Silencer

by James W. Hall

  * * *

  THORN RETRIEVED THE RUDIST, DROPPED it in his pocket. He collected the Glock from the countertop, the Mac-10 from the floor by the doorway. He snapped the release on the Mac and let the big clip fall to the floor. He aimed at the ceiling and held the trigger down to make sure no rounds were left inside. If he’d had sufficient strength, he would have cracked the goddamn thing in half.

  His ears were ringing and the fumes of his rage had scalded his throat as though he’d been bellowing at the moon for an hour.

  Jonah struggled to stand.

  Thorn kept the Glock steady while Jonah staggered to the sink and ran the faucet and lowered his bloody head into the stream of water. When he was done, he used a dish towel to pat himself dry.

  Turning to face Thorn, he let his eyes wander downward and saw the stains on the front of his shirt.

  “Aw, man. One of the Brooks Brothers.”

  “Soak it in cold water,” Thorn said. “That works with blood.”

  Jonah looked up and eyed Thorn for a moment.

  “What did he say? What did my brother say to you at the end?”

  “He said he was fucked. He smiled and he died.”

  “That’s all? That’s everything?”

  “He wasn’t much of a philosopher.”

  Thorn kept the pistol balanced in his hand. Hardly a quiver at all.

  “Well, fucked is right. From day one till now. Fucked.”

  “What we need,” Thorn said, “is some duct tape. Where do you keep it?”

  “Duct tape?”

  “I’m tying you up, and you and I are going to drive out of here.”

  “Just shoot me in the head, man. Get it over with.”

  “I’m over my quota already. Duct tape, where is it?”

  Jonah’s shoulders slumped and he waved a lazy hand toward the door.

  “Back bedroom.”

  “Lead the way, Jonah. Be careful.”

  Thorn tagged behind by several steps. A slow march through the living room. Several of the candles had guttered out. The papers on the wall were rattling like a field of brittle grass before an approaching storm.

  “What’s this? Your collected works?”

  Jonah halted in front of the poster with rows of skulls. In the top left corner a single circus clown in pasty makeup was grinning wildly.

  “These were done by monsters. Gacy, Dahmer, Manson, you know, the heavyweights. Doodling in their prison cells. Moses and I sold this stuff. It’s how we made our spending money.”

  “Oh,” Thorn said. “Like a paper route.”

  “Bunch of whackjobs,” Jonah said. “These are very sick fucks, sicker than me. I wasn’t sure before, but now I know. Totally sicker than me.”

  Jonah led him down a narrow hallway to the last door. He opened it, stepped inside. Thorn hung back in the corridor and waited. The Glock was centered on Jonah’s back. Thorn fighting the urge to end this now.

  Jonah walked across the room to a dresser, keeping his hands extended to the sides for Thorn to see as he reached out and took something off the dresser.

  “Duct tape,” Jonah said, turning around and holding up a roll. “All that’s left.”

  Thorn stepped forward through the doorway. There were twin beds, side by side. A lamp burned on a table between them. Moses was laid out on top of the blue bedspread. He was wearing a fresh pair of slacks, a crisp white shirt, his hair combed flat. His hands were folded together over his stomach, concealing the puncture wound.

  On the second bed lay a naked woman. A brunette, average build. Her legs were spread wide, ankles bound to the bed posts with silver duct tape, her arms stretched out as though she were making a swan dive into a bottomless pool. Her wrists were taped to the frame. A single strip covered her mouth. Her eyes were open but empty. Thorn saw no rise and fall of her chest. Across her throat a bruised and bloody crease dented the flesh as though she’d been throttled with a lead pipe.

  Jonah had backed into a corner of the room. His eyes were ticking back and forth between his dead brother and the woman’s naked body. Thorn stepped fully into the room. There was an odor he couldn’t name and didn’t want to.

  “Who is this?” Thorn said.

  “Her name is Donaldson. She’s a cop. She tried to arrest me.”

  “You did this?”

  The phone in his pocket sang out again. But Jonah made no move. He held the roll of tape in his left hand. His right was pressed flat against his heart as if he were pledging allegiance to some dark and secret nation.

