Public Enemy Read online

  Cooper sipped the ice water Ronnie had been kind enough to add to his order. “Sounds exciting,” he said.

  “Uh-huh, well, way these things work, we seize the vessel, the contraband, everything. Any drugs, we hand ’em over to the Coast Guard. Anything else, we keep.”

  “And?” Cooper polished off the remaining corner of the sandwich and popped the last two conch fritters in his mouth.

  “And Cap’n Roy askin’ me to come get you. Says he thinkin’ maybe you be willin’ to help with some o’ the more complicated matters.”

  Cooper placed his tray on the ottoman, moving his PowerBook and its portable printer aside with the lip of the tray as he set it down. He lifted the glass of ice water again, drained it, and set the glass back on the tray. Then he reclined in his armchair, assuming almost precisely the same position in which he’d recently fallen asleep.

  It was time to get Riley to skedaddle.

  “Riley,” he said, “for all intents and purposes, I haven’t slept in six days. Plus, the only thing I managed to accomplish in the process of this sleep deprivation was to lose two hundred and fifty thousand bucks. Actually it came closer to two fifty-two, counting fuel and incidentals. Ordinarily, Lieutenant, I wouldn’t trouble you with such matters. The reason I mention it now, however, is so that when you return from this friendly visit and report back to our esteemed chief minister, you’ll be able to explain my position entirely clearly.”

  Cooper had closed his eyes. Riley waited, but Cooper offered no further comment.

  Finally Riley said, “And what that position be?”

  One eye popped open. “My position, Lieutenant, is that the only way you’re going to get me out of this chair for the next forty-eight hours is if Minister Roy is willing to pay me around two hundred and fifty thousand bucks to do it. Two fifty-two, to be precise.”

  Cooper shut both eyes again. He quickly began to feel the trickling onset of sleep, but the return of bliss slowed when he sensed Riley hadn’t left. He opened his eyes to find the lieutenant still standing there. In fact, not only had Riley not left-the man had a grin plastered across his face.

  “When he ask me to come visit,” Riley said, “Cap’n Roy tell me some-thin’ like this: ‘Tell him this time, we make it worth his while.’”

  “Riley,” Cooper said, “I don’t even think Roy knows what two hundred and fifty thousand looks like. Strike that-no doubt he’s seized that much and more from anybody with a busted taillight giving him the chance to do it. But we both know he’d never give a penny of it to anybody. So skedaddle.”

  Riley held his grin.

  Cooper said, “What the hell is so funny?”

  “Probably be true,” Riley said, “that this is the kind of thing fall outside my area of expertise, mon. But still, with what I seen today, it seem to me there be a lot more than two-fifty to go around.”

  Trying in vain to keep up the fight now that his skedaddle strategy had backfired, Cooper dropped his head to wrestle with his predicament. First, he remained skeptical there was in fact that much money at stake. Second, he couldn’t think of any good reason he should help Roy do whatever it was Roy needed help doing. The last time he’d helped Roy out, what followed hadn’t exactly been a tea party. And third, as Cooper knew quite well, the more Roy was paying, the more questionable the task would turn out to be.

  Cooper mused that he could think of a few things the money he’d just lost might come in handy for, were he to find a way of recovering it. Assuming, of course, that Riley’s assessment was correct, and that Roy was actually good for it.

  Christ.

  “I’m tired, Lieutenant,” Cooper said.

  Riley’s smile grew one notch wider and he issued a clap that resounded through Cooper’s sluggish skull like a crazed pinball.

  “I’ll do the drivin’, mon,” Riley said. “You can sleep on the way over.”

  As he steered Cooper past the Coast Guard cutter anchored outside the entrance to Road Harbor, Riley tossed a jovial salute to the sentry standing guard at the stern.

  The sentry didn’t bother acknowledging him.

  Cooper observed the attack helicopter parked on the cutter’s helipad, rotors spinning. The chopper made a lot of noise, which made Cooper notice the unusual preponderance of noise as a whole. Except for semidaily cruise ship dockings and the regular arrivals of the turboprop commuter planes delivering tourists to Beef Island, Road Harbor was normally a peaceful place. But not today.

