Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  “Vic’s a reader,” Marty said.

  Thorn took down a leather-bound copy of Robinson Crusoe, strummed the pages, releasing a fine musty powder into the air.

  “Show him the site plan, Marty.”

  Eyeing Thorn with a complicated smile, Vic stood behind a sweeping oak desk that was littered with folders and documents.

  Marty rolled what looked like a room service table away from the wall. Spread out on its surface was an architectural model of what appeared to be a standard-issue tropical beach. A few miniature coconut palms arched toward the blue plastic sea, a crescent stretch of snowy sand. Filling almost every inch of the property adjacent to the beach was a massive structure, five stories high, a slab of concrete with windows, each with a view of Blackwater Sound. The mixing trucks would be rolling for a year just to lay the foundation.

  When Thorn looked up, Vic reached behind him and tugged a sash, and the red drapes that Thorn had mistaken for window coverings pulled aside to reveal a large watercolor of the same beach as the model that sat before him.

  Thorn set the book he’d been holding back in its slot on the shelf.

  “Van Gogh?” Thorn said.

  “You want me to disembowel you right here? Keep being a wiseass.”

  Even in the flattering golden light filtering through the fronds outside, the painting looked to Thorn like something Sugarman’s daughters would have discarded as a botched attempt. A hideous purple sky. A cliché beach.

  “My mother did that. So yeah, it’s not going to hang in the Met anytime soon. But the woman had a vision. You got to give her that. She poured her heart and soul into that painting.”

  Marty gave Thorn a crafty sideways smile. A private communiqué that dared Thorn to mock the painting.

  “So do you see?” Vic said.

  “See what?”

  “You see where you fit in? What this is all about.”

  “I’m a little slow,” Thorn said. “Everyone comments on it.”

  “Okay, here.” Vic shuffled through the papers on his desk till he located a file folder. He drew out a stack of glossy color shots and fanned them like an oversize deck of cards. Thorn touched the edge of one and pulled it free of the pile. Then he drew out another and looked at it. “Now do you see?”

  “You took these from the parasail.”

  “Hadn’t been for you fucking my sister, Thorn, I would’ve never seen your land firsthand. Hell, until then, I’d overlooked it altogether from the air. But I took one look that day, and I said, Eureka. I’m going to have that little stretch of coastline.”

  “The Island House motel,” Thorn said. “You bought that and knocked it down so you could build the Great Wall of China?”

  Vic ran his finger across the plastic sand of the model.

  “Land’s scarce, Thorn. That five acres you’re sitting on is about the last prime piece around. How it’ll work, I join your land with the Island House property and the one in between, which I already own, then I build a resort ten times bigger than anything the Keys has ever seen. And the highlight of the whole place will be that pretty little beach exactly like the one in the painting. A nod to my dear old mom. Hang her painting in the lobby.”

  “That’s Miami Beach, not the Keys. It’s the goddamn Fontainebleau.”

  “You’ve been playing pioneer too long, Thorn. People don’t want charm anymore. Some ramshackle cottage with warped floors and a ceiling fan that moves the hot air around. They want comfort. They want a view. The world’s changed. And you’re still hogging that chunk of land, playing your kid’s games, pretending you’re some asshole Daniel Boone. Well, that’s finished, my friend. You just got your fucking eviction notice.”

  “You’re nuts,” Thorn said.

  “You just figuring that out?” Vic said. “I guess you are a little slow.”

  Thorn saw the tick of a blue vein at Vic’s temple. Muscles tightening in his jaw and throat, sinews rising.

  “You already own a dozen resorts,” Thorn said. “And you kidnap a little girl so you can own one more?”

  “I’m taking your fucking land, Thorn.” Vic aimed his eyes across the room at the rows of books. “I offered you a fair price and you pissed on my shoe. This is what comes next.”

  His eyes were the color of the fake water his model makers had chosen. He let his gaze drift across the shelves of books until almost as if by accident his line of sight intersected with where Thorn happened to be standing. Vic’s face had assumed the most casual of expressions. But Thorn sensed the rage was still there, constricting his throat, narrowing his veins. Pressure building just beyond the edges of his blasé face.

