It wasn’t the nuke blast he and his supernatural comrade found intriguing-though once he’d seen the story, Cooper had logged a few calls to Laramie’s numbers and found her oddly unreachable. Instead, it was a series of articles, each failing to make the front page, that Marcel nudged him to examine. It seemed a number of heads of state, along with the occasional minister of defense, had gone missing. Each affected country had released its own version, in a different way and at an alternate pace, but the story was the same. Joe Leader of Such-and-Such Nation had been traveling on business or pleasure, and failed to reach his scheduled destination. In fact, he had failed to reach any destination at all.
Ordinarily, Cooper simply notched such news in his memory banks, looking forward to the day when one of the missing leaders turned up on some adjoining island with a botched face-lift and a few billion bucks of extorted dough. This time, though, he found the stories more relevant. The men who had gone missing, he found, were the same people he’d captured in the digital photos he’d sent to Laramie before she too had gone MIA.
What this meant-at least the way Cooper saw it-was that something stunk on that fucking island.
It was early in the seventh hour when the marlin, worn out, attempted and failed to make another run at freedom. Cooper delivered the sluggish fish to the kid’s waiting gaff with one final heave of the rod, and the boy swung the hook and stuck it in the marlin’s side. It was a shallow stab, not deep enough to hold, and with its remaining fumes of energy, the marlin slipped the gaff, moving back from the boat, a gentle weave all she could muster. That was when the fading fish took a look at him.
The fish stared right into his eyes-the old girl spent, still putting up a fight, weaving in the swells while some punk kid sought to jam a gaff hook in her back. He heard her speak too, and when she did, her words floated to him in the soothing voice of Simone, Marcel’s widowed lover. That fish, or Simone, he wasn’t sure which, pleading to him, to her corrupt soldier of honor:
Wi, monsieur, she said-somethin’ done come to pass on that island. Then Simone’s voice shifted deeper, becoming more masculine as the boy approached the marlin with the hook again. You the only one can deliver justice, Cooper-mon.
Oh yeah, she said, the truth, it shall set us free.
“Leave her alone,” Cooper said.
The boy looked over his shoulder at him, hook held aloft. Halted midswing.
Cooper motioned to the boy with a flick of his bleeding, blistered hand.
“Get my line out of her mouth,” he said, “and let that old bitch go.”
From up top, Worel said, “May die anyway, Cooper.”
“Let her go!”
The boy shrugged and did as he was told.
40
In the Virgin Gorda marina, Cooper had Worel pull alongside his Apache. He stripped, heaving his short stack of soggy clothes into his own boat, and dove into the tranquil waters of the marina to cleanse his body of the fish-battle grime. He boarded the Apache, kicked on the Mer-Cruisers and, nude and upright, rode at full throttle, blow-drying himself in the usual manner.
When he’d completed the ten-minute trip to Conch Bay, he secured the bowline to his mooring and ambled to the rear of the boat. Balancing on the very edge of the stern, toes wiggling beyond the edge of the fiberglass, he pissed long and far into the sea.
Since there appeared to be the usual amount of business under way at magic hour in the Conch Bay Bar & Grill, Cooper obeyed some sense of decorum and clothed himself in tie-dyed shorts and a tank top adorned with a sketch of three Charlie’s Angels-looking women riding the same surfboard. He rode his dinghy to the dock and jumped off without tying up; he passed Ronnie on the way in.
“Hustle up,” he said as Ronnie sped by him to secure the skiff.
He noticed that Ronnie displayed an oddly self-satisfied look as he ran past; Cooper also found it strange that the putz hadn’t fired back with some retort or other and concluded that something fishy was under way. Stepping behind the bar to pour himself some bourbon, he was sure of it. He told the bartender to have Ronnie bring the usual sandwich to his bungalow and made his way out of the restaurant.
He was halfway up the stairs of his porch when he noticed a well-toned set of legs, naked from mid-thigh down and crossed in that supremely feminine knee-over-knee way. The legs were visible, but just barely, in the dim post-sunset twilight. Ordinarily Cooper would not have taken issue with a woman seated on his deck chair, awaiting his arrival while showing some of the best legs he’d ever seen. Today, though, he knew there to be the high probability the owner of the legs was playing a role in Ronnie’s, and hell, probably also Woolsey’s latest idea of practical joke.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “Whatever it is they convinced you is going to happen, it’s been a long day. Too long. So it’s not going to happen.”
“Your hands are bleeding.”
Cooper recognized the voice but wasn’t immediately sure where he’d heard it; since he couldn’t yet see the woman’s face in the shadows of his porch, he looked down at his bandaged hands while he tried to figure it out.
“They’ll do that for a while,” he said. “Maybe a day or two.”
“You always sail nude?”
Her voice kind of drifted out to him. The feeling it gave him was somewhat disturbing-warmth, familiarity, imbalance. It felt good, but he felt immediately off guard. There’d only been one woman, a long time ago-
Wait a minute.
He tried to take back the thought he’d been in the midst of having, his mind’s hand reaching out, clutching, grasping for it in his attempt to reel it back in. He’d just realized who it was seated there on his porch, and he wasn’t about to acknowledge that kind of effect from her. Try as he did, he couldn’t grasp the thought-it hung there in his mind, evading him, the impression caused by her voice lingering.
He moved to the top stair, and through the inky shadows caught a flash of white from her eyes. He saw that her skin was nearly as bright as her eyes-woman needs a tan, he thought, like nobody’s business.
“Yes, I do,” he said, answering her question, “but that isn’t a sailboat, Laramie.”
He saw more white-a flash of teeth. Laramie was smiling.
Realizing she’d seen him pissing off the edge of the boat, Cooper felt suddenly childish. Everybody at the club, of course, was forced to regard that particular spectacle on a frequent basis, but having Laramie there to witness the nude blow-dry-and-piss session actually gave him the feeling he’d made a fool of himself.
“When you say your hands will do that for a while,” she said, “how do you know?”
“I did it while deep-sea angling.” Cooper wasn’t sure why he used the term angling, since he couldn’t remember ever having called it that. “Bring in a game fish the size we got today will usually take you six or seven hours. You’re out of practice, you’ll blister up in the first hour. Start bleeding before you’ve got the fish halfway home. I’m out of practice.”
“What did you catch?”
“What exactly are you doing here? Unless you’d prefer to beat around the bush for another hour or two.”
“Come on, what did you catch?”
“A marlin.”
“How big?”
“Hard to tell. Four-fifty, five hundred pounds.”
“Five hundred? Where is it?”
Cooper looked at her. The lie detector.
“I let her go.”
“Her?”
“Why are you here, Laramie,” he said.
Laramie stood. She brushed her shorts flat, and he saw she was wearing a pair of Conch Bay-issue knee-length khakis, part of the merchandising line Woolsey had launched the year before. Meaning maybe she’d come down in a hurry-packed light. Cooper thought of how she’d been difficult to get a hold of.