He kept his stroke on autopilot until he felt the sandy bottom rub up against his knees, stood shakily, headed back out on the dock, retrieved his T-shirt and flip-flops, and made directly for the sack. There was nobody around, and only the dim yellow safety lights were lit, as he shuffled through the kitchen and garden to bungalow nine. Lacking the energy to peel off his wet swim trunks, he simply left them on and toppled into bed.

Sometime shortly thereafter, as Cooper began to feel the creeping pull of sleep, his ears were pierced by the single most aggravating noise he remembered hearing. Lost in the initial moments of unconsciousness, he must have missed the short chortle that signaled an incoming fax on the HP all-in-one he kept hooked to his mobile sat phone console, but he didn’t miss the rest of it: the ink-jet housing grinding along its plastic strip, the creaking rollers contorting the paper through its designated route, the cartridge whining and whirring as it shot the page with thousands of pinpricks of black ink. Worse still-at least for Cooper in his fatigued post-swim state-was the length of the document ink-jetting itself to fruition. He kept thinking the racket would end with each succeeding page, but then the goddamned machine would suck another sheet into its maw and grind out another round of noise. Cooper counted fourteen pages before the racket ceased.

Thinking, after ten minutes of staring at the fan attached to his ceiling, that he could always sleep in-at least so long as the goat-of-the-day wasn’t going nuts-he flopped his legs out of bed, took the two steps into the middle of his room, and snagged the document from the printer. He flipped on the light and sat in his reading chair, loudly pushing the wires and other paraphernalia out of the way as he kicked his ankles up on the ottoman and sat back to read.

The cover page, otherwise blank, contained the ink-jet-transmitted version of five words written in Professor Susannah Grant’s looping cursive script. It said:

To: Island Man

From: Me

Cooper tossed the cover page on the floor and started in on the other thirteen, where he found Susannah to be true to her word: she’d promised her analysis of the artifacts within forty-eight hours of their lab session, even delivered eight hours early. Cooper hadn’t necessarily expected a three A.M. transmission, but all the better. His swim had just about cleansed him, and the sooner he found a buyer and unloaded the merchandise, the sooner he’d be free and clear of Cap’n Roy’s filth. Cooper thinking if Susannah’s fax gave him enough to go on, he might just be able to place a call in the morning, set up an exchange, and be done with it. Done with the artifacts, done with the incinerated body of Po Keeler, and done with Cap’n Roy.

It occurred to him there was the issue of who had killed Keeler-Cooper assuming, begrudgingly, that Roy hadn’t. He decided he would cross that bridge when he came to it. If ever.

He read that Susannah had concluded the artifacts belonged to some Central American native tradition, likely Mayan from what she called the Decadent period-date of origin, mid-nineteenth or early twentieth century, which sounded odd to him. She deemed them authentic, with a total value she called “difficult to estimate,” though she referenced a similar, smaller collection that had been auctioned through Christie’s in 1998 for an average winning bid of $1.24 million per piece. Assuming full authentication, a comparable perceived value, and a few years of appreciation, Susannah estimated that the auction-house value of Cap’n Roy’s stash would fall between sixty and eighty million bucks.

She spelled out the likelihood of the potential geographic origin of the gold used in the artifacts-somewhere along the continental spine connecting North and South America. She bolstered the gold-origin data with a cultural analysis of the images depicted in the collection. Most of what was depicted on the pieces, she said, fit the cultural, religious, and societal norms of “original” Mayan civilizations-in other words, those whose artifacts might have dated a millennium earlier than 150 years ago. Nonetheless she insisted the artifact-dating results were reliable, and speculated as to one possible explanation: the creators of Cap’n Roy’s stash of artifacts currently lived, or, some 150 years ago had lived in some remote locale, comprising one of what was generally estimated to be at least a few hundred “isolated remnant civilizations” found in mountainous, jungle, or otherwise treacherous or inaccessible regions of Central America.

Susannah wrote that she suspected this “remnant civilization” was “in all likelihood now lost,” since she had been unable to find anything relating to the existence of a contemporary tribe or cultural group currently practicing the sort of lifestyle depicted in the carvings and sculptures in the collection. Also, she wrote, such a group would be “unlikely to part amicably” with such burial artifacts as these. They were too sacred.

Cooper noted with an internal twinge that Susannah had narrowed her estimate on the whereabouts of the artifacts’ origin to a region encompassing the lower midsection of Central America. She’d boxed out an area on a map, including within her marked box parts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Staring at the rectangle of black ink Susannah had marked on the map, Cooper felt a vague, echoing thump, as though a muscle in his heart had decided to expunge its contents prematurely.

Cooper didn’t exactly keep this part of the world on his list of favorite places to visit.

Sitting there in his reading chair, the one light in his bungalow shining down from its nook in the ceiling fan, he gave some thought to Professor Susannah Grant. He thought about her mostly to stop himself from thinking about some other things he didn’t want to think about-but thinking about her didn’t offer much help.

After their afternoon in the lab, she’d taken him for a ride in her coupe and shown him one of Austin’s claims to fame-North America’s largest colony of Mexican free-tailed bats, all residing beneath a single bridge called the Congress Avenue Bridge. The bats headed out for the night’s insect hunt, in a dizzyingly endless stream, from beneath the bridge, beginning around dusk. Cooper found it odd but impressive. Afterward, she’d insisted on visiting him in his room at the Hyatt, but after a mere ninety minutes of remembrance, he’d sent her home early, Cooper regretting the whole trip upon the first brush of skin. Thinking that sometimes you just knew you’d made a wrong turn-time to head back.

She didn’t take the early dismissal particularly well, but despite her dour mood at last glimpse, Professor Grant had delivered.

Cooper didn’t like what the analysis was telling him about the people who belonged to the artifacts-or had, once. He didn’t like what it meant about the plea for help he was now certain he’d heard the golden-idol priestess on the shelf demand of him. And he didn’t like something else about all of this-particularly if Cap’n Roy hadn’t been the one to ace the belonger-to-the-rich.

Cooper tossed the fax onto the cement floor of his bungalow. It made a loud slapping sound-to Cooper, a perfect noise, an exclamation point on this episode of his life. He stood, shrugged his shoulders, rolled his head around to loosen the kinks in his neck, reached over to flip off the light, took the two blind steps he’d taken a few million times before-usually drunk-and fell back into bed. Thinking, as he imagined the muck and grime slipping from his body, that Susannah’s map, and what existed within it, didn’t matter for shit. Thinking that he’d heard all he needed to hear, and that the end was therefore near.

Cap’n Roy’s stash was worth as much as Roy had hoped, maybe considerably more-one large shitload of dollars. With one, or maybe two phone calls tops, Cooper held no doubt he’d be able to find somebody to take the goods off Cap’n Roy’s pesky little hands-a fence-and be done with it.