After another twenty yards, Burkhart pulled alongside Cassandra. She didn’t look over and didn’t break stride, just kept that gliding pace, lost in the easy athletic flow of her body, as if perhaps escape was no longer foremost on her mind, but instead she simply wanted to bask in this moment of exertion, delight in the stretch and flex of muscles she’d obviously nurtured for years.
TWENTY-TWO
BURKHART YELLED AT HER TO stop, but she didn’t respond. He yelled again.
Another four-wheeler rumbled up to Thorn’s right side and held its speed just beyond his side vision. He didn’t look back, didn’t slow, kept going for Cassandra’s sake, to interfere with Burkhart any way he could.
They’d run nearly a half mile by the time Thorn closed in, choking on the whorls of dust Burkhart’s four-wheeler was spinning up. Gasping, exhausted, he kicked it up another notch, gave it what he had left, pulled to Cassandra’s side, and together they continued to race out the main drive with their escort of ATVs on either side.
“The woods,” Thorn managed to call out. “Left, left.”
The look she gave him said she disagreed, but she veered beside him off the road and together they entered a pasture, the ground growing suddenly soft. Inches of glop were coating the earth, their feet sinking to their ankles.
“Shit,” Cassandra yelled.
Yes. Pig manure, a thick layer of it, the four-wheelers still beside them in the sloppy muck. Thorn took a quick glance at the ATV dogging him. X-88 at the wheel, Cruz beside him.
“Good luck, Thorn,” Cassandra called and swerved back the way they’d come, back to the hard-packed ground of the entrance road.
His lungs were aching, legs weak, but as he watched Burkhart closing in on Cassandra, raising a handgun, yelling for her to stop, Thorn found another dose of reserve.
He swung around and caught up to them at the entrance gate. There was a narrow asphalt road just beyond the entry, a public thoroughfare it seemed, but no traffic in sight in either direction, no houses across the way. Cassandra stood in front of Burkhart’s four-wheeler, arms at her sides, taking deep slow breaths but not heaving the way Thorn was.
“All I ask,” she said, “bury me in the same hole you buried my friends.”
“Tough broad,” Burkhart said. “But I would’ve broken you. Another day or two, you’d’ve been on your knees, worshipping my cock.”
“In your dreams, old man.”
Thorn was only a couple of yards behind Burkhart. Back in the field of pig shit, X-88 had gotten stuck, and the two of them were slogging across the pasture, Cruz yelling for Burkhart to hold on. Don’t shoot. Hollering it again as they trudged.
Thorn aimed a roundhouse right at the side of Burkhart’s head, at the swollen lump where he’d kicked him minutes before. But from the corner of his eye, Burkhart must’ve seen it coming and ducked away. Thorn’s second shot clipped his chin and knocked him sideways, and before Burkhart could recover, Thorn was on him, chopping the pistol loose with his right hand, then pivoting hard and slamming his forearm flat into Burkhart’s nose. The blood flooded out and Thorn hauled the man from his perch on the four-wheeler and slammed him to the ground.
He climbed into the driver’s seat and yelled for Cassandra to get aboard. But she was more interested in Burkhart. On his hands and knees, he was looking up at her with blood flowing from his nose, running into his mouth, and dripping down his chin.
“Leave him, goddamn it, let’s go.”
Cassandra stepped close to Burkhart and spit a wad of phlegm in his face. Then spit another.
She turned and climbed onto the seat beside Thorn.
“All right,” she said. “I’m good.”
Thorn gunned the vehicle out the last twenty yards of gravel and was turning left onto the asphalt that he believed led back to Pine Haven, where they might find some measure of safety, when he heard the first gunshot, then another. A slug dinged the metal roll bar and sparks showered them. He ducked and Cassandra ducked beside him, her head squeezed up against the primitive dashboard, her hands gripping the hard plastic rail. Two more gunshots, then they were on the asphalt and heading east, both of them still bent low.
“Stay down!” he yelled at her.
When it came, the black Ford pickup truck appeared so suddenly beside them Thorn had no chance to evade. A deep ditch on the right, the truck on his left. Webb Dobbins behind the wheel, Cruz and X bouncing in the bed.
