Public Enemy

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 jutting 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.”