Under Cover of Daylight

by James W. Hall

  Sarah’s voice came from the house, calling for him. He heard a motorcycle rev up, rev way, way up, missing first gear, revving probably past red line, catching the gear; then off it went.

  When Thorn emerged at the edge of the clearing. Amos Clay was standing beside Sarah, aiming his shotgun at him. Sarah with her hand inside her purse.

  “It’s Thorn,” Sarah said to Amos. “Thorn.”

  Amos continued to show Thorn the dark double barrels. Thorn still listening to the whine of the distant cycle.

  “What’re you doing shooting on my land, boy!”

  Sarah asked him if he was hurt, coming across to him, between those barrels and him.

  “I’m OK,” he said. He held up the pole for Amos to see. “You should’ve seen the size of the son of a bitch.”

  Amos said, “First goddamn fish I ever heard of shooting back.”

  They went inside the house. Amos still watching Thorn with a cagey eye. The shotgun in both hands, port arms.

  When they were all seated in the living room, Thorn felt a rush of nausea rising inside him. He drew in a breath, held it. Both of them watching him. His ears alert to any noise outside.

  Sarah said, “Amos has decided he wants two million dollars.”

  “And I’m going to get it, too,” he said. He’d sat in a chair across from them, tilted by the sag in his floor. He still gripped the shotgun by the barrel, its stock on the dirty rug beside his chair.

  “Says taxes will take half of it, so he needs two million to be a millionaire.”

  “That makes sense,” said Thorn.

  “Thorn,” Sarah said.

  “No, I agree with you, Amos. Goddamn Uncle Sam’s gonna steal half of it to pay some idiot not to plant corn, or to pay some other idiot so he can lay around and watch TV all day. I don’t blame you at all.”

  Amos shook his head at Sarah. See there, I told you.

  “But you know, what it is, Amos, is that two million is all we brought with us, so if you start hanging on any other charges here, this whole deal is gonna fall through.”

  “What were you doing out there, boy, shooting on my land?”

  “I thought I saw something,” he said. “It wasn’t anything.”

  “It sounded like the godblamed Second World War.”

  “I got carried away, is all. But shit, Amos. You’re gonna be John D. Rockefeller. You should be thinking about that. What’re you going to do with all of it?”

  “Buy a condo,” he said. “Up in Daytona Beach. I got a girl friend up there.”

  Sarah had crossed her arms across her chest, her head down, not believing the bullshit she was hearing.

  “Daytona’s nice,” Thorn said.

  “Daytona’s the shittiest town I ever seen. It’s worse than Miami,” said Amos. “I’m not going there ’cause I like the place. I’m going there ’cause that’s where my girl friend’s at. And you can bet your ass I’m glad to be leaving this rock, too. I been here for forty years, getting sucked dry by the bugs and burned dry by the weather. If you keep this land like it is now, you’re the damnedest fool I ever heard about, and if you build some goddamn concrete hotel or whatnot here, I’ll come back down here and have your ass ground up for chum.”

  Laying his shotgun down on the floor, Amos said, “Well, now, let’s see the color of this money.”

  “You can’t do this, Thorn.”

  “Can’t do what?”

  “The contract won’t be—”

  Thorn stood up, waving Sarah quiet. He brought the gym bags over to Amos and unzippered them.

  “Hundreds,” Thorn said. “Thousands of hundreds.”

  “I remember that trout you caught,” Amos said. “On a mirror lure at night. I never seen a mirror lure so mangled up in my life, and that sucker still caught fish.”

  “Yeah, it was a miracle lure,” Thorn said, winking at Sarah.

  “Daytona Beach,” Amos said. “What she said was she wouldn’t marry me less I was a millionaire.” The man smiled, his dentures stained, the sun rising behind his dull blue eyes.

  Irv turned the bike around at the guardhouse at Coral Reef. He did a wheelie and roared back toward Amos Clay’s, flattening himself against the seat, out of the wind. His ear was leaking down his shirt, blood all over his hands now. His own fucking blood. Irving McMann’s fucking blood.

