Squirming to his right, he explored the shelf behind him with the toe of his shoe. Nothing there, just more sheer wall. As he was drawing his leg back he felt a slight dip in the ledge. He craned around to see. It was a depression about the size of a bathroom sink. He studied it for a moment, saw how it might work.
He had to inch backward, scrunch himself into a tight tuck, then pivot his legs in the opposite direction. Cuts etched his chest and arms, and blood was tacky on his knees and shins. There was a dull ache in his gut, as though he’d torn muscles in his stomach from cramming himself into such a knot.
After he got a breath, he extended his legs one at a time into the bowl and eased down, toes over the edge, hunched into a squat like a swimmer on the blocks frozen in his starting crouch. He was poised to leap, but no longer sure his legs would respond when the moment came.
Good news and bad. The bad was very bad. He was now fully exposed to anyone who brought his face down to the level of the wooden decking. The good wasn’t all that good, because from this new squatting position, Thorn had the longest of long shots to uncoil and lunge upward and grab hold of a sleeve, an arm, or maybe the pistol.
One try would be all he got. If he missed he was going to plunge back to the floor of the cavern. And then it was over. Fish in a barrel.
He waited. He waited some more. He felt a tickle of sweat or blood coiling down his thighs. What was numb before was quickly going dead.
At last he saw the shadow moving across the deck overhead. He tried to limber himself, tried to send out messages to the lightless continents of his extremities. He wasn’t sure what parts of him were still awake and what parts had retired. He’d find out shortly.
It was Moses on the deck. He could tell by the louder screeches of the planks as the bigger man eased forward toward the opening.
At the hatch the same gun he’d seen before reappeared. The hand holding it was thick and dusted with black hair. The pistol moved smoothly as though the man was shining a careful beam of light in concentric circles around the cavern. A man of precision. A man in firm control of his emotions and his tools.
Thorn saw the glint of the sardine can on the ledge a foot away. He snaked his hand to it, lifted it without sound. He flicked it across the cavern, and it clanged against the far wall and bounced down the pitted stone, landing directly below the hatch.
The hand dropped lower. Moses was in a crouch, stretching out his arm as he bent forward to peer into the cavern. The pistol came first, then his hairy wrist, then his blue shirt cuff, and an inch or two more of the sleeve. When his sharp profile came down into the twilight, Thorn leaped out, both hands grabbing for the forearm.
And he got it, latched on as the pistol fired then fired again.
His hands slipped an inch on the man’s thick arm, relocked on the wrist, but Moses was unyielding.
Thorn bounced his weight up and down against the man’s strength and leverage, and felt him rock forward, briefly off balance. Thorn rattled the pistol, rattled it again, and it shook loose from the man’s grip and fell, clipping Thorn’s bare knee as it went.
Thorn bounced again, but Moses was ready for it this time. He clamped his other hand on Thorn’s right wrist, and began to rise, hauling Thorn up to the daylight with the effortless power of a two-ton wench.
There was nothing rational in Thorn’s reaction. If he’d had time to work out the odds, he might have decided to ride on up to the land and go one on one with Moses on that pineland prairie. But his instincts said otherwise, and he kicked his feet up, and planted the soles of his feet against the bottom of the deck, let Moses drag his arms a little higher so the big man was slightly off balance, then he thrust his legs straight and dragged the big man headfirst down into the cavern.
In the pitching tumble, their bodies collided midair, Thorn taking a futile swing at the man’s face, then came another crash against the floor. This time Thorn landed hard on his right side, cushioned by the other man’s bulk.
He rolled away, his lungs struggling. He was dazed, wobbling, remembering the pistol that fell somewhere close. Eyes bleared over. He pushed himself upright, rubbed his vision clear, raised his fists to block a punch or throw one.
Moses lay on his back at Thorn’s feet. A few inches above his navel, a spike of stone jutted from his belly. Blood was darkening his blue shirt.
