“Anything else, Donaldson?”
“Well, there is one more thing.”
He waited.
“How would I locate the hunting lodge? I want to talk to the Faust brothers.”
“Why?” Frisco said. “If you’ve been shut down.”
“Just a detour on my way out the exit. An itch I need to scratch.”
“I’ll draw you a map,” Claire said. “From here it’s maybe twenty minutes, bad roads. Lots of cattle gates to open and close. You’ll need a key for the last one.”
“A key?”
“The hunting cabin is inside the game preserve. It’s fenced in. I’ll put it in the map, where to find the key.”
“That would be very kind,” Donaldson said, and gave Frisco a chastened nod.
TWENTY-THREE
* * *
IT WAS NOT LIKE ANY barbed wire Thorn had ever seen. Bits of sheet metal twisted between two strands of wire, each one shaped into the letter H, with four dagger tips. The barbs were spaced an inch apart. Strung a few inches above and below those two-stranded wires was a single strand studded with six pointed tin stars that twirled like tiny propellers, clittering in the growing wind as if the fence itself were alive, eager to do its work.
It was barbed wire from another era, an antique. When he flicked his fingernail against a strand, tiny plumes of rust sailed into the steady wind. He found a section he could grip without slashing himself and tested its tension. It felt as taut and unforgiving as the day it had been strung.
The fence was at least twelve feet high and ran as far as Thorn could see in one direction, and in the other it disappeared into a stand of pines. Thorn felt sure that when he hiked into those woods, the fence would still be there. But he set off that way just in case.
Such a barrier was far beyond anything needed to keep wildebeests and antelope from straying. It was a monument to some other intention entirely. There was no way any man could climb that barrier. Even if Thorn had boots and gloves and heavy clothing, that fence would have shredded him to ribbons before he reached halfway. Bolt cutters might have made a dent, but anything less would be insufficient.
He was trapped. Thorn and the wild creatures and a man covered in blood.
Thorn moved along the fence line to the woods. A hundred yards off he halted. In the west the sun had dropped below a dark mass of cumulus and was shining from a slit of open sky along the horizon. Maybe an hour of daylight left.
Thorn watched as the stand of scrub pine and cabbage palm and palmetto brightened. He’d never believed in signs or secret codes sent down by the heavenly stewards. What was unfolding before him was just the everyday magic in the pine flatwoods. The hard flat light threw every limb and leaf and frond into high relief, and every bird and cobweb and sapling in the sharpest contrast imaginable, as if a haze had lifted, the blue smokiness that dulled the world all day long had been whisked away, allowing every green and every brown and all the russets and saffrons to achieve their perfect state.
The vision was so crisp and pure, so perfectly illuminated that for a moment as he watched, it displaced Thorn’s thirst and exhaustion and all his aches. He settled on his butt in the tall grass and took a breather as the color, minute by minute, reached its full blossom, then slowly began to back off, dwindling at a slightly faster rate, the light draining away, the bright pigments dulling to sepia, then finally to something close to black and white.
As he was rising to go, a heavy gust stirred the branches and fluttered the leaves and bowed the tall grasses in its path. And it was because of that, the odd confluence of wind and light that he noticed deep within the pine hammock, at the center of all that rocking and swaying, an object that held perfectly still.
Some dark and hulking thing. He squinted and tried to make out its exact contours, but he was too far off to be sure. It was no animal. Way too big for that.
It was on the route he was taking anyway in this wandering exploration, so he set off for the thicket of pines and palms, keeping his eyes on that unmoving thing. He felt like one of those colorblind men recruited in the Second World War to fly along as spotters on aircraft bombing missions. Because of their defect in sight, they weren’t fooled by the camouflage used to hide anti-aircraft guns. Their deficiency saved the lives of countless aviators and troops on the ground.
At any other hour of the day, in any other state of mind, Thorn might have passed by that stand of trees without a second glance. Only because he’d been exhausted and stopped to rest, then was drawn by the light and wind, had he managed to penetrate the facade of limbs and leaves and twisting vines.
In the fading light he worked his way to the center of the wooded grove, pushed through the snarl of branches, creepers, and spiderwebs.
And there it stood like some obelisk abandoned by long-departed explorers.
It must’ve weighed three tons or more, coated with red scales of rust and crumbling blisters of corrosion. Two giant wheels shaped like those on the wagon trains of early pioneers straddled a large cylinder that he knew housed a piston the size of a fifty-gallon drum. The machine sat astraddle two rails as thick as anvils. He’d seen this same engine once before on one of those field trips with that old high school geology teacher.
Thorn circled the motor and circled it again. On what he took to be its rear, he saw a copper plate riveted to one corner, and he kneeled to inspect it. With his fingernail he scraped away a patina of hardened salt and dust, and there was a date and name: 1933, HUMBLE OIL.
He closed his eyes, made himself take several deep and careful breaths. In the past, that’s all it usually took to recharge himself. But this time it didn’t come close. His body and his spirit had sailed far beyond such easy remedies.
He slipped his hand into his pocket and took out the rudist and rolled it in his fingers, feeling its rounded edges. That once ragged clump of mollusk shells had been smoothed by the centuries, buffed and polished by the restless layers of sand and bits of bone that mounted steadily around it.
