So he stood there, taking a leak beside the grenade launcher. Watering the rocks with his seventh cup of coffee. And then, more good karma luck. Here comes a lady. Short black hair, pretty good body on her, comes walking out of Thorn’s driveway.
She headed down the highway on foot. Benny thinking, now what? Go in there while the guy’s dick’s still wet, shake him awake, get some answers. Go pick up the lady? Grill her. Or just let the whole thing slide? Let that goofus country music guy do the work?
Jesus. What was he thinking about? A guy didn’t get up and walk away with a thirty-eight slug in his head. He didn’t give a shit what Roger said. Or the guy at the bar. Or Papa John. So, then, what was that photocopy? Some kind of half-assed trick photography probably. That nurse at Mariner’s Hospital? That’d be easy enough to arrange. It didn’t matter actually. Any way you looked at it, Thorn was jerking his chain.
Benny hustled the grenade launcher back in the trunk. Shut it and got in the car and started it. Pulled out on the highway.
Jerking his chain so he’d do something dumb probably. Like walk into the pointy teeth of some steel trap with his hard-on sticking out.
No, sir. Not Benny.
He drove south, slowed down beside the lady, got a good look at her. Pretty little thing. Nice Winnebagos on her. A regular tempest in a D cup. The guy had reasonable taste in women anyway.
Benny let go of a big sigh. Shit, he guessed he’d just let it go for now. Wait and see if that redneck Ozzie did his work.
26
Benny didn’t like old ladies. Simple as that. They didn’t fight fair. Take this one, sitting in her wheelchair with a muddy rock in her lap and a green Luger in her right hand, a goddamn water pistol of all things, aiming it at him. Like he was sugar and gonna melt.
And this morning especially, after not getting but an hour’s sleep. The call came at eight that morning from his internal affairs office telling him there was some kind of computer incursion a couple of days ago. Originating in Key Largo. Benny going, all right now, what is this shit? More chain jerking?
“Ma’am,” Benny said, standing just a yard away from a huge pile of rocks, getting a little vertigo from the situation. Not what he’d pictured as he drove over here. “I’m asking you a civilized question, and you go aiming things at me. I don’t think that’s polite.”
A thick-necked tomcat sprang up into her lap and turned and faced Benny. He didn’t like cats either. In fact, animals in general, about all you could say for them was they didn’t talk. Didn’t let on how stupid they were.
“Can we discuss this in a businesslike manner? Sit down and exchange views, that sort of thing?”
“You don’t have any views I want to hear,” Priscilla said.
“You don’t even know me,” he said. “I can be an entertaining fellow.”
“You’re trespassing.”
He said, “The answer to one question would do it for me. You tell me that, bang, I’m out of here.”
She said, “It’s the bang that worries me.”
Benny smiled. Good, she was warming to him. They were getting the dialogue going. After years of studying interrogation techniques, he’d found there was still only one good way. Get them to think of you as their only rational hope in a world gone haywire.
He’d worn his Keys threads today. A green sweat shirt with a picture of a pelican sitting on a wooden piling. Below the pelican, in black it said, “Another Shitty Day in Paradise.” He left his black leather jacket opened so she could read it. His stone-washed black jeans, boat shoes. Telling the world that this man knew how to hang loose.
She said, “All right, then. Put it in five words or less; then get the hell off my land.”
Benny stretched his eyebrows up, trying to ease the headache that was starting to grip his head. Jesus, sometimes these Conchs made New Yorkers seem down-home friendly. He found a level spot on the pile of rocks and sat down. But the old lady fired a shot at him, darkened his sweat shirt at the heart. He stood up. Ice tongs digging into his temples.
He forced out a smile and said, “I understand you do computer work, you know, hire out to do research for people. Things like that.”
“Assume anything you like. I’m sure as hell not going to tell you anything about anything.”
