The Secret Soldier (6 page)

And she wasn’t.

An hour later, she lay beside him, touching the scar on his upper arm, a knuckle-sized knot from a bullet he’d taken long before. She rolled the dead flesh between her fingers like a marble. “Does it ache?”

“No.”

She pinched it. “Does it now?”

“I thought we were supposed to be relaxing.”

“You never struck me as the cuddling type.”

He closed his eyes, and she rubbed his face, tracing slow circles over his cheeks. In seconds he fell into a doze, imagining an endless narrow highway. But he woke to find her hand sliding down his stomach.

“Really? Again?”

“If you can handle it.”

“Easy for you to say. I do all the work and you get all the credit.”

“Is that so?” She lifted her hand, tweaked the tip of his nose.

Wells turned sideways so they were face-to-face. “Maybe not always.”

Again she dropped her arm. He was eight inches taller than she was, and she had to scoot halfway under the blanket to follow her hand. “I’m looking for something.” Her hand was on his stomach now.

“You found it.”

“That’s your belly button.”

He leaned down, and their mouths met.

“There it is.” She paused. “You’re worn out. But I can fix that.”

“We’ll see. Maybe ... Yes. Yes, you can.”

 

 

LATER SHE NESTLED AGAINST
him, her breathing soft and steady.

“You’ve got a mission coming. An operation. Whatever you call it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I saw it when you came in. In your shoulders. Want to tell me?”

“It’s old business.” He waited. “Are you mad I can’t tell you?”

“John. Please. Do you want me to say I am, so you have an excuse to leave? You don’t need an excuse.”

He was silent. Then, finally: “I’m sorry.”

“It’s like you want to reinvent yourself but you know there’s no point in trying, because you know that you can only be who you already are.”

“Isn’t that the same for everyone?”

“Most of us have some give. You’re cut from rock.”

“Let’s go to sleep.”

“You want to spend your life with me here, you will. If not, you won’t. Just don’t ask me to fall in love with you while you’re deciding. I have to protect myself, too.”

He closed his eyes. He felt that somehow she was accusing him, though he wasn’t sure of what. Anyway, everything she said was true.

He slept heavily and without dreams. When he woke, she was gone. She worked the afternoon shift. He padded downstairs to find that she’d left coffee and a tray of freshly baked biscuits. He always wound up with women kinder than he deserved.

Wells drank the coffee as he considered his next move. He was guessing that Robinson dealt drugs small-time. He’d be handy to the local dealers. As a white face, he’d be less likely to frighten tourists who wanted to score.

Wells wondered how long Robinson had been playing this game, and why. Maybe he’d drunk or smoked though his cash and was supporting his habits by dealing. Maybe he had the insane idea that if he put together a big enough nut, he could get back to the United States. Maybe he was hoping to relive the thrills he’d had as a mole. Even he might not know the answer. Guys who listed pros and cons on a yellow pad didn’t wind up as double agents.

Now that Robinson had given up his best defense, his invisibility, Wells figured that finding him shouldn’t be too difficult. Montego Bay was only so large. Still, Wells wanted backup for the mission, a face that Robinson wouldn’t recognize. He thumbed through his phone, found Gaffan’s number.

 

 

MONTEGO BAY WAS JAMAICA’S
second-largest city, the hub of the tourist trade. From November to April, cruise ships disgorged clumps of sunburned Americans to buy T-shirts and rum at a heavily policed mall near the port. They were back on board by nightfall to head to the Bahamas or Puerto Rico.

Montego also had a busy international airport. Many wealthier visitors saw the city only on their way to the fancy all-inclusive resorts outside of town. But younger tourists on tighter budgets often stayed in Montego itself, in an area south of the airport called the Hip Strip, a name that immediately proclaimed a trying-too-hard uncoolness. Centered around Gloucester Avenue, the Hip Strip mixed hotels and clubs with shops selling overpriced bongs and bead necklaces. The hotel rooms facing Gloucester were useful for heavy partiers or heavy sleepers only. Until early morning, reggae and rap boomed from beat-up Chevy Caprices, the old square ones, and Toyota RAV4s with tinted windows. Outside the clubs, barkers promised drink specials and Bob Marley cover bands. Wells and Gaffan had rented a room just off Gloucester. Wells figured they would cruise the clubs until they ran across Robinson.

