She'd saved two hundred and twelve dollars this time. Enough for gas and tossed salads for a thousand miles or so. Get to Louisiana, maybe make it into Texas. She'd never been to Texas, but she was sure there were people out there who needed their pots scrubbed.
She was gone. Already out on the road, the throb of the Impala's big guzzler vibrating through her bones. The wind, the radio, the daze. She'd done it before and it had brought her here; now it was time again. Find a new self down the highway somewhere. Start over. Do a better job this time. Stay vigilant and tough. Keep the trip wires strung tight around the perimeters of her heart.
Thorn had inched too close. Squirmed past all the land mines, wriggled beneath the barbed wire, then scaled the high ramparts of Monica's walled city, and now he was stalking the hallways, circling toward the inner sanctum. There was not a second to spare. It was time to pry open the escape hatch, flee. Yes, it was cruel. It was mean and cold and pathetic. Monica, poor, stupid girl. Afraid of Thorn, of what she felt for him. Panic firing her blood. He had drawn so close. Just outside the door. She could hear him breathing. A flower opening inside her, exposing her again. God help her, she had to run.
She carried both bags out into the gravel drive. A sunny day, the breeze off the water full of spicy island smells. She opened the trunk, put them inside, slammed it shut, walked back into the apartment to see if she'd forgotten anything crucial. Just leaving behind a few clothes and some drawings she'd done recently. She guessed she was leaving them for Thorn, a parting gift. She glanced around hurriedly, saw nothing. For the thousandth time she considered a note. He deserved a note. He'd worry, get frantic, maybe even waste time trying to track her. She stared at the far wall, a drawing of Rover sitting on the end of Thorn's dock, then she turned and went back out the door.
Roy Everly was standing beside the car. Red thong, black baseball hat, dark glasses.
"You off?"
"Hello, Roy." She dug the ignition key out of her pocket.
"I saw the suitcases."
"I'm paid through the end of the month, right?"
"Did Thorn hurt you? Do something to you?"
"No."
"You moving in with him?"
"I'm leaving, Roy. Going on a trip."
He nodded and kept on nodding like she'd said something weighty.
"I'm just feeling . . . I don't know. But I need to get out of here."
"I can relate. Life on the rock drives you batshit. No two ways about it."
She stepped close and kissed him on the cheek. He'd been into the rum again.
"I guess you wouldn't want to take me with you. It's always been a fantasy of mine, take a road trip with a beautiful woman."
She sighed, wiped the sweat off her cheek.
"I need to go, Roy."
"I'm not trying to stop you."
Monica let her gaze drift out to a sliver of the bright Atlantic visible through the mangroves. Her vision was getting blurry.
"I imagine it's a little scary being with a guy like Thorn. That crazy fuck."
"It's not that," she said. "He's fine. He deserves better."
"He was just by, not more than fifteen minutes ago. He's investigating the dolphin thing."
"Yeah," she said. "I thought he might."
Roy looked past her toward his house. Gulls were diving in the canal near the dolphin tanks, squawking with excitement over a school of bait fish.
"I think about running away," Roy said. "I think about it every single day. Getting in the car, pointing it somewhere, going. But like they say, there's never any escape. Wherever you go, there you are."
Monica gripped the ignition key tight in her fist.
"Well, you have a safe journey then. Write when you get work."
Monica watched him walk back to his house, go inside, shut the door. She stood there feeling the key bite into her palm.
CHAPTER 6
Dr. Bean Wilson was the oldest medical man in Key Largo. Thorn estimated him to be around eighty-five, though some claimed he was older. As a youngster Thorn got his first inoculations from the man and he'd seemed pretty damn old even then. Over the years he'd visited Wilson dozens of times—a couple of broken bones, well over a hundred stitches, a fishhook embedded in his calf, another snagged in his earlobe: errant casts by a couple of novice anglers back in Thorn's guiding days. It had even been Dr. Wilson who'd cleaned and closed that gunshot wound in his shoulder.
