He was thinking it could have been the crabs he’d smelled, but knew it wasn’t. He found a switch on the wall and got some more lights on. He opened, then rooted through the first of three big waist-high freezers, cutting his fingers a half dozen times on the frozen crab legs within as he moved them around for a better look.

It was in the second unit that he found, jammed in beside an otherwise fully stocked selection of plastic-wrapped imported king crab legs, the uncovered but completely frozen body of the man Cooper judged to be the stateside fence used by Ernesto Borrego.

He couldn’t be sure, given the frosted-over nature of the clothes adorning the body, but it looked to Cooper as though there were at least a double-tap’s worth of bullet holes grouped precisely in the vicinity of the late fence’s ventricles. He brushed off some of the frost from the guy’s face and confirmed his identity based on the couple of pictures he’d seen in the condo.

Cooper dropped the freezer lid. Medvez was hovering behind him.

“In case you were wondering,” Cooper said, “I’m not particularly surprised.”

“No? Well thanks for bringing me along for the ride,” Medvez said. “Something I’ve always wanted to see-fresh-frozen art smugglers. Eleven ninety-nine a pound.”

Cooper nodded dully.

Government affiliation or no, Cooper had a pretty good idea whose turn would come next. He flipped off the light.

“Come on, Mr. Nightly News,” he said in the dark. “We get out of here quick enough, nobody’ll know you did my detective work, and we might just be able to keep you off the list.”

25

Laramie answered groggily.

“Yeah?”

“Rise and shine,” came the familiar baritone. In her sleep-deprived state she almost slipped right into the routine, that voice feeling like a comfortable old shoe. She could sense his presence beside her, and thought of the sand they’d always felt in the sheets, no matter which resort they’d picked. Laramie stretched lazily in the sheets-

And snapped out of it.

“Christ,” she said. “What time is it?”

She pulled herself up against the headboard.

“Early,” Cooper said, “or late. Depending.”

She confirmed this with a glance at the dim green numbers on the alarm clock in her room: 4:42 A.M.

“Up and at ’em,” Cooper said. “If you don’t get your tail out of bed pronto you’ll be late for your seven A.M. breakfast meeting in Naples.”

“I’ve got a seven A.M. breakfast meeting in Naples?”

“The Sunrise Café. Known for its eggs Benedict, though they serve a mean doughnut too.”

Laramie got her head wrapped around things. She knew better than to say what she wanted to say-So this means you’ve reconsidered our offer?-or, better yet-What are you doing in Naples? Be wiser, she thought, to wait until they were face-to-face to pop her questions.

Still, she couldn’t resist the temptation of at least one toe-dipping probe.

“And you think I’d be interested in driving, I don’t know, an hour or so, at this time of the morning, why?”

“I happen to be in the area. I figured I’d do you and ‘the people you work for’ a favor. Save them some time-you know, in case they’ve started spinning their wheels in a vain hunt for the numbered account my initial extortion dough got siphoned into, or any of the many hundreds of investments my attorneys subsequently made with it, scattered around the globe like little financial Easter eggs. And don’t get your hopes up on your own personal knowledge contributing to the hapless mission of the federal government finding any of my assets-just because we hung out some doesn’t mean you have any more concept than the sea turtles south of Conch Bay as to where that money lives.”

“Ah,” Laramie said. I knew I shouldn’t have said anything…

“Anyway,” Cooper said, “since they’re not ever going to find any of it, not in a couple generations’ worth of IRS investigators, I’ll save them the trouble and have a cup of coffee with you-as per your ‘initial recruitment effort.’ As to the driving part-among the reasons you’ll need to be the one logging the miles is the fact that I’m not meeting you anywhere near the people you work for.”

“Fine.”

The phone line kind of sat there between them, part noise and part silence.

“You said you’ll have a cup of coffee,” Laramie said. “You drink coffee now?”

“Helps with the headaches.”

“What are the other reasons?” Laramie said.

“For drinking coffee?”

“You said ‘among the reasons’-that avoiding coming anywhere near ‘the people I work’ for was ‘among the reasons’ I’m the one who has to do the driving. Why else?”

She heard some kind of muffled sigh rumble from the receiver.

“Laramie, after our breakfast rendezvous, I’ll be hopping back aboard my refueled speed machine and heading south. Conditions are expected to worsen as the tropical storm currently dumping six inches of rain on Cancún moves into the Gulf, so if I don’t clear Key West by ten, said speed machine will wind up as fiberglass kindling somewhere near the halfway point of my intended voyage.”

“What if the storm moves faster than that?”

“Then you’ll be eating your granola alone.”

Fair enough, Laramie thought.

“All right,” she said. “Storm allowing, I’ll see you at seven and brief you there.”

“You can brief me all you want,” Cooper said, “and I’ll give you my thoughts on whatever it is you’ve got going. But if you were asking me then, and you’re asking me now, and you ask me over coffee, to come work for whichever people it is you’re working for now, I’m not interested.”

A bonking rattle sounded out, and Laramie knew he’d dropped the phone on its cradle.

She leaned back against the headboard, allowing some of the fog to clear from her sleep-deprived brain. She sat there with her eyes closed for a minute, or maybe five, then flipped off the covers and rolled her feet off the side of the bed.

She wondered, as she stood, what the simplest way might be of procuring one of the task force fleet’s black-on-black Suburbans at five in the morning.

“It’s only a matter of time.”

After swallowing the sip of black coffee he’d just taken, Cooper attempted and failed to determine what it was Laramie was talking about. He was certain she wasn’t talking about what had slipped into his mind once she’d uttered the words.

“You want to run that by me again?”

“The caffeine addiction,” she said. “You didn’t used to drink any coffee. Now you look suspiciously like a two-cups-a-morning guy to me. Addiction can’t be far behind.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But last I checked, there were a few other addictions chewing up most of my real estate. Not sure there’s room for any others.”

Cooper was feeling irritable-or highly uncomfortable, at any rate. Upon Laramie’s arrival at the table, it seemed there had been a slight quickening of his pulse. It was a familiar sensation-familiarly annoying. He’d thought himself impervious to it, which was what made it so annoying: he had assumed his year-plus of rage at Laramie’s decision to abandon him and his island way of life, coupled with the so-preposterous-as-to-be-humorous threat Laramie had made in her “initial recruitment effort,” would function as a kind of force field. A moat.

Here he was, though, a mere three minutes into his breakfast meeting, and the force field had already disintegrated in favor of the same old quickened pulse. He thought of an imaginary wall suddenly detonating into a million digital pixels and the pixels fading to reveal an image behind.

“You’re an asshole,” Laramie said.

Cooper blinked.

“You’re an infantile, inconsiderate, uncontrolled, obnoxious child,” she went on, “in an aging, sunbaked, time-and-fisticuff-abused adult male shell.”