The Big Finish

by James W. Hall

  “I heard about a certain trumpet flower,” he said. “Know anything about that?”

  Millie frowned out the windshield and was silent.

  “What I heard,” Thorn said, “this flower is the linchpin for Dobbins. Without that plant the farm wouldn’t survive. Did I get that right?”

  “I believe you did.”

  “So Pine Haven has no choice but to look the other way on Dobbins’s sideline business because without that part everything else collapses. His farm, eventually the town.”

  “Sounds like we got two detectives riding with us, Emma.”

  “What trumpet flower is he talking about, Mama?”

  “I’ll explain later,” she said.

  “You always say that.”

  At the entrance to the Dobbins farm, Millie pulled onto the shoulder, the wipers slapping at the rain, ahead of them in the headlights the road was a foggy smear. Millie switched on the overhead lights and Thorn turned around in his seat to face Flynn.

  “They’ll fix you up. You’ll be healthy in no time. I know you will.”

  “Go on, I’m fine,” Flynn said. “Don’t worry about me. And don’t forget what I asked you to do.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  “This isn’t good-bye,” Flynn said. “So no big scenes, okay?”

  Flynn extended his hand and Thorn clasped it in both of his. Flynn’s grip was firm and dry, squeezing hard, and in those few seconds his son managed to transmit a message as rich as any human hand Thorn had ever held.

  “No worries, Dad. I’m getting my second wind. Just chill out. We’ll go to the hospital, I’ll beat this infection, then I’ll take on whatever’s next.”

  He released his son’s hand. Blinking back the burn in his eyes, Thorn kept his face stiffly composed, a stoic habit from the schoolyard and fields of play, the athlete’s maxim: never rub an injury, admit to suffering. But it wasn’t easy. His eyes were blurred and the bottled-up sob obstructing his throat made breathing a sudden chore.

  After he and Sugarman climbed out and Thorn retrieved the duffel, there were no more good-byes. They stood in the drenching rain beside the car. Flynn saluted, Emma waved, and Millie gave them a simple raised fist, then switched off the interior light and drove off into the rising wind.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “NO APOLOGIES REQUIRED.”

  “I was an idiot, persuading you to go,” Thorn said. “She tricked me and I fell for it big time.”

  They were plunging ahead through the lashing rain.

  “She tricked both of us. And Tina too. She’s good at it.”

  The outdoor lights near the main barn lit their way down the gravel drive. Thorn was soaked. His jeans had doubled in weight, the coat was shedding water, but was a size too small and the driving rain leaked in and plastered his shirt to his skin. Shivering against the biting wind, he hugged the coat to himself while the two shotguns in the duffel thumped against his back.

  “I talked to Sheffield a couple of times, yesterday, earlier today. Cruz came to see him two weeks ago, wanted to pick his brains about you, Thorn. Her real name is Obrero, by the way, husband was DEA, she was FBI for a while till her older daughter’s suicide. Girl was jacked up on heroin and coke, jumped off a building and after that Obrero fell apart, totally lost it.”

  “So she’s tricking herself too. Putting her girl’s suicide on Cassandra.”

  “The woman’s completely stripped her gears.”

  As they trekked through the darkness and the pounding rain, Sugar filled him in about Cruz’s meeting with Sheffield, her questions about Thorn, clearly trying to find a way to manipulate him. And about Cruz enlisting Julia’s and Tina’s help by convincing them this was an antiterrorist operation.

  Remembering that he was still carrying it, Thorn halted Sugarman with a hand on his arm and dug Tina’s cell phone from his pocket and handed it over.

  “Where’d you find this?”

  “Trunk of X-88’s car. Hidden near the wheel well. At the end she was trying to call you, Sugar. You and nine-one-one.”

  Sugarman examined the phone, checked the recent calls, stood blankly for a moment, then snapped it shut and stared up at the pelting rain and the black heavens, his mouth yawning open as if he were unleashing a silent howl.

