"A friend of mine was killed. I think it had something to do with a tilapia."
"Now, that would be very odd."
"You were saying these fish survive at higher rates."
"Yes, well, for instance, take a grouper," he said. "At each cycle, your average female grouper produces five thousand eggs. Out of that, maybe two or three survive to adulthood. Two out of five thousand. Not a very good production rate, though it is fairly normal for most fish. But with tilapia, because of the mouth breeding and their general genetic resilience, out of that same five thousand eggs, you'll have roughly three thousand surviving. Three thousand adult fish. Which, of course, works out to be a thousand times more productive than normal fish in the wild. All of which makes them very desirable fish for aquaculture."
"Aquaculture?"
Ludkin typed a few sentences into his computer.
"Fish farming," the professor said. "The fastest-growing form of food production in the world."
"I didn't know."
Ludkin took a short, exasperated look at Thorn, then ducked his eyes back to his work.
"Some cultures have been farming fish for thousands of years, while in the West we are just discovering it. Raising some salmon, some trout, catfish, trying to use our high-tech skills on it. But we're still very much behind in the field. Someday soon, most of the fish we consume will be farm raised. Billions and billions of pounds of fish growing up in breeding ponds. There's a worldwide race going on at this moment to see who can patent the best aquaculture techniques, market the best fish."
"But there's no such thing as a red tilapia."
"That's what I said."
There was a knock at the door, and Ludkin grumbled his permission to enter.
A woman in her twenties with pert blond hair and a button nose opened the door and stuck her head through the crack, and told Professor Ludkin it was eleven thirty. His graduate tutorial was waiting.
"Yes, yes," he said, and went back to typing.
The young woman kept her head in the doorway.
"Maybe there's somebody else I could talk to," Thorn said.
"Professor Ludkin," the young woman said. "The tutorial was supposed to start at eleven."
"Red tilapia are a myth," Ludkin said. "Stories have circulated about them for years like fairy tales. People turning lead to gold. But it can't happen. You can't change a black fish into a red fish. You can't turn a white into a red either. It's hogwash. Scientifically ridiculous."
"Why would anybody even try?"
Ludkin looked up at Thorn. The man took his glasses off, drew a handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his sport coat, and began to polish the lenses.
"Why would anybody try?" The professor smiled, his eyes a milky blue, probably not seeing much beyond the edge of his desk. "Why do actresses dye their hair blond? Why do car manufacturers spend millions of dollars experimenting with new paint colors?"
"Why don't you just tell me."
"Because, my dear fellow, a red tilapia would be far more popular than a black tilapia. It is that simple. Popularity. Go to a fish market, go to a restaurant. Watch what people buy. They want redfish, red snapper, those are the commercially popular fish."
"That's ridiculous."
"Ridiculous?" Ludkin looked up at Thorn. "Yes, I suppose it is. But it's true nonetheless. Red fish are more sought after than black or white. Strange but true."
"Wait a goddamn minute. What about salmon, grouper, trout? They're popular. And they're not red."
Ludkin peered coldly at him for the count of five.
"Are you dense, young man?"
"Yeah," Thorn said. "Murder has that effect on me. Makes me very dense. Dense and violent."
Ludkin dwindled an inch or two in his chair, lost a couple of shades in skin tone.
Finally he cleared his throat, and said, "Salmon, grouper, trout, those are established fish. People know them. They order them off menus, buy them at fish markets. Their parents ate salmon, their grandparents, and they eat them too. But unfortunately, the natural supplies of all those fish are dropping drastically. We'll see the end of commercial salmon fishing in our lifetime. The time is ripe for alternatives.
"But Americans don't know tilapia. It's an unfamiliar name. And even though they breed at fantastic rates, have flaky white meat, have all the right commercial properties, fish farmers have resisted raising them simply because they're ugly. But if they were red, a color Americans clearly prefer, if this red fish were lying on beds of ice in fish markets all over America, it wouldn't matter what its name was, the results could be staggering. If someone had a breeding stock of red tilapia, I daresay that person would control a very large share of the market on farm-raised fish in a year or two."
