Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  “So you shot him. You shot your father.”

  “He was a loser. And his stupid petty thievery is what killed my mother, and almost killed the whole lot of us. He was going to give me to that stupid boy like I was some truck stop whore.”

  Thorn was silent. Anne looked down at the fists in her lap.

  “I blew him through the front window, then shot Al Woodson before he could say a word.”

  “And Vic?”

  “Cowering inside the whole time. Hiding in our bedroom closet.”

  “I see.”

  “When I told you the story that night, I gave you the same version Vic and I worked out between us. Making him the hero. Turning him into the one that saved what was left of the family. We drove together all the way to Florida and that’s what happened on the trip. I made up that story and I gave it to him. At first he was dazed and blubbering half the time. So I led him through it step-by-step, planted it in his head. He didn’t accept it at first. He kept looking over at me and shaking his head, refusing, refusing, but mile after mile I went over it again, very patient, very slow, every second of what happened in my imaginary version, until by the time we drove into Key Largo, that’s what he believed. He was a hero.”

  “You also convinced him he was a killer.”

  “That wasn’t my purpose. I wanted to protect him, make him strong. I needed him when we got down here. We were two kids, runaway teenagers. I needed to count on him. I needed him strong.”

  “Well, he’s crazy now.”

  “Yeah. He’s out of control.”

  “A little crazy goes a long way.”

  They passed through Key Largo, then drove beyond the black area of Hibiscus Park, past the Publix, and on toward Pennekamp Park. Not talking for those three miles. The road less strangled with traffic. Most of the winter people already home. Just some weekenders heading home to Miami and Lauderdale.

  “That’s three shots,” Thorn said.

  “What?”

  “Your mother fired once and you fired twice. You said it was a shotgun.”

  She looked at him for a couple of moments, mouth tight.

  “What, you think I’m still lying?”

  “Clarification,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “Why would I lie? I’m telling you how it was.”

  “I didn’t say you were lying. I just asked a question.”

  She sighed.

  “Mossberg AOW, twelve-gauge. It’s a three-shot shotgun.”

  Thorn kept his eyes forward, but he was seeing that night from her eyes. A teenage girl, her mother dead at her feet, then killing her own father. Trying to imagine how that had forever reshaped the landscape of her heart. How she coped then, how she’d continued to cope over time. Getting a glimpse of the hard woman she’d turned herself into, but still vulnerable. Still parts of her easily wounded.

  “You were going to tell me about your recent history. The man you met.”

  She looked down the highway, then turned back to him. Her eyes seemed brighter. Relieved of some inner pressure. Finally shattered the flimsy history she’d invented as a child and had been carrying around ever since.

  “It’s all just a bunch of stories, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “The past,” she said. “Just one lie overlaid on another. That’s what we do; we fiddle with the facts, find a better way to tell it. Dress things up, add, subtract to suit our needs, make what we’ve done more tolerable. Any way you cut it, memories are just one story after another.”

  “Stories maybe,” Thorn said. “But somewhere inside, everybody knows what’s true about their past. Even Vic.”

  “You think so? I’m not so sure.”

  “It’s in there somewhere. It may be down deep, buried under a lot of muck. He’s a coward and a fool and he knows it.”

  “If he does, it’s under a whole lot of muck,” she said. “A ton of it.”

  She drew a breath and let it go.

  “I murdered two men,” she said. “And I gave that to Vic. I guess I never admitted that part of it. I was trying to make him strong, but without meaning to, I was also handing off the guilt. Turning him into the fucked-up individual he’s become.”

  “You did it to survive. You were a kid in a terrible situation.”

  “Doesn’t let me off the hook.”

  “At least it helps explain how he is now. The thing with the knife. Vic’s got a lot of proving to do. And you seem to be his number-one audience. Though I’m not sure exactly what I’ve done to piss him off so bad.”

  “You’re with me, for one thing.”

  “The protective older brother. Comes and has a talk with all her boyfriends, lets us know we’re swimming in dangerous waters.”

