Public Enemy Read online

  Then he ran.

  Somebody saw him, shot at him from above, and hit him in the back. The shot knocked him down, but he got up again, and found he could still breathe, and still run. So he did. He ran until he could only walk, walked until he could only crawl, crawled until he collapsed, then awoke to the sounds of a river, the river he had known from the operations maps would be to the east, assuming they had kept him anywhere near where he’d been caught. That was the direction he had tried to run. Twenty miles, thirty, fifty-he had no idea, but he heard it, then found it-the Rio Sulaco. As he fell into it, the thousands of mosquitoes that had been feasting on him separated and floated away in a grimy cloud on the surface of the wide, gentle tributary.

  A mile downstream he whacked his head on a boulder, passed out, and didn’t remember a goddamn thing from the next three years of his life.

  Journey complete, Cooper sat on the last plank of the dock. He took his pole, disengaged the hook from the guide nearest the reel, then set the pole down until he’d dug out one of the worms from the bucket and slid it, wriggling, full bore onto the hook. Then he took the pole, pointed it out over the water, flipped the catch on the reel, and slowed the pace of the hook-and-weight’s drop into the water with his thumb pressed against the spool of filament. When he felt the weight hit bottom, he flipped the catch back into place, reeled in about a foot and a half of line, and set the pole across his lap. He draped his arm across the pole and clasped it in his hand midway up the pole.

  Cooper was doing the food-chain thing, a sort of timed experiment he liked to do from this decrepit dock, situated around the corner from Conch Bay. The old man with the goats had built the dock maybe twenty-five years ago, then let it fall into utter disrepair. Cooper would walk over the hill behind the club, stop and dig for worms or sand shrimp, and head down to the dock. He could usually wrangle about a dozen baitfish in under an hour; once he caught the smaller fish, he got serious, switching out the original hook and weight for some heavier drag, a bigger, barbed hook, and a steel leader.

  Then he’d find a couple footholds on the rotting dock and have a few casts under the light of the moon-and just about every time he came out, he’d catch a couple monsters before running low on the baitfish. It was always a hell of a fight, trying to keep himself out of the water on the rotting old pier while he reeled in the fish.

  Cooper knew the Cap’n Roy theory was the easy way out, the simplest possible explanation behind Keeler’s death and the subsequent vaporization of the plane. And he couldn’t deny the scheme might have made sense for the top cop: take a payoff from Keeler in exchange for refusing Homeland Security’s request for his extradition, spring him, then cap him on the yacht transporter’s way out through the prison gates; complete the cash sale of the tomb-raided treasure trove, then blow the evidence clean out of the sky, those gold artifacts mangled and sunk to the bottom of the Sir Francis Drake Channel. This plan left nobody alive-at least nobody besides himself and Cap’n Roy’s merry gang of day players, each having pocketed his own share of the bounty-who knew anything about the money Cap’n Roy had secured.

  But Cooper had to face facts: Cap’n Roy Gillespie, dirty though he was, didn’t work that way. Cap’n Roy took every handout available and leaped at the chance to avail himself of such sticky situations-or, Cooper thought, such ordinary police duties-as murder investigations. But he didn’t have killing in him-seeing this kind of thing in people being easy for Cooper. It was easy because he knew exactly what it was to be the opposite.

  And Cap’n Roy was not the same as him.

  If Roy wasn’t good for it, things became much more complicated. One big question, for instance, was why he and Cap’n Roy were still around at all. If somebody had wanted to shut this thing down at the source-hiding what, Cooper couldn’t figure, unless somebody had an oddly extreme case of the racial-profiling rage Cooper had felt for the statues-then Keeler, the boys on the plane, and the goods themselves were the least of anyone’s troubles. He, Cap’n Roy, and a small army of semidirty RVIPF cops probably knew more than Keeler did, and damn well knew a lot more than anyone on that detonated plane had known.

