Will Staeger - Public Enemy

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.”

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.