He was awake and looking at Thorn. He lifted his head and saw what had happened to him, then set his head back down. His mouth relaxed into a lazy smile.
“Fucked,” he said.
Thorn retrieved the pistol. He ejected the clip, thumbed out the remaining rounds. Only two. He fitted them back in the magazine and slid it back into the Glock.
From far away he heard Jonah calling out. He was yelling for Moses, yelling his brother’s name again. Coming closer.
Thorn stepped over to the side of the pit and stood beneath the ledge where the diamond ring had fallen. He scanned the floor of the cavern but saw no sign of it. He scuffed his feet in the dust, listening to Jonah’s voice calling out, closer and closer.
Moses grunted and coughed. His head rocked back and he held perfectly still as though exposing his neck for a barber’s blade.
Thorn continued his search for the ring. Jonah called out again.
Thorn stooped over, peering at the floor, crisscrossing the area below the ledge methodically until he spotted a gleam at the base of one of the stubby stalagmites. He picked up Kate’s ring, blew off the dust, dropped it in his pocket. The diamond and the rudist. Two survivors of another age.
Above him, Jonah thumped across the wood decking, and Thorn raised the pistol and aimed at the hatch. Jonah stopped short of the opening.
Moses hacked against the pain. He rolled his head from side to side like a lover in ecstasy, then his body began to buck as if he were attempting to pull himself free of the spike. A second later when his body stilled, Thorn was certain that Moses had moved beyond the possibilities of speech.
But he was wrong.
As Thorn held his aim on the opening above, Moses bellowed, “Gun! He’s got a gun!”
Thorn held his aim. He could make out Jonah’s shadow through the chinks in the plank. Tempted to fire, but knowing it was a risky play with only two shots left.
“You okay, Mo?” His voice was bewildered and forlorn. “Moses, you hear me, man? You okay? You in trouble down there?”
But Moses couldn’t answer. For Thorn was crouched over him, grinding a knee into his throat, bearing down with all his weight, depriving Moses of his last breaths, cutting short his final seconds. All the while keeping the pistol fixed on the opening above.
Jonah wailed his brother’s name. Wailed it again, a panicked howl.
Moses’ arms jiggled once and dropped to his sides.
Then the shadow on the decking moved away and the wail retreated.
Thorn lifted his knee and felt for a pulse on Jonah’s big brother. None there. For a moment he took his own pulse, the moral one, and got the same result. Not a pang of regret, not even a goddamn twitch.
He retrieved his flowered shirt, put it on, still damp and riddled with holes. He tucked the Glock into a front pocket of his shorts, and climbed the wall a second time. Driven by the certain knowledge that Jonah was coming back fully armed, Thorn made it up the steep rock without a slip or hesitation, as quick and sticky-fingered as a cartoon hero scaling an office tower.
He wedged back into his familiar burrow, not wasting a second, he found the best angle for leverage, planted his hands, then heaved up against the loosened plank.
He blew a breath, blew out another, grunting like one of those stumpy weightlifters forcing the iron bar up and off his chest, straining with everything he had to raise the end of the board an inch, then another.
The plank flexed and he heard the squeal of rusty nails pulling loose farther down, and he blew out another breath and rammed his shoulder against the board, and it creaked once more and tore free.
Thorn shoved it
aside, and stuck his head out into the daylight, twisted and wriggled and jammed his body through the gap and hauled himself up and out onto the land again.
Good lord it was a stunning day, with the sun high and fiercely bright, and the sky an exhilarating blue. A half mile to the west he saw a small cabin in the shelter of a dozen pines. A compact car was parked nearby. Thorn turned and headed in the opposite direction, toward the closest stand of trees, sprinting without pain, as light-footed and limber and free of gravity as a schoolboy set loose for the summer.
NINETEEN
* * *
ANTWAN DISHED UP A THIRD helping of roast beef from the serving dish that Deloria held out to him, saying, “Thank you kindly, ma’am, these are mighty fine vittles,” lathering up his words with hokey southern charm, all the while grinning at the cook, Deloria Gonzalez, whose eyes were red and swollen from sobbing in the kitchen over the loss of Gustavo and Earl Hammond.