Thorn kept the four-wheeler throttled all the way up, but there was no way to outrun the pickup, no side roads ahead, and Dobbins was edging into his lane, bumping his running board into the steel cage of the four-wheeler, leaving behind a trail of sparks.
Thorn leaned over to Cassandra.
“I’m going to stop. Look for your chance and drive on.”
“What?”
“Do it.”
Thorn brought the four-wheeler to a gradual stop, and Dobbins halted the pickup beside him. Raising his hands straight above his head, Thorn stepped out of the ATV and walked to the front of Webb Dobbins’s pickup. As X and Cruz were climbing from the bed, Cassandra hit the gas and the four-wheeler roared away.
“Get her!” Cruz shouted. “Go, go, go.”
But Thorn’s chest was pressed against the pickup’s grill, hands high. No way for Dobbins to maneuver. Maybe Thorn’s calculation was right, that he was more valuable to them than Cassandra, or maybe he was about to find out otherwise.
Cruz and X trotted around the truck, Cruz shouting at Dobbins to run Thorn down if he had to, Cassandra was getting away, the roar of the ATV fading in the distance.
X rounded the passenger side of the pickup. He approached Thorn casually, his left hand upraised as if testing the air for raindrops. Two red tablets lay in the center of his palm.
“Forget it,” Thorn said. “No way that’s going to happen.”
“Oh, but it is. It is.”
With the nonchalance of someone trying not to spook a wild beast, X eased toward him. Thorn held his ground in front of the truck, listening to the rumble of Cassandra’s ATV recede.
Then Dobbins gunned the engine, tapping and releasing the accelerator, pushing the revs higher and higher.
“Time for your medicine, Grandpa.”
When X stepped within range, Thorn chose an angle and threw a jab at X’s jaw, but he sidestepped the blow, caught Thorn’s wrist, and slung him backward against the grill of the Ford pickup, then shouldered him solidly in place, leaning on Thorn with his hard belly, heavy and hot, grabbing a handful of hair in his right hand, cranking Thorn’s head back at an unbearable angle.
X-88 mashed him against the hood, and though Thorn grappled for X’s arm and wriggled against the suffocating weight, X was stronger, far stronger, younger by decades, heavier by fifty pounds, a rubbery power and leverage that was impossible to budge.
There’d been a time not long ago, golden years when Thorn would have squirmed loose, or found some clever maneuver to break free. But not anymore, not against this younger man who seemed to absorb pain, even relish it. The man’s strength and weight were smothering him, crushing the air from his lungs.
Maybe he couldn’t break X’s grip, but Thorn could damn well keep his mouth shut. He pressed his lips tight, clamped his jaw.
A sly smile came to X’s lips as if he’d seen this move before and knew exactly how to defeat it. Thorn felt it coming and tried to block it with his thigh, but was late by a fraction.
The big man’s knee thudded into Thorn’s groin, and he gasped, and damn it, X timed his move perfectly and clapped his left hand over Thorn’s open lips, kept it there with what felt like a well-practiced hammer lock, and Thorn tasted the acrid burn of the tablets on his tongue, the tiny pellets melting fast, and in the next slow seconds as Thorn struggled against the rigid hold and tried to spit out the tablets, X-88’s face began a leisurely dissolve, and the daylight grew gray, then a darker gray and darker still, with X’s hand pressed over his mouth, and as Thorn sank again into tha
t altered state, a dreamlike slide, not so bad, not painful, kind of pleasant actually, giving himself over to the will of others, directed, bossed, all independence gone, all accountability, and that X-ray vision, yes, strangely, unexpectedly, he’d enjoyed that part before, and he was thinking a last thought, how glad he was that Sugar hadn’t come along and fallen into this same shithole, just as a strobe light began to flash as if some giant windmill was whirling in front of a pink sun, and X’s round ignorant face melted like ice cream on a summer day, and right before everything blurred into unreality, Thorn made a leap of logic based on nothing more than the immense pressure of X-88’s headlock, Thorn’s mouth forced open and covered by X’s hand. He had the answer to Deputy Randolph’s question back in St. Augustine, the mysterious mechanics the killer used to jam ground beef into the black kid’s mouth and keep it there.