  Coming around the breakwater-a place where Riley had made a grim discovery a year and a half ago-Cooper caught his first view of the mayhem at the root of all the noise pollution. That was the only word for it, mayhem-Cooper never having seen such bustling activity or having heard such noise here in nineteen years as a neighbor.

  Roy’s Marine Base fleet was out in force-actually in its entirety, Cooper counting all five boats including Riley’s, the other four buzzing around the harbor in what Cooper had come to recognize as Cap’n Roy’s way of assuming control of a crime scene: every cop on the scene remained active, but if you looked closely, you would notice none of them was accomplishing a thing. The volunteer salvage team was deployed in full SCUBA gear, most of them busy on the patrol boat decks, a couple of them swimming in the bay. The city’s fireboat was spraying a geyser of water, the 40' tug positioned the farthest possible distance from its target so as to allow for the most glorious possible arc of seawater, even though whatever fire had been raging had long since been doused.

  The target of the fire hose was a custom luxury yacht Cooper pegged at 140-plus feet, the word Seahawk posted on its side in tall, cursive, sterling silver letters. The yacht’s stern had burned down to a charred stump, and was still warm enough to be steaming under the deluge from Roy’s tug. A second, smaller boat, an open-deck rubber-hulled deal featuring the familiar red-and-white Coast Guard paint scheme, was lashed to the Marine Base pier ahead of the yacht, and displayed no apparent damage. Cooper recognized it as one of the task force chase boats he’d seen from time to time, and knew it to be capable of speeds in excess of sixty knots. Fat chance that boat had of catching his Apache, at least not when he had the MerCruisers tuned-knob the fuel aerator over to its richest mix and he’d leave that chase boat in the dust.

  Riley took the long way around, circling the harbor on his approach. Cooper guessed that Roy had instructed him to do this-make sure he caught the full scope of the mayhem-so he ignored the intended view and instead took in the passing shoreline. They swung past the empty cruise ship berth, eased along Road Town’s main waterfront district: a pastel rainbow of shops, the new ferry terminal, one pair of strip malls, then all of it giving way, up and back, to half-constructed buildings and rougher lots on the slopes of the town’s two hills.

  Unwatched tour concluded, Riley brought them into the harbor’s bigger marina. He passed the series of lime-and-red storage buildings lining its eastern edge, approached then passed under the fountain of water spraying from the fireboat, then finally pulled the patrol boat alongside the only available stretch of dock space. The dock fronted a grouping of aluminum-sided structures Roy had succeeded in getting everybody to call the Marine Base.

  It was only after they’d parked that Cooper encountered the first sign that Roy might not have dispatched Riley solely to roust him from slumber.

  Three upstanding members of Roy’s regular militia-meaning non-Marine Base men, cops wearing long pants and patent-leather shoes-stood guard before the closed doors of a building called the Barn, a storage facility in which the lesser-ranked Marine Base cops normally housed the department’s heavy marine equipment. Cooper took the presence of the regular RVIPF cops as a sign-since, first, in looking back, he couldn’t remember their having guarded anything, ever, and second, because today they also happened to be armed.

  In the British tradition, RVIPF cops typically did not carry.

  The lanky West Indian who always seemed to be busy with something or other on the Marine Base pier took
the patrol boat’s bow line from Riley, secured it to a tack, and went back to his business. It appeared to Cooper that the guy was gutting a fish on one of the wide planks of the dock.

  Looking forward to getting home, Cooper didn’t wait for Riley to lead the way and instead leaped onto the dock, stern line in hand. He tied the line off, stuffed his hands in the pockets of his swim trunks, and, after a glance over the shoulder of the fisherman to confirm that it was, indeed, a fish he was slicing open, headed inland solo.

  In a matter of seconds there appeared, strutting toward him from the Marine Base headquarters building, a man with the stiffest spine Cooper had ever known. Like the director of a big-budget action film deigning to greet the studio representative visiting the set of his picture, Cap’n Roy Gillespie, apparently having decided to lose his three-piece chief minister suit and reoutfit himself in full police-chief regalia for the occasion, reached out for a handshake as they met a few yards from the dock. Cooper rudely kept his hands lodged deep in the pockets of his swim trunks.

