More static. Laramie felt the mild warmth of frustration rise into her cheeks. She didn’t like the feeling it gave her, asking her odd new phone pal for serious advice. But who else could she ask? Eddie Rothgeb came loaded with a formidable knowledge base, but one thing he certainly didn’t bring to the table was operations experience.
“The first rule,” Cooper said, “is when you bust them, don’t let them know you’ve done it.”
“Fine, but maybe you could offer a couple, you know, technical-”
“Second rule: if you think somebody’s on you, then somebody is. Easiest thing to do, if you want to make them, is chop up your routine. Not the whole thing, just parts of it.”
Laramie thought about that for a moment. “All right,” she said.
“Where did you have dinner tonight?”
Laramie didn’t answer right away, which bothered her-and which also explained why she didn’t like asking W. Cooper questions like this. It put her at a disadvantage, Laramie knowing he’d somehow seize the opportunity to ask more personal questions than she cared to answer.
“Koo Koo Roo,” she said.
“Chicken?”
“Chicken.”
“Skinless?”
“I’m not finding the humor here, so if you-”
“Regular stop, maybe you get it to go, coming home, a couple nights a week? When you aren’t knee-deep in SATINT till two A.M.”
Laramie eyed the plastic bag with the restaurant’s logo on the kitchen counter near the phone.
Cooper said, “Keep the restaurant in the routine, but change it up. Dine in-house instead. Read a book for an hour while you eat. Visit the restroom five or six times-and keep an eye peeled while you do it. Do the same thing for every segment of your routine, and you may see the same face a couple times. You run, right?”
Laramie resisted the urge to sigh. “Yes, I run.”
“Head out the same way you always do, then change the loops. Log an extra mile or two. You get it by now.”
“I do.”
“Call me when you’ve looked at the pictures,” he said, and clicked off.
Laramie tossed the phone on the other side of the couch, lifted her wineglass, sipped, and noticed the blinds covering her living room window weren’t entirely shut. She closed them, came back to the couch, and tucked her bare legs beneath her. She pulled a blanket from the armrest, covered her legs with it, found the remote control, and punched up Headline News. She’d make her way through the gamut of 24-hour cable news networks, and maybe a few minutes of E! or Style before she crashed, but she usually chose to start things off with the twenty-two minutes as peddled by the Headline News marketing campaign.
W. Cooper, Laramie thought, is a fucking smart-ass-but I suppose I picked the right guy to ask.
33
When Cooper’s eyes opened in his bungalow, he did not feel as though one of his dreams had awakened him. Ordinarily he felt that way-he would burst awake sucking wind, soaked in sweat, gasping for oxygen after drowning in the river, or grasping at the locked dungeon door. Tonight, though, there was no such desperation. One moment he had been lost in the void of drunken slumber; in the next, he was awake, silent, and sober.
It might have been the sound of a twig, broken unnaturally; possibly it was a series of actions-breathing, walking, moving-audible only when performed by heavy mammals or the occasional oversize reptile. Whatever it was that had awakened him, it was not organic to the island, to the resort, or, for that matter, to life as he had lived it for what would soon approach two decades.
In a place even Ronnie could not find, Cooper kept something in addition to the Louisville Slugger. He had not used it once during his time in the Caribbean, but tonight, he knew, would be different. He found and withdrew the TEC-9 assault pistol from its hiding place and, checking over his senses, found himself to be strangely sober. It was as though he hadn’t tasted an alcoholic beverage in years, when in fact he had been blistering drunk when he’d passed out for the night a mere couple hours back.
He left his bungalow through a gate attached to the outdoor shower, neither noticing nor caring that he was stark naked as he did it.
Then Cooper was out in the night.
Shreds of moonlight allowed him to identify the black-clad shapes, hard shadows against the more inconsistent lines made by the palm fronds, the shadows creeping along the side of his bungalow. They were headed for his porch.
Wraiths, he thought. Always wraiths.
Without sound, in no rush, he strolled casually along the stones of the garden path and, with a cap-gun set of cracking spits, tagged two of the three wraiths with unerring head shots, reflexively averting the potential complications of body armor.
Wraith number three contorted his shadow into a turn-and-shoot motion and got a bullet headed in Cooper’s direction. Despite the wraith’s speed, his shot only lashed a burning stripe of pain across Cooper’s right shoulder. Otherwise it failed to affect the more deliberately aimed round from Cooper’s gun, and then there were no more wraiths, and in their place only unseen lumps in the unlit garden.
Cooper grabbed at his right shoulder and found his arm to be functioning. He continued his self-check, finding his entire body, notwithstanding the shoulder, remained in whatever moderately good health in which it had found itself prior to the incident. Then he took another form of inventory, realizing, among other things, that he now stood nude in the garden, and that the sound of gunfire must already be delivering every last one of the club’s occupants for a look-see. He slipped into his bungalow through the back, redeposited the gun in its hole, pulled on some Adidas shorts and the Tevas, found a bandage and some athletic tape, strapped the bandage over the shoulder wound, covered the dressing with a T-shirt, found his sat phone, and went back out by way of the porch.
As Cooper had known he’d be, Ronnie was already waiting for him on the path below the stairs. He came down and they talked for a minute, Cooper making some suggestions on what to tell the guests who would probably be swarming the bungalow in seconds.
Once they’d agreed on what Ronnie should tell them, Cooper noticed Dottie standing quietly on the path a few yards back from his porch, arms folded across her breasts, which, unfortunately, he wouldn’t have been able to see anyway, since she seemed to be wearing a tank top. She also seemed to be wearing a bikini bottom, or maybe just panties-either way, the Dottie-spotting, coinciding as it did with Ronnie’s zippy arrival, confirmed his suspicion. She’d been in the putz’s room when the firecrackers had gone off.
“Oh, look,” Cooper said, “Dottie.”
Ronnie shrugged and turned to head off the resort’s guests at the pass.
From the confines of bungalow nine, Cooper dialed Cap’n Roy’s home number with his sat phone.
“Yeah, mon,” Roy muttered.
“Roy,” Cooper said, starting right in, “I’ve got three dead commandos in the garden outside my room.”
It took a minute, but then Roy said, “How they get there?”
“I haven’t really thought it through, but I feel pretty safe making the wild guess they came to see me after I talked to the wrong person, or took a look around the wrong place, while working in my capacity as detective-for-the-dead.”
“What you talkin’ ’bout, mon?”
“What I’m talking about is, I’ve been asking around about that twice-dead zombie from your Marine Base beach,” Cooper said. “I assume you knew our boy was a zombie before handing him over to your unsuspecting friend the spook, by the way. His name, in case you wondered, was Marcel. Marcel S.”
Roy didn’t say anything for a while. When he did, he had that clarity in his voice that Cooper took to mean he’d sat up in bed, maybe even rolled his feet off the edge of the mattress and planted them on the floor while he thought things through.