When Sarah came aboard, they didn’t speak. She stowed the gym bags with the cash inside the live-bait wells, loosened the lines, pulled them aboard, and coiled them neatly. Thorn eased the boat forward into the channel.
They made it to Carysfort Reef by midnight and Thorn killed the motor and they drifted for a while, looking up at the stars. Listening as the flying fish hummed past, chased by something big. There were a couple of other boats out there, fishing for yellowtail, one group drinking and whooping as it reeled up its fish. The wind had lain down, and the moon was nearly full again.
When they had drifted off the reef, back into the quiet dark, Thorn started up the engine again and headed the Heart Pounder out to sea.
“What is it now?” Sarah asked him.
“Four-thirty,” Thorn said. “Looks like we’ve been stood up.” Sarah, at the wheel up on the tuna tower, was staring south into the darkness. The loran flickered green in the dark. Thorn’s hand on the rail beside hers.
“See if I made a mistake,” she said. She pointed the penlight at a scrap of paper she’d opened on the control panel.
Thorn peered at it and said no, that’s where they were. The numbers matched.
“They ever been late before?”
“Not this late,” she said.
“If it was me, I’d split,” Thorn said.
“It is you.”
“It’s both of us,” Thorn said, “And Kate.”
“Five more minutes,” Sarah said.
The swells were regular and deep, rocking them against the railing of the tower stand.
“Let’s go in,” said Thorn. “The deal’s off.” A school of flying fish broke out of the water off their bow, skimmed along for twenty yards, and cut back into a wave.
“Damn,” said Sarah.
Thorn said, “It’s OK. I don’t see why we can’t go ahead with the other part of it. Go on to Amos’s.”
“A hundred thousand dollars short?”
“Amos strike you as a real reliable counter? Think he can count to a million?”
“You don’t know, Thorn. He could have invited a lawyer, a relative, somebody else who was a good counter.”
“You got another suggestion?”
“This is all falling apart, Thorn. I knew it was going to, I felt it.”
“You sure the appointment was for three A.M.?”
Sarah said yes, unfortunately, she was sure of it.
She cranked up the big Chevy and stood aside for Thorn to take them back in.
“The deal’s dead,” Sarah said. “Even if Amos did believe it was a full million, soon as he goes to put it in the bank or in stocks or anywhere, the whole thing would come to light. Banks, they count money pretty carefully. They’d miss a hundred thousand.”
“Amos? A bank? I’m telling you, Sarah. If it’s over ten thousand dollars, Amos is going to believe he’s a millionaire. You get his signature on the contracts, as far as we know later, he lost the hundred thousand, or spent it or gambled it away.”
She said, “I like straight lines, things sticking together. I’ve never been much on making it up as you go.” Sarah shook her head. “But at this point I guess we don’t have much choice but try it your way. Con the old coot. Shit, shit, shit.”
Thorn was lowering the anchor at Carysfort Reef, a place he knew on the outer bank, where it dropped to sixty feet. Ledges down there and a scattering of staghorn coral. He’d dived it plenty of times. There were big grouper lurking around under the ledges. As long as Sarah insisted on this part of the routine, they might as well get supper, tempt one of those drowsy giants out with a jumbo shrimp.
As the anchor chain ran out, Thorn looked out into the fading dark. A searchlight panned the water about a mile to the east. It swung around and made another arc.
Thorn hauled up the anchor and secured it quickly. He hustled back to the cabin, climbed the tower ladder.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“We’re clean,” she said. “No problem.”
“Almost a million in cash on board. That’s pretty damn dirty, Sarah. Let’s go before they decide to hail us.”
Thorn spun the wheel, easing the throttle forward, heading due west, the shortest route to shore.
The spotlight swung back and forth another time. Still too far away to tell if it was a private vessel or not.
Thorn powered the boat up onto a plane, both of them watching the boat behind them. Its searchlight went out. Thorn took a compass heading, Sarah still looking back toward the lightening horizon.
She said, “We’re probably overreacting.”
The searchlight came on again, aiming toward the Heart Pounder.
Sarah cursed, and Thorn kept his eye on the compass heading.