  “My people have already drawn up the closing papers. Done the title search bullshit and all that, got all the t’s crossed.”

  “I sign and then Janey Sugarman magically appears.”

  “You sign, then you get an item of equal value.”

  “How do I know she’s still alive?”

  “How does a man know anything?” Vic said. “In this life, you got to take a lot on trust.”

  “I want proof,” Thorn said. “Or I don’t sign anything.”

  Anne Bonny pushed open the door and stepped into the room.

  Her flesh had regained most of its coppery hue. She glanced at Thorn briefly, then back at her brother.

  “I’m going, Vic. I need that money.”

  “Shopping?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly, “shopping.”

  “All right,” he said. A smile for his sister. Stooping to draw open a drawer, pull out a stack of bills, begin counting out a sum.

  While he counted, Anne looked at Thorn, and though he might have designed a slightly more provocative display for Marty’s consumption, Thorn was happy enough that she raised her right hand and grazed her fingertips across his bare arm. If Thorn had witnessed a similar touch to Alexandra’s flesh by any man, his skin would’ve writhed and he would have barked in protest. So all in all, he didn’t feel compelled to do more than just stand there and savor the lingering simmer of that touch.

  In the next moment a flush came to his face, and he found himself replaying a rapid sequence of moments from their long hours in his bed, sex that was disconnected from all knowledge of each other, their personalities or their pasts, two anonymous people grappling with each other for hours at a time.

  And as Vic handed Anne Bonny the stack of bills, Thorn felt a lurch in his chest, the visceral other half of the recognition he’d just had. That even though he didn’t feel for Anne any of the complex, deeply rooted devotion he did for Alexandra Collins, still, this tall, troubled woman who turned to him now and spoke his name and waited for him to resurface from the far place where he’d gone, this woman aroused him in ways that he’d all but forgotten were possible.

  “Go get the Cadillac, Marty,” Vic said. “Annie’s going shopping.”

  “No,” she said. “Thorn will take me. Won’t you, Thorn?”

  Vic smiled at his sister and shook his head.

  “At the moment, Annie, Thorn’s occupied with a small real estate matter. Marty can drive you where you need to go.”

  “I’ll do it, Anne,” Thorn said. “You ready?”

  “I’ll get my things,” she said, and walked past Marty out the door.

  When she was gone, Vic pushed a sheaf of papers across the desk.

  “Forget it. I’m not signing anything without proof she’s safe.”

  “You sign the papers, you get your proof. That sweet little girl is fine for the moment, but there’s no way to know how long she can hold out in her present predicament. You don’t want that on your pious conscience, do you, Thorn? The blood and guts of an innocent child?”

  Vic took a fountain pen off his desk and uncapped it and was still focused on slipping the cap onto the butt when Thorn made it around the desk.

  Not in the script, not even close. But the surge of anger blindsided him and he seized Vic’s ears and hammered the man’s head back against his mother�
�s silly painting. Once, twice, ripping the canvas, opening a gash halfway across that sandy beach.

  Vic managed to twist his head a few degrees to the side and saw the damage and it sent a groaning shudder through his body. He snarled a curse and Thorn felt the fountain pen gouge through his shirt and into his belly and then a second stab, settling deep in the soft tissue lower down.

  Thorn slammed a forearm into Vic’s left temple and was drawing back for another when Marty Messina grabbed him by the arm and slung him backward across the room into the shelves of books. All that prison muscle finally paying off. Books tumbled down across Thorn’s shoulders.

  The pen was only buried a half-inch, but it was a half-inch of solid pain. Thorn pushed himself away from the shelves and gripped the pen and wrenched it free, threw it on the rug. Vic was touching the ragged seam in his painting, muttering to himself while Marty stood in the center of the room in a wrestler’s crouch, daring Thorn to make another move.

