Will Staeger - Public Enemy

She thought of something else that had been working its way around her head during their discussion.

“Now we know the role Lois the dispatcher played,” she said.

Knowles and Cole looked at her, not grasping it yet.

“By my guess,” she said, “he made friends with her because she was the one who could ensure he keep his schedule-week in, week out.”

Knowles considered the notion, then nodded.

“You may be right,” he said.

Laramie stood.

“I think it’s about time I gave our operative a call,” she said.

Cooper had a feeling it wouldn’t be easy digging up the dirt on “ICR,” whatever the letters stood for. For starters, the third letter on the board was partially cut off by the frayed edge of the wood, so that the company name, if that’s what it was, might have been “IC Rentals” or “ICRT” as easily as it could have been just the simpler acronym “ICR.”

More out of laziness than anything else, Cooper decided to place his bet on the easy version, which meant searching for a three-word company name, or individual’s name, with current or former holdings in Guatemala or Central America. Though he knew just from the scent of the soil it was unlikely that ICR, the person or company, would be claiming any involvement with the facility built, operated, and burned in the upper portion of that figure-eight of volcanic crater where they’d taken their little hike. Whoever or whatever it was, ICR probably wouldn’t even admit to being in Guatemala at all, meaning searching based on a geographical presence would probably turn out to be a waste of time.

There were six relevant, classified databases he could search, and more than a few techniques he knew to employ with ordinary search engines, to hunt around for the dirt. This morning he’d picked the veranda as the operations center. It was almost dawn, Cooper lucky it wasn’t pouring rain the way it almost always did before the sun came up. Ronnie, he knew, would soon emerge to slice his melons, and probably want to talk-ask him where he’d been, tell him about some crap one guest or another had pulled, a crazy request he’d been asked to provide.

Cooper usually answering, That’s what you get for being an errand boy. You get to run errands, or something to that effect.

While he still had the peace and quiet, Cooper did his work-and found nothing. He started with Google and some other less reliable ordinary search engines, working through Spanish-language variations first, separating the letters, trying one Spanish word beginning with I, then two words beginning with I and C, and so on. He tried the other techniques he’d honed during his many hours with nothing to do, but other than a few individuals’ names-Inez Charon Rodriguez, for instance, who, he learned, lived in Argentina and enjoyed water sports and horseback riding-there was no name, company or otherwise, that popped up showing any apparent relevance. He tried more and more variations, using some standard Spanish words, working through the logical ways a Spanish-language company name would be structured, but again found zilch.

He switched to English variations and after another forty minutes of looking, found only a number of obscure entities that seemed to have nothing to do with corporate or government business.

He tried some of the slower, though occasionally more thorough federal databases he liked to use, but soon concluded he was wasting his time. There wasn’t any publicly named organization with known ties to Central America that used the initials ICR, at least not that related to a chemical spill or the manufacturing of materials that might have caused one.

Not that he’d expected to find anything to go on anyway.

He closed his PowerBook, putting it to sleep automatically, then tossed his left ankle over his right knee, crossed his fingers behind his head, and leaned back in the plastic deck chair that he knew would break if he put too much weight into his lean.

Earlier he’d placed the strip of wood on the white plastic table beside his PowerBook, the wood’s letters beginning to fade. Cooper lifted his bare foot to shove one end of it and spin it in place on the tabletop.

He had plenty of people he could call-among others, any of a number of the individuals Cooper kept on his long list of corrupt souls he’d caught in action and was always pleased to blackmail or extort when opportunity beckoned. He’d try a few such souls later today, see whether they could give him some goods on the letters printed on the scrap of wood-but he knew it’d only be due diligence, and nothing more. He had that sense he sometimes got-that he’d already found all he’d be finding. The rest was nothing more than a waste of energy and time.

Particularly if the snuffer-outers, and by extension the chemical plant torchers, were, as he suspected, “of government” and “of Washington,” or at least somewhere in the States.

“Crap,” he said.

Maybe I’ll just sit out on the beach and wait around until the snuffer-outers work their way around to me-

He heard a noise and realized that somebody had begun slicing melons behind him. Without turning to look, he already knew it wasn’t Ronnie-the errand boy, he knew, wouldn’t have got to work without offering up at least a snide remark, or hangover-heavy greeting. Cooper listened, still facing the beach and not the melon slicer, and detected the bubbling gurgle of a pot of coffee brewing somewhere behind him too. Finally, it seemed a form of calm-or maybe he’d have to call it a fluid sort of transition-had come over the veranda and its surrounding garden.

Because of this, he knew who it was who was doing the slicing.

The man with the knife cut a tall, lanky shadow against the nearest bungalow wall. He cut the fruit with an expert, if rusty hand, doing it a little more slowly than when he used to do it every day. Meaning that when Cooper turned, he found the proprietor of the Conch Bay Beach Club looking back at him, an almost imperceptible nod offered while the man continued with the slicing and dicing. His name was Chris Woolsey-a tan, fit, cheery-looking fellow maybe half a decade younger than Cooper but much healthier-and much healthier looking-than the permanent resident of bungalow nine.

Woolsey didn’t spend as much time in Conch Bay these days-there were a few other properties to manage-but when he did, it was evident to gecko, plant, and person alike that this was a man who’d found his place in life.

As with Cooper, that place was here.

“The hell’d you do with Ronnie,” Cooper said.

“Even the putz gets a vacation now and then, Guv.”

“Where’ve you been?”

“Mostly the Caymans,” Woolsey said. “Little while in Aruba.”

Cooper nodded. He knew what Woolsey meant, and specifically where the proprietor had been on the islands he mentioned.

Cooper sometimes admitted to himself he envied Woolsey for his generally friendly manner-it was utterly genuine, and in fact he’d grown more effusive in the two decades Cooper had known him. Cooper envied Woolsey for it but couldn’t quite grasp how it might be possible to always be in a fine mood. Though on the other hand he could see how a person might be capable of acting that way, had that person not been subjected to near-fatal torture, nor dug himself a spiritual hole and taken a nosedive into the abyss in the years that followed.

“You know, the lagoon’s beginning to look like shit,” Cooper said. “Saw a fucking beer can down there the other day.”

Woolsey nodded.

“Got a notion to cut back on the rezzes,” he said. “Put a limit on it. Maybe raise the prices. Cut ’em back either way.”

“In the meantime let’s get Ronnie down there with the net to clean it out. When he’s back from his little sojourn, that is.”