  “I had to see,” Jonah said. “I had to see exactly how fucked up I am.”

  Thorn felt his finger tense against the trigger.

  “I’m not a monster,” Jonah said. “I thought I was, but I’m not.”

  “You might want to reconsider.”

  “No, see, I touched her after she was gone. I tried, I really did. But it didn’t give me a thrill.”

  “It’s not supposed to.”

  Jonah’s eyes wandered from the dead woman’s body to Thorn.

  “But how do you know until you try? How do you know for sure?”

  Thorn had no answer for that. It was one of the Zen koans he hadn’t gotten to yet.

  “Let’s go,” Thorn said.

  “Where?”

  “Out of this room.”

  Jonah walked past him into the hallway. Thorn took one backward glance at the woman on the bed, then shut the door and told Jonah to keep walking.

  When they were in the living room, the phone in his pocket trilled again.

  “Answer it,” Thorn said.

  Jonah drew out the glossy red phone and looked at its screen.

  “Who is it?” Thorn said.

  “He’s asking where the fuck I am.”

  “Asking? How’s he asking?”

  “He’s texting me. You know about texting.”

  “I should but I don’t.”

  Jonah held up the phone and Thorn stepped closer.

  “See,” Jonah said. “ ‘WTFUB’—where the fuck you be? He’s always asking that. You want me to hit him back?”

  “Who is that?”

  “Guy you told me you saw in a bar on TV. You know. One-Ton Antwan.”

  “That’s who’s running the show?”

  “He’s the man. They don’t come any badder than that zombie.”

  “Ask him what he wants.”

  Jonah thumbed the tiny buttons.

  “He always gets back quick. Man’s very hyper, got blood-pressure issues.”

  The device made an electronic tinkle, and Jonah looked at the screen.

  “He wants us to come to the lodge. Me and Moses. Got a job for us.”

  “What job?”

  “The way you say it is, ‘WTF4?’—What the fuck for?”

  “So say it.”

  Jonah typed the letters, and a second later when the phone jingled again, Jonah held it close and said, “He’s got some garbage needs to go to the dump.”

  “What garbage?”

  “I can ask him, but he won’t say.”

  Thorn felt the skin on his neck prickle. “Ask him: What garbage?”

  Jonah danced his thumbs on the keyboard. A few seconds passed, the phone remained quiet, and Jonah said, “I told you. Antwan doesn’t share his business dealings. He’s one cagey primate.”

  Jonah settled on the couch across from a crude drawing of a topless woman with large round breasts. He looked at it for a few seconds, then winced.

  “This whole fucking disaster, man, it was my idea. I mean if we’d just smacked you, tossed your body in a canal, Moses would be alive. But I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted more cash flow. Fucking money, man, that’s the root of all evil.”

  “No,” Thorn said. “It’s only one.”

  Jonah reached to a side table and touched a finger to a small white cell phone.

  “Who are you, Thorn? Some kind of kingpin?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “You’re some
kind of big deal, aren’t you? I mean even Claire Hammond knows you.”

  “Is that right?”

  He tapped the white cell phone again.

  “This is the cop’s.”

  “So?”

  “After I killed her, I mean, it’s like I had to see who she was, so I went through her stuff, her wallet, her purse and shit. Listened to her messages, one from her husband, sounding worried, wanting to know when she’s coming home. And, hey, then there’s one from Claire Hammond. She mentions your name, Thorn.”

  The device in his lap played its jingly tune again.

  Jonah read the text and said, “Okay, so I was wrong.”

  He typed something back and after a second the phone jingled again.

  “What the hell’re you doing?”

  “Antwan wants to get rid of some people at the lodge. I asked him who it was, and all he said was a couple showed up, sticking their noses in his business. A guy he’s calling ‘brown sugar’ and the guy’s squeeze, a twiggy.”

  “Brown sugar?”

  Thorn grabbed the shoulder of Jonah’s shirt and hauled him to his feet and pushed him toward the front door.

