Silencer

by James W. Hall

  “Up near Lake Okeechobee? That place?”

  Rusty said, “Yeah, that one. The Hammond family, seventh-generation Floridians, here before Ponce de León.”

  It was a sheer afternoon in early November. A few minutes earlier Rusty Stabler had returned from a business trip and located Thorn in his customary spot, on the dock by the lagoon, tying bonefish flies. Selling those handcrafted lures to Keys fishing guides and a few longtime customers brought in a meager income, though it was the only income Thorn had ever required.

  After they kissed, Rusty began to pace along the dock, a twinkle in her smile.

  Thorn watched her for a minute, then went back to work on his bristle worm.

  “So what about Coquina Ranch?”

  She halted, her back to the water and the early-morning sun.

  “Okay, but not until I have your undivided attention.”

  Thorn knotted the thread, snipped the end, and turned away from the fly-tying vice. Rusty was wearing one of her new business outfits: olive twill pants, a white linen blouse, and a burgundy jacket. Around her neck was a gold chain with a plump antique pearl her mother bequeathed to her.

  In the last year, as her corporate duties consumed more of her time, Rusty had been forced to supplement her wardrobe of shorts, sandals, and T-shirts. Since most of her adult life had been spent on fishing boats, she’d never even owned a steam iron or coat hanger, much less a business suit. Which was one of the many things she and Thorn had in common.

  With so little fashion sense, Rusty chafed and squirmed in those first store-bought outfits, and for weeks all the skirts and blouses seemed to fit her angular frame as awkwardly as starched cardboard. Little by little she discovered a style that suited her—clothes with a sporty grace, just proper enough to allow her to slip in and out of the boardrooms and the wood-paneled chambers of various elected officials that were now on her appointed rounds.

  It was only one part of Rusty’s makeover in the last twelve months. Using two decades of business smarts she’d acquired from running her own charter fishing operation, Rusty Stabler was now very skillfully managing Bates International, the third-largest privately held corporation in the United States.

  Last winter, Abigail Bates, the matriarch of the Bates family, a grandmother Thorn didn’t know he had, left her large and complicated estate to him, including the corporation and all its subsidiaries, which were valued in the billions of dollars, a sum so staggering it never seemed quite real. At Thorn’s urging, Rusty agreed to oversee the board of directors, select new members, and take a shot at converting BI from a profit-driven monster that trashed large swaths of Florida into a good citizen and a constructive force. In other words, turn Genghis Khan into Henry David Thoreau.

  Though he’d always known Rusty was exceptionally bright, Thorn was boggled to see how undaunted she was to be swimming in those deep waters. She’d learned the lingo fast and well. Nowadays she spoke fluently about balance sheets and global platforms and short selling and supply chain management and metrics for functionalities. The gibberish of the marketplace.

  She was a lean woman with ash-blond hair that she kept so short it barely required a comb. Her hazel eyes were wide set and tenacious. Her narrow face highlighted the slope of her cheekbones, and in relaxed moments her generous lips tended to soften into an artless smile. In the right light Rusty could pass for mid-twenties. She liked to tell the story from last summer when she’d set a six-pack next to the register at a 7-Eleven, and the twenty-something kid behind the counter carded her. She didn’t have her license and the kid flat refused to sell her beer. Best damn beer Rusty never bought.

  “I’m ready, Rusty. What about Coquina Ranch?”

  She looked out at the riffle from a passing school of mullet, then took off her jacket and hung it carefully on the back of the Adirondack.

  She smiled.

  “Oh,” Thorn said. “So this is good. Something big.”

  “Very big. I think it fits your guidelines perfectly. Turning shit into gold.”

  “Our new mantra,” Thorn said.

  “So here’s the nutshell. We’re going to sell the entire Bates tract east of Sarasota and use the money to buy Coquina Ranch.”

  “How’s that work?”

  “It starts with the state of Florida, their land-preservation program.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s called Florida Forever. They buy land, take it off the table.”

  “Rings a faint bell.”

