“Maybe he thinks he’s invincible,” said Thorn.
“Or invisible,” Sugarman said. “Well, we got a guy at the jail right now I know would be happy to love this guy. Make a hell of a cell mate.”
“Jesus.”
“Not so loud with that,” Sugarman said. “Jeannie.” He nodded toward the back of the house.
“Is that it then?”
“Well, the big guy was half shark-eaten when he came in. We sent his teeth to Tallahassee. I’m told by county medical the guy had some first-class bridgework; pathologist said he’d never seen anything like it. Stuff like that can turn out to be as good ID as fingerprints. Can be hell to track down, but it’s a place to get going.”
Jeannie called from the back of the house, “Are you talking about me, Sugarman?”
“I want to see these guys that did my house,” Thorn said.
Sugarman said, “I’ll meet you down there in half an hour.”
“ ’Cause if you are,” she called out, “I want to hear what it is you’re saying about me.”
At the door, hearing Jeannie banging around back there. Thorn said, “I just want to look at them, see their faces.”
“Sugarman!” she called. “Close that door! Those mosquitoes are carrying me off.”
Sugarman tightened the towel around his waist and said, “You know, until she came back, I was thinking of leaving.”
“Leaving Key Largo?”
“Key Largo. Florida, all of it. Going up north. I was thinking about New Jersey.”
“New Jersey? Nobody goes to New Jersey.”
“I still might,” he said. “I’ve heard it’s nice there.”
“This is your home, Sugarman. You were born here. You can’t just chuck it like that. These are your roots.”
“What kind of place is this? It’s like living in a damn airport. Everybody’s got a suitcase, Thorn. Somebody you’ve never seen before is sitting in your spot at the diner. I hear they got basements in New Jersey. I’d like to see a basement for once.”
Thorn shook his head.
“Sugarman!” Jeannie called. “You shut that door or I’m calling the police.”
“I’ll see you down there,” Thorn said.
Thorn walked out to the Fleetwood, hearing another rumble louder than the three-wheeler or the chain saw. He looked over his shoulder up into the trees. It was Jerome making his midweek run, trimming the treetops, driving the senile war veterans under their couches. Spreading his cancerous relief.
He got into the Caddy, started up the V-eight. He watched the blue smoke filter down, probably mixed now with African dust. He took in a lungful of that gas. Holding it in like dope smoke, getting high on the poison, holding in the pinch of someone’s dried-up homeland.
He looked around the shady neighborhood. Everybody standing around with their rakes, their lawn mowers, their sponges and hoses, letting that haze break apart before they got back to it.
Thorn waited on the sidewalk outside the jail on Plantation Key. Sugarman arrived, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt. His eyes looked sore and heavy, but Thorn didn’t ask him about it. He’d heard Jeannie’s voice.
Sugarman led Thorn inside and back to the holding cells. The other cops glanced at Thorn and nodded at him. Not a member of their club, maybe, but no longer just one of those others.
“These guys,” Sugarman said as they waited for a door to be unlocked, “they picked up their morals on their lunch break. Getting stoned and listening to outlaw music.”
The two guys in the cell looked a lot like redbeard’s friends. Wore their hair in ponytails. One of them had a little dot of gold on his earlobe. Thorn stared at them. And they, sitting on the edge of their cots, smoking cigarettes, stared back at him.
“They didn’t kill her,” Thorn said. “She would’ve tossed these shits overboard.”
23
THORN WATCHED SUGARMAN pull his van into traffic and start home. He waited until the van was well up the highway, and he got out of the Fleetwood and went back into the county building.
Janice Deels was at the counter for car and boat registrations. She was on the phone but covered the mouthpiece and whispered to Thorn she’d be right with him, rolling her eyes at the person on the line.
He stood next to the water fountain and watched her talk. He felt as if his blood were glowing. Sarah was Dallas James’s daughter. The eye patch guy and his partner had killed Kate. The two of them were connected with Grayson and Ricki. Sarah and Kate had been bringing in dope. Kate was dead. Eye patch was dead.
