Public Enemy

23

Throughout Collier and Lee counties and all the way back to Miami, Ricardo Medvez was regarded by all-rich, poor, chic, nearly everyone in between-as the news anchor of choice. Their trusted man, host of the six and eleven o’clock news, telling it like it was from his seat in the studio of the Fort Myers NBC affiliate.

In certain, less public circles, Medvez was also known for some other things: a gambling addiction, frequent trips down the crystal meth, coke, and freebase superhighways, and a generous propensity for lump-sum payoffs engineered to discourage numerous paternity suits from making the rundown of his own news broadcast.

Having largely succeeded in keeping his evening and weekend activities under wraps, however, Medvez-who otherwise considered himself starkly heterosexual-had, one night, made a tape. Perhaps it’d been the freebase talking, or maybe he’d just unlatched a long-locked closet door, but one night Medvez, jumping on the phone, ordered up half a dozen male prostitutes, punched the record button on a couple of camcorders, and made a private porno flick that made Deep Throat look like a Pixar movie. He got plenty of mileage out of the tape, taking it with him wherever he knew he’d possess sufficient private time with a VCR.

The odometer wore out, though, when one of the people he owed a hundred grand in gambling debts to got hold of the tape. From that point on, the interest rate on his gradually accumulating vig jumped a few dozen percentage points and Medvez assumed he was fucked for life.

This remained the case until a year and a half later, when the olive skinned news anchor stumbled across a high-stakes card game in Key West. A few of the guys in the game kept referring to the weathered, baritone-voiced card shark taking all of their money that night as the “spy on the island,” and Medvez wondered what this meant. Afterward, putting his finely honed interviewing skills to work-dulled somewhat by the lines of coke he’d done in the bathroom between hands-he ascertained that his fellow gambler was in fact a spy of sorts, and resided on an island in the British Virgins.

Medvez propositioned him on the spot.

“What would it cost if I wanted a favor done?” he asked.

Cooper sized up Medvez, the two of them out on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant they’d used for the game.

“What kind of favor,” he said.

When Medvez explained, Cooper pondered the request for a few minutes-standing there in his Tommy Bahama short-sleeved shirt at four in the morning-then said, “I won’t kill anybody for you, but this shouldn’t be too hard to handle. I’ll need whatever information you have on them, everywhere you’ve seen or associated with them, who you think they might work for, and so on.”

Then he asked what Medvez had to offer in return.

“You like boats?” Medvez asked.

“Sure.”

“Wanna take a walk?”

“How far?”

“Old Key West Marina. Five minutes, tops.”

Parked as it was, roped beside the fuel depot in the island’s marina of choice, Cooper would always remember his first encounter with the squat-hulled, off-white-and-burnt-orange Apache 41 custom racing vessel. For him it had been like meeting that woman you were meant to be with-he felt he’d known her all along. Upon further inspection, the forty-one-foot boat revealed its brawny twin engines, luxury quarters belowdecks, and nearly untouched, mint-condition state. He knew the boat to be worth somewhere close to four hundred thousand dollars.

“I’ll take it in advance,” he’d told Medvez back then, “but if I can’t solve your problem, you can have it back.”

Medvez agreed, and in an odd way-because of his own love for the racing boat he’d had built to his exact specs-he found himself, over time, to be mildly disappointed by the lack of contact from the people Cooper had somehow silenced. Medvez never asked Cooper whether he’d actually retrieved the tape, and ultimately didn’t really want to know.

Cooper took the name and number El Oso Polar had passed him on the Post-it and ran them through three separate wash cycles-the reverse directory services of CIA, FBI, and one private think tank. The machines returned three neatly pressed but slightly different packages. Between them came one post office box, three residential addresses-two in South Florida, one in Louisiana-one business address, two different versions of the man’s name, his social, printouts of four different credit bureau reports-the kind the manager at a car dealership pulled when you went in to buy a car-plus a basic breakdown of the person’s various bank and credit card accounts and loans and various supposedly current addresses.

Cooper didn’t have much interest in placing phone calls to people he didn’t know, who didn’t expect his call, and who wouldn’t have any interest in answering the kind of questions he intended to ask. He did, however, have an interest in finding out who had sent the contract killer to take out Cap’n Roy. And his only current lead-at least outside of the entire federal government of the United States of America or anyone else who had access to reports or radio communications from U.S. Coast Guard antidrug task force fleets-was the name of the fence the Polar Bear had provided him. Cooper figured an in-person conversation with the man might yield some answers on who else had been aware of the intended transaction.

He took his boat up to Naples-it was a long haul, but he was in the mood for a challenge. Including a couple of half-hour breaks, he made it in a shade under nineteen hours, bay to bay: five A.M. departure from his Conch Bay mooring and an arrival one hour shy of midnight at the fueling pier near downtown Naples. He’d made an average speed of forty-eight knots.

