Haitian Harbinger

by Lincoln Matt

  “Hey, we heard the drugs are better over here,” I said. “And I can’t say we don’t like a challenge.”

  The young man shrugged and started conversing with his grandfather again. They discussed something at length in French for a while, but I didn’t dare ask one of the Dominicans what they were saying for fear of giving us away.

  Finally, the old man performed some kind of weird incantation on the voodoo doll and handed it back to me. We gave him some money.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Now, what about scoring that blow? You know of a place?”

  “As I said, you’d be better off going back where you came from,” the young man said, his tone harsher now.

  He took a step toward us, and Martínez instinctively reached for his weapon. Both of the Haitian men’s eyes went straight toward the Dominican man’s hip.

  “You aren’t who you say you are, are you?” the young man asked.

  The game was up, but we could still try to keep the secret of who we were in this room, at least for now.

  I pulled out my own weapon and pointed it from one man to the other and back again. Frail as he was, I wasn’t about to underestimate this old guy after what Emmanuel had told Holm and me.

  Holm, Martínez, and Alonso all pulled their own weapons in turn, but just as they were doing so, the young man reached behind the counter and grabbed one of his own, pointing it straight back at me.

  “Tell me who you are, or I shoot,” he shouted.

  “Tell us what we want to know, or we all shoot,” I retorted calmly. “Where do we score some blow around here?”

  “That’s really what you want to know?” the young man asked with a nervous laugh. “You just want to know where you can buy drugs?”

  “Not any drug,” I said quietly.

  A flash of understanding crossed the young man’s face, and he said something hurriedly in French to his grandfather. I looked to Martínez for a translation.

  “He said they want the zombie powder,” Martínez said. “In those words, roughly translated.”

  “So it’s you who made it,” I snapped to the old man. “Our sources were correct on that.”

  The man just gave me another toothless grin and a wheezy laugh in response.

  “Where did you hear that?” the grandson asked, still shouting. His hands were shaking around his gun.

  “Now, son, look here,” Holm said, taking a step toward the kid with his weapon still raised. “You’re in over your head here, right? We can help you.”

  “That shit isn’t going to work on me,” he snapped back. “I may be scared, but they’ll be here any minute. They keep a close watch on this place.”

  Almost as if on cue, I heard screams about a half-mile away from us, where we left the rest of the Dominicans.

  “Shit,” Alonso cursed, making as if to run in that direction.

  “No,” I snapped, holding out my left arm to stop him without moving my gun. “That won’t help them.”

  “He’s right,” Martínez said sympathetically. “Our men can handle themselves. And if they can’t, one more won’t be of any help.”

  I turned my attention back to the Haitian men. “Whether they come or not, I’ll shoot you before they get here if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

  The boy laughed nervously and repositioned his hands on the gun, and I noticed that the grip was covered in his sweat.

  “You think I won’t?” I asked. “You want to bet?”

  I shot at the cash register, sending it up in a whirl of smoke. The kid stared down at it.

  The older man threw up his hands, dropping his walking stick to the ground with a clatter, and said something quickly in French.

  “He told the kid to just talk,” Martínez translated. “That it’s not worth dying over, and the cartel won’t kill them anyway since it needs them to make the drug.”

  “You think they need us?” the young man asked, tears streaming down his face. “They don’t need us, Papa, they’ve already used us. They’re making it themselves now on that damn ship.”

  The man said something else in French. Apparently, he understood English just fine, even though he didn’t speak it.

  “He says that the cartel’s indebted to them,” Martínez said. “That they wouldn’t dare harm a voodoo witch doctor and his family after what they’ve done for them.”

  “They don’t care about the old ways, Papa,” the young man sobbed, the gun nearly slipping out of his hands now. “They don’t care at all. They’ll kill us for no reason at all if they want to.”

  “You’d do well to listen to your grandson,” Martínez warned. “He knows what he’s talking about.”

  More gunshots and screams rang out in the distance, but they weren’t as distant now.

  “They’re getting closer,” Holm murmured.

  As soon as he said that, several Haitian gangbangers with machine guns came crashing into the voodoo shop, knocking over a stand of voodoo dolls in the process. One of them shouted something in French and started rushing in our direction.

  Holm, Martínez, Alonso, and I all positioned ourselves between the old man and his grandson and the gangbangers.

  “Get down,” I hissed to the kid, and I heard him scramble to pull his grandfather down with him beneath the countertop.

  Then they started shooting. And we shot back.

  Bullets flew all over the place, and I ducked down and maneuvered around all the walls and voodoo paraphernalia to take cover.

  It worked, for the most part. I saw out of the corner of my eyes that Martínez got hit, but he was still alive and shooting his own gun. Holm and Alonso both seemed to be doing okay, ducked behind the opposite wall, and shooting at the gangbangers when they had the opportunity. The kid and his grandfather were still cowering behind the front desk.

  After making sure everyone was okay, I took cover behind a mess of fake skeletons and tried to take stock of where we were at.

