Public Enemy

37

Cooper had a feeling it wouldn’t be easy digging up the dirt on “ICR,” whatever the letters stood for. For starters, the third letter on the board was partially cut off by the frayed edge of the wood, so that the company name, if that’s what it was, might have been “IC Rentals” or “ICRT” as easily as it could have been just the simpler acronym “ICR.”

More out of laziness than anything else, Cooper decided to place his bet on the easy version, which meant searching for a three-word company name, or individual’s name, with current or former holdings in Guatemala or Central America. Though he knew just from the scent of the soil it was unlikely that ICR, the person or company, would be claiming any involvement with the facility built, operated, and burned in the upper portion of that figure-eight of volcanic crater where they’d taken their little hike. Whoever or whatever it was, ICR probably wouldn’t even admit to being in Guatemala at all, meaning searching based on a geographical presence would probably turn out to be a waste of time.

There were six relevant, classified databases he could search, and more than a few techniques he knew to employ with ordinary search engines, to hunt around for the dirt. This morning he’d picked the veranda as the operations center. It was almost dawn, Cooper lucky it wasn’t pouring rain the way it almost always did before the sun came up. Ronnie, he knew, would soon emerge to slice his melons, and probably want to talk-ask him where he’d been, tell him about some crap one guest or another had pulled, a crazy request he’d been asked to provide.

Cooper usually answering, That’s what you get for being an errand boy. You get to run errands, or something to that effect.

While he still had the peace and quiet, Cooper did his work-and found nothing. He started with Google and some other less reliable ordinary search engines, working through Spanish-language variations first, separating the letters, trying one Spanish word beginning with I, then two words beginning with I and C, and so on. He tried the other techniques he’d honed during his many hours with nothing to do, but other than a few individuals’ names-Inez Charon Rodriguez, for instance, who, he learned, lived in Argentina and enjoyed water sports and horseback riding-there was no name, company or otherwise, that popped up showing any apparent relevance. He tried more and more variations, using some standard Spanish words, working through the logical ways a Spanish-language company name would be structured, but again found zilch.

He switched to English variations and after another forty minutes of looking, found only a number of obscure entities that seemed to have nothing to do with corporate or government business.

He tried some of the slower, though occasionally more thorough federal databases he liked to use, but soon concluded he was wasting his time. There wasn’t any publicly named organization with known ties to Central America that used the initials ICR, at least not that related to a chemical spill or the manufacturing of materials that might have caused one.

Not that he’d expected to find anything to go on anyway.

He closed his PowerBook, putting it to sleep automatically, then tossed his left ankle over his right knee, crossed his fingers behind his head, and leaned back in the plastic deck chair that he knew would break if he put too much weight into his lean.

Earlier he’d placed the strip of wood on the white plastic table beside his PowerBook, the wood’s letters beginning to fade. Cooper lifted his bare foot to shove one end of it and spin it in place on the tabletop.

He had plenty of people he could call-among others, any of a number of the individuals Cooper kept on his long list of corrupt souls he’d caught in action and was always pleased to blackmail or extort when opportunity beckoned. He’d try a few such souls later today, see whether they could give him some goods on the letters printed on the scrap of wood-but he knew it’d only be due diligence, and nothing more. He had that sense he sometimes got-that he’d already found all he’d be finding. The rest was nothing more than a waste of energy and time.

Particularly if the snuffer-outers, and by extension the chemical plant torchers, were, as he suspected, “of government” and “of Washington,” or at least somewhere in the States.

“Crap,” he said.

Maybe I’ll just sit out on the beach and wait around until the snuffer-outers work their way around to me-

He heard a noise and realized that somebody had begun slicing melons behind him. Without turning to look, he already knew it wasn’t Ronnie-the errand boy, he knew, wouldn’t have got to work without offering up at least a snide remark, or hangover-heavy greeting. Cooper listened, still facing the beach and not the melon slicer, and detected the bubbling gurgle of a pot of coffee brewing somewhere behind him too. Finally, it seemed a form of calm-or maybe he’d have to call it a fluid sort of transition-had come over the veranda and its surrounding garden.

Because of this, he knew who it was who was doing the slicing.

The man with the knife cut a tall, lanky shadow against the nearest bungalow wall. He cut the fruit with an expert, if rusty hand, doing it a little more slowly than when he used to do it every day. Meaning that when Cooper turned, he found the proprietor of the Conch Bay Beach Club looking back at him, an almost imperceptible nod offered while the man continued with the slicing and dicing. His name was Chris Woolsey-a tan, fit, cheery-looking fellow maybe half a decade younger than Cooper but much healthier-and much healthier looking-than the permanent resident of bungalow nine.

