Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  “See what I been doing? My little hobby.”

  Vic stood in the doorway.

  “What?”

  “The jars. The ones you’re looking at.”

  Anne looked back at the frogs and mice. Scattered among them were four or five other jars that contained what looked like pickled eggs. Floating in a clear broth, the white orbs were coated with a pinkish film.

  “Every summer I been going back up there to Kentucky. I bag a Woodson. Been at it for six, seven years now. One’s my limit, though. Don’t want to deplete the supply. I fly up, take a week, hunt one down. These days they know it’s coming, try to get ready, hunker down, defend themselves. But they don’t know exactly when I’ll be there, so they can’t be prepared every second of every day. It’s my way of paying homage to Mom, keeping her memory alive in those godforsaken hills. They think it’s Mother’s ghost coming for them. That’s what I hear.”

  “Woodsons?” Anne tried to focus on the jars, the pickled eggs.

  “Their nuts, Annie. Those are Woodson cojones.”

  Suspended in the gelatinous fluid, the white orbs stared out at her like sightless eyes.

  After a while she heard Vic leaving the room, but Anne couldn’t pull herself away. The light-headedness she’d been feeling had spun into full vertigo. Trying to breathe, trying to keep her balance in that room with its ancient dust, the stifling density of its air, its dark swirl of memories and terrors she thought she had long ago escaped. And those blind, white eyes.

  “You got an appointment?” the motorcycle guy asked Thorn. Black T-shirts, torn jeans, heavy belts, and black boots, the standard uniform, except for the insignia on their shirts. A queen conch sprouting handlebars, and two spinning wheels. Maybe it was supposed to be funny and Thorn just wasn’t in the mood. Hell’s Conchs.

  The runty one said, “Charlie asked you a fucking question.” The man had long, ratty red hair and a crooked nose that looked like it might be handy for opening beer bottles. There was a heavy cast on his right foot that someone had spray-painted black.

  “What happened to you? Been punting cement blocks again?”

  “Is this guy funny, Charlie? ’Cause I’m not finding him humorous.”

  For a half-second Thorn toyed with the idea of taking these two on. Sucker-punch one, kick the other backward into his bike. But Thorn had come courting, playing a delicate game, and he had to remind himself to downshift his rage, keep Janey’s face out of his head. And Alexandra’s, too.

  “My name’s Thorn. Is himself around?”

  “Himself?” the little one said.

  “He means Vic. He’s being a wiseass.”

  “Mr. Joy wants to see me,” Thorn said. “He’s gone to a lot of trouble to get me here and I don’t think he’d want you two gentlemen to slow that process down.”

  The big one reached into his jeans pocket and drew out a silver cell phone, flipped it open, hit a button. The small biker hobbled near Thorn and tipped his head a few inches closer like he was trying to draw in Thorn’s scent so he could track him down later.

  The large man put his phone away and reached around the cement column and pressed a button and the iron gates rolled apart.

  “See you later, wiseass,” the little one said.

  “Can’t wait,” Thorn said.

  A snowy egret stood frozen on the shoreline of Joy’s property, its neck cocked as it peered into the shallows at its feet, ready to spear lunch. Holding so still it could have been an ornament.

  Vic seemed to be watching the bird as he stood out on the sunlit lawn between a large oval swimming pool and a redbrick house with asphalt shingles. Thorn had seen uglier houses, but not many. That brick structure was a jarring contrast to the graceful yellow-and-white conch mansion that stood on the north end of the property. The big house had a white tin roof and finely filigreed rails and balustrades, an abundance of French doors and lazy outdoor ceiling fans and white wicker furniture, that graceful, airy Keys style that the nineteenth-century shipbuilders had stolen from the Bahamas by way of New Orleans and Cape Cod. This was a copy of some of those dignified Victorian structures that filled the backstreets of Key West, and from a distance the house was pleasing enough to the eye for a blatant forgery.

  In a way, the dingy brick house seemed the more authentic of the two structures. It didn’t belong anywhere near a subtropical island, but it wasn’t a copy of anything, either, wasn’t intended to seduce. It was a crude and uncomplicated building, and if it wasn’t pretty, at least it was honest.