  There was the possibility that whoever it was who’d done the deeds hadn’t known Cooper had interviewed Keeler, and therefore didn’t realize that Cooper knew the shipment had come originally from a man called Ernesto Borrego-El Oso Polar. But any conspirators worth their weight in palm fronds would, Cooper knew, assume that Cap’n Roy had interrogated the man, and that some minimal degree of information on the chain of ownership would therefore have come to light.

  Meaning that somebody, by this theory, must have proactively decided not to kill him and Cap’n Roy. There was also the issue of Susannah Grant-though nobody would have been able to track his trip to Austin. He’d done it with fake ID having nothing to do with his current identity.

  No, he mused-Susannah aside, there was, in all this, a nifty fit with a highly uncomfortable notion.

  It was this: whoever was doing the killing seemed to possess no particular desire to fuck with government employees. If the conspirators knew who he and Cap’n Roy worked for-or at least, in his case, who he technically worked for-it followed that the conspirators might have intentionally refrained from crossing the “government line.” The concluding wrinkle in this theory was that it offered a pretty good chance that the conspirators got their own bread and butter from a government payroll too-American, British, or otherwise-thereby explaining their heightened sensitivity to, and proactive decision against, the murdering of fellow U.S. or British G-men. They were trying to keep quiet whatever they wanted kept quiet, but were only willing to go so far in doing so. As though by scaring other government people off, only without crossing the cop-killer line, these people were looking to put the hush on things without having the hushing come back to bite them in the ass.

  Or it could just be a crooked thief with brains enough to know he ought to avoid the cop-killing stigma.

  The first monster catch of the night came around eleven; after hauling in what he guessed would be a twenty-pounder, he almost laughed when the slippery little shape of a baby albacore, no more than a foot long, broke from the water and flickered against the moon, wriggling on his hook. Looked as though he’d eaten the entire six-inch baitfish Cooper had used to catch him too.

  Keeping the pole in his right hand, Cooper reached out with his left hand and got hold of the hook. It took a balancing act, but he managed, as usual, to set the pole down, pull the hook from the hungry tuna’s mouth, pull the kill stick from his swimming trunks, whack the fish between the eyes, underhand it back to the beach, set the hook into another baitfish, and cast the food out at the pool where he knew that bigger fish than the hungry tuna gathered at night.

  Around twelve-thirty, with nothing more than a couple further nibbles that had gone nowhere, Cooper gathered his gear-along with tomorrow’s lunch-and headed back over the hill. An unlucky night-rare were the pickings so slim from the old dock, though he’d had more unlucky nights than usual in recent months.

  He saw the lights as he crested the hill. You could always see the lights of Road Town once you stepped over the lip of the trail, at least whenever a fog hadn’t rolled in for the night and obscured the five-mile view.

  But tonight it was a different sort of light.

  It looked, to Cooper, to be happening somewhere along Blackburn Road, a mile or so east of the harbor. The lights swirled red and blue, piercingly bright even all the way across the channel. He could see there was more than one set of them too; maybe the whole set of them, as close to the entire motor pool of the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force as you’d encounter in any single incident.

  Cooper knew upon seeing this that it had been one hell of an unlucky night for someone else too. He felt a sort of white heat rise in his chest as he swung through the half-empty restaurant.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, and decided to make a stop by bungalow nine. He’d get out of his clothes and change into
something that didn’t exude the scents of worm and fish.

  Probably best to look a little more presentable for what he figured he was about to see in Road Town anyway.

  19

  Cooper crested another hill, this time from the interior of a minivan taxi, and when the cabbie said, “Can’t go no farther, mon,” Cooper paid him, let himself out, and talked his way past the patrol cop manning the road block. Cooper hadn’t seen the patrol cop more than once or twice before-kid might have been nineteen, and looked more like an eighth-grader in a policeman costume than a law enforcement official. Even the trademark RVIPF cap was too big for his head. Still, without knowing the kid worth a damn, he could read his expression like an open book.

  The RVIPF cruisers were parked in an array of angles across and along the side of the road, and what Cooper had suspected from his view across the channel was confirmed now: the carnival of police and other authority types was gathered, more or less, at the front door of the chief minister’s house-the residence of none other than Cap’n Roy Gillespie.

