Public Enemy

18

He waited until they came all the way in-until the very instant before they grabbed him. While the cell door was open and he was still free to move. He felt their presence, he heard that the door had not yet closed, and he took his shot.

Sidestepping, he spun, seized the pistol from its nook in the ammo belt of the guard closest to him, and fired blindly. He fired blindly because of the obvious-he wore a blindfold and his hands were cuffed behind his back-but he managed to empty the revolver’s chambers in what he estimated to be the vicinity of the three men. Then he dove into the hall, smashing his chin and ear as he bounced on the hard stone of the passageway.

He had grown so emaciated and his musculature was so weak following his imprisonment and starvation that he was able, and quickly, to pull his cuffed wrists down past his ass and under his squatting legs. He felt his hands partially dislocate from the wrists as he did it, but this weird bending of his frayed bones allowed his wrists to slip from the cuffs like twigs from a bucket. The dislocation should have hurt, but he never remembered any pain from that moment.

He remembered only that he had discovered his hands to be free.

He still dreamed, often, of the house of horrors that followed. As much as he had been trained to kill, as any soldier was, he later admitted the actions he undertook on that day were the actions of a killer-not those of a soldier trained to kill, but those of a murderer. One who kills pathologically, for sexual pleasure-the more brutal the act, the better. He viewed himself differently from that point forward, and this altered view of himself hadn’t changed over time. He knew it never would. That it never could.

Once he got the blindfold off and had slipped out of the cuffs, he looked up and found he’d downed two of them. The felled men were making noises-grunts and curses, each man far from dead. Cooper saw the third man, coward that he was, turning the corner ahead of them in the passageway. Going to get help-going, Cooper knew, to the chamber of horrors. What came next, he knew God would never forgive him for. That He couldn’t, and shouldn’t. Presuming there was even somebody upstairs, which he often found hard to believe-Cooper considering it would be better if the attic were empty, given the toll the big man would undoubtedly collect once Cooper’s time came around.

He found another gun on one of the men he’d shot, snatching it as the bloodied guard realized what was happening and, too late, made a grab for it. Cooper held the pistol to the man’s chin, leaned in close, eye to eye, screamed some obscenity he’d never been able to remember, and pulled the trigger. He watched from two inches away as the man’s face erupted, chin to hairline, blasting across the floor in wet fragments of bone, tooth, flesh, and gristle, a triangular spray that deflected off the floor and rained out and up, catching his own chin and cheeks with wet warmth as it shot forth. Ears ringing-for the moment, deaf besides the ringing-face burned from the muzzle blast, one eye partially blinded by the bright burst of the shot-Cooper pocketed the pistol. He knew he would need it for what he would do when he caught up to the third man. The coward-running for the chamber of horrors.

First, though, the second of the three.

Cooper found the man gurgling in pain on the floor of the passageway, rocking slightly, busy trying to get oxygen into his flooded lungs. Pulling the machete the man kept on his belt, memories registering of the slices this one had made on his arms, legs, even once across his cock, Cooper grinned a diseased, insane, murderous grin-and swung. He sliced clear through one of the man’s arms and Cooper heard the machete clang on the rock floor of the passageway. It felt so good to him that the tremors of an orgasm came searching for his loins, but his testicles had endured so much pain by then the tremors were met by a brick wall and retreated. Cooper sought more of the pleasure, savagely-an addict going for the ultimate hit, slicing, whacking, chopping, exhausting himself as he diced his former captor into what he remembered counting as nine pieces. He went back, then, to the man with no face-the one he had shot. The man was already dead, but the addict craving another hit could not shake his need, and so he lifted the man by his remaining hair, held his body in a seated position, and beheaded what was left of the guard’s skull with the machete.

Thrusting the machete under the arm that held the faceless head, he drew the stolen pistol again with the other hand and began to run. Not away-not yet. Head in hand, holding it out ahead of him, he ran, screaming at the edge of his deteriorated larynx, sprinting headlong down the dark tunnel…to the room.

He came at them with the pistol blazing. They were ready for him, warned by the fleeing coward, and they shot at him and hit him more than once from their hiding places. He saw where they were hiding-one crouched astride the open doorway, one prone beside the chair, the third standing behind the wooden post that kept the ceiling of the ancient room from caving in. Without adequate training and the requisite balls, however, felling a target shooting back from close range was one of the most challenging tasks in combat, and these men were no match for the addict seeking his next hit.

Bullets whinging and pocking on the wall and floor around him, Cooper found his opponents to be pathetic, the cowards generating miss after miss. He was struck in the left forearm and outer thigh, but with the pain tolerance he’d developed-that they’d fostered in him-he didn’t even notice. With the five shots he had remaining in the revolver, the addict went five-for-five against the three opponents. He knew exactly who each man was: the guard who had fled in the passageway had been the one feeding him the crusty tortillas; the one beside the chair was the one who had whipped and strafed him; the one behind the post, the man with the mustache, was the one who’d always done the talking as the other whipped him with the serrated paddle from hell.

Two bullets made it into each of Whip-man and Tortilla, one into Mustache. The direct hits disabled them, and they fell, and whether two of them had survived the initial bullet strikes, Cooper had never known. He knew that Mustache had not been killed, because he gutted him with the machete while the man screamed and flailed on the floor. He laid waste to the other two in like fashion, Cooper screaming, a constant yell, as though he held no need for breath in the process of emitting the steady, curdling wail that escaped his throat. When he was through with the men, he took to the chair-the chair-and killed it with the machete like he had the men. When he had chopped it to pieces, he took all of the guns in the room and emptied them at the remaining pieces of the chair, blasting away until each revolver clicked on an empty chamber. Until there were no more bullets to shoot with.

In the process of his committing these inhuman murders, the door of the chamber had somehow eased shut. He remembered seeing this, feeling the deep cringe of ungodly fear, as though the devil himself had closed the door and would shortly be setting the oven to broil. He’d made an impossible escape, accomplished vengeful, disturbingly satisfying retaliation-and yet it seemed he would remain trapped for eternity in the chamber of horrors.

He dropped the first man’s severed head, which he realized only then he had held on to throughout; he dropped the pistol he’d just exhausted. Then he scrambled for the door, slipped, and fell. On his face. And hands-he remembered his hands from that moment, the sight of them in the torch-lit room, because he found them coated in blood when he looked at them. Dipped and soaked to well above the wrists. He felt the same blood dripping from his face, and chin, and neck, and as he stood, he saw that he had become coated with it, with the blood of his enemies, that he was standing in a puddle of it, of the blood he had shed, a puddle the edge of which he could not see. His shoeless feet were immersed in it, toes nearly covered.

He slipped and skidded through the blood, all but wading, as though he were dreaming of trying to run through quicksand. He grasped the handle of the door, the handle he had wanted so badly to grasp all those times, and his hands slipped on it, and he thought for a terrifying moment that it was locked, that he had somehow locked himself in, but then he tried it again and it opened.

He didn’t know which way to go, but he knew that if he followed the lost light he could find his way, that hint of daylight reaching through the darkness and the torches lighting the tunnels, the drab gray mist of daylight brighter around each succeeding corner and stairwell, and then there was a massive wooden door with a round, windowless opening in the center, and he grasped its handle with his bloodied hand, pulled it inward, and felt the blinding assault of equatorial sunshine on eyes that hadn’t seen daylight in months. He collapsed from the blinding daylight-the pain striking him in his eyes, a place he was not accustomed to feeling pain.

He rose slowly, recovering-squinting, so that he saw the world only through the miniscule slivers between his interlaced eyelashes.

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.