  When he recovered, he wiped the rain from his face and tucked the phone in his pants pocket. Thorn clamped a consoling hand on his shoulder and Sugarman reached up and patted his hand. All forgiven, back on track.

  They tramped on through the sludge, the rain bearing down harder.

  “So is there a plan? You’re going to try to take out all these folks on your own? Dobbins, X-88, his girlfriend, Cruz?”

  “No,” Thorn said. “Not that way.”

  “I’m angry enough to disembowel a few people,” Sugar said. “What they did to Flynn and his friends and the thing with Tina. But you know I can’t do that. It’s not who I am. I’m not like you, Thorn.”

  “Then why are you still here?”

  “I want the guy who killed Tina. I’m taking him in, and making sure he goes away forever. I sure as hell don’t want him to die on the field of battle.”

  “We have the same intention then.”

  “Okay, then why aren’t we calling in the feds, the state police?”

  “Dobbins is holding the whole damn town hostage. I don’t want to injure a lot of innocent folks by pulling Dobbins’s plug without a backup plan.”

  “Spell it out for me.”

  “We’re going to do what Flynn would do.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What they did in Marsh Fork and the other places. Creative approach. Nonviolent. Strategy was always the same. They changed the shape of the playing field, and that changed the way the game was played.”

  “You mean blowing up that retention pond, the toxic sludge destroys the school. Government has to build a new one in a less dangerous place.”

  “Yeah, maybe that’s an approach you and I can agree on. Try our best to see nobody gets hurt, make sure the bad guys lose, give the good guys a chance at a fresh start.”

  “You got all this figured out, do you?”

  “Are you kidding? When have I ever figured out anything? I’m just trusting the seat of my pants.”

  There were a couple of drowsy Mexicans in blue jumpsuits working the midnight shift in the main barn. It appeared their job was some kind of sentry duty, marching up and down the main corridor watching the piglets sleep, watching other pigs, the insomniacs, pace back and forth inside their stalls, and a few others who were chewing listlessly on the cage bars.

  Thorn and Sugarman stood dripping just inside the double doors and watched the two men parade up and down the aisle with the kind of stiff attention that suggested they’d been caught slacking on the job before and the punishment had been harsh and memorable.

  “What now?”

  “I need to show you how to work this thing.”

  Thorn hauled the unloaded Atchisson out of the duffel. He inserted the twenty cartridges into the drum and smacked the drum into its slot and held the weapon out to Sugar.

  “You said nonviolent.”

  “Nobody gets shot, nobody dies,” Thorn said. “That’s our goal.”

  “Are you playing with words?”

  “No, I mean it. Nonviolent.”

  “And by the way,” Sugarman said, “those bricks of cash Cruz used as a stage prop to incriminate Tina, that’s part of the drug stash her husband, Manny, left behind.”

  The Mexican workers had spotted the two of them and were frozen in place. Those black, sleek shotguns had that kind of spellbinding power.

  “No te preocupes,” Thorn called out to them. “Está seguro.”

  They shouldn’t worry. They were safe.

  But the men weren’t convinced by this strange Anglo and his African American partner. They raised their hands high and backed down the main corridor, and when they were close to the rear exit, they broke into a sprint.

  T
horn led Sugar up the metal stairs and across the observation platform to the small concrete room where he’d been held captive.

  As Thorn had guessed, the Mexican who Thorn had untied was back in his chair, still wearing that pair of white boxer shorts with red hearts printed on them. His mouth was again covered with duct tape, hands bound with rope, and now his face was swollen and there were gashes around both eyes.

  Dobbins had made him pay dearly for his few moments of freedom.

  He recognized Thorn and stiffened. Thorn peeled away the duct tape.

  “Quieres ser libre o es demasiado peligroso?”

  It seemed only fair to ask him if he wanted to be free or if that posed too great a risk.

  The man considered the question, eyeing the ominous weapons. After another moment he nodded his head.

  “Si, señor. Quiero ser libre.”

  Thorn asked him his name and the man replied that it was Jesús.

  “Te pido solo una cosa, Jesús. Si quiere.” Thorn was asking for one thing, but only if the man was willing.

