Public Enemy Read online

  Cooper saw no need to speak.

  “Still, we like to keep your boys playin’ by the rules, and sometime that take some encouragement. And this time, we got ourselves a bit o’ leverage. It seems there one survivin’ smuggler, and we got the man in custody-right here in the building.”

  “That so.”

  “Yeah, mon, and the Coast Guard want him. Our position be, Coast Guard take the boat and we keep the loot-only then we consider handin’ over the smuggler. Sure you can see my reasonin’-that boat worth nothing to me, burned half to a crisp. Them artifacts, well, that be another story.”

  “When you say the boat’s worth nothing to you,” Cooper said, “it’s the public property of the British Virgin Islands ‘you,’ correct?”

  “Oh, yeah, mon, nothin’ but.”

  “Just clarifying the rules of the gray zone.”

  “And ain’t that nice of you, mon. You know, it turn out, after a bit o’ interrogation, this smuggler tell me the contraband you just took fifteen percent of is one shipment among many in a pipeline of antiquities flowin’ south to north. He takes a few transport deals, stays out of it other than that.”

  “Out of curiosity,” Cooper said, “you planning on telling me anytime soon what it is you want me to do?”

  Roy, smiling, made a sweeping gesture toward the sprawling, sunlit view of Road Town. “Take a look-lovely place, ain’t it? Yeah, mon.”

  Cooper refused to turn. “Had a look on the way in,” he said. “I’ve had a thousand looks on a thousand ways in.”

  “Movin’ back from the water, though, it get worse, eh, mon? Roads gettin’ some potholes, people hungry too. Conditions not be the best among the entire population.”

  Cooper yawned.

  “Seem to me,” Roy said, “somebody knowin’ the kind of people you know might be capable o’ findin’ us a fence, or a buyer-maybe one willin’ to pony up top dollar for the native treasure trove you just finished pillagin’. Nobody need be tellin’ you how far that money’d go toward helpin’ us rebuild our strugglin’ little village by the sea.”

  Cooper felt the urge to ask Roy a question-Native treasure trove of which natives?-but he let it go, since there would have been no rational way that Roy could have known the answer. Plus, it was an answer Cooper wondered why he felt curious enough to ask about at all.

  Leave it alone, he heard himself think.

  “Took you long enough,” Cooper said, “to get to that nifty little word.”

  Roy grinned. “‘Fence’?”

  “Yeah,” Cooper said. “Fence.”

  Cap’n Roy stood, replaced his cap, and flipped open a Nextel phone.

  “Come on down,” he said into it, “and take Cooper back to the beach.”

  Cooper snuck a look out the window. The fireboat was easing off on its dousing of the yacht with its arcing spray, the geyser from the fire hose going limp. The SCUBA divers were climbing out of their boat onto the Marine Base dock. The show, it seemed, was winding to a close.

  “Any interest,” Roy said, “in seein’ the smuggler? I’m set to sit down with ’im again, see if there’s anythin’ else useful he know might be good for me to know too.”

  Cooper lifted the heavy bag of idols, hearing the clunk again as he picked it up.

  “I’ll pass,” he said.

  “Riley give you some photos for the road. We snapped every little thing in the treasure trove. Got ’em from every angle-eBay-ready, mon,” he said.

  Cooper, standing, saw that Riley now stood in the doorway down the end of the hall.

  He looked down at his sack of contraband. I could take this with me and decide later. Give Chief Minister Roy a call from his bungalow, tell him he’d be taking a pass on the fencing assignment, and ship the pirated goods back by way of the Lieutenant Riley shuttle. Or, if the mood struck, he could make a few calls, toss his bag of goodies in for a commission fee, and call himself even on his poker losses.

  Deciding he was too thick with lethargy to undertake any brash decision making just yet-Always good, he thought, to keep your options open-he heaved the sack over his shoulder.

  Without so much as shaking hands or otherwise offering Cap’n Roy any form of farewell, Cooper left the chief minister’s office, ambled down the hallway, and out past Riley into the blinding sun. He held his free thumb up and out as he passed Riley. Hitching a ride.

  Riley followed him down to the dock.