"Lead to gold."
"Oh, yes," Ludkin said. "Everyone agrees. If such a fish existed, it would be extremely lucrative."
"So what're we talking about? Genetic engineering? Fiddling with DNA to turn black to red?"
"Unfortunately, it can't be done. We've played around with it ourselves here in the lab. They tried at Seamark for years. Utter failures. It's just wishful thinking."
"Seamark?"
"A government facility near Florida City. Marine research."
"The government is doing this, trying to change fish colors?"
"Agriculture, engineering, chemistry. Everything. Government people have their careers to justify, just like anyone else. Promotions to make. If someone came up with a red tilapia in a government lab, they could write their own ticket from then on."
The man showed Thorn his small yellow teeth.
"Professor Ludkin," the young woman said. "Should I just go call off class?"
"Then, of course, there's Peter Lavery," Ludkin said. "A gentleman farmer, runs a tilapia farm in Thomasville, Georgia. He's been claiming to be close to a red tilapia for years. But he's a crackpot. Like they all are. Winchester, Lavery. All of them. Dilettantes, amateurs. Not unlike the perpetual-motion crowd."
"Winchester?"
"Has a farm over on the west coast of Florida," Ludkin said. He put his glasses back on, squinted at the woman in the doorway. "What do you want, young lady?"
"Your eleven o'clock graduate tutorial," she said.
"I'm canceling it," he said. "I'm too busy."
"Yes, sir."
She shut the door quietly.
"Students!" he said. "Damn students."
"This Winchester," Thorn said. "He's also working on a red tilapia?"
"All I know about Winchester is, he's stopped in here a few times in the last couple of years. Asked me questions, picked my brains like you're doing. And from the nature of the questions, I would assume that was his interest. Yes. Red tilapia."
"Anybody else?"
"Those are the main ones. The main crackpots. "
"Lucrative," Thorn said. "Just how lucrative?"
Ludkin stared blankly into Thorn's eyes for a moment.
"Lead to gold," Ludkin said. "How lucrative would that be?"
"Can you put a dollar sign on it?"
Ludkin sighed, completely drained of patience. He took off his glasses and turned his blind eyes on Thorn as he wiped the lenses again with a dirty handkerchief.
"Billions of pounds of fish consumed each year," Ludkin said in a metronome beat. "Tilapia sell for five dollars a pound. Red tilapia would certainly be more. And you could figure that with the color change, tilapia might account for a significant percentage of the total fish market, say ten percent, twelve percent maybe. Now you do the math, Mr. Thorn. Tell me, what's ten percent of a billion dollars? Put a dollar sign in front of that, and what do you get?"
Thorn rose, stood behind his chair, and looked down at Ludkin.
"What I get," said Thorn, "is a goddamn good motive."
***
It was quarter after one when Thorn stopped at a bait store in Florida City and asked the three-hundred-pound woman behind the counter if she'd heard of a place called Seamark. She looked up from
the shrimp tank where she was skimming the dead ones off the surface.
"We got beer, we got worms. Which will it be?"
"I already had lunch."
"Well, then, if you're lost, there's maps for sale across the street at the Shell station." Miami manners creeping south.
They'd never heard of Seamark at the Shell station, not at the Texaco either. It wasn't on the Homestead-Florida City map. Thorn checked a phone book under United States and found nothing.
He drove west, crossed through the shabby intersection that was the center of Florida City. He pulled into a strip shopping center. A pet store, a TV repair shop, a doughnut place. Two stores on the end boarded up. Florida City's main shopping district. He tried the TV and doughnut shops first. Empty looks. Then went into the aromatic pet store. Breathed in the ammonia of damp kitty litter and the spoiled-fruit smell of snake.
"You turn left on Silver Palm." The teenage girl with black punk-rock hair was cleaning out a parrot cage. "Keep going west till the road gives out. Put it in four-wheel drive and keep on going down that gravel road till it peters out. And you'll be just about there."