  Vic turned from his opulent view. He was wearing black trousers and a tight black T-shirt that showed off the sharp V of his torso.

  “Well, if it isn’t my favorite bowel obstruction come calling. We meet again, Mr. Thorn.”

  Vic Joy was an inch or two taller than he was, maybe twenty pounds lighter. A rangy man with crinkly iron-tinted hair that hung loose down his back and small, overactive eyes that struck Thorn as totally independent from the rest of his face. At that moment his gaze was trained on Thorn’s face, judging, probing, while his mouth curled into a vacant smile.

  “I got your note,” Thorn said.

  “And which note would that be?”

  “The one stuck to my door, suggesting you’d like to make a swap for my property. ‘Items of equal value.’”

  “So tell me,” Vic said. “You here to start trouble or is there some commerce you’d like to transact? You should figure that out, Thorn, before we go forward, don’t you think?”

  “You know why I’m here. Because you kidnapped a little girl.”

  For a few seconds Vic’s eyes lost their hold on the moment and seemed to swim down into the lightless realms inside him as though he were drawing strength from the cesspool of his past. When he refocused on Thorn, some of that frigid darkness was still in his eyes.

  “I don’t like you,” Vic said. “You should know that up front.”

  “I’m crushed,” he said.

  “I’ve made a little study of you, Thorn. Talked to people who know you, know where you came from, what you do with your time. It’s the way I do business. I like to know my enemy.”

  “And?”

  “You’re everything I despise, Thorn. A backward, shiftless do-nothing. A man who mocks the hard work and aspirations of others. A scoffer who believes in nothing but the bullshit orbiting his own navel.”

  “You’ve done your homework.”

  Vic reached out and poked a stiff finger into Thorn’s arm.

  “Don’t think I’m just some run-of-the-mill businessman,” Vic said. “Oh, I buy, I sell, I develop land. But the bottom line for me is fun. And that’s exactly what this deal is going to be. Fucking you over, Thorn, that’s going to be a major pleasure. And don’t think you’re going to walk in here and negotiate or bargain or play games. Because you’re in my world now. And once you’ve stepped into my gravitational field, you don’t get away, son. There’s no escape from Vic Joy.”

  Thorn watched as Anne Bonny came out the front door of the brick house. She glanced in their direction, but her gaze wandered across the two of them as if they were invisible. With an uncertain grip on the handrail, she leaned heavily against it as though her legs were about to fail.

  “I’m here to get the girl back, that’s all.”

  “Yes, yes, the girl,” Vic said. “I love it. A guy like you who prides himself on being such a fucking individualist. This rebel free spirit. Well, that’s bullshit. You’re typecast, Thorn. As predictable as Pavlov’s dog. Stimulus, response. All I have to do is put a poor child in danger, and you salivate all over your shoes.”

  Anne’s legs gave way and she slumped sideways against the rail and half-slid, half-stumbled down the last two steps and went sprawling into the grass.

  Thorn sprinted over and got to her as she was struggling to lift her head.

  “Stay down,” Thorn said. “You fainted.”

  Her gaze roamed his face, but she seemed to see nothing there she comprehended. He
r eyes were hazy and vague and her breath came in hurried heaves. She turned her head and glanced back at the brick building and a burst of dark panic flared in her face as if the phantom she’d been fleeing was stalking down the stairway after her.

  Vic squatted beside them and laid a hand across her forehead.

  “Poor thing’s gotten feverish.” He nodded at the house. “Memory lane can be one steep-ass road to climb.”

  “That’s the place where it happened?” Thorn said. “The Harlan house?”

  Vic gave Thorn a look of naked surprise.

  “She told you about that?”

  “You brought that piece of shit down here?”

  “Damn right,” Vic said. “Brick by brick, board by board. Man’s got to preserve every scrap of his history he can. That goddamn house is the foundation of everything I am today.”

  “And just as ugly,” Thorn said.

  He scooped Anne Joy into his arms and hoisted her up.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “She needs to cool off,” he said. “Lie down for a while.”

  Vic tagged along, appraising Thorn’s physique with the precision of a tailor sizing a customer.