Double-parking against a lengthy yacht that looked something like Po Keeler’s Seahawk, he kicked the bumpers off the edge, tied the two boats front to rear, then strolled through the rear cabin of the other boat on his way to the dock. He knew it was unlikely anybody would be using the big yacht anytime soon-with these kinds of boats, people liked having them more than using them. He took a cab to the single-building television station on the outskirts of Fort Myers.

In the lobby of the television studio, Cooper told the receptionist he had a story their evening news anchor would want to hear about. He told her it was about a film that had been made of a famous celebrity without the celebrity’s permission, and that competing media outlets would leap into a frenzy to cover the story if Ricardo Medvez didn’t come out and capture the scoop while he had the chance.

At 11:23-Cooper watching the weather segment begin on the eleven o’clock news on the monitor in the lobby-Medvez barged into the lobby in the suit Cooper had just seen him wearing on television. The contrast between the dark fabric of the suit and the white shirt he wore made the anchor’s Latino skin tone appear even darker than Cooper’s island tan-though Cooper could see pale orange smudges of pancake makeup on the edge of the man’s shirt collar.

Medvez saw it was Cooper who’d made the thinly veiled threat and grinned. He nodded to the receptionist that all was cool, saw Cooper had been watching the monitor, and opened the door to the newsroom.

“Wanna watch the rest from back here?” he said. “We’re just wrapping up.”

“Why not,” Cooper said, and followed Medvez into the newsroom.

Medvez was good-very good. Cooper watched the last segment of the news from a folding chair four feet behind the assistant director. The AD gave Medvez his cues; besides the weather girl and sports guy, Medvez anchored alone. Seated in there watching the studio lights banging off of Medvez’s glistening hair, it wasn’t much of a stretch for Cooper to grasp the man’s appeal-old ladies and blue-collar men’s men would relate to the guy equally. Red state, blue state, displaced Cubans, blue hairs fresh off the links-no matter who you were, there was something in Medvez for you.

Including the denizens of the narcotics, gay porn, and gambling industries.

When they wrapped, Medvez offered Cooper a seat in the cubicle he inhabited in the center of the newsroom. Even after the last newscast of the day, there was a restrained but constant swirl of activity buzzing around them in a way that made Cooper think of a police precinct house. Medvez kept his jacket and makeup on but loosened his tie.

“So to what,” he said, “do I owe the honor?”

“I actually have a story for you,” Cooper said. “One with considerable sex appeal, in fact. Though not as much sex appeal as that tape of yours.”

Medvez’s eyes went hard and shifty and Cooper could see most of the on-air aura drain from the newsman’s olive-orange skin.

Cooper got on with it.

“There’s an antiquities smuggling ring,” he said, “part of which is operating out of Naples. May even be a good old-fashioned curse involved, since a string of somewhat upstanding citizens have recently met their demise in connection with the smuggling operation.”

Medvez leaned back in his chair.

“Florida’s got plenty of murders to go around,” he said.

“Well, you can scoop the competition on this one,” Cooper said, “help yourself hold on to that anchor seat and keep getting babes-or whatever. Either way, I’ve got something you’re going to do for me, so you may as well mix in a story along the way.”

Medvez glared at him, his crumpled-up chin looking as though he’d just bitten into a lemon. Cooper pushed across the desk the complete stack of data related to the Polar Bear’s Naples-based fence.

“The man described in these credit reports,” he said, “is the broker for the U.S.-based buyers of the pillaged artifacts. The reason I’m giving you his papers is I want you to find him. What’s in there should be enough for an ace reporter like you to track the guy down.”

Cooper checked his watch.

“I’ll give you until tomorrow afternoon. By then I’ll need to know exactly where I can find him. I’ll come by after the six o’clock news, and once you wipe that fucking makeup off, you’ll take me there and we’ll have a talk with the man. I’ll get you back by eleven and you can stay famous for another night.”

Medvez lifted the stack of papers, Cooper thinking maybe to clock the guy’s name, then dropped the stack back on the desk.

“What the hell you need me for?” he said. “I’m no reporter. I sit behind the desk wearing my ‘fucking makeup’ and say what other people tell me to say. I even wear shorts most of the time I’m on the air-the cameras can’t see below your waist.”

Cooper stretched and yawned.

“I’ve been looking forward to a nice, long run on the beach,” he said. “The kind you don’t get living on an island with only a quarter-mile stretch of sand. I’m sleeping in, tracking down some huevos rancheros, then scooting out for as long a run as I can handle. Presuming my mostly broken-down legs can take it, I’m taking a shot at seven miles out, seven back. When I’m done, I’ll shower off at my hotel, load up on seafood fettuccini at Vergina on Fifth, then stroll over to the Tommy Bahama store and re-stock my wardrobe with the latest in tropical silk fashions.” Cooper stood. “With all that on my plate, it just seems counterproductive, spending my brief stateside time doing something like scrounging up a current address on some black market art smuggler.”

Medvez shook his head, expression still puckered and nasty. The anchor was well aware of the fact he didn’t have any choice in the matter.

Cooper smiled, then mimicked the words Medvez had used to sign off from the news.

“You take care, now,” he said. “See ya tomorrow at six.”