In all those years, Thorn had watched the doctor's thick hair turn brighter and brighter white, but other than that the man had not aged. Just an inch or two over five feet, Dr. Wilson was trim and limber and his cucumber-green eyes still had the wry spark of a young man who found the world wondrous and outlandish. As a kid Thorn had been buddies with the doctor's only son, Bean junior, thrown together at first because their parents socialized, but gradually becoming inseparable. Four of them. Sugarman, Gaeton Richards, Thorn, and Bean junior. Exploring the serpentine mangrove canals and the flats, learning every rock and twist of elkhorn coral below the surface on the Atlantic side, and the secret lives of every fish that hid in their crevices.
The Wilsons and Thorn's adoptive parents had vacationed together several summers, trips to Florida's panhandle. Thorn and Bean junior spent those long sunny days wrestling atop the dunes and tumbling down them, or out on a little johnboat with their poles, searching the marshes for redfish and snapper. They'd been blood brothers until their junior year, when Bean junior was shipped off to some fancy prep school in the Northeast, and though Thorn had answered every one of Bean's homesick letters, eventually the mail ceased and they lost touch. He'd heard that Bean went into the military, and had been badly wounded in Vietnam, but he'd never heard the details. The few times Thorn asked Dr. Wilson about him, the old man grew subdued and changed the subject. Bean junior was a doctor now himself. An anesthesiologist. He had a practice down in Key West, a couple of hours away, but he never visited.
Old Dr. Wilson worked out of a small CBS building wedged between a propeller shop and an Ace Hardware. Two decades back, when he purchased the place, it was a one-seat barbershop, the red-white-and-blue pole swirling away out front. Shortly after he moved in, the doctor and a couple of his friends were painting the walls of what would become his examining rooms, when a Yankee tourist bustled in and demanded a haircut. Said he had an important business engagement back in Manhattan early the next day and needed to look sharp for it. Damn sharp.
Dr. Bean Wilson tried to explain that he wasn't qualified for such a challenging assignment, but the New Yorker would have none of it and plunked himself down in the barber chair that Bean had not yet removed. While his friends stood around grinning, Doc Wilson proceeded to cut the Yankee's hair, and afterward the man proclaimed it to be the best goddamn haircut he'd ever had the pleasure of receiving and said that Bean Wilson's hands were the absolute softest, kindest, most intelligent hands that had ever touched his sorry scalp. He tipped Dr. Wilson twenty dollars and Bean mounted it on the wall next to a couple of lunker trout he'd landed years earlier. Inspired by the event, Wilson took the necessary tests for a barber's license, telling his patients he needed a backup plan in case one day everyone on Key Largo had a long healthy spell.
Thorn parked the VW in front of the propeller shop just in case Monica drove by and questioned him later. The story was, he'd been shopping for a new prop for the Chris-Craft—spending the extra loot he was raking in from his Crazy Marys. He promised himself he'd go into the propeller shop after visiting Bean Wilson, look around, see what they had, just so it wouldn't be a lie.
There was a CLOSED sign on the front door of Dr. Wilson's office, but his yellow Coupe de Ville was in the lot, parked next to a white Ford Fairlane with government tags. Thorn tried the door, found it open, and stepped inside.
Bean's waiting room was dark; a dozen mismatched chairs ringed the room. The pane of opaque glass was pulled across the receptionist's window. In the center of the room the barber chair sat like some nutty thr
one, and that Yankee's twenty-dollar bill was still hanging beside the fish mounts. Everything was exactly as it had been on Thorn's last visit three or four years back. Probably the same Reader's Digests and Field and Streams.
Thorn punched the call button and waited. He didn't hear the buzzer ring, but he could make out voices coming from the back, low and serious. After a minute he mashed the bell again and still heard no response, so he pushed through the door into the narrow hallway that led to Dr. Wilson's office and the four examining rooms.
He followed the voices to the last room on the left.
He'd never seen Dr. Wilson's lab before. It was a brightly lit twenty-by-twenty cubicle lined with metal storage racks. In the center of the room was a long stainless-steel table covered with beakers and plastic boxes, a microscope and some other equipment he couldn't identify. The room smelled of caustic chemicals with a pungent undercurrent of disinfectant. The two men were leaning against the table with their backs to Thorn. The other man had dark black hair that he wore in a rigid flattop. Even through his blue pin-striped banker's suit, Thorn could see this guy was keeping his gym card punched. Wide shoulders tapered to a narrow waist.