On that long-ago excursion, his geology teacher had bused the class to Collier County, an hour west of Coquina Ranch, taking them to a remote spot on the fringes of Big Cypress Swamp, an area called the Felda Fields. It was there in the early forties the first commercial oil well in Florida was drilled. Two miles below the ground was what oil men called a pay zone. But because the reservoir was a measly thirty feet thick, it only managed to produce a few million gallons of crude. Enough to make things interesting, but not the gusher Humble Oil was searching for. At the time when Thorn’s class visited, the oil had mostly played out and only a few stripper wells were still operating, the bulky rigs propelled by motors exactly like this one.
It made perfect geological sense. Down in the substrata, over the countless centuries, some portion of that same oil that was discovered in the Felda Fields had trickled eastward along the seams in the bedrock, moving steadily downstream toward a rudist-lined basin deep beneath Coquina Ranch, where it was trapped and held.
But why such a machine had been brought to this spot then abandoned, Thorn could only guess. The business of oil was always changing. Better extraction methods or higher prices could turn old fields new again. A deposit that was once considered unprofitable suddenly acquired great value. Maybe that’s what happened at Coquina Ranch.
What was nearly certain was that there was oil beneath this ground, and oil was behind Earl Hammond’s death, and it was oil that had brought Thorn unwillingly to this place.
He gave one backward glance at that great machine as he resumed his hike.
As far as he could see, he had no other choice, nowhere left to go except back to the hunting cabin.
TWENTY-FOUR
* * *
A HALF HOUR NORTH OF Clewiston, with twilight settling, Sugarman spotted the sign for Coquina Ranch. In the last few miles each ranching operation they passed seemed to be trying to outdo their neighbors with a more extravagant logo. But not the Hammonds. Theirs was barely a sign at all.
Just maroon lettering on a modest whitewashed background. No insignia, no fancy crest. And none of the KEEP OUT warnings they’d been seeing plastered around every other turn-off.
Sugarman swung off the highway and into the one-lane dirt road lined by ancient slash pines. The trees were planted so close to the narrow roadway that if he’d wanted to turn around and run for his life, there was no place to accomplish it.
Rusty made a noise in her throat. Not sure of this.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you?”
“Trust me. It’s not my first time rescuing Thorn.”
“What makes you think he’s here?”
“I don’t know where he is. But this is what we’ve got.”
The road made a hard right and narrowed even more. A half mile ahead, down the corridor of pines, a concrete guardhouse was stationed in the center of their path.
“We’re in over our heads, Sugar.”
“No, we’re not. We’re exactly where we should be. Doing the right thing in the right way.”
In her lap she made a fist, and stared down at her knuckles like a prizefighter getting psyched for the main event.
“Relax,” Sugar said. “Guardhouses are my specialty.”
In spite of herself, Rusty smiled.
There was a football game playing on the small TV in the gatehouse. A hundred thousand rabid fans were roaring, and the man inside wasn’t happy about missing the next play. He looked like a Mexican with an Aztec warrior or two coloring his genes. On his cheek and forehead were several red welts, inflamed scars that Sugarman had seen a few times before. Ancient cigarette burns.
Sugar didn’t mind waiting. And the guard didn’t mind letting him wait. He watched the next play, watched the one after that, and watched a little of the Budweiser commercial before he got off his stool and sauntered to the open door.
By then, Sugarman had decided the steel girder blocking the road was about three times as thick as it needed to be to stop an average passenger car traveling at top speed. Maybe they were expecting an invasion of Mack trucks. Or maybe they’d gotten such a fabulous deal on the girder, they couldn’t resist. Given another few minutes of waiting, Sugarman could make a decent list of other possibilities. It was one of the ways he’d learned to wait. Observing his immediate environment and trying to decode the decision-making processes of the interior decorator or the builder, or the guardhouse architect. You never knew what you might learn from simple observation.
“What do you want?” The Aztec warrior wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and a chunky nine-millimeter was holstered on his hip. More artillery than one might expect for a cattle ranch. Long ago the Aztec had gotten MOM tattooed on his biceps, but there was still plenty of room for the names of the rest of his family on that muscle.
“I’ve got an appointment with Frisco Hammond.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Call him. Tell him Mullaney is here.”
“If someone at the ranch is expecting a visitor, they tell me. Nobody told me. Which means you’re not expected, which means you’re not getting in.”
He quirked an eyebrow at Sugarman, pleased by his own watertight logic.
Play had resumed on his television set and the guard turned away and went back to his stool. He sat for a minute before the set, then during the next commercial the guard palmed a tiny cell phone from his desk and made a call. He spoke for a few seconds, then snapped it shut, set it down, and went back to the game.
“You think you can back out of this place?” Rusty said.
“I don’t believe that’s an option.”
The man sat through another few minutes of football. Sugarman heard enough of the broadcast to know it was late in the fourth quarter and the score was close. As one who had also frittered away vast amounts of time on TV football, Sugarman was sympathetic to the man’s irritation. When you’d burned three hours of a beautiful afternoon watching that steroidal mayhem, and it all came down to the last two-minute drill, it was physically impossible to pull away.
