Upon his return from Tortola, he’d taken the idol out of the canvas sack and set it on the shelf. He’d thought at the time that it would look good in his room, which made him think the gold stash might not carry a curse with it after all. Maybe the idol-or whatever, he thought, you call one of these things-was a good-luck charm. A sentry, standing guard, warding off evil spirits. At least he could give the theory a shot: test out the idol’s spiritual powers by seeing whether it kept Cap’n Roy from calling, or Lieutenant Riley from returning to bring him to the good chief minister. Maybe the idol had already caused Ronnie to bring the sandwich for him.
Either way, Ronnie must have wondered what the fucking thing was-this shining golden idol planted on the top shelf of his otherwise Spartan room, the only chunk of decor in the entire bungalow, not counting the pair of conch shells he’d moved aside to make room for it.
He popped his fourth beer and took a thick slug of it as he came over and sat in his reading chair. As always, he found the first taste of the beer to be disappointingly lukewarm. The refrigerators in the bungalows ran on propane; they were meant to keep a half gallon of milk from spoiling, or a dozen eggs cool, so guests could make their own breakfasts if they wanted. The little fridges wouldn’t keep beer or soda cold enough unless you remembered to take out the ice cubes from the freezer box and put the beverages in their place. Ronnie never did it that way when he brought something over, and Cooper never thought ahead-he wanted a beer when he wanted it, never thinking to put the second, or even the third, in the freezer while he drank the first. Be nice, now that I’m on the fourth bottle, to be sipping an ice-cold brew. He drank some more of the lukewarm beer anyway.
He thought about the smuggled artifacts Cap’n Roy had asked him to unload. Contrary to Roy’s supposition, he knew next to nothing about the business of art theft, and couldn’t think of anybody from his list, at least not offhand, whom he might impel to assist in the fencing of a batch of stolen objets d’art-assuming, which he figured it was safe to assume, they were in fact stolen. Had to have been stolen from somewhere-and it could be that Cap’n Roy knew by now where they’d been stolen from, considering Roy was holding the last surviving smuggler in his brand-new Marine Base holding cell. Finishing the fourth Bud, Cooper thought a little about Cap’n Roy’s offer to join him for the interrogation of the smuggler. Maybe, if he was going to figure out what these goods were worth and how to unload them for the highest price, it wasn’t a bad idea to take him up on the invite.
The problem, as Cooper understood it, with modern-day art theft was that most major works were accounted for, so when you did steal them, your only real recourse for profit lay in the insurance payoff. Swipe it and give it back, and you could find yourself a nice chunk of change, maybe ten percent of the thing’s appraised value. Plus, along with the money, the insurance company agrees not to press charges.
Cooper figuring this meant the only way anybody was going to make any real money on art theft in this day and age was by finding something new-Indiana Jones style. He assumed it still happened, and wondered whether Cap’n Roy’s newfound stash represented the fruits of such tomb raiding. A roomful of gold, buried for centuries, uncovered by an earthquake-or maybe a backhoe excavating a stretch of rain forest so a parking structure could be laid down in its place.
Too bad these raiders picked the wrong route north.
Cooper thought of somebody it might make sense to call. The somebody he was thinking of could probably at least tell him what these things were-where they came from, who made them, and when. He could take Lieutenant Riley’s pictures, a couple items from his loot bag, and-if nothing else-determine through this person whether Cap’n Roy had seized somebody’s private collection, looted from the owner’s Beverly Hills mansion, or whether the goods had been pillaged from a two-thousand-year-old burial site.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to call anybody at all, or do anything whatsoever, but he was starting to develop a fondness for the idol watching over his bungalow. He decided, from the look of the thing, that it was a she-the bust of an Aztec priestess, or Mayan she-monk, or whatever the hell it was the Mayans or Aztecs had preferred to call their female religious leaders. This golden priestess delivered here by fate-to keep him safe from intruders, hurricanes, and cold beer.
He rose, retrieved and opened lukewarm Bud number five, and came over to examine the idol at close range. When he did, something bothered him about her. It came as a kind of flutter in his upper gut-a familiar sensation, or at least a sensation of seeing something familiar. It wasn’t anything like the racial-profiling rage he’d felt earlier, but was instead a form of déjà vu-only not quite, at least not in the strictest sense of recalling that he’d been here before. As he stood near the shelf and sipped his beer, he realized the déjà vu stemmed from what he was hearing, rather than feeling.
He’d just heard a quiet call for help-a request for an assist.
From a statue.
He knew he ought simply to conclude that he’d spent too many years alone, that such imaginings were not a sign of good health. Plus, it might just have been the barley and hops talking. Still, in hearing the call for help from the twelve-inch Mayan priestess, Cooper was suddenly faced with the notion that his second case as detective-to-the-dead had just come knocking at his door.
’Ey, Cooper, cawed the priestess, her accent oddly misplaced in an islander’s lilt, we hear you’re pretty good with dead folks. Friend of ours, in fact, tell us you help him find peace in the ever after…and we thinkin’ you maybe wanna help us too. Something wrong need rightin’, Cooper, and you know what? You might just be the man for the job.
Cooper tossed his latest empty bottle in the kitchen wastebasket. He had a few things he wanted to do this afternoon-swim a few loops around Conch Bay’s shrinking coral reef, jog up and down the beach, maybe throw back some Pusser’s shots while toking on a joint at the end of the beach club dock just to see whether he could freak out a few of the incoming dinner patrons. But instead of doing any of these things, Cooper lifted his satellite phone from the table where he kept his laptop. He dialed the number for the chief minister’s office, and told the receptionist, whom he knew and who knew him, that he was looking to speak to Roy.
The receptionist found the chief minister in short order.
“Yeah, mon,” Cap’n Roy said when he picked up. “You find some rich bastard interested in doin’ some interior design for his mansion, thinkin’ maybe our little treasure trove do the trick?”
Cooper ignored the question.
“You still have your smuggler in custody?” he asked.
“Captain o’ the good ship Seahawk? Marine Base be fillin’ up after a night of good times in town last night, so we still got him, yeah, but he up in the big house now.”
“Ours, though, I take it,” Cooper said. “You haven’t given him back to the Coast Guard.”
He was double-checking that Cap’n Roy was talking about the prison on the north side of Tortola, which the prior chief minister had arranged to have built at a cost of $33 million before being sent there himself for extorting ten mill off the top.
“Before you comin’ down to see what he has to say? Not a chance.”
If there was something Cooper despised most, being predictable was it.
He asked for and memorized the vitals on the smuggler, said, “Get me a pass and a room,” then hung up on the honorable chief minister.