Dust Up: A Thriller (27 page)

Even if that was true, I wasn’t crazy about what would happen to her after extradition, either. I’d have to worry about that later.

“I’ll call a lawyer too,” he said, “see if I can get her released.” He took out his car keys. “But right now, I need to go. And you need to get off the street.”

“No. I need to take down Energene.”

68

Regi had been skeptical when I told him what I had in mind, and even more so when I said I wanted to ask Toma for help. But his resistance softened when I pointed out that Toma might welcome the chance to get back at the guys who killed Toussaint.

He left a message on Toma’s voice mail with my phone number, saying it was urgent that he call me. Then he looked up at me. “I can’t guarantee he’ll get back to you.”

I nodded.

“Don’t go out on your own,” he said. “I mean it. Not now. It’s too dangerous.”

I said I wouldn’t, not sure whether I was lying or not.

He turned to go, then paused. “Thanks for all your help.”

“You too.”

“You’re a good friend to Haiti. And to me. Take care of yourself.”

I felt my throat tighten up. “In a few days, we’ll be at Marcel’s drinking cold beers with Miriam and exaggerating our stories.”

He smiled. “I will look forward to that.”

We shook hands, and he left, driving away in Elena’s car.

As soon as he was gone, I texted Danny. “Do you know anything about an extradition order for Miriam Hartwell?”

“No. I’ll look into it.”

Then I called Nola on her phone.

“Doyle,” she said immediately, like she’d had the phone in her hand already.

“Hi. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m stuffed. Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. Where are you?”

“The Carnegie Deli.”

“What?” Not what I was expecting.

“I’ve been here all day. Mikel’s building is around the corner. I left a note at the front desk asking him to meet me here.” She yawned. “I’ve been here for hours.”

“He might not even be in town.”

“According to his Twitter feed, he had breakfast here at the deli this morning and gave a talk at a lunch meeting of some green investment group. He’s in town.”

“How long have you been there?”

“Since noon. The food is really good, but the portions are huge.”

“What are you going to do if he doesn’t show up?”

“I don’t know. I guess leave him another note and get a room nearby. Try again in the morning.”

“You have the files with you?”

She yawned again. “Yes.”

“Be careful, babe.”

“I will. I’ll call you when I hear from him.”

“Okay. On my cell phone, I guess. I’m getting rid of this one.”

“Why?”

“I’ve learned a lot since this morning.”

“What?” She suddenly sounded wide awake. I told her the basics, about Gaden and Saint Benezet, about what was going on with the Soyagene-X, about what Ducroix seemed to be up to. “Jesus, Doyle, that’s horrible. This is … big.”

“I know. That’s why you need to be careful.”

“You need to be careful, Doyle. You’re in the middle of all this. You need to get out of there.”

“I will. I will soon. I just have a couple of things still to do.”

“What’s your plan?”

I had told her most of it when the call came in from Toma. I told her I had to go.

“Be careful, Doyle,” she said. “I love you.”

“You too, babe. We’ll talk soon.” Then I clicked over, and she was gone. “Hello?” I said, answering the other call.

“This is the
blan
?”

Switching the calls felt like being wrenched from one world into another. “This is Doyle. Is this Toma?”

“What do you want,
blan
?”

I might have overestimated his enthusiasm. It was more like a sullen indifference. But he was nearby, and he agreed to come see me.

As I waited for him, the sunlight dwindled, and the windows darkened. I practiced with two phones, calling the iPhone from the burner, setting up the interview app to record the conversation. I was surprised it actually worked.

When Toma arrived ten minutes later, I realized his attitude on the phone could have been intended to hide the stress now etched on his face even more deeply than the day before.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown,
I thought.

“So tell me again what you need from me,” he said.

I explained once again what I had in mind, where I needed to go, what I needed in order to do it. He pointed out flaws and suggested fixes.

When we were done, he summed it up, nodding his head gravely. Then his face cracked, and he let out a short laugh. “You crazy, you know that?”

I shrugged. I thought it was a decent plan.

“You have a gun?” he asked.

I raised my shirt to show him the .45 I’d taken from the Jeep and told him about the M16 that was still wedged behind the seat.