  Cap’n Roy wore a pressed white polo shirt, sharply creased gray slacks, the same shiny cap with the checkered band that Riley wore, and a set of gleaming patent-leather shoes. Cooper marveled yet again at how these guys could consistently wear slacks in the humid ninety-degree heat without emitting sweat from a single visible pore.

  They stood in the midst of a gravel parking lot currently occupied by more police and civilian vehicles than Cooper remembered ever having seen anywhere in the islands. Roy remained undeterred by Cooper’s rebuff; his smile gleamed so pearly white it made his deeply black skin appear almost blue.

  “’Ey, mon,” he said, “if it isn’t the spy-a-de-island, come by to see us down the Marine Base way.” The words flew from his mouth like the lyrics to a reggae track.

  “Normally it’d be a pleasure, Roy,” Cooper said. He always avoided using Roy’s self-proclaimed nickname. “But today isn’t really the best day.”

  “We under high alert, mon. State of emergency.”

  “I see that.”

  Roy motioned for Cooper to follow as he started toward the Barn.

  “Got something I’m thinking you maybe wanna see, mon,” he said with a wink.

  Cooper followed him across the gravel. He elected not to bite on Roy’s joke-this was exactly what Roy had said the last time Cooper had been asked to help the RVIPF out of a bind.

  “This time,” Cooper said, “I’m encouraged by the approach you instructed Lieutenant Riley to take.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yep-primarily because Riley seemed confident my demand for a fee in the amount of two hundred and fifty-two thousand U.S. dollars would be met.”

  Roy returned the salute from the guard at the main door to the Barn, unlocked the padlock himself, and opened one of the big double doors to which the padlock had been affixed.

  “This time ’round,” he said, “money be the whole point.”

  Cooper followed him inside and Cap’n Roy didn’t say another word.

  Cooper figured Roy was waiting for Cooper’s eyes to adjust-that was what Cooper was waiting for-and when they did, Cooper beheld the sight that had injected the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force with such fiscal optimism, and the reason Roy had clammed up.

  It seemed the stash the chief minister was holding inside the Barn spoke for itself.

  Set out as though for auction, or maybe to photograph-lit, as it was, by police spotlights rigged to function as museum-style lighting-there stood a collection of various objects, some massive, some miniscule, but every single one of them appearing to be made of solid gold. The collection filled the Barn, a building Cooper had once seen host a full-court basketball game. It looked to Cooper like the second coming of the King Tutankhamen exhibit, a display he remembered observing in relative awe as a child.

  He quickly counted seventy smaller objects-busts, heads, vases, an egg-along with a dozen full-body statues, three room-size tapestries, and nine boxes of varying sizes. Pretty much every one of the objects depicted, in one form or another, exotic figures wearing bejeweled robes, or warriors in full headdress. Cooper sensed a sort of recognition, a familiarity, with the faces depicted by the figures-and then, when his eyes had adjusted well enough to make out the features of the individual faces, a sudden anger swelled in his throat.

  The surge made him want to yell, to scream out a string of obscenities and brutally trash the display Roy and his boys had so carefully arranged.

  He swallowed back the odd impulse, wondering whether he might have just gone insane, whether it was in this one moment that he had finally lost it, crossing over the line of lunacy: Goddamn statues, I’ll kill you, who am I, I’m hearing voices, WHO AM I? But then, as quickly as it had come, Cooper’s bout with madness retreated.

  He had a fleeting sense of the source. It had to do with the familiarity he’d felt before the swell of rage had come-he knew the faces on the idols on display in the room, or at least descendants of the people portrayed by them. The high, thick peaks of the cheekbones, the slope of the forehead, the teardrop orbs of the eyes…it had been people with faces something like these who had once imprisoned and tortured him, and who continued to torment him even today, by way of a recycling nightmare circuit that rarely neglected to make its overnight visit.

  There you have it-you’ve just racially profiled a bunch of gold statues.

  Walking around the building to examine the artifacts with a more rational eye, Cooper guessed the faces portrayed in the works were Central American Indian-similar, though not identical, to the faces of his onetime captors. He pegged the look of these faces as a pure ethnic strain of what had appeared in his captors as one watered-down dose among many.

