The Big Finish

by James W. Hall

  The only customer in the Happy Biscuit, Thorn chose what he considered the premier spot, a backless counter stool of fake red leather in the exact center of the counter. He tried it out, swiveling to his left then his right. It squeaked harshly, which drew the attention of the blond waitress who was cleaning the coffee machine. She looked up at the clock over the coffee station. Three-fifteen.

  “A little early for dinner,” she said, coming over with a menu.

  Her tag read MILLIE, a name more suited to her grandmother’s generation. She was in her mid-thirties with a tired smile. No rings on her fingers, a barrette in her hair that was hand-painted by a kid. EMMA spelled out in awkward yellow letters.

  Millie was a pretty woman, maybe a decade past her innocent years, with the battle-weary look of a single mom who’d survived the worst that men could do. She’d heard all their small-town lies. Experienced every disillusionment and betrayal. Weathered the slow erosion of her reputation when one ex after another spread poisonous libels about her. At least that’s how it worked for certain women Thorn knew in Key Largo.

  “What’s the worst thing on the menu?” Thorn said.

  She wiped the counter in front of him, keeping her eyes down.

  “Well, there’s a line I haven’t heard before.”

  “I like to start at the bottom, work my way up.”

  “And what’s that accomplish?”

  “If I’m expecting the worst, I’m rarely disappointed.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “I’m looking for somebody,” he said.

  “Now, that,” she said, and met his eyes, “I’ve heard more than once.”

  Thorn smiled.

  “He’s a young man, a much better-looking, less battered, and far more idealistic version of me.”

  She gave him a closer look, and whatever she saw made her flinch and clutch her rag and take a half step back from the counter.

  “The pulled pork sandwich,” she said. “It’s dry and tasteless.”

  “I thought this was hog country.”

  “They’re dry and tasteless hogs.”

  “That’s the worst you can do? Pulled pork sandwich.”

  “It’s stringy and tough.”

  “Okay then,” Thorn said. “I’ll start with that.”

  “Fries or coleslaw?”

  “His name is Flynn Moss. He probably showed up a week or two ago. He’s an environmentalist. Cares more about the woods and rivers and birds and all that than he does about himself. Trying to do good for mankind.”

  The light had begun to twitch in her eyes, her mouth trying on and discarding various moods. Unskilled at concealing her emotions.

  She ducked her eyes and said, “Coleslaw is homemade. Got raisins in it, a little on the sweet side.”

  “I’ll go with the fries.”

  “Limp and greasy, cooked in oil that turned black three days ago.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Thorn said.

  She braced herself and looked directly at him again.

  “Anything to drink?”

  “How’s the water?”

  “Go with the root beer. Water’s got a metal taste. Myself, I’m used to it, but people from out of town, well, they can have a hard time.”

  “How hard?”

  “Very,” she said. “A very hard time.”

  “Then I’ll take the water,” Thorn said.

  “Of course you will,” she said with a faint smile. “Of course.”

  She was right about the pulled pork. But Thorn slathered it with sauce and wolfed it down, discovering he was more hungry than he’d thought. The fries, however, were as gummy and far removed from the world of food as candle wax. The water tasted of copper and iron and something else he couldn’t identify but that reminded him of the fumes released from paper mills.

  Finished, he pushed the plate aside and waited for Millie to return.

  Beyond the pass-through opening he could see a dark-haired heavyset man scraping the griddle with a spatula. Another man, Hispanic, was chopping vegetables, a phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear. Both had their backs to Thorn and there was no sign of Millie.

  While he waited he flipped open Tina’s phone. On the screen was a NO SERVICE message. He set the phone on the counter and waited some more.

  The vegetable chopper stopped for a moment, cut a look at Thorn, then spoke to the man at the griddle, who also turned his head and appraised their sole customer. Thorn waggled his fingers at the men, but neither waved back.

