He could see her in full now, the recently set sun casting her in a glow he placed somewhere between crimson and sepia: buttery skin, pink from a couple hours of sun, compact features with little to nothing amiss, longish hair he’d call something like brownish blonde pulled back in a ponytail. She had the trim frame of a runner-fit and lean, but not about to go out and win any Puerto Rico bikini contests.
“Tell you what, W. Cooper,” she said. “Why don’t you bop into your room and shower off those little waves of salt.”
She pointed to his chest, where there were, indeed, crusted white wavelets of salt, distributed in the approximate pattern of sand on a beach. Cooper knew the salt water to dry that way when he started wet and rode home in the breeze.
“After that,” she said, “maybe we can have something to eat. I’ll buy you a dinner at the restaurant down there and answer your question of why I’m here. In fact, I’ll do you one better: I’ll make you a proposition.”
When it became apparent she wasn’t going to tell him the nature of the proposition, Cooper said, “If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say you’re down here on the sly. Maybe you even had your cute little rear end handed to you by some of those supremely wise bosses of yours. Meaning that the thing you’re probably interested in, I’m not necessarily capable-”
“Thanks for the ‘cute little rear end’ thing, just then,” Laramie said.
Cooper found he’d run out of fuel for whatever thought he’d been in the midst of conveying. He stood there at the top of the stairs, looking at Laramie’s particularly bright eyes with what he figured to be as blank an expression as he’d seen in the marlin’s half-dead stare.
“Just take that shower, mister,” she said, then sat down and recrossed her legs.
41
Cooper figured out what Ronnie’s smart-ass look was all about. The errand boy pulled a bottle of Chardonnay from a nest of ice beside their table, poured Laramie a glass, and replaced Cooper’s melting tumbler of tinted ice with a fresh pour of Maker’s Mark. Then Ronnie stood tall, hands clasped behind his back, and announced he was ready to take their orders, flaunting his smug gleam of pleasurable contempt in a way that made Cooper want to kick him in the shin.
Cooper knew that Ronnie was thinking there had never been a legitimate dinner date hosted by the occupant of bungalow nine, not that he’d seen in his tenure anyway. Ronnie was well aware that Cooper spent plenty of time helping women get drunk and enticing them to sneak up to his bungalow-leave your husband and his Izod shirt at the bar-but now, in the presence of Laramie, Cooper knew Ronnie could smell his vulnerability like a shark on the scent of blood. And the kid thought he was succeeding in delivering his implicit threat: Give me a few minutes with the lass and I’ll have her high-tailing it for the States in no time, mate. Tell her a story or two about her knight in shining armor, few of the things been said to have gone down over the years in good old bungalow number nine. Cooper resisted the tangible urge to grab Ronnie by his ponytail and inform the putz he didn’t give a shit about either Ronnie’s implicit threat, or the woman Ronnie was evidently so impressed with.
Laramie ordered a seafood Caesar salad and asked for the dressing on the side. Cooper told her nobody eats a Caesar salad with the dressing on the side, since that would keep it from being a Caesar salad. Then he ordered a Cabernet to accompany the Maker’s Mark, conch fritters, and the house burger with cheddar.
Once Ronnie had tenderfooted his way back to the kitchen, Cooper looked at Laramie, whose face was growing pinker by the minute from whatever sun she’d got while waiting for him to return. She was staring back at him with a look he couldn’t interpret, something between skepticism, fascination, and determination.
“Shoot,” Cooper said.
“Hm?”
“What’s the favor?”
“Proposition,” she said, and smiled, and Cooper felt a funny twitch in his stomach. Laramie grabbed her glass of Chardonnay and peered around the place-beach, lagoon, stars, garden, bungalows, torches. The warm orange glow of the fire-lit restaurant.
“Your home,” she said.
Ronnie came with Cooper’s glass of Cab. “Everything all right here?”
“Fine, boy. Now leave.” To Laramie, Cooper said, “This, along with a few hundred thousand square miles of ocean I consider the better places to dive and fish, a couple dozen miles of various white sand beaches, sunrise, sunset, an ivory moon, that precision-engineered machine you call a sailboat, the humid heat that burns your skin, plus whatever whiskey, rum, vodka, and women are available, along with the credo of ‘live slow, mon.’ That, and an occasional visit to the handful of casinos within ‘sailing’ distance-yes,” he said, “this is my home.”
He drank a slug of the Cab.
“Now let me guess,” he said. “You want me to take you to Mango Cay.”
“The island, you mean?”
“The island.”
Laramie put her fist under her chin and leaned the weight of her head against her fist. Cooper wondered if she were considering how savvy he’d been in determining her reason for being here, or maybe admiring how sharp his features looked around the eyes.
Laramie said, “Let me ask you a question.”
“Go right ahead.”
“Is there maybe a little friction between you and the esteemed deputy director of our nation’s intelligence operations?”
Cooper raised his eyebrows once he thought about this for a moment, deciding Gates’s goon squad must have determined he’d been the one on the other end of Laramie’s phone calls. The DDCI would not have liked seeing that.
“‘Bad blood,’” he said, “may be the more appropriate term.”
“It probably wouldn’t have been a bad idea,” she said, “to provide at least some indication of the shitstorm I’m sure you knew would hit once Gates figured out it was you I was talking to.”
Again Cooper had the sensation of mild embarrassment, that feeling of foolishness-as though he’d behaved like a five-year-old and been caught at it. Before he could interject in his own defense, Laramie said, “Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. You illegally obtain access to classified SATINT you’re not cleared to review and proceed to leak an even more highly classified analysis of the intel to a senator hostile to the foreign policy platform of the president-which analysis had previously and personally been compartmentalized by the CIA’s chief operating officer-and I suppose it’s inconsequential, relatively speaking, that I’ve befriended the COO’s arch-nemesis in the process.”
Ronnie delivered the conch fritters and Laramie’s salad. Once he’d topped off their wineglasses and departed, Laramie took a bite of her salad, the bite consisting of a morsel of sea bass and one square of romaine lettuce but no dip in the side dish of dressing.
Cooper ate three conch fritters slathered in Thousand Island sauce, took a thick sip of his wine, and said, “Who’s the senator?”
She told him about her notes to Senator Kircher, leaving out the casting couch episode.
“And yes,” she said, “I’d like you to take me to that island.”
Cooper drank some Maker’s Mark.
“I’ll pay you for your time,” Laramie said. “I’ll pay you to take more photographs while we’re there too. I have to warn you that I’m not sure what I’m looking for, or what we’ll accomplish in going there, but I can’t do nothing, and given what I know, nothing is something that shouldn’t be done. Nobody in Langley, or anywhere else that I can tell, is doing anything to connect the dots. The only dots anybody seems intent on connecting are those that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that I showed classified intelligence and analysis to Senator Alan Kircher-and, above all, that I was secretly talking to you.”