Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  “Big and blue and shiny. With a black edge along its wings.”

  Sugarman was silent for a moment, thoughts scrambled, heart in disarray.

  “Your watch, Janey, what time does it say?”

  “Same as yours, Daddy. Fifteen minutes until twelve o’clock. It’s very hot here. It’s been raining and it’s very hot.”

  “Listen, sweetie. Listen carefully. Thursday night when the men first put you in the airplane, do you know what time that was?”

  “They shot Dr. Andy. They shot all the other people, too, his clients.”

  “I know,” he said. “That was terrible. But we need to put that behind us. We have to work on this, Janey. We need to concentrate, okay? It’s important. You need to try to remember. It was nine o’clock on Thursday night when I saw the man dressed like a pirate on your Web camera. How long after that did you get on the airplane?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t notice my watch.”

  “Did they take the boat back to shore before you got on the airplane?”

  “Yeah, after they shot the people, they put me down in Dr. Andy’s cabin and locked the door and then drove the boat somewhere. I watched television and we drove for a long time and that’s when they came and took me out of the cabin and put me on the airplane.”

  “Okay,” Sugarman said. “Okay.” Trying to stay sharp, but everything was tangled in his head, wave after wave of emotion, going from trough to peak and back again in a half-second.

  “What were you watching? What was on the TV, Janey, when they came and got you?”

  “News and stuff. Mostly news, the weather, boring stuff. Dr. Andy can only get three channels on his boat. Is he dead?”

  She was looking over her shoulder as if hearing something.

  “There’s lots of wildlife here, Daddy. Lots of birds.”

  “And when you landed, the sun was just coming up? Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you flew all that time in between? From when you got onto the airplane till they landed, there weren’t any other stops?”

  “No stops, just a long trip.”

  “And the airplane, can you describe it?”

  “It was little. Just the place where the pilot sits. Two seats up there, and a few where I was.”

  “How many seats in the back, Janey? Where you were.”

  “A few. I’m not sure.”

  Sugarman said, “Sweetheart, does your computer have a little picture of a battery at the bottom of the screen?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s half-full. But I don’t know how long it goes when it gets like that. This is Dr. Andy’s computer.”

  “Will you be all right if we sign off now?”

  “You’ve got to go, Daddy?”

  “I need to think about this, sweetie, study a few things to help find where you are. You understand, don’t you? We don’t want your machine to die. We want to be able to talk as long as possible. Okay? Will you be all right?”

  “Trace the phone call, Daddy. That’s what they do on TV. Call the police and they’ll tell you where I am.”

  “It might be more difficult than that.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re on a satellite phone, for one thing.”

  “I bet the police can do it. I’ve seen that show, the one on Thursday night. They do all kinds of stuff.”

  “Okay,” Sugarman said. “I’ll call somebody. I’ll look into it.”

  “I’ve got windows,” she said. “Four windows. They nailed boards over them and they locked the door, but I can see out around the boards. I’m going to look for birds, Daddy. I’ll do that.”

  “That’s good, Janey. Birds, yes, anything else you can see. Keep looking at that sign. Maybe the wind will move the palm frond out of the way.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Sugar looked across the room at a mirror reflecting his backyard, squirrels chasing each other across the limbs of a mahogany tree. He was terrified of breaking this connection, losing this fragile contact maybe permanently, but it was the only way. He did a quick calculation in his head, the minimum time he’d need for the few things he’d thought of so far.

  Sugarman spoke her name and Janey answered. She was staring directly into his eyes. He wasn’t sure but thought he saw the glint of tears on her cheeks. He drew a breath and gripped the laptop screen with both hands, then eased his hands away. Staying strong for her. Showing her the way to act in this crisis. Don’t lose it, don’t lose it.

  “Janey, I want you to dial back in to Dr. Andy’s site at six o’clock tonight, okay? That’ll give me time to think about all this and make a plan. I’m going to come get you. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “How can you get me if you don’t know where I am?”