He nodded. “I’ll get you to the water. You’re on your own after that, right?”

I nodded. “When can we go?”

He looked over his shoulder at the window. “It is dark already.”

I shrugged.

“You’re in a hurry.”

I nodded. “That’s right, I am.”

“It’s more dangerous at night.”

I shrugged.

He did too, and a few minutes later, we were crossing the street toward the Jeep. He stopped as we approached it.

“Is this a police Jeep?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Where did you get it?”

“We stole it.”

“You stole it?” He snorted. “Who’s we?”

“Regi and me.”

“
Regi?
” He laughed hard at that. “You’re a bad influence on my uncle.” He got into the Jeep and punched me in the shoulder, hard but playful. “I like it, though. It’s good for him.”

I drove, and Toma directed me, away from the ocean and toward the hills. He rooted around in the Jeep as we drove, finding binoculars, a canteen, and a flashlight. He tried on Officer Turnier’s cap but frowned in the mirror and put it back.

We made a few detours to avoid roadblocks or protests with piles of burning debris in the middle of the intersection. Toma laughed at those, smiling like it was festive.

At the edge of the city, he directed me onto the same road up into the mountains that Regi and I had taken to come meet Toma the first time.

Behind us, the city’s meager lights twinkled in the still-growing darkness. Scattered among the streetlights were smudges of flickering, smoking orange from the fires burning in the streets.

It looked like a place teetering on a knife’s edge, that could go either way at any moment. We turned another switchback, and the city disappeared behind a row of uneven shacks, the streetlights and bonfires replaced by the occasional light of a candle or the dim glow of small electronics in the otherwise darkened windows.

The solid pavement once again became patched and pockmarked before turning into random chunks of asphalt embedded in hard-packed dirt. The darkness made it even more harrowing as the road dropped any pretense of paving. Before long, we ran out of road entirely.

“Park here,” Toma said.

I pulled over to the side of the road, at the same spot where we had encountered Cyrus. The headlights swept out into the dark night over the city before I killed the engine. It crossed my mind that Toma could be luring me to some kind of ambush, but I had called him. I had set this up.

“I need to pick up some supplies,” he said, studying my face in the dark. I stared back at him, trying to look inscrutable. The .45 was a heavy and comforting presence against my stomach. I made sure my hand stayed close to it as I followed him through the darkness along the same path we had taken before.

The small cluster of buildings appeared ahead of us, black shapes in the darkness. I could just make out the white chairs on the front porch.

“Wait here,” Toma said, barely visible beside me. I saw his form pass in front of the white chairs and then disappear inside. A dim light came on, spilling just enough illumination through the doorway that I could see a pair of eyes glaring at me in the darkness. I might have flinched when I saw them, because a white smile opened up underneath them. Then I made out the barrel of a gun, maybe two feet from my head.

The eyes leaned in closer. “Thcared?” asked a voice in the darkness.

Cyrus, whom I had disarmed last time I was there.

His eyes looked crazy enough that I was thinking he just might shoot me, that I needed to take the threat seriously. Then I heard my own voice saying, “Thcared thtupid.”

His eyes hardened, and I thought this was probably the end. Then Toma’s silhouette appeared in the doorway with a bag over his shoulder, and his voice hissed, “Cyrus!”

We both turned to look at him.

They snapped at each other in Kreyol until Cyrus tilted his head, waggled the gun pointed at me, and said in English, “And what’s the
blan
doing here?”

Toma studied him in the dark for a moment. Then he pulled a pistol out of his waistband.

Cyrus smiled and cocked his gun, still pointed at my head. All in the same instant, Toma smiled too—a tiny, sad, weary smile—and as his hand came up with the gun, Cyrus’s smile faltered.

The muzzle flash from Toma’s gun was blinding in the darkness. My pupils slammed shut, and by the time they opened up again, Cyrus was missing an eye, and his smile was falling off his face in chunks.

His gun fired too as his fingers responded to his brain’s final command, but he was already dead. In that second flash, I could see the red ruin of his face, his remaining eye blank and wide as it rolled up into his head. Then he dropped, swallowed up into the darkness.

I felt a tiny droplet of moisture on my cheek. I wiped it on my shoulder and kept my eyes away from the sky, keeping open the possibility that it could have been rain.