  There were six gangbangers in the shop, all with guns. Two of them were already down. Two more were trying to make their way up to the front where we were. The other two hung back near the door as if they were afraid that we had backup on the way.

  I had to assume we didn’t, given what we’d heard. Maybe splitting up the group hadn’t worked out so well, after all.

  Slowly, and as quietly as I could manage it, I slipped back around the skeleton display and into the adjacent room, where no one was currently around. Then I weaved my way through the assorted displays of pins, bongs, and other random gifts to come back around to the original front room through a different doorway. I hid behind the voodoo display from which I’d taken that doll when I first walked inside.

  I was close to the guys by the front door now, but they didn’t know I was there. They probably thought that I was still hiding behind the skeleton display.

  Quickly, before anyone else had time to react, I pulled out my gun and shot them each point-blank in the head. Both bodies slumped to the ground in a heap.

  This got the other remaining two gangbangers’ attention, and they both whipped their heads around to see what had happened to their companions.

  This gave Holm and Alonso the opening and the line of fire they needed. Almost as one, the two men raised their weapons and shot at the remaining gangbangers.

  It was messy, and one of them survived the onslaught somehow and reached for his gun one last time as he fell to the ground. But I caught him first, shooting him again for good measure.

  For a few moments, after it was all over, all I could hear was my heartbeat and the mixed heavy and shallow sounds of all of us breathing.

  Finally, I walked over to inspect the bodies.

  “All dead,” I reported as I peered out the window. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in our general vicinity. “Alonso, you should go check on the rest of our guys. Martínez, you should stay in case we need a translator.”

  Alonso nodded gravely and headed back out in that direction.

&n
bsp; Slowly, the young man and his grandfather peered over the edge of the counter. They didn’t rise all the way, however, just staring at us and the bodies with wide, scared eyes.

  “You killed all those men?” the boy chirped, and I couldn’t tell if it was a question, a statement, or something he just couldn’t bring himself to believe.

  “We did,” I confirmed, walking back over to him and resting the barrel of my gun on the countertop. Not threateningly, but enough to remind them that I had it. “And we’ll do it again if we have to. So, the question is, are you ready to talk?”

  CHAPTER 23

  Ethan

  “Okay,” the young man murmured, his voice shaking and tears streaming down his cheeks. “Okay. We will talk. I will get him to talk.”

  “That sounds like a good plan,” I said, giving the boy and his grandfather a small smile.

  “What, are we gonna offer them a deal like the others?” Holm asked, leaning into me and murmuring in my ear so the young man wouldn’t hear. He sounded skeptical.

  “No way,” I said, and Holm looked relieved. “These guys made this thing. There’s a limit. But we need to get them to talk. And we can at least offer to get them away from the cartel, serve their time in the Dominican Republic instead of ending up cannon fodder over here.”

  “Fair enough,” Holm relented.

  “Okay,” I said, leaning forward on the counter again to face the still-quivering young Haitian man. “We have some questions. Let’s start with, where did the drug come from?”

  The elderly man cackled and said something in French, and the grandson began arguing with him again.

  “The older one doesn’t really want to talk,” Martínez translated. “He’ll give us vague ideas about things, and he’ll tell us where to find this ship, but he doesn’t want to say a damn thing about the drug. Something about it being an old family recipe.”

  “An old family recipe?” Holm repeated, incredulous. “You’ve got to be kidding me. This isn’t chocolate chip cookies we’re talking about. It’s a killer drug designed to turn people into virtual slaves.”

  “Good luck convincing them of that,” Martínez said with a snort. “These voodoo guys, they can be pretty cagey about this stuff. You might as well be asking grandma for her cookie recipe. It’s that important to them.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, turning back to the Haitian men. “Why don’t we start somewhere else. What are your names? You already know ours. We gave you our real ones.”

  “We have the same name,” the young man said. “Samuel. Everyone just calls me Junior. And everyone just calls him Papa, but he won’t want you to call him that, since you’re not one of us.”

  “Okay,” I said with a nod. “Good to meet you, Samuel and Junior. How about you tell us how you got involved with the cartel, if you’re not interested in talking about the drug itself?”

  The old man, Samuel, said something quickly in French and batted his hand at me as if he was annoyed by the question.

  “He says that they came in one day and demanded he give them the recipe,” Martínez said. “That someone had heard that he had it, and they wanted it from him. Or at least for him to make it for them so they could sell it. He doesn’t seem to have liked that very much.”

  “What did you tell them, then?” I asked, imagining that the man wouldn’t have wanted to give this information to the cartel any more than he wanted to give it to us. “Did they threaten you?”

  “They didn’t at first,” Junior sighed, looking at his grandfather with an almost pitying expression on his face. “They were nice, what is the word… flattering even. They kept coming back, kept asking. They upped their offer every time, always bringing extravagant gifts and lots of business with them. We haven’t had much business, you see, as there are fewer and fewer tourists coming to this part of the island. The shops right on the edge by Florida do better, and with the cartel activity, we’d been hit even harder than most.”

  “So the cartel was already upping its game before you gave them the drug,” Holm reasoned.