Thorn cleared his throat and both men swung around. After a moment's puzzlement, a smile formed on Dr. Wilson's lips.
"Sorry to interrupt."
"What brings you around, Thorny? Got a gash needs sewing up?"
"No, sir. I'm not bleeding this time. Not that I've noticed."
"One of those rare moments in the annals of modern medicine," Dr. Wilson said. "Thorn completely intact. Leaking nary a bodily fluid."
"Brad Madison," the big man said, and stepped forward and offered his hand.
"I'm sorry," Bean said. "Where'd my manners get off to? This is Thorn, and this is Brad Madison. And what a treat. Two of my favorite people meeting at last."
"You're the fishing guide Bean keeps threatening to set me up with."
"I do some fishing, yeah."
"Brad's got a little problem with relaxation," the doctor said. "I was hoping to get the two of you together someday. Drink a little beer, catch some fish, bring his blood pressure down a few notches."
"Now, there's what I like about Doc Wilson," Thorn said. "Always up on the latest medical advances. Beer and fishing. Real cutting-edge stuff."
The men chuckled.
"And I hear you're something of an amateur detective."
"No, not really. Just had a couple of run-ins with some quarrelsome people, misunderstandings I had to straighten out."
"Quarrelsome heavily armed people," the doctor said.
Everyone had another polite chuckle and Wilson led them to his office and poured himself a mug of coffee and offered the pot around. Thorn declined. He was wired already, still picturing those bloody footprints, hearing the echo of that battery-operated cackle coming from inside the dark Everly house.
"Brad's with the DEA, Thorn. Head man, as a matter of fact. Special agent in charge."
"Is that right?"
"You remember the Grassy Key Massacre?" Wilson said. "That drug bust that went bad?"
Thorn nodded. "Four dead, six wounded. And those were just the good guys."
"Those numbers would've been different," Brad said, "if it weren't for Doc Wilson. I sure as hell would've gone from the wounded column to the other one."
"Just doing my job," Wilson said. "Got called into the emergency room that night. Right place, right time, that's all."
Brad was standing stiffly in the doorway, a man who wanted to stay but needed to go. His gray eyes seemed preoccupied, as if he were adding long columns of figures in his head, trying to keep a running total while he carried on a civil conversation.
"I came by to ask you about the dolphin thing," said Thorn.
Wilson set his cup down, leaned back in his leather chair. He eyed Thorn thoughtfully. Today he had on a yellow button-down shirt with a blue polka-dot bow tie, khaki slacks. Although his wife had died thirty years earlier, Bean Wilson still sported his heavy gold wedding band.
"What dolphin thing is that?" Brad reached up to reshape the perfect Windsor knot at his throat. It took him a second or two, but somehow he made it even more perfect.
"Other night at the dolphin research center. Eleven of them hacked up. You didn't hear about it?"
"Oh, that, yeah," Brad said. "Christ, just when you think there isn't any way we'll ever top ourselves—way to go, South Florida."
Dr. Wilson straightened his ink blotter, rubbed a line of dust off his desk.
"I thought since you were working over there, Doc, you might've heard something."
"You work with the dolphins, Bean? I didn't know that."
"Oh, I draw blood, run some tests. Nothing much beyond that."
Brad Madison rubbed at the deep creases in his forehead.
"So what's your interest, Thorn?" Wilson said. "Somebody hire Sugarman to investigate? You helping him out?"
"Sugar's away on vacation. I'm just curious, that's all. It's nothing."
"Every time Thorn gets curious, I have to get out my sutures." Dr. Wilson smiled at Brad. "So what do you need to know, son?"
"Well, for one thing, the dolphins' spines were taken, and maybe their brains as well. There some kind of market I don't know about? New Chinese aphrodisiac or something?"
Wilson wiped away the same line of dust. His smile flickered briefly, then came back full strength.
"The police are pursuing a line of inquiry, I understand," he said. "Roy tells me they think there's a Santeria connection." Brad chuckled.
