Will Staeger - Public Enemy

Another day has begun, he thought, here in Conch Bay.

Cooper sat in the blistering inferno that was his porch, the old stoop made that way by the direct sunshine that struck and cooked it every afternoon between the hours of two and five. It hadn’t been designed quite right to handle the direct, oppressive afternoon sun. He’d once planted a thermometer out here to measure how hot it got, and the thing had actually sprung a mercury leak. It had registered higher than 140 degrees on the day it broke, but Cooper had decided this wasn’t quite possible-that he’d simply bought a faulty unit that wasn’t made for direct sunlight.

Around noon, the kitchen phone had started up with another ring cycle, and somebody had taken down the number of the woman everybody had already been told not to bother to come get him for. Now, baking in the afternoon heat, Cooper, bored with too many options on how to spend the remaining hours of the day, begrudgingly punched in Laramie’s number on his sat phone. He was informed by the man who answered that he’d reached the LaBelle Motor 8 Luxury Motel. As instructed by the information scribbled on the slip of paper, he requested room number eighteen.

She answered on the second ring.

“All right, what is it,” he said.

Laramie’s interpretive delay lasted only a couple seconds.

“Why did I call, you mean?” she said. “Maybe I was calling just to catch up.”

“Maybe not.”

Cooper leaned slightly forward in his deck chair and planted his elbows on his knees, the sweat pouring out of him in the heat of his outdoor oven. He’d never tried it, but frequently wondered whether eggs would fry out here if he cracked open a pair on the reading table between the chairs. He reflected that for a few months, on and off-between trips aboard the Apache to a string of resorts-Julie Laramie’s rear end had logged its share of oven-hot hours in the other chair on this deck, but not many; not enough. Laramie hadn’t liked the afternoon heat-she preferred the porch at night, under the stars.

Though as it turned out, she hadn’t preferred much of that, either.

“I’m-” Laramie said, then stopped. “This is mildly awkward.” She hesitated again, Cooper suspecting she was hoping for an encouraging word or two-Go ahead, Laramie-but he didn’t bite. Effectively maintaining his reputation as a grouch.

Laramie went on anyway.

“I’m in a complex and difficult situation,” she said. “I’ve been given permission, and instructions, to speak to you-officially, I mean. To recruit you. As a member of my team.”

Cooper sat silently for a while, elbows pressing reddish indentations into his thighs.

“That is awkward,” he said.

“I’m in Florida. Obviously I’m unable to discuss why, or what we need you to help us with, on the phone. We’ll pay for you to come meet with us.”

Cooper began a kind of repeating, monotone chuckle.

“I know I’ve offered to pay you before and you laughed at me then too. I know you don’t need-”

“No problem,” Cooper said. “If I were interested in coming, I’d happily pay my own way. Actually, I’d charge it to my expense account, so it’s just a matter of which department pays.” He realized something, thinking of Laramie’s call in a slightly different way, then said, “Or which agency.”

“It’s important for you to come up here and meet with us. With me. There isn’t really a choice.”

Cooper said, “No choice, eh?”

“We’ll discuss it when you arrive. I can’t until then. You’ll need to trust me. But we’ll get you up here the fastest way we can do it.”

“Not interested,” he said.

“No, it’s not-look, you have to come. You’re necessary.”

“Not sure,” Cooper said, “how I was unclear.”

The occasional, distant ping of interference over the satellite connection did its audio dance while neither of them said anything for a while.

Then Laramie said, “If you don’t come, the people I work for have told me they will consider freezing your assets. They have the capability, and you’ve told me where you put enough of it for us to get hold of a significant portion of your money.”

Cooper’s monotone Morse chuckle resumed then quickly overtook him, verging on an all-out belly laugh of the sort the Polar Bear of Caracas had levied on him two days before. After about a minute of this, Cooper finished up his laughter as though it were a delicious drink and sighed.

“I’m sorry,” Laramie said, “but the people I work for instructed me to tell you that this would be our only recourse were you to decline my initial recruitment effort. It’s that important. And I don’t have time to ask more than once. If I need to force you to come, I’ll do it.”

“‘Initial recruitment effort,’” Cooper said. “That’s nice. You know, I find it amusing the way the American government believes itself all powerful in places it has less pull than a gecko. Good luck to you.”

He took a great deal of time removing the phone from his ear, holding it beneath his chin so he could find the button, and plowing his thumb into the word End printed in red letters on the upper-right corner of the keypad. He set the phone on his reading table, leaned back against the rear spine of the deck chair, and closed his eyes to soak in the convection waves of mercury-busting heat.

He considered, with enormous satisfaction, that he still had at least another hour and a half before the temperature would sink below three digits again.

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.