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.

The cop at the base of the stairwell normally functioned as a kind of desk sergeant in the department’s main offices. As he stood aside to let him pass, Cooper realized there was, among other emotions, something like fear in the cop’s eyes.

Either the desk sergeant or the kid out front must have radioed ahead, since, as Cooper elbowed open the gate to the pool deck, he found Riley there waiting for him. The lieutenant didn’t say anything, didn’t really offer up any particular expression on his wide-boned, normally cheery face-he just nodded solemnly and stepped back to fall in behind him as Cooper came out onto the deck. It was on the deck that he saw, sprawled halfway between the French doors at the back of the house and the lip of the pool, the splayed, bug-eyed, and clearly dead body of Cap’n Roy.

Cooper stood over the body. It took a few minutes, but in time, the investigative function of Cooper’s mind began to engage itself, and Cooper found comfort in it: two visible bullet holes placed three or four inches apart near the geographical center of his chest; a bloodied, formerly white robe still wrapped partially around him, the robe’s terry-cloth belt partially untied, maybe from the gunshot impacts and subsequent fall, but still curled around itself enough to hold the robe in place; dark blue swim trunks, but otherwise unclothed beneath the robe; one flip-flop fallen off his foot, the left, on the wood planking of the deck, the other still adorning his right, its rubber thong wedged between his toes; a hand, his right, placed against his rib cage, slightly beneath the wounds.

Cap’n Roy had been shot as he exited his house, intending to come out for a swim in his infinity pool. The pool’s underwater lights were on, as though Roy had flipped them on before strolling out for a few laps-a little relaxation, here in the man’s chlorinated oasis, a pool that featured a view of the Caribbean to match the most luxurious of resorts.

After a while, Cooper unsure of how long it had been, Riley came up beside him. The other cops, formerly busy taking photos and performing related investigative activities, resumed their work; Cooper realized they’d stopped to let him have a look at Roy.

“Cap’n had a two-man security detail watchin’ him,” Riley said, “morning, noon, and night. Told me it was your words made him do it-‘Spy-a-de-island tell me I better watch my back,’ he said to me, ‘so watch my back I will.’”

Riley shook his head in utter disgust.

“We were it, mon-Tim and me. Arranged it to go ’round the clock-one man on, one man off, goin’ 24/7.” He brushed gently against Cooper’s shoulder and Cooper looked up, realizing as he did it that this was why Riley had brushed him-so he would look up and see the places Riley was about to describe.

“Tim was hidin’ out over there,” he said, pointing to a defunct stairwell from the home that had been here before Roy had built his shadow-funded luxury residence in its place. “Standin’ where he could watch the street and the house at once. Thing is, I was comin’ up the stairs down low, readyin’ for the shift change, when Cap’n Roy come walkin’ out and get hit. Two shots, mon, and he down and dyin’ right away.”

Riley had been motioning in the direction of the hill just beyond the deck, and the second pool of light and activity there-Cooper realizing what he meant from the way he was telling it.

“The shots came from up there,” Cooper said, the sandy mumble of his voice rough and thick.

“Yeah. Shit, mon, two-man security detail failed at protectin’ its one and only charge. Maybe the killer, he too good for us island cops. But I’ll tell you this-that two-man security detail be too good for the killer when he lookin’ to get away.”

Cooper sharpened his focus on what Riley was saying.

“Without a way out o’ here by way o’ the deck or them old stairs,” the cop said, “there only one steep slope to the street, or a cliff down to the rocks. He tried for the slope but I knew he’d be tryin’ it. Didn’t waste any time. Or energy, mon. Not going to let our assassin head on down that hill and away.”

“You shot him,” Cooper said.

“Many times.”

Cooper nodded. They stood that way for another moment, beside each other, beside Cap’n Roy’s body on the deck, both looking off toward the pool of light and activity they knew to contain the dead target of Riley’s vengeful wrath.

“Let’s have a look,” Cooper said after a while.