Sharing the same air, breathing in, breathing out. All that air, all those molecules endlessly passing between us, along streams of air, connecting us, converting us. In this hothouse, this closed system, breathing in the expelled breath of men long dead, breathing out molecules that will outlive us. Caught in a plot too complex for any one mind to hold. Quentin and Elizabeth breathing out, Dallas James breathing in, Dallas exhaling, Sarah inhaling. Thorn, standing beside the water fountain, trying to breathe.
I’m awful sad about Kate,” Janice said, taking his arm and turning him to the door. “I hope you’re doing OK.” Her arm in his, she led him outside to the shade of a banyan, her brown paper sack in her left hand.
“I’m getting better,” said Thorn.
“Well, good!”
Janice had been a cheerleader. He remembered how she’d cried after losing games. He remembered her giving speeches in the auditorium about pep.
They sat on the grass under the banyan, and Thorn accepted one of her pieces of fried chicken and held it while she ate.
“I’m glad you came to see me,” she said. “I think about you.”
Thorn nodded. Holding his chicken. Breathing in, and out again.
“You know,” she said. “I hear about you. I hear you’re dating a girl from Miami.”
“I need your help, Janice.”
She wiped her mouth with a napkin, leaned across and took hold of his arm, and smiled at him earnestly. “Whatever I can do, Thorn, you know that.”
“Irving David McMann,” she said in a hoarse whisper, and wrote it on a pad. She typed in another command, watched her screen for a moment and whispered, “He lives at Coral Reef. One-ten Barracuda Lane. Apartment A.” She wrote that down. “Is that all you want?”
“You can’t let anyone know I asked you for this.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the woman working at the desk behind her. “I like my job.”
“I appreciate it, Janice.”
“Perfect Execution. What is this guy, a friend of yours?”
“He owes me something,” Thorn said.
She stood up and leaned across the counter and pecked him on the cheek.
“Perk up, Thorny.” She squeezed his biceps. “Did you know the prayer group has been praying for you?”
“Don’t stop now.”
“I’m in the book,” she said.
Thorn slipped the note in his pocket and left.
Irv was getting the classic late start. He’d overslept because the electricity had gone off and on sometime during the night and his digital clock was just blinking to be reset. Then he’d had to track down a key to Milburn’s condo, where they’d stored the heavy ammo. He’d decided to go paramilitary on this. He’d hyped himself to a paranoid, full-tilt rage, picturing the kind of delivery boy who carried a million dollars.
Then the BMW wouldn’t start, so he had to call the Reef Exxon station to come tow it in. And then he had to pack the rest of the grenades, the Uzi, and the sawed-off shotgun into a pack, something he could strap onto the Kawasaki 650.
So, it was one-thirty, hot as shit, humidity 105. Irv always said it wasn’t the heat, it was the stupidity. If he had any goddamn sense, he’d be spending the summers in Mendocino. Like his old man, the chicken franchise king. Johnny Chickenseed, Irv called him. Never to his face. But when Irv had that million safe in municipal bonds, shit, he’d call the old man any damn thing he
pleased. Usually Irv just did a month in the winter at Coral Reef Club, then back to Manhattan or the family house at the Cape. But this year things had been happening, and he’d just coasted on into the summer. Never again.
Irv was astraddle the motorcycle, about to crank it up, when he remembered the photograph of the guy Thorn. An extremely familiar guy, not much of a haircut, but a good jaw, good wide chest. The photograph was of this Thorn guy and Ricki standing outside Sloppy Joe’s Bar along with the old lady charter boat captain. Irv liked having a photo of her. Like an old lover, you look at it, and some of the memories come floating back up. Yeah. Like her throwing fucking chum in his face.
Irv thought maybe he should buy a Polaroid, snap a shot of all his victims from now on. Something to remember all this by, something for his weird little grandchildren. He’d sit in his rocker and tell them, This is before. And this with the blood is after.
