CHAPTER 7
Pepper's starched white nurse's uniform was half soaked by the time she reached Mallory docks. A northwest wind had kicked up early that morning and Key West harbor was as frothy as a ten-dollar milkshake. Banging hard all the way across from out beyond Christmas Tree Island, the Zodiac inflatable almost bucked her out twice.
Pepper tied up the raft, tucked it under the dock behind Ocean Key House, and walked across the square to the little parking lot behind the sandal shop. She unlocked the hearse, got in, and spent half a minute touching up her hair in the rearview mirror: put on her apricot lipstick, got a little terra-cotta blush onto her cheeks. When she was satisfied, she opened her purse and took out one of the Japanese hot claws that were the current selection in the Chili of the Month Club. Pepper had been a loyal member since high school, when one of her boyfriends signed her up as a joke. Right off, she found she loved the things and she'd been keeping her membership paid up ever since, even during that terrible time after her daddy had his fatal heart attack and money was scarce.
When she'd finished her hot claw breakfast, she cranked up the V-8 and pulled out of her spot and took Whitehead up toward Eaton. The hearse was candy-apple red with a mirror shine and a soft grumbling engine. It had thick white sidewalls and seventeen coats of paint and it could get up over a hundred before you could take a deep breath. Like it did every time she sat in the thing, the car gave her a few extra beats in her heart. Riding along, she was inside and outside the car at once, out there on the sidewalk watching herself slide past while she sat high and happy behind that wheel, feeling all those stallions trembling at the bit, waiting for her command.
Running late that morning because of the long ride across the harbor, and damned if a block up Whitehead, Pepper didn't get stuck behind a car with Michigan plates, creeping along at two miles an hour, five old ladies stuffed in there, gawking at all the Key West weirdness. For two blocks she hovered behind the Olds-mobile, staring at all that fluffy white Michigan hair.
After another block she couldn't take it anymore and coasted up close to their rear bumper, slipped the shifter into neutral, then flattened the accelerator to let the Yankee shit-for-brains hear her silky engine with all that power, the rumble of its glass packs. She worked the accelerator, louder and louder until finally the three biddies in the backseat turned and glared at her, and Pepper smiled her prettiest and reached under the dash and flipped the pneumatic lifter switch on and off, which sent that big car's front end flying three feet up in the air. Slamming back down so hard, the steering wheel popped out of her hands.
She just did it that once, the old ladies still looking, their eyes as big and white as boiled eggs. Then she saw them yammer to their friends in the front seat, all five of them turning around to stare. And Pepper slipped the car into gear, swung out and roared up Whitehead, going so fast she missed her turn.
A year had passed since the doctor gave her the ten thousand dollars and told her to go buy a used van. Something to haul the patients in. Pick them up at the airport or bus station and taxi them back to the clinic. Shuttle them up to swim with the dolphins once a week, or up to Miami for this or that medical test.
A van was what the doc wanted, with room for wheelchairs and baggage, maybe even a stretcher now and then. But on the first car lot she came to out on Roosevelt Boulevard, Pepper saw that gorgeous hearse. She wound up talking the salesman down to ninety-five hundred. The doc wasn't pleased, but over time he'd adjusted. Like her daddy used to say: You want to do something, go on, do it. Don't ask nobody first. It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.
Now, after a year of handing over every spare dime to Scooter Jackson, head mechanic at the Truman Gulf station, Pepper had herself a showstopping lowrider. Green and red and purple neon tubes on the undercarriage, chrome-plated hopping shocks with Fenner pumps, and Hydro-Aire dumps. Scooter had just finished putting in a Bose sound system that could crush your skull if you twisted it up to full volume.
The way she had it rigged, Pepper could lower the Caddy's body down to an inch clearance of the roadway or use the hopping shocks to make that big car do a Fred Astaire tap dance or send it bucking three feet up in the air like some kind of wild goddamn stallion. Ten switches for a multitude of moves, a half dozen speakers, all the switches concealed under the dash, so nobody on earth could tell what that car could do unless Pepper Tremaine decided she wanted them to know.