  He opened the phone and tried again but it was as useless as before. At home in the Keys, Thorn didn’t have a landline and he didn’t own a cell phone. He’d never been comfortable conversing electronically. Ready to hang up as soon as the connection was made. Phones were unreliable. They flattened out voices, pared away the highs and lows of emotional content. People got away with lying on phones more easily than in person, no facial clues, no telling gestures, and sometimes Thorn had spoken on phones to people who were obviously doing three other things while speaking to him, a rudeness that would rarely happen face-to-face. He’d happily toss Tina’s phone in the nearest waste can except he had to speak to Sugar, needed to tell him what he’d learned about Tina, get Sugar to alert the proper authorities, start things moving.

  He tucked the phone in his pocket and waited some more.

  No Millie. And the fry cook and vegetable kid had also disappeared.

  Thorn called out a hello.

  He got down from the stool, called out Millie’s name.

  When he got no response, he went around the counter and pushed through the swinging doors and came into the kitchen. A knife and a half-cut celery stalk lay on a wooden cutting board. A pot of collard greens was simmering on the stove, the blue flame extinguished beneath it.

  Maybe everyone was taking a smoke break. He was turning to go back to his stool when he heard a hiss from the far side of the kitchen. Thorn headed in that direction, toward the stainless-steel door of the walk-in cooler. The linoleum creaked behind him.

  He swung around. But there was no one there and no one in the diner he could see, no one in the tiny kitchen. The only movement in the area was a cloud of steam rising above the pot of collard greens.

  The hiss came again from behind a half-open door beside the cooler. An office, or maybe a broom closet.

  Thorn flattened his back against the wall, edged forward until he arrived at the door. He reached out and nudged it open. Stepped in front of it, raising his fists.

  At the sight of him Millie stepped back. She’d changed out of her waitress smock and was in her street clothes. A navy turtleneck, old jeans, with silver running shoes.

  “They’re coming for you. You’ve got to go.”

  “Coming for me. Who?”

  “They mean you harm, I can tell you that much. It was Rodrigo, the kitchen boy, he’s the one who alerted them. Don’t blame him. Everyone’s scared. He did what he was told, that’s all. What everyone was told.”

  “Who’s coming?”

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “You too. Right now. They gave you something. A drug. Rodrigo crumbled up a pill and slipped it in your sandwich. I didn’t know about it until a minute ago. It hasn’t hit you yet, but it will soon. You need to get somewhere safe. Quick.”

  “What pill?”

  She shook her head, not going there.

  “Have you seen the young man I described?”

  She sighed in resignation, and nodded yes.

  “Before Thanksgiving. Just a fleeting glance. But it was him. That’s how it started.”

  “How what started?”

  “I’ve got to get out of here. I’m sorry. I’ve done all I can. I have to live in this town. You’re on your own now. Get somewhere safe and stay there. It could last for hours. Go on.”

  “Is he injured, the boy you saw? I was told he was shot and seriously injured? You hear anything about that?”

  “It may be true, I don’t know. All I know is all the ot
hers disappeared.”

  “What others?”

  “The ones he was with. Protestors, like you said, environmentalists. They were around for a couple of weeks, trying to organize people, asking questions, sticking their nose into things. They had a camp in the woods back of Belmont Heights, then they were gone. All at once, overnight. People said things, but I don’t know what to believe.”

  “What things did people say?”

  “Now look, I’ve got to go.”

  He blocked her path.

  “When did this happen, the night they disappeared?”

  “I don’t know, before Thanksgiving, a couple of days. Something like that.”

  “Almost two weeks ago.”

  She hesitated, then stiff-armed him, pressing her hand flat against his chest, leaving it there for a moment as if feeling for a heartbeat.

  “Okay, listen,” she said, her hand softening. “The drug’s called Devil’s Breath. The dose he slipped you, it works like roofies only it won’t knock you unconscious, but it steals your free will. You do whatever you’re told. You’re powerless, there could be hallucinations. Till it’s out of your system, you need to hide somewhere quick, stay there.”

  She shoved past him and was across the kitchen, heading to the back door when Thorn said, “You have a daughter. Emma.”