  “That’s part of it,” she said.

  “And what else?”

  “He wants what you’ve got.”

  “My land, you mean. Or my nuts?”

  “He wants what you have, Thorn. Something he doesn’t have and you do. It enrages him that you’re like you are. Not impressed, don’t give a shit about his money, his possessions. He doesn’t run across that very often and it infuriates him when he does. You’re not even particularly afraid of him.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “You’re in his sights now, Thorn. The crosshairs are on your forehead.”

  “I realize that.”

  “You don’t seem too worried.”

  “Oh, I’m worried,” he said. “But at the moment I’m a little more worried about what’s happened to a nine-year-old girl.”

  “I know Vic took her,” Anne said. “He admitted as much. But I have no idea what he did with her.”

  “Square one,” Thorn said.

  He drove in silence for a while. The declining sun put the palms along the highway in sharp relief. Birds on the telephone wires were dark silhouettes surveying the endless flow of traffic. The hot wind coming into the car brought that hazy, festering smell of a full-moon low tide, the sulfurous stink of exposed marl and rot of barnacles and shellfish and decomposing seaweed. A lush and sticky breeze that marked the last quick days of spring giving way to the heavy suffocation of summer.

  “Well, as long as I’m confessing,” she said.

  He looked over and met her eyes.

  “You sure you want to hear this, Thorn? It’s another tragic story.”

  “Ready if you are.”

  She began to describe that day in February at the Lorelei when Thorn and Alex and Lawton and Sugarman and his girls had come to lunch. Right after Anne had served them, she’d met a striking young man out on the sunny deck.

  Thorn listened to her as he was slowing for the shrub-veiled entrance to his driveway.

  “Aw, shit. Now what?”

  A Monroe County Sheriff’s car was blocking the mouth of the gravel drive, its blue lights spinning. A couple of deputies were lounging around, which meant, of course, that there were more inside, doing the real work.

  Thorn swerved into the cut-through, gunned across the highway, and stamped the brake and the ancient VW bumped onto the shoulder and slewed through the gravel to within a foot of the left front fender of the cop car.

  A few minutes later, when the deputies finally let them pass and they pulled up next to his stilt house and parked, he saw Sheriff Taft down by the dock with the others.

  Taft ambled up the sloping yard to meet them. There were half a dozen cars scattered across Thorn’s yard—a white van, an ambulance, two cop cars, and a navy blue Crown Victoria.

  “I been trying to reach you, Thorn.”

  “I must’ve left my beeper at home.”

  Uniformed cops and two slender men in white shirts and dark slacks were milling around down at the water’s edge. He supposed the white-shirts might be Mormon missionaries, but more than likely they were FBI. Thorn counted seven people in all before Taft stepped into his line of sight.

  He looked at the bloody mess on the front of Thorn’s shorts.

 
“What the hell?”

  “Hard day at the office.”

  Anne stepped up beside him, and Taft paused a moment to take her in. She was a few inches taller than the man, and he tilted his wary eyes up to hers.

  “Anne Bonny Joy,” she said. Then a second later, “Vic Joy’s sister.”

  Sheriff Taft looked back at Thorn, studying him for an awkward moment.

  “Man, oh, man, what kind of shit have you gotten into, Thorn?”

  “Goddamn it, Taft, what’s going on?”

  The sheriff glanced again at Anne, then unbuttoned his shirt pocket and drew out a photograph and handed it to Thorn. A black-and-white police mug shot, taken head-on. It took him a half-second to place the guy. The red-haired mongrel outside Vic Joy’s house. Same hooked nose, same sneer.

  “We got a match on the fingerprints on that knife in your door. The guy’s a local. Marshall Anthony Marshall.”

  Thorn handed the photo to Anne and she took a minute with it.

