by Lincoln Matt
“Gotcha,” he said. “We’ve been analyzing these bodies, and also taking samples from the witnesses who may have ingested the drug, as well. We think we’ve identified some of the ingredients.”
“Oh?” I asked, growing excited at the prospect of a breakthrough. “What are they?”
“Nothing you would know about, just fancy scientific names,” Clyde said. “But we think we know why it hasn’t been identified before. Some of these ingredients, they’re natural in the body.”
“Natural?” I repeated. “How’s that work?”
“It means that the body acts as a natural disguise for the drug itself. Since the ingredients are native to the human body, at least in some capacity, it doesn’t show up naturally on tox screens and blood tests,” Clyde explained. “But we can see the elevated levels if we look more closely at the victims’ bodies as a whole since while the ingredients are native, the amount is unnatural.”
“But hold on, how can you OD on something that’s native to the body?” I asked. “I’m no biologist or doctor or anything, but doesn’t the liver have something to do with that kind of thing?”
“Normally, yes,” Clyde confirmed. “But this is a strange case.”
“You’re telling me,” I chuckled. “How do you figure?”
“Well, it would seem that the chemicals are in such an amount that it overwhelms the nervous system,” he said. “So it’s not a classical overdose. It’s in the brain.”
“The brain?” I repeated. “That doesn’t sound so good. So you think this is neurological?”
“That’s the theory,” Clyde confirmed. “But we don’t have all the information yet. And we are working on getting more evidence from drug busts to figure out what is going into these people’s bodies, and how. The witnesses are not much help beyond what you already know. I’m sorry I can’t give you more to go off of, Marston.”
“It’s more than we had a few minutes ago,” I assured him. “Thanks, Clyde. And thank Bonnie, as well, for both of us.”
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll be in touch as soon as we have anything more to share. Hopefully, it won’t be too long.”
“Oh, Clyde,” I interjected, remembering something that I was supposed to ask him. “Before you go, we were wondering if you knew anything about something called Haitian zombie powder.”
A rumbling noise came through the phone as Clyde let out his greatest belly laugh.
“Haitian zombie powder?” he repeated. “You’ve got to be kidding me with this, Ethan. Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“No,” I said, surprised and a bit taken aback. “I remember reading about it once in college. An anthropology class, I think. What’s so funny about it?”
“It’s widely thought to be a long-debunked myth in the scientific community,” Clyde explained, still chuckling. “That old professor who originally documented it took urban legend for fact and set off generations of misconceptions along with it. There’s no such thing as a zombie, Agent Marston. I would think you already knew that.”
“Of course, I don’t think there are real zombies,” I chuckled. “But we were just wondering, with the way this drug has been described by the witnesses, and now this boy Holm and I just talked to… well, it’s just strange is all. And since I’d read about it before, I thought I’d go ahead and ask.”
“Haiti is a third world country. There’s no doubt about that,” Clyde said. “About as third world as they come, in fact. But it still operates in reality like the rest of them.”
“So you don’t think there’s any stock to the theory,” I said.
“I mean, it wouldn’t be impossible,” Clyde said. “I’d be hard-pressed to call anything impossible after seeing these bodies up close. But I don’t know, Ethan, the supernatural?”
“It doesn’t have to be supernatural, though,” I argued. “It can just be the effects of the drug. And we don’t really know what was in it, do we, if I remember correctly?”
“We don’t know what was in it because it never existed,” Clyde reiterated. “But I take your point. I’m not convinced that all this talk of voodoo witch doctors and other nonsense doesn’t have you out of your wits, but the point is taken, nonetheless.”
“So, you’ll look into it, then?” I asked.
“I’ll ask around,” he agreed. “But I don’t promise anyone will have a better reaction than I did.”
“I suppose that’s as much as I can ask for,” I relented.
“Take care, Marston,” Clyde said. “And be wary. This isn’t quite like anything we’ve encountered before.”
“I’ve gathered as much,” I agreed. “And I will. Thanks again. We’ll be in touch soon.”
And with that, he clicked away.
Holm must have been waiting for me to get off the phone because he showed up right after that.
“What now?” he asked.
I related everything that I had learned from my conversations with Diane and the lab tech.
“Well, it’s good those two kids will be taken care of, at least,” Holm reasoned when I was finished. “I wouldn’t have expected it, but I came to like both of them.”
“Yeah, me too,” I agreed. “And it is good, though I worry for the family members still in Haiti. All the more reason to get over there and check this out as soon as we can.”
“Interesting about our vic, too,” Holm mused. “Abel. Weird name. Biblical, right?”
“French, too,” I said. “So it could be either inspiration or both.”
“French as in the Haitians,” Holm said.
I nodded. “The question is how he got so wrapped up with them in the first place,” I said. “Was it in New Orleans after he left Florida? Just by happenstance on the dealing market? Or was it something more sinister?”
“My money’s on the last one,” Holm said. “It’s always whatever the worst one is lately.”