But catching Robinson had proven more difficult than Wells had hoped. Until he arrived, he hadn’t understood the scope of the drug trade in Jamaica. Pot and other drugs were technically illegal on the island, but at every corner on Gloucester, dreadlocked men cooed, “Smoke. Spliff. Ganja, man. Purple Haze.” After a while, the words blended into background noise. “Spliffsmokeganjaman.” The Jamaican national anthem.

The Montego Bay cops were around, too, walking the avenue. As far as Wells could tell, they weren’t trying to stop the trade. Their presence was intentionally obvious, giving the dealers plenty of warning. The only people they caught were tourists too stupid or high to hide their smoking. Wells had seen an arrest, a barely disguised shakedown. A young woman—mid-twenties, maybe—passed a tiny joint to her husband when the cops approached. “Come here,” one of the cops said. The couple wore narrow wedding rings of bright, cheap gold. “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “We’re sorry. We didn’t mean to disrespect your country.”

The lead cop pulled the man into an alley. The other cops stood in the street around the woman. “You know, it’s the first time I ever smoked pot,” she mumbled. “I don’t even feel anything. Just thirsty.”

Wells watched from a shop across the street, riffling through T-shirts that read “Life’s a Beach in Jamaica” and “No Shirt. No Shoes. No Problem.” A couple minutes later, the guy emerged from the alley, an unhappy smile plastered on his face.

The cop in charge seemed satisfied. He patted the husband. “Enjoy your trip, mon. And be careful.”

“Yes, sir. We’ll do that.” The cops disappeared. The husband pulled out his wallet, cheap black Velcro, and opened it wide. Empty. “Two hundred dollars. Assholes,” he said.

“You said it would be okay,” his wife said.

“It could have been worse.”

A philosophy of sorts, Wells figured. Then the couple disappeared, poorer and wiser. The shakedown had happened the second day, when Wells still hoped to find Robinson on the street. But Robinson was no doubt working carefully, popping up for a few days and then retreating. And the sheer volume of the drug trade meant that Wells and Gaffan couldn’t simply hope to bump into him. They would have to search him out, a more dangerous proposition.

 

 

NOW WELLS TUCKED HIS
wallet, thick with twenties, into his shorts and followed Gaffan out of their hotel room. “Where do we start tonight?”

“Margaritaville.” Part of Jimmy Buffett’s empire, which stretched over Florida and the Caribbean like an oversized beach umbrella. The Montego Bay outpost featured water trampolines and a one-hundredtwenty-foot waterslide that dropped riders into the Caribbean. Each night it filled with tourists who would prefer to visit another country without seeing anything outside their comfort zone, exactly the type of unimaginative dopers who wanted to score from white dealers.

The night before at Margaritaville, Wells had watched a guy in a tropical shirt work the room. He sat with a table of frat boys for ten minutes before he and one of the guys got up. They came back five minutes later, the frat boy rubbing his nose, his face flushed. The coke must have been pretty good. An hour or so later, the dealer pulled the same trick with another table. But the dealer couldn’t have been Robinson. He had blond hair and was a decade too young.

Margaritaville was on the southern end of Gloucester Avenue, separated from the street by high walls. Wells and Gaffan paid their cover and walked past three bouncers, each bigger than the next. They gave Wells a not-very-friendly look, letting him know that his shorts and especially his boots barely passed muster.

“Welcome to the islands,” Gaffan said. “Nicest people on earth. Want a beer?”

“Red Stripe.”

The inside of the bar was empty. The drinkers had migrated to the decks over the bay, getting ready for another subtropical sunset. The sun had turned the sky a perfect Crayola red, and a satisfied hum ran though the crowd, as though the world had been created solely for its amusement. The dealer stood in the corner, in a different tropical shirt today, his hair pulled into a neat ponytail. Wells edged next to him.

“Nice day,” Wells said.

“They all are this time of year.”

“Peak season. Business must be good.”

The dealer shook his head.

“I saw you last night.”

“Looking for something?”

“I might be.”

“I’m not a mind reader. Ask away.”