The marine patrol boat gained on them gradually over the next two miles. Sarah banged her ribs against the railing of the tower as Thorn plowed at right angles into the light swells.
“If they really want us, they’ll radio for an intercept.”
“Maybe not,” said Thorn. “They’re spread awful thin out here.” He mashed the throttle lever down for any trickle of extra juice.
By the time they were in the channel off Garden Cove, the marine patrol was five hundred yards behind them. A man’s stony voice came over a loudspeaker, warning them to stop immediately.
“Stop, Thorn,” Sarah said. “It’s over.”
“Cut your engines, Chris-Craft!” came the voice again.
“Just a little farther,” Thorn told her.
They were slowing to make the hard left turn into Crawfish Creek, back into the mangrove canals, no more than fifty yards of visibility in that dusky light. Thorn took them into the turn, the marine patrol now just two hundred yards from their stern, riding their wake.
He gripped the throttle with one hand, the wheel with the other. Told Sarah to hold on.
“No, Thorn, come on. It’s over.”
“I used to play boat tag back here,” he said, watching the mangroves fly past. “This is my second home.”
He whirled the wheel to the right and hit the throttle lever, cutting into an opening in the mangroves that was half the width of the Heart Pounder. The branches scraped the hull, crashing against the railing, but Thorn forged through the narrow canal. Thirty yards of that, and they broke out into a small lagoon. Thorn could hear the other boat back there, slowing, looking for his wash.
Three small creeks led out of the lagoon. Thorn chose one and forced the Heart Pounder into it. The engine almost stalled as the prop dug through the mire, churning up a trail of silt behind them. He powered through mangrove roots, the Chevy chugging now, strangling on the muck.
Sarah ducked the lash of a branch, bumped her nose against the tower rail.
“You OK?”
“Just push this sucker, Thorn. Push it.”
He smiled and made it through the last ten yards and out into a main channel. A twenty-three-foot Mako with some Cuban fishermen was cruising past. They saluted Thorn and Sarah with Budweisers. Dawn beers.
Thorn ducked into two more inlets on the way back to Kate’s. Bulldozing mangrove roots, ramming ahead through passages too narrow for a boat half their size. At one narrow crook of the canal they surprised a couple of teenagers fishing from a little plastic boat, almost capsized them.
Thorn said, “This thing was due for a hull job anyway. I must have scraped a few barnacles off her.”
“Off me, too,” said Sarah. Her face ruddy, a spark in her eyes.
Sugarman recognized this guy, but he couldn’t place him. He sat there with the Bible opened to Ecclesiastes, thinking who this guy was. Fairly short, and nicely dressed. A suit, John Kennedy haircut.
He’d walked into the town house in question at about 1:00 P.M. And Sugarman had been trying to make him for the last hour. He’d narrowed it down to Key West. The guy was a Key Wester, but beyond that, all Sugarman could call up was haze. Key West, Key West. John Kennedy haircut. A suit. Like a banker or some kind of hotshot. A do
ctor, lawyer, haberdasher. No, in Key West, Hart Schaffner & Marx were probably a gay comedy team or a bunch of Communists.
Sugarman stepped out of the way of an old red-faced guy carrying some bright pink golf pants and went over to stand by the entrance to the pro shop, staring at the town house. The slick haircut from Key West had driven up in a gunmetal gray Volvo, very conservative, like his suit. He’d opened the front door of the condo like he had a key. That or the guy was one hell of a locksmith.
The hell of it was, this guy didn’t match the description he was going on. A little too tall and with straight hair.
He debated it. Go over there, frisk the guy, frisk the whole condo. Violate everybody’s rights. Peek in the window? Catch somebody with his zipper open. Or just stay put in the golf shop, drive this young pro into scream therapy. Damn if Sugarman couldn’t use a little scream therapy himself at this point.
Sugarman glared at the condo. Dead quiet over there. He’d wait it out. Be patient. He wasn’t sure if he was being very professional about all this. He could feel a clench building in his throat.
“Twenty, twenty-five pounds,” said Thorn. “I pictured it weighing more. You hear about a million dollars, you think it must take up a whole motel room.”