  The man asked what that one thing was.

  “Por favor llevemos al invernadero.”

  Sugar said, “I got everything but that last one.”

  “I’ve asked him if he’d be willing to show us the way to the greenhouse.”

  * * *

  “You’re sick? You can’t smell anymore?”

  “Sick, yeah,” X said. “Call it that. Swelling in the brain. It’s been coming for a while.”

  “Then what’re we supposed to do about that goddamn video?”

  Burkhart said, “The man tells you he’s dying, you’re worried about a video?”

  “Dying? He didn’t say anything about dying.”

  The cab of Dobbins’s truck was steamed up by the three men tightly packed. The wipers slinging away the rain as they sped back toward Belmont Heights.

  “You want to know the truth,” X said, “it’s a relief.”

  “What? Dying?”

  “Not smelling anymore. And yeah, sure, dying too, getting on with the next thing.”

  Dobbins had nothing to say to that. Dying wasn’t high on his bucket list. They were headed back to colored town because Webb decided he needed to have a sit-down with Ladarius and Eddie and whoever else wanted to attend. One by one, he was going to turn Burkhart loose on them, let the old soldier use his military tricks to get the truth.

  One of them would know where the Moss kid and Thorn had run off to.

  As Webb had suspected, Ladarius and Eddie and their people were working with the hippies all along. As soon as this rain passed and things dried out for a day or two, he was going to stock up on kerosene and Belmont Heights was going to feel Webb Dobbins’s wrath. Time for a community bonfire, get started on that beautification project Laurie had been campaigning for for so long.

  But first they’d do a little enhanced interrogation. Begin with Ladarius, that insolent son of a bitch.

  “That one,” Webb said, pointing at the shack where Ladarius lived.

  Burkhart swung the truck off the road and bounced into the front yard with the headlights shining bright against the door. As they were getting out, a curtain twitched in the front room.

  “Need anything special, Burkhart? Tools of the trade that could speed this up? I could run to the farm, pick up whatever sharp objects you’d like.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be required,” Burkhart said. “Common household utensils should be sufficient. You did say the man had a couple of daughters.”

  “Three little girls,” Dobbins said.

  Burkhart smiled.

  “Even better.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  JESÚS STOPPED IN A CLOAKROOM near the exit and pulled on a blue jumpsuit, the same uniform the sentries were wearing, and in a row of lockers he found a pair of work boots that fit him. When he was dressed, he led them outside the barn and guided them along a meandering path that circled around one after another giant pond of pig manure then past three other barns where Thorn heard the indignant squeals and grunts and mutterings of pigs, a mixture of protest, outrage, and yearning.

  The deluge had died away to a drizzling mist, more fog than rain. The temperature was dropping fast and Thorn had to shift the shotgun from hand to hand to prevent them from going icy numb.

  Sugarman was silent, bringing up their rear flank, glancing to each side into the dark hollows of the night.

  They hiked across a large gravel parking area, then another just like it, and came to a county highway, crossed it, then slogged through a ditch on the other side, and clumped ahead through a muddy field and went another mile down a private paved road.

  Thorn moved alongside Jesús.

  “Cuánto más lejos?”

  Not much farther, Jesús replied. One more mile.

  When they finally rounded an old wood barn that smelled of damp hay, Thorn realized they’d hiked far enough from the farm that they’d left behind the stink of the manure lagoons and the pig barns.

  Jesús halted and pointed to the lights of a two-story farmhouse skirted by porches. Rockers and hanging swings and potted plants decorated the verandas. Several outbuildings were clustered so close to the house that they fell inside the halo of illumination from its many windows. A silo, a granary, a smokehouse, a tobacco barn, and what looked like the original settlers’ log cabin, as if the Dobbinses had preserved these structures as family shrines in memory of their hardy ancestors.

  About fifty feet to the left of the house was the glassed-in conservatory.

  On the other side of the house, parked in the driveway, was a white Jaguar.

  “Quien es este coche?” Thorn asked him.

