Then Jim came out of the alcove. Cooper watched as he flicked the remnants of his last cigarette into the street, turned, and began to walk with a deliberate stride back down the street, moving in the direction of the van. Cooper was ready for a confrontation, figuring Jim would easily have made him from the alcove, Cooper sitting in a gleaming Ford Taurus with four hundred miles on the odometer in a neighborhood littered with vehicle carcasses. Jim didn’t come his way, though, and instead paused on the other side of the street and looked around the interior of another alcove from his spot on the sidewalk.

Cooper realized what it was Jim had in mind just before he did it.

Turning suddenly into the alcove, Jim leaped on the bum sleeping against the wall and unleashed a series of savage, pistonlike kicks into the man’s head. The attack was silent, brutal, and quick. Once the violence subsided, Jim checked his victim over, grabbed him by his hair to take a look, confirming the knockout. Then he threw the wino over his shoulder, shifted his posture to get comfortable with the weight, and carried the comatose bum back to the van. Cooper had the urge to get out of the Taurus, walk across the street, and kick Jim’s teeth in, but he knew it wouldn’t do him, or his twice-dead client, any good. He still had to find out where Jim was headed, why, and to see whom. Among other things.

Jim drove a few miles on a main thoroughfare before making another turn. Cooper was completely lost, but he discovered this didn’t matter, since Jim wasn’t going anywhere-he parked on a quiet side street and simply remained inside the van. After a while, Cooper saw him duck into the back; after another while, he returned to smoke another cigarette in the front seat before leading Cooper onto the highway.

At 3:11 by Cooper’s dashboard clock, Jim exited the turnpike. Cooper burned some fuel catching up as the Mitsubishi vanished from the through-way, and as he followed Jim’s route off the exit ramp he saw a sign displaying the words CANNERY and MUSEUMS. He caught the broken taillight around a corner between what appeared to be a pair of abandoned warehouses before the minivan’s brake lights flared and Cooper could see Jim easing the Mitsubishi out onto a dock.

Cooper parked the Taurus and got out. He could smell the Caribbean immediately. They’d come to a run-down waterfront district where some of the buildings had been preserved and repainted as museums, others either abandoned or used anonymously, streaks of grime and rust evident along their corrugated metal siding. Two piers stretched out into the bay; rows of creosote-laden pilings supported the fat buildings the way giraffe legs might hold up an elephant. Cooper could see the van out on the first pier, the southernmost, so he found his way out to the end of the other.

Cooper heard the thrum of an approaching engine and pegged it, without being able to see the boat, for a Bertram or a Chris-Craft, Cooper guessing at least a forty-five-footer. He found a small depression in the planks of the pier, a place where he could sit, adequately camouflaged, and still enjoy an unobstructed view of Jim. Jimbo, he saw, was leaning against the front grille of the minivan, having another smoke. Cooper wondered whether it was tobacco or dope he’d been smoking along the way.

The boat approached the dock sideways, giving the pilings a brawny bump, Cooper thinking the boat’s captain couldn’t keep a freight train on railroad tracks. It looked a little bigger than he’d thought, maybe fifty feet, but definitely a Chris-Craft like he’d guessed; it was hard to tell, given the boat’s severe weathering. What he could see, even in the half-moon darkness, was that the hull was swollen with barnacles and stained with blooms of rust.

A thin white guy wearing foul-weather gear and a baseball cap emerged from the rear of the boat. He secured the lines, climbed a ladder that Cooper hadn’t noticed was connected to the pier, and pulled himself up onto the dock. He and Jim came together, Jim still smoking; there was conversation which Cooper had no way of hearing, and then the white guy went back to the edge of the dock and waved. A second man, also white, appeared in the back of the boat holding something small and dark. He tossed it up to the guy on the dock and went back inside the boat. Cooper could see that he had thrown his companion a canvas athletic bag.

The first white guy handed the bag to Jim, who unzipped it, checked inside, then zipped it closed again and tossed the bag into the minivan through the open passenger-side window. Jim then opened the rear hatch and proceeded to remove the wino, now bound with duct tape. Jim carried him to the edge of the dock, where the first white guy, now positioned on the ladder, grabbed hold. Struggling to hold the wino’s near-dead weight, he climbed down the ladder to the boat. His companion came out again and helped take the wino into the cabin.

Then the two of them were back inside the boat, Jim was behind the wheel of the minivan, and everybody left.

Cooper stayed where he was for a moment, not really sure whether he wanted to get up at all. He thought about what this meant, presuming he could extrapolate-or whatever it’s called, he thought, when it’s the opposite of extrapolation-and apply this odd turn of events to recent history. If he could, then perhaps Marcel S., once-dead and then exhumed and revived, had been delivered somehow to Jim, who then passed him on, as with the wino, in exchange for whatever was in the canvas bag. Maybe to the same pair of white guys in the Chris-Craft; maybe not. It seemed unlikely-and, given the rest of Cap’n Roy’s mystery ride, too easy-for the owners of the boat he’d just seen here at Cannery Row to have procured both the wino and Marcel from ol’ Jimbo, but it was certainly possible. This logic therefore made it worth his while to make a call he’d been thinking about making for one hell of a long time anyway.

In the meantime, though, there was something he needed to do.

He caught up to the minivan just shy of the highway on-ramp, using some good old-fashioned American horsepower to overtake it. Once he had, Cooper cut in front of the van and stood on the brake pedal, giving Jim a choice: lock his own brakes or ram headlong into the Taurus. Jim hit the brakes.

Cooper, who was already out of the Taurus, was able to get over to the driver’s-side door of the minivan before Jim had figured out what was going on. When he got there, he smashed his fist through the window, grabbed Jim by the neck, and slammed his head against the steering wheel. Jimbo’s eyes rolled back in his head, pretty much the way Cooper had seen albacores’ eyes do when you whacked the suckers with the deep-sea charter-issue kill-stick. Cooper then opened the door, reached over, unbuckled Jim’s seat belt, got hold of the back of Jim’s sweat suit top, and pile-drove him through the front windshield. He pulled Jim’s head back inside, raking his face through the jagged glass, then bashed Jimbo’s forehead against the steering wheel until his arm hurt, Cooper losing count of the number of times Jim’s bleeding face hit the hard plastic of the wheel after maybe twenty whacks.

Winded, he hoisted Jim, long since comatose, out of the minivan and over his shoulder, then loaded him into the trunk of the Taurus. He crawled inside the van and found the duct tape, came back, and mummified Jim about the way Jim had done with the wino.

Consulting the map provided by the rental agency, Cooper took the Taurus to the front entrance of the U.S. embassy on Oxford Road. He pulled up to the barricade blocking car bombers from direct access to the front stairs, rolled down his window, and showed the stone-faced M.P. standing there his fraudulent DEA identification card. He told the M.P. there was a man tied up in his trunk who’d gone AWOL and was wanted on fifteen counts of first-degree murder, requested that the guard return his car to Hertz when he had a chance, then got out of the Taurus and walked away.