“It sure seems like it,” I chuckled. My phone buzzed again. “It’s Alejandra wondering where we are. We’d better go tell her what we found out.”
Sure enough, Alejandra was waiting for us in my suite, nervously pacing across the room.
“I just spoke to my father,” she said, continuing with her pacing after stopping to acknowledge our entrance. “People are growing much more nervous, and the other politicians are beginning to lose faith in him. He’s being pressured to resign once again. Oh, how is this happening again? We thought that we had put our struggles behind us after all that messy business with Miguel, but here we are again.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, and I meant it. While things in the Dominican Republic leadership certainly weren’t great, President García was the loose thread holding it all together, by my estimations.
“Did he say anything else?” Holm asked. “We were wondering if he could grant amnesty to two of our witnesses…”
“Oh yes, he mentioned something about that,” Alejandra said dismissively. “He spoke with your director back in Miami before he called me. He’s not worried about that, though it will look bad if it gets to the press. Not that I can imagine how it could all get any worse.”
“Perhaps you should go back to Santo Domingo,” I gently suggested once more. “Now that the conference is over, your skills would be of best use there, wouldn’t they? Away from all this fighting and where all the real diplomacy is going down.”
She turned to face me, biting her nails as she mulled this over. “I don’t know. I want to be there, but I also want to be here. You don’t know the area, after all, and you could need me. And so could the border towns, for that matter. I fear that the patrolmen won’t know how to deal with a crisis on their own in the event that more discord crops up.”
I didn’t quite know how to argue with this, so I just said, “That makes sense. Though you would be safer back in the capitol.”
“I know I would, but my safety is not my primary concern,” she said. “Although, given the way things are going back home, it may not be as safe
as we may think.”
“You have a point there,” Holm said.
“Good, then it’s settled,” she said. “I’m staying. Now, how did your meeting with this clerk who betrayed us go?”
We told her about José and everything he had overheard.
“Interesting,” she said when we finished. “He seems like a smart enough kid, though I worry about him getting into trouble again down the road, given this track record.”
“That’ll be even more likely if we just lock him up,” Holm pointed out. “At least he has a shot this way.”
“True enough,” she relented.
Then, I told her about my calls with Diane and Clyde.
“This is even more interesting,” she said, furrowing her brow. “What is this about Haitian zombie powder you were asking your lab tech about?”
“Oh, that,” I said, feeling heat rush to my cheeks despite myself. I’d rushed past that part in my retelling of the conversation, not wanting Alejandra to think I was even crazier than Clyde did for suggesting the idea. “That was just something I was spit balling with Holm about earlier. It’s nothing.”
“I don’t know, it sounded like a decent theory to me when we were talking about it,” Holm said. “What’s changed?”
“Well, Clyde seemed to think the science on the whole thing was outdated,” I explained. “An old anthropologist from the ‘70s not doing his due diligence with the research.”
“Do you know anything about this?” Holm asked Alejandra to my chagrin.
“We don’t know much about Haiti, you understand,” I rushed to say, for what little defense it offered. “Only what we’ve learned on this trip, and what we’ve heard about on the news and in the movies. And, well, in that college class a long time ago.”
Alejandra laughed, but it wasn’t mean-spirited like Clyde’s. “I always have thought that was an old wives’ tale,” she said. “A story parents told to scare children into going to bed, nothing more, nothing less. I’m surprised you’ve heard of it, though I know it’s been the basis for some of those pulp movies before. The kind of things that make people from your country sail over to Haiti for the day in search of a good time and all they find is a broken place and an even more broken people.”
“I suppose that’s a better explanation,” I said. “It’s just with everything we’ve heard, all these little pieces keep adding up to something I can’t quite explain. The masks, the witch doctors, the voodoo, the magical undetectable drug, and now this talk of zombies. It’s all very strange.”
“I don’t disagree,” Alejandra said. “It probably wouldn’t hurt to ask around the border towns about it. They would be closer to the source than I ever was in Santo Domingo.”
“That could be something we could get done tonight,” Holm reasoned. “Better than just sitting around here and waiting for tomorrow.”
“There are a lot of patrolmen down here right now,” I said. “I’m sure one of them can give us a lift.”
“I’ll come with you,” Alejandra offered. “To act as your translator. You’ll need someone who speaks English and Spanish well enough, and I doubt you’ll find many of them in the patrolmen.”
“One of them was a translator by trade,” I pointed out. “He interrogated that first boy with us.”
“Yes, they keep the French translator on site,” she said. “But you wouldn’t find him in the field. Plus, I know my way around. And I know the culture. The patrolmen just sit on the border and watch for trespassers.”
“Alright,” I relented. “Just stick by our side and stay out of trouble, do you understand? We’ve had enough of civilians getting shot at for one mission, and I don’t want to have to return you to your father in a body bag.”
“You and me both,” Alejandra laughed. “He would never let me hear the end of it, even in death.”
“And I doubt he’d let me hear the end of it, either,” I added. “Or my boss, and that would be my problem very fast. Besides, I’m getting to like you.”
