Then he’d find a couple footholds on the rotting dock and have a few casts under the light of the moon-and just about every time he came out, he’d catch a couple monsters before running low on the baitfish. It was always a hell of a fight, trying to keep himself out of the water on the rotting old pier while he reeled in the fish.
Cooper knew the Cap’n Roy theory was the easy way out, the simplest possible explanation behind Keeler’s death and the subsequent vaporization of the plane. And he couldn’t deny the scheme might have made sense for the top cop: take a payoff from Keeler in exchange for refusing Homeland Security’s request for his extradition, spring him, then cap him on the yacht transporter’s way out through the prison gates; complete the cash sale of the tomb-raided treasure trove, then blow the evidence clean out of the sky, those gold artifacts mangled and sunk to the bottom of the Sir Francis Drake Channel. This plan left nobody alive-at least nobody besides himself and Cap’n Roy’s merry gang of day players, each having pocketed his own share of the bounty-who knew anything about the money Cap’n Roy had secured.
But Cooper had to face facts: Cap’n Roy Gillespie, dirty though he was, didn’t work that way. Cap’n Roy took every handout available and leaped at the chance to avail himself of such sticky situations-or, Cooper thought, such ordinary police duties-as murder investigations. But he didn’t have killing in him-seeing this kind of thing in people being easy for Cooper. It was easy because he knew exactly what it was to be the opposite.
And Cap’n Roy was not the same as him.
If Roy wasn’t good for it, things became much more complicated. One big question, for instance, was why he and Cap’n Roy were still around at all. If somebody had wanted to shut this thing down at the source-hiding what, Cooper couldn’t figure, unless somebody had an oddly extreme case of the racial-profiling rage Cooper had felt for the statues-then Keeler, the boys on the plane, and the goods themselves were the least of anyone’s troubles. He, Cap’n Roy, and a small army of semidirty RVIPF cops probably knew more than Keeler did, and damn well knew a lot more than anyone on that detonated plane had known.
There was the possibility that whoever it was who’d done the deeds hadn’t known Cooper had interviewed Keeler, and therefore didn’t realize that Cooper knew the shipment had come originally from a man called Ernesto Borrego-El Oso Polar. But any conspirators worth their weight in palm fronds would, Cooper knew, assume that Cap’n Roy had interrogated the man, and that some minimal degree of information on the chain of ownership would therefore have come to light.
Meaning that somebody, by this theory, must have proactively decided not to kill him and Cap’n Roy. There was also the issue of Susannah Grant-though nobody would have been able to track his trip to Austin. He’d done it with fake ID having nothing to do with his current identity.
No, he mused-Susannah aside, there was, in all this, a nifty fit with a highly uncomfortable notion.
It was this: whoever was doing the killing seemed to possess no particular desire to fuck with government employees. If the conspirators knew who he and Cap’n Roy worked for-or at least, in his case, who he technically worked for-it followed that the conspirators might have intentionally refrained from crossing the “government line.” The concluding wrinkle in this theory was that it offered a pretty good chance that the conspirators got their own bread and butter from a government payroll too-American, British, or otherwise-thereby explaining their heightened sensitivity to, and proactive decision against, the murdering of fellow U.S. or British G-men. They were trying to keep quiet whatever they wanted kept quiet, but were only willing to go so far in doing so. As though by scaring other government people off, only without crossing the cop-killer line, these people were looking to put the hush on things without having the hushing come back to bite them in the ass.
Or it could just be a crooked thief with brains enough to know he ought to avoid the cop-killing stigma.
The first monster catch of the night came around eleven; after hauling in what he guessed would be a twenty-pounder, he almost laughed when the slippery little shape of a baby albacore, no more than a foot long, broke from the water and flickered against the moon, wriggling on his hook. Looked as though he’d eaten the entire six-inch baitfish Cooper had used to catch him too.
Keeping the pole in his right hand, Cooper reached out with his left hand and got hold of the hook. It took a balancing act, but he managed, as usual, to set the pole down, pull the hook from the hungry tuna’s mouth, pull the kill stick from his swimming trunks, whack the fish between the eyes, underhand it back to the beach, set the hook into another baitfish, and cast the food out at the pool where he knew that bigger fish than the hungry tuna gathered at night.
Around twelve-thirty, with nothing more than a couple further nibbles that had gone nowhere, Cooper gathered his gear-along with tomorrow’s lunch-and headed back over the hill. An unlucky night-rare were the pickings so slim from the old dock, though he’d had more unlucky nights than usual in recent months.
He saw the lights as he crested the hill. You could always see the lights of Road Town once you stepped over the lip of the trail, at least whenever a fog hadn’t rolled in for the night and obscured the five-mile view.
But tonight it was a different sort of light.
It looked, to Cooper, to be happening somewhere along Blackburn Road, a mile or so east of the harbor. The lights swirled red and blue, piercingly bright even all the way across the channel. He could see there was more than one set of them too; maybe the whole set of them, as close to the entire motor pool of the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force as you’d encounter in any single incident.
Cooper knew upon seeing this that it had been one hell of an unlucky night for someone else too. He felt a sort of white heat rise in his chest as he swung through the half-empty restaurant.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, and decided to make a stop by bungalow nine. He’d get out of his clothes and change into something that didn’t exude the scents of worm and fish.
Probably best to look a little more presentable for what he figured he was about to see in Road Town anyway.
19
Cooper crested another hill, this time from the interior of a minivan taxi, and when the cabbie said, “Can’t go no farther, mon,” Cooper paid him, let himself out, and talked his way past the patrol cop manning the road block. Cooper hadn’t seen the patrol cop more than once or twice before-kid might have been nineteen, and looked more like an eighth-grader in a policeman costume than a law enforcement official. Even the trademark RVIPF cap was too big for his head. Still, without knowing the kid worth a damn, he could read his expression like an open book.
The RVIPF cruisers were parked in an array of angles across and along the side of the road, and what Cooper had suspected from his view across the channel was confirmed now: the carnival of police and other authority types was gathered, more or less, at the front door of the chief minister’s house-the residence of none other than Cap’n Roy Gillespie.
Visible from the road as Cooper marched the fifty yards downhill to Cap’n Roy’s house was a stripe of yellow crime scene tape, draped across the twin rails that flanked the home’s main stairwell. Set directly back and up from the stairwell, in the area of the property Cooper knew to house the pool, a number of lights had been set up. A camera flash popped a couple times while Cooper stared. Over to the right of the pool, a light pole was up, and he could see a couple RVIPF caps moving to and fro behind a hedge near the top of the slope.