It was a clear, hot night. Cap’n Roy stood beside Cooper on the tarmac, out of uniform for the first time Cooper remembered seeing. Might, Cooper thought, be decked out in the khakis and sandals you’d see anybody else wearing, but the man doesn’t look one inch less the chief minister. Didn’t matter what you wore-keep a look like that on your face and you could forget going casual.
Riley came out of the terminal behind them with a lanky patrol officer named Tim. The last time Cooper encountered him, the skinny young cop had been carrying a body bag down the Marine Base dock to Cooper’s Apache. It gave Cooper a creepy sort of feeling-he wondered whether Tim’s presence might bring bad luck. It certainly had last time.
Behind the plane now, Riley took hold of the handle beneath the cargo door at the back of the plane’s fuselage. He pulled open the big door, unfolding then locking its ramp in place. Cooper watched as a bulky, tanned, short-sleeved arm appeared from inside the plane. The thick man connected to the arm peered down at Riley and Tim, then at Cooper and Roy. Satisfied, at least by Cooper’s take, that the passengers aboard the plane hadn’t been duped into some form of bust, the guy ducked back inside, then reappeared behind a much smaller man, whom he followed down the stairs.
Cooper knew the smaller man-had summoned him, in fact. When he spotted Cooper, the smaller man stopped, turned, and gestured for his handy-dandy thug to return to the plane. The bigger man climbed back inside, then came out again carrying two overstuffed black canvas bags. The smaller man ignored Cap’n Roy’s presence and came directly across the tarmac to Cooper.
“Give you the benefit of the doubt,” the man said.
Cooper nodded and motioned to Cap’n Roy. The bigger man took the hint and slogged his way over to Cap’n Roy through the torpid heat and handed the chief minister the two bags. Showing little sign of effort, Cap’n Roy took and set them down, unzipped one, reached in, dug around, then zipped it closed-Cooper catching a glimpse of the sea of U.S. currency within as he did it-before doing the same with the second bag.
Cap’n Roy then waved to Riley, who had retreated back near the customs area in the terminal.
“Good enough,” Cooper said to the small man. “We’re in business.”
Because of the ATR 72-500’s engines, he had to say it loud.
The smaller man retreated to the plane with his thug, dug out a cigarette, and had a smoke while he waited, solo, in the wash of the whirling turboprops.
Riley and Tim returned at speed aboard a forklift and a three-car luggage train. The forklift held two reassembled wooden crates, cut down by half to fit the plane’s cargo hold, and the luggage train spilled over with maybe four dozen pieces of baggage. Working quickly, though not without evident strain, Cap’n Roy’s minions loaded the semidisguised contraband aboard the plane, Cooper finding the ordinary-luggage thing amusing-first, because he knew the seemingly typical bags Riley and Tim were hefting around happened to be stuffed with solid gold, and at two-hundred-plus pounds each, were highly likely to do some lower-back damage to this rookie team of baggage handlers. Marveling at the sheer number of bags, he also wondered where the hell they’d got all the damn things-it was as though Cap’n Roy had been seizing a few Samsonites a day for months on end, eagerly awaiting the day when eight crates of stolen Mayan artifacts would arrive in Road Harbor aboard a flame-scarred yacht.
The smaller man and his thug checked each bag and both crates before Riley and Tim loaded them aboard. The thug held a clipboard, which the smaller man took from him and wrote upon following his examination of each bag. It looked to Cooper as though he didn’t trust the bigger man to get it right.
Twenty-nine minutes after the plane had pulled in, the last garment bag was stuffed into the belly of the plane. Without another wasted gesture, the smaller man climbed the plane’s stairwell; the thug followed and closed the door behind them. Riley leaped aboard the luggage train and sped back to the terminal, Tim following in hot pursuit with the forklift.
The propellers rose in pitch and threw down against the humidity in their distinctive, baritone wail, and then the ATR 72-500 was taxiing away from the terminal and off into the darkness. Cooper counted a hundred and twenty-five seconds before the plane sped into view again, appearing in the splash of light from the terminal, nosing up and shooting from the runway and into the night.
He counted another nine seconds before the plane could no longer be seen, swallowed whole by the deep black of the Caribbean night. Cooper heard Cap’n Roy make a cluck-cluck sound of some sort, and as he turned, he found himself forced to field another toss from the chief minister.
This time Cap’n Roy was throwing a few bricks of cash at him.
He caught the money, shoved most of it in the pockets of his swim trunks, and, offering no parting gesture whatsoever, started back for the terminal. He had made it about halfway there when a stinging sensation pricked him in the corner of his eye. He waved it off, intending to shoo away whatever bug had stung him, then realized it hadn’t been a bug at all. Instead, turning his head in the direction of the source, he realized it had been a visual sting-a sharp burst of light in the distance which, in the time it took him to turn, had already expanded into a blinding cotton ball of orange. He found the lack of noise accompanying the ballooning burst of light odd, since what he was seeing came with the one-word translation of explosion-
At which point the sound waves came along, and the out-of-sync crack and bass-toned voom completed the translation.
Once it had sunk in, Cooper let his eyes fall to Cap’n Roy, who had stopped, bent over the two bags, frozen in the motion of lifting them from the tarmac.
Cap’n Roy stared at Cooper, and Cooper stared back at Cap’n Roy.
While it seemed a bit of a stretch-a stupid set of acts, were Roy to have committed them-Cooper’s game of connect-the-dots matching Cap’n Roy up with the murder of Po Keeler, and now the detonation of the plane, remained too easy to play. He took the theory for one last spin. Had Roy gone completely off the deep end? Offed the yacht transporter or had him offed, and then, deciding he’d got away with that, gone ahead and blown the plane out of the sky, post-exchange, post-sale, that plane going up in a ball of flame that took out the people inside too-the only people besides himself and Roy’s own band of merry men who might otherwise identify the corrupt Virgin Islands cop who’d sold the stash of gold?
Staring at the chief minister, Cooper considered it would also be logical for Cap’n Roy to experience a moment of hesitation and suspect him. He knew, though, that once Cap’n Roy considered things, the good chief minister would conclude there was nothing in it for him-as he, unfortunately, found himself concluding with regard to Cap’n Roy. There were much easier ways for Roy to keep things quiet-plus, Roy wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, at least not according to Cooper’s experience with the man.
Cooper looked at the bags in Cap’n Roy’s hands. In case Roy couldn’t see his eyes in the darkness, he jutted his chin in the direction of the bags.
“Be good to get that money out of here,” he said to the chief minister.
Cap’n Roy held his eyes.
“Where this money goin’,” he said, “nobody be findin’ it anytime soon.”
Cooper, still looking at him, turned his shoulders, kind of pivoting at the hip until he had himself squared up with the islands’ top cop.