Today he had the Apache anchored a quarter mile off the northeast corner of St. John while he tooled around a wreck somewhere just over a hundred feet below the surface. The broken deck of the ship was rife with sea life-coral, anemones, sea urchins, French grunts, some angelfish. Hovering over the stern of the old wreck, he watched a group of parrot fish, some as long as three feet, poking through the coral, rooting out algae. If he kept himself still, he could hear them sucking down their meal. He didn’t like keeping still, though, because today, as had been the case for the past week, he found that if he kept himself still, he started seeing and hearing things. Intrusions.
The tranquility he normally found on these dives had been violated this afternoon by a kind of jumpy fear, Cooper constantly looking to see whether Roy’s body from the beach would swim out at him from around the next outcropping of coral. He couldn’t shake the feeling-it was as though a kind of delusionary sixth sense was telling him the oddly burned and busted body was following him around.
Following another shot of air, he came around the side of the wreck, getting a wide view of it in the clear water. Figuring the boat for a British vessel circa 1880, maybe a little earlier, he could see it had broken into three pieces, but the two masts remained intact. Cooper spotted the pug nose of the resident barracuda, the fish six, seven feet long, big enough to take him if the mood struck. The fish eyed him blankly before retreating, but then Cooper thought he saw another shape in the murky shadows of the cabin.
It was Roy’s body from the beach, calling out to him with a raspy screech.
You’re all I got, the bloated face said, you washed-up old fuck!
Topside, Cooper pulled the anchor on the Apache, stripped off the swim trunks, popped a half-dozen Advil to battle the emerging pressure headache, and rode back to Conch Bay. As always, he made the ten-minute trip nude, blow-drying his sun-wrinkled hide in the forty-knot wind that whipped across the deck of the Apache.
The sun was fat and orange on the horizon when he eased up, drifting to a stop, and tied his bow line to a white buoy about forty yards from the Conch Bay pier. Ignoring the loud gaggle of tourists dining at the beachfront restaurant, Cooper proceeded to piss from the side of the boat for something like three minutes before yanking on a fresh pair of shorts. He splashed the Apache’s dinghy into the bay, zipped into the dock, and waited stubbornly in his seat until Ronnie came out from the restaurant and wordlessly assumed the task of tying off the dinghy.
At the bar, he waded through the fat, sunburned people waiting to order a drink, walked behind the counter, and poured himself a very tall Maker’s Mark on the rocks. The kid tending bar continued with the cocktails he’d already been mixing. Cooper gulped the bourbon like it was Gatorade, the chilled drink tasting smooth and spicy going down. It worked like a kind of VapoRub against his headache but did nothing to exorcise his new friend the ghost. After consuming a refill, in fact, Cooper watched as Roy’s body from the beach strolled up and took one of the stools at the bar, eyeing him with the same, flat look he’d seen in the eyes of the barracuda.
Oh yeah, the ghost screeched from his stool, the truth shall set you free, mon.
Cooper poured another bourbon for the road, told the bartender to have Ronnie bring him a ham sandwich, and walked barefoot down the gravel path to his bungalow.
Inside, he lifted from the counter of his kitchenette the Polaroid snapshots from Eugene’s photo gallery and found the picture of the tattoo. He stared at it for a while, holding it at different angles beneath the yellowing incandescent bulb hanging over his kitchen table. The picture didn’t tell him anything except that he could see now it wasn’t nearly as put together, or neatly inked enough, to be an ankh. Cooper wasn’t even sure how he remembered what an ankh was, but he knew now he wasn’t looking at one. The tattoo was rougher-uglier. A crude, waved pattern rimmed the entire symbol, and a black orb-Cooper thinking it was probably a moon, or star-resided an inch or two from the top of the symbol’s main circular head. Whatever the hell an ankh was, he thought, it probably didn’t come with a moon.
His bungalow had only the one main room, which came loaded with the kitchenette, plus a bathroom that reached partially out back by way of its outdoor shower. Adjoining the kitchenette was a twin-size bed with no headboard, the bed somewhere around six inches too short for him, a problem he’d never felt urgently inclined to fix. Lurking between the bed and the door sat the room’s only other furniture: a squat, upholstered chair and matching ottoman.
Cooper kept his PowerBook on the ottoman. Beside it, a tangle of wires and devices lay on the floor, some connected, most not. He took the picture and fed it into a scanner he kept plugged into the side of the laptop; when he had the image up on the monitor, he worked it over with his mouse pad, isolating the symbol from the splotchy underlying skin.
He submitted the image as a search key within a classified online database to which he enjoyed unfettered access. The search engine took forty seconds to complete its hunt and delivered three hits. For each, the database software delivered a photo of the symbol it had found along with a body of text explaining its significance.
The first match was in fact an ankh, explained as the ancient Egyptian symbol for life. The passage mentioned alternate names: Ansate cross, Cross of life. Pulling down some of the Maker’s Mark, Cooper noted that the ankh’s horizontal bar was much higher than the tattoo’s. The second and third matches, similar but still not identical to the tattoo, each contained the same description: “A symbol commonly used by practitioners of religious ceremonies involving ancestor worship and communication with animistic deities, e.g., voodoo.” A more general explanation of voodoo followed, which Cooper had no need for. Live in the Caribbean long enough, and you saw your share of it.You also learned pretty quick that nonpracticing West Indians were generally superstitious enough to steer well clear of black magic and its practitioners. Hell, he thought, maybe Roy had made a savvy move after alclass="underline" run across a voodoo tattoo on a body washed up on the beach and I’d dump it off on somebody like me too.
Roy passing the buck, though, didn’t do anything for the body on the beach, or its ghost either. Fucking kid dies a horrible death, and some two-bit local chief of police arranges to send him straight to the crematorium-no murder case, no investigation, nobody meting out justice-hell, nobody giving a flying leap.
Eh, Cooper, dat you, mon? It’s me, your old buddy Cap’n Roy. We down the Marine Base way. Come by ’bout an hour and help me fuck over this poor bastard now that he done died.
You’re all I got, you washed-up old fuck.
Cooper jumped as three loud bangs sounded through his bungalow. The bangs were followed by a dull thump, then footsteps retreating down the stairs.
Deciding, after due consideration, he was in no mood to chase Ronnie through the garden with the Louisville Slugger, he rose, opened the door, retrieved the wax-paper-encased ham sandwich from the floor of his porch, and more or less inhaled it while standing in the doorway.
If he had to, he could do some digging. Nose around some of Puerto Rico’s botánicas, find somebody specializing in voodoo tatts-somebody who could tell him where somebody wearing this one might have hung out. He had a few people on his list who lived in that world; in fact there was a certain San Juan detective who might just do, a guy at least two or three notches further along than Roy on the corruption scale. Then again, Cooper didn’t like Puerto Rico all that much. And he liked the other voodoo hotbeds, Haiti and Jamaica, even less-life at Conch Bay suited him just fine.