  “Hey, back the fuck off, man. What’s going on with you?”

  “We’re going to the lodge.”

  “I’m not going to any lodge. I’m staying here. I’m staying with Moses. I’m going to have a funeral.”

  “Get going.”

  Thorn shoved him toward the door.

  “I said no. I’m not deserting my brother. Fuck the lodge.”

  Jonah dodged to the left behind the couch and was halfway to the kitchen before Thorn could raise the Glock. But again he couldn’t shoot. Not moral hesitation, but necessity. The asshole knew the way out of this landlocked maze.

  Thorn started across the living room, calling out to Jonah.

  He was passing by the Gacy poster when Jonah popped into the doorway holding the Mac-10. His shit-eating grin was back.

  But only for a second. That grin died quickly on his lips. Thorn dropped him with the first shot to his chest, watched him fall, then stepped close to put the second through his tortured brain. Granting Jonah his final wish.

  With the toe of his shoe, Thorn nudged his shoulder. Jonah was gone.

  Thorn kicked away the Mac-10, and it skidded across the hardwood floor.

  There was no clip in the slot.

  THIRTY

  * * *

  FRISCO HAD NEVER TOLD THE story, never been tempted to tell it. Since the night Earl Hammond revealed it to him, Frisco kept it locked up with most of the other memories of his childhood on Coquina Ranch, inside a dark vault in his chest. Though he’d hauled it around without complaint all these years, he knew the knowledge had made him colder, less trusting of men who held the reins of power.

  In silence and in no particular hurry, he drove west out of the orderly network of streets and roads and avenues that spanned Miami, all the roadways broad and lit, straight as rulers, and numbered north and south and east and west. Most of the city was mapped that way. If you knew an address, you could drive directly to it. Good for cops and taxi drivers, good for tourists. But soulless and dull. In a way that’s what Earl Hammond’s story was about, those roads, all the other cars packed tight around him.

  “You ever hear of the Trilateral Commission?”

  They were stopped at a light, 8th Street and 107th Avenue. Claire turned down the jazz station she’d been listening to.

  “Some kind of Ayn Rand phony cabal? The twelve men who run the world?”

  “Well, that particular cabal exists, the Trilateral Commission. David Rockefeller started it in the seventies. Supposed to foster international cooperation. They have official meetings, put out papers, that kind of thing.”

  “Is this about Coquina Ranch?”

  “It’s about the second half of that story Earl was telling you.”

  She was cupping Frisco’s cell phone in her hands. He could see its slow green pulse like some otherworldly creature calmed by her touch.

  “Trilateral Commission is just one of many. There’s Bohemian Grove, a summer camp for the rich and famous out in California. The Carlyle Group, Davos, Bilderberg, the Jerusalem Assembly. Skull and Crossbones. A couple dozen of them. Lots of overlap, same guys, different campfires. Ex-presidents, sheikhs, people you’ve never heard of. The global elite. The Four Hundred who matter.”

  “Sitting around, complaining about their prostates,” Claire said.

  He smiled.

  “Prostates are not unimportant.”

  “So you’re saying Coquina Ranch is one of those?”

  “It was never supposed to be.”

  Claire was silent while Frisco gathered himself for a moment.

  “That night little Earl went back to bed, but it was too much for him. For godsakes, Ernest Hemingway, his hero, was sitting out there a half mile away. The President of the United States is there. Earl fidgeted for an hour, couldn’t get to sleep, so he rolled out of bed and stole back down there. He knew every twig and branch out in those woods, so it wasn’t hard to sneak around. In the daytime when the campfires weren’t in session, he played in those woods, pretended he was part of the gatherings. One of the gang.

  “By the time he returned, the cast of characters had changed. Hemingway was gone. Hoover had left, too. Edison and Ford were still there, and another man had joined them. An old codger, frail as Edison, in his eighties.”

