Will Staeger - Public Enemy

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.

Laramie’s diplomatic pouch beat Cooper home. As was generally the case when these things came, somebody-presumably Ronnie-had already brought it up and left it on his porch. Cooper presumed further that a courier had brought it to Conch Bay in the first place and been instructed to deliver the pouch only to him, but that Ronnie, or somebody on the staff, had convinced the courier to chill out at the bar, got him hammered, and sent him packing on whatever boat or pontoon plane he’d come in on.

Initially, Cooper ignored the pouch’s presence on his darkened porch, ambling into his bungalow after seventeen hours on the high seas and plunging directly into his pillow for however long a snooze the goat-of-the-day would let him enjoy.

He awoke to the sounds of people and music, shocked by the midday illumination creeping through the jalousie panes, his first thought that the snuffer-outers might have succeeded in taking out the goddamn goat.

He checked his watch to find it was lunch, not breakfast, underway down at the Bar & Grill.

The restaurant’s music selection always included the same rotation of Caribbean-themed songs, but he never failed to find them pleasing to the ear anyway. The lifestyle many planned for a whole year or more just to ingest for seven nights-the sounds, the rum, the sun, the sand, the lapping waves, the fish, the reefs, the SCUBA and snorkel gear-Cooper took in every day of the year, and never grew tired of it. Never. It got a little more crowded every year-there seemed one less layer to the sheen every time you took a close enough look-but in his view, the British Virgin Islands could have trademarked the elixir bubbling up from every lagoon in the chain. It was the essence of the Caribbean-at least the essence of the part you could enjoy if you had enough money, or had decided along the way that money didn’t matter all that much.

Maybe he’d call Lieutenant Riley and recommend the RVIPF apply for a patent-with Cap’n Roy gone they’d be needing a new revenue source.

Unaccustomed to his good mood but writing it off as the fruit of his long sleep, Cooper moseyed onto his porch, cooler today than usual, and eyed the diplomatic pouch. Can’t hurt to be prepared-just in case my preposterous $20 million request gets the thumbs-up from “the people she works for.”