Woolsey didn’t spend as much time in Conch Bay these days-there were a few other properties to manage-but when he did, it was evident to gecko, plant, and person alike that this was a man who’d found his place in life.

As with Cooper, that place was here.

“The hell’d you do with Ronnie,” Cooper said.

“Even the putz gets a vacation now and then, Guv.”

“Where’ve you been?”

“Mostly the Caymans,” Woolsey said. “Little while in Aruba.”

Cooper nodded. He knew what Woolsey meant, and specifically where the proprietor had been on the islands he mentioned.

Cooper sometimes admitted to himself he envied Woolsey for his generally friendly manner-it was utterly genuine, and in fact he’d grown more effusive in the two decades Cooper had known him. Cooper envied Woolsey for it but couldn’t quite grasp how it might be possible to always be in a fine mood. Though on the other hand he could see how a person might be capable of acting that way, had that person not been subjected to near-fatal torture, nor dug himself a spiritual hole and taken a nosedive into the abyss in the years that followed.

“You know, the lagoon’s beginning to look like shit,” Cooper said. “Saw a fucking beer can down there the other day.”

Woolsey nodded.

“Got a notion to cut back on the rezzes,” he said. “Put a limit on it. Maybe raise the prices. Cut ’em back either way.”

“In the meantime let’s get Ronnie down there with the net to clean it out. When he’s back from his little sojourn, that is.”

“Not entirely clear he’s comin’ back, mate.”

Cooper turned to look at his friend.

“Feeling guilty?” Woolsey said after a little while.

“Why would I feel guilty?”

“Seeing that you’ve been even more than your usual horse’s ass recently.”

“Christ,” Cooper said. “You too?”

“It’s usually funny as effin’ hell, mate,” Woolsey said. “Almost a tourist attraction in and of itself, having a bitter, angry old fuck such as yourself in the last bungalow in the row. Angry and sad-make that depressed-are bloody different, though.”

Cooper turned back around to face the water.

“See,” Woolsey said, “somebody’s pissed, you argue with him, even laugh at the bloke, right? Take some barbs but who gives. Somebody’s in a funk, it’s different-kind of rubs off on you. Rubs off on the whole effin’ place. Rubbed off on Ronnie anyway.”

Cooper lowered his eyelids. “He quit?”

“He will,” Woolsey said, “you don’t quit driving him into his own depression. Hell, Guv-lucky anybody’s even coming by any longer. Place has the atmosphere of a funeral parlor. Maybe one with a sad old dog sleepin’ in the corner.”

Cooper didn’t say anything. Woolsey, who had finished slicing the fruit, stacked a few cubes of each kind on a series of plates. When he had the servings assembled, he wiped his hands on a towel he’d been keeping in the waistband of his board shorts, turned his back, reached for the pot of coffee, and poured two white mugs full enough to prohibit the addition of any milk. He grabbed both mugs and came over and handed one to Cooper.

He took a nearby seat and the two of them sat there, facing the very short crescent of sun as it began to show itself, fatten, then rise above the horizon. Cooper sipped, Woolsey sipped, and they said nothing. Cooper didn’t disturb his PowerBook, or the piece of wood. He just kept sipping, and looking out at the water and the sun.

When they were finished with the first round, Woolsey brought the pot over and poured them each a new cup and they drank that too in silence.

When they began to hear some footsteps on the garden path-the tell-tale sound of flip-flop on gravel-Woolsey stood.

“Time for the world-famous continental breakfast,” he said.

Woolsey stood there, sort of glaring down at Cooper, until the guests behind him were only a few steps away. When they were nearly within earshot but not quite, he said, “I trust we understand one another.”

Cooper didn’t look up at him, or do anything else to acknowledge the comment, but Cooper knew better than to think he could get away with the silent treatment on a friend as old and good as Woolsey. He understood Woolsey perfectly well-this didn’t mean he was ready to admit anything-far from it-but Woolsey knew as well as he did that their little get-together had gotten under his skin. They certainly did understand one another-for nearly twenty years now, they almost always had.

When the bubbly conversation arrived along with the married couple on the veranda to spoil the solitude of his morning paradise, Cooper stood, folded his PowerBook beneath an elbow and the strip of wood in the pocket of his swim trunks, and headed out onto the beach-opting, as he usually did, to take the scenic route on his walk back to bungalow nine.