“I’m afraid I’m getting to like you as well, Agent Marston,” she jested, taking my arm as we made our way to the elevator.
CHAPTER 17
Ethan
Down in the lobby, we managed to convince some patrolmen to take us out and around the nearby border towns. They were reluctant at first, given everything that had happened, but Alejandra was more than convincing. So were Holm and our MBLIS badges, for that matter.
So, one officer begrudgingly drove us around to find some folks to talk to.
“There are often shops open late,” Alejandra said as we rode in the backseat of the old Jeep. “Bars, motels, or even just people walking down the street, though I imagine there’s less of that nowadays. Either way, we should be able to find some people to talk to.”
I checked my watch. It was getting near eight in the evening. The day had simultaneously managed to fly by and pass with agonizing slowness. It felt like both a lifetime and a moment ago that I had been crawling around the dirt just past the other side of the border, being shot at by a mysterious sniper.
I found that time often moved in this strange, both slow and lightning-fast way when I was on a difficult and exciting mission like this one, though I doubted I had ever, or would ever in the future, find another assignment quite like this.
There was a dull sense of dread and apprehension rising inside of me, the closer we got to crossing over into Haiti and hopefully finding our answers. But there was also a sense of excitement and interest. It had been a while since Holm and I had come across something quite this novel, and while that unsettled me, it was also undeniably fascinating.
Plus, if this turned out to be like some cool zombie movie, I wouldn’t complain. Just so long as I wasn’t the zombie in question. Or Holm or Alejandra.
We first stopped in the small town nearest to the hotel.
“The hotel is for travelers,” Alejandra explained as we exited the vehicle and bid the nervous patrolman, who didn’t want to leave his Jeep unattended, farewell. “So, it’s closer to the road than to civilization.”
“This is civilization?” Holm asked, looking around the place.
It was basically a road with a bar, a church, and what looked like a small gift shop on it. Off in the distance, I could see a few houses sprinkled throughout the area. I wondered if José’s mother and little brother were sitting up there somewhere, wondering where he was and if he was alright.
“It is here,” Alejandra laughed. “Come. I believe I see a light on in the bar.”
She beckoned for us to follow her, and we did so. I kept my hand close to my side as we walked, by where my gun was safely hidden. I wasn’t going to be caught unawares, not after being shot at twice today already.
There was one bartender, a thin man with salt-and-pepper hair and lines on his face, probably in his late fifties or early sixties, tending bar, along with two customers, who were both slightly younger men, though not by much. One of them looked to be drunk already, and they sat on opposite ends of the bar, indicating they were not together.
The bartender looked up at us with what I could only describe as an indifferent surprise. He said something to us in Spanish, and Alejandra responded.
“He said he doesn’t see many people like us coming in here,” she translated. “And I said I could believe it.”
“We should order something,” I said, and Alejandra motioned for the bartender to come and gave him an order in Spanish. He returned not long after with three beers.
“Classing it up tonight, I see,” Holm said.
“Take it easy,” I reminded him. “We’re on the job.”
“What do you make of me?” he asked with a sly grin.
“Well, you were the one who wanted to go to Mike’s at three in the afternoon yesterday,” I reminded him.
“Was that yesterday?” Holm asked with mild surprise. “Seems like a lot longer than that. Or a lot shorter. I don’t know.”
“I know what you mean,” I chuckled,
taking a sip from my beer glass. It was watery but better than I’d expected it to be.
“What should I say?” Alejandra asked.
“Ask him how things have been around here lately,” I suggested. “Start slow and ease him into it. You don’t want to spook him off with too many questions too soon, but you also want to get a sense of whether he’s into anything he maybe shouldn’t be. It always pays to be cautious.”
“Alright,” Alejandra agreed, and then turned back to the bartender to converse with him in Spanish some more.
She asked her question, and he shrugged and said something in response, then paused, then said something else. It sounded like a question. Alejandra responded again and then laughed at something else he said.
“He says that things have been slower than usual,” she murmured. “With all the gang activity, there are strange things going on at night. He’s been closing up early the past couple of weeks, around ten. Then he asked me whether I was with that conference at the hotel. I said I was, and he said he felt sorry for me.”
“Tell him that’s smart, to close up early, and ask him why he felt it was necessary,” I suggested. “Try to suss out what’s been going on around here.”
Alejandra nodded and engaged with the man some more. Soon, he was opening up more and more. Then one of the customers, the less drunk one, piped in.
“What are they saying?” I asked.
“The bartender says that at first they just heard gunshots at night, and then a young Dominican man turned up dead, covered in welts and lesions like the girl in the hospital,” Alejandra explained. “Then, things started to get more difficult, and they would see gang members coming and going from some of the houses as they pleased. The customer said a slur we use to describe Haitians and complained about them interfering with daily life.”
“Don’t blame them,” Holm muttered. “I wouldn’t like it either, having gangbangers running around my streets all day.”
“We live in Miami,” I reminded him with a chuckle. “We already live like that.”
“Fair enough,” he shrugged.