  He was still shivering, but his brain had cleared. Milburn was dead. He’d shot him. Down in Key West. There wasn’t any Milburn, not back there in the woods, not anywhere. Irv couldn’t believe it, how he’d come unfastened like that. Started hearing things, and then the bat or owl or whatever the fuck it was that had clawed at his ear. He’d thought it was that fat sack Milburn, running a goof on him, like old times. A fat smartass ghost.

  Now, there he was, a banshee on a Kawasaki, flat out in fifth gear, ninety-five on that empty narrow highway.

  This time he didn’t go slinking into the woods, hiding like some Cong scum. He braked hard at Amos Clay’s drive, and then downshifted to second, revved up the drive, hitting the potholes, hammering his nuts, getting angrier with every hurt.

  It didn’t matter to him now if there were five, ten, a whole army of them. He had the Uzi still on the shoulder strap across his back, and he’d just wade into them, get his money, and fly. It was his money. Maybe it hadn’t been at first, but after two weeks waiting in the woods, wiping his ass with his left hand, and all the rest of it, it was his money.

  There was nobody outside the house. Nobody in the clearing. Irv didn’t bother with the kickstand, just let the bike fall, and swung the Uzi over his head, rammed in another magazine, and walked over to the door.

  In the two weeks he’d been living in the woods, thinking of himself as a Zulu warrior, he’d wanted to scream a dozen times, and now, as he threw open that rickety door, a scalding howl came from his throat.

  There was his money. All spread out over a long table, bundles of it held by rubber bands. And there was the old man Irv had been watching come and go all week. The old man was on the other side of the table, standing there, staring at Irv with his Uzi.

  The old man reached out and picked up his dentures that lay next to a bundle of hundreds. He popped the choppers in his mouth.

  Irv watched the old man shrink up, as he got the picture, his dentures probably coming loose. Irv screamed at the man. He waved the Uzi at the old fart, telling him to back away.

  This was it. Not much of a goddamn audience, but what a fucking part. Playing Irv McMann, killer, millionaire. The million cash dollars lying there. Sunlight still coming strong, a warm breeze. Life was still good. Everything was going to be possible. Playing himself. His own fucking self. That’s all Jack did, after all. Why shouldn’t Irv get famous playing himself?

  Irv aimed the Uzi now. The old man raised his hands, a feeble squint, a quiver in his face. Like he was bracing himself for the noise the Uzi was going to make.

  Irv inched around the perimeter of the table. The old man turned to face him but didn’t back away. Irv didn’t like the way this old fart was standing there now, like he was sassing him, challenging him to go ahead and shoot.

  “You know me?” Irv asked him. “You know who the fuck I am?”

  “I been knowing you was coming,” said the old man. I been waiting all my life, knowing you was on your way.”

  “Who am I!” Irv screamed at him. “Who am I, you dead fuck!”

  “You ain’t getting me to say it. Not out loud I won’t.”

  Irv let off a three-round burst and pinned the skinny old fart against the wall. Amos started to slide to the floor, but Irv stapled him with another burst and another one. Kept him up there, jerking against the rough wood wall. Twitching, bucking, like somebody had hold of his prostate.

  Sugarman had found a good line. It didn’t have anything to do directly with Jeannie and the minister or marriage, but it scared the shit out of him and might just, in a general kind of way, make Jeannie see how serious things could get. In Jeremiah. Cha
pter 19, Verse 7, the Lord is talking, saying, “I will cause their people to fall by the sword before their enemies, and by the hand of those who seek their life. I will give their dead bodies for food to the birds of the air and to the beasts of the earth. And I will make this city a horror, a thing to be hissed at, every one who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all its disasters. And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and their daughters, and every one will eat the flesh of his neighbor in the siege and distress.”

  He liked it because it was God-the-avenger. Not Jeannie’s picture of God, some sexy white guy with a beard who wanted everyone to screw and moan and have orgasms day after day. This God was one serious guy. When he says, “Honor thy husband,” he can back it up. A God using cannibalism to make his people mind him, this was a serious God.

