacrifice he been told to make. Basically it be the brand marking somebody that bokor done zombified. Anybody spend time in the voudaison tell you that-but where, when, who done burned it in, well, je ne sais pas, mon ami. Your guess be as good as mine, since them bokors be workin’ outside of mainstream voodoo.”

He flicked the remnants of the joint to the pavement and to Cooper’s great relief folded closed the robe and knotted its strap above his equine protuberance.

“Somebody might be more up to speed,” Ocholito said, “be a man name of Benoit. Reynold Benoit, M.D. He live mainly in Port-au-Prince; by day, he work in conventional medicine, out of Hôpital H. L. Dantier.”

Cooper stored this. “And by night?”

Ocholito grinned, showing off that gold gleam. “That,” he said, “be why I’m giving you his name.”

Cooper nodded.

“Well, Little-eight,” he said, “I’d love to continue our conversation, but Manny’s backlog of unsolved cases beckons.”

He jerked his chin at Manny, walked around the Dumpster, and cut back through the store, finding no sign of the fortune-teller on his way to the car.

It took him ninety minutes at the blackjack tables of the El San Juan casino to put himself ahead for the day, net of the rigged cockfight and four-hundred-dollar Cat in the Hat peepshow. Around 2 A.M. he found some company in a pair of inebriated sisters from New Jersey who needled him until he agreed to accompany them to the suite somebody had procured for them, where they shared some of Jamaica’s finest and a three-for-all in the suite’s whirlpool tub.

Once the ladies’ presence had depreciated to a two-tiered snore pattern on the overcrowded king-size bed, Cooper pulled a Coke from the minibar, rode a pair of elevators back to his own room, and took his PowerBook out to the balcony. He was thinking he was only willing to go so far to find answers-even when the questions came to him in his dreams, screeched by the dead-and, given this, it occurred to him the Internet was a lot closer, and certainly a more pleasant place to visit, than Port-au-Prince, Haiti, sometime home to Reynold Benoit, M.D.

By way of his access to a set of online databases, he found varying theories on whether the ritual of transforming a living person into a walking corpse actually worked, or was simply the longest-running urban legend on record. If it was only myth, much of the credit for originating the legend went to a pair of books, published a century apart-in 1884, a bestseller documented savage cannibalistic voodoo rituals; recently, a more scholarly book claimed to have identified the ingredients used by witch doctors, or bokors, to reduce ordinary men to so-called zombie status. The recipe was composed of human remains, a certain indigenous flower, and varying amounts of venom extracted from the bouga toad and puffer fish. When properly administered-along with the appropriate black-magic spell-the coup poudre, as it was called, supposedly sent its victim into a coma, slowing down his metabolism enough to generate the appearance of death. Bury him, wait a few days, dig him up and feed him conconbre zombi-another indigenous plant-and the bokor had a custom-lobotomized menial laborer whose friends and family thought had died.

A gust of wind whistled through the El San Juan’s main tower, the trades picking up and shifting direction by a few degrees as the city’s perpetual nighttime cloud cover broke and the moon materialized. Who knows, Cooper thought-maybe the gust of wind was caused by an evil spirit, a petro-loa, checking in on my progress. Or hell-could be it’s Le Gran Maître himself, telling me…telling me what? Back off? Keep going?

Then again it could have been the weather pattern and that was it.

Either way, he decided he’d go ahead and call it a voodoo moon: a voodoo moon, telling me to get my ass out of San Juan.

He closed out his Internet connection at four-forty-five. American Eagle, he knew, ran the first flight to Terrance Lettsome at five-fifty; if he got the hell off the balcony he could make the flight and be back in the spiritually protected environs of the Conch Bay Beach Club in time to catch the late morning rays. Toss back a sweet cocktail, maybe a piña colada or a painkiller, and see if boredom, sunshine, and syrupy booze could accomplish what gambling, rapture, and herb had not:

Clear this fucking head of mine, he thought, of petro-loas, Puerto Rican cops, and Les Chats dans les Chapeaux.