“He’s been challenging me since Toussaint died,” Toma said, still standing in the doorway. “I didn’t ask to be in charge, but I am. It was going to be him or me.”

He reached back and turned off the light, then stepped off the porch. “I didn’t like him, but I didn’t want to kill him,” he said as he walked past me. “If one of us had to go, I’m glad it was him.”

The clouds parted, and the moon came out, a thin sliver that washed everything with a faint light.

“He could have shot me,” I said, sounding shrill in my own ears.

Toma shrugged. “I hardly know you, man.” Then he turned and walked away. “Come on if you’re coming.”

69

We hiked without speaking at first, the birds and crickets making plenty of sounds to fill the void. The moon came and went, lighting our way and then disappearing and leaving us in darkness. Most of the time we walked through low, scrubby brush, but at times, we had to take turns hacking through the trees. Toma had grabbed two machetes, an automatic rifle, and a bag of salty plantain snacks. He shared the machetes and the plantain chips. The rifle he kept for himself.

I didn’t know the guy, didn’t know how to read him, especially not at night, swinging a machete around. But he seemed upset. I had no idea if Cyrus was the first life he’d taken, and I wasn’t ready to concede that he had no choice in doing it, but I understood his predicament. I was heartened that it still wasn’t easy for him.

“Fucking Haiti,” he said, bitter and weary, fifteen minutes after we’d set out.

I didn’t know what to say to that. He had a point. It was not a country without problems. But it had upsides, as well. People like Regi and Marcel and Elena. People like Portia. And it wasn’t my country to criticize. How many times a day did I say, “Fucking America”—and with good reason too. But I wasn’t Haitian, so I kept my mouth shut.

“The only successful slave rebellion in the history of the world. Did you know that?”

“I might have.”

“Yeah, well, you might not have. I never heard it mentioned when I was in the States. Spartacus, sure. There’s movies about him. ‘
I’m Spartacus’ … ‘No, I’m Spartacus
.’ Fuck that—who wants to be fucking Spartacus? I want to be Louverture. At least he
won
his fucking rebellion.” He laughed bitterly and hacked at a nearby tree branch, his voice growing louder as he continued.

“This country has such a proud history, and it’s such a fucking mess. Don’t get me wrong—I know it’s not all the Haitians’ fault. The Americans and the French and the Dominicans, fucking Dole Fruit and now motherfucking Stoma Corporation, they’ve been lining up for two hundred years—four hundred years—to rape us and kill us and take our land and our money and our resources. Then they all line up and say, ‘Poor fucking Haiti, the poorest country in this hemisphere’—as if it wasn’t the most profitable colony in the world before they squeezed it dry. As if they didn’t all get together and decide to make Haiti an example, to make sure those black slave-revolting savages would regret the day they dared to take back the land they’d been working themselves to death on, dared to string up the bastards who’d been killing them for generations on it.” He sighed, and his voice came down again. “As if they hadn’t agreed to make sure the first successful slave revolt was going to be the last one, too.”

He kicked a rock in the moonlight, sending it skittering into the brush, causing an indignant squeak and a frantic thrashing in the bushes.

As the silence returned, I wondered if I should chime in, but he was making a lot of sense, and he seemed like he wasn’t finished. Plus he was swinging that machete around pretty good. I kept quiet.

“We drove out the French, drove out the Americans, built the citadel—the Eighth Wonder of the World. Sometimes it seems like we can do anything, and sometimes the most basic things other countries do every day, they’re just beyond us.”

He paused again. Kicked another rock.

“I know what Regi thinks. About Toussaint. About me. But Toussaint was a good guy. He was my friend. Yes, he was a criminal, but he was born into a criminal world. You don’t play basketball on a football pitch. You don’t play Scrabble on a chessboard. He got himself born into Haiti, the poor bastard, so Haiti was the game he played. And he was good. He wasn’t a murderer, he was a thief, in a land where stealing is the national fucking pastime. And nobody cared until he stole food from those rich bastards who weren’t even eating it. Who weren’t sharing it or selling it or giving it away. They were letting it sit there while people starved. So what if he stole it? He got it into the mouths of the people who were hungry.