  The full collection of artifacts was in mint condition, polished to a degree rivaled only by Roy’s shoes. Eight large, opened wooden crates stood in one of the back corners of the Barn with cardboard spaghetti and other padding paraphernalia strewn about them. In seeing this, Cooper was reminded of what he’d read about that old King Tut haul: anybody foolish enough to dig up somebody’s sacred burial ornaments, plus anybody foolish enough to come into contact with them down the line, was said to be subject to a curse. With death generally befalling those who caught it.

  Cooper considered he wasn’t exactly in a death-curse kind of mood-and that meant it was time to call off whatever Roy had in mind for his latest in a long line of bullshit stunts. The chief minister could keep whatever money he was offering, and recruit somebody else to handle whatever questionable task Cooper had been ferried over to undertake.

  “Catch,” Roy said from behind him.

  Cooper turned and instinctively caught the foot-high idol Cap’n Roy had just tossed him. As Cooper began to object, Roy threw him a second, smaller statuette-and then a vase. Half-juggling those he’d already caught, Cooper snatched each from the air as they came before realizing what he’d just done.

  Great-whatever curse has befallen the robbers of this tomb’s bounty now rests squarely on your own shoulders.

  “Seem to me,” Roy said, flashing his pearly whites, “you find the right buyer, that ought to add up to two-fifty large. Maybe even two fifty-two.”

  Cooper examined the goods he held in his hands. The dull clunk resulting from contact between the sculptures confirmed that they were, in fact, solid, and they certainly looked like gold to him.

  Thinking, Well, you’ve already got the damn curse, he looked over at Roy.

  “I’d put these three at one seventy-five, tops,” he said.

  After standing expressionless for a moment, Roy nodded sharply, reached down to retrieve an ornately carved gold box, then tossed this too in Cooper’s direction. Cooper caught it in the crook of his elbow.

  Roy said, “There you go, mon,” appearing pleased enough to worry Cooper to the extreme.

  Cooper nodded.

  “Which begs the question,” he said, “of what it is you’re paying me to do.”

  “Yeah, mon.” Roy f
ound a canvas bag at the base of the wall nearest him, came over to Cooper, and held it open while Cooper deposited the idols, vase, and box within. Roy zipped the bag shut and handed it to him.

  “Come on down to the office,” he said, starting out of the Barn, “and we talk about that.”

  After a few steps through blinding sunshine, Cap’n Roy led him into the Marine Base headquarters, a single-floor boathouse Roy had remodeled into a reception-cum-squad room, complete with hallway, holding cell, interrogation room, unisex restroom, and, mainly, a massive corner office for himself. Roy’s personal office featured, among other luxuries, a vast expanse of windows affording him an entirely unobstructed view of the bay. He rarely used it now, but still retained it solely for his own use.

  Roy removed his cap, reclined in the chair behind his desk, and placed both hands behind his head. From this seat, he could see much of his kingdom. Cooper took the assigned guest chair, a wooden creaker he assumed Roy had rescued from the town dump. From his seat Cooper could see nothing but Roy and the series of marine steering wheels and anchors affixed to the wall behind.

  The idols clunked inside the bag as Cooper set it on the floor.

  “Coast Guard task force come with them heavy guns, but no jurisdiction,” Cap’n Roy said. His eyes were on the harbor. “Anytime your boys come into the BVIs, rule says the drug war need to live slow for a bit.”

  “My boys?”

  “And yet,” Roy said, “once in a while, it seem some unavoidable circumstance result in a fracas like the one we seen today. This happen, mon, and it put us in a gray zone. And that about where we be now: one big, fat gray zone.”

  Cooper knew this to be Roy’s favorite sort of zone.

  “Homeland Security, they okay with us keepin’ the boat. Better for us to do the disposin’, you see. But they prefer the contraband, of course, remain wit’ the U.S. of A. Sometime back, in an unrelated matter, we hold a little discussion ’bout this and come to a compromise: drugs or weapons, we hand ’em over. Anything else, and that contraband be confiscated-public property of the BVIs, mon. Belongin’ to the islanders.”