"Sounds like a place they don't want you to find."
"Only way I know about it is me and my boyfriend go dirt biking and we ran across the place. Six months ago, I guess. Something like that. We never went back. Not friendly people back there. Not friendly at all. What do they do in that place, anyway?"
"I don't know," Thorn said. "Alchemy maybe."
She looked at him and nodded.
"I thought it was something like that."
***
The VW convertible didn't have four-wheel drive, so when the gravel road turned to dark mush, he pulled off to the side, parked under a gumbo-limbo, and walked. He was wearing a long-sleeved blue T-shirt and gray jeans and three-year-old white Keds that were spattered with engine grease and fish guts. As close to formal wear as Thorn owned. His going-to-town clothes.
The mosquitoes weren't hampered by the T-shirt. They lit up welts of warm flesh on his back and neck as he wandered down the trail, deeper into the dense hammock. The live oak and slash pines were covered with strangler figs, and a dense thicket of mahogany, stopper, buttonwood, some rogue Florida holly grew close to the path. A cypress or two, bromeliads sprouting in the crooks of branches. The ground was sloppy wet just off the gravel, a slough, or the eastern edge of the Glades. Birds squawking out there, the click and chirr of animals Thorn didn't recognize. Thorn had a brief and eerie chill, as if he were being observed by something big and fast. A panther perhaps.
There was a lush sulfury smell of freshly turned earth, and the air around him had a vague greenish hue. He saw motorcycle tracks hardened into the trail, running up the slight rise. Beyond the rise, the pathway dipped into a gully filled with dark water, and beyond the ditch, it led up into the woods again. Thrill hill.
He stopped and listened, but heard only the piping whine of mosquitoes at his ear. He waved his hand in front of his face, and stepped down into the knee-deep water, plunging ahead toward the opposite bank where the trail seemed to resume. Slogging through the soft mud, a tangle of weeds around his ankles, the water rose to his thighs. Thorn forged on and grabbed the limb of a sapodilla and dragged himself up the slippery bank. When he'd caught his breath, he pushed aside a low branch of a Brazilian pepper and headed on into the deep brush.
"Hey, there," a man said behind him. And Thorn felt the hard thrust of a rifle barrel at his spine. "Now, where in hell you think you're going, boy?"
Thorn didn't move. The man patted Thorn down, ran his hand skillfully up and down the legs of his jeans. Then came around and stood before him. A few inches taller than Thorn and maybe a hundred pounds bulkier. The man had kinky gray hair tied back in a ponytail. Except for a pair of muddy cowboy boots, the man was naked.
His big gut spilled down over his pubic hair and almost hid his nub of a penis. He had the meaty upper arms of a man who'd never done any serious exercise but could still clean and jerk a pickup truck if he had a mind to. His bolt-action Remington looked freshly oiled. Walnut stock, large-barreled .375. A safari rifle.
"Well," the man said. "You ain't a butterfly collector, 'cause you don't have a net."
"You think you could point your friend there a little off to one side?"
"I could do that," the big man said. "But I won't. Not till I find out what the fuck brings you snooping around back here."
"I'm looking for a fish," Thorn said.
"Yeah? And where's your pole?"
"Red tilapia. That's the fish I'm looking for."
It didn't mean anything to the man. His eyes remained wary, but nothing flickered.
"You're naked," Thorn said.
"I'm a sun lover," the man said. "Haven't worn any clothes to speak of since nineteen sixty-five."
"And the mosquitoes?"
"They've given up on me."
"You live out here?"
"Hey, who's on trial here, buddy boy?"
"Look," Thorn said. "I was told there was a research place back here. A place where they're farming fish. I have an interest in the subject. I thought I'd try to find it."
"You thought you'd try to find the place."
"That's right."
"An interest in fish."
"That's right. An interest in fish."
"Shee-it."
"Now, listen," Thorn said. "I don't give a rat's ass what you're up to back here. If you got a still, you're growing marijuana, fine. I'm just trying to find this place. Seamark."