  “Here’s the story. I was talking to some of our people in Tallahassee, Bates attorneys and lobbyists, sketching out the goals we had in mind, and someone suggested I go to the Division of State Lands, talk to the Florida Forever people. I was there a couple of hours, brainstorming with the director of the program, and little by little we shaped the outline of a deal. Maybe at that point I should’ve called you and gotten your go-ahead, but I didn’t.”

  “You don’t need my permission for anything, Rusty. Nothing. Ever.”

  “Well, this is a big deal,” she said. “Probably bigger than anything you had in mind. You can say no. Nothing’s set in stone yet.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “In exchange for the eighty-eight thousand acres along the Peace River, the phosphate mines, the state is going to pay you five hundred and thirty-four million dollars.”

  “That should buy a few cases of Dos Equis.”

  “Yes, it should.”

  Last year after Thorn inherited the Bates holdings along with that parcel of land, he and Rusty and Sugarman had driven up to Summerland and spent a few days exploring the back roads of the region, then tramped on foot for miles along riverbanks and through scrubby pinelands to get a feel for the property that now belonged to him. It was huge. It was desolate. It was a long way from the coast, and it was dense with wildlife, including some rare crested caracaras and wild hogs. It was a different Florida than the one featured in fashion shoots and the slick TV shows. This was the rugged heartland of the state, a good hour from the sandy coastline and blue waters and neon-drizzled hotels, a landscape still as harsh and inhospitable as it had been when the first cutthroat Europeans on horseback pushed into its matted underbrush seeking the Fountain of Youth and bricks of gold.

  “So I filled out a stack of paperwork,” Rusty said, “ran everything by the Bates lawyers, then went back and negotiated like hell with Division of State Lands. They’re fast-tracking the environmental-risk audit. The state’s required to see what contaminants on the land need to be cleaned up before they take possession. They know about the phosphate pits, the gyp stacks. That’s factored in. But even if they find something they don’t expect, we should be able to get waivers. I agreed in principle to pay whatever costs might be incurred in a clean-up. Margaret Milbanks, the director of State Lands, she’s ecstatic. This is a huge deal, a career maker. It’s so big it depletes the fund.”

  “Wait a minute. Why do we want to sell land to Florida?”

  “So they’ll preserve it. So nothing will ever be built on that land. So it’ll be green forever. A flyway for migrating birds. So the rivers will never be polluted or pumped dry. So the trees will never be harvested.”

  “Who needs the government? We could keep it that way ourselves.”

  “As hard as it is to imagine, Thorn, someday you won’t be here. And depending on how you write your will, if you ever get around to that, the land could still be up for grabs in the future. Now it won’t be. Ever.”

  “We could give it to the state for free. No reason to make the taxpayers cough up five hundred million and whatever.”

  “Five hundred and thirty-four million dollars.”

  “Why?”

  “The taxpayers have already anted up. The money’s set aside in the Florida Forever fund, just sitting there waiting for the right offer. If you hadn’t claimed the pot, someone else would. Normally it’s some real-estate sharpie, he unloads a chunk of property that’s not commercially viable, no utilities, too costly to
develop, bad zoning, so he pawns it off on the state, then turns around and uses those millions to buy other land and develop golf courses and condo communities or strip malls.”

  “The old shell game,” he said. “Con men picking the citizens’ pocket.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But we’re not going to do that.”

  “Well, this is where it gets tricky.”

  “Give it to me. I’m a big boy.”

  “The day after I signed the initial agreements, Earl Hammond showed up at Division of State Lands and offered them Coquina Ranch. Almost two hundred thousand acres. If he’d come in one day earlier, he could have had the deal we got.”

  “But we depleted the fund.”

  “Right.”

  “Only we don’t really want all that money.”

  “No, we don’t,” Rusty said.

  “So you tore up the deal, stepped aside, and let him take the five hundred million. Which means we’re still stuck with the Bates land.”