“It’s more a someone than a something.”

“That’s gonna be impossible. Something, difficult. Someone, impossible.”

“You don’t even know who.”

The dealer pulled away from the rail, turned to face Wells. He looked like a surfer, tall and lanky, with a craggy, suntanned face. He lifted his sunglasses to reveal striking blue eyes.

“What I know is that you and your bud, you couldn’t look more like cops if you tried. Him especially.”

Gaffan walked toward them, holding two Red Stripes. Wells raised a hand to stop him. “We’re not cops.”

“You don’t fit, see. There’s several kinds of doper tourists. The frat boys, bachelor-party types, they just wanna buy some weed, coke, not get ripped off too badly. You’re too old to be frat boys. The old heads, retired hippie dippers, they were in Jamaica back in the day, man, back in the day. Probably once for about a week, but they still talk about it. Now they have kids and they came on a cruise, but they want to get high for old times’ sake. That
definitely
is not you.”

“True.”

“Then you have the true potheads, the guys who subscribe to
High Times
and argue on message boards about Purple Skunk versus Northern Lights. Amateur scientists. At least they would be if they weren’t so damned high all the time. They come down here two or three at a time. Mostly they don’t look like you, they’re fatter and their eyes are half closed. But let’s say you two have kept yourself up better than most. Except they don’t hang out here. They go straight to Orange Hill, like wine connoisseurs in Napa doing taste tests. And believe me, they’re equally annoying. So what are you, then? You look like cops. Or DEA, but why the hell would the DEA be buying ounces on the Hip Strip?”

“We’re not DEA. We’re not cops. We’re looking for someone. Nobody fancy. Nobody like Dudus”—Christopher Coke, a dealer who had run an infamous gang with the unlikely name of the Shower Posse.

“That’s good. Seeing as he’s in Kingston”—the Jamaican capital. “And seeing as you wouldn’t get within a mile of him. Let me tell you about Jamaica. Seventeen hundred murders reported last year, not counting a couple hundred bodies that never turn up. Dumped in
de sea
to feed
de fishees,
mon. Four times as many murders as New York City, and New York has three times as many people as Jamaica.”

The dealer stopped talking as a woman splashed down the waterslide and into the bay with a pleased scream. “Watch this. Her top’s going to come off. Yep.”

Shouts of “Tits!” erupted from the deck. “Tits! Tits! Tits!” The woman happily raised her polka-dotted bikini in the air as the crowd cheered.

“The whole country is a warehouse for coke and pot. From here you go west to New Orleans, east to the Bahamas and Florida. The politicians are owned by the gangs lock, stock, and barrel. They don’t even try to hide it. The cops just play along. Don’t let the dreads and the Marley songs fool you. This place is Haiti with better beaches.”

“So how do you get by?” Wells found himself intrigued.

“These frat boys? They’d pay by credit card if they could. They like a friendly face. And by friendly I mean white.”

“And you keep the locals happy.”

“I take care of the people who take care of me. In and out of this bar. I understand my place in the ecosystem. I don’t have aspirations. And understand, please, that whether it’s white or green, it’s so pure that I can step on it two, three times and still make my customers happy. In fact, I have to, or they’d wind up OD’ing. And trust me, you don’t want to see the inside of a Jamaican hospital, any more than a Jamaican jail.”

Around them the deck was filling up.

“It’s getting busy,” the dealer said. “I appreciate the chance to chat, but I gotta go.”

“How do we prove we’re not cops? Get high with you?”

“I believe you. You’re not cops. But you’re trouble. Whatever you want, it’s trouble.”

The sun touched the edge of the horizon. A long collective sigh went up from the crowd beside them.

“Gonna be a beautiful night,” the dealer said. “Do me a favor. Get lost. I see you and your boy hanging around, I’m gonna talk to my friends. You don’t want that. These dudes, they won’t care even if you do have a badge. They do sick stuff when they’re stoned. Most people get relaxed when they smoke, but these guys, they just dissociate. They won’t even hear you screaming.”

“We’ll be going, then.”

The dealer nodded. Two minutes later, Wells and Gaffan were on the street.

“So? He know where Robinson is?”

“He didn’t say, but I have a feeling he might.”