Sugarman waited. Rusty fidgeted. Whistles blew, fans screamed, announcers recited their time-honored clichés. The final two minutes of football ate up twenty minutes of real life. When it was over and the winning coach had been sufficiently interviewed and the beer advertisements resumed, the Aztec brushed off the lap of his jeans, stood up, and swaggered back to the car.
“You still here?”
“Frisco’s waiting for me. You know Frisco, right? Browning’s big brother.”
The Aztec settled the heel of his hand on the butt of his fat pistol. “You got his cell number?” The Aztec slumped forward to see Sugar’s face.
“I do.”
“You call him, have him call me. Then we’ll see.”
“When I call him, all I get is voicemail.”
“Well, then, I’d say that leaves you shit out of luck.”
Some tough guys were tough and smart. Most were just tough. The Aztec was about to take the exam.
Well-trained security men never stood close beside the door of an occupied car. Cops, highway patrol, for them it was second nature to plant their feet well behind the trajectory of a swinging door. The physics of doing otherwise could be brutal.
Sugarman drew his cell phone from his pocket, punched in Frisco’s number one more time, and when the voicemail’s robotic voice began to speak, Sugar said, “Well, it’s about damn time.”
The guard bent forward. Sugar hooked his finger under the door latch and said, “The gentleman monitoring the front gate wants to speak to you.”
The Aztec narrowed his eyes, but when Sugar held the phone up to the open window, the man stepped forward into the flight path of fifty pounds of sheet metal.
The door must have banged his knees because the guard buckled forward and whacked his forehead against the window frame. Another scar for his collection.
Sugar shouldered the door open, shoving the man backward to the ground. He was out of the car and had stripped the guard’s pistol from his holster before the Aztec finished groaning.
At that point it should have been a simple matter of tying him up with something handy, locating the lever that activated the gate, and driving on into Coquina Ranch, except for the white Mercedes sedan which cruised up behind them and tapped its bumper gently against Sugarman’s.
Two men got out of the Mercedes. Sugarman leaned down to the window and told Rusty to stay put. He’d handle this.
At that she unbuckled, got out of the car, and glared at him across the roof.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “What was I thinking?”
“Don’t worry about me, Sugar.”
By then the white guy had gone behind the Mercedes and joined the driver, a black man who Sugarman recognized from somewhere. The two huge men looked at Sugarman, then at Rusty, then at the fallen Aztec.
The black guy grinned and said, “We have us a situation.”
The white guy was a head taller than his buddy. In fact, he was bigger than any man Sugar had ever seen up close. He had a pudgy face and apple-red cheeks, and the body hiding inside his baggy khaki slacks and loose white shirt had the bulky solidity of a giant sack of grain. This was a guy you could punch till your fists were bloody and he might not even notice. Yet he moved like the best heavyweights do, with a silky agility that seemed almost weightless.
The black guy hung back as the other man advanced on Sugarman.
“You okay, Hector?” As he spoke, his eyes stayed on Sugar’s.
“This man, he ambushed me, Mr. Hammond. Give me a second to catch my breath, sir, I’ll take care of business with him.”
“Retrieve your pistol from the gentleman, Hector. Then go inside your shed and clean yourself up.”
Hammond kept his eyes on Sugarman’s face, tipping his head by small degrees to the left and right as if he might be selecting the best spot to sink his teeth.
Sugar handed the pistol to Hector and the guard said somet
hing in Spanish about Sugarman’s ancestors.
“The name is Sugarman,” he said to Hammond. “A friend of your brother’s. I just dropped by to have a word with Frisco.”
“He told me his name was Mullaney,” the Aztec said from his stool.
“You misled my security man to believe your name was Mullaney. That’s the name of the chief of police in Miami. This falsehood caused my associate and me to break off our business dealings and drive back here, which is a considerable inconvenience. Why’d you lie, Mr. Sugarman?”
“Maybe I was stretching the truth a little. I’m a friend of Mullaney’s. I thought the name might get somebody’s attention.”
“Oh, it did do that,” the black man said.
“I know you. You’re One-Ton Antwan. Dolphin runningback. Nowadays you’re promoting casino weekend getaways.”
“He knows you, Antwan.”
“Yeah? Well, that puts him in the upper quartile of the well-informed.”
“Why did you attack my security man?”
“He has a bad attitude and bad manners. His breath isn’t that great, either.”
Rusty came around the car and slid in close beside Sugar’s left shoulder. Hammond flicked a look her way and said, “And who are you?”
“She’s with me,” Sugarman said. “We’re here to see Frisco.”
“What do you want with my brother?”
“Look, I’m sorry. I understand this is a difficult moment for you and your family, you’re grieving. It’s a terrible loss, I’m sure.”
Hammond chewed on the edge of his lip. There was something childlike in his menace as if even after all these years living with that body, he still found his superior size and strength a little astonishing, like some teenager who’d been dropped behind the wheel of a car way too powerful for his abilities.
“Want me to call Sheriff Prescott?” Antwan said. “Have these two removed all official and legal-like.”
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