As Pepper came to the light at Truman, she reached under the dash and flicked on the undercarriage neon. Nobody could see it in the bright daylight, of course, but Pepper Tremaine knew it was on and that was all that mattered. She goosed the big V-8 and whooped as the tires burned around the corner. By god, she could sense that neon down there rippling along the asphalt like her own incredible aura chasing after her, trying to keep up.
***
At the clinic, Pepper ducked her head into the TV room to say hey. A few of the vets looked up, gave Pepper a quick hello, then went back to whatever book or bottle or card game they had in front of them. She could hear the weight machines grinding away on the big sunporch they used as a rehab room and she could smell the smog of sweat filtering out.
Doc Wilson was some kind of genius at tapping into government grant money. He had all the best rehab equipment, best Nautilus machines, best whirlpool baths; he had physical therapist nurses coming from the naval hospital every day to work with the vets, and he'd gotten the government to pay for close to two dozen spinal pumps in the two years he'd been running the clinic. Twenty-odd pumps at twenty-five thousand a pop. A goddamn genius.
As she walked down the hallway, she could hear the doctor on the office phone, talking the way he did when he was mad and trying not to show it. His fizz all shaken up, cork about to fire. Only this time it was worse than she'd ever heard. Staying calm, nice and polite, but his voice box about to rupture from the strain.
Pepper pushed open the door, sat down on the padded chair across from him. Bean looked up at her, face red, forehead clenched, then he lowered his head, took his eyes out of gear, and listened for a moment or two more to the voice in his ear.
"Yes, Dad, okay, yes, I'll be happy to look into it. I'll call around and get back to you. I promise. Yes. I know. It's an awful thing. We're all shocked and horrified."
His voice might've sounded calm enough to someone passing by, but Pepper could hear the awful tremble in it, the sound the air makes just before a crash of thunder. With a quick good-bye he set the phone down in the cradle, and leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. He smiled at Pepper, but it wasn't a smile that meant anything good.
"Your dad again?"
"How clairvoyant of you."
"What is it this time?"
"Well, as a matter of fact it has to do with you, Pepper."
"Me? What'd I do?"
"Someone was in my father's office a little while ago, asking him about the dolphins that were slaughtered. Imagine that."
"The police?"
"The police are idiots. We don't have to worry about them."
"Well, who?"
"A man by the name of Thorn."
"Is that bad?"
"Well, you be the judge, Pepper. He wanted to know why anyone would torture the animals before killing them. He wanted to know about their spines and brains."
"We chopped them up in little pieces. Made a mess. Just like you said."
"I repeat, he wanted to know about what value their spines and brains might have. Why anyone would torture them. Dad thought I might know the answer to that so he could pass the information on to Thorn."
Pepper felt the stir in the air. She shifted her butt against the chair, getting ready for the lightning strike, the explosion of thunder.
"This is perfect," he said, "just fucking perfect." Bean's laugh was full of broken glass. "Of all the goddamn people in the world to get excited about those dolphins, it just had to be Thorn. Goddamn self-righteous pit bull."
He
leaned forward, stared down at his shiny desktop for several moments. Pepper reached into the pocket of her white dress for another Japanese hot claw and watched Bean Wilson's mind crank. Gorgeous man with white skin and thick golden hair. Wearing an expensive green T-shirt and tan chinos. When he lifted his head there was a crafty light in his eyes. His lips spread slowly into a dangerous smile.
"Pepper, my dear. Do you recall where you put that key my father gave us last year?"
"Hanging on the board in the kitchen with the rest of the keys."
Bean's smile widened. He lay both hands flat on the desk before him like he might be about to make it rise into the air. Pepper believed he could accomplish it if he tried. He was that kind of man, the air always buzzing around him like he was surrounded by a halo of stray electrons.
"So who is this guy Thorn, anyway?"
He lifted his smile to her.