  She stopped and flung him a hopeless look.

  “The young man I’m looking for, Flynn. He’s my son.”

  “I know he is,” Millie said.

  “You’d do anything to protect Emma, wouldn’t you?”

  She swallowed, held her ground but didn’t reply.

  “I’m the same,” Thorn said. “Anything it takes, I’ll do it. Anything.”

  “You stay here much longer,” she said, “you’ll get your chance.”

  And she was out the door.

  Thorn went back out the swinging doors and headed to the Taurus. He felt fine. Maybe he was immune to whatever they’d slipped him. But he’d decided to take Millie’s advice and drive the Taurus out of town, find a side road somewhere, and park until he was sure he was okay.

  He was in the middle of Main Street when the wide and cloudless sky began to wobble. He stopped and looked up just as the heavens started to rotate counterclockwise. Then the sky turned a bright flickering crimson and cracked apart in a dozen fragments like the shell of a giant egg going to pieces.

  Thorn looked down quickly, focusing on the ground in front of him, and continued to plod across the street. It was wider than he remembered, seemed like half a mile of asphalt between him and the car. As he watched, the street expanded, becoming a black ocean of asphalt where sailing ships set forth long ago and were never heard from again. Where mythological creatures rose from waves of black asphalt and sucked down all voyagers foolish enough to attempt a crossing.

  He stopped and looked back at the restaurant. Maybe he should go back. It was an impossibly long way to the car. It might be quicker to return to the diner, take back his squeaky swivel seat. Just wait this out. Maybe order more water, try something else on the menu.

  The Happy Biscuit logo was smiling at him. The flaky lips were spread wide, and as he watched they spread wider. The Happy Biscuit thought Thorn was hilarious. He was stranded in the middle of Main Street in Pine Haven, not sure where to go, and his plight was making that biscuit even happier than usual.

  Thorn turned back to the Taurus. He ducked his eyes again, focused on the asphalt as he plodded on across the endless black surface until at last he made it to the car. He steadied himself with a hand on the door handle. He was breathing hard. He could feel his heart working. He ventured another look skyward. As he watched, the giant red egg turned black, became a perfect midnight sky, then began to fill up with the brightest stars he’d ever seen.

  Thorn swallowed back the gob of nausea clogging his chest. He’d been stoned plenty of times, been drunk more than that, about as drunk as it was possible to get. A few times when he was younger, he’d experimented with LSD and mescaline, so he’d seen this heavenly highlight reel before, observed a few gaudy hallucinations, brick walls melting like hot wax, the air dense with spirit orbs and auras and sparkling dragonflies zipping at light speed.

  He opened the car door and looked inside. There was a woman in the passenger seat. He didn’t recognize her. She might not have been there at all. He straightened up, took another look at the sky. Which was a mistake, for now it was a sphere of stained glass, and it was gyrating, thousands and thousands of bright broken pieces of red, green, and blue glass twirling. He didn’t feel euphoric. There was no rush, no exhilaration. And he didn’t feel frightened or anxious or the least bit mystical. The world was erupting all around him, spinning off its dizzy orbit, but he felt quiet inside. Mildly interested in the weird events, but not particularly alarmed.

  He looked back into the car. The driver’s seat was empty. But he was uncertain how to enter the vehicle. The geometry and physics of getting inside seemed ridiculously complex. He was too big to fit. The space was tiny and a steering wheel blocked his way. Where was he supposed to put his feet? Which hand went where? He stood looking into the baffling car. The woman was still in the passenger seat, leaning down to watch him, and grinning like a hungry wolf. She wasn’t anyone he knew, wasn’t anyone he wanted to know.

  He shouldn’t drive. Not in his condition. Not with the sky the way it was. He decided to go sit somewhere. Find a shady patch of grass and sleep this off. He was about to slam the door and seek out a grassy plot when a powerful hand gripped his right biceps and spun him around.