  5

  The next morning, at six-after he’d had only fifteen and one-half hours of sleep-one of the goats residing on the old man’s private residence behind the club woke Cooper up. This was a daily problem. The goats worked like a combination rooster and alarm clock, alternating only due to weather-in rain, they didn’t make any noise until seven; if the sun came out, they were whining away from six o’clock on. They’d always stop after thirty minutes or so, and Cooper had never quite been able to figure out why they performed their rooster imitation in the first place. Somewhere along the line he satisfied himself with the theory that each morning, one of the goats became convinced today was the big day-that somebody would open the gate and let him wander off the old man’s property and down to the beach.

  The snorkeling ain’t what it used to be here, kid, he wanted to tell this morning’s goat. Too many boats been mooring here too many years. There’s something wrong with the coral, so stay up where that old farmer feeds you apples, where you eat the shrubs on the hill, or whatever it is you do when you’re not pulling alarm clock duty.

  He made a pit stop for a cup of black coffee at the beachfront veranda, where Ronnie was already up, slicing melons for the guests who’d bought the meal plan. They usually started coming down from their bungalows around seven-fifteen. Cooper sat in one of the chairs and kicked his feet up on the railing, from which spot he watched the sea as it shifted from gray to blue. Parts of the lagoon soon turned a bright shade of turquoise, a color you only found in the waters of the Caribbean and maybe a scant few other exotic locales.

  Across the channel, where Tortola hunched, and off to his left-St. John-he could see places where the sun, rising behind him, had begun to pummel the islands with its rays. As with most mornings, Cooper felt as though he were staring at a postcard. He’d grown accustomed, but never tired, of the view.

  “What did you do with the bucket,” he asked Ronnie without looking at him.

  Ronnie continued with his slicing. He was working on a honeydew melon.

  “Used it the day before yesterday on the ferry,” he said. “Think I put it behind the kitchen.”

  Cooper nodded, still examining the view, then polished off his coffee and stood. Ronnie had a look at him: Cooper wore an old blue swimsuit, no shirt, and his swimming goggles, which he’d wrapped around his neck. There were enough old scars on his torso to make his skin resemble a tie-dyed shirt.

  “Gettin’ to work this morning, then, are you, mate?” Ronnie said.

  Cooper grunted as he set the coffee cup on one of the trays Ronnie would use to bus the breakfast tables once the guests came.

  “Yes, I am,” he said.

  When Cooper cleaned his boat, he cleaned every inch. For the all-important scrubbing beneath the waterline, he liked to dive in with the swim goggles and a sponge, mopping off accumulated grime, all the while counting off the seconds to test how long he could hold his breath underwater. Due to many years of skin diving on deeper and deeper wrecks around the islands, he’d recently been able to set his personal best, managing to count to one hundred and ninety-four: three minutes and fourteen seconds without coming up for air. Having sucked down the prosthetic-faced Clancy’s secondhand smoke for a few days, though, Cooper didn’t hold out much hope of breaking any records.

  He took his dinghy out to the Apache and brought the big racing boat in to the dock. The dock didn’t fill up until eleven-thirty or twelve, when all the visiting yacht-charter types came over from their catamarans aboard a fleet of identical-looking gray Zodiacs, mostly to sample the cl
ub’s cooking, made famous by Rosie, Odessa, and Dennise, the three well-fed West Indian women who’d been working their culinary artistry there for years.

  Cooper flipped the bumpers over the edge and pulled against the dock, gunning the throttle then killing it-let the boat coast into position, no bullshit reverse-forward-reverse throttle work needed here. As the Apache lolled against the side of the dock, squeezing the bumpers, Cooper tossed one line to the dock, came around to the bow to grab the other line, leaped to the dock with it, tied it off, then strolled to the stern and secured that line. He already had the bucket out on the dock, and a hose too, which he’d stretched from the spigot behind the kitchen.

  Inside the bucket were his implements of destruction: the tools, towels, and solvents he used to clean his boat. The five-hour boat-cleaning job was something he could have paid one of the local kids, or even Ronnie to do, but he didn’t trust anyone but himself to do it properly, or at least that was what he told himself. In truth, he had discovered it was as good a way to confront his demons as any. A kind of self-controlled therapy session.

