Will Staeger - Public Enemy

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.”

Laramie answered groggily.

“Yeah?”

“Rise and shine,” came the familiar baritone. In her sleep-deprived state she almost slipped right into the routine, that voice feeling like a comfortable old shoe. She could sense his presence beside her, and thought of the sand they’d always felt in the sheets, no matter which resort they’d picked. Laramie stretched lazily in the sheets-

And snapped out of it.

“Christ,” she said. “What time is it?”

She pulled herself up against the headboard.

“Early,” Cooper said, “or late. Depending.”

She confirmed this with a glance at the dim green numbers on the alarm clock in her room: 4:42 A.M.

“Up and at ’em,” Cooper said. “If you don’t get your tail out of bed pronto you’ll be late for your seven A.M. breakfast meeting in Naples.”

“I’ve got a seven A.M. breakfast meeting in Naples?”

“The Sunrise Café. Known for its eggs Benedict, though they serve a mean doughnut too.”

Laramie got her head wrapped around things. She knew better than to say what she wanted to say-So this means you’ve reconsidered our offer?-or, better yet-What are you doing in Naples? Be wiser, she thought, to wait until they were face-to-face to pop her questions.

Still, she couldn’t resist the temptation of at least one toe-dipping probe.

“And you think I’d be interested in driving, I don’t know, an hour or so, at this time of the morning, why?”

“I happen to be in the area. I figured I’d do you and ‘the people you work for’ a favor. Save them some time-you know, in case they’ve started spinning their wheels in a vain hunt for the numbered account my initial extortion dough got siphoned into, or any of the many hundreds of investments my attorneys subsequently made with it, scattered around the globe like little financial Easter eggs. And don’t get your hopes up on your own personal knowledge contributing to the hapless mission of the federal government finding any of my assets-just because we hung out some doesn’t mean you have any more concept than the sea turtles south of Conch Bay as to where that money lives.”

“Ah,” Laramie said. I knew I shouldn’t have said anything…

“Anyway,” Cooper said, “since they’re not ever going to find any of it, not in a couple generations’ worth of IRS investigators, I’ll save them the trouble and have a cup of coffee with you-as per your ‘initial recruitment effort.’ As to the driving part-among the reasons you’ll need to be the one logging the miles is the fact that I’m not meeting you anywhere near the people you work for.”

“Fine.”

The phone line kind of sat there between them, part noise and part silence.

“You said you’ll have a cup of coffee,” Laramie said. “You drink coffee now?”

“Helps with the headaches.”

“What are the other reasons?” Laramie said.

“For drinking coffee?”

“You said ‘among the reasons’-that avoiding coming anywhere near ‘the people I work’ for was ‘among the reasons’ I’m the one who has to do the driving. Why else?”