  “No, I didn’t do that,” she said. “The attorneys for the state are drafting the arrangement. I don’t understand all the ins and outs. But essentially everyone gets what they want. In about three weeks we’re all going to sit down in a room, pass some papers around a table. The state of Florida hands you a check for five hundred and thirty-four million dollars, you endorse it over to Earl Hammond, which leaves us with zero, and when everything is signed, the state of Florida takes a shitload of land out of circulation. You wanted to use Bates International to do some good, well, this is something very good.”

  Thorn took a swallow of the breeze coming off the water. Feeling a quick tingle of righteousness.

  “Coquina Ranch,” Thorn said. “That’s the safari operation, right? A thousand bucks to shoot a penned-up wildebeest. That Earl Hammond?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “And we’re going to take this guy’s land, put him out of business?”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “Better and better.”

  “Minor point, but old man Hammond is holding back a few hundred acres to leave to his two grandsons. Even subtracting that, bottom line, your land plus the Hammond land, that’s four hundred fifty square miles of Florida real estate. Which is larger than all five boroughs of New York City.”

  “Out of circulation forever,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  Thorn looked out the mouth of the lagoon where the Atlantic was slick as ice. Today its color was more Irish green than blue. Maybe there was some chromatic aberration at work, particles in the upper atmosphere diffracting the sunlight in some oddball way. Though he could be wrong. It might be sorcery, not science. That deep green might be an upwelling at the ocean floor, a rare release of emerald water from the secret vats of Neptune and his boys. Yeah. He liked that idea better.

  “You’re a very smart woman, Rusty Stabler. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  “I never tire of hearing it.”

  “Can we keep my name out of this?”

  She looked off at the treetops for a moment, then came back.

  “Well, Margaret and a couple of her legal team in State Lands will know, but yeah, I stipulated that you wanted to remain anonymous.”

  “If it can’t be, I won’t sign anything. We keep this thing between you and me and Sugarman. That’s it. No big hoo-hah, pictures in the paper, any of that.”

  “Understood.”

  He leaned out and kissed her on the lips. When the kiss was done, her eyes stayed closed for a fraction of a second, then drifted open.

  “I had a feeling you’d like it.”

  “It’s better than anything I imagined. You’re an amazing woman.”

  “I am,” she said. “I’m damn amazing.”

  “I’ll tell you what else I want to do,” he said.

  Rusty touched the pearl at her throat with an inward look as if briefly communing with her departed mother.

  “Thanksgiving is in a couple of weeks, right?”

  “Two and a half.”

  “The deal will be done by then?”

  “If nothing snags it. That should be about right.”

  “Then I want to have a party.”

  Her eyes came back to him, first puzzled, then amused.

  “A party?”

  “A celebration. You, me, and Sugar, we’ll know what it’s about. To everybody else it’s just a bash.”

  “Thorn’s going to have a party? Hermit crab leaving his shell?”

  “Yeah, the new and improved Thorn. Dance on the table. Toast the smart woman I’m lucky enough to live with. A big, loud, drunken, shit-faced party. Invite everyone we know. Everyone they know.”

  At that moment, Sugarman came walking around the west end of the house, wearing a jaunty Panama hat, faded jeans, a red polo shirt. Looking at Thorn, then at Rusty, sensing something, getting a quizzical look.

  “What happened?” he said. “Who got pregnant?”

  “No one around here,” Rusty said. “Thank God.”

  “Rusty just made five hundred million dollars. We’re rolling in loot.”

  “Five hundred million?” Sugarman said. “That’s almost half a billion.”

  “More or less,” Rusty said.

  “What do you want money for, Thorn? A new pair of flip-flops, a safety pin to hold up your loincloth?” Sugarman smiled innocently.

  His buddy had been giving him the same raft of shit forever. As a couple of ten-year-old misfits, they’d struck an immediate bond that hadn’t faltered over the turbulent decades.

  “Go on, Rusty, tell him the story. I’d like to hear it again anyway.”

  Sugarman eased into one of the rattan rockers and Rusty ran through it one more time. Giving him the abbreviated version. Sugar rocked, looking off at the indigo sky above the mangroves. Nodding as Rusty spoke, not interrupting like Thorn had, but simply absorbing it, a slow smile taking shape on his lips as the scope of the deal came clear.

