Blackwater Sound

by James W. Hall

  “I understand you encountered my fish.”

  “Word travels fast.”

  “Is it true?”

  “We hooked a big blue with a silver cigar attached to its back. But it didn’t have anybody’s name on it.”

  “That’s my fish,” Braswell said.

  “We had it up to the boat,” Thorn said. “The swivel hit the rod tip, Farley was taking a wrap when the leader broke.”

  “That’s her, that’s my fish.” His voice was so nearly devoid of emotion it sounded as though it was piped up from some lost place inside him.

  “Like I said, Mr. Braswell, this fish didn’t have anybody’s name on it.”

  “Farley told me it was over a thousand pounds.”

  “Farley’s being modest,” Thorn said. “It was well over a thousand. Grand and a half, maybe more. Biggest damn blue I’ve ever seen.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Braswell. I’d like to be neighborly, but it’s just not in my nature to give away information of that sort.”

  “It’s the second time we’ve had that marlin on,” Farley said. “I told Mr. Braswell about that.”

  Thorn smiled. Farley had the liar’s gift, a pure heart and a simple delivery.

  “It’s true,” Thorn said. “We caught her a few weeks ago out near the drop-off, and we’ve been hunting her ever since. Me and Farley believe we’ve got her figured out. At least well enough to jump her that second time. We’re hoping the cliché is right and the third time’s our charm.”

  Braswell licked his lips. His shadowy stupor seemed to be lifting, eyes growing more alert, as if he’d just traveled a great distance in a short time and his mind was still a few steps behind his body, but gaining fast.

  “Come on aboard, Mr. Braswell,” Alexandra said. “I’ll go get you some coffee. Sounds like you boys have a few things to discuss.”

  Thorn shot her a searching look. What kind of bullshit was this? He’d only been around her a few hours but he was fairly sure she wasn’t the kind to defer to men. Nobody’s coffee mistress.

  She sent him a smile of sly innocence.

  “It’s okay, Thorn, don’t worry. I’m not running off. I’ll just get some coffee and be right back.”

  When Alex was gone, A. J. came aboard. He paced the deck for a moment, then took an uneasy perch on the starboard gunwale. Farley sat on the transom. Thorn stayed on his feet.

  “You’ve had two hook-ups on this same fish,” A. J. said. “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Finding fish is an art,” Thorn said. “And Farley here is the Monet of marlin.”

  A. J. looked over at the big man.

  “I’m well acquainted with Mr. Boissont’s reputation. I knew his father. Jelly was a very good man. Fine captain, fine guide.”

  “Well, as I say, Farley’s instincts, his knowledge of these waters, that’s what led us to her a second time. On our next encounter, we’re bringing that bad girl in. She’ll be hanging up for all the world to see.”

  “Do you know about the transmitter, that silver cigar you referred to?”

  “We heard some dock gossip, yeah. You’re tracking her via satellite. Like that fish has a little cell phone and it calls you up every once in a while.”

  A. J. looked at Thorn more closely now, the last of the fog burning off, his eyes sharpening.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “But it hasn’t worked,” said Thorn.

  A. J. Braswell rubbed the gray stubble on his cheek and looked out at the busy marina.

  Behind Braswell a procession of clouds paraded along the horizon like pink floats trimmed with gold and saffron. In the west white stalky birds coasted out to sea for their daily rounds. Most of the big yachts were moving through the harbor now, mates yawning, making final adjustments to the lines, checking the giant lures. Gulls squealed near the resort’s tiny beach and a heavyset man in a rubber bathing cap dove into the pool to begin his solitary laps. Looking around at such a place, it was possible to believe the earth would heal all its wounds and men of charity and good cheer would prevail. Spiced with honey and coconut, a warm breeze chimed in the outriggers and filled the lungs with optimism. In such weather, in such a place, even the most hard-bitten cynic might be tempted to grant forgiveness to his enemies and lay down his weapons and his anger forever. Fall to the ground in a benevolent swoon.

