She hit the brakes, and Thorn caught himself, thumping his hands against the dash.
Sarah slid the shifter into neutral and tapped the shift knob with her fingernail, thinking it all over, watching her finger as she tapped.
She said, “I have a life, a whole world you don’t know anything about.”
“You mean men. Men.”
“A lot of things, Thorn. I like you, I think of us as very close friends. Friends who can confide in each other.”
“Friends who can confide in each other.” Thorn watched her tapping out her Morse code. Her eyes still lowered.
She said, “I like to talk to you. I like you to talk to me.”
“You have other lovers?”
“I see other men.” She looked up, let him have a taste of her sharp blue eyes.
“But you like to talk to me. For me to talk to you,” Thorn said. “I’m trying to get this straight. I’m trying to hear what you’re telling me.”
“Thorn, Thorn, Thorn. I don’t know what to do with you.” She took his hand and held it in both of hers. She shook her head and brought his hand to her mouth, kissed the back of it. Thorn watched her kissing it, her eyes closed now.
“I’m going too fast,” Thorn said. “I’m scaring you, going this fast. You think I’m just saying this ’cause Kate was killed, ’cause I’m in shock, ’cause I’ve got a hangover.” He knew his voice sounded frantic, uneven. He swallowed, gave her hand a squeeze.
“No, Thorn. You don’t scare me,” she said. “I scare me.” She put his hand back in his lap. “I’m trying very hard to be honest with you. I don’t want to have to hurt you.”
“So,” Thorn said, trying to shift into an upbeat voice, “what’s Amos Clay have to do with this?”
They sat silently for a few minutes in Amos Clay’s drive, and then Sarah cleared her throat and began to explain it to him. Amos Clay’s 430 acres was the proposed site for Port Allamanda. The tract hadn’t been purchased yet by the Grayson Group. They were getting all the environmental impact rulings settled first, all the public hearings, all the variances. The investors were leery, not ready to sink millions into the project and have it held up somewhere in court once it got started.
So when Kate had learned this, she’d sat down with Amos Clay and had made a deal with him. This old lobsterman who’d bought that worthless isolated land a little at a time for thirty years, Amos Clay, was ready to cash in. And his old friend Kate Truman had wrangled an agreement out of him, a right of first refusal. Before he could sell the tract to the Grayson Group, he had to give her a shot at it.
“The contract expires August first,” Sarah said. “Either we complete the deal by then, or Grayson and his people get the land.”
“How much does he want?”
“A million cash.”
Thorn laughed.
“What? You think that’s high?” Sarah said. “It’s a steal. This is the last major tract of waterfront this size between Homestead and Key West. Everything else is off the auction block. Either it’s state park or it’s been designated by the state as in an area of critical concern, not for sale. Amos’s land’s probably worth ten million, maybe more. But Amos has it in his mind to be a millionaire. One million’s all he wants.”
Sarah gazed down the path. Broken chunks of limestone in their way. An egret picking at a patch of dirt.
“Oh,” Thorn said. “Now I’m getting it. I’m a little slow. Somebody knew what Kate was up to. What the both of you were up to.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Sarah said, still looking at the egret. “That wouldn’t be a good thing if they did. A lot of people would be very pissed off. It’d be more serious than making speeches about wood rats. If Kate owns this, there’s no project, nothing. And you know—don’t you?—we’re talking about millions of dollars here. Huge profits. Lots of jobs, lots of spillover business for Key Largo.”
She put the car in gear, and Thorn sat back. His hangover was loosening its grip. He breathed in the brackish air, feeling it fill a new hollow inside him.
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”
“Sure you do, Amos. We were up in Shark River, in your old seventeen-foot skiff, and you’d been filling up the fish box all morning with snapper and redfish and we went up the river a hundred yards and I caught a six-pound bass. Liked to give you a heart attack finding freshwater fish so close to a saltwater fish.” Thorn talking Florida cracker, or trying to.
“I never fished with you.”
“I’m Kate’s boy.”
“Where’s Kate at?”
“She’s on a trip,” said Sarah.
“Where to?”