Irv went back in the condo. He’d stuck the photograph on the front of his refrigerator with one of those little magnetic vegetables. A brussels sprout or was it a broccoli? Irv didn’t eat shit like that, so he wasn’t sure.
The plan was, he’d go back to the mangroves at old man Clay’s house. Stay there for a while, get nasty, starve himself a little, and when his blood was cooking, he’d cruise on down the road to where this Thorn lived. Isolated spot, it looked like on the map Ricki had drawn. Perfect place for a little explosion. Irv McMann’s Carnage à la Carte.
After two hours out in the golf club parking lot, baking in the Fleetwood, wondering if anyone was watching him, calling in to security, Thorn saw the short guy come out of his town house and watched him open the door of the small attached garage and try to kick-start a big red motorcycle. Finally it caught and filled up the garage with oily smoke. Thorn slumped down.
He waited till the guy had rumbled out to the main road; then he started the car and pulled out. Following a quarter mile back, Thorn wound through the Coral Reef streets, feeling conspicuous as hell in that rusted boat. But at the same time his heart was light and fast. He’d found the guy, found where he slept, where the asshole lay down and dreamed.
Past the guard gate the cycle went straight ahead at the four-way stop, still pumping out blue smoke. The guy was wearing a chunky pack, army regulation. And black, shiny long pants and a black, shiny shirt, a red helmet. Thorn couldn’t tell much about his face. But he was short, five-four or -five, and he’d come out of the town house, 110 Barracuda Lane, apartment A. Had to be him.
When the bike slowed to about forty, Thorn thought maybe he’d been spotted, and he passed, watching in the rearview mirror as the guy pulled off onto the shoulder, just down from the entrance road into Amos Clay’s. Thorn drove on, thinking, Oh, boy, oh, boy. You get enough chum in the water, things start happening.
He drove on up 905 for another couple of miles, then stopped and turned around. About two hundred yards before Amos Clay’s drive he pulled off onto the shoulder. He got out and cut into the woods, heading north to the spot where he’d seen Irving McMann enter the jungle.
It took him almost half an hour to cover the half mile. Stepping carefully, and halting. Listening. Moving ahead another few yards, prying through the tangle of brush, his eyes scanning for any movement, the flash of that shiny black outfit.
Thorn was about fifty feet from Irv’s camp when he saw him. Pressing his back against an oak, he watched through a mesh of vines and Florida holly, Irving David McMann clean his Uzi. He had it broken down and spread out on a clear plastic tarp, and he was running a brush in and out the barrel. Amos Clay’s place was two hundred yards to the east, just a glimpse of it visible through the dense bush.
On his toes, Thorn retreated, taking his bearings. North of a giant gumbo-limbo. Maybe a stone’s throw from the highway.
The mosquitoes had discovered Thorn. They were sending their straws into his neck, his shoulders, his arms. Sipping. Stoning themselves on adrenaline.
24
SARAH WAS WAITING at Thorn’s place, sitting in her Trans Am in the shade of a sea grape tree when he returned. He parked the Caddy beneath the stilt house and went over to her car and got in.
She didn’t look rested. Her madras blouse was wrinkled. She didn’t smell fresh.
“My place is a mess,” he said. “Let’s do this at Kate’s.”
She drove. Her window open, her hair tangling in the wind.
“So where’s the cash? Where do you keep it?”
She didn’t look at him.
“OK,” he said. “Then let me try this, tell you a story. Stop me if you don’t like it.” He rested his hand on her shoulder. Patted her once. Relax.
He said, “Once there is a little girl, eleven, twelve years old, having a so-so childhood. And one night she wakes up out of a deep sleep because she thinks she hears something, or maybe it’s just some slight barometric change that wakes her. She follows her instincts out to her front porch, and she sees a teenage boy holding her father up against his car. And the boy rears back and hits her father. And she sees them drive away together. The next day she wakes up and she thinks maybe it’s all a dream. Right away after that her mother comes in her room and tells her that her father has been killed in a car accident. He’d been drinking, out for some weird midnight drive.