  “I don’t like this,” Vic said. “My sister sharing family history with some shit heel she picks up in a bar.”

  Thorn carried her up the front stairs and a young man in a white jacket and dark trousers held the white door ajar.

  “Which way’s the bedroom?”

  “Upstairs,” Vic said. “First door on the left.”

  Anne’s eyes were closed and her features had turned soft and blurry as though she were suspended a couple of inches below the surface of a pool of clear water.

  Cradling her, Thorn registered the familiar heft of her body, the well-muscled but limber frame. A sudden unwelcome tingle fired through him, this flesh that once had stimulated his flesh to such incessant heat.

  He was halfway up when Marty Messina rounded the second-floor corner and halted abruptly.

  “Well, fuck me,” he said. “What do we have here?”

  At the top of the stairs, breathing hard from the climb and his pulse rattled by that unsettling ghost of desire, Thorn nudged past the man. Messina was freshly scrubbed and wore tight white jeans and an orange tank top that exposed the mats of dark hair growing on his shoulders. A square patch of gauze was taped to the edge of his armpit, a dot of blood showing through.

  “Orange isn’t your color, Marty. Clashes with your shit-brown eyes.”

  Thorn managed to turn the doorknob and knee open the door. He carried Anne across the Oriental carpet to the four-poster and laid her out, tucked the pillow under her head. He went to the windows and lowered the blinds.

  “Get her some cold water,” Thorn told Marty. Vic was standing behind him in the doorway.

  “Fuck you, Cheese Whiz.”

  “Go ahead, do it, Marty,” Vic said. “Some Perrier with ice and lime. A damp washcloth, too.”

  Messina pouted for a moment, then wheeled and huffed away.

  “Think that ought to do it?” Thorn said.

  “Do what?” said Vic.

  “Get Marty using his cell phone. The thing I’m here to accomplish.”

  Anne moaned and dug her head deeper into the pillow.

  “Like I said.” Vic chuckled from the doorway. “Pavlov’s idiot dog.”

  Nineteen

  “She’s a beauty,” Kirk Graham said.

  “You know what it is?” said Sugarman. Just past Vic Joy’s estate, he made a wide U-turn, heading back north, farther off the coast, for the return trip to Key Largo.

  “Been a while since I saw one, but hell, yeah, I know that plane. I even flew one for a while, down in Saint Croix, doing a little barefoot island-hopping for one of the hotels down there. Sight-seeing trips for the tourists. Lasted a few months, back in my wild and crazy youth.”

  “I want to know how far it can fly in seven hours or maybe eight.”

  Key Largo was full of pilots, but Kirk Graham was the only one he knew who was a full-blown aviation fanatic. Built model planes, flew the radio-controlled ones. He was a senior pilot for United Airlines, took weekend runs to Rio. Down one night, back two days later. Gave him the rest of the week to work on his tennis game. Sugarman knew him from the courts where Kirk spent most of his off-hours, giving lessons to the pretty ladies and hustling guys half his age who’d never seen an old guy like Kirk in such greyhound shape.

  “That’s Vic Joy’s place, isn’t it?”

  Sugarman nodded.

  “You working a case?”

  He nodded again.

  “I don’t know,” Kirk said. “If Joy’s mixed up in it, you’d better call your life insurance agent, double your policy.”

  “What do you know about that plane?”

  Kirk tugged the bill of his baseball cap lower against the wind.

  “I could go on the Net when we get back, pull up all the stats, give you the whole deal. But off the top of my head, I recall a few things.”

  Sugarman passed along the eastern edge of Rodriquez Key, took a heading on the distant markers at South Creek that led to Largo Sound.

  “It’s a Grumman G-73 Mallard. Came after the Goose and the Widgeon. The Grumman people wanted an amphibian for commercial use with the regional airlines that work the islands. It seated ten or eleven besides the two pilots. But it never caught on and you don’t see many these days. Chalk’s Airlines, up in Miami, they still use them, the turboprops, but otherwise they’ve pretty much disappeared.”

  “What about fuel capacity, speed? What’s its range?”

  “Range and speed depend on a lot of factors, the number aboard for one.”