  “You’re fucked, Thorn,” Marty said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  He backed out of the room and onto the landing. One of the female servants was coming through the front door. She halted, stared at the blood drenching the waist of his shorts, and dropped the stack of mail in her hand.

  Thorn hauled himself upstairs, leaving splatters and smeared footprints on the white maple steps.

  As he made it to the top step, Anne was coming out of her room.

  “Christ, Thorn. What the hell is this?”

  “Pen’s mightier than the sword.”

  Anne looped an arm through his and towed him into her room, shut the door, and turned the lock. She laid him on her bed and undid his belt and drew aside his shirt. As she drew open his clothes, her eyes seemed to soften, as though she were drifting along with him back to that other time. The loosening of underclothes, the tugging of elastic bands and silk, the urgency to expose and be exposed.

  Anne Bonny went into the bathroom and ran the water and brought back a warm washcloth and dabbed at the first puncture. Then she had to roll down the elastic band of his Jockey shorts to get at the lower one. His penis partly revealed, though some of it still hidden by her guarded handling.

  “Bleeding’s slowing down,” she said. She kept the washcloth pressed hard to the wound. “They don’t look that bad.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “What happened?”

  “I lost my cool.”

  “Easy to do with Vic. He feasts on that, provoke and conquer.”

  “Tore a little gash in that painting your mother drew.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Anything but that.”

  She went back to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and retrieved a bottle of peroxide and some small Band-Aids. She sat down again on the edge of the bed, cleaned the wounds, and crisscrossed them with bandages.

  When she was done, the throb had eased. With her free hand caressing his chest, his senses were scattered, hard to focus on the ache. A warmth rising in him as he looked up into the shadowy heat of her eyes.

  “Old times,” he said.

  She nodded. Eyes turning inward for a long moment. Then coming back to his, her mouth crinkling into a restrained smile.

  “We were good,” she said. “In a lot of ways.”

  “Yeah,” Thorn said. “The physical part, that was special.”

  “Takes more than that for things to work.”

  “I know,” he said. “But we handled that part well.”

  “We did. Damn well.”

  She used the washcloth to wipe away the smears of blood on his ribs and at the narrowing of his waist and then scrubbed at the bloody tufts of pubic hair.

  “Everything’s a trade-off, isn’t it?” she said. “No way to have it all in one neat package.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But some packages are neater than others.”

  Thorn closed his eyes and fixed his mind on the receding pain. He was here with her, behind a locked door with Marty Messina fully aware of his presence. He was satisfying Jimmy Lee Webster’s assignment better than he would have imagined. No further action required. The appearance of intimacy. Tweaking Marty’s suspicions. If Webster’s theory was correct, then Thorn had accomplished all he needed to do to bring Daniel Salbone out of hiding. He could simply shut down, lie still, wait for half an hour, and walk away from that house forever, having done all he could do to get Janey back.

  So it startled him to see his own hand rising like a draft of smoke to graze her cheek, to cup that fine-boned face, hold it in his palm for several seconds while they searched each other’s eyes, and then his hand eased her head down slowly without resistance on her part. Until her eyes closed and an involuntary moan escaped her throat and her lips parted to join his, eager and pliable, that blend of force and gentleness that had marked their kissing from the very start.

  As the heat deepened and spread through his chest and the kiss grew more serious and probing, some circuit tripped in his libido and Thorn simply shut down.

  With the hand cupping her cheek, he exerted the slightest pressure on her jaw and edged her away.

  The question was in her eyes. Thorn drew a deep breath and studied her lips and eyes and the taut coppery skin. An exotic beauty who stirred him still, in fact, even more, now that he understood something of the horrors she’d been struggling to free herself from.

  “What is it?” she said.

  Thorn considered it for a moment, breathing her breath, her foreign scent that was still so familiar, so richly seasoned with memories.

  “I can’t,” he said. “There’s other people now.”

  “Other people?”

  “Yes.”