  To strangers, Sugarman could come off as dull, a plodder, lacking in ambition. But Thorn knew the flip side of that surface appearance. He’d never met anyone as resolute, persistent, and loyal as Sugar. This man whose self-indulgent parents had betrayed him the moment he was born had set his course early in life and had kept an unswerving focus ever since. He was determined to be the opposite of his own parents. Steadfast and dependable to a fault.

  Sugarman was only a week old when he was deserted by his Nordic blond mom and his badass Rastafarian dad. He’d been raised by a granny in the Key Largo slums and grew up polite, soft-spoken, but with uranium at the marrow. With his sharp-angled good looks and cinnamon skin, Sugarman had long been a target for bullies of both races. “Pretty boy,” the jerks would call him, “dandy man.” Sugarman was slow to anger, but if the taunts ever got physical, he wasn’t shy about shutting them down. Long-limbed and nimble, he could flatten a shithead’s nose quicker than most men could make a fist.

  After high school he spent a few years living his childhood dream, though he eventually discovered that working for the Monroe County sheriff’s department was far less gratifying than he’d imagined. When he grew weary of writing speeding citations and stepping into the middle of snot-slinging bar fights and domestic chaos, he went private. “Security consultant” was what he was calling himself lately.

  As Rusty reached the end of her story, Sugarman shook his head and whistled in admiration.

  “And that’s not even the most incredible part,” Rusty said. “Get this: Thorn wants to have a party to celebrate. On Thanksgiving.”

  “Thorn? A party? Mr. Anti-Social?”

  “I said the same thing.”

  “Hey,” Thorn said, “a guy can change. Give me a chance.”

  Sugarman looked at Rusty and shook his head.

  “Boy, oh, boy,” he said. “This I gotta see.”

  THREE

  * * *

  ON THANKSGIVING NIGHT, CLAIRE HAMMOND was in the tack room skinning a wildebeest
when Earl wandered in and sat down on a bench nearby. Just the two of them—the first time they’d been alone together in weeks.

  Earl Hammond sighed, took the unlit pipe from the corner of his mouth, and tucked it in his back pocket. She waited in silence while he rolled up the shirt sleeves of his blue work shirt, then cut a look her way and gave her a bashful smile.

  “How you doing tonight, Miss Claire?”

  She said she was fine, just fine.

  He chewed on that for a minute, nodding to himself, building up to something, but not quite there. A moth circling the Coleman lantern stumbled in Earl’s direction, and he raised a hand and waved it on its way. For half a second his eyes darted to her, then cut back to the darkness beyond the barn door.

  She wiped her bloody hands on a towel and came over to him.

  “So,” Earl said. “You have time for a story?”

  “Another one about the good old days?”

  “What? Do my stories bore you?”

  “Come on, Earl. I’m kidding. I love your stories.”

  Earl Hammond was a big rumpled man whose silvery hair was still luxuriant. Though he was in his eighty-seventh year and there was some stiffening in his gait, he showed no loss of vigor, no wasting of muscle, no fading of the sharp light in his eyes. An unbowed six-foot-six, he could still ride a horse at full gallop, could fell a mature pine without setting aside the ax to catch his breath, and was still the best marksman on the ranch. Men were drawn to his cast-iron vigor, women to his reserved gentility.

  Staring off at the shadows, Earl Hammond told the tale straight through, altering his deep voice here and there to mimic the various characters, and narrating the rest in that slow, resonant manner she’d heard him use a few times before, a tone he reserved for cherished memories, rare glimpses into his storied past.

  Earl Hammond had been ten years old that winter in 1930 when Henry Ford and Thomas Edison arrived at Coquina Ranch early in the afternoon on a Friday. Clara Ford and Mina Edison stayed behind in Fort Myers, where the two families wintered in adjacent homes.

  Young Earl had met Mr. Edison on previous visits but had never seen him so pale and feeble. Mr. Ford had to hoist Edison out of the passenger seat of the Model A Tudor Sedan, then assist him across the bridge and into the lodge.