  Unlike the nightmares.

  He did the work every sixty days or so, not because the Apache needed it, but because he did. He would always need the work; it would never go away. It would always stay with him, and that was why he was here, killing the pain, in one of the only places in the world where he’d thought there might be enough natural painkillers to salve any wound. But not his; his never left. It always needed fresh treatment, another dose of medication to ease the pain. A prescription to help escape the episode of his life that had brought him here-accomplished by way of skin diving, drinking, dope smoking, fucking, sunbathing, poker playing, and six or seven thousand other idle pursuits the British Virgin Islands and its environs had to offer.

  But sometimes it took facing the music-and when he knew he’d need to play the tune, he preferred to do it while cleaning his boat.

  The twelve-man team descended on the palace under the cover of night. They came by way of a high-altitude drop, released into the jet stream miles east of the target, the plane inaudible from the palace grounds. They came to earth silently, invisibly, the soft pads of their specialized boots ballet shoes in the choreography that followed.

  It was sickeningly easy. They slaughtered the small army of sentries in seconds, aware of precisely where each guard was posted, the position of the dictator’s defenders matching the satellite images each man on Cooper’s team had studied relentlessly before taking the plunge into the night sky. It was too easy, Cooper soon coming to the nauseating realization that no leader of any country, of any size, could possibly be taken down so simply, with so little resistance.

  Even so, they executed the prime minister in his bed while he slept, the silent spits from Cooper’s muted assault rifle ending the prime minister’s reign as planned-planned, Cooper came to learn, by a desk jockey aspiring to a spymaster’s seat on the hallowed seventh floor of the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. The desk jockey, though, had grossly underestimated the influence and savvy of the minister of defense overseeing the palace guard. So poor was the desk jockey’s intelligence, in fact, that he’d been fully ignorant of the defense minister’s ability to catch wind of the mission Cooper’s team had been deployed to accomplish. Cooper supposed he, or somebody on the squad at least, should have considered the possibility too. But what the hell, he came to think, did we know back then? We were stupid goons, riding on adrenaline, raiding the palace of an evil dictator, an ally of the Soviet empire America intended to vanquish.

  As the last breath passed from the lips of the sleeping dictator, a second wave of soldiers in the prime minister’s guard rose from hiding places throughout the palace and dispatched with eleven of the twelve members of Cooper’s goon squad in the span of sixteen seconds. Fleeing the palace by way of a hall behind the first-floor kitchen, Cooper found himself surrounded-undiscovered in the initial trap wave but doomed to certain capture. He was hopelessly outnumbered, finding a guard lurking behind every door, window, or passage, Cooper creeping along in his vain search for a way out of the palace and into the jungle beyond. But he found no such means of escape, and instead hid in a janitor’s closet, hoping to remain in his hiding spot until they’d forgotten him, or decided they’d counted wrong-that they’d taken down the whole invasion team. It worked for a few hours, but they knew he was around, Cooper hearing the search as they worked through the nooks and crannies of the palace, approaching the kitchen, the hallway, and finally his precious closet. He decided the best chance at anything was surrender, so when he heard them in the kitchen he eased open the closet door, reached his hands out past its knob, and pushed his gun into the hall with his padded shoe.

  He’d never been able to determine why they hadn’t just killed him. He supposed their anger needed a symbol, a puny enemy to attack, and as the sole survivor of the assassination squad, he gave them that. He learned much later that the minister of defense had publicly decried the terrible tragedy of the loss of the nation’s leader, then declared martial law and announced the appointment of himself as prime minister for the length of the late leader’s term. He’d promptly locked up or killed the senior members of the opposition party who might otherwise have defeated him in an election.

  He also locked up the sole surviving member of the assassination squad that had assisted him in his rise to the throne.

  As many times as it was possible to take a human being there, they took him to the brink of death. The very limits of pain and blood loss. On a rotating cycle-following a few days of isolation and continued starvation-they would walk him to a torture chamber in the depths of a seventeenth-century dungeon he supposed he had some Spanish explorer to thank for. They would strap him to a chair. The chair had no seat, and Cooper, fully naked, his balls exposed through the bottom of the empty chair, would be whipped-strafed. Torn. The whip had something on it, not nails but something like them. Sharp. Grating.