“Up north.”
“Well, I know that,” he said. “Ain’t nowhere else to go but north.”
“She may be away for a while,” said Sarah. “That’s why we stopped by. I wanted to make sure you knew we’re planning to close our deal the thirty-first of this month.”
Amos mulled that over. He was sitting in his rocker, one of Dr. Bill’s chairs, an early model before Dr. Bill’d begun to mold the wood like sculpture. Amos’s coral house still smelled the way it had twenty years before, when Thorn had come over for visits with Kate or Dr. Bill, to take Amos fishing in the backcountry. It was thick with the odor of moldering laundry, mildew, and whiskey.
The thing that had changed in those years was the floor. It now sagged so badly that anything that wasn’t fastened down had begun to slide toward the middle. Rotten floorboards probably. A deep trough ran through the whole house, and from where Thorn sat, he could see drinking glasses, beer cans, and silverware that had slid into the sag. The lamp beside Amos’s chair was leaning dangerously toward the middle of the house. Some of the pine planks had splintered from the strain, and tumbleweeds of dust were caught in the prongs of frayed wood.
“I told you I wanted it in cash now. Don’t think I’ll take any goddamn check or anything else.”
“It’ll be cash,” Sarah said.
Amos turned on Thorn, his gray stubble catching the noon light. On his cheeks and forehead there were dark pigment spots like dried spatters of blood.
“Who’s this you brought along?”
Sarah rolled her eyes, beseeched the ceiling.
“You know me, Amos. I’m Thorn. Kate’s boy. Dr. Bill’s.”
“I don’t know any Thorn.”
“We went fishing together. We caught us a mess of fish. You were the best backcountry guide anywhere around here.”
“That don’t mean nothing. Don’t try to butter me up. Nothing from back then matters worth a damn to me. I’m headed out of here before somebody hangs a sign on me. And starts charging Yankees a nickel apiece to see the last Conch in captivity.”
“Amos? Have you spoken to anyone about our contract?” Sarah couldn’t hide her impatience. She was bent forward toward Amos, her face ruddy in that dim light.
“Hell, no. She told me not to. Don’t get me riled. Making me out to be some goddamn nitwit. I know what’s right? You know what’s right?” He swallowed some more of his drink. It looked like whiskey in the tea glass.
“It’s important, Amos,” Thorn said. “You mustn’t tell anybody about Kate, or about Sarah.”
“I can handle this, Thorn. Please.” Sarah was on her feet, leaning away from the downhill pull of that sag. “I’m preparing all the papers, Amos. And I wanted to set up a specific closing time. I was hoping the afternoon on Thursday, the thirty-first, would be OK with you.”
“I got other buyers,” he said. “I’m giving Kate a chance at it, but it don’t matter none to me. I’m going to be a millionaire either way it works out. I always knowed I’d be one. Don’t ask me how, but I knowed it since I was little I’d be a goddamn millionaire. John D. Himself. Yes, sir, it was a time everybody laughed and laughed when I bought more of this land. But they’re dead serious now. Dead serious.”
“We’ve got to settle on a time first, Amos,” Sarah said.
“I heard you.” He swallowed some of
his whiskey and gave Sarah a cagey stare. “Two weeks from today,” he said, jutting his chin out, in control, the millionaire.
“That’s right,” said Sarah, “good, two weeks then.” She hitched her bag over her shoulder.
Thorn rose.
“And I won’t deal with nobody but Kate.”
Thorn watched Sarah field that. She smiled at Amos, stepping over to him, and patted him on his shoulder.
“Amos,” she said. “Kate’s been trying to get Thorn here in on things. Get him more involved so he doesn’t wind up a mean old housebound coot like you. She was hoping you’d deal with Thorn on this. Go ahead, just like normal, same price, same terms. But it’d be Thorn signing the papers and handing over the cash.”
Amos looked down at Sarah’s hand on his shoulder. He sniffed. Squinted at Thorn.
“I knowed who you were, boy. I knowed the minute you walked in here. I remember that afternoon clear as a photograph. And it weren’t any six-pound bass. That’s just like you. It was four and a half. I can still recall the important things. If it’s got fish in it, it’s still up here.” He tapped his temple.
