Alphonse pointed into the hazy distance, Cooper noticing the kid did not appear remotely fatigued. Following his finger, Cooper could see, maybe two miles off, in a greener section of the plain they’d just reached, a settlement. There was a patchwork of farmlands, a few dozen shanties, the same creek dribbling its way through town; there were no visible roads coming in or out, just the half-green village, a bone-dry forest behind it, and the endless brownish landscape rising in all directions from the valley.

The thing that appealed most to Cooper about this newfound testament to human survival was the hope that he’d be able to round up a watering hole, maybe find some unique local spirits-no doubt primitively distilled, he thought, but still home-brewed and pure.

He found it in the form of an open-air shack on the outskirts of town, literally a lean-to with a counter crafted from a slab of driftwood, Cooper wondering where you found driftwood in the desert. There were a couple of stools standing against the slab, with some tables and chairs filling out the rest of the place. Four locals populated the joint, pretty much just hanging around-two at a table, one at the bar, and the fourth behind the driftwood slab. Maybe serving. All four appeared dressed for farmwork.

He got the evil eye immediately, Cooper feeling like a drifter coming into the saloon in a Clint Eastwood movie, only with bleeding toes and blistered feet. He ignored the looks and took a stool at the bar. Alphonse followed his lead as he shrugged off his backpack and settled on the seat, Cooper trying to remember a good line from an Eastwood film to offer these boys, but it’d been too many years since he’d owned a television. He opted for the mock-idiotic-tourist routine instead, though he considered it might be fair to say he was in fact an idiot for even coming here at all.

Nodding at Alphonse, he said in drawling English, “Anything they got. Whiskey, rum-maybe something they make themselves.”

Alphonse, playing the role, jerked his chin at the bartender and banged out a stretch of his patented triple-broken dialect.

The bartender was bigger than the others, his skin a cup of strong coffee, forehead a little taller than you found on other West Indians, so that it gave the impression of a receding hairline. He smoked a cigarette with a long ash that dangled lazily from his lips. Everybody in here, Cooper realized, was smoking. He guessed the latest in filtered low-tar brands weren’t readily distributed in La Vallée des Morts. Secondhand smoke, going to kill him.

The bartender pushed off from the post he’d been leaning on. He didn’t touch the cigarette in his mouth, leaving the ashes to fall. He pulled an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid from a box.

“Deux?”

Alphonse hesitated but forged forth. “Wi, deux,” he said, and the bartender put a pair of paper Dixie cups on the driftwood slab and filled them before returning to his post.

Cooper looked around the place and got the other six eyes staring back at him, big, white orbs, sunk deep into dark, weathered sockets. The two at the table were young and sinewy, maybe even tough; clearly annoyed at the interruption, these boys formed the epicenter of the evil glare. Cooper put them in their early twenties. The guy seated at the bar was older, closer to fifty, with a short, gray beard that resembled lint balls stuck to his chin. Hunched over his drink, he stared back at Cooper with something like fascination.

Cooper figured the appearance in this bar of a pale, well-fed blan wasn’t much different from a moose or a bear coming off a yacht and sliding up to the bar at the Conch Bay Beach Club. He saw no need to consider the communal evil eye they were giving him anything more threatening than a symptom of shock.

He dug into his backpack and pulled out the props he’d stowed there, the driftwood slab as good a place as any to take them for a test drive.

On a white sheet of paper, he’d sketched a depiction of the brand. He’d folded the rest of the sheet of paper behind the image, so that he had a rectangle about the size of a four-by-six photograph with the sketch residing within the borders. Also in the stack of goodies he pulled from the backpack was the full set of Eugene Little’s Polaroids he’d snatched on his way out of the morgue-the shot of the brand on the victim’s neck, a profile of the poor kid’s face, and a head-and-shoulders portrait too, Eugene’s photography pretty good in that it made the body appear half-alive. Sort of like a mug shot of the kid, only with his eyes closed. The face was bloated and pale, and infested with sores, but it still gave the general impression of the boy’s appearance: if the chain-smoking bruiser serving the firewater in Dixie cups had known the kid in life, he’d also know him as captured in death by Eugene’s specialized form of photography.

Cooper set a ten-dollar bill on the slab beside the first of the props-the sketch. He caught the bartender’s eyes before jerking his chin at Alphonse.

“Ask him to come over again.”

This time it took nothing in the way of a prompt from Alphonse to get the bartender to approach. Thinking, Ah, the universal language, Cooper said, “Ask him if he’s seen this brand before. There a bokor in the neighborhood might be using it?”

Alphonse semitranslated. Cooper watched as the bartender’s eyes drifted only briefly across Alphonse, the man keeping his focus on the ten-dollar salary he intended to earn. To influence him a bit, Cooper stuck a finger onto the folded paper, pointing at the sketch.

“This, here,” he said as Alphonse finished the translation.

The bartender’s eyes worked in their sockets, adjusting from money to sketch. They then ran up to Cooper’s face, back down, and, with a lightning-quick snatch, the bartender jerked the money off the bar and pocketed it. He looked at Cooper again, this time with a degree of defiance. Then he fingered the sketch and turned it in a short circle before pushing it back across.

“Non,” he said. “Mwen regret sa.”

Then he went back to his post. His cigarette had burned down and out, so he fired up another with a paper match and sucked at it, once again leaving the cigarette lodged permanently between his lips. Cooper noticed that there were now grubby fingerprints on the paper holding his sketch.

He took out a second ten-dollar bill, popped it straight, and laid it on the bar in the same manner as before. He pulled the sketch from the bar, tried rubbing off the fingerprints, failed, returned the sketch to his pocket, and came out with the head-on mug shot.

He said, “Ou ne konnen le témoignage des Bizango, eh?” then put the picture on the slab. “Then how about my cousin here-he ring any bells?”

Alphonse regarded him with the same befuddled expression he’d displayed in the pickup.

The bartender came over and snatched the money, but when he tried to finger the photograph, Cooper pulled the picture back.

“Touchez-pas,” he said.

The bartender snorted, looked at the photograph, shook his head, said, “Non,” and stood his ground.

Cooper nodded and popped off another ten. Alphonse looked like his head was going to explode if he saw another bill hit the slab.

“Maybe he could tell us,” Cooper said, pulling Alphonse back into the exchange, “if there’s anyplace to stay around here. Couple of beds, even some soft earth and a roof. Hot meal wouldn’t be bad, would it?”

Alphonse nodded in appreciation of what he understood Cooper to have said-the first sign of fatigue Cooper had noticed in the kid, in any form, for the duration of the journey-and gave the bartender some version of what Cooper had told him. The bartender retrieved the third bill and answered the question; Alphonse semitranslated his response, which Cooper had already understood perfectly well.

“Five houses down,” Alphonse said, “il dit there be an old lady là-bas, she give the beds. Pay that lady the money you be paying here, il dit could be she cook supper aussi.”