Cooper got his full body weight planted into the small of Madrid’s back, pulled the velociraptor’s arms around behind him, and pile-drove the man chin-first into the turf.
“¡Hijo de la gran puta!” Madrid spat.
Cooper pretzeled both of the man’s wrists against opposing shoulder blades and stabbed a knee into the lowest vertebra in Madrid’s spine. With the hand that wasn’t occupied, Cooper snatched his Browning from his waistband and secured the velociraptor’s chin to its spot near the top of Trafford’s penalty box, barrel of gun to rear of neck.
“Ain’t payback a bitch,” he said.
Cooper wore a blue-and-green Tommy Bahama short-sleeved shirt featuring a recurring pattern of parrots and palm fronds, khaki shorts with deep pockets, and his travel sandals. He allowed himself a look around the massive workout room.
“You built a weight room on a soccer field?” he said.
“Sí,” the velociraptor said. “Old Trafford Stadium. Man United.”
“Man United, eh,” Cooper said. It occurred to him that Conch Bay’s staff of soccer-loving Brits, most of all Ronnie, would appreciate this odd expression of untold wealth better than he. “You know, you’re doing pretty well for a bodyguard. Especially for an incompetent one.”
A kind of grunt came from the tall FieldTurf beneath Cooper’s hand.
“Pretty safe guess,” Cooper said, “Borrego was having you handle a few more things than physical-protection services, he paid you like this. But I don’t care what else you are. It occurred to me that your mildly late, but highly effective appearance in Borrego’s office during my visit was a couple notches too casual. Born, the way I saw it, of endless and constant routine.”
“So what?”
“Just saying I’m guessing you were always around the man. Everywhere he went. All the time. Including the trip to Central America the two of you took to buy the artifacts Borrego was shipping to Naples.”
Even though he hadn’t really asked a question, Cooper, upon gaining no response, angrily mashed the barrel of his pistol into the musculature of the velociraptor’s neck and sharpened the prod of his kneecap on his spine.
“Who’d you buy them from, where’d they get them, and how do I find these people?” Cooper said. “Start answering.”
He thought he heard Madrid say something, pushed the Browning a little deeper into his captive’s neck, heard another mumble that lost itself in the turf, then, ticked off, Cooper stood all his weight on his knee and said, “Say again, motherfucker!”
Madrid turned his face from the blades of the turf with a grimace.
“I said it’s not that simple!”
“Go on.”
“Maldita puta, this fucking turf hurts,” Madrid said. Then, turning his head another quarter inch toward Cooper, the velociraptor appeared to Cooper to smirk-or at least a corner of his mouth performed an upward curl, whatever expression was intended. “We had a pretty good idea you’d be paying us another visit. So we’re ready to answer your fucking question. Just not like this.”
“No? Why not? I kind of like the way this conversation’s arranged.”
Despite enjoying his reply, Cooper found himself mildly disturbed by the velociraptor’s use of the word we.
“Because, gringo, there’s somebody else you’d rather talk to about it than me.”
“Yeah?” Cooper felt a slow sinking sensation in his stomach-he’d been had.
“Sí,” the velociraptor said. “What’s the expression you Americans use? Better you hear it ‘from the mouth of the horse,’ I think?”
“Close enough,” Cooper said, already knowing what was coming before the bodyguard said the rest.
“Then you and your expressions probably agree it’d work out better,” Madrid said, “if you get your answers de la boca del Oso Blanco.”
Cooper sat there for a minute, planted as he was on the velociraptor’s back. Thinking he was getting pretty good at being taken to the cleaners.
From the mouth of the Polar Bear.
Doing it quickly so as not to lose the edge, Cooper stood and stepped back, keeping the Browning pointed at the velociraptor.
“On your feet, then,” he said, “Mr. Man United.”
Madrid drove about the way Cooper figured Dale Earnhardt Jr. did, wending around so many bends at speeds registering near 140 kph on the speedometer of his BMW M5 that Cooper began to think he’d need to break down and take a dose of Dramamine for the first time in his life. Despite the speed, the velociraptor wasn’t frantic in the way he drove-listless, Cooper thought, was a good way to put it, Madrid about as enthusiastic about the many gear changes, braking, and acceleration leaps as the driver of an airport rental-car shuttle might have been about his wheel-bound duties.
It took about twenty-five minutes for the M5 to deliver them to a lower-middle-class neighborhood at the base of a long hill, the place maybe four hundred times wealthier than ninety-eight percent of Venezuela but with tiny homes, built too closely together on narrow, unkempt lots, Cooper tagging it immediately as a place where the police didn’t get much cooperation from the residents.
A dozen long blocks from the thoroughfare they’d come in on, the velociraptor zipped the M5 around a final series of turns, slowed, then pulled almost daintily into a short driveway beside a slovenly, two-story house with a dilapidated Spanish-tile roof.
Madrid triple-flashed his high beams as he parked.
The place, Cooper observed, had “safe house” written all over it. Good pick of locations for it too-nobody in this kind of neighborhood bothered you much, asked you anything, or otherwise got in the way of whatever you felt like doing. Cooper thinking maybe he should consider a spot like this-it’s missing a beach and a few snorkeling holes, and there’s no hammock, porch, or dock, but what the hell: Lieutenant Riley and friends wouldn’t bother him here, would they?
The velociraptor took them to the side door, which was answered by a pair of men who looked vaguely like Madrid-at least the way Madrid looked while on duty, each of these guys sporting a suit and tie and exuding a quiet sort of menace. They did look a bit stupider than the Polar Bear’s A-number-one man, which quality they quickly exposed when both men failed to mask their surprise at the somewhat effeminate workout gear their boss had shown up in.
The twin looks of mild shock were quickly concealed and the men parted. The velociraptor came into the house between them; he didn’t give his men any evident signal to take down Cooper, so Cooper followed him in. In the kitchen, the lights were bright and the shades drawn. In here, another four armed bodyguards were playing a card game at a folding table that looked as though they’d brought it solely for the purpose of the game. The four guys watched Madrid, Cooper, and one of the doormen swing through the kitchen and down into the basement through a door beside the fridge.
While oddly misplaced, the bottom floor of the dilapidated row house was supremely outfitted. A widescreen plasma set looking somewhere north of a hundred inches wide played, in silence, an action movie featuring a submarine and a series of torpedoes chasing it. Within and beside the TV cabinet were multiple decks-DVD, stereo, and otherwise-along with a tower full of CDs and a case of face-out DVD boxes. Cooper recognized most of the titles.
The television was playing silently, since the sounds of the film were being monitored by Ernesto Borrego by way of a fat set of earphones. The headset’s coiling connecting wire stretched, limply and partially airborne, to a plug on the face of one of the many decks in the TV cabinet.
The Polar Bear ignored the presence of Cooper and his security men until the climactic moment of the scene he’d been watching played to fruition. When the submarine had avoided the torpedoes, Borrego depressed a button on the remote control he’d been holding, removed the headphones, and turned to Cooper.