This was exactly how it was done.
TWENTY-THREE
SUGARMAN WAS STUDYING A BONG Tina had covered with peace symbols and white smudges that were her attempt at peace doves. There was a row of them at eye level on a shelf in the back of Island Treasures, her shop in the Tradewinds Shopping Plaza in Key Largo. Open seven days a week, ten to six. Behind the counter was Julia Jackson, the purple-haired librarian, texting someone, her thumbs a blur.
Sugarman killed a few more minutes in the bong aisle while the overweight couple in matching I ♥ KEY LARGO T-shirts finished pawing through a bin of plaques with off-color one-liners and finally wandered out the door.
Julia didn’t look up when Sugarman edged up to the counter.
“Must not be easy,” he said. “Going from books to bongs.”
Julia finished with her text, whooshed it away, and looked up at him.
“Sorry? You said?”
“Books to bongs,” he said. “Must be a jarring adjustment.”
“Not really,” she said. “I get high from reading. Don’t you?”
She flashed him a flirty smile.
“Tina’s not here,” she said. “She went off … oh, she went off with you.”
“We got separated,” he said.
“Separated?”
“Complicated story. I thought she might’ve checked in with you.”
“Nope, haven’t heard a word. Something happen?” She was keeping her eyes from him; lying wasn’t one of her talents.
Sugarman looked at the shelves behind Julia, filled with cigarette papers and water pipes and glass figurines in the shapes of mushrooms and dwarfs and unicorns.
“She probably took the long way home. Nothing to worry about. The other thing is, I wanted to ask you about Thorn.”
“Thorn?”
“Yeah, Thorn and his son, Flynn. The postcards you saw him looking at in the library.”
She cut her eyes down to her phone.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Tina told me you’d mentioned the postcards.”
“She did?”
She looked up, rubbed an eye with her knuckle, smeared her mascara. For all her coquetry Julia seemed at that moment childlike and unsure, as if her coy act was a cover for deeper insecurities.
“I was curious if you ever saw Tina talking to anyone, somebody she might’ve been discussing Thorn with. And the postcards.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do, Julia. A stranger, maybe someone who came in the store, or who Tina told you about. Thorn’s name came up.”
She shook her head, but her gritted teeth said otherwise.
“I know what’s going on,” Julia said. “Tina’s gone missing, you’re worried about her, trying to track her down.”
Sugarman sighed.
“Am I that transparent?”
She nodded. “Pretty much.”
“Well, okay. Yeah, I’m a bit concerned about her whereabouts.”
“I’d say you’re a lot concerned, you wouldn’t be in here asking stuff.”
“So help me, Julia. You remember Tina talking to anyone about Thorn?”
She looked out the window of Island Treasures at a gang of tourists in madras shorts and sun hats trooping by.
“What’ll happen to Island Treasures if Tina doesn’t come back?”
“Don’t worry about the store.”
“Tina told me to keep it to myself. The woman, I mean. Madeline, I think was her name.”
Sugarman felt his heart sag. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he’d been hoping this whole episode was an elaborate case of mistaken identity, or that Sheffield was right and Tina was just hiding out somewhere, ashamed to show her face for a few days till things cooled down.
Julia straightened a tray full of key chains on the countertop. She flicked a piece of lint away. Her cell phone buzzed and she checked the screen but didn’t answer.
“You met Madeline?”
“First time she came in the store was on a weekend, so yeah, I was here. It was busy, but I overheard a few things.”
“When was this?”
“A week ago, around there, more or less.”
“What did she look like, this Madeline?”
“Pretty, I guess, in that Latin way, sultry and cold at the same time. Long black hair, thinnish, a little thingy on her nose. A crimp or something.”
“You get her last name?”
“I heard it, but I don’t remember.”
“Cruz?”
“Maybe. Yeah, that sounds right.”
“And the stuff you overheard?”
“I shouldn’t be talking about this. I don’t like to gossip.”
“This is to help Tina. You want to help me find her, don’t you?”