  The golf pro was whistling at him. Sugarman looked up and followed the pro’s pointing finger over to the condo. His man had arrived. Dressed like Hugh Hefner home from a night of mud wrestling. Carrying two gym bags. Was it enough probable cause that a guy was riding around on a motorcycle in his pajamas? Sugarman thought it probably was.

  He watched the guy open the front door, go inside. He’d let Irving mix with his buddy in there for a while, let things coagulate; then he’d go over and see what was going down or what was coming up.

  28

  THROUGH THE BRIGHT, hot noon Thorn steered the skiff the five miles up to Coral Reef Club. He wound through the network of creeks and canals and finally into the main channel. Past the marina full of yachts and schooners, their masts and rigging tinkling in the midday breeze, and into the residential canals. At no-wake speed he guided them past the private docks, most with their fifty-foot Hatterases, Bertrams, like glossy stallions dozing behind their masters’ condos.

  Thorn was listening to the Evinrude burble, tuned a little rich maybe, but still, all in all, he’d done a damn good job getting that thing going. It was a goofy time to feel it, but Thorn, with Sarah on the seat before him, her head tipped up a bit to let the breeze run down her neck, and his motor behind him going fine, felt happy.

  There wasn’t a bigger or smaller word for it. This was where he wanted to be, what he wanted to be doing. And he was with her, the only one who knew who he truly was, down to the muck and mire no one else had ever known.

  Of course, the fact that she might want to murder him took some of the fine edge off his pleasure. He felt the way those abandoned soldiers must feel who finally work their way out of the jungle after twenty years, happy to be standing in the clearing, but not sure if that first person they see is going to embrace them or rattle bullets their way.

  He slowed to barely above an idle, scanning the line of yachts. When he saw it, the red Scarab, Perfect Execution, he cut into the slip, bumping up beside it.

  Sarah said, “I know this boat. These guys. They were the ones acting like DEA men, scared the hell out of me.”

  “They’re scary guys,” Thorn said. “They did Kate. It was about Allamanda. And Ricki, she was mixed in it, too, somehow. Judas, maybe.”

  Sarah asked him if he was sure.

  “I’m sure about the little guy. Absolutely sure.” Thorn tied up to the Scarab.

  “You have a plan?”

  “Sort of.”

  “A sort of plan, for guys like this? I don’t know, Thorn. You got to have some idea, some strategy. Maybe it’s time to call Sugarman.”

  “No,” Thorn said. “I’m the one stirred the dragon up, I’m the one to go in the cave.”

  “Take the pistol then at least.” She held it out to him by the barrel.

  “No,” he said. “You keep it. What plan I got doesn’t include that.”

  Sarah drew in a long breath. Nodded her head in agreement. She gathered the hair on her shoulders with one hand and lifted it off her neck. Holding the Colt still by the barrel, letting the breeze cool her briefly, she looked lonelier than Thorn had ever seen her. Gone inward, eyes unplugged.

  Thorn said, “You stay here, and don’t let anybody come tearing out here and try to get away in that boat. Do you hear me, Sarah?” She came awake in there, met his eyes. “Can you shoot that thing?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said vacantly. “I’ve been practicing.”

  “Wonderful. That’s wonderful.” He headed on down the dock.

  “Thorn,” she called out. He stopped at the end of the dock. “We could both just let go. We could just drop this, the whole goddamn thing. Walk away.”

  But he heard in her voice that she didn’t believe herself. He stayed there for a moment, watching her, bracing himself against a piling. He watched her sigh and drop her head.

  She raised her eyes to him, waved him away. “Go ahead, go on.”

  He moved up the terrace to the condo, swung wide around it and around to the front door. A golf cart hummed down the shimmering avenue. Thorn nodded to the old man and his wife riding in it. They drew up to their garage, two doors down from Irv, still watching him.

  In the shadow of Irv’s stoop he pressed his ear to the door but heard nothing. Carefully he tried the handle. Locked. He brought his ear back to the door. There was only the hum of the air conditioner.

  He circled the building, and as he came around behind Irv’s patio, he glanced down at Sarah, pacing the dock, her gaze out to sea. The patio was surrounded by a high wooden fence. Thorn lifted the latch to the wooden gate and slid inside. He pressed his back against the cedar planks. There were marijuana plants growing there in large stone pots.