  Thorn wasn’t sure which way this was spinning. Those men down by the water weren’t here because of a mug shot. The ambulance, the white van, the dark Crown Vic. Those were out-of-towners. Probably Jimmy Lee Webster and his gang throwing their Washington weight around. The idea of handing over Marshall Marshall to the authorities didn’t faze Thorn, but the consequences did. Getting Vic entangled with Sheriff Taft, forcing him and Marty Messina to waste time on the legal horseshit that would arise, did nothing to get Janey free any sooner. Not that he could see.

  “Don’t know him,” Thorn said. “Looks like a nice young fellow, though.”

  “He’s not,” Taft said. “He’s got more priors than the pope has beads.”

  “I’ll be darned. Looks can be deceiving.”

  Taft burned him with a look.

  “You want to get this thing solved, Thorn, or are you going to keep playing this one-on-one bullshit?”

  “Don’t know him, Sheriff. Wish I could help.”

  Anne shook her head. Didn’t know him, either.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Yeah, right.” Taft snapped the photo out of Anne’s hand and slid it back in his pocket and buttoned the flap. “Thanks so much for your assistance. Now there’s this other little thing.”

  He half-turned so Thorn could view a slice of the activity at the shore.

  “I came over here a couple of hours ago to run the photo by you. I knocked, I waited, but you weren’t around. I was starting to leave; that’s when I saw something in the trees down by the water.”

  “In the trees?”

  “It wasn’t birds,” Taft said. “Nothing natural.”

  Thorn tried to step past him, but Taft put a rough hand on his chest and held him in place.

  “Since I couldn’t locate you,” the sheriff said, “I took the liberty of tracking down your friend at Miami PD. The ID tech lady.”

  Thorn drew his eyes from the bustle by the water and looked at Taft.

  “Yeah, and what does Alex have to do with this?”

  “I thought maybe she could help me track you down.”

  “Well, I’m here.”

  “Yeah, you are, but she’s still coming down from Miami. On her way right now so she can give us a hand with things. Since she’s a fellow officer, I thought I might actually get some honest answers from her about what the hell kind of game we’re playing here.”

  “Great,” Thorn said. “Perfect.”

  “What time was it when you left your house today, Thorn?”

  “I don’t know. Nine, nine-thirty.”

  “And you noticed nothing unusual on the premises when you were leaving?”

  “What is it, Taft? Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “You noticed nothing unusual on the premises this morning?”

  Thorn sighed.

  “That’s right, nothing unusual. Would I have seen this thing? Maybe I walked out and it was there and I didn’t notice.”

  “Oh, you would’ve noticed this, Thorn. No two ways about it.”

  The sheriff brushed a hand across the front of his shirt, then tugged on both cuffs. Getting prissy around an attractive woman.

  “Miss Joy,” Taft said. “You might want to stay up here, spare yourself the ugliness.”

  She glanced at Thorn.

  “Is she free to go?” Thorn said to Taft.

  He stepped back and grazed her body with an unnecessarily long look.

  “Better if she stayed. Unless she’s got some really powerful reason to flee a homicide scene.”

  Twenty-Two

  Four o’clock, two hours till his next talk with Janey. Sugarman was trying damn hard to keep from imagining the details of her situation, the fright and confusion she must be feeling, the small, hot cell where she was imprisoned. And his own dread was getting in the way as well, clouding his ordered thoughts. Putting a quiver in his handwriting as he scribbled down a list of everything he could remember from their earlier conversation. Smell of the ocean, a blue iridescent butterfly with wings edged in black, those animal sounds coming from nearby, heat and rain. And pulling that together with what he’d picked up from Kirk Graham. A thousand nautical miles. Maybe even eleven or twelve hundred.

  He used a razor blade to cut a page from the musty Encyclopedia Americana, a map of North America, then he dug an old metal compass out of a tool drawer in the garage. He calibrated the compass against the map’s legend, setting it for eleven hundred miles, then drew a circle with the center point in Islamorada.