"He's an old friend of mine," Bean said. "An old friend who is about to have a very nasty accident."
CHAPTER 8
Thorn spent the rest of the afternoon bent double belowdecks on the Heart Pounder. He was so cramped, he could barely draw a breath. His spine felt like it was bent an inch past the breaking point, his chin pinned to his chest, the crown of his skull grinding against an overhead joist.
After an hour that way he was still three or four complete turns from getting the final nut tightened down on the starter motor. At his current rate, three turns would take another week. With his right arm crooked around the exhaust manifold and cylinder head cover, his left twisted and going numb, he had leaned into the crevice as far as he could, and still he couldn't see the steel plate where the rear housing was mounted, so he was doing this job by feel because apparently the Chris-Craft engineers hadn't planned on the starter unit failing within the normal lifetime of the boat. They'd almost been right.
It had taken nearly forty years for the small electrical motor to give out. Built to last, like things in the first half of the century had been, before planned obsolescence began to afflict even the marine industry. For the last month Thorn had been forced to let the Heart Pounder sit idle while he located someone who could fabricate a new field coil and brushes to fit the old housing. Charlie Peacock, an eighty-year-old conch who was the head mechanic over at Performance Marine, charged him nearly double what it would have cost to replace the whole damn unit with an off-the-shelf model. But Thorn went ahead and did it, plundering the last of his savings because he considered it his meager tribute to the gods of his ancestors, trying to live up to their high standards. Not to mention the fact that he sure as hell didn't want to jinx the old tub by doing a crucial repair with some shabby Taiwanese part, then a month later find the power plant dead thirty miles offshore while a tanker bore down on him.
With his knuckles bloodied, his legs dead, Thorn was wedged into the only posture the Chris-Craft designers had seen fit to allow for this particular chore, some kind of tenth-degree yoga move. The Mangled Monkey Pose.
When Monica called his name from out on the dock, Thorn knew he was still at least two full turns away from snugging the starter motor down and would probably be too goddamn stiff to regain the necessary position for another day or two, but he sucked in a breath, pried his right arm out of the narrow cavity, untangled the rest of his body, set down his open-end wrench, and dragged himself out onto the sunny deck.
Impossible as it seemed, in the five months he'd known Monica Sampson, she'd grown even more beautiful. The buzz cut she'd worn when he first met her had lengthened nicely and was starting to tickle the tops of her ears. And the few pounds she'd put on lately had settled into highly sensuous locations. All in all, she seemed to be coming down with a serious case of the Keys disease. Definitely showing the softened features and lazy eyes of the deeply afflicted. As her pulse slowed and her veins relaxed, even the three tense crinkles between her eyebrows had smoothed over as though the years were gradually melting from her body.
"Christ, Thorn, you look like you've been dipped in hot tar." He groaned as he stepped across the gunwale onto the dock. The parts of his body that weren't asleep were throbbing. From the knees down, his legs were as numb as if he'd been fishing in a Montana stream all afternoon. And a hard fist was tightening around the base of his spine.
"And you look swell too."
He leaned forward to kiss her, but she waved him off. "Maybe after you've been steam cleaned."
She had on a black sleeveless blouse, black jeans, and white running shoes. Still dressed from work. Not much use for her artistic talents in the Keys. Only job she could find that used any of her skills was art director at the local paper, which sounded better than it was. What it meant was that Monica did the layouts and paste-ups, scissors and glue, some basic computer graphics.
"In that outfit you could take a major smudge, nobody'd notice."
"Don't get fresh with me, sailor."
"Might be fun," he said, "we could roll around, get greasy, then steam clean each other."
"I came over to make you supper."
"The two things aren't mutually exclusive."
"Supper first," she said. "Then we'll see."
They stood for a moment gazing out at the bay, silvered by a declining sun. A hundred yards out a great blue heron skimmed a foot off the surface, its large, ungainly body reshaped for flight, its wide wings moving with gawky grace. Miles to the west the string of mangrove islands were black against the purpling sky as if someone had stenciled a low mountain range into the horizon.
