Painkiller

Six months later, the man with the baritone voice called again and asked Worel whether he had ever been able to replace that smashed-up boat of his.

Worel said, “Just so happen I’ve been able to procure a few of them boats, mon. You looking to do some fishing?”

“I am.”

“Reason I ask,” Worel said, “is if you looking to do some fishin’, we goin’ to do some fishin’. Matter of fact that be the case anytime you call. Anytime you want, we go out. Refreshments on the house. Matter of fact,” Worel told him, “you ever get any idea ’bout payin’ for any of these trips, then you should call somebody else. Seein’ as I’m sure anybody else out there probably be happy to take your money. But not me, mon, no sir. Not me.”

Cooper said that was all right by him and booked an all-day fishing trip for the following week.

There was a tug on the shorter line. Worel spotted it from the bridge, upward of twenty feet away, and eased off on the throttle. Silence flooded the boat with the drone of the engine off a few decibels.

“Look like he coming in again,” Worel said up top, when bang, the tip of the pole shot down toward the water.

Cooper clambered to the chair. The kid took the pole, adjusted the drag, and set the rod in the cup between Cooper’s legs, Cooper now buckled into the chair that always reminded him of the kind they used in prisons to execute convicts. Only this chair was the opposite kind of chair: one built for redemption. A seat in which he could rediscover some of the broken-off pieces of his soul.

He waited for Worel to set the hook, the old man gu

It was a marlin, her side bluer than the ocean in the sun as the graceful fish got airborne, reaching skyward, bucking, infuriated at the presence of the hook in her mouth. Cooper knew the fish was sending him a message as clearly as if she had called him to deliver it on his sat phone: Go ahead, try and bring me in, Cooper, you old sack of shit. Look at my lines, a world-class athlete of the deep-go ahead and try to drag me in with that useless rod.

Cooper thinking he was ready, knowing what he had in store for the next four, five, or who knew, maybe eight hours, judging from the size of that bitch offering up her challenge. What he had in store was the chair, the rod, the fish, and pain. Lose your concentration three hours in, let up on the tension, and that marlin would burn you for your moment of weakness. She’d shake the hook and be off for a tuna di

Up top, Worel worked the boat backward, chasing the fish as it ran. The kid pulled in the last of the other lines. Chalking up his palms in the attached bin, Cooper settled in for the unique form of bliss he knew he’d find-the physical exhaustion, the sharp pain, muscle failure, dehydration, blood loss, and sunburn, combining to deliver a sensation more liberating than even the purest chemical high. Peaceful, floating nothingness-the ultimate painkiller.

Begi

During the past few days, he had found some interesting stories in the seven newspapers Ro

It wasn’t the nuke blast he and his supernatural comrade found intriguing-though once he’d seen the story, Cooper had logged a few calls to Laramie’s numbers and found her oddly unreachable. Instead, it was a series of articles, each failing to make the front page, that Marcel nudged him to examine. It seemed a number of heads of state, along with the occasional minister of defense, had gone missing. Each affected country had released its own version, in a different way and at an alternate pace, but the story was the same. Joe Leader of Such-and-Such Nation had been traveling on business or pleasure, and failed to reach his scheduled destination. In fact, he had failed to reach any destination at all.

Ordinarily, Cooper simply notched such news in his memory banks, looking forward to the day when one of the missing leaders turned up on some adjoining island with a botched face-lift and a few billion bucks of extorted dough. This time, though, he found the stories more relevant. The men who had gone missing, he found, were the same people he’d captured in the digital photos he’d sent to Laramie before she too had gone MIA.

What this meant-at least the way Cooper saw it-was that something stunk on that fucking island.

It was early in the seventh hour when the marlin, worn out, attempted and failed to make another run at freedom. Cooper delivered the sluggish fish to the kid’s waiting gaff with one final heave of the rod, and the boy swung the hook and stuck it in the marlin’s side. It was a shallow stab, not deep enough to hold, and with its remaining fumes of energy, the marlin slipped the gaff, moving back from the boat, a gentle weave all she could muster. That was when the fading fish took a look at him.

The fish stared right into his eyes-the old girl spent, still putting up a fight, weaving in the swells while some punk kid sought to jam a gaff hook in her back. He heard her speak too, and when she did, her words floated to him in the soothing voice of Simone, Marcel’s widowed lover. That fish, or Simone, he wasn’t sure which, pleading to him, to her corrupt soldier of honor:

Wi, monsieur, she said-somethin’ done come to pass on that island. Then Simone’s voice shifted deeper, becoming more masculine as the boy approached the marlin with the hook again. You the only one can deliver justice, Cooper-mon.

Oh yeah, she said, the truth, it shall set us free.

“Leave her alone,” Cooper said.

The boy looked over his shoulder at him, hook held aloft. Halted midswing.

Cooper motioned to the boy with a flick of his bleeding, blistered hand.

“Get my line out of her mouth,” he said, “and let that old bitch go.”

From up top, Worel said, “May die anyway, Cooper.”

“Let her go!”

The boy shrugged and did as he was told.

40

In the Virgin Gorda marina, Cooper had Worel pull alongside his Apache. He stripped, heaving his short stack of soggy clothes into his own boat, and dove into the tranquil waters of the marina to cleanse his body of the fish-battle grime. He boarded the Apache, kicked on the Mer-Cruisers and, nude and upright, rode at full throttle, blow-drying himself in the usual ma

When he’d completed the ten-minute trip to Conch Bay, he secured the bowline to his mooring and ambled to the rear of the boat. Balancing on the very edge of the stern, toes wiggling beyond the edge of the fiberglass, he pissed long and far into the sea.

Since there appeared to be the usual amount of business under way at magic hour in the Conch Bay Bar & Grill, Cooper obeyed some sense of decorum and clothed himself in tie-dyed shorts and a tank top adorned with a sketch of three Charlie’s Angels-looking women riding the same surfboard. He rode his dinghy to the dock and jumped off without tying up; he passed Ro

“Hustle up,” he said as Ro

He noticed that Ro