That was it. So much for the buddy-buddy approach. The pincers were digging in. Benny pulled in a lungful of air through his nose. And he stepped around behind her and took hold of the grips and started rolling her toward the water.
When Thorn woke that Friday morning, finding Darcy gone, he walked down to the Heart Pounder and lay down in the bunk. But a dream came almost immediately, and it shook him awake. In it the refrigeration in the ice cream truck had failed, and Gaeton was lying there, thawing under a sticky coating of corn syrup and chocolate.
Thorn had dragged himself up from the bunk, off the Heart Pounder, up the dock, across the yard to where the truck was parked under the stilt house. He unlocked the door and went inside and opened the lid. There was still thick frost on his friend’s eyebrows. Temperature holding steady at thirty-four.
He stayed in the ice cream truck till dawn, sitting in the driver’s seat. Bones heavy, stomach hollow. A guilt hangover. He went over his final day with Gaeton, the drive to Miami, the alligators, the joking at 120 miles an hour. The look that passed between them as Gaeton aimed his handgun at the gator.
Then he let himself recall those long-ago Saturday mornings in the Guardian office. The smell of printing fluid, the comforting chug of the press. Gaeton senior reading, rereading, typing fast with two fingers.
Then, later on those afternoons, Gaeton senior would lean back in his swivel oak chair, pick up that knife, and begin to whittle again on a piece of oak, making those puzzles he did, a ball inside a slotted vase, a woman trapped inside a cage. While Gaeton and Thorn stacked the Guardians in the baskets on their bikes, then pedaled up and down the highway, delivering papers till dark.
Thorn sat in the ice cream truck, watching the bay turn silver, then dark green. He remembered how he’d felt on those days, that radiance in his chest. Whatever name he might give it now, then it was simply that people smiled to see him coming with the paper, and in his rearview mirror they shook the paper open and began to read as they walked back to their houses.
Even in Key Largo, a town amused by its own corruption, where folks were never shocked or even mildly surprised as they read the truth about themselves and their leaders, still, they seemed happy to see him coming and read carefully when he left.
Thorn dressed in a pair of rumpled tan pants, a plaid flannel shirt. He brushed his teeth and washed his face at the spigot under the house. He combed his hair with wet fingers. By ten o’clock he had the Lakowski sawmill going, getting some nice-looking planks out of a dirty-dog chunk of white ironwood.
The tree had come from a stand of ironwoods that were bulldozed recently, making way for the new K Mart. The county biologist had quietly protested that these were the last ironwoods anybody knew about in all of North America. The proper downcast looks came over the county commissioners. Another loved one is about to leave us. And the vote was unanimous.
None of the locals had fought very hard for those trees. It was getting so people were bored fighting these battles. Nobody was taking the long view anymore. Thorn had begun to believe it was because there was a drop in the population of grandchildren. When people stopped having kids, it rippled everywhere. It got harder to care about what happened in the middle of the next century when nobody you loved would be alive then. To hell with the long view.
And you needed a damn long view for a white ironwood. You planted a seed, it took six years to get tall enough to tell it from the grass around it.
He reset the saw blade and jammed the last of that heartwood into the shriek of the machine.
When he looked up, Nan LaCroix was standing a few feet away. She was the head librarian for the local library. He brushed the sawdust from his arms, switched off the
big machine, and said hello. Nan was tall and thick, had the remnants of a British accent. She was dressed for work.
“Priscilla asked me to come see you,” she said. “Just now.”
“Yeah?”
“Someone called the library.”
“What is it, Nan?”
“Well, I don’t understand this, but she said you would.”
Thorn took a breath, dusted more wood flakes off himself.
She said, “A person called and inquired about our use of a computer at the library.”
Thorn stopped brushing at his flannel shirt.
“And you said?”
“Well, I didn’t talk to him myself, but Margaret Elkins told him no, we weren’t that newfangled. And the man asked if there was somebody who worked for the library who had access to a computer terminal, somebody who might be able to do a little computer research work for him. And Margaret told him that no, nobody who currently worked for the library did, but that there was somebody around town who knew computers and might like to pick up some extra money. Priscilla.”