  But not Thorn. Looking around the Abaco Beach Resort for the last few hours at all those magnificent yachts, the display of abundance and good health and all that shared passion for big-game fishing, was starting to piss him off. If this was all the wealthy folks could find to do with their accumulated good fortune, this nonstop show of gluttony and back-slapping bonhomie, then maybe it was time to storm the boardrooms and throw the buffoons out on the street. Let them test their favorite theory—that if the wealth were ever redistributed, the rich folks would reclaim their fortunes in no time through the same hard work and ingenuity that had led them to the top in the first place. Thorn would happily wager his last nickel on the Farley Boissonts of the world.

  “Mr. Thorn,” A. J. said. “You’re going to come fishing with me.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I mean no offense, Mr. Thorn, but I look at your equipment, your boat, and yes, sure, it was fine for an earlier era. It would be fine now for pursuing most fish. But the marlin I’m seeking, as you’ve discovered yourself, requires more substantial gear. Tackle of the highest quality. A boat that is fast, maneuverable, and set up with the latest electronics. I hope I’m not insulting you, Mr. Thorn.”

  “I’m not insulted. Are you insulted, Farley?”

  Farley gave Thorn a blank look.

  “We’ll join forces,” Braswell said. “My science and your art.”

  “Is that what you do, A. J., you co-opt your rivals?”

  “I want to catch this fish, Mr. Thorn. I’ve worked toward this end for the last ten years. If it’s money you want, I am a wealthy man. You may set your price.”

  Thorn sighed, continued his cramped pacing.

  “We’ve been doing pretty well without you, Braswell.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” he said. “Fifty thousand for each of you if we get a hook-up. But I’m the one who sits in the chair. There’s no compromise on that. I catch the fish.”

  Thorn looked at Farley. Muscles moved beneath his shirt. Muscles squirmed in his face. A body like his was never at rest.

  “Seventy-five thousand apiece,” Braswell said. “But I catch the fish.”

  Thorn came to a halt behind the fighting chair.

  “I’ll need to discuss it with my captain.”

  “Certainly,” he said. “Take your time. But we’re missing some prime fishing weather. Waning moon, falling tide.”

  Farley joined Thorn in the cabin. Out in the cockpit, Braswell slumped forward and turned his complete attention to his right palm as though he were trying to read his own grim fortune. Farley leaned against the galley wall. He brushed a dreadlock off his forehead and shook his head.

  “Too damn easy, Thorn. It isn’t feeling right to me.”

  “We chummed the waters, he took the bait. What’s not right?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t trust him?”

  “The man’s gone off in his head. He’s a crazy one, he is. No, I don’t trust him.”

  “He’s invited us aboard his boat. That’s where we want to be, Farley. That’s the whole point.”

  “Too easy, Thorn. Too damn easy.”

  Thorn glanced over toward the ByteMe. She loomed several feet above the adjacent boats, the chrome of her flybridge and tower glinting in the sunlight. A small red flag attached to the tuna tower trembled on its pole, then, as Thorn watched with stunned fascination, the flag suddenly lifted and stood out straight as if starched by the blast of a gale.

  The concussion that followed a moment later fractured a side window in the Heart Pounder’s galley and th
rew Thorn forward against the edge of the butane stove. Another explosion followed in seconds and a scalding wind flooded the cabin.

  Out on the deck A. J. stood gripping the starboard rail. Every boat in the marina was rocking in the choppy water. A ball of fire rose from the next dock, black smoke boiling into the heavens. There was another blast, and one more after that. The air shuddered and shook, and far away a woman’s voice began to wail with the piercing horror of an air raid siren. More smoke darkened the sky, and from all around them came yelps of alarm, women shrieking, men barking orders at each other. The few boats left at the docks emptied; men lugged fire extinguishers onto the jetty, others stumbled outside with the drunken, stunned eyes of shell-shocked soldiers. This wasn’t the battle they’d enlisted for.

  Thorn jumped across to the dock.

  “Hey, Thorn, hold on,” Farley yelled. “It might not be over.”

  But he was running, shouldering through the crowd on the dock, then racing down the sidewalk and cutting into the adjacent dock. Five boats were smoldering, their windows blasted out, charred wreckage. Patches of the water were aflame and the oxygen had been sucked from the air.