  “Oh, yes,” Junior confirmed, nodding with fearful, wide eyes. “They’ve been growing for some time. And then there was all that business with the President’s son…”

  “Miguel,” I said as I nodded. “Yes, we know all about that.”

  “I imagine you do,” Junior said, sighing again. “But yes, after that didn’t work out well for them, they were starting to flounder. Before that, there was a lot of expansion. I think that’s why they wanted what Papa had. They needed to make a big push, and they needed something new to do it. Or something old wrapped up in new packaging, I guess.”

  “So it is what the old scholars thought,” I said, a little too eagerly. “It is this Haitian zombie powder business.”

  The old man cackled again and said something sharply in French.

  “He says that that was an American name for it,” Martínez translated. “Stupid and straight out of your movies.”

  “That tracks,” I laughed. “But even so, it’s the same drug?”

  The man said something else shortly.

  “He says that yes, that was his family’s work,” Martínez translated. “But he still doesn’t want to talk about the drug.”

  “Okay, right, back to the cartel, then,” Holm said quickly. “So, did you ever give in? How did they end up with the drug?”

  “When Papa wouldn’t cave, they threatened him,” Junior said. “We were going to go out of business and have to go into hiding. Then they threatened to force me to join their ranks. He gave in, but on the condition that we handled all the supply, and it stayed on the island.”

  “Let me guess, that didn’t go according to plan, either,” I said flatly. As much as I wanted to empathize with these guys, something told me they weren’t as innocent as they’d like to seem. After all, they had the recipe all these years. It’s not like they never intended to use it. They just didn’t want other people to cut in on their profits.

  “No, it did not,” Junior confirmed. “It worked well at first. I think Papa was even enjoying it. It was like the old times, he told me once, isn’t that right, Papa?”

  The old man gave another toothless grin to confirm, and a chill ran up and down my spine. No, these guys weren’t innocent at all.

  “So, what happened?” Holm asked.

  “Well, what do you think?” Junior asked with a shrug. “They got greedy. They always get greedy. That’s their way, isn’t it? Why they came here in the first place? They expanded through Haiti, then to the Dominican Republic, and then plans for the other surrounding islands in the region and for America.”

  “Did you try to stop them?” I asked.

  The old man cackled again, but it was without humor this time. He said something else in French.

  “He asks what the point of that would be,” Martínez translated.

  “Exactly,” Junior shrugged. “And he is right. By then, it had gone too far. If we protest, they kill us. It’s that simple. Papa likes to think they are indebted to us, but I think they will kill us eventually, anyway. They don’t need us anymore.”

  The old man and the younger one began to argue again in French, and Holm and I turned back to Martínez for translation.

  “They are arguing about this again,” Martínez explained. “The old man doesn’t think that anything will happen to them. It will break sacred laws, unwritten rules. The grandson says that doesn’t exist anymore, and no one cares about them.”

  “Your grandson is right,” I said, addressing the old man directly now since I knew he understood English. “They don’t care about you. They don’t care about anything except making their money and getting more power. You’ve seen as much, haven’t you? They went back on your deal. Why would you be so afraid of them if you didn’t know this to be true?”

  The old man didn’t seem to have an answer to this, but he gave me a scathing look. Out of the corner of my eyes, I caught Holm taking a step back in alarm. The guy was prett
y creepy. I’d give him that much.

  “So, about the expansion into the States,” I said. “Did you ever meet a guy named Jake Wallace? Sometimes went by the street name Abel?”

  Based on Ricardo’s reaction to the same question the previous night, I’d expected the Haitian men to be afraid at the mention of our victim. But they weren’t.

  “Yes, I met him a couple of times,” Junior said as if Wallace was a perfectly normal person.

  “For what purpose?” I asked. “What was he like? Did he say anything about what he was doing here?”

  “He was an annoying man,” Junior said, scrunching up his face in distaste. “Very much like the American tourists, he talked about American voodoo shops back in his city like they are the real thing, laughed about our culture, talking about how the drug would be a real hit back home.”

  The older man, Samuel, said something in French again in a similar tone to his grandson.

  “He expresses similar sentiments,” Martínez translated. “Says this is why he wanted to keep the whole operation on the island, so as not to involve people like that.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Do you know anything else about him? About how they were going to expand into the United States?”

  “Ah, they’d figured out the recipe by then,” Junior scoffed. “They’d already taken it from us. They wanted to use Wallace to expand into New Orleans. They set up the ship off the coast as their base of operations. I overheard them saying this. I don’t think they knew that I know English. Anyway, they were making the drug there and sending shipments back to Wallace’s city. I think this was the second one, that is why he’s here now.”

  I noted the use of the present tense here. “Where do you think Wallace is now?”

  Junior shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I haven’t seen anyone in over a week. They don’t need us anymore, as I said.”

  Samuel said something else in French. It sounded like a curse. I turned to Martínez for translation again.

  “He makes fun of the foreigners and the cartel members who brought them into the fold,” the policeman explained. “Says that they are tarnishing the old ways.”

  “Right,” I said, returning my attention to the Haitian men.