Public Enemy

24

Sore from the run, and full after a Polar Bear-size helping of seafood pasta, Cooper rode in the passenger seat of the news anchor’s S500 AMG sedan. Medvez, unmasked, had the wheel. With his deep bronze skin he didn’t look much different without the makeup-Cooper thinking maybe a decade older, provided you were examining him from as close a place as the passenger seat.

“You can see his place from here,” the anchor said.

He pulled into a parking lot serving a set of shops and restaurants called Tin City and parked in a slot that faced the main drag, so that when he tugged the emergency brake they were staring out the front windshield at the condominium tower across the street. The Tin City parking lot was nearly empty; Cooper could see the roof of a tour boat parked in the channel beside the parking lot. He knew the inland-most edge of Naples Bay to reach past Tin City and under Highway 41, where it squeezed down to the size of a creek and dissolved into salty marsh. It was long since dark, and rush hour, what little downtown Naples had of it, had just about wound down for the night.

Medvez handed him a pair of binoculars.

“Second story, corner unit, right side of the building,” he said. “Pretty easy to see most of his place with those curtains pulled.”

Cooper adjusted the lenses and had a look.

“Left his lights on,” he said.

“Place looked that way at six A.M. and again at noon when I came back,” Medvez said. “Unless he gets up real early, I don’t think anybody’s been home since last night.”

“What about the other addresses?”

Medvez shrugged. “Couldn’t reach him at any of his numbers; no answer on his e-mail. Answering machine at the condo you’re looking at gives you one of those computer voices telling you the machine is full. I checked all four of the addresses your documents listed as his places of residence during the last ten years-turns out two were business addresses, two residential. One of the businesses is now one of these banks that pop up every couple of weeks around here, Sun Coast or whatever. Bank just moved in two months ago. One of the residentials is an apartment four miles east on Highway 41, where a single mother and her two loud teenage sons live. The other business address looked pretty much vacant to me, and this was the other address on the list.”

Cooper dropped the binoculars and eyed Medvez.

“Back in the reporting groove, eh?” he said.

Medvez offered another shrug.

“Broke a couple investigative stories to earn the anchor’s seat,” he said, “but that was a long time ago.”

“What do you mean by ‘pretty much vacant’?”

He nodded. “Warehouse. Seafoods, it says, but it doesn’t look or smell dirty enough for that. Might be a cold-storage place-definitely not retail, not where it’s located, over on the bay in about as bad an area as you’ll find around here. Couple of fish-packing firms and tour boat offices next door. There were a few things going on even as late as five in the other buildings, but nothing in your guy’s warehouse. Lights out all day. Nobody working there, no cars in the lot, no boats on the pier. Actually the pier’s busted and rotting, hasn’t seen a boat in a couple hurricanes. Parking lot ain’t much better-quarter-mile dirt road gets you there and you find nothing but the warehouse at the end. The neighboring operations have separate entrance roads and their own asphalt parking lots.”

“You go in yet,” Cooper said, motioning with the binocs, “take a look around the condo or the warehouse?”

Medvez’s face pinched in on itself, that lemon-chewing look again. “Reporting compelled by extortion, yes. Unprompted breaking and entering? No.”

Cooper set the binoculars in the well behind the emergency brake.

“I’ll educate you on the latest techniques,” he said. He motioned in the direction of the building. “What’s a place like that go for? Looks like a two-bedroom, maybe three at most.”

“Right in town here? Seven-fifty, eight.”

“For a territorial view of Tin City and the marsh?”

“Relative paradise, my dear extorter.”

Cooper nodded. He liked the term-relative paradise-if not the concept.

“Let’s have a look,” he said.

The middleman’s Uniden answering machine contained twenty-seven messages. Cooper listened to all of them, determining that twenty of the messages had been left during the prior five days. There did not sound to be anything of substance as to his whereabouts for the evening, at least not that Cooper or Medvez could understand. Cooper took notes on a pad the middleman kept beside the answering machine.

The guy’s car and condo keys, residing on the same ring, sat on the counter in the foyer. Most of the lights in the place were on, including those in both bathrooms. The condo turned out to be a two-bed, two-bath, the second bedroom set up as a home office-Dell desktop, HP printer, Ikea file cabinets, boom box, telephone handset nestled in its charging base. The office had a view to the marsh.

With Medvez leaning, half hidden against a hallway doorjamb, Cooper rummaged through the office. He dug up little more on the man than the credit reports and related documentation provided by his sources had already told him-couple of contacts he hadn’t known about before, written here and there, but that was it. He took a few dozen shots at the password that would unlock the computer, but couldn’t hack his way in. He knew a few people who could, but that wouldn’t do him much good at the moment.

