Hustling into the alley, he found only a rusted Hyundai propped up on cinder blocks beside a Dumpster. He crouched, advancing gun-first around the Dumpster, then let his gun arm drop.
His back against the wall just past the Dumpster, Manny was lighting a particularly long joint for The Cat in the Hat. The Cat, whom Cooper presumed to be Ocholito, toked a lungful of weed and nodded his approval.
Cooper resheathed his Browning in the small of his back and took his first good look at the little man. Four foot nine at best, he wore a knotty beard that looked as though it would never grow all the way out, and like the taller man Cooper had seen conferring with Manny at the gallera, Ocholito was dark enough to make the cop look pale. The red top hat was half as tall as the man himself, and Ocholito wore a robe-satin, red like the hat, and unsecured, his manhood hanging unabashedly exposed to the Puerto Rican sunshine. Cooper now understood why Ocholito preferred, as Manny had put it, a whole lotta woman: in his own way, the four-foot-nine Ocholito was a whole lotta man.
Ocholito passed the doobie, and Manny sucked down a lungful of his own. Once he’d held it awhile, Manny said, “Mi amigo here, he’s looking for some answers nobody going to have but you, Ocho.”
“Oh yeah, c’est vrai?”
Ocholito’s voice was deep and oddly rough, like somebody with sand lodged in his larynx.
Cooper pulled the picture of the tattoo, thinking he ought to open a PI firm-we handle your problems when you’re already dead, just contact us in our dreams and we’re on the case. Hundred percent pro bono. Keeping his distance, he reached out to hand the snapshot to Ocholito.
“A kid who washed up dead in Road Town,” he said, “had that tattooed on the back of his neck. Voodoo symbol for death, the way I understand it. Had some tracks on his arms too. What I’d like to know is who uses the tatt-kid was running drugs, got caught stealing, I’d like to know who he was muling for. Somebody wearing that sign, maybe it makes him a banger-Eighty-seventh Street Voodoo Crips, I don’t know. Maybe you do.”
The Cat in the Hat glared at him, causing Cooper to observe that one of Ocholito’s eyelids was permanently wrinkled shut. The little man snatched the picture with manicured fingernails painted a high-gloss black and looked at the snapshot.
“Where your boy die again?”
“Body washed up on Tortola. Where he died? Anybody’s guess.”
The Cat in the Hat returned the picture and shook his head.
Cooper said, “Doesn’t mean anything to you?”
“Personne, nobody kill him,” Ocholito said in that sandy voice.
Cooper waited for further clarification. Getting none, he said, “Trust me, the boy was killed.”
“Nobody kill him ’cause he already dead.”
Cooper eyed the snapshot, seeing nothing more than he’d seen any other time he’d looked at it. “You’re telling me you can see from a picture of his neck he was already dead when they shot him?”
“That picture you showin’ me,” Ocholito said, “ain’t no tatt.”
“No?”
“Non. What you got in your hand, that be a picture of a brand.” Cooper wasn’t sure how he could tell, but he knew what was coming before Ocholito said his next words. “Et mon ami,” Ocholito said, “the brand you holdin’ be the mark of a zombie.”
Manny and Ocholito traded tokes. Cooper examined each man as he smoked, attempting to determine whether this might all have been a practical joke, planned months in advance by Manny, The Cat in the Hat, and Cap’n Roy.
“Assuming,” Cooper said, “I buy into that particular side of voodoo myth, I’d still like to know who uses the, uh, brand.”
“Nobody here.”
“Here, meaning-”
“Only place that shit go down for real, be Haiti, or maybe the DR. Pas ici.”
“Zombies,” Cooper said, “being in short supply outside of Hispaniola.”
“No, there plenty in Louisiana too,” Ocholito said and grinned. A gold tooth gleamed when he smiled. “But that about it.”
“Who in Haiti would use it?”
“Je ne sais pas.”
Cooper stomached his proximity with Ocholito’s naked member and stepped closer.
“Horseshit,” he said.
Ocholito’s expression and stance remained fixed, Cooper reading him immediately as a man who dealt with disrespect in ways that did not reside in the moment. Overendowed and not to be fucked with-outside of his exhibitionism and taste in women, Le Chat dans le Chapeau, Cooper thought, has it going on.
