Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

“Don’t light him up,” Marty said. “Vic wants him along for the ride.”

  “What the fuck for?” The short man, Marshall Marshall, scratched his flint again, but no spark showed.

  “Vic’s sister,” Marty said. “To get the code out of her.”

  “What? We get to torture him?” Marshall grinned.

  “He’s mine,” Vic said, rising from the ground. “Don’t touch him.”

  “Come on, Thorn,” Marty said. “Time’s a-wasting. We got to move.”

  “What code?” Marshall looked back at Marty, scratching his lighter idly, and this time the flame sputtered and caught and the heavy fumes ignited in a blue-white whoosh, the air turning to a superheated solid that battered Thorn in the chest and pitched him up and over the rail. He backstroked through the blazing wind, tried to right himself but failed, and smacked on his rump a yard from Vic, then slumped back into the grass.

  His hair was singed, head fogged, and eyes nearly sightless from the blast of light. A numb heat flowed up his spine. Flat on his back, he groaned and pried his head a few inches off the ground, and as his hazy vision cleared he watched the green-and-orange flames crawl along the stairway and snap at the walls and then there was a secondary flash and rupture of fire along the pilings that supported the house.

  All around him the air was sucked from the night. A howling vacuum that shot sparks into the sky, twisting upward on the powerful drafts, a stream of embers lifting off like spirits returning to the heavens, ten thousand specks of wood flickering and dancing, serving their last purpose on earth before they winked out against the stars.

  Twenty-Seven

  “This is it,” Sugarman said. “Green-and-rufous kingfisher.”

  Lawton bent to look at the shiny color plate, the little green kingfisher perched there amid rows of candy-bright exotics, the motmots and half-dozen different woodpeckers, toucans.

  Sugarman squinted at the small print on the adjacent page.

  “This is the bird she saw. I’m sure of it. ‘Dark metallic green. Rufous underparts.’”

  “I knew a Rufus once,” Lawton said. “Rufus Slotsky. But I never saw his underparts.”

  Sugarman looked up at the old man and felt a smile rise to his lips.

  Alex was still out on the front porch, pacing back and forth in front of the screen door, the cell phone at her ear, using her free hand to swat at the moths and gnats swarming around her head. Earlier, when she began making her calls, Sugarman hadn’t been able to hear her, but as the evening wore on she’d started talking louder, more emphatically, annoyance creeping in, flashes of anger. Same thing over and over, talking to someone she knew at Miami PD or Metro, getting the number for someone higher up, a referral to Washington, local FBI, then speaking to people she didn’t know. Waking them from sleep, apologizing, saying it was an emergency. Over and over explaining the situation, a nine-year-old girl kidnapped off her soon-to-be-stepfather’s yacht, five people murdered, yeah, yeah, that one, the one off the Florida Keys, big boat, the psychic guy. Yeah, yeah, but the point is, now the girl has contacted her father via satellite phone, and she’s being held hostage in the jungle somewhere in Central America, trying to keep it simple and clean, four sentences, five. They needed a trace; how hard was that? Then listening to the response, sometimes two or three clipped questions from Alex, the pleading tone coming into her voice, or more exasperation, then hanging up and calling the next one. Everybody passing her on to somebody else. This was out of their area of specialty. Was a known terrorist holding the girl? Well, it required a subpoena, get in line, put your name on the list. Three hours of that, approaching four.

  A while ago Sugar had gone out to the porch when she was between calls and told her she could stop. It was obvious no one was going to help, but Alex shook her head.

  “So much for my clout,” she said. “How about the Herald? One of those pit bulls looking to make a name. That’d light a fire under my so-called friends in law enforcement.”

  “Circus time,” Sugar said, shaking his head. “TV trucks would be camped on the front yard by morning. It’d all blow up. Vic would find out about it, know Janey’s talking to me, and he’d pull the plug. Or worse.”

  She looked out at the empty street, the quiet working-class neighborhood. Plumber, fishing guide, grocery store manager, druggist.

  “That bird thing doesn’t seem to be working, Sugar.”

  “Oh, yeah, I think it is. I’m getting it narrowed down. We’re almost there.”