She took a huge breath and held it with her cheeks puffed up as if she were about to submerge.
Julia only remembered snatches of that conversation in the store. Cruz introduced herself as a federal agent, working on an investigation that involved Thorn. Could Tina be of help? Tina stiffened, freaking out that this was a drug bust in the making. That’s what Julia thought too. Weed.
But Cruz wanted to know if Tina was aware of any contact between Thorn and his fugitive son. That’s when Tina glanced over at Julia, and Cruz noticed the look they were sharing and invited Julia to participate.
“So you told Cruz about the postcards?”
“A federal agent,” Julia said. “I’m not going to lie. That’s serious shit.”
“You said earlier ‘first time,’ so there were other times?”
“Next couple of days at Tina’s house,” Julia said. “Tina told me before she left on that trip with you, not the exact details or anything, trying to shield me I guess, but Cruz wanted her to work on some kind of sting operation, go undercover, you know, top secret, hush-hush. It got thrown together very fast, a whirlwind. Cruz stayed at her place, they were huddled up together, cooking up this plan to capture Thorn’s kid. I mean, he’s a criminal, right? He attacks people and things, burns stuff down. Tina was just doing her civic duty.”
“Yeah, her civic duty.”
“That’s what Tina said.”
“Ever hear Tina mention automatic weapons, anything like that?”
“Whoa.” Julia raised her hands to her shoulders, showed her palms. “No way. Guns, no guns. Nothing whatsoever about guns ever came up. Tina hates guns. You should know that, her boyfriend and all.”
Sugarman asked her several more questions but Julia cycled through the same narrative without any variation. When two elderly ladies came in and started to cruise the store, Sugarman took the opportunity to thank Julia for her help and leave.
He stood by his car door, trying to absorb Julia’s story. Cruz had been in Key Largo for several days, planning something with Tina, some kind of scheme to nab Flynn. Sugarman was wrestling with that when someone hailed him by name.
A red Chrysler convertible had rolled up behind his car, top down. The driver leaned over the door edge and called out his name again. There was an Asian woman in the passenger seat wearing a colorful scarf over her hair.
; The man removed his baseball cap and sunglasses. Frank Sheffield.
He gestured at his passenger.
“This is Shirley Woo. Sugarman, meet Shirley. Shirley, Sugarman. Shirley’s an artist, Sugarman’s a private cop.”
“What’re you doing here?”
“A sunny Sunday, felt like a drive, see how you Keys characters shake, rattle, and roll.”
“And you just bumped into me?”
“Hey, I may be retired but I still have skills. The FBI, this is what we do. We track people down. Now get in, let’s go someplace with a view, get a fish sandwich. I got something I need to tell you. Not good news.”
They went to Snappers on the Atlantic side. A busy Sunday afternoon, a live band playing Jimmy Buffett medleys. Tables outside around the basin were full, so they got seats inside by a window.
“Been here before,” Frank said to Shirley. “Fish is very fresh. Get anything you like, I’m buying.”
Shirley Woo took off her scarf and her glasses and appraised Sugarman with a frankness bordering on rude.
“Eat first, talk later?” Frank said. “Or vice versa?”
“What’s the bad news?”
Frank scrubbed his hands together and blew out a breath.
“You and Tina Gathercole close? Engaged, going steady, like that.”
“What is it, Frank?”
“Yes, well, I put Tina’s data into the system, and last night late, a former colleague called me with a hit. Tina’s prints were on file, a couple of drug busts back in the seventies, so the ID was quick and easy.”
“Come on, Frank. I’m a grown-up.”
“Very dark stuff. A vagrant found her body in the woods just outside St. Augustine. Murdered.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“It gets worse.”
“Tina was murdered. How much worse can it be?”
“Murdered, yes. But it’s the method that’s rough.”
When Frank described the cause of death, then described the ligature marks on her ankles and wrists, adhesive residue on her lips, Sugarman turned his eyes away and looked out the big windows. The water seemed as flat and lifeless as a chintzy oil painting, the sky a long stretch of blue desolation. All that harsh winter light began to burn his eyes.
The Big Finish Page 18