  In the last slip the ByteMe pitched and swayed as if riding out a hurricane. Spiderweb cracks laced its side window and a shadow of soot covered its hull, but otherwise the big white boat appeared undamaged. There was no security guard in sight and no sign of Alexandra.

  Thorn shifted to the right. Something on the edge of his field of vision had snagged his eye. He stepped to the edge of the dock, peered out through the flames, and after a moment of searching, he saw it, hovering inches below the rainbow sheen of gasoline and oil that coated the surface, the faded red of the Snook’s Bayside T-shirt.

  He took two steps and dove.

  But when he surfaced, he was lost in the wilderness of smoke and fire and floating debris. As he treaded water, a hard shift in the morning breeze rose around him and began to push the closest bank of flames in his direction. It swept toward him across the dark water like a prairie fire feeding on brittle grass. The whoosh of heat stole his breath and drove him beneath the water. He kicked and breaststroked deeper, then twisted around to search for Alexandra in the murky cool. Yellow light flickered from above and lit the gloom just enough for him to glimpse her. Twenty yards to his left, her body, inert and ghostly, was drifting downward.

  He spun around and dug through the water, flutter-kicked and churned his arms till he was beside her. He looped an arm across her chest, blew out the last trickle of air from his lungs, and whirled back toward the firestorm above.

  Don’t ask him how he did it, but Lawton got the plastic cuffs off. He gnawed them for a while in the middle of the night but made no headway. He rubbed them against what looked like a sharp edge on the vanity, but it wasn’t sharp after all.

  Then somewhere shortly after daybreak they were gone. As if he’d dreamed them off. As if some power in his brain had shrunk his bones sufficiently so he could slip free.

  He wanted to show someone. Maybe the fat blond boy who’d brought him a bandage and a glass of ice water and helped him drink it. Yeah, he wanted to show him. Johnny was his name. Very familiar, that boy. A face Lawton recognized and could put a name to, but he couldn’t bring up the rest of the boy’s file. He was sure it was in there, a rap sheet six feet long. He had that look about him. But his recollection of the boy was lost in the dense clouds, lost inside the smoke and haze that clogged the back reaches of his mind.

  With his hands free, it only took a second to release the plastic tie around his ankles. He rubbed the blood back into his feet. Numb needles pricking the soles, jabbing the tender flesh of his toes.

  He was just standing up, looking around the guest quarters, at the photograph of a marlin soaring from the sea hung on the wall beside the door, when the blast hurled him back against the bed. He lay there for a few minutes, groggy, wondering what part of this was dream, what part real. He hoped the real part included getting loose from the handcuffs. He hoped he could remember enough about what he’d done to duplicate it. He’d love to show the boy, Johnny, that he and Harry Houdini were cut from the same amazing cloth.

  He lay there on the bunk for another minute, listening to the other explosions, feeling his ear thump with every squeeze of his heart. Johnny had cut his ear. He remembered that. He remembered the knife, its odd blade. But he didn’t know why he’d been cut. There had been a good reason, but it escaped him now.

  When he stood up the room was warmer. Much warmer. Hot almost, even though it was still early yet and he could feel the cool spray of air-conditioning blowing from the vent. But the room was hot and there was yelling and screaming outside and the boat was rocking. Lawton went to the slot of a window and pushed aside the curtain and looked out.

  It was a war scene out there. Men with blackened faces and torn clothes and bloody gashes running without direction, men aiming their fire extinguishers and spewing white clouds of gas at the flames. The dock blown to pieces, pilings shattered. And on a section of the dock, not twenty yards away from Lawton, he watched as a rangy blond man climbed the wooden ladder that was mounted on a piling. He was soaking wet and he held with his free arm a girl with long black hair. A pretty woman with white skin. She had on a red T-shirt and yellow shorts, and the blond man laid her out on the dock and tipped her head back, pinched her nose and pressed his mouth to hers and blew into her, then pressed his hands against her chest, leaning his weight against her. He did this several times before a bubble of water broke from her lips, then a spew of foam and gooey fluid.

