Painkiller

A few months later, about the time his finances were ru

The voice told him that wouldn’t be a problem.

Malloy had some difficulty this time, had to cruise the hard-core party scene for a few days before he found some suitable addicts. He even had to work the Kingston homo scene to get his third man, but his navy days gave him some experience with that, so he got it together and delivered the goods just the same. Five hundred bucks a head, cash, and Malloy was fucking loaded.

As word got around there was a serial killer preying on homosexual users in the Kingston underground party circuit, it wasn’t long before demand had outstripped his basic supply. A few calls from such sources as the contractors of a South American airport expansion, some shadowy weapons manufacturers, and a pair of rogue strip-mining investors made it clear to Malloy how much fucked-up shit was going down. He had raised his price to fifteen hundred a head by the time his girl taught him more about the voodoo ceremonies, telling him some of the traditions, including the one in which local medicine men drugged up the town retards, rattled off some mumbo jumbo, and turned them into zombies. Fucking real-life zombies, some in Jamaica, a hell of a lot more up in Haiti. Malloy was a businessman, and he saw in this new product source an opportunity to lower his risk, accountability, and cost. The logic was pretty simple: find some people other people thought were already dead, and you had yourself some truly disposable labor.

Malloy soon had to off the voodoo girl, figuring she’d have too much on him if he didn’t, but once she was out of the picture, Malloy got back into a rotation of dark-ski

Parked discreetly on the street in front of Malloy’s house was a green Ford Taurus. Since Malloy couldn’t see the car while balling his girlfriend inside the house, he obviously couldn’t see the man inside the car, either; seated behind the wheel of the Taurus was a gruff, deeply ta

Bored out of his skull and half asleep, Cooper wondered when the hell he would see something that would indicate what the sexual dynamo inside the house did for a living, and why a witch doctor in the Haitian badlands would have kept this freak’s pager number on a blank business card behind his desk.

The Verizon account inquiry CIA made through the company’s USVI-based regional headquarters had kicked back a name and billing address. The name on the account was James Beam, which joke Cooper appreciated immediately; the address turned out to be only that, matching a shit-hole local equivalent of a Mail Boxes, Etc. store. Cooper had first parked his Taurus near the store, begrudgingly arriving by way of American Eagle to San Juan and then American, no Eagle, on to Kingston. He had no idea what he was looking for, but hadn’t partaken of the utter boredom of a good old-fashioned stakeout in years. It hadn’t seemed so bad, Cooper sitting on the Conch Bay beach thinking about doing it, but after seventy-two hours of observing box number nineteen through the facility’s dirt-spattered window, chubbing up on a variety of Blimpie sandwiches while planted in the driver’s seat of the Taurus, he began to think that there might be a better way of going about this. Pulling around the corner every four or five hours to take a leak in the alley behind a grocery store, heading downtown to pass out in a room at the Crowne Plaza when the mail center’s closing time came around, only to start the routine from the begi

He tried to avoid thinking about Marcel S. and Cap’n Roy while he sat in the car, working at different methods of throwing up a mind block when thoughts of them entered his head. One way that worked, he found, was to allow his mind to wander northward. To Langley, or at least to some suburb nearby.

To wherever it was that Julie Laramie lived.

He kept thinking about the way she’d spoken to him. She’d carefully and consistently taken a moment to think about anything she said before saying it, Laramie putting the extra time she bought into thinking about what to say or what not to say, maybe into calculating the reason he’d called her with his a

It’s fu

Early in the seventy-third hour of his stakeout of the mail joint, Cooper got his first look at Barry the witch doctor’s distributor of the undead. The guy who opened box nineteen was one of the strangest-looking human beings Cooper had ever seen-there was no doubt he was African-American somewhere back in the family tree, but his lunar skin and tiki-torch hair made for a brutal departure from that side of his family. To get a grasp on what he was looking at, Cooper decided he would have to make up a new racial-profiling term and called the man a redheaded albino black.

Cooper had pulled into traffic behind the guy’s sputtering Mitsubishi minivan and followed him home; a little later he followed him to a bar with an address on a particularly sleazy avenue called the Half Way Tree Road. Later still, Cooper followed ol’ Jim Beam-along with the dark-ski

Camped outside Jim’s place, Cooper’s knees were in danger of catching frostbite, so cold was the air-conditioning flow from the vents beneath the dash. The A/C was uneven, so that while his knees were turning blue, sweat ran in a constant stream down his neck, back, and ass. The subject of his stakeout didn’t emerge from the house for sixteen hours following the time he’d entered it with his dark-ski

The visitor wore a shiny Adidas sweat suit, going with the full outfit even in the ninety-degree heat. He cool-walked it to the albino’s front door, and then they were pretty obvious about it: Jim answered the door, came out on the porch, handed the Jamaican some money, and the Jamaican handed Jim a bag of weed. Neither of them looked around or otherwise displayed any cause for concern, just standing out there on the porch doing a drug deal.