“You phone Priscilla, tell her about the call?”
“Yes, we did. And she became quite excited and said to come get you. To tell you to come over right away.”
Thorn said, “Did anybody tell this guy how he could find Priscilla?”
“Margaret Elkins did, yes,” said Nan. “Did she do wrong?”
Benny was applying some intense psychotherapy to the old lady, showing her the connection between sanity and gravity by hanging her front wheels over the edge of the seawall.
He said, “You pulled a prank. You knocked on my door and then I got up from what I was doing and came to the door and you ran away.”
There was a stiff breeze coming across the bay today. Coolish, it jostled the water against the seawall. Benny tipped her forward and watched as she gripped her armrests. The cat looked down at the water and climbed up onto the old lady’s shoulder and jumped back to land. So much for animal loyalty.
Benny kicked at it, almost lost his balance, and dropped her in the drink. The muddy rock she’d been carrying in her lap slid forward and splashed into the bay.
He rolled her back a bit and said, “I think somebody put you up to that. Am I right? I don’t think you were just sitting around and said to yourself, think I’ll call up some businesses, sneak into their computer, prowl around. You don’t seem like that kind of old lady to me. Huh?” He gave her a little rattle. Her butt scooted forward a couple of inches.
She turned in her seat, raised the water gun, and got a spurt directly in his left eye. He squinted hard, rolled her back onto land, and rubbed at the eye, smearing the sight back into it.
“You ignorant crone,” Benny said.
But she had rolled away, up the sloping yard back toward her houseboat. Benny shook his head. Christ, look at him. Here he was, the CEO of a eighty-million-dollar company, a man with a vision and a mission, the general of an army of ex-cops and federal agents, and he was chasing around after a crippled-up colostomy case.
He jogged up the yard and caught her as she was rolling up the ramp to her houseboat. The woman could roll. He had to give her that much. Rock and roll.
Benny took hold of the grips and dragged her back down the ramp. The gristly old dame locked the wheels with her hands, but Benny got her back to the grass. He was starting to sweat, breathing a little heavy now.
“What? You going in there, bring out a water hose, really spray me good?”
He moved around to stand in front of her. A couple of her cats came to the doorway to see the commotion. She raised that Luger again, aimed it at him. He flinched, but she didn’t shoot. Probably down to her last couple of squirts, wanted to save them.
“Hey, listen, Miss Spottswood. Save us both any more of this bullshit, would you? It might seem like a little thing you did, asking my computer about illegal immigration. But we’re talking about a project here, it’s top secret, classified. People like you, if they’re asking questions about an area like this, then we got a leakage problem. It could mean we got a serious national security breach. Do you see where I’m taking you?”
Priscilla looked at the narrow gravel lane that led out to the highway. Her eyes lingered there for a moment; then she brought them back to Benny.
She said, “Then let me see some ID. If you’re a government official. If this is all legitimate, then you show me some official ID and I’ll consider being civil to you.”
Benny felt the pierce of those tongs again. ID, Jesus. Everybody was so hot for ID.
He said, “It was this Thorn character, wasn’t it? You just give me a nod, yes or no, and we’ll call it settled between us. Thorn put you up to it. Am I right?” He stepped up closer to her, bent over so he could get his face on the level with hers.
She raised the Luger and got him in the other eye. A real stinger.
Thorn had the VW up to sixty, but he was boxed in behind a Bronco pulling an Aquasport and a Toyota full of college kids. Two bare feet sticking out the front passenger window. He honked at the college kids, flashed his lights. Got two birds back. One out the driver’s window and one from a guy with a big neck in the back seat.
It was ten more miles to Priscilla’s. He’d told Nan to call Sugarman and have him meet Thorn there and to make sure he knew it was an emergency. He held his horn down, and it croaked like a strangled fowl.
