Maybe there was something to that-the part about his being officially dead. Maybe the real version of Benjamin Achar was dead too. In the same way he’d assumed the identity of someone who’d died, maybe he’d abandoned a similarly, if only officially dead identity he’d once worn around.

Or maybe there wasn’t anything to it at all, and it wouldn’t matter anyway.

Cooper observed that he’d polished off the sandwich, fritters, and all but a quarter inch of the last glass of Cabernet. He also observed that with the whole bottle of vino inside him, he was feeling pretty good.

Not quite all the way to satisfied, but still pretty good.

He swallowed the last swish of wine, found the fax Susannah Grant had sent him, and punched in her number on his sat phone.

She answered on the third ring, prompting Cooper to decide this was all the confirmation he needed. He clicked off-no need to heat up any of the bad blood from their aborted rapture session in Austin. She was doing fine, and even if her phone had its caller ID feature intact, she wouldn’t know anybody besides RESTRICTED NUMBER had just called. The snuffer-outers would have got her by now if they knew about her.

Cooper punched in a second set of digits-the Caracas number for Borrego Industries. When he asked the receptionist to connect him to the Polar Bear, the woman shot back a terse reply, struggling as she had in person with her English.

“Who is this?”

Cooper felt a pit form in his stomach on hearing her tone.

“Tell him it’s Cooper,” he said.

“What does this regarding?”

“Just tell him it’s Cooper.”

She put the call on hold and Cooper waited. After about a minute, the call was answered by a man whose voice Cooper didn’t immediately recognize, except that he recognized it wasn’t Ernesto Borrego.

“Why are you calling here,” the man said. He had a deep voice, almost as deep as Cooper’s, with English as heavily accented as the receptionist’s-along with a kind of masterfully projected audio scowl discernible to Cooper even across many thousands of miles of sky.

“Well, I called to speak with Borrego,” Cooper said. “That would be why I asked for him.”

“He is not available.”

“I thought he was proficient at returning calls?”

“Proficient?”

“Expert. Good. Skilled-”

“I’m aware of the meaning of the word. Proficiency is difficult to achieve, however, when you are dead.”

Crap.

“When?” Cooper said.

“Please. We have already notified the policia you have called.”

“Well give them my regards-”

“You are the chief suspect in his killing. I suggest you turn yourself in to the authorities in Tortola, where you live.”

Not quite, Cooper thought, but close.

“Yeah,” Cooper said, “I’ll do that first thing. Who is this?”

“Who do you think?”

“I bet you’re the friendly neighborhood bodyguard who took my gun,” Cooper said.

The velociraptor paused at the other end of the line.

“Sí,” he said. “And I will take it again if you show yourself here. Only I will use it on you-not give it back.”

“Good luck. I’m a suspect because I came by for my visit last week?”

“You’re a suspect because you shot him.”

Cooper said, “I need the names of the tomb raiders Borrego bought the gold artifacts from. The Caracas shipment that was headed for Naples. Borrego told me you would give them to me.”

“Bullshit. And I wouldn’t tell you even if he told me to. You know what? I will kill you myself,” the velociraptor said. There came a muted pfft sound, which Cooper assumed to be the sound of the man spitting. “I’ll kill you with my own hands. I know where you live.”

Cooper wondered whether Borrego’s thug had spit on the floor, or a desk. He also wondered whether this guy had been reading too many comic books.

“Been tried before,” he said flatly, and hung up.

Between the long run on the beach in Naples and the longer boat ride home, Cooper was experiencing a kind of dull ache in what felt to him like every joint in his body. He wondered whether it was really the run and the ride. Maybe it was something else, like the wine. Maybe, he thought, I need to live on a longer beach, where I can take a long run every day, without needing to turn around for another lap every five hundred steps like I do here. Or maybe what I really need is to find another beach, long or short, where the paradise isn’t relative. At least not yet.

Where I don’t wake up after a rare morning of sleeping in-only to learn I’m next up in the dead pool.

Maybe there’s a beach like the one I’m thinking of in Tahiti, or Fiji, or Malaysia. Maybe there’s a spot where I can find a different bungalow, make up a new name, and finally accomplish the fucking escape from insanity I tried to pull off nineteen years ago. Maybe I’ll even be able to find, in that place, a total absence of the memory, phone calls, and predicaments of Cap’n Roy, Po Keeler, the Coast Guard, this fucking twelve-inch golden idol on my shelf, that goddamn Polar Bear, the Polar Bear’s stateside fence and his king crabs-even an absence of the other guy with a made-up name, good old Benny Achar, who’d blown himself up, killed a hundred-plus Floridians, and annoyed a government agency or two in the process.

“Or maybe I wouldn’t find anything different at all,” he said, and shouted out for Ronnie to bring him another bottle of wine.

28

When he sold his third paperback, Wally Knowles bought the place in New Hampshire. A rambler with two bedrooms and one small bath, the size of the place topped out around six hundred square feet. Nineteen acres of forest had come with the house, though, and almost four hundred linear feet of the property nosedived straight into Sunapee Lake. Cost him $62,900, which price he paid some eight years prior to the time people started realizing the ski-resort town of Sunapee was as good a place to hang out in the summer as in winter-and began paying ten times what Knowles had paid for his whole property just to snatch up an empty half-acre building site.

His wife left him two weeks before he bought the lake house. Having come to agree with her view of his unimpressiveness, Knowles, who for his third novel got a $75,000 advance-his first of any kind-decided he’d better figure out how to live as cheaply as possible. He’d have to, if for no other reason than the measure he’d just undertaken to address his escalating midlife crisis: upon signing his divorce papers, Knowles promptly resigned from his $38,400-a-year job as public defender in the Bronx and went ahead with his plan of writing for a living. He put a chunk of his advance down on the house, wrangled a thirty-year fixed rate mortgage to cover the rest, and on the day of his closing found himself observing the view from a lakefront home, in which it would cost him $208.71 per month, escrow included, to write for just about as long as he damn well pleased.

Had she not been killed before a dose of positive karma struck her ex-husband, Mrs. Knowles might have come to regret saying, in the divorce, that “she didn’t want a red cent” and relinquishing the fifty percent interest she could have taken in her husband’s “pesky little books.” Book number five, it turned out, seized the second slot on the New York Times best-seller list its first week in print, and did not relinquish a place in the top five for nearly three years. Thirteen million copies sold. This led, among other things, to sales of just over six million copies of his first four titles.

Knowles did not regret for one instant having retreated from life as he’d known it. As the only African-American for miles, a man with a penchant for black suits, black Ray-Bans, black shirts and ties, a black ten-gallon hat, and no interest whatsoever in conversation, Knowles was known, simply, as “the black guy on the lake.” Although he’d heard the descriptions of him change, over time, to something like “the author,” the fact remained that despite his success, people still considered him an odd duck and a half.