Not unlike himself.
Eugene stepped back and took some wider shots-head and shoulders, the full upper body. When he was through, he set the camera on the countertop next to the rows of pictures. He nodded at Cooper and motioned toward the body with a gloved hand.
“Give me some help,” he said.
Cooper at the feet, Eugene at the head, they turned the body over. A new wave of foul air wafted up at them. It smelled so bad Cooper could feel it in his brain. Again Eugene didn’t seem to notice.
The victim’s back had fewer sores than the front, and the marks were smaller. The skin was smoother and darker, Cooper suspecting this to be the natural color of the man in life. On the victim’s back, Cooper saw the cleaner, almost precisely round entry points of the series of bullets that had caught him. He didn’t like the feeling it gave him.
When Eugene got to the neck, he started pushing and stretching at the skin. He looked up and jutted his chin at Cooper.
“See this?” he said. “Identifying mark.” He left the table and went over to the counter for the camera.
Cooper moved closer and saw what Eugene was talking about. At the base of the neck, barely visible against the skin, was a green symbol, dark enough to all but blend in. Maybe an inch in height, the symbol was composed of a circular top that at its base tapered off into a single vertical line with a horizontal bar below.
It looked like a tattoo.
It also looked religious, half upside-down cross, half right-side-up racquet. A word occurred to him, Cooper not sure if it was right. Ankh. He thought ankhs, if that was the word, were Egyptian, which wouldn’t make much sense in the Caribbean-but then again, not much did anyway. Eugene came back and started snapping pictures again, grunting while he did it. Finally Eugene set the camera on the counter and jammed his fists against his hips.
“What you’ve got here is some kind of menial laborer. A young one-I’d estimate him to be nineteen, maybe twenty.” He came over to the body, held up one of the hands. “Subject displays deeply calloused hands, fingernails embedded with grime, dozens of scars on the fingers and back of the hand.” With gloved fingers, Eugene pulled open the lips. “Both the fingernails and gums show definitive signs of chronic malnutrition. Sores in and around the mouth indicate a lack of citric acid in the diet. Scurvy.”
He let go. “Musculature is sinewy, with a great deal of long-term ligament and tendon damage. Less than five percent body fat.”
Cooper shrugged off a twitch in his shoulders. Eugene worked his way around the body and lifted the torso. “Seven gunshot wounds, bullets entering and exiting quite cleanly. He was shot in the back. The bullets did a great deal of damage-not your ordinary bullets. Burns on the chest and abdomen,” Eugene said, lifting the body now, exposing the chest, “are, as you say, odd, not like any I’ve seen. If I were doing a legitimate autopsy, I would take tissue samples, see what kind of residue is there, get some indication as to what burned him.” He extended one of the body’s arms. “There are also tracks on both triceps. Could be heroin, which, normally, is simple to test for. The back of the upper arm is a difficult place to self-inject, by the way.”
He let go of the upper body and moved around to the legs, Cooper watching him as he went. “Compound fractures of the lower legs indicate the victim fell from a great height, difficult to tell exactly how high without analyzing the bones. Ankles are also broken, with extreme ligament damage.”
Eugene pulled up abruptly.
“Listen here,” he said. “I’ll need the rest of that money now.”
Cooper’s thoughts, mired as they were in tattoos and ankhs, were making him uncomfortable. He was thinking that he’d seen a symbol like the ankh-tattoo on the victim’s neck somewhere before, and not just in a history textbook, or museum. Eugene wasn’t helping his malaise, Cooper watching the friendly neighborhood medical examiner shuffle around the body, rat-like, Eugene blinking like a pervert, sniffling between sentences while he sought a second handout.
Goddamn that Roy.
Cooper pulled out his wallet. “Here’s what we’re going to do, Ignatius. Run those tests you’re talking about. All of them-including ballistics, assuming you can find any bullets. Tell me what comes back. You do that, I’ll give you another hundred now as a down payment on a two-hundred-dollar bonus. Payable when I see the results. You still get the rest only if nothing hits the papers.”
Eugene glared at him, sniffling. “To do the rest, the full autopsy, I’ll have to do that after hours, you understand? The tests on the bones, the burns, tissue samples, the soil samples from underneath the nails”-the tic snapped at him again-“I’ll tell you, Cooper, I get charged lab fees for that, we don’t do it all here. And there are going to be questions. Especially if I send anything to ballistics.”
Cooper stuffed his last hundred-dollar bill and two of the fifties in Eugene’s pocket. Up close, he could hear a wheezing sound. It came from Eugene’s nose.
“There’s your whole bonus,” he said. “That puts us back at three hundred more when I see the test results, and when I’m satisfied you haven’t squealed. That’ll make seven bills total-negotiation over.”
He walked over to the counter, looked around until he found the Polaroid of the tattoo-the ankh, if that’s what it was-and took it. Even in the harsh, bright light of the flash captured on film, the symbol was hard to see against the victim’s dark skin. Cooper grabbed another few pictures that interested him before heading for the stairs, and the fresh air that waited beyond. On his way across the room he turned and took in Eugene, who stood watching him from beside the body.
“Live slow, Ignatius,” he said, then walked out of the morgue.
4
Cooper was down deep. He’d been under for two minutes, holding his breath, and could handle another three if he felt like pushing it, just the way he’d seen in a National Geographic documentary about the South Pacific. It was there where it seemed armies of twelve-year-old boys swam as far down as ninety feet and stayed under for upward of seven minutes. They went down there to haul in illegal, mile-long nets laid by rogue fishermen selling their catch to multinational fish-packing firms. Cooper thinking, as he had watched the show, that child labor laws didn’t have much bearing on the people of the remote South Pacific, but man, those kids could swim.
One lazy afternoon around twelve years back, thinking of the show, he decided to see how long he could hold his breath beneath the waves. He parked his boat over a wreck that was famous with the SCUBA set and dove, wearing nothing more than swim trunks, goggles, and his dive watch. No tanks, no fins. He made himself stay down for sixty seconds, then ninety, then two minutes, diving so deep that after a few hours of it-constantly popping his ears to equalize the pressure-Cooper felt as if his head would implode. That first night he came back to the Conch Bay Beach Club with a migraine that lasted a week, but he went right back out when he felt good enough to do it again.
Couple months later and he was staying down like those South Pacific natives, feeling like the Man from Atlantis-scare the shit out of the occasional honeymooners, their eyes bugging out of their masks, mouthpieces blasting off in a cloud of bubbles as they bolted for the surface. Cooper the moray eel, popping out of a shadowy pocket ninety feet down.