  “Almost? Looks to me like you’re down to Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, three fairly large countries last time I checked.”

  “Closer than that.”

  “Even if you had her exact location, then what? Charter a private jet, fly down there, guns blazing?”

  Sugarman hadn’t considered the “Then what?”

  “Maybe I will,” he said.

  Alexandra frowned at her phone.

  “I’m going back to the phones,” she said, and she was still at it. Not once mentioning Thorn.

  Green-and-rufous kingfishers preferred forest swamps, less often small forest streams, keeping to deep shade, which made them difficult to see. They plunged from low twigs or vines for small fishes, aquatic insects. Solitary or in pairs. A song of week… or wick wick wick wick with high, thin notes. But the part that mattered, the part that had his heart thumping hard, was its range: southeast Nicaragua to western Ecuador. A large area, but if he’d figured the longitude correctly, the only portion of that area that overlapped with eighty-four degrees west was a small section of the southern coast of Nicaragua and maybe a tiny slice of northern Costa Rica.

  Not a dot yet, but a tiny crumb of that former pie.

  It was nearly one o’clock and Lawton was prowling Sugarman’s guest bedroom, snooping in drawers and under the bed. Some of his old homicide detective brain cells sputtering to life. Out on the highway a string of sirens raced past, sounded like a multiple-car pileup or a serious fire. Down the hallway and through the screen door, he could see Alexandra with her phone in her hand. She’d closed it up and was just standing there, the moths dancing over her head like some outlandish halo.

  Sugarman was staring at the computer screen. It was still dark, but he thought he’d heard something. He used the touch pad to raise the volume bar to the very top.

  “Janey?”

  “Shhhh,” she said. “Shhhh.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Alexandra came into the room and stood behind Sugarman.

  “There’re people.”

  “People?”

  “Shhhh. Turn your lights off, you’re glowing. They’ll see.”

  Sugarman motioned to Alexandra and she flicked off the overhead lights.

  “Who is it, honey? Who’s there?”

  “Men,” she whispered. “Some women, too. Some of them naked.”

  “What?”

  “Naked?” Lawton said. “That any way to act around a child?”

  Alexandra put her arm around Lawton’s shoulder and held a finger to her lips.

  “They’re drunk and they’re shooting guns.”

  “Guns?”

  Sugar leaned close to the screen to try to pick up her outline. But saw nothing except the black sizzle of electrons.

  “Machine guns,” Janey said. “Listen.”

  He could barely make it out. A string of pops answered by several short bursts.

  “What’s happening, Janey?”

  “They’re not shooting at each other. They’re aiming at the sky. They’re having a party, a big party, I think.” Her voice dropped to a near whisper again. “Three men came to my cabin and looked inside, but I was hiding down in the corner on the floor and they didn’t see me. They tried to pull the boards off the window, but they got tired and left. They’ve started a big fire out by the lagoon.”

  Sugarman heard more machine-gun fire in the background. And voices, screams, cheers, or cries of pleasure, it was hard to tell.

  “The na
ked woman,” Janey said. “They’re in a circle around her.”

  “Oh, God,” Sugar said quietly.

  “I saw the sign, Daddy.”

  “The sign?”

  “Out front, the sign.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, I was looking with my binoculars at two men fighting and one of them fell against it and knocked the sign crooked. So I can see it now.”

  “What’s it say, Janey? What’s on the sign?”

  “Shhhh. They’re coming. Shhhh.”

  Then the dark computer screen grew darker and the machine-gun fire abruptly ceased.

  Twenty-Eight

  The gashes in his belly were aching again. Sitting in the tight airplane seat, Thorn felt the warm trickle of blood running beneath his belt. Reopened from the five or six body blows Vic had administered while Marty held Thorn from behind.

  And the wallop Thorn had taken on his rump was starting to spread fiery tendrils around his tailbone, coiling upward like a vine strangling a sapling. His neck was stiff and his hands were swollen and the heavy vibration and grim roar of the airplane were drumming deep inside his joints. Plucked strings throbbed up the backs of his legs. Whatever limberness he’d felt earlier in the day was gone. His sack of skin had been emptied and refilled with dried-out cartilage and brittle tendons and bits of broken glass.