  “We’ll figure that out, Janey. Between the two of us, we’ll figure it out. I promise. I just need to think about this a little while. But it shouldn’t be too hard. We’re pretty smart, you and me, right?”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll look for birds and stuff.”

  “Is there water, Janey?”

  “I told you, Daddy. I got Cokes.”

  “No, I mean, is there water anywhere outside your windows?”

  She got up and left the chair.

  The screen went fuzzy and he heard what sounded like the tapping of Morse code for a few seconds. Then a dial tone and someone else’s voice speaking a few words in another language. Stray transmissions wandering in from the crowded heavens. He bent close to the screen and spoke her name. Trying not to sound frantic, trying to stay calm, though he felt anything but.

  When her face came back, he let go of the air bunched in his lungs.

  “There’s water,” she said. “It looks like a little lake. I don’t know, there’s trees in the way. But I see water and it smells like the ocean is somewhere close.”

  “It does? You can smell that?”

  “The ocean smells a certain way, Daddy. Haven’t you ever noticed that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed. I didn’t realize you had.”

  She tipped her head up, listening to something that came across the tiny speakers in Sugarman’s laptop as a shrill piping, like a single key held down on a screechy church organ.

  “Look, Janey, we need to save your battery. You reconnect to the site at six o’clock, okay?”

  “We’ll figure this out,” she said. “The two of us will. And Thorn, too. Is he there?”

  “Not right now, sweetie. But we’ll do it together. You and me, we’ll solve this thing, and I’ll come get you. Okay?”

  “Okay, Daddy. Six o’clock I’ll call you.”

  “And listen, Janey, don’t drink those Cokes too fast, okay?”

  “What?”

  “Go slow with the Cokes. You don’t want to drink them all at once and then have nothing left.”

  “But you’re coming right away.”

  “I’m coming as soon as we can figure this out. But we don’t know how long that’s going to take, Janey. So go slow with the Cokes.”

  He could see her face change, the smile drain away.

  “I’ll go slow then,” she said.

  He had to work hard to summon the breath, and even then the words almost choked him as he said, “I love you, sweetheart. Be strong, okay?”

  “I love you, too, Daddy.”

  And a second later his screen went dark.

  Eighteen

  “I’m not going in there, Vic. I told you, damn it.”

  “Oh, come on, Annie. You’re the only one who can really appreciate it. I show it to my friends, they smile and all, but it doesn’t have the impact.”

  “No, Vic.”

  Anne and Vic were still poolside, Vic working on her to take a tour of the brick house. Off behind the main house there was a long low wood building that looked like a garage or work shop. All morning a couple of long-haired men had been coming and going. Shooting her looks as they passed in the distance. From the
wood shop she’d been seeing the bright flutter of sparks and heard a shrill scream like a grinding wheel.

  For hours she’d been reminding herself that this was what she’d told Daniel she would do if something terrible ever split them up. She’d come to Key Largo, wait for him. Wait and wait, however long it took. And when Vic had made his offer of lodging she’d accepted impulsively. Out of weakness, her core gone soft and uncertain. She was waiting for Daniel. Even though she’d seen the men firing at him at close range, her instincts told her Daniel was still alive. A man so strong, so vital. She’d seen him roll away into the shadows. Maybe he’d gone over the side as she had done. She kept saying it to herself. It kept her sane, kept her moving forward. This was her new job, to wait for her lover to reappear.

  “Isn’t it pretty?” Vic said. “No replica, either. That’s the exact house, our family heritage. Brick for brick, board for board. Furniture, light fixtures, window treatments, rugs, the whole deal. Even the pots and pans. Those asshole Woodsons trashed it some, but I had all that fixed up. Good as new. Isn’t it pretty?”

  “It was ugly then, it’s still ugly.”

  “Jesus, why do you have to be so contrary, Annie? I haven’t done anything to piss you off. I’ve given you a place to stay. A roof and servants. You got a big payday coming up soon, a half-million bucks. Why so angry?”