Thorn smiled at him and stepped across the floor’s divide to shake his hand.
Amos glared at Thorn’s extended hand and shook his head fast and hard.
“I ain’t shaking your damn hand till it’s full of money. You come back here in two weeks with my million American dollars and I’ll be shaking both your hands. Now get on out of here, the both of you.”
As they were driving back down 905, Sarah said, “Do you trust him?”
“No.”
“Me either,” Sarah said. “He’s not a bad man. Just highly porous.”
Thorn could feel Sarah glancing at him. But he kept his face ahead, watching the rough asphalt pass beneath them.
“You mad at me, for telling you how I feel?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t call it mad.”
“What is it? Tell me.”
“Where does the cash come from, Sarah?”
Her foot came off the accelerator briefly. As she eased it back on, she said, “That’s another story.”
“I want to hear it.”
“It’s too long to go into now,” she said.
“Were you bringing in dope?”
“Thorn, don’t be an ass.”
He turned and stared at that mouth, tried hard to place it.
She dropped him off at Kate’s. Thorn, keeping his voice neutral, told her she was welcome to stay there.
She said she guessed she’d go on back to Miami. She was way behind at work. He watched her drive away; then he went inside the house, found Kate’s car keys. He took the VW south to the Waldorf Shopping Plaza. As he drove, he thought he could still smell the sickening honey aroma of dead wood rat.
He drove south to Key Largo’s only shopping center—a dime store, two gift shops, and a run-down grocery. A bookstore specializing in fishing magazines and shell books. He cut through the parking lot and drove back into the neighborhood behind, along a winding street past half-million-dollar houses on deep canals. Most of them deserted for the summer. A treeless neighborhood. Stark yards covered with pea-size rocks imported from North Carolina. Back in these new neighborhoods there was no grass to cut, nothing to fuss over during their season here and nothing to worry about after they shut up the house and headed back to Ohio. Glaring white houses. Each one positioned so it had a blue slice of the Atlantic for its own.
He parked the VW outside the Quonset hut that was the office for Jerome Billings, Jr. and Sr., owners of Bash-a-Bug, Key Largo’s oldest pest control service.
16
THERE WAS A SIGN on the door that said KNOCK FIRST, so Thorn pounded three times and waited. Three more times. He bent over and peered through the dusty window. Jerome senior was leaning back in his chair, his bare feet up on the desk. A chrome hubcap near his feet where a cigar smoldered.
Thorn dragged the rusty door open and stepped inside.
“Hey, Thorn,” Jerome called above the chug of the air conditioner. He waved Thorn into a chair and put aside the pistol magazine he was reading. “They find the sorry bastard yet?”
“Not yet,” Thorn said, still standing by the door.
It was hotter in there than outside, and Thorn told him so.
Jerome said, “The gotblamed thing feels like it’s stuck on reverse cycle.”
“Be cooler without it,” Thorn said, straining to speak above the rattle and huff of the machine.
“It just takes it a while to catch up on days like this. I’m used to it.”
Thorn asked him where Jerome junior was.
“Out in the bird,” he said. “Poor fucker.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh, they’re needle-dripping him. They cut him open, took out a goiter the size of a house. Kid’s a goner.”
“Oh, shit.”
“He’s gone deaf, too. Got to get up next to him and holler like the devil.”
“Jesus, Jerome. They just find this out?”
“Two, three weeks back. Started off bleeding from the shorts. Never a good sign, bleeding from the shorts.” He picked up his magazine again, found his place, and said, “Used to be, living down here, eating fresh fish, good clean air, people lived to be older than rocks. But gone are the days, Thorn. All the shit coming down lately, it’s as bad as living in Miama.”
Thorn opened the door, let the sun and air into the room. He said, “People say it was, but I sure don’t remember it ever being a paradise.”
“There was a time,” Jerome said, “it was a shitload closer than it is now.”