“I’ll give you some advice, mon ami,” Ocholito said. His voice had deepened to where he sounded like a Buddhist monk in song. “Journey you about to go on, maybe things be better, you stay home. You ready to pay the price?”
“Depends.”
Ocholito smiled again. “Maybe we bring you into the voudaison,” he said, “find you a loa. Mine, he give me powers most people only dream about. But the price be steep.”
“You asking me to sell my soul? Cosmic debt I’ve been running up pretty much drained that bank account.”
The Cat in the Hat emitted a Buddhist-monk chuckle. “We’ll see about that.”
Ocholito looked at Manny, giving him some kind of signal; needing no translation and too annoyed to negotiate, Cooper pulled a stack of fifties from his wallet and handed The Cat in the Hat four hundred bucks. Ocholito snagged the money with his high-gloss fingernails, and Cooper stepped off, giving Ocholito back his private space. The little man sucked down the last of the joint, held his breath for thirty seconds, exhaled, and nodded.
“Once you out of the country,” he said, “you out of the loop. So I ain’t your best source. Pas encore. But that picture you showing me be some version of the brand the bokor, black-magic witch doctor, burn into the skin of somebody fail to make the sacrifice he been told to make. Basically it be the brand marking somebody that bokor done zombified. Anybody spend time in the voudaison tell you that-but where, when, who done burned it in, well, je ne sais pas, mon ami. Your guess be as good as mine, since them bokors be workin’ outside of mainstream voodoo.”
He flicked the remnants of the joint to the pavement and to Cooper’s great relief folded closed the robe and knotted its strap above his equine protuberance.
“Somebody might be more up to speed,” Ocholito said, “be a man name of Benoit. Reynold Benoit, M.D. He live mainly in Port-au-Prince; by day, he work in conventional medicine, out of Hôpital H. L. Dantier.”
Cooper stored this. “And by night?”
Ocholito grinned, showing off that gold gleam. “That,” he said, “be why I’m giving you his name.”
Cooper nodded.
“Well, Little-eight,” he said, “I’d love to continue our conversation, but Manny’s backlog of unsolved cases beckons.”
He jerked his chin at Manny, walked around the Dumpster, and cut back through the store, finding no sign of the fortune-teller on his way to the car.
It took him ninety minutes at the blackjack tables of the El San Juan casino to put himself ahead for the day, net of the rigged cockfight and four-hundred-dollar Cat in the Hat peepshow. Around 2 A.M. he found some company in a pair of inebriated sisters from New Jersey who needled him until he agreed to accompany them to the suite somebody had procured for them, where they shared some of Jamaica’s finest and a three-for-all in the suite’s whirlpool tub.
Once the ladies’ presence had depreciated to a two-tiered snore pattern on the overcrowded king-size bed, Cooper pulled a Coke from the minibar, rode a pair of elevators back to his own room, and took his PowerBook out to the balcony. He was thinking he was only willing to go so far to find answers-even when the questions came to him in his dreams, screeched by the dead-and, given this, it occurred to him the Internet was a lot closer, and certainly a more pleasant place to visit, than Port-au-Prince, Haiti, sometime home to Reynold Benoit, M.D.
By way of his access to a set of online databases, he found varying theories on whether the ritual of transforming a living person into a walking corpse actually worked, or was simply the longest-running urban legend on record. If it was only myth, much of the credit for originating the legend went to a pair of books, published a century apart-in 1884, a bestseller documented savage cannibalistic voodoo rituals; recently, a more scholarly book claimed to have identified the ingredients used by witch doctors, or bokors, to reduce ordinary men to so-called zombie status. The recipe was composed of human remains, a certain indigenous flower, and varying amounts of venom extracted from the bouga toad and puffer fish. When properly administered-along with the appropriate black-magic spell-the coup poudre, as it was called, supposedly sent its victim into a coma, slowing down his metabolism enough to generate the appearance of death. Bury him, wait a few days, dig him up and feed him conconbre zombi-another indigenous plant-and the bokor had a custom-lobotomized menial laborer whose friends and family thought had died.