When he woke up, Cooper thought about that. He had always wondered how nuclear bombs were set off. Whether somebody working on a military base in Kansas could somehow make a mistake with a cigarette and wipe out half the country in the process. He called for and downed another painkiller, then read that exposure to non-weapons-grade U-238/U-235 had been documented to cause “extreme radiation sickness associated with direct and/or invasive contact, occurring during industrial accidents at nuclear power plants and, in fewer cases, reactor meltdowns aboard nuclear-powered submarines.” The intel on personnel exposed to submarine reactor melt-downs was difficult to come by, the report said, since most such meltdowns resulted in an imploded submarine and an all-hands-lost scenario. Still, the report contained photos of a pair of bodies recovered from just such an incident. The victims pictured displayed burn wounds similar to those on the body from the beach.
Cooper tossed the DI report on the white sand of the Conch Bay beach and sat upright in the chair. He thought about what it might feel like, eating bouga toad and puffer venom, being buried alive, winding up sometime later in a nuclear power plant or submarine and surviving an otherwise fatal meltdown long enough to be shot multiple times in the back while leaping from a tall building and breaking every bone in your legs-while loaded up on heroin. Go for a swim, wash up on a jetty, get pawned off on a spiritually bankrupt alcoholic with a gambling problem, only to be examined by a murderous, fugitive breast-implant surgeon. Cooper figuring by now that Eugene had probably ordered the body incinerated, that poor bastard’s journey concluding in a furnace one story beneath the streets of Charlotte Amalie-radiation going up the chimney and into the breeze. At least this time, he thought, no voudoun bokor’s going to pull the guy from the grave and put him back on the Haitian black-magic hamster wheel.
He thought that it wasn’t too much of a stretch to put himself into this kid’s head. His Central American friends might not have fed him any coup poudre potions, but he’d known a state of being about as close to hell as he figured life allowed, and didn’t find being passed off as dead to the general public an entirely alien concept.
He and I share something, Cooper thought: not a fucking soul seems to have given two shits about either of us.
My problem, he thought, is that I’ve exiled myself to this island, where I’ve got nothing better to do, or too much better to do, or too much fucking time on my hands to do all the things that are better to do, since I know I’ll get around to doing them all sooner or later. He couldn’t think of any other reason a rational human being would do anything more in the case of the twice-dead zombie from Roy’s beach-nothing besides tossing the ninety-seven-page DI report in the sack of garbage Ronnie collected daily from the club’s wastebaskets, and going for a swim. Problem with doing that, he thought, is that the fucking ghost that Roy pawned off on me will wind up sticking around. He’ll keep me from wreck-diving, bodysurfing, tanning, eating, boozing, and toking my way through the pain from this festering wound of mine, a pain I’ll never kill-best I can do is medicate it, so the goddamn medication had better work.
And thanks to Roy Gillespie and his voodoo handoff, I’m getting no relief.
“Fuck,” he said, pulled off his tank top, kicked away the Tevas, and went for a swim.
11
Knowing not a single decent combination of commercial flights existed for the Tortola-to-Haiti route, Cooper grudgingly pulled into Port-au-Prince aboard his Apache, navigating the squalor of the port at five knots. Sure, he mused, stick to the cruise ship docks, the container port, and it looked like any other Caribbean bay, but shoot for a slot to moor a private boat and you’d discover the truth: pick the wrong spot and the Apache would be hauling coke to Dade County within the hour.
He searched for the U.S. Coast Guard pier, which he knew to be in the general vicinity of the container docks, which themselves hadn’t been used in years. The pier wasn’t labeled, so it took him almost half an hour to find it. When he did, he coasted in sideways, needing no engine-thrust adjustments following his final throttle kick.
In the main building, he tried out some papers that said he was a Department of Homeland Security liaison working for the DEA. Throw enough agencies into the mix, he found, and you generated enough confusion or fear to get you in just about anywhere. He told the Coast Guard officer he was here to meet with a consular officer at Government House; the officer nodded at the papers and waved him through. Cooper figured he looked to the officer exactly the way the man expected a DEA man would-white polo shirt, worn blue jeans, blank, navy blue baseball cap. Or, he thought, maybe the guy lets anybody in who’s stupid enough to come here.
He poked around for Port-au-Prince’s version of a cab-an ordinary car, a publique, belonging to anyone, with the qualifying feature of a red ribbon dangling from the rearview mirror. Two blocks from the dock, he nabbed a Datsun minivan. He worked at ignoring the miserable conditions along the fifteen-minute ride through the city.
H. L. Dantier General Hospital didn’t resemble any hospital Cooper recalled seeing: neither its stucco exterior or red-tile roof appeared to have been washed in the past ten years, and what might once have been called landscaping had evolved to unruly jungle. Cooper had a fleeting thought that Eugene Little would feel right at home here.
On the second floor, a receptionist asked him to be seated in an adjoining waiting room until a woman dressed approximately like a nurse came out to get him. Cooper couldn’t place it, but there was something missing from her outfit: maybe it was the belt, or the shoes, but she looked incomplete, like an actress in a play afflicted by a poorly stocked wardrobe department. She brought him to a room that looked similarly incomplete relative to any doctor’s offices he remembered visiting. Not that he’d been to any in almost twenty years.
After Cooper waited in the empty office for a little longer than twenty minutes, Dr. Reynold Benoit entered, Cooper thinking maybe he’d come from the restroom, the way the man held a rolled-up newspaper in his fist. Benoit ran about Roy’s height; his skin was a rich ebony, and he wore eyeglasses with the wire frame visible only at the top of the lens, the kind Cooper had seen nowhere else except on Robert Redford in 3 Days of the Condor.
“How you do, mon ami,” Benoit said in a tinny, high-pitched voice that was alarmingly shrill. “As I told you on the phone, I’m here takin’ this meeting, but you coming from Monsieur Petit-huit, or ‘Ocholito’ as he call himself him now in PR,” he said, “that don’t mean much. Not to me. Not anymore.”
“Our boy Little-eight,” Cooper said, “tells me you’re an authority on something I’m interested in finding out about. So I don’t really care what he means to you. I care more about you.”
“One more thing, since we chattin’ frank,” Benoit said. “Maybe Petithuit tell you, peut-être pas, but what I know don’t come free.”
Thinking his twice-dead zombie client was beginning to eat into his self-imposed monthly expense account allocation, Cooper handed Benoit an envelope holding three one-hundred-dollar bills. He’d figured on doing it the classy way, hide the money in an envelope-since he was, after all, visiting a hospital-but Benoit took it, tore the envelope open, and shamelessly counted the money a few inches in front of his face. He nodded and shrugged, unimpressed-but, Cooper thought, not quite to where the good doctor would think to kick him out. Perfect: he hadn’t spent more than he needed to.