Then he climbed back into his dinghy, unlashed its line, and fired up the Evinrude for another big-wake ride past the unsuspecting SCUBA pupils on the way back to his Apache.
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” he said to Riley, “in that shit bucket you call a patrol boat. I’ll handle my own transportation this time.”
The afternoon was sticky and dank, one of those overcast days that stunted your attitude and made your skin crawl-the heat, a sopping humidity, and no sun breaking through the whole day long. Made you wonder why people came or lived here-made you notice all the grunge and grit, the streets behind the hotels, the rummies looking for a quarter, the squalid neighborhoods beginning to overtake the streets currently under the reign of the luxury resorts.
Two hundred feet up a pine-forested hill behind an inlet called Hurricane Hole, Cooper surveyed the very dead body of the belonger-to-the-rich, Po Keeler. Amid a sea of pine needles, ferns, and seemingly misplaced desert scrub, Keeler, with his too-gritty tan and unkempt hair, was splayed out, kind of folded up and bent unnaturally, as though he’d been thrown or rolled here. The stand of pines in which Keeler lay was strewn with plastic bottles, a KFC bucket, some crinkled waxed-paper wrappers, and, farther up the hill, a white plastic garbage bag that had once been packed full but appeared to have been ripped open and raided since, Cooper thinking probably by the black squirrels that usually got into everything.
Above the plastic garbage bag, the hill grew rapidly steep, until, another hundred feet up, Cooper could see the railing of a turn in the road that passed by on its path to the prison.
He knew Keeler looked as if he’d been tossed here because he had. The turn in the road above was known locally as the Dump, a spot where locals who’d fallen behind on their monthly garbage payments came by after dark and flipped a Hefty sack or two out the window as they made the hairpin turn and kept going. Anything with food in it, in fact just about everything at all was torn to shreds and mostly removed by the local wildlife; once or twice a week, somebody from Roy’s posse or the parks and recreation squad came in here with an ATV and raked up the remains.
The rake job on today’s remains would be a little more labor intensive.
Cooper and Riley had moored in Hurricane Hole, called that because that’s what it was: a small, murky bay somebody once dredged out of the pine scrub, the place where anybody who motored over fast enough to win the first-come, first-serve rule stored their boats during stormy weather. Two of Cap’n Roy’s Marine Base cops had been waiting for them, sporting the force’s single, fat-wheeled ATV, which they’d parked in a way that blocked the view of the body from the turn in the road. When Cooper showed up after the climb up from Hurricane Hole, the Marine Base cops had removed the camouflage-green tarp they’d previously laid over the body, so that Cooper could get a look.
Cooper saw enough to determine, for what it was worth, that Keeler had been capped at least twice: there was a bloody mess on the front of his polo shirt and a jagged little hole in his forehead. The aim of the shot that had tagged him in the forehead appeared notably precise. Makes it pretty easy, Cooper thought, to conclude that it had been a professional who’d aced the once-bonded yacht-transport man.
“I’ve seen all I need to see,” he said, and nodded in the general direction of the guys leaning against the ATV before heading back down the hill. Riley came uphill past him and threw off a salute on his way by. Cooper knew Riley would get the Marine Base boys to wrap up the body with the tarp; they’d then carry it down the hill and load it aboard his Apache.
Cooper’s Disposal Service.
He didn’t return Riley’s salute on his way back down to Hurricane Hole.
11
It was closing in on eight-fifteen when Cooper made it back to Conch Bay, the tarp-mummified body of Po Keeler freshly sloughed off to Cooper’s man at the Charlotte Amalie morgue, the Apache’s deck hosed clean of the body’s blood and scent. It had only taken a few grand and the usual unveiled threats to convince the expatriate former plastic surgeon to agree to lighting up a special session in the kiln, but even the mere act of holding a conversation with Eugene Little, M.D., made Cooper want to shower off. Toss a little corpse-incineration into the mix, the possible though unlikely murderous impropriety of Cap’n Roy, plus the afternoon visit to the garbage-strewn bend called the Dump, and Cooper was feeling ripe for a full-body chlorine wipe. Thinking he ought to grab the nearest bleach rag from Ronnie’s arsenal of busboy tools and scrub till he bled-hell, even then, he’d probably still feel the grime clogging his pores.
Every time-every goddamn time he went along with one of Cap’n Roy’s under-the-radar sewage-treatment schemes, it seemed he came out looking, and feeling, dirtier than the sewage itself.
He double-parked his dinghy alongside the most ostentatious Zodiac he could find, every tack taken tonight by the capacity dinner crowd. Balling his T-shirt around his Reefs, he hucked the assembly to the dock, dove off his boat into the lagoon, and started in on a crawl headed away from shore. He swam hard for a long while, poking his head above the surface every fifty strokes or so to ensure he wasn’t about to get run over by a cruise ship, but otherwise pushing his head into the ocean and swimming blindly, satisfyingly, in the dark, out to sea. At the point when his chest cavity had become a full-time vacuum, sucking for more oxygen than the atmosphere had to offer, Cooper stopped, treading water, and turned to see where he’d wound up. The fear that always came next, he found exhilarating.
The current in the Sir Francis Drake Channel was deadly-fast, strong, and deceptive enough so that if you didn’t pay attention, it’d take you all the way around the point and into the open Atlantic. Do it at night and it got worse-it was easy to slip past a rock, or another of the small islands to the east, and lose your angle on the lights that could show you where you were.
He could see the telltale yellow incandescence of the Conch Bay Beach Club, but only barely, and it wasn’t straight behind him anymore-looked to be a good two miles east of him now. At least he hadn’t passed behind Peter Island, which could have put him out to sea for good. Still, the current was strong tonight, strong enough so he’d be hard-pressed to make it back. Probably, he thought, feeling the rush of fear he’d come out here to feel, if you’re lucky and strong, it’ll be two, maybe three A.M. by the time you drag your ass back to the bay, and the way you’ll be splashing through your last mile, I’d put the odds around fifty-fifty some tiger shark gnaws off a chunk of your thigh before you get there.
Cooper knew that the worst part of it was the pace: you didn’t swim hard enough for the first two hours, you wound up too discouraged to make it back. You’d look up, nearly dead from the workout, only to find you hadn’t gained an inch relative to the landfall you were trying to make. Twice, out on these swims, he’d been forced to succumb to Mother Nature-give up, drift for a while, keep an eye out for lights and swim toward them like a maniac once he spotted them. The first time, a friendly shift in the current brought him back to a beach on the opposite side of Tortola just after four in the morning; on his second flubbed effort, he was picked up by a deep-sea fishing charter off of St. Thomas around dawn.
Tonight, it was a hard haul, but he made enough headway early on to fend off the discouragement factor, and no sharks made an evident play for him. Just shy of two-thirty, he looked up from his slow-motion, straight-armed windmill crawl to see that he’d just about run his head up into the Conch Bay ferry they kept moored ten yards from the dock.