He had to duck under the swipe of the last man’s blade, but he came up under the swinging arm with a point-blank shot to his assailant’s rib cage and, wraith, evil spirit, or otherwise, the shot felled him, and Cooper was done with the targets in his video game.
He went to Alphonse. Some of the would-be killers were making noise, moaning on the ground, but Alphonse wasn’t. He lay flat on his back, silent, his face expressionless but alert, Cooper thinking he looked as though he’d expected this precise turn of events to happen. It wasn’t pretty: Alphonse’s right arm had been sliced clean through, his blood, black in the moonlight, spreading out all over everything, the soil, his clothes, his legs, his feet. The two dead men Cooper had shot lay beside him.
Cooper looked for and found the kid’s long arm. The machete had severed it above the elbow; a length of nearly three feet of it was twitching on the ground a foot or two from the body it belonged to.
He found his backpack, grabbed the inventory of T-shirts from its main pouch, tore off two of the backpack’s straps, and did his best to tie off Alphonse’s upper arm with the makeshift tourniquets. By the time he finished, the shirts he’d wrapped around the stump were soaked through with blood, but there was at least a chance he’d managed to curtail the blood loss. He tore off another strap from the backpack, took off his shirt, did a scaled-down version of the same tie-off on the severed arm itself, set the arm across Alphonse’s waist, and leaned down near the kid’s face.
“Hang tight, Kareem,” Cooper said. “I’ll be right back.”
He came through the middle of town, passing the driftwood bar and the old woman’s lean-to along the way. The lights were burning inside the witch doctor’s house when Cooper came up the porch stairs. He tried the knob, which turned, but the door was latched somehow and wouldn’t open, so he kicked it in.
Barry the witch doctor and Cooper’s escort from the morning were seated on the floor, cross-legged and facing each other about four feet apart. The place was thick with smoke. They shared a pipe-smoking a little herb, eh, Cooper thought. Get ready to smoke this pipe, poppy.
The escort had whipped his head around in surprise upon Cooper’s entry; the witch doctor had not.
“Allez-y!” Cooper said to the escort. “Vas!”
The guy got up and headed for the door, spouting off at the mouth as he did it. Cooper ignored him, knowing he was the kind who would leave. The witch doctor remained on the floor in the lotus position, eyes closed, Cooper thinking he probably still has a lungful of that weed in there.
“You been warned,” the witch doctor said, eyes still closed. “Now you going to die.”
“Your death squad already struck out, big boy.”
The guy opened his eyes and looked up at him. Given the circumstances, Cooper didn’t like how leisurely the look was.
“You be dead soon enough,” the witch doctor said.
“Here’s a message from Marcel S.,” Cooper said, and plugged the witch doctor with the first four shells of the fresh clip he’d popped into the Browning on the walk over.
Barry toppled over backward onto the floor. Cooper came over and checked his robes, but there was nothing on him. It made Cooper think a little more about the bastard’s last words, the bokor sounding all too confident as he’d said them.
You be dead soon enough.
He came around behind the desk and rifled through everything he could find-the cell phone, the charger, some trinkets, papers, a short stack of money in the metal box under the desk. He took out the money and threw it on the floor. Under the money, there were some other things. Coins, what looked like a car key, a couple of blank business cards with phone numbers written on them. Cooper recognized the main area code for Puerto Rico on one of the cards. The other he didn’t know for sure but figured it for Jamaica. He snatched the business cards and kicked the money, scattering it across the floor, and left.
Graveside, he took the loose end of the strap he’d used to tie off Alphonse’s arm and knotted it around a pair of belt loops on his shorts. He let go of the severed arm, and it dangled from his waist-the flexed fingers of the kid’s lost hand reaching almost to his shoelaces, but not quite. He retrieved the last of his candy supply, feeding Alphonse a few bites before polishing off the rest himself. He gulped a bottle of water and, deciding to do without the rest, left the backpack beside the empty grave. He positioned himself alongside Alphonse’s long, limp body, the kid looking like a snake in the dirt, and then, bending at the knees, he reached backward and stretched his arms out behind his legs to loop them underneath Alphonse.
Cooper got the kid a foot off the ground, crouched deeper, leaned forward, and pulled the boy’s skinny body up over his ass. He positioned Alphonse’s waist so that he could bend the kid’s body around the contour of his hips, and with Alphonse bent around him like a noodle-float in a suburban swimming pool, he was able to clasp his hands underneath the noodle, in front of his body-just above his own nuts, as it turned out. Bobbing once to check the seal of his hand clasp, he shook his head, reasonably satisfied that this was the best he was going to do, and stood up straight.
“Not too bad, Kareem,” he said. The kid felt light as a feather, though he’d have to see how long that would last.
He set out and felt the grade wearing on his hamstrings before he’d taken a dozen steps. The blisters on his feet squeezed against the boots and his arms ached. He looked up at the hill, which it did not appear to him he had even reached.
“Christ.”
It was going to be a long walk up that fucking mountain.
16
In 1974, at the tail end of the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese strategists, fearing a possible last-ditch invasion by the U.S. Navy, ordered a series of mines planted outside a harbor near Haiphong. By the time local intel overrode the paranoia of the strategists and the order came to sweep the mines, local vessels had been safely navigating the harbor for almost two years. All of the local captains knew exactly where the mines were.
Unfortunately, the new rotation of military personnel supervising the minesweeping operation did not. Operating from a combination of the original specifications and hearsay from local fishermen, the man in charge of the mission did his best, but found that once the harbor and its adjoining channel were ostensibly cleared, the count of recovered or detonated mines came up two devices short. After a cursory second sweep, the commander wrote off the discrepancy, stating in his report that the two missing mines must have previously detonated without incident.
In actuality the missing mines had broken from their moorings almost two years before the sweep.
A typhoon in the fall of 1976 had caused the cables anchoring the two mines to scrape against a marine escarpment for sixteen straight hours; both cables were sheared, one near its mine, the other almost where it had been affixed to the ocean floor. The mine with the shorter length of cable floated to the surface and drifted off in the night, washing ashore thirty miles up the coast along with some driftwood and other debris. It was never discovered except as a sort of jungle gym used unwittingly by local kids.