Other than Antwan’s plate, the table was bare. Fifteen minutes earlier all the serving dishes and plates had been removed, but that didn’t slow Antwan. Browning kept looking off toward the living room, where two crime-scene technicians were still studying blood patterns on the carpet.
For the last few minutes, Browning had been using his great-grandfather’s gold toothpick to probe his gums. For as long as Claire had been on Coquina Ranch, Earl Senior’s gold toothpick sat untouched in a shot glass of cut crystal on a side table next to the family Bible. Browning must’ve been eyeing it for a while but had restrained himself as long as Earl Junior was alive.
For a moment she tried to attribute his behavior to simple heedlessness, the bewilderment of grief. Or to the second glass of bourbon he was knocking back just now. But try as she might, those excuses wouldn’t wash.
That Browning was using the toothpick at such a moment was as crude an act of disrespect as a Hammond could offer to family traditions. He might just as well have rifled through Earl’s pockets before his body was stretchered away.
Frisco sat at ease, wrists on the table, fingers intertwined as though in prayer. He was monitoring the progress of a housefly as it tracked across the blue tablecloth toward a pile of sugar that Antwan spilled while spiking his iced tea.
Making this series of small observations was how Claire was keeping herself intact. Holding tight, maintaining a watchful disengagement. There had been almost no conversation at their luncheon. Antwan had asked Frisco how he’d been doing, and Frisco made some stock reply. Nothing substantial. Nothing about Earl, nothing about the grotesque tragedy of the night before or the investigation unfolding around them. Nothing about Claire, whether she was to be crowned a hero as Frisco claimed, or if she was seconds from being handcuffed and dragged away to jail by one of the armed men in the other room.
“A funeral,” Claire said. “We need to talk about a funeral. Two funerals.”
“There’ll be no funeral for Gustavo, if that’s what you mean. That son of a bitch is going to hell. No charlatan priest is doing some last-second absolution hocus-pocus on his everlasting soul.” Browning’s voice was directed toward the kitchen, speaking for Deloria’s benefit, so she might spread the master’s curse among the help. A new boss in town.
Browning downed the last of his bourbon. He clinked the cubes inside the glass as if considering another, then smacked it down.
“Ya’ll have a preacher in mind?” Antwan forked in another bite.
“The Hammonds,” said Frisco, “are not big churchgoers.”
“Didn’t think so,” Antwan said. “As it happens, I know a couple of Bible beaters in Miami. Big-time TV evangelistas. White or Afro, take your pick.”
Browning cleared his throat for effect.
“ ‘The mirth of the wicked is brief, the joy of the godless lasts but a moment.’ Man, old Earl loved to trot that one out when he thought I was slacking. It’s from Job. He was big on Job. Revelations, Numbers. All the hardass books.”
Everyone turned to look at him, but Browning was preoccupied with freeing a tendril of beef from his teeth.
“Do tell,” Antwan said.
“And the goddamn Great Depression, that was another of Earl’s obsessions. That man never got over it. Couldn’t take pleasure in anything cause he thought God was going to snatch it away from him any second.”
“Let’s hear some more of that good Bible stuff,” Antwan said.
“This is from Numbers,” said Browning. “In Earl’s own voice.”
He glanced at Claire with a grin like a kid doing a forbidden parlor trick.
“Cut it out, Browning,” Frisco said. “Show some respect.”
But he went ahead with an uncanny impersonation of Earl Hammond’s gruff speech. It was a talent Browning had never displayed before.
“Leviticus five, seventeen. ‘If a person sins and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord’s commands, even though he does not know it, he is guilty and will be held responsible.’ ”
Antwan put his fork down and patted his hands together.
“Like Earl himself was sitting right there speaking those very words.”
“Here’s one,” Browning said, and brought forth Earl’s voice a second time. “ ‘Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it.’ ”
Browning sent Claire a sheepish smile, shrugging a halfhearted apology. She just shook her head and turned her eyes away.