  It was more than he could explain. For it wasn’t Alexandra alone, though she was most of it. There was also Lawton and Sugarman and Janey, too. There was even the damn dog.

  It had been so long since he’d been a part of a family, he’d forgotten the sensation, the sense of duty and mutual respect—those deeper pleasures than simple self-indulgence.

  Anne Bonny drew back and settled herself upright on the bed beside him.

  “It’s always something.” No bitterness, just a faint trace of regret.

  “Yeah,” Thorn said. “Always something.”

  She lay down beside him.

  “Is this all right?” she asked as she nudged closer.

  Thorn swallowed. Over it now, though the heat of the kiss still lingered.

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

  And they huddled close, her head tucked into the hollow of his shoulder, Thorn closing his eyes, willing himself to relax, following his breath in and out until it slowed, until finally he drifted off into a restless, guilty nap.

  Maybe it was an hour later, maybe more, when he felt himself rising through the smoky layers of dream, feeling hands fumble at his opened clothes, tug his crotch, careful fingers working to separate his parts. In that slow, groggy resurfacing, he was aware of the heat and tightening in his penis, and he groaned and reached down to nudge Anne’s fingers away and felt instead the sudden cold sting of steel against his scrotum and a strong and hairy hand holding him firm.

  He tensed and came instantly awake. And looked down to see Vic Joy perched on the edge of the bed. A hunting knife in one hand, Thorn’s balls gripped in the other. The blade of the knife was touching the tender wrinkled skin at the base of the sack.

  Anne sat up beside him.

  “Vic!”

  “Tell him, Annie. Tell him how hard our mother worked on that goddamn painting. What it meant to her. How much of her heart is in those trees and sand and water.”

  “Put the knife down, Vic. Put it down.” Annie rose from the bed and raked a strand of hair from her face.

  Thorn swallowed and strained to stay still.

  Vic said, “Some men would be squeamish to touch another man’s genitals. But not me. When I was a boy I castrated hogs. Tell him, Annie. Tell him about the hogs and that stray dog that kept
coming into our yard bothering us. Tell him about the animals from the woods. Tell him, so he’ll know.”

  “Vic, you can’t do this. It’s not right.”

  “A man comes into my house and mocks me, he tears a gash in my birthright. Tell him about the Woodsons. Tell him about the collection you saw.”

  She went slowly around the end of the bed. Quiet footfalls as if to keep from waking a sleeper.

  “You’re not such a cocky bastard now, are you? Where’s the smart mouth, asshole? Come on, say something clever.”

  Vic tightened his hold and adjusted the blade so a half-inch thrust would do the job. Thorn closed his eyes, holding back the howl that was storming in his chest. Lights flickered behind his eyes as Vic twisted his grip a half-turn.

  “I’ve held bigger balls,” Vic said. “And I’ve cut them loose.”

  Anne stood beside him and laid a hand on his shoulder and Vic looked up at her, but his grip did not relax a fraction.

  “There’s Woodsons who’ve done less to piss me off than this man has, and those boys are walking around without their sex.”

  “I know,” she said. “Thorn was wrong to do what he did. But listen, Vic: Our mother, she wouldn’t want this. She wouldn’t want you to cut a man like this, not in her own house, her sanctuary. There was never violence, Vic, not at home.”

  Vic’s eyes were glassy and vague as he looked up at his sister. Years melting away, his features smoothing.

  “Mother’s dead and gone. She’s not here to speak for herself.”

  “Vic,” Anne said. “Give me the knife. Give it to me.”

  “She’d forgive me, no matter what I did. She’d find it in her heart. She always forgave me. That woman was a fucking saint.”

  Anne reached down and touched the back of his knife hand, and the contact registered with a keen bite against Thorn’s flesh.

  “Give it to me, Vic. It’s going to be all right. We’ll get the painting repaired. Anything can be fixed, Vic. You know that. It can be patched as good as new. Right?”

  “I’m going to kill this fucker. It’ll never be the way it was. Never.”

  “You need him alive, Vic. You need him to sign the papers for his land.”