Will Staeger - Public Enemy

It took about twenty-five minutes for the M5 to deliver them to a lower-middle-class neighborhood at the base of a long hill, the place maybe four hundred times wealthier than ninety-eight percent of Venezuela but with tiny homes, built too closely together on narrow, unkempt lots, Cooper tagging it immediately as a place where the police didn’t get much cooperation from the residents.

A dozen long blocks from the thoroughfare they’d come in on, the velociraptor zipped the M5 around a final series of turns, slowed, then pulled almost daintily into a short driveway beside a slovenly, two-story house with a dilapidated Spanish-tile roof.

Madrid triple-flashed his high beams as he parked.

The place, Cooper observed, had “safe house” written all over it. Good pick of locations for it too-nobody in this kind of neighborhood bothered you much, asked you anything, or otherwise got in the way of whatever you felt like doing. Cooper thinking maybe he should consider a spot like this-it’s missing a beach and a few snorkeling holes, and there’s no hammock, porch, or dock, but what the hell: Lieutenant Riley and friends wouldn’t bother him here, would they?

The velociraptor took them to the side door, which was answered by a pair of men who looked vaguely like Madrid-at least the way Madrid looked while on duty, each of these guys sporting a suit and tie and exuding a quiet sort of menace. They did look a bit stupider than the Polar Bear’s A-number-one man, which quality they quickly exposed when both men failed to mask their surprise at the somewhat effeminate workout gear their boss had shown up in.

The twin looks of mild shock were quickly concealed and the men parted. The velociraptor came into the house between them; he didn’t give his men any evident signal to take down Cooper, so Cooper followed him in. In the kitchen, the lights were bright and the shades drawn. In here, another four armed bodyguards were playing a card game at a folding table that looked as though they’d brought it solely for the purpose of the game. The four guys watched Madrid, Cooper, and one of the doormen swing through the kitchen and down into the basement through a door beside the fridge.

While oddly misplaced, the bottom floor of the dilapidated row house was supremely outfitted. A widescreen plasma set looking somewhere north of a hundred inches wide played, in silence, an action movie featuring a submarine and a series of torpedoes chasing it. Within and beside the TV cabinet were multiple decks-DVD, stereo, and otherwise-along with a tower full of CDs and a case of face-out DVD boxes. Cooper recognized most of the titles.

The television was playing silently, since the sounds of the film were being monitored by Ernesto Borrego by way of a fat set of earphones. The headset’s coiling connecting wire stretched, limply and partially airborne, to a plug on the face of one of the many decks in the TV cabinet.

The Polar Bear ignored the presence of Cooper and his security men until the climactic moment of the scene he’d been watching played to fruition. When the submarine had avoided the torpedoes, Borrego depressed a button on the remote control he’d been holding, removed the headphones, and turned to Cooper.

“Wondered how long it would take,” he said with a flash of those sharp yellow-brown teeth. “Not long, turns out.”

Since none of the Polar Bear’s crack security staff had seen fit to take away his gun, Cooper racked a bullet into its chamber and pointed it at the couch-bound Borrego.

“I’ve got a few questions,” he said.

“Ask away.” As usual, there wasn’t any discernible tension in the Polar Bear’s tone.

“I was thinking of taking you up on your spelunking offer,” Cooper said, “when it turned out you were dead. So I thought I’d come see your guy here, and see if I might compel him to tell me the things you wouldn’t before.”

“You mean the answer,” Borrego said, “to your question of who I bought the artifacts from.”

“And the additional question,” Cooper said, “of exactly where the sellers found these things. Plus how any of this might explain why somebody’s killing everybody who had anything to do with the loot.”

“I think we’ve got the same questions,” Borrego said. Cooper was enjoying the Polar Bear’s no-nonsense manner. “And I do know a little more than I told you-but not a lot. We’ll still need to go find them-the sellers, I mean-in order to find out the rest.”

Cooper surveyed the behavior of the velociraptor and the doorman. They hadn’t noticeably moved and didn’t seem particularly on edge.

“What made you think I’d show up?” Cooper said.

Borrego shrugged.

“You struck me as a sharp cookie.”

“No doubt,” Cooper said. “Why else?”

“I believe I told you I found it odd I hadn’t received a call when the shipment didn’t show in Naples. After you left, I tried to reach my fence. Couldn’t. I had a vague idea as to his preferred list of buyers-always a good thing not to rely too heavily on a middleman-so I called three or four of them. Also not reachable. Missing-dead, I expect. Like my fence. Caught the story online in the Fort Myers papers.”

“A story broken first on the nightly news,” Cooper said, “by one Ricardo Medvez.”

Borrego thought for a moment, digesting this.

“You went there, then,” he said.

Cooper nodded. “Found his body. Frozen in an icebox beneath a couple hundred pounds of Alaskan king crabs.”

“In Florida?”

“Fresh frozen,” Cooper said.

“This Medvez a friend of yours?”

“Wouldn’t really call him that.”

“You gave him the story, though.”

“Maybe you’re doing the killing,” Cooper said.

The Polar Bear didn’t shift, fidget, or change expression. He didn’t say anything either.

After a while, gun still drawn, Cooper said, “If it isn’t you, I don’t really see any other way of finding out who the snuffer-outers are, and why they’re taking people out, besides paying a visit on whoever it is who found the artifacts and having a look at whence they came.”

“‘Snuffer-outers’?” Borrego said.

“That’s what I’ve come to call them.”

Borrego considered this.

“Snuffer-outers it is, then. Incidentally, you should know,” he said, “that we may not find a thing.”

“Maybe so,” Cooper said.

He backed up, shuffled one step to his left, and kicked the place on the doorman’s hip where the man had been keeping his gun. As Cooper had suspected from the drape of his jacket, the gun, a fat, black automatic pistol, hadn’t been housed in a holster, so it dislodged from its spot in the waistband, sort of leaped up into the air, and clattered to the floor. Cooper retrieved it and placed both it and his Browning beneath his own waistband.

In no rush, the Polar Bear disentangled himself from the leather sofa and rose.

“Jesus and his boys will pack a few things for us,” he said. “We can leave in the morning. You want us to find you a place to sleep, or do you still suspect me of doing the snuffing?”

Cooper said, “I’ll take that M5 Jesus just parked in the driveway and bring it back in the morning. You an early riser?”

“See you at six,” Borrego said.

He inclined his chin in the velociraptor’s direction and Madrid tossed Cooper the keys.

“Hasta mañana,” Cooper said on his way up the stairs.

Cooper took the call when he saw the area code on the caller ID readout display the same number he’d used to invite Laramie to breakfast. Ordinarily, there was nothing remarkable about his taking such a call, but since Cooper did so while seated aboard the Borrego Industries Gulfstream G450, winging it over the Caribbean to Belize, he found the clarity of Laramie’s voice mildly surprising.