“Maybe then the mother goes on and tells the little girl about that other accident her father’d been involved in a long time ago, happened in the same spot where he died. Maybe he’d even had others.
“But the little girl can’t forget her dream. She grieves over her father’s death and keeps her dream to herself. Sometime later, maybe she’s a teenager by now, she finds out the details of that other accident, eighteen years earlier, there in Lake Surprise. The father had killed a young couple. Their baby had survived. This baby would’ve grown up. He would’ve been a teenager about the time the little girl’s dream comes to her. And she—she maybe suddenly knows it all. She knows how this boy felt having his father and mother killed. She knows all of a sudden what loss, hatred, and obsession he might have known.”
Sarah kept her eyes ahead. The road was empty, but she was hard at work driving.
“How is this so far?”
She looked at him, a grudging softening of her face. “You’re on a roll.”
“Well,” Thorn said, “so now our little girl is feeling what the boy felt. Maybe even identifying a little with his anger. This burn that won’t stop. She forces herself to eat, to sleep, to hold a pencil and pay attention. She manages to get through high school, and by now, maybe she’s thinking, No, it couldn’t be. This is crazy, why am I screwing up my life like this? It was just a dream anyway. Maybe a quirky touch of precognition, a little ESP dream or something. However it happened, she gets through college, and she goes on to law school. Maybe somewhere in here it starts haunting her again, and she decides—”
“No,” she said. “You’re straying now.”
“Ah, OK.” Thorn closed his eyes, pressed his hand to his forehead, consulting his muse. “I got it. She never skips a beat. Always haunted. Never lets it go.”
“That’s better,” Sarah said.
“Yeah, yeah. And then there’s law school. That was to bring the guy to justice. Find out about legal rights. All that stuff. ’Cause basically our young woman is civilized. Go into her living room. Speak to her mother. The little girl had a good life, moral training. Maybe her emotional training was a little cold, a little halfhearted, but basically she has scruples. She wants to nail this asshole, but nail him legal if it’s at all possible.
“So, now, she’s out of law school, and she knows the law isn’t going to help her any on this. She takes a job, a perfect job for somebody feeling guilty about this murder fantasy she’s been having, and she starts driving down to Key Largo on the weekends, sniffing around. Scene-of-the-crime stuff. Maybe she’d already done some of that in high school. She knows the guy’s last name from the newspaper article. Key Largo’s a small town, so she finds out fairly quickly. But
there’s one hitch. She’s not absolutely sure. There’s a shadow of a doubt.
“And she might imagine it, showing up on this guy’s front porch and saying, ‘Hi, I’m the daughter of the man who killed your parents. Want to talk?’ That wouldn’t work. So she decides to go undercover. She starts using her mother’s maiden name. She reads about Kate in the newspaper, all her environmental battles, and our lawyer decides it’s a good time to develop an interest in wood rats.”
Sarah turned off the highway into Kate’s driveway. Thorn was quiet till she’d parked beside the house. The sky was darkening in the east. Another storm, more Sahara dust.
She turned off the motor and drew a coil of hair free from the corner of her mouth. When she turned her eyes to him, he said, “She and Kate spend some time together, and she starts to like it. She’s not that hot about wood rats, but Kate, Kate she likes.
“Then girl meets boy. Over here. Boy comes over one night, I think it was a weekend in September, to cook his specialty, Dolphin California, for Kate, and this lovely woman is here. Whose idea was that?”
She said quietly, “It was destiny.”
Thorn chuckled and said, “So then, there we are, practically up to the present. Woman tracks down man she thinks murdered her father. Takes him to bed. Tries out special new truth serum. But lo and behold, instead of confessing that he killed her daddy, he’s smitten. He invites her along to his little ceremony, as she called it. He’s ready to confess to her all his dirty little secrets, and what’s she do? She’s swimming out there, splashing around.”
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