  They whipped his penis, his nuts, and ass, the same every time, doing it until he bled a puddle, and they thought he might be dead. Each time, the clouds of pain would lead him to a serene, peaceful state, the cliff edge of death. After it was determined he had survived yet again, they would throw him back in the prison cell, one of a few dozen subterranean rooms in the subterranean facility. They would come back and check a couple of days later to see whether he had died. Seeing his chest bobbing slowly, they would give him just enough food-usually in the form of a crusted tortilla chunk-for him to notice he was dying of starvation.

  Enough to get him through to the next session.

  After too many cycles to count-when he sensed death’s tendrils becoming more permanently present, like the prosthetic Clancy’s tendril of smoke from his uninhaled cigarette-Cooper vowed to make whatever pathetic move he could muster the next time they came. With what little he had left, he would take them.

  And when he did, he would kill them all.

  6

  Cooper remoored the Apache about ten minutes ahead of the first Zodiacful of lunch guests. He came back in on the skiff, tying it to one of the tacks on the dock, and headed back to bungalow nine. As he had hoped, there was a ham-and-cheese sandwich and some ice water waiting for him on the table beside his kitchenette. He opened the room’s tiny fridge and found a fresh six-pack of Budweiser too-Good work, Ronnie, you putz, he thought. Planting himself in the chair at the table in the kitchenette, Cooper put away the water, three beers, and the sandwich, watching people come over for lunch from their very expensive sailboats moored in the bay. He could see out through the jalousie panes of his kitchen window, louvered open as they were on the other side of the screen designed to keep out the bugs.

  When he was through with the sandwich, he looked over at the built-in shelving behind his reading chair. He’d been attempting to ignore the presence of the foot-high statue he’d put there, but the more effort he put into ignoring it, the more he noticed the thing.

  Upon his re
turn from Tortola, he’d taken the idol out of the canvas sack and set it on the shelf. He’d thought at the time that it would look good in his room, which made him think the gold stash might not carry a curse with it after all. Maybe the idol-or whatever, he thought, you call one of these things-was a good-luck charm. A sentry, standing guard, warding off evil spirits. At least he could give the theory a shot: test out the idol’s spiritual powers by seeing whether it kept Cap’n Roy from calling, or Lieutenant Riley from returning to bring him to the good chief minister. Maybe the idol had already caused Ronnie to bring the sandwich for him.

  Either way, Ronnie must have wondered what the fucking thing was-this shining golden idol planted on the top shelf of his otherwise Spartan room, the only chunk of decor in the entire bungalow, not counting the pair of conch shells he’d moved aside to make room for it.

  He popped his fourth beer and took a thick slug of it as he came over and sat in his reading chair. As always, he found the first taste of the beer to be disappointingly lukewarm. The refrigerators in the bungalows ran on propane; they were meant to keep a half gallon of milk from spoiling, or a dozen eggs cool, so guests could make their own breakfasts if they wanted. The little fridges wouldn’t keep beer or soda cold enough unless you remembered to take out the ice cubes from the freezer box and put the beverages in their place. Ronnie never did it that way when he brought something over, and Cooper never thought ahead-he wanted a beer when he wanted it, never thinking to put the second, or even the third, in the freezer while he drank the first. Be nice, now that I’m on the fourth bottle, to be sipping an ice-cold brew. He drank some more of the lukewarm beer anyway.

  He thought about the smuggled artifacts Cap’n Roy had asked him to unload. Contrary to Roy’s supposition, he knew next to nothing about the business of art theft, and couldn’t think of anybody from his list, at least not offhand, whom he might impel to assist in the fencing of a batch of stolen objets d’art-assuming, which he figured it was safe to assume, they were in fact stolen. Had to have been stolen from somewhere-and it could be that Cap’n Roy knew by now where they’d been stolen from, considering Roy was holding the last surviving smuggler in his brand-new Marine Base holding cell. Finishing the fourth Bud, Cooper thought a little about Cap’n Roy’s offer to join him for the interrogation of the smuggler. Maybe, if he was going to figure out what these goods were worth and how to unload them for the highest price, it wasn’t a bad idea to take him up on the invite.