THEY HEADED BACK to the bank, Max at the wheel now, getting used to Port-au-Prince’s ruined streets. Once he’d dropped Chantale off, he’d return to the house. His head was heavy, pounding. He was done for the day. He couldn’t think clearly. He hadn’t had time to release the information he’d been steadily accumulating throughout the day, and his brain was fit to burst. He needed to process all the information, break it down into useful and useless, chuck out the trash and keep the good stuff, then work it, break it down, look for common threads and connections, promising leads, things that didn’t quite seem to fit.
Chantale had barely said a word since they’d left Dufour’s house.
“Thanks for your help today, Chantale,” Max said and looked over at her. She was pale. Her face shone with a dull dew of perspiration, which pooled and crested into small droplets on her upper lip. Her neck and jaw muscles were tensed.
“Are you OK?”
“No,” she croaked. “Stop the car.”
Max pulled over on a bustling road. Chantale got out, took a few steps, and threw up in the gutter, prompting an exclamation of shocked disgust from a man who was pissing up against a nearby wall.
Max steadied her as she heaved a second time.
When she’d finished, he stood her up against the car and made her take deep breaths. He got the water bottle out, poured some onto his handkerchief, and wiped her face, wafting the notebook to cool her off.
“That’s better,” she said after she’d recovered and the color had returned to her face.
“Was that too much for you? Back there?”
“I was real nervous.”
“Didn’t show.”
“Trust me, I was.”
“You did great,” Max said. “So much so I’ll give you tomorrow off.”
“You’re going to Cité Soleil, right?”
“You got me!”
They got back in the car and she drew him a map. She told him to get some surgical masks and gloves—which he’d find in one of the two main supermarkets—and to be prepared to throw his shoes away if he planned on leaving his car and walking around. The ground was quite literally made of shit—animal and, most of it, human. Everything that breathed in the slum had a textbook’s worth of diseases on it and in it and all around it.
“Be real careful out there. Take your gun. Don’t stop your car unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“Sounds like what they used to tell folk about Liberty City.”
“Cité Soleil is no joke, Max. It’s a bad bad place.”
He drove her to the Banque Populaire and watched her and her ass until she’d gone through the entrance. She didn’t turn around. Max wasn’t sure if that still meant something now.