Koko. Peter Straub

went to the first urinal and pretended to pee, waiting for everyone to leave him alone with Dickerson. Something had gotten loose inside him, buzzed under his ribs, made him so lightheaded that he wobbled.

      For an instant he thought he was already in Honduras, his work was either completed or ready to be begun all over again. Under an immense sun little brick-colored people milled around a comically provincial airport with tumbledown shacks, lounging policemen, and dozing hounds.

      Dickerson zipped up, moved swiftly to the sink, passed his hands through a stream of water and a stream of air, and was gone almost before Koko came back to the men’s room.

      He hurried out. The loose thing in his chest buzzed painfully against his ribs.

      Dickerson was moving quickly into a huge room where carousels like black volcanos whirred and gouted suitcases down their ribbed flanks. Nearly everyone on their flight was already gathered around the second carousel. Koko watched Dickerson work his way around the edge of the people waiting for their bags. The thing in his chest slipped down into his stomach, where it flew like an angry bee into his intestines.

      Sweating now, Koko crept through the people who stood between himself and Dickerson. Lightly, almost reverently, he brushed his fingers over the linen sleeve that held Dickerson’s left arm.

      ‘Hey, Bobby, I don’t feel right, you know,’ Dickerson said, bending forward and lifting a big Vuitton suitcase off the belt.

      Koko knew one thing: a woman had picked out that bag.

      ‘About the money thing. Let’s eighty-six the whole idea, okay?’

      Koko nodded miserably. His own beat-up case was nowhere on the carousel. Everything had gone slightly blurry around the edges, as if a fine mist hung in the air. A tall black-haired woman who was a living sword plucked a tiny case off the belt and – Koko saw through the descending mist – smiled at Dickerson.

      ‘Take care,’ Dickerson said.

      A uniformed man walked unerringly up to Dickerson and passed him through customs with a few questions. Dickerson strode off to a window to have his passport stamped.

      Dazed, Koko saw his own suitcase thump down the side of the carousel and glide past him before he thought to lift it off the belt. He watched Dickerson’s steadily dwindling body pass through a door marked EXIT-TRANSPORTATION.

      In Customs the inspector called him ‘Mr Ortiz’ and searched the ripped lining of his suitcase for diamonds or heroin.

      At Immigration he saw flaming wings sprout from the uniformed shoulders of the man in the booth, and the man stamped his passport and welcomed him back to the country, and Koko grabbed his old case and his carry-on bag and ran to the nearest men’s room. He dropped the bags just inside the door and sprinted into an open toilet. As soon as he sat down his bowels opened, then opened again. Fire dripped and spurted from him. For a moment Koko’s stomach felt as though a long needle had pierced it; then he bent forward and vomited between his shoes. He sat in his own stink for a long time, his bags forgotten, thinking only of what was there before him.