Painkiller

Will Staeger

Painkiller

The first book in the W. Cooper series, 2005

FOR NADINE

(the list of reasons runs longer than this book)

1

He couldn’t remember coming here; he didn’t know where he was. Jagged leaves, black in the wet night, whipped his cheeks as he ran. Sores bled beneath a torn jersey. A gust of wind knocked him off balance, and he slipped, fell, and rose again. Hurling his diseased body through the jungle, he couldn’t find sufficient oxygen to fill his lungs; few of his muscles obeyed the orders from his brain. None of this mattered.

All that mattered was the pain-and the need to escape it.

Rifle shots cracked, the equivalent of snapping twigs in the roar of the hurricane. Figures emerged from the jungle behind him-rain-soaked wraiths shouldering heavy firepower. Voices barked, and with sudden brilliance a flare arced into the sky. Its parachute caught and held, bathing the fleeing man in daylight.

He may have registered a thought-memories of home, of yesterday, of five years ago. Of Simone. In that instant, it might all have come back to him; it might not. In the next, he fell, dropping eighty feet in the darkness. His legs churned on, pumping, until the rocks at the base of the cliff drove them into his pelvis.

Flashlight beams pierced the sky-rotating, descending, settling on his broken remains. It was only a matter of seconds before he was moving again. Propping his upper body on shattered elbows, he lunged forward, fighting the surf as it pummeled him. He climbed across one boulder, then the next, until, sluglike, he pulled himself onto the wooden planks of a dock. Clawing at the rain, his bloody fingers stretched, reaching for the vision that appeared to him at dock’s end. Moored against the farthest piling was a rowboat-an eight-foot dinghy, slapping and banging itself to pieces, restrained only by a fraying rope that wouldn’t survive the hour.

A star-shaped muzzle blast burst from the lip of the cliff. Another pulsed beside it, and in seconds the brittle pier was chewed to pieces by a fusillade of armor-piercing shells. He was nearing the end of the dock when one last bullet struck him in the back, and the pain that had propelled him ebbed. His struggle slowed, then ceased.

The hail of gunfire subsided; the airborne flare splashed into the sea. The flashlight beams pulled skyward and vanished. Finally, as the torrent raged around him, the man slumped, incapable of completing his escape.

2

Six o’clock in the morning and already the phone was ringing. There was no answering machine, and anybody with the number knew the rule: emergency use only. This meant the caller would persist, so if Ro

A thick rain pelted the metal rooftops of the beach club, where gray daylight had begun to offer the palm trees some definition. In thirty, maybe forty minutes, the sky would be blue, the sand dry-the island drying out like a wet paper bag in a hot oven-but as Ro

“Conch Bay,” he said. In Ro

The voice on the other end of the line spat out a request. In hearing the caller’s aim, Ro

Completing his second stroll through the rain, Ro

“Cooper!” he said, and took a step back.

It took a while, but when it did, the reply came in a baritone, the voice sludge-thick with hangover phlegm.

“Keep out.”

Ro

Another silence.

Then the voice said, “The new one. Dottie.”

“Nah,” Ro

Ro

“Run, boy,” Cooper said, and watched through the fresh hole in the door as Ro

Cooper dropped the Louisville Slugger and listened, eyes closed, to the chock-chock of the bat as it settled on the concrete floor of the bungalow. He rolled his shoulders, cracked his knuckles, and pulled in a deep, slow breath, inhaling the pungent scent of the rain.

Blinking against the morning headache, he dug a pair of shorts from a mound of clothes, looked at his Tevas, decided, defiantly, to go without-Cooper thinking he’d show the little pissant that the broken glass lying around the porch didn’t faze him. Hell-the first week he spent here, he’d watched the gardener they had that year, a local kid maybe fifteen years old, working all day in bare feet. Walking along those gravel paths with the sharp stones, and the kid hadn’t even brought a pair of shoes with him. Cooper thinking at the time that he, given enough practice, could probably do the same thing. And thinking now, a few years in-a few years of walking shoeless over those same stones-he’d developed calluses thick enough to dance the jig in a shark’s mouth, were the mood to strike.

Anybody visiting the Conch Bay Beach Club didn’t need an owner’s manual. Rent a mooring in the bay, consume a savory meal beneath the palm trees, throw back some rum punch at the bar. Bake your skin, snorkel amid rainbows of sea life, sleep with sand in your sheets, wake up to the cries of goats and roosters. No roads, no cars, two minutes of hot water in the shower, and no lights after midnight. It was these and other factors-the fish, the sea, the beach, the rum, the women, casinos, conch fritters, palm trees, blue sky, rain, trade winds, hurricanes, the oppressive heat, lethargic pace, and near-total lack of local white people-that had caused Cooper to adopt Conch Bay as his permanent residence. He’d decided on a bungalow set back from the beach, a swath of fat-leaved foliage dividing it from the portions of the resort equipped with such amenities as air-conditioning, indoor showers, and newlyweds.