  Visible from the road as Cooper marched the fifty yards downhill to Cap’n Roy’s house was a stripe of yellow crime scene tape, draped across the twin rails that flanked the home’s main stairwell. Set directly back and up from the stairwell, in the area of the property Cooper knew to house the pool, a number of lights had been set up. A camera flash popped a couple times while Cooper stared. Over to the right of the pool, a light pole was up, and he could see a couple RVIPF caps moving to and fro behind a hedge near the top of the slope.

  The cop at the base of the stairwell normally functioned as a kind of desk sergeant in the department’s main offices. As he stood aside to let him pass, Cooper realized there was, among other emotions, something like fear in the cop’s eyes.

  Either the desk sergeant or the kid out front must have radioed ahead, since, as Cooper elbowed open the gate to the pool deck, he found Riley there waiting for him. The lieutenant didn’t say anything, didn’t really offer up any particular expression on his wide-boned, normally cheery face-he just nodded solemnly and stepped back to fall in behind him as Cooper came out onto the deck. It was on the deck that he saw, sprawled halfway between the French doors at the back of the house and the lip of the pool, the splayed, bug-eyed, and clearly dead body of Cap’n Roy.

  Cooper stood over the body. It took a few minutes, but in time, the investigative function of Cooper’s mind began to engage itself, and Cooper found comfort in it: two visible bullet holes placed three or four inches apart near the geographical center of his chest; a bloodied, formerly white robe still wrapped partially around him, the robe’s terry-cloth belt partially untied, maybe from the gunshot impacts and subsequent fall, but still curled around itself enough to hold the robe in place; dark blue swim trunks, but otherwise unclothed beneath the robe; one flip-flop fallen off his foot, the left, on the wood planking of the deck, the other still adorning his right, its rubber thong wedged between his toes; a hand, his right, placed against his rib cage, slightly beneath the wounds.

  Cap’n Roy had been shot as he exited his house, intending to come out for a swim in his infinity pool. The pool’s underwater lights were on, as though Roy had flipped them on before strolling out for a few laps-a little relaxation, here in the man’s chlorinated oasis, a pool that featured a view of the Caribbean to match the most luxurious of resorts.

  After a while, Cooper unsure of how long it had been, Riley came up beside him. The other cops, formerly busy taking photos and performing related investigative activities, resumed their work; Cooper realized they’d stopped to let him have a look at Roy.

  “Cap’n had a two-man security detail watchin’ him,” Riley said, “morning, noon, and night. Told me it was your words made him do it-‘Spy-a-de-island tell me I better watch my back,’ he said to me, ‘so watch my back I will.’”

  Riley shook his head in utter disgust.

  “We were it, mon-Tim and me. Arranged it to go ’round the clock-one man on, one man off, goin’ 24/7.” He brushed gently against Cooper’s shoulder and Cooper looked up, realizing as he did it that this was why Riley had brushed him-so he would look up and see the places Riley was about to describe.

  “Tim was hidin’ out over there,” he said, pointing to a defunct stairwell from the home that had been here before Roy had built his shadow-funded luxury residence in its place. “Standin’ where he could watch the street and the house at once. Thing is, I was comin’ up the stairs down low, readyin’ for the shift change, when Cap’n Roy come walkin’ out and get hit. Two shots, mon, and he down and dyin’ right away.”

  Riley had been motioning in the direction of the hill just beyond the deck, and the second pool of light and activity there-Cooper realizing what he meant from the way he was telling it.

  “The shots came from up there,” Cooper said, the sandy mumble of his voice rough and thick.

  “Yeah. Shit, mon, two-man security detail failed at protectin’ its one and only charge. Maybe the killer, he too good for us island cops. But I’ll tell you this-that two-man security detail be too good for the killer when he lookin’ to get away.”

  Cooper sharpened his focus on what Riley was saying.