  After rendezvousing with his seaplane out beyond Shell Key, Vic and Marty and Marshall Marshall dragged Thorn and Anne Bonny out of the boat and strapped them into a couple of rear seats. Vic cranked up the engines and took off toward the west, then when they were airborne, he swung the bulky floatplane back toward Key Largo and took a heading south of Thorn’s property, coming in just above the treetops.

  As they passed overhead, Vic tipped the wing so they could view the flames consuming Thorn’s house. He had been dead wrong about the fire-resistant nature of that wood. The blaze was vigorous as hell and looked to be spreading into the tangle of vines and trees on the south edge of the property.

  A pump truck had arrived and several pickups from the volunteer force; men were scrambling about, but the only rush of water Thorn saw was aimed at the surrounding foliage. They were containing it. The house was a lost cause.

  Once before his house had been destroyed by explosives, and another time the floor had been riddled by bullets fired by a cowardly killer who tried to murder Thorn without actually confronting him. Now his home was gone again.

  All it contained of value was a few trinkets that had survived the previous destruction. Photographs of his adoptive parents, a handful of mementos, and the possessions he’d accumulated since. Only a few of those he truly valued. Mostly the tools of his trade, the custom vice grip, the fine, precise scissors, a couple of first-class fly rods, and an assortment of fur and feathers that seemed to have some supernatural power to lure fish.

  Aside from some odds and ends he kept aboard the Chris-Craft, most of what he owned had been inside those four walls, but as the plane banked away into the dark heavens, his immediate sensation was a sense of release. No longer burdened by belongings. Truly now there was nothing he couldn’t do. He was free to drift up the highway, leave Key Largo for good. A rucksack, a good pair of shoes. Start over somewhere else, build each night’s nest in a tree, then move the next morning. A hobo, a drifter, an aimless vagabond. See the places he’d only heard about. Settle in a city, make peace with concrete, accustom himself to horns and late-night sirens and exhaust fumes instead of air. Maybe Vic Joy had done him an inadvertent favor, freeing him from that belief he’d been clinging to, that somehow he belonged to this island, belonged anywhere. Lately as it had become nearly unbearable for Thorn to watch the slow unraveling of the fabric of the Keys, the crystal waters filling with sludge, sea bottom and reefs bleached to a sterile white, more and more it seemed time to go. Past time.

  Maybe climb aboard the Heart Pounder, his old cabin cruiser, fill it with gas, and motor as far as the tank allowed, find a job, work for the next tankful. Small increments up the coast or across the Gulf Stream to the islands or over to Mexico. An expatriate with no identifying numbers, no destination, wandering from port to port. Why not? What did he have to keep him? Alexandra gone, the loyalty and frankness that bound them shattered by his childish deceit, his willingness to play Jimmy Lee Webster’s fool.

  Even Thorn’s oldest friendship seemed to be finished. Sugarman was rightfully enraged that in some fashion Thorn had been the cause of Janey’s abduction. There was no one left. No friends, no lovers, no reason to remain.

  The swell of grief rose in his throat like a gluey bubble. The bitter tang of self-pity. Sugarman had been right. Everything Thorn loved eventually got torched. He had nothing, and nothing was all he deserved; hell, nothing was more than he could manage. The life of a vagabond might even be too great a challenge. For if he succeeded in leaving the island, surely wherever he went, he’d be towing along that same black thundercloud, daggers of lightning regularly striking down anyone in his proximity and destroying everything he cared for. “Beware, all ye who encounter Thorn. For grave consequences shall follow this sinner to every corner of the earth, and surely if you so much as touch this man, you shall perish and all that you once loved will turn to ash.”

  “Don’t you just love a good fire?” Marty grinned at him from across the narrow aisle. “Hell of a lot cheaper than a bulldozer. All finished in one night, right down to the dirt.”

  “You’re a riot, Marty.”

  Marty rubbed at the lump Thorn had delivered to his temple.