  The car, he replied, belonged to the sister, Laurie.

  “Wait here,” Thorn said.

  “What’re you doing? You said no one gets hurt.”

  “And I meant it. We’re playing by Flynn’s rules.”

  Thorn entered the house, shut the door quietly behind him. A stairway with ornate bannisters stood directly in front of him. He took a quick look into the parlor, whose furniture and decorations were at least a half century out of date. A stage set that looked unlived in. No magazines strewn about, no signs of human occupation or any contemporary touch, as if the room had been decorated just so, then left to collect dust. A museum display of roughly the same vintage as Millie’s living room, but this was a stifling formal room where no entertaining had ever taken place.

  Back in the foyer, he heard music playing upstairs. Smoky New Orleans jazz, heavy on the sax. He followed the music up one flight, then another, past a collection of metal-framed photos that showed the gradual evolution of the Dobbins clan and the farm they operated, from the small circle of log buildings Thorn had just seen outside to the massive aluminum structures that now housed thousands of pigs.

  And many photos of a frail woman with a despondent air holding a young boy on her lap, and more photos of the same woman grown even frailer, this time cradling a baby in her arms, the boy growing into a burly lad, standing apart looking bewildered and bereft, and in her later incarnation the mother became so delicate she seemed to be hardly there at all, standing stiffly beside that adolescent boy and the smug young daughter in their crisp matching Easter outfits and later their high school graduation robes.

  Mingled in were photographs of a bulky, robust man with a flamboyant mustache whose resemblance to Webb Dobbins was unmistakable. In every image the man seemed to loom over the other family members, an impression produced more from his severe and contemptuous countenance than his height.

  At the top of the stairs Thorn heard voices, the low murmurs, croonings, and giggles of what sounded like erotic play. Both voices he recognized as he moved to the door. Pixie’s bright and chirpy inflection and the low throaty growl of Laurie.

  He turned the doorknob and nudged open the door with the barrel of the shotgun. They’d kicked the bedsheets to the floor and were intertwined in a naked knot of damp flesh. Pixie was pres
sing a pillow to her face as if to muffle her cries of pleasure.

  Laurie looked up, her face glistening with the jelly of Pixie’s release.

  “Well, look who came to the party.” Laurie scrubbed her palm across her mouth and licked a finger clean.

  She climbed off Pixie and got out of the bed and stood facing Thorn, as if daring him to gawk at her nakedness, while she lit up a roach, took a drag, then handed it to Pixie.

  “Three things,” Thorn said.

  “Oh, good, a man who likes to dominate. My favorite kind.”

  “Can you run this farm without Webb’s help? Without drug money?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Can you? A smaller version maybe, like the farm you grew up on. Can you do that? Do you know how to manage that?”

  “If I wanted to I could. Sure.”

  “Well, you do, you want to,” he said. “You want to because you don’t want Pine Haven to die. You want to because this is your home, these are your roots. Even though you act like you despise everything around you, you haven’t left, so there’s still some kind of bond to this place. But most of all you want to because you don’t want to go to jail with your brother. Agreed?”

  “You’re a presumptuous asshole.”

  “Because when this is done, I’ll be coming back from time to time to make sure you’ve fulfilled your side of the bargain. If you let the farm go down, then I’ll do everything I can to make sure you serve the same sentence as your brother.”

  Laurie’s mocking smile was tightening into a frown.

  “Okay, the second thing is this. When I leave the room I want you to call Webb, tell him I’m here. He needs to get home quick so he can watch everything he’s worked so hard for go up in flames.”

  “Are you insane?” Laurie said, taking back the joint from Pixie.

  “You’re going to call him as soon as I leave the room.”

  “You bet your ass I am.”

  “And third, you’re going to tell me where the bodies are buried. When you tell me exactly where they are, we’ll hang those murders on Webb and Burkhart and you get a pass. You get to stay and run this farm, have your fun. But if you lie or stonewall me, you’re going down with your brother. Make up your mind and do it quick. Where are they buried?”