Riley was at the Conch Bay dock again, reclined in his seat in the patrol boat, goddamn cap pulled down over his eyes as though he’d motored over for no better reason than to have a nap. Coming into the lagoon, Cooper switched over to the dinghy and cut a mean stripe past a couple of SCUBA students on his way to the pier. This time he didn’t waste any effort on the game of get-the-cop-to-skedaddle it had turned out he was pretty shitty at playing. Instead, he tied off his boat and punched the sole of one of his sandals against the side of Riley’s boat. It made a satisfying thuk, as though he might have succeeded in dislodging a piece of the boat’s chrome trim from the hull.
“What now?” he said.
Riley poked up the brim of his hat.
“Smuggler,” he said, “turn up dead.”
It took Cooper a couple seconds.
“Po Keeler, you mean,” he said.
“Yeah, mon.”
“Clearly you’re operating under the flawed assumption that I give two shits.”
Riley didn’t say anything.
“It happen inside?”
“No.”
Cooper nodded. “You let him out, then.”
“Yesterday noon.”
“When did he ‘turn up’?”
“’Bout seven A.M. today.”
Cooper thought about the deal Po Keeler had been wanting to make with Cap’n Roy. He thought that he could connect some dots were the mood to strike. Not that the mood had hit, but it was easy enough: Busted smuggler bribes top local law enforcement official; top local law enforcement official releases smuggler from prison; busted smuggler turns up dead. Coincidence wasn’t being too friendly with Cap’n Roy Gillespie.
It occurred to Cooper that Cap’n Roy might have recorded the conversation he’d held with Keeler-probably had-almost beyond a doubt, he decided. Meaning it might be that Riley was here on a public relations mission-that he’d come to smooth out the suspicious wrinkles on the otherwise starched-and-pressed bribery-and-murder scheme Cap’n Roy had conducted before realizing he should check the prison tapes. At which point he learned that Keeler had vetted his payoff idea with Cooper before taking his shot with Cap’n Roy.
“So what do you want, Riley?” Cooper said. “Actually, let’s skip the theatrics: what is it our esteemed chief minister is too busy to come and ask me in person?”
Riley surprised Cooper by actually answering his question.
“Look pretty bad on Cap’n Roy,” he said, “if that smuggler’s body turn up and people find out about it. People like the Coast Guard, even-especially them, since Cap’n Roy just finished arrangin’ the man’s release. He asked me to bring you up to the pine scrub, where we found him, and that’s about all he said to do or say. But you and I both know the chief minister’s thinkin’ ’bout a favor you did for him some time back. Thinkin’ maybe you be up for pullin’ something ’bout the same, one more time around.”
“Christ,” Cooper said.
“Yeah, mon,” Riley said.
“Maybe I should put up a sign on my bungalow: ‘Cooper’s Disposal Service.’ Why wrap a body in a rug and take it down to the local dump when you’ve got me hanging around? A one-man dead-body transfer station.”
Riley kind of shrugged with his head. There wasn’t, Cooper supposed, much for him to add.
“What do you think, Riley?”
When Riley didn’t say anything for a moment, Cooper said, “And don’t waste my time with the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force party line. A lot of Roy’s predecessors, fellow superior officers of yours, have done worse. His being a cop, especially a BVI cop, doesn’t put him beyond reproach in the slightest-so don’t give me a whitewash. I want to know what you think.”
“Yeah,” Riley said after looking at Cooper for a while. “You right about that-some done worse.”
Cooper waited.
“And I know you’re saying if he did it, well then, you’re out,” Riley said. “You know-if that be the case, you don’t want the first part of it. But if it’s seeming like he didn’t do it, then, yeah, mon, maybe you might come by and lend a hand.”
“‘Might,’” Cooper said, “being the key word. Go on, Lieutenant.”
Riley aimed his eyes right at Cooper’s, and Cooper saw some hardness in them-accepting the challenge he’d just been offered by Cooper’s use of his rank-and a softness too, maybe something in there showing that Riley was a little disappointed in his boss, whether in what the man had done, or in the way he’d handled it.
When he was finished looking at Cooper with those couple of things in his eyes, Riley shook his head.
“No, mon. No way.”
Cooper kept looking back at him.
“Either way,” Cooper said, “Minister Roy is getting himself in pretty deep.”
After another little while of looking at him, Riley gave Cooper a nod.
“Power to the people,” Riley said.
Cooper stood still for a moment, thinking he was liking Lieutenant Riley more and more, and wondering, among other things, how the hell he would succeed in convincing the medical examiner of the city of Charlotte Amalie, USVI-even though the man happened to be on his list of fully extortable targets-to toss the second clandestine homicide victim in as many years into the incinerator without that coroner asking anybody in the government that employed him for permission to do it.
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.