Public Enemy

26

Cooper spent most of the ride home from Naples thinking through recent history as crafted by, or against, Po Keeler, Cap’n Roy, El Oso Blanco’s stateside fence caught sleeping with the frozen crabs-and the anonymous killers who’d snuffed them out. Cooper thinking of them as snuffer-outers-the snuffer-outers who’d hired the killer Lieutenant Riley had shot on the hill beside Cap’n Roy’s infinity pool.

He decided he would call Lieutenant Riley to see whether they’d found a ballistics match between the bullets that killed Keeler and the gun the assassin had used on Roy. He’d guess it’d turn out that way-as the body count added up, the game of connect-the-dots was getting easier. This much he knew: everybody who’d been offed to date had been immersed in the shipment, seizure, or resale of the gold artifacts stash. The list of duly immersed parties still among the living wasn’t long-himself, El Oso Blanco, Lieutenant Riley and his staff, and Susannah Grant, whose involvement he estimated couldn’t be traced. Either way, though, unless he found some way of identifying and taking down the snuffer-outers, chances were he and his surviving associates would soon show up in the dead pool.

He continued to find it odd there hadn’t been an attempt on his life already, and if he could presume El Oso Blanco was continuing to chow down on a daily rotation of bucket-served take-out luncheons-which he should probably no longer assume-it was just as odd that Borrego too had not had the pleasure of an assassination attempt. He wondered whether it had been assumed by the killers that Lieutenant Riley would be scared into silence by his chief minister’s murder, or whether Riley was being crafty about keeping an eye out-or possibly that the snuffer-outers just hadn’t yet dispatched a second contract killer to take aim at the lieutenant. Still, if the snuff-out mandate remained in effect, Cooper figured Riley for third in line.

He and the Polar Bear would be vying for top honors.

It didn’t compute, though, that the snuffer-outers, in wanting the trail of the gold artifacts stamped out, wouldn’t have thought to kill the Polar Bear first. Maybe they hadn’t known of the big man’s involvement to start with, though Cooper found this unlikely-Borrego had been the one to kick-start the whole goddamn thing. Maybe Borrego was just a tough guy to kill-but that theory didn’t hold water, particularly given the Swiss cheese security configuration at his Venezuela headquarters.

Could be, he mused, that the Polar Bear is the snuffer-outer-but however snugly the pieces might have fit for this answer, Cooper decided it was hogwash. There was nothing in it for Borrego, same as there’d been nothing in it for Cap’n Roy.

Despite multiple hours of theorizing, he kept coming back to the same conclusion. The snuffer-outers hadn’t killed him yet because of who he worked for. Now that Cap’n Roy had been taken down, it was clear it wasn’t just a government thing-the snuffer-outers obviously didn’t mind taking down the chief minister of a small, though NATO-allied, island nation. They did, however-at least by his working theory-hesitate before snuffing out an employee of a federal agency of the good ole U.S. of A.

Meaning the snuffer-outers were probably U.S. of A. types themselves-specifically, U.S. of A. government types. Other hues fit the color scheme of this picture too: the contract killer, for instance, was the kind of man certain federal agencies of the Evil Empire would hire. Cooper thinking that if you threw in a botched assassination coup, the impossible survival of imprisonment and torture, a reverse-extortion scheme, and maybe a couple decades of sun and alcohol, then that contract killer would probably look reasonably similar to someone else.

Plowing through the crest of a fifteen-foot swell fifty miles east of Cuba, he found himself-following a few hours of brooding-in exactly the same place he’d started.

Cap’n Roy was dead. Somebody, probably somebody on Uncle Sam’s payroll, didn’t want anybody finding out about the antiquities stash El Oso Blanco had bought, sold, and shipped. Among a set of stupid, greedy people, Cap’n Roy had simply been unlucky enough to emerge as either the stupidest, greediest, or both-and got himself killed for it.

It struck Cooper that in case he were to find himself in a vengeful mood-And when do I not?-he’d need to find out who the snuffer-outers were. And unless he felt like yanking the stateside fence’s hard drive from the marshfront condominium and spending a few weeks tracking down every single name on the man’s electronic Rolodex, which he already knew wouldn’t tell him a goddamn thing about the snuffer-outers anyway-

Hell, I’m going to need to go in the other direction.

The only problem with looking in the other direction was that everyone on that side of the equation was dead-except one: the six-foot-nine behemoth of a pale-skinned intermodal transportation kingpin called the Polar Bear.

Maybe if he gave El Oso Blanco a ring-test the man’s claim that he actually returns his calls-the big guy could shed a little more light on the source of the artifacts. Something more than the way he’d put it in his office, slobbering across that bucket of pasta: somewhere along the border between Guatemala and Belize. Not a place Cooper preferred to spend his leisure time; not a place Cooper preferred to spend any time.

It didn’t really seem to Cooper there was any other way of going about it-even if what Borrego had said was true, and they’d need to travel to the source to find the kind of specifics Cooper was looking for. He didn’t have any fucking choice-not now, not after the ghost of the twelve-inch priestess statue had been joined in his skull by the wraith that was once Cap’n Roy Gillespie. Cooper hearing the greedy, stupid son of a bitch coming at him in two-part harmony with the equally annoying priestess-’Ey, Cooper, we up here waitin’, wrongly departed, and now you all we got. Oh, yeah, the truth shall set us free, mon, and then maybe we start to thinkin’ ’bout settin’ you free too!

Looping past Anegeda into the Sir Francis Drake Channel, Cooper concluded there was a pretty good chance Cap’n Roy wouldn’t be resting in peace anytime soon. That the chances were, following one last phone call that wouldn’t yield a goddamn thing, “the spy-a-de-island,” as the late chief minister preferred to call him, would just have to plan on watching his back a little more closely than usual-at least until the curse befalling all who came in contact with the shipment of gold artifacts and their annoying twelve-inch priestess had blown over and gone the hell away.