He was already thinking he might have some difficulty parting with the priestess, though-he was growing attached to the idea of keeping her as a good-luck charm on the shelf of his room.
“Don’t go getting any ideas,” he said to the idol on the shelf, grabbed the last lukewarm Budweiser from the propane-fueled fridge, found a clean T-shirt, and went to take his scrubbed-and-buffed Apache out for a spin to Road Town.
7
The idea of Tortola’s having a prison was akin to building a second Louisiana Superdome on the moon. The permanent resident population of the island fell somewhere in the range of twenty thousand people, with another ten thousand or so planted around the other islands in the chain. This sort of population usually rated a town jail at best, but since the esteemed leaders of the local government saw the BVIs as a semi-sovereign nation destined someday for independence, it only made sense that such a place should have its own prison. They ordered one up that could house 110 inmates.
When he came in through the main entrance, Cooper noted-as he had the first three times he’d been here-there was no razor wire on the chain-link fence rimming the property. He asked the RVIPF guard at the front desk how many overnight guests they had staying here this week.
“Fourteen,” the guard said, “includin’ the smuggler come in this mornin’.”
Cooper knew these guys loved to use the word smuggler. The word was an important element in the RVIPF’s basic training regimen-Roy handed to each new trainee a boxed DVD set featuring every episode of the Miami Vice television series, on which such trainees were quizzed incessantly. Accordingly, Cap’n Roy’s troops reveled in anything even close to a drug bust.
Cooper told the guard he was here to see the very smuggler he’d just mentioned. The guard nodded, took his ID, and started in wordlessly on some paperwork behind the counter. Cooper knew three of the remaining thirteen inmates to be a set of Colombians Roy and Riley had caught a year ago toting a catamaran full of cocaine bricks, the idiots moored right in the main Road Town marina with their stash. The drug runners had offered the waitress working the dockside restaurant a baggie of uncut coke as payment for their sixty-eight-dollar tab, not including tip. The waitress, who happened to be Riley’s niece, had made a call from behind the bar, prompting Cap’n Roy and his boys to come on down to the restaurant and haul in the patrons before the Colombians had finished their cappuccinos. By Cooper’s count of the penitentiary population, with the three Colombians, the deposed former chief minister, and Cap’n Roy’s new smuggler catch, this meant there were nine local convicts, up here on the hill doing hard time in the Caribbean sunshine between the three square meals a day and free cigarettes they got as part of the sentence. This being at least twice what any local job got you.
Those hotel room tax dollars hard at work.
The guard buzzed him in, where he was met by another. The second guard took him down a shiny hallway with recessed overhead halogen lighting. Midway down the hallway, the guard peered into a small window, which was built into a door. Satisfied, he waved, and another, unseen guard-Cooper thinking it was probably the guy at the front desk again-flipped a switch and the door unlocked itself. The guard pulled it open and gestured that Cooper was welcome to go in ahead of him.
Cooper took him up on the invitation and came in to face the seated figure of Powell Keeler III, nickname Po, legal resident of Southampton, New York, date of birth June 14, 1962. All this per the bio dictated to him over the phone by Cap’n Roy, Cooper thinking the Hamptons made sense for somebody who captained boats for a living, something the chief minister told him “Po” had insisted was the case.
Po Keeler sat opposite a countertop built into a wall that cut the room in half. A large rectangular hole in the wall was covered only by half with a Plexiglas shield, so that an inmate could easily climb over the shield whenever he saw fit. Holes had been pressed through the section of Plexiglas so that any sound waves that didn’t make it through the opening one foot above could pass freely through the Plexiglas shield at face level. Cooper thinking maybe he’d invite the prison’s architect out to the Conch Bay Beach Club, where they could have him install a furnace and forced-air heat to combat the ninety-degree temperatures.
Keeler himself, Cooper observed, was tan enough to pass for a professional yacht charter captain. He had the general appearance of a New England WASP but with too much sinew. The wisp of hair at his forehead seemed too long, the skin on his neck a little too riddled with age spots-the sort of blemishes that bond traders, stuck inside all week making their money, didn’t get. And Keeler looked sloppy: among other features, Cooper could see that one of his nostrils displayed a short crescent of snot crust. Biff from Connecticut wouldn’t allow something like that to be seen, even while incarcerated.
Cooper pegged Keeler immediately for the upper-crust equivalent of a belonger, the BVI term for noncitizens who, after a period of living in the islands, were granted limited rights of citizenship. Po Keeler hung out with the wealthy, but didn’t quite fit the mold. A belonger. Cooper also thought he might have seen Keeler around somewhere; as many tourists came to visit the West Indies, those who made a living in its marinas were few, and you could always tell the type.
Cooper flashed Keeler one of his fake ID cards, going with an FBI laminate this time. On the cab ride over, he’d stuffed it into the part of his wallet that flipped easily out and back.
“Got some questions for you, Po,” he said. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything you had going out in the yard. They put a pool in out there yet?”
Keeler flipped his hand limply.
“Whatever,” he said.
They were both seated now, on opposite sides of the half-ass Plexiglas shield.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened here,” Cooper said.
Keeler looked at him for a minute.
Then he said, “Who the fuck are you?”
“Po,” Cooper said, “maybe I should climb over this bullshit divider and beat your ass until you’re lying on that million-dollar linoleum floor in a pool of your own blood and a busted-up face. Maybe then I talk to one of the guards, have him bring in whoever it is he tells me’s the randiest, longest-dicked rapist in the joint, then go out and fire up a Cohiba while he pulls an Abu Ghraib on whatever virgin orifices he’s able to find on that lily- white temple of yours. Be honest, I think a guy they’ve got in here now, name of Big Boy Basil, could use the exercise. He is one fat, stinking lummox of a man.”
Keeler looked at him for a while, not really reacting, maybe watching to see whether Cooper was planning on making a move, or maybe whether Cooper was going to break out laughing at the joke, if in fact it turned out to be a joke. After his moment of study, Keeler shrugged and said, “Hell, I’ll tell you the same thing I told the police chief. ‘Cap’n’ somebody, man called himself.”
“Cap’n Roy.”
“Whatever. Like I laid out for him, I’m down here doin’ what I do. I transport yachts once in a while. If somebody needs it, you know. I charge a nominal fee, let them handle the insurance, and deliver it home from wherever they left it, or maybe vice versa.”
Cooper noticed Keeler performed a kind of involuntary nod-a short jerk of his head down and to the left-at the conclusion of every sentence. It looked as though his subconscious mind was unable to hide his pride at completing the full sentence each time he pulled off this amazing feat.
“This time around,” he said, “I’m taking that Trinity back to its home in Naples. West coast of Florida. Was. Fuck. Owner of the boat just took his family through the ABCs, on down to Caracas.”