  Frisco steered into a service station, pulled up to the full-service pump, and let an elderly Cuban gentleman fill his tank with gasoline that cost fifteen cents a gallon extra for a little old-time service. He wanted to do the story justice, but it sounded bland as he related it to Claire. None of the color or the smells that he could picture in his mind. The dying campfire, the men huddled close. That story had been in the vault too long and lost its flavor.

  “Earl found out later who the old guy was. Rockefeller.”

  “John D.?”

  “Yeah, he had a winter home in Ormond Beach and he’d gotten to be friends with Edison and Ford, met them at the ranch a few times. They shared a love for Florida. They’d go camping together, in their straw boaters and sport coats, a bunch of eccentric outdoorsmen. Rockefeller was a serious golfer at a time when playing a round of golf was like hiking the backcountry. He’d been retired from Standard Oil for twenty years, his wife had died. That was the time when he was giving his money away in huge chunks.”

  Frisco paid the Cuban man for the gas and pulled back into the traffic. He glanced again at his cell phone flashing in her lap.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just haven’t had much practice telling this story.”

  “You’re doing fine.”

  Frisco cracked his window, let in some cool night air.

  “Well, what little Earl heard that night, he didn’t understand. It took him years to put it together, to grasp what an outrage he’d witnessed.”

  Claire was quiet, watching Frisco speak.

  “It was just talk, nothing concrete, no papers drawn up or anything like that. None of that came clear till later. But Earl Junior was certain the seed was planted that night. The Depression was just taking hold, and here were these men, captains of industry, they got all the money in the world, and they couldn’t stop looking for business opportunities. It was in their blood, it was who they were.

  “The plan was simple. Start a company, call it something innocent. Rockefeller proposed the name that night, and that’s the thing Earl remembered. National City Lines. A year or two later Firestone came into the deal, and Alfred Sloan with General Motors. Rockefeller used his West Coast branch, Standard Oil of California, as cover. A year or two after that campfire, National City Lines started buying up streetcar systems, all the electric mass transit. Trolleys, trains. They bought more than a hundred. Tulsa, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. Then they just stepped back and let them fall apart, raised fares, cut service, fired mechanics
and conductors, didn’t maintain the rail lines, let it all rust. Found every goddamn thing they could to undermine the business. A decade of neglect and sabotage until automobiles and gasoline-powered buses started looking pretty attractive to commuters and politicians. Just a simple plan to get everybody out of electric trains and into gasoline-burning cars, so all the men sitting around that fire could get a little richer.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s it?”

  “When he got old enough and put it together, Earl Junior hated the idea that National City Lines was born at Coquina Ranch. Hated that his own father had collaborated in a way. It was corruption of the worst kind—moral, ethical—and it was unpatriotic. Everything Earl despised.”

  “It’s what competitive people do,” Claire said. “Same in sports. Find your opponent’s weakness, exploit it. It’s the way the world works. Push hard, take advantage. Go for the throat.”

  “Part of the world works that way, I guess.”

  “I’m not trying to justify it.”

  “There’s referees on the football field, and there’s cops on the street, but tell me, Claire, who’s watching the guys sitting around the goddamn campfire?”

  She was silent, staring out the windshield at the faint lights of ranch homes in the distance. Frisco had never realized how angry that story made him.

  “I’m sorry I barked,” he said.

  She waved her hand, blowing it off. “So where does the oil fit?”

  “Geology was one of Edison’s hobbies. The guy had a million hobbies. All that time he spent on the ranch, he and Ford were poking around, damming up streams, digging in the dirt like a couple of kids, excavating fossils. Eventually he sold Earl Senior on the idea of setting up a few exploratory wells. He thought the topography looked right. Earl said fine, be my guest. All a big joke.

  “That’s how it started. Wildcat crews showed up one day, rigs got built, wells drilled. I don’t know who footed the bill. Probably John D. They hit some oil, hit it again, all in that one area on the western border where the red circles are. But Earl Senior lost interest. He didn’t see the point. Why wreck his sanctuary? The ranch was selling cattle to Cuba at the time, making good money. He thought of the oil as a retirement fund. He could tap it one day if he needed to, like hocking the family silver. He wasn’t opposed to drilling.