“In five or tens, it might,” Sarah said. “The people we’ve been dealing with, they like hundreds.”
Thorn put the gym bags with the cash into the bait well. Sarah stepped aboard, put her purse on top of the bait well lid. The Heart Pounder was tied up on one side of the dock, Thorn’s skiff on the other.
“You got everything?” Thorn nodded at her purse.
Sarah gave him a lost look. “I think so.”
“Well, I guess it’s judgment time.”
“I wish you’d stop being so damn upbeat. This is serious.”
“Is that what I’m being?” He turned, yanked the starter rope, and the motor caught. “I’m sorry. Hey, I’m just trying to keep my tongue from sticking to the roof of my mouth.”
27
FOR IRVING MCMANN it wasn’t the million dollars anymore. It wasn’t owning Vacation Island or going to Hollywood, meeting Jack Nicholson or becoming a movie star. By now he’d stared so long at that coral house with its tin roof, at the glimpse of ocean beyond it, at the crotons and sea grape and hibiscus that were planted next to the house, that Irv was sick of this neat little scene, just wanted to make wreckage of it, some absolute over-the-top mayhem.
He was itchy and tired and smelled like he was decomposing. He knew he was slipping into another stage. His thoughts were just coming willy-nilly, nothing connected, a jumble of wild images flowing past. One minute he flexed his biceps and gave it a good feel; next minute he’d slipped the oily barrel of the .44 in his mouth and sucked.
Just that morning he’d been digging with his hands in the sandy dirt, at first thinking of making his campsite into a foxhole, but he’d gotten to limestone in about three inches. So what he did was, he tried a pinch of dirt. Tasting it, connecting with this sacred place where he was about to become rich. Saying to himself that he didn’t want to be Ho Chi Minh anymore. He didn’t even know who Ho was. Thinking maybe what’d be the ultimate challenge at this point was to be Irv McMann. A guy who killed people for his occupation.
His watch showed three o’clock. The thing was going down in the next couple of hours if he could hold on. He was sick of The Story of O, bored by the torture. It was all so polite, her master always asking her before he whipped her if it was OK. Irv had lost his erection. For the last few hours he’d massaged it and squeezed it, but the thing was gone, just a flap of flesh. Dead carne. That scared him a little.
But then, on the other hand, being scared was giving his blood a tremble, a cold burn that Irv thought might just make the whole episode better. He’d pictured two or three burly guys, carrying suitcases of money. Maybe one guy with the suitcases and two big, ugly Italians carrying the automatic weapons. Irv’d run through it over and over, trying to make a movie out of it. He comes charging out of the bushes, wipes out the weaponry first, and then, as the guy with the suitcases goes for his gun, Irv leaps on him and chews his throat out.
Irv McMann lay on his belly, peering at Amos Clay’s house, mosquitoes feasting on his neck, his cheeks, the backs of his hands.
Thorn made the skiff fast at Amos’s dock, a slipknot instead of the usual clove hitches, cinching it up close to the rotting post, for a fast exit.
“I’ll be up there in a minute; you go ahead,” he said.
Sarah wasn’t sure. She stood on the bank, her leather briefcase under her arm. Regarding Thorn. He dragged the gym bags out of the bait locker and carried them over to her.
“You can handle these, can’t you?”
“Of course.” Still staring at him, sizing him, trying to read the poker face.
Thorn said, “I’m just going to snoop around a little first. See who’s in the bushes. Go on in there. I’ll be in to witness in a few minutes.”
“You want the gun?”
“No, you hold on to that.”
Sarah went ahead, walking up the slight knoll to the front door. Thorn watched her knock, wait. The door came open. Amos standing there in overalls, a baseball cap. She looked back at him, said something to Amos, who looked at Thorn, too. Thorn waved at them. Neither waved back.
Sarah went inside.
Thorn retrieved his short-shaft blue rod, the reel reloaded with ten-pound test. A lure he’d named Crazy Billy was tied on. He’d created it the night before, the first fly he’d managed in what felt like months. He’d pulled it up from the void, only a vague idea at first of what he was after. But he had quickly caught the old sizzle.