  Lawton Collins stood at the window and watched the man saving the woman’s life. The pretty, dark-haired young girl seemed so familiar. Someone’s pretty daughter. He thought he knew her but wasn’t sure. He’d had a wife once but he didn’t know about children. Probably not. He felt too alone to be a father.

  Twenty-Three

  After her throat was clear and her lungs were working on their own, Thorn stretched her out flat on her back along a side dock. Her teeth clicked and a hard shiver rattled through her hands and arms. Thorn stood up, glanced around, spotted a broken cabin door on a sixty-foot Davis two slips away. The yacht was listing hard to starboard, its mooring lines taut, straining to hold the enormous weight of the sinking boat.

  Thorn jumped aboard, poked out a panel of broken glass, unlocked the door, and stepped into the salon. The floor was submerged in half a foot of water. More water surged down the hallway into the staterooms. He was halfway across the salon, sloshing toward the companionway, when a loud crack sounded outside—one of the heavy lines giving way. The boat lurched and Thorn thumped a shinbone against the glass coffee table and almost went down.

  He found his balance and continued wading through the knee-deep water into the master stateroom. Flinging open the locker door, he pawed through shelves but found only small bath towels. Then he turned to the bed, threw off the bedspread, and stripped off the two cashmere blankets.

  He carried them in a bundle back to the salon and was almost to the door when a second mooring line popped and the yacht pitched hard to starboard, then the remaining lines snapped one after the other like a firing squad’s barrage. He clambered out to the aft deck, lobbed the blankets up on the jetty, and hoisted himself onto the port gunwale. He teetered, caught himself, set his feet, then leaped across to the dock, and stood watching as the boat slipped under.

  Alexandra’s eyes were tightly shut. She’d crossed her arms over her chest, clasping herself against the trembling. Thorn pulled her arms apart and peeled her wet T-shirt up and tugged it over her head. Then he dragged off her gym shorts and lay the blankets over her and tucked them tight around her nakedness.

  After a few moments her shivers gradually subsided, but her breathing was still ragged and her face ashen. Twice she tried to speak, but the effort made her wince and clench her eyes shut and sent her back into the semiconscious doze. Thorn gripped her hand and spoke to her in a calm voice, told her to hold on,
it was going to be all right, she was fine, she’d gotten a little knock on the head, swallowed some water, but she was okay now, she was warming up, it would be fine, everything would be fine.

  Down the dock, a young man cried out, his voice rising above the uproar. Thorn swung around and stared at the heavyset young man up on the flybridge of the ByteMe.

  “It’s pinging! It’s pinging!” It was Johnny Braswell. He was fanning smoke from his face, leaning forward over the chrome rail. “You hear me, Dad? It’s pinging!”

  The kid had on a white tank top and blue flowered baggies.

  “It’s moving, the ping is moving. Big Mother’s on the surface.”

  A few yards behind Thorn, Farley and A. J. were grunting as they dragged a large rectangle of fiberglass down the dock. It looked like it might be the T-top from an open fishing boat, probably blasted loose by one of the explosions. Straining mightily, the two of them brought it to the splintered edge of the dock and on the count of three heaved it across the gap. Then they set about nudging it and shifting it until it formed a makeshift bridge across the five-foot break between the landside dock and the section leading to the ByteMe.

  “You coming, Thorn?” Farley called.

  Behind him A. J. got a running start and bounced one foot on the fiberglass panel and sailed safely across to his side of the dock.

  “I can’t leave her. You go on.”

  Braswell waited on the other side of the panel, hands on his hips. Wisps of black smoke sailed above his head. The air reeked of melting plastic and the woozy vapors of diesel fuel and high-test gasoline. Enough raw gasoline had seeped into the harbor to level half the island from the slightest spark.

  Alexandra shifted her head against the planks. The boiled-egg lump disfiguring her left cheekbone was beginning to darken. It was now only a shadowy blue, but if Thorn knew his shiners, by evening that blue would darken to a glossy black and both her eyes would be swollen shut.