"Oh, now, there's some silly horseshit. Santeria is goats and chickens, for godsakes. What're they thinking about?"
"I was wondering about your research, Dr. Wilson. If you might've come across anything that would make dolphins valuable to somebody."
"They're valuable alive," Wilson said. "But dead, I can't imagine how they would be."
He turned his eyes down and studied his ink blotter carefully, as though it were a chessboard ripe with possibilities.
"Who's the research for?" Thorn said. "The blood you're drawing, all that?"
Wilson clicked his eyes back to Thorn. He seemed confused for a moment, his forehead deeply crinkled, as if Thorn had accused him of some obscure misdemeanor.
"I help out various groups," Wilson said. "A professor from FIU who's doing psychological studies on dolphins; another group out in California."
"That's it?"
"And Bean junior, for some research he's doing. It's just simple work, drawing blood, some lab reports. Nothing secretive about it."
"Bean junior?"
"He's working with wounded military vets down in Key West. Pain management. He sends them up here every week to swim with the dolphins. He's studying the biological changes the patients are going through."
"Last you told me, Bean was doing anesthesia. Operating room stuff."
"Oh, he quit that a few years back. Now he runs a small clinic."
Brad Madison was shifting his eyes back and forth between the doctor and Thorn.
"Anything else I can help you with?" the doctor said.
"They tortured the animals. That's what it looks like. They were there for a long time, hacking on them while they were still alive. Could that have any significance? I mean, medically?"
Wilson smiled patiently.
"I didn't hear about any torture," Wilson said. "But no, I have no idea why anyone would do such a thing. It's horrible, that's all. Horrible."
"Sounds like crazies to me," Brad said. "Teenagers sitting in a dark room too long, maybe some angel dust floating around. They played some records backward or whatever they do nowadays, and got a wild hair going about dolphins. Bang, it happens. Random chaos. With those kinds of kids, looking for some logical reason for this or that is a waste of time. Pure waste."
Thorn looked around at the diplomas on the wall, the mahogany plaques and citations from local civic groups. The doc had been a lifelong volunteer.
"Yeah," Thorn said. "Too long in a dark room. That'll do it."
"I can call Bean junior," Dr. Wilson said, "and the professor I work with at FIU, see what they might be able to contribute to your investigation."
"I'm not investigating."
Brad Madison and the doctor looked at each other and smiled.
"So what exactly do you call it, Thorn?" Brad said.
"Sniffing around."
Brad's smile deepened.
Running a hand through his thick hair, Dr. Wilson lifted his eyebrows and stared at Thorn over the rims of his glasses. "Anything else?"
"I guess not," Thorn said. "But if you'd make those calls, I'd be interested in anything Bean or the professor might have to say."
"Investigating," Brad said. "Say it, Thorn. Feel it in your mouth."
"Sniffing around," Thorn said. "Sniff, sniff."
After a minute more of aimless chat, Thorn thanked Wilson for his time, apologized again for interrupting. Brad Madison said he had to get going, had an appointment farther down in the Keys. He walked Thorn outside.
In the lot Brad unlocked his Fairlane, took off his jacket and draped it over the passenger seat. His Glock was harnessed tight against his ribs.
"You have some kind of problem with Doc Wilson, Thorn?"
"What do you mean?"
"Sounded to me like you were cross-examining him. Going after him pretty damn hard."
Thorn looked out at the cloud of gravel dust swirling up from the wake of passing trucks. A shirtless man on an ancient bicycle cruised by on the rutted bike path.
"I just asked a couple of questions."
"Then maybe you need to work on your technique. Seemed to me you were manhandling him for no good reason."
"Well, I'm sorry. That's not how I meant it."
Brad gave him a long, hard look, one he'd probably perfected in dungeon-room interrogations.
"I'd hate to see anything hurt that man," Brad said. "All he's done for me."
Thorn nodded.
"I'd really hate that, Thorn."
After Brad pulled out onto the highway, Thorn walked across the lot to the propeller shop and went inside to see what kind of deals they might have on high performance three-bladers. You never knew when you might need a little more propulsion.
Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6) Page 6