  “Without a way out o’ here by way o’ the deck or them old stairs,” the cop said, “there only one steep slope to the street, or a cliff down to the rocks. He tried for the slope but I knew he’d be tryin’ it. Didn’t waste any time. Or energy, mon. Not going to let our assassin head on down that hill and away.”

  “You shot him,” Cooper said.

  “Many times.”

  Cooper nodded. They stood that way for another moment, beside each other, beside Cap’n Roy’s body on the deck, both looking off toward the pool of light and activity they knew to contain the dead target of Riley’s vengeful wrath.

  “Let’s have a look,” Cooper said after a while.

  On the slope, the carnage wrought by Riley’s bullets on the killer’s body was disguised by scrub and wildflowers. Even under the lights, it was hard to make out the corpse in the knee-deep bed of weeds; once Cooper waded uphill to the spot, though, he felt even worse about the killing of Cap’n Roy, and who it was that might have been responsible.

  It fit his developing theory all too well.

  “Crap,” he said.

  “Yeah, mon,” Riley said beside him, “once I started I kept on-emptied two clips. Twenty bullets. Don’t think a single one of ’em missed.”

  “No,” Cooper said. He could see now, taking a look at the body, that Riley had literally destroyed the physical frame of the man who’d shot Cap’n Roy from his sniper’s post on top of the hill. But he hadn’t looked at the body until now, and Riley’s carnage hadn’t been what he was complaining about. “More bullets the merrier. What I’m talking about is who you shot.”

  “What-you know him?”

  “Not him. Not this one man. But I don’t need to. I know what he is. I know what he does. Christ. Look at him-I could probably take a good guess at some of the places he trained. Maybe tell you right now his top two or three rifles of choice.”

  “You see all that,” Riley said, “lookin’ at his bloody remains in the weeds?”

  “I see it from his face. From his fucking haircut. His race. It’s like a serial killer-there’s a standard profile. And this motherfucker is it. Crap,” he said again.

  “So? Who he be, then? A spook? Like you?”

  Cooper shook his head. “Not quite. Probably hired by spooks, though.”

  “This mean you no longer thinkin’ Cap’n Roy take down the smuggler and the plane?”

  Cooper turned to look at Riley when he said this. He saw, looking at the man, more than a little rage coming back at him, Riley defending the honor of his fallen chief with a measure of bravado. Cooper understood. He held the challenge of Riley’s gaze.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” he said.

  Riley eased a little closer to him. Close enough so that his chin, which was kind of jutt
ing toward Cooper, nearly touched his own.

  “You let me know when you finish up with thinkin’ it through,” he said.

  Cooper kept his thousand-yard stare on the lieutenant who would probably soon be chief of police. Then he said, “Why don’t you show me the rifle he used,” and dropped his eyes to let Riley feel like the winner in the contest determining who was defending Cap’n Roy’s honor best. Cooper wasn’t sure whether Cap’n Roy had any honor to defend in the first place, but he was thinking he already missed the son of a bitch as much as anybody else would-including Lieutenant Riley.

  Cooper followed Riley over to the rifle, which was still in its place in the weeds where the assassin had dropped it before tumbling a few yards downhill under the onslaught of Riley’s twenty-bullet barrage. Without touching it, Cooper examined the rifle, bending down to get a closer look. When he’d finished, he stood and shook his head again.

  “That one of those ‘top two or three rifles of choice’?”

  “Yep.”

  They had a view of the water from where they stood, Cooper taking a look out across the channel. He was just able to make out the pale yellow safety lights of the Conch Bay Beach Club on its squat little island across the way. Cooper stood there, looking, hands in the pockets of his Tommy Bahama swim trunks. Riley looked too, hands on his hips, one of the hands a little lower than the other because of the holster that rode on his hip.

  “Unlikely,” Cooper said, “this’ll be the end of it.”

  Riley thought about that.

  “Yeah, mon,” he said.

  Cooper kept staring out at the black water and sky.

  “Goddamn that Cap’n Roy,” he said.

  After a long silence, Cooper heard Riley’s barely audible reply.

  “Yeah,” he said, all but whispering. “Yeah, mon.”

  20