  “We agreed on a million, Vic.”

  “Okay, a million. I just misspoke.”

  “Sure you did,” she said. “And I’m not going into that goddamn house.”

  “Where’d you sleep last night?”

  “Upstairs,” she said. “In the main house.”

  “Christ, Anne, you could’ve slept in your old room, same mattress, everything. It’s not like the place is haunted or anything. Come on, just take a quick look, humor me, for godsakes. Think of it as a museum. The Smithsonian of Joy.”

  A short Hispanic man in a white jacket and dark trousers, another of Vic’s servants, was striding across the patio with a phone in his hand. Anne had counted seven household staff, plus two more young men who’d arrived a few minutes earlier and were kneeling in the flower gardens weeding. Maybe full-time help, gardeners or goons, it was hard to tell about any of them. And then there were a couple of motorcycle guys posted out by the front gate. They smoked cigarettes and drank beers and tinkered with their bikes. Not exactly zealous sentries. Certainly nothing like the squad of sharks stationed around the grounds of the Salbone estate.

  Vic took the phone and listened for a while, then stood up and ambled out to the edge of the pool. From a couple of his curt questions, Anne gathered it was a business call, one of his accountants or lawyers. A man named Ramon was getting cold feet about something, trying to back out. Vic bullying the guy, his voice rising and his vocabulary inflating to more syllables than was his habit. Telling Ramon if he didn’t show up, he was going to lose his spot in the deal. It’d be his funeral. Glancing over to see if Anne was awed by his business prowess. Then speaking a few words in Spanish and hanging up.

  Anne looked around again at the servants she could see. Five visible at that moment. Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure how free she was to come and go with all these hired hands around. As if she might be more of a prisoner than she’d imagined.

  Over at the workshop, Marty stood in the open doorway watching the flash and flicker inside.

  Vic tossed the phone to the servant who stood twenty feet away, waiting. The young man fumbled the catch and the phone fell into the grass.

  “Jesus, look at that, will you? Jorge, the klutz. Man, I go and hire the one Cuban in the whole world that isn’t a professional baseball player.”

  Vic came over and looked down at Anne, trying for something he probably meant as an affectionate smile.

  “Hey, look, Annie, I’m not some uncaring asshole. I can appreciate why you wouldn’t want to go into the old homestead again. The shit that happened that last night, all that mayhem at such an early age. You probably got a touch of the post-traumatic syndrome thing. I’m not insensitive to that. But I’m telling you, Annie, it did wonders for me buying the place, having it hauled down here. I probably saved a hundred grand in shrink bills. I walk through that old house every now and then, and man, it’s like whatever’s been bothering me, it just flies out of my chest.”

  “I didn’t realize you were bilingual, Vic.”

  “Hell, these days you want to do business, you can’t speak too many languages.”

  “Look,” she said. “You want me to go in that house, then you do something for me.”

  Vic smiled. He lifted his hands and raked his fingers back through his long hair, stretching his arms out straight, untangling the gray snarls.

  “You really got that bargaining thing going on, Anne. That Joy desire to strike a deal.”

  “I need some cash. Some walking-around money.”

  Vic laughed.

  “Man, oh, man, Annie, you’ve been pirating for months and you got nothing to show for it?”

  “To hell with you.”

  “Okay, okay. What do you need money for? You got everything you could ask for right here. Food, servants…”

  “I need clothes, toiletries,” she said.

  “You been shopping at the Island Silver and Spice, got a nice new outfit.”

  “I know one of the clerks. She let me charge it.”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Fuck you, Vic. Never mind. Just fuck you.”

  He laughed again. Then he dug a finger in the corner of his eye, dug out the crumb, and flicked it away.

  “Okay,” Vic said. “I’ll advance you some of the cash you got coming. How’s that? A thousand, two? You can do a lot of walking around with two thousand.”

  “Okay,” Anne said. “Two thousand.”