  “Two adults and a child,” Sugarman said.

  Graham peered at him.

  “Child?”

  “Young kid, less than a hundred pounds. The adults were big. Probably pushing two hundred.”

  “Is this personal, Sugarman? About what happened on that yacht?”

  “You don’t want to get involved, Kirk. I just need the data.”

  Kirk nodded, getting enough of the picture to let it go.

  “Okay, well, I believe the Mallard has a maximum cruising speed of somewhere around one-sixty, one-seventy, that’s knots. Pretty typical for a plane that size and weight. The floats slow it down, or it’d be up near two hundred.”

  “So in seven hours?”

  “Thousand nautical miles, maybe eleven hundred.”

  “It carry enough fuel to do that in one hop?”

  “A person who could afford the Mallard G-73 could afford to outfit it with an extra tank or two. But even without the added capacity, it could probably make eleven hundred easy enough if it wasn’t flying into a gale.”

  “Eleven hundred miles,” Sugarman said. “Jesus God.”

  “Bad news?”

  Sugar steered the Whaler through the first markers into South Creek. A big dive boat heading out at full power, its decks crowded with tourists, sent a wake curling up behind it, a five-foot tsunami of dark green water with nowhere to go in that narrow mangrove-lined channel. Sugar took the shortest direction through it, plowing head-on, slamming up and over the wave. Kirk pitched hard to the side and had to grab the console rail to keep from going over.

  When they were in the quieter water, Sugarman glanced his way.

  “Sorry.”

  Kirk had taken a good dousing but said it was okay, no problem.

  “Thanks for your help.”

  “Man, Sugar, I never saw you this worked up.”

  “Never been this worked up.”

  Sugarman kept the throttle flat, roaring through the channel’s hairpin turns, flushing herons and flocks of egrets that had been clutching peacefully to high perches in the mangroves. One great blue heron trumpeted a hoarse bray, disentangled itself from the branches, and with a couple of lazy strokes swam up into the clear sky. Slowest wing beat of any of the wading birds.

  Sugarman followed the g
rayish-blue bird as it caught a current and settled in for a ride. An elegant bird, but like every other creature, it survived from one bloody moment to the next. Gristle and bone, plunge and kill, cut and run.

  “Annie’s going to be fine,” Vic said from the doorway of her bedroom. “Now let’s you and me have a talk, Thorn.”

  Anne was resting, eyes closed, breath coming evenly. Thorn went to the window and cranked the wood blinds tighter.

  Out in the hallway Marty had reappeared and was leaning around Vic for a view of the scene. For Messina’s benefit, Thorn walked to the bed and touched Anne’s cheek with the back of his hand, lingered there for a couple of beats. He might have bent to kiss her on the forehead, but he didn’t want to push it, give Marty a reason to be mistrustful.

  Maybe it was Thorn’s wishful imagination, but when he looked over again Messina seemed to have tightened his frown a notch. Eyes hardening.

  Perhaps it was that cruel edge in Marty’s face that brought Janey’s face swimming into Thorn’s head and staggered him for a moment. He had to force down a breath, relax his hands, or else he would have charged the two of them right there. For Janey’s sake, he worked up a stiff smile and showed it to Vic.

  “Yes,” Thorn said. “She’s doing fine.”

  Vic led them to his downstairs study and shut the door and walked over to stand behind his desk. On one wall a double set of French doors looked out at the Atlantic, and the other three were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookcases painted a glossy white. While Vic watched, Thorn wandered the room, scanning the man’s library. It was, as far as he could tell, devoted entirely to seafaring novels, from Treasure Island to Peter Benchley. Conrad shelved beside Jimmy Buffett. Several volumes dedicated to Blackbeard, Captain Kidd and Gasparilla, Sir Francis Drake, and an entire wall of what looked like swashbuckling paperback romances. Garish colors and giant sabers and deep necklines. Stunted by his mother’s infatuation with pirate lore, clearly, Vic Joy had never managed to broaden his interest beyond that training. Some might politely call him a specialist. But Thorn wasn’t feeling polite. Junk was junk. A lifetime of drinking rotgut didn’t qualify you as a connoisseur of anything.