He took her hand in his, gave it a squeeze, but she didn't squeeze back. He looked at her.
"Something wrong?"
She kept her eyes on the horizon.
"What do you mean?"
"I feel something," he said. "Joking around, but with a shadowy undercurrent."
She turned her head, eyed him for a moment, then looked back at the colorful sky.
"Shadowy undercurrent?"
"Yeah."
"It's nothing," she said. "There's no undercurrent, shadowy or otherwise. I had a rough day, that's all. It'll pass."
She gave his hand a perfunctory squeeze and let it go.
He saw the muscles strain in her neck as if she were struggling to breathe.
Eyes still on the bruised light, she said, "So what were you up to all day?"
"Usual. Tied some flies. Spent the last couple of hours trying to get that starter motor in."
Monica made a noise in her throat as if her polygraph were twitching.
"Last I looked," Thorn hurried on, "all I had was a jar of crunchy peanut butter with some purple fuzz growing on it and a couple of dubious avocados, a stale loaf of rye bread. But I do have some wine."
"I brought groceries," she said. "I lit the coals. You should start getting cleaned up if you want a glass of wine before supper. Yellowtail is marinating. It'll be ready to grill in another fifteen, twenty minutes."
"You've been here awhile."
"I didn't want to disturb you. Sounded like you were having such fun under there."
Thorn stepped around to face her.
"You put the paper to bed? Or is there more work after supper?"
She tilted her head to one side and studied him, her lips hinting at a smile. In her eyes, the cloud shadowing the sun had moved on, a slow brightening.
"What you mean is, can I stay the night?"
"I didn't want to be crude."
"Let's just see how the yellowtail turns out," she said. "I'm sure as hell not sleeping with some guy who can't even cook."
She led him back down the dock toward his wood stilthouse. She walked with one foot in front of the other, normal in every respect, except there was some kind of whispery sway in her hips.
"You walk nice."
She gave a subtle flounce on his behalf.
"Sophomore elective. Sashaying 201. Only useful course I ever took."
Thorn showered, used the pumice soap to rub himself red. His legs were tingling now. Only his toes still
numb. He toweled off quickly, stepped into a pair of clean shorts and found his last fresh shirt, a white Hawaiian printed with pink hula girls and simmering volcanoes. The shirt was older than Monica—a relic from his high school years. He'd stored it at the bottom of his drawer because the cotton had worn as thin as woodsmoke. One good fingernail across the back would rip it in half. That's how busy he'd been lately, between the boat repairs, fly-tying, and Monica, not even enough time for a Laundromat run.
When he came out, she was sitting serenely on the sofa, her gold hair backlit by the dwindling sun. Paging through a magazine she'd brought, she hummed along to a song that played softly on her portable CD player—smoky saxophones, a woman's haunting ballad. She had positioned her stereo on the round oak dining table across the room so that it was directed toward the bedroom. Thorn smiled. The tension had eased in her face. Unless he charred the yellowtail or dropped the damn thing into the coals, there would be music tonight.
He stood across from her, the low coffee table between them. He'd constructed the table from wood he salvaged when one of his ironwoods was knocked down in last summer's brush with a hurricane. He'd finished the planks with his finest-grain sandpaper, then waxed it till it was buttery slick. No nails, everything tongue and grooved, dovetailed. It took him two weeks of steady labor to get it done and shave away the wobbles, though a real carpenter would have finished it in half the time.
On the cypress walls behind the couch Thorn had hung a half dozen of Monica's framed drawings. Simple pen-and-inks on white parchment. Dock lines coiled up neatly against rough pine planks. A wicker basket full of fishing reels. Some studies of Thorn's yellow Lab, Rover—the dog sleeping in different positions; one of him paddling across the bay, a stick gripped in his teeth, his head held high; another with him sitting upright, head tipped to one side, eyes attentive as if he might be listening outside the bedroom door to indescribable pleasures within.
Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6) Page 7