  “So come on, take a peek. I preserved it just like it was. You won’t believe this, Annie.”

  “All right, all right.”

  She stood up, followed him over to the building, lagging a little.

  “You’re going to love this, Annie. The Woodsons ransacked it like they were looking for money, but all in all, when I got back there finally, it was still in pretty good shape. Personally, I’m surprised they didn’t get a goddamn wrecking ball and level the place. That’s what I would’ve done in their shoes. You know, I’m thinking of trying to resurrect that old schooner in the front yard. You want to help with that? I made some drawings.”

  She’d stopped on the top step and was staring at the wood planks of the porch.

  “Yeah, that’s the bloodstains,” Vic said. “I considered replacing the wood, but hell, that wouldn’t be right. That’s Mom and Dad, what’s left of them. Like having them in an urn. Not any different from that.”

  Anne stepped around the stains and pulled open the screen door and stepped across the threshold.

  Vic didn’t follow her inside, stayed out on the porch, maybe out of respect for her privacy. Anne stepped slowly across the living room, looking at the brown corduroy love seat where she’d reclined that final night, the same blue-and-red oval rag rug in the center of the tiny living room. That very book Vic had been reading lay open on the rug where he’d left it. The kitchen was unchanged. A box of Martha White self-rising flour sitting out on the counter, ready for biscuit making. Dishes in the sink. Probably direct descendants of the Kentucky roaches scurried across the counter.

  She felt the swoon of déjà vu, only far more intense than that. This house was more than some well-preserved museum, some replica of her past; this was the very thing. The same stale odors of human sweat and oily cooking and moldy boards, the same particles of lifeless dust swirling in the light.

  She glanced back to see Vic standing on the porch, gazing out at his oceanfront property. Anne had a quick vision of the view off the Harlan porch, the grim landscape below, the acid stench of the mines. She walked down the narrow hallway, looked at the three photographs on the wall. One grainy black-and-white of her mother and fat
her smiling broadly and leaning against the hood of that old Rambler, young lovers, with a palm tree in the background. The two other photos were class pictures of Vic and Anne from high school. Anne with long straight hair and a grim smile, performing for the photographer, but showing not a trace of real pleasure. Her eyes with a rabbity fear, a darting readiness to flee.

  She was back there then, in Harlan, among the ghosts, among the awful, oppressive fantasy her mother had imposed. Realizing in that aching moment that her mother was undoubtedly mad. More fixed and determined in her lunacy than Anne had ever supposed. Not merely eccentric, as she’d so long believed, but dangerously, chemically insane. A woman who had invented a dreamworld for herself and was committed to luring her husband and her children into that same hypnotic creation. There’d been no way to know it then. Anne had managed to resist only out of some blind instinct, but now she saw it, looking into her parents’ bedroom, at the collection of pirate junk and Hollywood publicity photos of pirate actors on her wall. Three-cornered hats, daggers, a red sash that might have belted the waist of Errol Flynn.

  Anne had had enough. She turned and was gathering herself to march from the house. But the cramped bedroom she’d shared with her brother all through their childhood and teenage years was one step away. She couldn’t help herself and entered the room.

  Bunk beds. Vic on top, Anne below. Vic’s same portable radio on the narrow shelf he’d hammered into place. Her shabby green comforter still draped across her bunk. The desk where she’d done her homework, Vic’s initials carved into the upper right corner. Even a shelf on one wall crammed with glass jars. The pickled remains of the dozens of frogs and snakes and field mice he’d tracked down in the nearby woods and killed. The floating heads of chickens, coiled intestines he’d pulled from possums and rabbits, the ear of a butchered hog.

  She couldn’t summon coherent thought, just looked at those marinated creatures and scraps of flesh. Standing in the cramped room she thought she’d left behind long ago. All that torment and sadness and confusion she’d known as a kid came welling back. This room, this house, the voices in the walls. A place she’d imagined had sunk into the bottomless sea of years. Lost down in the lightless depths.