As he steered Cooper past the Coast Guard cutter anchored outside the entrance to Road Harbor, Riley tossed a jovial salute to the sentry standing guard at the stern.
The sentry didn’t bother acknowledging him.
Cooper observed the attack helicopter parked on the cutter’s helipad, rotors spinning. The chopper made a lot of noise, which made Cooper notice the unusual preponderance of noise as a whole. Except for semidaily cruise ship dockings and the regular arrivals of the turboprop commuter planes delivering tourists to Beef Island, Road Harbor was normally a peaceful place. But not today.
Coming around the breakwater-a place where Riley had made a grim discovery a year and a half ago-Cooper caught his first view of the mayhem at the root of all the noise pollution. That was the only word for it, mayhem-Cooper never having seen such bustling activity or having heard such noise here in nineteen years as a neighbor.
Roy’s Marine Base fleet was out in force-actually in its entirety, Cooper counting all five boats including Riley’s, the other four buzzing around the harbor in what Cooper had come to recognize as Cap’n Roy’s way of assuming control of a crime scene: every cop on the scene remained active, but if you looked closely, you would notice none of them was accomplishing a thing. The volunteer salvage team was deployed in full SCUBA gear, most of them busy on the patrol boat decks, a couple of them swimming in the bay. The city’s fireboat was spraying a geyser of water, the 40' tug positioned the farthest possible distance from its target so as to allow for the most glorious possible arc of seawater, even though whatever fire had been raging had long since been doused.
The target of the fire hose was a custom luxury yacht Cooper pegged at 140-plus feet, the word Seahawk posted on its side in tall, cursive, sterling silver letters. The yacht’s stern had burned down to a charred stump, and was still warm enough to be steaming under the deluge from Roy’s tug. A second, smaller boat, an open-deck rubber-hulled deal featuring the familiar red-and-white Coast Guard paint scheme, was lashed to the Marine Base pier ahead of the yacht, and displayed no apparent damage. Cooper recognized it as one of the task force chase boats he’d seen from time to time, and knew it to be capable of speeds in excess of sixty knots. Fat chance that boat had of catching his Apache, at least not when he had the MerCruisers tuned-knob the fuel aerator over to its richest mix and he’d leave that chase boat in the dust.
Riley took the long way around, circling the harbor on his approach. Cooper guessed that Roy had instructed him to do this-make sure he caught the full scope of the mayhem-so he ignored the intended view and instead took in the passing shoreline. They swung past the empty cruise ship berth, eased along Road Town’s main waterfront district: a pastel rainbow of shops, the new ferry terminal, one pair of strip malls, then all of it giving way, up and back, to half-constructed buildings and rougher lots on the slopes of the town’s two hills.
Unwatched tour concluded, Riley brought them into the harbor’s bigger marina. He passed the series of lime-and-red storage buildings lining its eastern edge, approached then passed under the fountain of water spraying from the fireboat, then finally pulled the patrol boat alongside the only available stretch of dock space. The dock fronted a grouping of aluminum-sided structures Roy had succeeded in getting everybody to call the Marine Base.
It was only after they’d parked that Cooper encountered the first sign that Roy might not have dispatched Riley solely to roust him from slumber.
Three upstanding members of Roy’s regular militia-meaning non-Marine Base men, cops wearing long pants and patent-leather shoes-stood guard before the closed doors of a building called the Barn, a storage facility in which the lesser-ranked Marine Base cops normally housed the department’s heavy marine equipment. Cooper took the presence of the regular RVIPF cops as a sign-since, first, in looking back, he couldn’t remember their having guarded anything, ever, and second, because today they also happened to be armed.
In the British tradition, RVIPF cops typically did not carry.
The lanky West Indian who always seemed to be busy with something or other on the Marine Base pier took the patrol boat’s bow line from Riley, secured it to a tack, and went back to his business. It appeared to Cooper that the guy was gutting a fish on one of the wide planks of the dock.
Looking forward to getting home, Cooper didn’t wait for Riley to lead the way and instead leaped onto the dock, stern line in hand. He tied the line off, stuffed his hands in the pockets of his swim trunks, and, after a glance over the shoulder of the fisherman to confirm that it was, indeed, a fish he was slicing open, headed inland solo.
In a matter of seconds there appeared, strutting toward him from the Marine Base headquarters building, a man with the stiffest spine Cooper had ever known. Like the director of a big-budget action film deigning to greet the studio representative visiting the set of his picture, Cap’n Roy Gillespie, apparently having decided to lose his three-piece chief minister suit and reoutfit himself in full police-chief regalia for the occasion, reached out for a handshake as they met a few yards from the dock. Cooper rudely kept his hands lodged deep in the pockets of his swim trunks.
Cap’n Roy wore a pressed white polo shirt, sharply creased gray slacks, the same shiny cap with the checkered band that Riley wore, and a set of gleaming patent-leather shoes. Cooper marveled yet again at how these guys could consistently wear slacks in the humid ninety-degree heat without emitting sweat from a single visible pore.
They stood in the midst of a gravel parking lot currently occupied by more police and civilian vehicles than Cooper remembered ever having seen anywhere in the islands. Roy remained undeterred by Cooper’s rebuff; his smile gleamed so pearly white it made his deeply black skin appear almost blue.
“’Ey, mon,” he said, “if it isn’t the spy-a-de-island, come by to see us down the Marine Base way.” The words flew from his mouth like the lyrics to a reggae track.
“Normally it’d be a pleasure, Roy,” Cooper said. He always avoided using Roy’s self-proclaimed nickname. “But today isn’t really the best day.”
“We under high alert, mon. State of emergency.”
“I see that.”
Roy motioned for Cooper to follow as he started toward the Barn.
“Got something I’m thinking you maybe wanna see, mon,” he said with a wink.
Cooper followed him across the gravel. He elected not to bite on Roy’s joke-this was exactly what Roy had said the last time Cooper had been asked to help the RVIPF out of a bind.
“This time,” Cooper said, “I’m encouraged by the approach you instructed Lieutenant Riley to take.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep-primarily because Riley seemed confident my demand for a fee in the amount of two hundred and fifty-two thousand U.S. dollars would be met.”
Roy returned the salute from the guard at the main door to the Barn, unlocked the padlock himself, and opened one of the big double doors to which the padlock had been affixed.
“This time ’round,” he said, “money be the whole point.”
Cooper followed him inside and Cap’n Roy didn’t say another word.
Cooper figured Roy was waiting for Cooper’s eyes to adjust-that was what Cooper was waiting for-and when they did, Cooper beheld the sight that had injected the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force with such fiscal optimism, and the reason Roy had clammed up.
It seemed the stash the chief minister was holding inside the Barn spoke for itself.
Set out as though for auction, or maybe to photograph-lit, as it was, by police spotlights rigged to function as museum-style lighting-there stood a collection of various objects, some massive, some miniscule, but every single one of them appearing to be made of solid gold. The collection filled the Barn, a building Cooper had once seen host a full-court basketball game. It looked to Cooper like the second coming of the King Tutankhamen exhibit, a display he remembered observing in relative awe as a child.