It was a heavy lure, with brass treble hooks, a wisp of blue Mylar for a tail, broken points of two lead pencils glued on for eyes. The body was a rubber eraser. An obscene lure. No fish alive would strike such a thing. But Thorn didn’t intend it to bring up fish.
He walked toward the house, his eyes swiveling, his tread lightening. Drifting into the quickened senses of bonefish stalking. He came right up to the front door, then melted off to the right, crouching as he went, choosing a route through the dense trees and vines.
The gumbo-limbo he’d taken a sighting on was about a hundred feet behind the house. So Thorn swung wide and started a slow trajectory back to where Irving David McMann waited. Get behind him. Watch him watching. Hook him in the face or eye with Crazy Billy, and then, while he was fighting with the hook and pain, subdue him. Thorn’s chance to bring his man in alive this time. His moment come ’round again.
He seemed to be making too much noise. Poling across the flats was one thing. Slipping the pole in, not stirring the marl, drawing it out without a wake or a flutter of water. But this was a harder thing. Every cobweb seemed hooked to a rattling seedpod; every bed of decaying leaves hid the crunch of a stick.
Thorn brushed mosquitoes from his face. He had already inhaled a bitter insect, lodged now like an aspirin in his throat. His dark green T-shirt damp with sweat.
He felt his pulse ticking in his chest.
Twenty yards into the jungle, Thorn caught himself mid-step. Drew back. A voice was speaking just five, six yards to his right. Beneath a young banyan tree. Closer to the house than he’d estimated. He was speaking to himself, as if he were trying different voices, or different intonations, saying the same thing:
“Milburn, I know it’s you, man. Milburn. I know it’s you, man. Milburn, I know. It’s you.”
Thorn had to step a foot closer to get a clear path to McMann. He was standing there in black pajamas, holding an Uzi in his right hand, peeking out from behind the banyan, looking toward the house. From his position the guy had a view of the driveway, but it seemed to Thorn that his view of the dock was obstructed by the house. Thorn wasn’t sure, but it might be that Irving David hadn’t seen them arrive.
Thorn opened the bailer on the reel, held the line with his finger. He edged forward, blocked from Irving’s peripheral vision by a st
and of buttonwood saplings. Irving chattered on, washing away the mosquitoes in front of his face.
Thorn stepped into a strong cobweb, the fine wire gluing to his cheek. He felt the spider scuttling down the back of his T-shirt. He held still while it fled.
One more step forward, and Thorn was standing in an aisle that led through the brush to Irv’s encampment. At Thorn’s feet there was a sudden flurry in the weeds. He stiffened and drew back. Fewer than ten thousand of them left on earth and he had crushed a nursery of woodrats.
He watched two of the adolescents burrow under a pile of sticks and leaves nearby. And he stepped forward into that lane again, avoiding the nest this time, took quick aim, and cast his lure at Irving David McMann.
The lure ticked against one of the stringy roots hanging down from the banyan branches and fell to the ground. Thorn reeled it back carefully. The treble hooks caught in a pile of sticks. Thorn paused, took a new grip on the rod, and flicked the line up to shake it free.
“Milburn!” Irving hissed. “Milburn! Show your fat ass.”
Thorn traced the path he wanted and then cast again, underhanded this time to get it beneath those dangling roots. As the line played out, Irving stooped over, began searching through the rest of his supplies. The Uzi still in one hand.
Crazy Billy caught on Irving’s ear. Thorn hauled back on the rod with both hands, raising the tip then, and cranking hard.
Irv howled and came up firing the Uzi. Spraying the tops of the trees as if he were trying to bring down a sniper. Thorn gave the rod another ripping jerk. The treble hooks tore loose.
Irv kept screaming and spun around, firing rounds from the Uzi till it was empty; then, still screaming, he bent down, scrabbled through his pack, and came up with a grenade. He was crying when he pulled the pin and lobbed the thing toward a tree twenty yards to the left of Thorn. Thorn flopped flat, the blast sending whistles past his head.
He listened to Irving crashing through the brush toward the highway. Thorn stayed down, the trunk of an ironwood tree between him and where the grenade had hit. It was all right. Let him run. Thorn knew where he lived.
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