“That’s some god,” Antwan said. “One unforgiving asshole.”
“Show some manners,” Frisco said. “Both of you.”
“What?” Browning said. “What the hell’s eating you?”
“Knock it off,” Frisco said. “I’m not telling you again.”
Antwan smiled to himself, picked up his knife and fork, and sliced up a few cubes of beef, speared one, then stirred it in the gravy and tucked it into his mouth.
“Come on now, Frisco,” Antwan said. “You got to admit, boy’s got a gift.”
“Your wife is taking this hard,” Frisco said. “In case you and your wing man haven’t noticed.”
Antwan turned and looked at Claire, then reached out and patted her on the shoulder. She stifled a cringe.
“No reason to feel bad, Miss Claire. You’re the stuff of legend. Walk in with a shotgun, unload on a man in the act of homicide. It’s all good. I mean, aside from the loss of Earl Hammond. That’s surely an immeasurable sorrow to us all. But there’s no blame on you. None whatsoever.”
Claire bent forward at the waist, tipping in her chair as if she’d had the breath punched out of her.
She needed to unburden. She had to stop this churning, get out of the suffocating chambers of her mind. Browning should have been the one to turn to, but hearing him mock Earl Junior and watching him fiddle with that gold toothpick sickened and repelled her. In the overnight hours her mannerly, deferential husband had disappeared. This new Browning Hammond was behaving like some freshly coronated prince cavorting in his throne, taking practice swings with his scepter.
Now Antwan made a production of patting his lips with his napkin. He refolded the white linen square and arranged it beside his plate, and announced that it was a fine meal on a very sad day. Everything spoken with that smile tingeing his lips.
“Tell me about the map,” Frisco said.
Browning pried another fleck of meat from between his teeth, looked it over, sucked it off the gold toothpick, then set the implement down and lined it up neatly on the tablecloth. A mirror image to Antwan’s tidiness, as though the two of them were working in tandem, performing some kind of drill from their football days.
“What map you talking about, Frisco?”
“Last night there was a map on the coffee table. It was rolled out flat and there were a dozen red marks on it.”
“Where’d you hear about any map?”
Browning kept his gaze on Frisco, but his eyes made small angry darts her way.
>
“So you’re saying there was no map?” Frisco said. “No map of any kind?”
Browning looked at Antwan, and Antwan shrugged.
“Don’t remember no map. No map at all.”
“I don’t either,” Browning said.
“There was a map,” Claire said. “I saw it on the coffee table.”
Antwan slid his chair back and seemed to consider putting his feet up on the table. Then checked himself.
“Oh, she means the shopping center,” Antwan said. “My project in Tamarac. That’s what threw me off. It wasn’t no map. It was a blueprint. The layout of the plaza, the stores, parking lot, the bathrooms. All that shit.”
“A shopping center,” Frisco said.
“In Tamarac,” Antwan said.
“You’re building a shopping center?”
“One of my projects, yeah, me and a couple of skin doctors. Don’t tell me, Frisco, you’re one of them tree huggers can’t abide progress.”
Browning was silent. He’d picked up the toothpick again and was holding it between thumb and index finger as if measuring its length. He was staring down at the tablecloth like he was waiting to see if Antwan’s shopping center story held up before he was compelled to join in.
Claire wasn’t sure how flawed her perception was. Above all, Browning had always seemed an honorable man. Though like anyone he had his flaws. A temper that could flare unpredictably. More than once she’d had to tug him out of a restaurant or bar when he’d locked eyes with a local cowboy who grinned too knowingly at Claire. That was familiar territory, boy-men finding their way. But the person who sat across from her at the table seemed a sudden stranger. A man who’d somehow managed to shrug off any trace of remorse or horror from the night before and was sporting with a plaything he would never have touched with Earl alive.
“I want to see this map,” Frisco said. “This blueprint. Where is it now?”
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