“Who said I was paying?”
Manny ignored him. “The guy runs everything into PR out of Haiti’s name is Ocholito,” he said. “He tell you what you want to know. Or maybe he tell you there nothing to find. Either way, nobody going to know nothing if Ocholito don’t.”
The golden bird knocked Cooper’s scrapper to the turf and pounced. The official let this play out for ten or fifteen seconds before separating them. The handlers descended on the ring and repositioned the birds. They squawked and flapped their wings.
A cacophony of shouted bets shot forth, people raising hands, calling out odds. Cooper started pointing his fingers and snapping out “Sí!” Putting three, four grand on the line, getting fifteen, twenty-to-one odds.
Manny said, “You betting on the wrong bird, puto!”
They released the birds and let them fight. Cooper’s was down again in seconds, his opponent tearing chunks of meat from his legs with the espuelas.
“Why would it cost me to see Ocholito?” Cooper said.
“Ocho prefer not to be found,” Manny said, “so he shacks up somewhere new every couple months. Some new mamacita always waiting in line. You need to know which woman, you want to talk to him.”
The scrapper lifted himself off the turf and engaged in another twenty seconds of warfare until his adversary practically beheaded him with a swipe of the espuela and he toppled, dead.
Cooper shrugged and rose.
“The fix was in,” he said.
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.