Thorn went outside and walked across the asphalt airstrip to the army surplus DC-3 the county used for mosquito spraying. Jerome had been flying it since high school, and there’d been a time when he and Thorn had taken a few aerial-busting rides together.
He climbed up the ladder and leaned through the cockpit window. Jerome was working under the instrument panel, a tangle of wires hanging down across his chest.
Thorn stretched in farther and yelled out Jerome’s name.
Jerome lurched up, whacked his head against the back side of the panel, and squeezed out from under it.
“Good Jesus, Thorn!” Jerome twisted around and sat in the pilot’s seat.
“Sorry, man.”
“My goddamn daddy tell you to do that?”
Thorn said he had.
“Fucker’s going deaf himself, and damn him if he don’t think it’s me can’t hear. Whispers like he’s in church half the time. He’s driving me fucking crazy.”
Jerome junior readjusted his black wig, checking it in the glass of a gauge.
“And this goddamn thing. Feels like I got my head stuck in a bucket of tar.”
“Your daddy lying about the cancer, too, I hope?”
“No,” Jerome said. “He’s right on that one.” Jerome shot a thumb back at the steel tank showing behind him. “Thousand gallons of Malathion. Try flying inside a cloud of that shit for ten years.” He reached into his shirt, dug out his cigarettes. He offered Thorn one, and Thorn shook his head. “Worse thing about having cancer is you got to drive up to Miama. I’d rather have them just cut out my intestines than drive on those highways up there. Between the New Yorkers and the assholes with old-timers’ disease, man, the way they drive, should send ’em all back where they come from. Shut the goddamn state border and lock it tight.”
Thorn watched him light the cigarette, flick the match out his window.
“I heard about Captain Kate,” he said. “Soon as I heard, I told Jerome senior she must’ve come across somebody’s sweet little coke deal. That what it was?”
“Don’t know yet,” Thorn said. He took a sip of air from outside the cabin. “She wasn’t making a lot of friends trying to stop Allamanda the way she was either.”
“I was with her all the way on that, man. But don’t bring it up around himself in there. That old man wants to sell the airstrip to a condo company. What
the hell would I do around this place if I couldn’t fly that plane? Wait tables? Make beds at the Holiday Inn? No, but him in there, he’d sell this place to Castro if he could. The dumb shit bought it when it wasn’t worth nothing, and now he thinks he’s a real estate genius.”
Jerome pressed at his wig. Ribbons of sweat coming from its edges.
“You know, about Captain Kate, I got to say, man, much as I don’t like to, but she was hauling in a lot of fish lately. Lot more than looked healthy.”
“What in the hell does that mean?”
Jerome sucked on the cigarette and eyed Thorn.
“I don’t know, buddy. I just saw her about every time I made a pass along her quadrant, her cockpit with four, five ice chests. Boat riding kind of low in the water. I thought four ice chests? Now that’s a lot of fish. One ice chest is a lot of fish for me. So, naturally, I just thought ...”
He flicked his cigarette out the pilot’s window, smoke coming out his nose and mouth, raising his eyebrows at Thorn.
“I came to ask a favor of you,” Thorn said.
“You don’t have to say nothing to me, Thorny. I wouldn’t say a word to nobody. Hell, I smoke some of that shit myself now and then.”
“I came to ask a favor, Jerome,” Thorn said, keeping his voice empty.
“OK, OK. I thought you should know, is all.”
Thorn said, “I want to borrow the VW, Junior. I’ll trade you Kate’s VW for a couple of days.”
Jerome gave him a look.
“The bash-mobile?”
“Yeah,” Thorn said.
Jerome climbed out of the cockpit and led Thorn behind the Quonset hut where the car was parked. It was a bright pink Volkswagen with round black mouse ears coming off the roof, a long corkscrew tail welded to the trunk. And black whiskers fixed to the hood. Someone had tried to paint two buckteeth in black and white below the whiskers.
“I want to take it down to Key West.”
Jerome said, “The motor’ll get you there and back. But the damn ears are on the blink.”
Jerome showed Thorn the small electric motor mounted on the ceiling inside. He thumped the metal box, and the ears began to wiggle furiously. He hit it again, and they stopped.
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