I yawned wide and long and leaned against the wall while I waited for Petinski to locate the key. ‘I’m going to bed for an hour,’ she said as she unlocked the door to our suite. ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘I can join you for a few minutes if you like,’ I said. ‘I’ll be in a coma within a few seconds.’ ‘That’s okay. I’ll still have fun.’ ‘On the couch, Cooper.’ * I came awake, ripped from sleep, eyelids fluttering open. The room was quiet, the sun a little higher, the air a little warmer than it was when I fell onto the couch. I lay still and listened to the sounds coming through the open balcony doors – friendly sounds of the pool filter gurgling, kids splashing, the beat of a bird’s wings in the enclosed courtyard, the toot of a distant horn out on the street. Sleep had been an exhausted shutdown, like the kind that follows combat. I shouldn’t be awake, and yet I was. Nightmarish images began to drift across my mind from the night before: the cored cranium of a dead BOPE officer; the man on the balcony with his throat cut, stiff with rigor mortis; the heel of my boot kicking the axe blade through a man’s spinal cord; the puffed-up security guy who reminded me of the Michelin Man; and, of course, Shilling . . .