  He was face-to-face with a reddish-haired man with beefy arms and a belly that hung over the waistband of his camo pants. His black T-shirt was tight across his wide chest; whatever muscles he had were buried beneath layers of flab.

  “Your name Thorn?”

  “It was,” he said. “A while ago.”

  “For a lowlife he’s sort of cute,” came a woman’s voice from behind him. “What shall we do with him?”

  The meaty hand held Thorn in place.

  The man considered her question, staring into Thorn’s face with a mix of rage and bewilderment as if Thorn was only a stand-in for what was truly pissing him off.

  This guy was a heavyweight, a gamecock by the look of him, but he’d gotten sedentary and gone to seed during his journey to middle age and he looked like a one-punch wonder who would never make the second round of any match without getting so winded and red-faced he’d trip over his own feet. Thorn was fairly sure his most threatening trait was his murderous scowl. He decided to make a fist and take a swing at the man’s big face, but when he tried, he couldn’t locate his hands.

  The man’s face turned ugly—so strangely, cartoonishly, grotesquely deformed it made Thorn titter. Like Ladarius’s daughter had tittered earlier. He remembered her titter. It was sweet and innocent. Thorn couldn’t recall the last time he’d tittered himself. Maybe never. It was a little sad to think he’d never tittered in his life, sad but also amusing. So amusing he tittered again.

  From behind him the woman said, “Let’s get started.”

  “She’ll be here soon,” the man said. “Let her handle this.”

  “We don’t need Cruz,” the woman said. “His eyes are spinning. The asshole is ours. Let’s put him to work. Introduce him to Pine Haven. Start getting the word out.”

  The woman floated in front of Thorn. More ginger hair. This woman was very thin, very hard. A grin that made Thorn’s stomach knot harder than it was already knotted.

  “So, Thorn,” she said. “My name is Laurie.”

  “Laurie,” Thorn said. “Laurie.”

  “And this is my brother, Webb.”

  “Webb,” said Thorn. “Laurie and Webb.”

  “That’s right. Now I want you to go across the street, throw a rock through the window of that pool hall. Say hello to the fellows inside. They’d like to meet a man like you. Tell them your name, tell them you’re looking for someone. How does that sound
to you?”

  “Like fun,” he said. Or someone did. He felt the words rise from within, but couldn’t take credit for them.

  “Do you like breaking things, Thorn?” Laurie asked him.

  “Breaking things, sure.”

  “Good, good. You’re going to have a chance to break a lot of things. We’re going to write your name in the sky so everyone can see you’re here, everyone for miles around.”

  “Start a ruckus.”

  At that moment his head had grown top heavy and he was having trouble stabilizing it on his neck. It wanted to tip forward, chin to his chest. He had to lift the entire thing just to see the woman, lift it again, lift it. Very hard to keep the thing upright, like balancing a bowling ball on a broomstick.

  He tried to remember who these people were. Were they friends of his from somewhere? They seemed to know him. That was good. In his present state he needed friends looking out for him. But he wasn’t sure exactly who they were. His head was fuzzy, full of smoke, nothing much of consequence seemed to be going on inside his skull at the moment. Laurie and Webb. They must be his friends although he couldn’t place them. Lately, he’d been seeing people he’d known most of his life, and their connection to him slipping just beyond reach. It didn’t matter. He’d remember these people later when the sky was back to normal, when the smoke cleared.

  “Thorn wants to break some things and start a ruckus,” Laurie said. “Find him a rock, Webb. Find him a great big rock.”

  NINETEEN

  THORN BROKE A WINDOW, A plate-glass window with the name of the pool hall painted in white letters. It wasn’t the first window he’d broken in his life. He could remember at least one other from long ago, a window he’d smashed by driving a lucky golf ball into it when he was trying to save Sugarman, trying to draw the attention of a bad guy who was holed up in his condo at Ocean Reef Yacht Club, lure the bad guy out in the open. He remembered that window very clearly as he stood on the street in Pine Haven with a crowd of men pouring out of the pool hall and surrounding him.