  A thick curtain was drawn across the sliding glass doors. He brought his face against the glass and squinted into a small buckle in the curtains, but he could see only the corner of a white chair. He waited there for a few moments, a light fog from his breath building on the glass.

  As he was drawing back to leave, he caught a flash of shiny black. Those satiny pajama legs. He brought his eye quickly back to the window. He couldn’t see above the knees of those black pants, but that was high enough to catch the glint of the long silencer, pointing, for now, down to the floor.

  He edged out of the patio and jogged around the row of town houses and across the street to the golf pro shop. He caught his breath outside the door, patted for his wallet.

  The clerk was a young blond woman. She looked up from her Cosmopolitan when Thorn asked her if he could use the phone. She checked him out silently and then pushed the phone on the counter over to him.

  Jerome senior answered on the first ring.

  “I got a problem, Jerome.”

  “Insect problem?”

  “You could say that.” Thorn smiled at the clerk, who had put her magazine down and was listening to this. “Same bugs that stung Junior.”

  “Yeah? Is that a fact?”

  “I’m out here at Coral Reef, a short row of town houses across the street from the golf pro shop. You know it?”

  “I believe I do.”

  “Know it from the air?”

  “Yep,” he said. “Squeeters get awful bad up there this time of year, don’t they, boy?”

  “They surely do,” said Thorn.

  After he’d finished setting things up with Jerome, he shopped for ten minutes. Bought a red polo shirt, parrot green long pants. A shiny white leather belt. A blinding yellow sports coat. He stood in the middle of the triple mirrors. There was something missing. He splurged on a red-and-white-checked porkpie hat.

  As he was counting out Grayson’s money, $340 for the whole outfit, the young woman clerk asked him if he didn’t want shoes. Thorn looked down at his scruffy tan boat shoes.

  “That might be overdoing it,” he said. He glanced around the shop. “But, ah, I do need a driver.”

  She’d closed her magazine, her eyes resigned to deal with this nuisance.

  “Walk in here a fisherman, walk out a golfer,” she said. “Why not?”

  “What do you recommend in a driver?”

  “The Daiwa’s a big seller, with the fiber glass shaft, high imp
act through the power zone.” She gestured toward a display rack nearby.

  “Something more traditional,” Thorn said, thinking about Dr. Bill, his heavy leather bag, long afternoons at Homestead Country Club. That one summer when Dr. Bill had experimented with landlubber games.

  “You got your Ben Hogan, Ram, Jack Nicklaus.”

  “Ben Hogan,” Thorn said.

  “Balls?”

  “Got to have ’em,” Thorn said, picking up a large box from a shelf. He thought about it for a moment and took a second and third dozen.

  “Those are illegals,” she said. “Hot Dots.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They’ve got some space age stuff in them, makes them go farther. Can’t play tournaments with them. But then I guess you’re not looking to play tournaments.”

  “These’ll do fine,” he said. “And some, what do you call them, tees?”

  She handed him two packages from behind the counter, and he counted out more of Grayson’s money.

  “You’re all set,” she said as she handed back his change.

  “How do I look?”

  She shrugged. None of her business if people wanted to dress like Martians.

  Thorn walked back across the street, the stiff synthetics chafing already. Up on the stretch of fairway that ran behind the row of town houses, Thorn emptied each of the boxes of balls on the grass. There was a patch of creeping Charlie strangling the grass at his feet. Some golfer hiking out of the rough had tracked bad seeds into this virgin Bermuda.

  Wishing now he’d bought the spikes, Thorn adjusted his feet, looking for the stance Dr. Bill had shown him one or two afternoons twenty years before. The fairway was skinned and scorched, as hard as a sidewalk where Thorn teed up the first ball. Lining up, shoulder down, head down, grip firm but relaxed. Hit down, ball goes up. Almost like casting underhanded. It was always a surprise how suppleness and snap got more distance than muscle.

  Irv’s place was done in black and white. White short shag, flat black walls. Checkered furniture. High-tech black counters. All the toys, the stereo, TV, disk player, polished black.