In the master bedroom, Cooper flicked on the light and discovered a very neat room, decorated about the way you’d expect a bachelor to decorate a bedroom. The drawers contained clothes that looked as though somebody else did the folding; the closet displayed two dark suits and a reasonable selection of tropical leisure wear.

There was some milk getting close to the spoil date and a pair of Bud Lights in the fridge, but nothing else worth noting anywhere in the condo.

Medvez, who had not moved from his place against the doorjamb, said, “You know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

Ignoring the comment, Cooper made one last swing through, his tour concluding in the foyer, where the answering machine lay. He had the sense, from no specific evidence, that the man who’d been living here was no longer around-at all.

He jerked his chin at Medvez.

“Why don’t we go see how vacant that warehouse is,” he said.

Medvez shrugged and followed him out the way they’d entered.

Looking at the old building from the interior of the Mercedes, Cooper experienced a vision of being eaten by an alligator the minute he stepped from the car. There was just something about any partially developed area of Florida swampland-the look of the pines, the shrubs, the fat tropical leaves-that always gave him the sneaking suspicion there were some nasty critters laying low, looking for an easy meal.

Shrugging off his Yankee’s sense of dread, he exited the car and crunched across the gravel parking lot-thinking, as he went, he’d have called it that, gravel, rather than dirt. Monitoring the edges of his peripheral sight with an eye wary for gators, he strolled the perimeter of the warehouse.

He found pretty much what the anchor had described: the aging wooden structure was built on undisguised landfill, and reached partway out into a narrow, swampy portion of the bay as a kind of wharf, the wharf’s single, dilapidated dock offering little in the way of support. There was only enough latent light from the neighboring buildings for Cooper to see the exterior features of the place, but when he tried to examine the interior through the caked-over windows he found it a useless effort.

Cooper found a window with its lock hinge out of whack, fought the friction brought on by the couple dozen layers of peeling paint, and swung himself inside the rickety warehouse. He quickly found a light switch, and with the sound of a dying mosquito, a pair of tin-coned lights flickered on from the ceiling. He turned to observe Medvez climbing in behind him-the man unable to resist.

Between its rows of boxes and bookshelves-racked to the gills with yellowing paperbacks-the place looked to Cooper like a distribution center for the crap they put outside head shops. He saw painted wooden statues depicting various native peoples, totem poles, dark hardwood furniture, tables full of brass and cast-iron figurines, and stacks of large picture frames wrapped in protective material.

Cooper thought he detected something-it was very faint, but it was there, kind of lingering in the humid interior of the warehouse. Probably not the best environment for paintings and first-edition book collections. Also probably not so good for what he was afraid he smelled.

He came into a smaller back room, the part of the building that over-hung the water, where he picked up on the heavy buzz of big freezers. In here Cooper saw the first evidence of a legitimate business operation run by El Oso Blanco’s fence: a series of signs, labels, Ziploc bags, and low-slung freezers were all marked with a logo featuring a crab’s claw and a slogan printed in red: Snow Country King Crab Legs, Frozen North of the Border and Brought Fresh to You.

From one corner to the other, Cooper thought-a nation of consumers on whom the concept of fresh had been lost a long, long time ago.

He was thinking it could have been the crabs he’d smelled, but knew it wasn’t. He found a switch on the wall and got some more lights on. He opened, then rooted through the first of three big waist-high freezers, cutting his fingers a half dozen times on the frozen crab legs within as he moved them around for a better look.

It was in the second unit that he found, jammed in beside an otherwise fully stocked selection of plastic-wrapped imported king crab legs, the uncovered but completely frozen body of the man Cooper judged to be the stateside fence used by Ernesto Borrego.

He couldn’t be sure, given the frosted-over nature of the clothes adorning the body, but it looked to Cooper as though there were at least a double-tap’s worth of bullet holes grouped precisely in the vicinity of the late fence’s ventricles. He brushed off some of the frost from the guy’s face and confirmed his identity based on the couple of pictures he’d seen in the condo.

Cooper dropped the freezer lid. Medvez was hovering behind him.

“In case you were wondering,” Cooper said, “I’m not particularly surprised.”

“No? Well thanks for bringing me along for the ride,” Medvez said. “Something I’ve always wanted to see-fresh-frozen art smugglers. Eleven ninety-nine a pound.”

Cooper nodded dully.

Government affiliation or no, Cooper had a pretty good idea whose turn would come next. He flipped off the light.

“Come on, Mr. Nightly News,” he said in the dark. “We get out of here quick enough, nobody’ll know you did my detective work, and we might just be able to keep you off the list.”