Cooper nodded and popped off another ten. Alphonse looked like his head was going to explode if he saw another bill hit the slab.
“Maybe he could tell us,” Cooper said, pulling Alphonse back into the exchange, “if there’s anyplace to stay around here. Couple of beds, even some soft earth and a roof. Hot meal wouldn’t be bad, would it?”
Alphonse nodded in appreciation of what he understood Cooper to have said-the first sign of fatigue Cooper had noticed in the kid, in any form, for the duration of the journey-and gave the bartender some version of what Cooper had told him. The bartender retrieved the third bill and answered the question; Alphonse semitranslated his response, which Cooper had already understood perfectly well.
“Five houses down,” Alphonse said, “il dit there be an old lady là-bas, she give the beds. Pay that lady the money you be paying here, il dit could be she cook supper aussi.”
Cooper put his props in a pocket, tossed back whatever the bartender had poured into the Dixie cup-it tasted like sake-and winked at Alphonse.
“Come on, Kareem,” he said. “Let’s go seek some room and board.”
The old woman recommended by the bartender offered them a vegetable stew, which, while it tasted like bat guano, Cooper gladly consumed after the exhausting trek down the mountain. Room and board set him back another twenty-probably ten times what he needed to pay, but Cooper thought he’d keep the free-spending tourist charade going. He’d long since learned that playing a role that wasn’t too much of a stretch for him-a foolish honkie spending beaucoup money-was about as good a way to elicit knee-jerk overreactions from native West Indians as any. Typically it also went a good way toward ensuring his well-honed interpersonal skills were usefully underestimated.
Noshing on the foul-tasting stew, Cooper swallowed hard, regretting that he hadn’t procured a bottle of the bartender’s mellow Dixie cup brew before leaving the bar. He could have used it to wash down the food.
They slept fully dressed on a bed of something like straw in the woman’s backyard, Cooper keeping his Browning tucked under the belt of his khaki shorts. He slept on his side. They had the blankets from Cooper’s backpack, but who needed them; it might have dropped to ninety-five for the night, but there still came no breeze. Cooper listened as he slept, something he’d learned to do a long time ago and didn’t have much use for any longer, at least outside of the times Ronnie was in the mood for practical jokes. He hoped he wasn’t too rusty-get caught in a deep sleep while an angry farmer tried to off him for his wad of ten-dollar bills.
The first bite didn’t come until morning, when a small, wiry guy with the same deep eye sockets as the fellas from the bar gang arrived at the old woman’s house. When Cooper and Alphonse came out around six-thirty, the guy was already waiting for them, seated on a box the old woman used as a chair. Cooper was ready for the guy to make a move-didn’t look like it but he was, following Alphonse out of the shack-but there wasn’t anything to be ready for, at least not yet. The wiry guy said a few words to Alphonse that Cooper couldn’t hear, and Alphonse told Cooper that someone wanted to see him, and if they went with the guy he’d take them there.
Cooper agreed and brought up the rear as they walked into the heart of the village and on through to the side nearest the dead-brown forest. It was about a ten-minute walk. The guy concluded his assignment by delivering them to a shanty that, while still small, looked more like a house than any of the other dwellings in town. It was the last building this side of town, set back from the other homes with an actual yard. Cooper could see that their old friend the creek cut through the backyard of the place.
The escort opened the door and stood aside to usher them in. Cooper stood for a moment in the doorjamb to let his eyes adjust, the transition a little difficult as he came inside. Once his eyes had made the shift, he could see that the shades inside the house were drawn. Only one or two lights were burning, Cooper thinking the light must be coming from candles until he heard the hum of an engine running somewhere out back, took another look at the lights, and saw that they featured sixty-watt bulbs in sockets with the lamp shades missing.
Whoever it is who’s summoned us to his throne, Cooper thought, he’s running electricity off a Honda generator and has the shades drawn so he can show off. Imagine that-a guy so rich he can afford to run electric lamps inside during the bright daylight. Cooper wondered where the guy got his fuel.
There were shelves built into each of the walls, loaded with handcrafted talismans and ornaments-basically a bunch of junk, but junk with one recurring feature: carved into or stamped upon each of the items, Cooper could plainly see a depiction of the mark somebody had branded onto the neck of the body Cap’n Roy had been so kind as to palm off on him.
There were some books on the shelves too, titles he couldn’t make out, a couch and chairs, orange shag carpet, and in the center of the room, a metal desk of the sort used by Cooper’s fifth-grade math teacher. Behind the desk sat a man.
The man was thick, bald, and bearded, his skin a notch or two lighter than that of his fellow citizens. The robe he wore looked African but probably wasn’t, his earlobes were adorned with at least a dozen earrings each, and he was busy laying upon Cooper his own version of the village’s patent-pending evil eye. At length, the man jerked his chin toward the couch and chairs.
Cooper sat, choosing the couch. As he did he observed that as with Manny’s old buddy Ocholito, the man behind the desk had fingernails that were painted in high-gloss black. Alphonse took one of the chairs; Cooper could see the kid was spooked. Their escort closed the front door and stood inside with his back against it.
“We never seen you before,” said the man behind the desk. He spoke in unaccented English, his voice deep, making Cooper think of Barry White on some old Motown television special. The accent made it sound like the guy had been born in Ohio, or Pennsylvania.
Cooper said, “Correct.”
“We don’t get too many strangers ’round here.”
Alphonse flicked his eyes at Cooper, then back at the man behind the desk. Cooper thought about what it meant, this being the richest guy in town, the only guy with painted walls and fingernails plus a backyard generator, undoubtedly the only guy speaking fluent English on top of it. Pulling his mug shot photo, Cooper stood, walked over to the desk, dropped the picture on it, and came back to the couch and sat.
“Friend of yours?” Cooper said.
The man’s eyes flicked over to the snapshot, lingered, then refocused on Cooper.
“What it is you looking for, you better off looking somewhere else,” he said.
Cooper, getting tired of this room and the people in it, met the man’s dead-eyed stare with a bankrupt look of his own, thinking, Match this thousand-yard stare, priest-man. Cooper could feel Alphonse’s nervous energy beside him.
“Are you familiar with the person in that photograph?”
“I don’t know nothing ’bout what you asking.”
“You’re sure.”
“We have nothing for you,” the man said, “and you are not welcome to remain here.”
Cooper nodded, rose, crossed the room, retrieved the picture from the desk, and returned it to his pocket. Standing beside the desk, he could see a few things that might otherwise have been hidden from view: papers, pens, pencils, a file drawer unit, what looked like a key-locked fire safe, a cellular phone-older, bulkier, but still a cell phone out here, at least seventy-five miles from the nearest tower. Its charger was plugged into an extension cord Cooper figured hooked up to the generator out back.
While he found this stash of goodies mildly interesting, Cooper figured it wouldn’t do any good to ask any more questions of the semimute Bizango medicine man. Anyway, he’d stirred up all the trouble he needed to-all he had to do now was hang around and wait for the reaction.