  The pencil tip traced a path that went as far north as Philadelphia, as deep into the west as Kansas, Texas, and central Mexico, then curved south and east to include all of Central America and turned due east to skim at least a hundred miles inland across northern Venezuela and Colombia before the dark line arced out into the Atlantic and encircled Puerto Rico and the string of small islands of the West Indies, from Martinique and Saint Lucia north to Nevis, Saint Kitts, and Barbuda.

  He set the compass down and looked at his circle. Next he might have spent some time doing the math and figuring the square miles of his search area, but he could see no point in that. A number that large would only increase his sense of utter futility.

  Janey was somewhere eleven or twelve hundred miles away. Seven or eight hours by air, in a hot, rainy, animal-rich region somewhere near the sea. It sounded like a rain forest, a tropical jungle. Which meant he could rule out Philadelphia and Cleveland and Memphis, in fact, all of the noncoastal U.S. and even most of the coast, which was, for the most part, too densely developed or too temperate to match her description. There might be a few areas along the Louisiana or Mississippi shore that would qualify, swampland where animal life was abundant and the smell of the sea was nearby. Surely he could eliminate a good deal of arid and desert Mexico. Which left him hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory, both the coastal regions rimming the Caribbean Sea and the islands scattered throughout it. A search area so vast, it took his mind out of focus. Sent his spirits spiraling downward.

  As he was mulling his next step, studying the map and his enormous circle, the terrible notion came to him that the pilot of that plane might not have flown in a straight line at all—for any of several perfectly ordinary reasons. Dodging thunderstorms perhaps could send him hundreds of miles off course. And then there was Cuba lurking out in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, a huge no-fly zone that would make any flight path heading south or southwest from Islamorada have to add a lot of extra miles.

  He needed Kirk Graham for a better idea about how many. But his own quick calculations, using the compass to step off fifty-mile chunks of possible flight paths, showed him that hundreds of miles and as much as an hour or two could be lost by a wide diversion around the island of Cuba.

  And then, of course, there was the disturbing possibility that the pilot of the plane had been sufficiently devious or paranoid to intentionally add flight time to the trip to throw off any such computations as Sugarman was now attempting. But because he
could not confirm that, his only choice was to go with the zone he’d outlined and hope there was time for him to shrink that enormous circle down to a single dot before Janey’s situation got any worse.

  The smell of the sea was something. And the blue butterfly. And there’d been a bird she’d mentioned. But now he couldn’t recall.

  He set the map aside, looked across at the dark screen of the laptop, then began to comb through the volumes he’d borrowed from the Key Largo Library.

  “It’s called a gibbet cage,” Anne said. “It’s a pirate thing.”

  Taft swung around and stared at her.

  “A pirate thing?”

  “Eighteenth-century pirates, yes. You don’t see a lot of them anymore.”

  “No shit,” Taft said.

  Thorn was sitting nearby on the yellow bench watching the forensics people taking photographs, measuring the site, searching the grass and the muddy shoreline for footprints or any other traces left behind.

  Hanging from a heavy limb of the oldest gumbo-limbo in his yard were three men. They hung side by side, a foot or so between each body. A ton of stress on that limb, but it was holding up fine. Each of their naked corpses was locked inside a tightly fitted frame of what looked like reddish iron. A one-inch flat band of metal circling the neck, another around the chest, and two more around the torso. Their legs were banded at knees and ankles like braces on a child with polio. Iron bands ran along the shinbone and joined the ankle and knee braces together and linked them to the rest of the cage. The men’s heads were gripped by four iron strips that looked like the inner frame of an ancient diving helmet. Two heavy chains connected the helmet with the hip bands. Apparently it was a device meant to hold a man stable, not necessarily to torture or kill.

  Jimmy Lee Webster and Zashie and a man Thorn didn’t know were hanging there. Throats slit, then hoisted up to the tree branch. From the swaths of blood on their white chests it appeared they’d been caged and hung from the branch with their hearts still beating.

  The two white-shirted investigators nudged close to Anne and were listening to her recitation. She seemed eerily casual about the scene, while Thorn noticed that even the cops were taking care not to lift their eyes to the three bodies in the tree.