  “Vic’s pissed, man. He’s going to slice your balls off. And I’m going to be there, front row.”

  Vic was at the controls and Marshall sat in the copilot seat. Charlie, the other biker from Vic’s front gate, was tucked in the seat just behind Thorn, and Anne Bonny was wedged in beside him. All the men wore the same uniform: green camouflage fatigues and black T-shirts, heavy black boots. A pirate special forces team. With their pistols in black webbed holsters on their hips.

  Anne had been silent since they had abandoned the Black Swan and climbed aboard the floatplane. Stunned, lost, broken. The resurrection of her lover had been a cruel hoax, the pennant on Thorn’s flagpole probably nothing more than Vic’s ploy to keep Anne in one place waiting hopefully while he made his final preparations.

  Thorn turned in his seat and peered back at her, and the collapse he saw in her eyes, the doomed acceptance of her fate, gave Thorn a harsh slap. She was even more forlorn than he. And seeing her hopeless eyes, recognizing the sagging surrender in her face, sent the blood flooding back into his veins.

  Maybe he had no future, maybe he had lost everyone and everything he cherished. But he still had the one thing that had carried him through every struggle since his childhood. Thorn’s personal curse. A blind pigheaded urge to push on, one step after another, and in this case, to do whatever he could to wreck the plans of these sadistic assholes. And if somehow at the end of this plane ride Janey Sugarman was still alive, he might even have a last shot to make that right as well.

  He sat still for a moment reclaiming himself, letting the blood cleanse away the stink of defeat, until he felt himself rising out of the gloom. He drew a long breath and blew it out.

  A moment later he leaned out into the narrow aisle, closer to Marty.

  “So let me get this straight.”

  “What’s that, lover boy?”

  “You sold out Salbone, gave him up to Vic?”

  “One way to look at it.”

  “There’s another way?”

  “Cut myself a better situation,” Marty said. “Traded up.”

  “And now what? We’re heading off to that pirate shindig I been hearing so much about?”

  Marty gave Thorn a steady look. Maybe Thorn had been underestimating him. What he’d thought was stupidity was actually disdain, a simple contempt for anyone not willing to backstab those who blocked his path to greater fortune. A perfect sidekick for Vic Joy.

  “Wh
at do you bring to this, Messina? Muscle, is that all?”

  “What do you care, Thorn?”

  “Hey, I’m dead meat, what difference does it make if you satisfy my curiosity?”

  “Fuck you. I’m not telling you shit.”

  “Because see, what I think is, Vic is using you like he’s using his biker dudes. You’re maybe a half a point smarter than Marshall and Charlie, but basically you’re just a big boulder Vic can hide behind when the guns go off. That’s what I see going on here.”

  “I got something he wants, shit-for-brains. I got leverage.”

  “Yeah? Maybe you did when you were Salbone’s lackey. But I don’t see you bringing anything to the table now but about ten pounds of body hair.”

  “You’re wrong, asshole, as usual.”

  “Anne knows the code, but you don’t know it. Salbone didn’t share it with you.”

  “Salbone was paranoid. He was the only one who knew all the pieces.”

  “And what piece did you know? How to drive the boat?”

  “The contacts,” Marty said. “I did the contacts.”

  “Contacts?”

  “See, you don’t even know how the fuck it works.”

  Thorn leaned back in his seat. Not interested anymore. Dozing off. It took almost a minute, but Marty couldn’t leave it alone.

  “Without the contacts, you got shit,” he said. “Who you going to call to unload five thousand Honda motorcycles or generators or ten thousand gallons of olive oil, for chrissakes? Well, I know who to call. That’s what I did. I got the contacts. Names, numbers, all of it.”

  “And Vic needs you for that.”

  “Damn right he does,” Marty said. “Vic knows how to storm a fucking boat. He knows movie bullshit, and history. Sir Francis Fucking Drake and the Golden Hind, Harry Morgan, all those guys. But his connections are in real estate and marinas and business shit. Vic can steal all the product in the world, but he doesn’t know squat about moving it. If you can’t move it, you’re fucked. Damn right he needs me. The man wants to expand to the big time, I’m indispensable.”