He kept the accelerator flat to the floor, a gap opening as he pulled even with the Bronco. He motioned to the driver to let him cut in front, and the guy scowled at Thorn and sped up just enough to pull even again with the Toyota.
He held the horn down now, straddled the center line, and mashed the gas pedal flat. When he angled in between these two clowns, both of them yelled at him, honking back. But giving him room.
He’d crept ahead twenty, thirty yards when the siren sounded. In the rearview mirror Sugarman’s lights flashed. He was shaking his head at Thorn. The Bronco and the Toyota slowed, and Thorn edged over into the right lane, up to sixty-five now. Sugarman got in front of him and led the way, still shaking his head.
Darcy’s Eastern flight to Mexico City had taken three hours and twenty minutes. She had chosen it to coincide with the arrival of an Iberian flight from Madrid. In the concourse she eased away from the passengers on her plane, mingling with those who flooded down the concourse. She tore up her ticket and dropped the remains into two different trash cans. She was probably overdoing all this, but she was running on such high-octane paranoia now that she couldn’t help it.
At Immigration she stood behind a group of Americans, the women in bright stretch pants, the men smelling of whiskey. When one of the men turned to her and asked her if this was her first time abroad, too, she answered him in Spanish. He smiled awkwardly, mangled a quick muchas gracias, and turned back to his group.
The immigration officer examined her passport and took a lazy look at her. He spoke to her in Spanish, asking her the purpose of her trip. She said, a vacation. No luggage? She said no, none. The man looked again at the passport, flipped through the pages, Maria’s border crossings for the five years before she’d run back to Spain.
The phone on his desk rang. He picked it up, still holding her passport, his fingers rubbing the plastic seal over her photo. He listened to the phone for several moments and said sí, he would. He would do that, watching her while he talked, feeling the edges of the plastic on her passport.
She wished now she had dressed more formally. She’d worn faded Levi’s and a black short-sleeved cotton blouse with a button-down collar, labels removed. And a pair of old Keds.
The immigration officer hung up the phone, took one more curious look at her photograph, and said in careful English, “Enjoy your stay, Miss Iturralde.”
She took her passport and moved through the turnstile into another line through Customs. She had distributed the ten thousand dollars about her clothes. Two thousand in each pocket, some more in her shoes, a thousand in her purse. But the
woman at Customs simply waved her through into the main lobby. Anything Darcy wanted to smuggle into Mexico fine by her.
Darcy found a women’s room. She locked herself in a stall and closed her eyes, leaning her head against the door. She began to hyperventilate.
It took her five minutes to gather herself. Then she left the stall, stood in front of a mirror next to a Mexican girl. The girl looked up at Darcy and smiled. She wasn’t more than seven. An infant in a leather sling was lashed to the girl’s back. A girl of fifteen came out of one the stalls, took the child by her hand, and led her away.
Darcy went back out into the noisy lobby, bumped into the same group of Americans. The man who’d spoken to her winked over his shoulder and moved along with his herd.
She went to the Pan Am information counter, where Benny had instructed her to stand. She was about to ask the attendant the time when a man in a white uniform stopped beside her. He was blond and over six feet. His uniform had no patches or markings.
“Maria Iturralde?” he said.
“Sí.” She stepped away from the man.
“I was told you speak fluent English.”
“I do,” she said.
“Well, I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve been circling the airport for an hour. Dadgum air traffic here is worse than Atlanta.”
He had blue simple eyes. He’d been an Eagle Scout, won merit badges in innocence.
“So, how was your flight?”
“Fair,” she said, breathing smoothly now. “It’s a long way.”
“Well, this leg’ll be a lot easier.”
“I certainly hope so,” she said.
27
Benny wheeled her over to the rock pile. He came around in front of her and took hold of that water gun and twisted it out of her grip, shaking his head at this, at the silliness of it.
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