"Seamark? Well, hell, why didn't you say so?"
The big man lowered his rifle, turned and waded through bushes, and Thorn followed.
***
There were two dozen of them. From sixteen to seventy. All of them naked. A volleyball game was in progress on a sandy square near the swimming pool. A few people lounged on chaises and watched the game. A man was doing slow, arduous laps in the pool while a radio on a wooden picnic table played a Lawrence Welk polka. More women than men. More blondes than brunettes. Nobody paying any special attention to Thorn, and Thorn trying not to pay too much to them.
Circling the camp were a dozen small cabins each with a screened-in porch, SUNNY PALMS was painted on the lintel over the main gate.
"Sweaty palms," the big man said, pointing at the sign. "That's what they call us in town. They think this place is about sex. Orgies and all that. But it isn't. It's about being natural. That's all."
"You get a lot of Peeping Toms? That's why the gun?"
"It ain't loaded," the man said. "But it does the trick ninety-nine percent of the time. We get a lot of kids out here. Coming out on dirt bikes, three-wheelers. Got their binoculars. Irritates the hell out of me. I take a pass through the woods every now and then, see who I come up with."
The man led Thorn into the main cabin.
"Hey, Shelley," the man said when they were inside. "Found this one out on the east perimeter. Says he's looking for Seamark. You have any trouble, call out."
The big man gave Thorn a cautionary stare and walked out the door, left Thorn looking at a dark-haired woman about his age. She was tanned as dark as pumpernickel. Dark eyes, long lashes. Her breasts were large and hung so far down, her nipples were hidden behind the large oak desk.
"You looking for Seamark?"
"That's right."
"Well, you found it."
Thorn glanced around at the office. Orange cypress paneling. Bookshelves covering two walls. Some drawings thumbtacked to the wood, kid's renderings of birds and alligators.
"This?"
"It used to be. Seven months ago. The government was leasing the land. Now we're leasing it. Moved right into the cabins they used. A nice little piece of property. Out of the way."
"I guess my information is out of date."
"I guess so," she said. And she stood up, showed him her slim athletic build, a wild snarl of pubic hair. She came around the desk and stood in front of him.
"Who are
you?"
"I'm a guy," he said, "who's trying to find out what happened to the woman he loved."
She looked at him for a moment, and he thought he saw a small flame come to life deep in her dark eyes.
"I'll show you around. Would you be more comfortable without your clothes?"
"If it's all the same," Thorn said, "I think I'll leave them on."
"Suit yourself."
***
"This is where they found the bodies," Shelley said. She'd taken Thorn to the shell of a concrete-block building fifty yards to the east of the volleyball game. The building had been gutted by a fire. A couple of stainless steel tables gleamed in the rubble. Some broken beakers and a twisted Bunsen burner, what looked like a half-melted microscope, the remains of some wooden furniture.
"Bodies?"
"Twelve of them. The complete staff of Seamark. One of our Sunny Palms members, Andy Beam, was on the volunteer fire crew from Homestead. They answered the call out here, so he saw the bodies while they were still stacked up."
"I don't follow you."
"Crisscrossed. Like Lincoln Logs. Ankles on throats. A little log cabin of corpses. Andy said it was the creepiest thing he'd ever seen. Somebody's idea of a joke. No sign of blood. No gunshots, no stab wounds. Just these dead people stacked up."
"I never heard anything about it."
"Oh, no, you wouldn't have. The good stuff never makes it into the paper. The truly interesting news, somehow they manage to keep it quiet."
"Unless you have a friend in the fire department."
Shelley turned away from the building and led Thorn down a narrow sandy path into a clearing.
"We haven't decided what to do with this yet. Seems like we could use it for something."
In the middle of the clearing there was a concrete pool the size of half a basketball court.
"This was where they raised the fish," she said. "A breeding tank."
"The tilapia."
"Whatever they were."
"And what happened to them?"
"Andy said he'd never seen such a thing. So many fish in there you could walk across their backs. All of them floating upside down. Poisoned."
Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3) Page 9