She set her plate in the drying rack, wiped off her fork and knife on the dish towel, keeping her back to Harden, her eyes hidden from him, doing the routine things, the every-day-at-lunch things. Trying to move with a leisurely pace, keep the fidgets out of her hands, though she could feel the warm tension in her chest, the radiance of anxiety, the double-time tick of her pulse as she put the mustard and lettuce and the sliced turkey back in the refrigerator, let the door whoosh closed.
She sponged off the white tile kitchen counter, keeping her actions slow, lazy, uninspired, rinsing the sponge and squeezing it out. And then, Jesus Christ, she almost squealed when she heard the rumble of the truck, and the next second its two quick honks.
Harden scraped his chair back and stood up. When Sylvie turned from the sink, he was already at the back door. He tugged a blue work shirt off the peg by the doorway, put it on.
"Who is it?" Sylvie said.
"UPS truck."
"Oh, goody," she said. "A package from somebody."
"Did you order something again, Sylvie? Is that what this is?"
His voice was cold and he didn't wait for an answer. He was already out the back door, heading across the fifty yards of sandy yard to the front gate.
Sylvie followed, keeping a distance, already feeling the stink of failure growing on the moment.
The UPS man got down from the truck with a small box in one hand and his clipboard in the other, his brown uniform fitting tight over his wide shoulders, deep muscular chest, a brown baseball cap over his thick blond hair. Looking authentic.
When she got within earshot, the man in the UPS uniform was saying, "You folks live a long way out."
Harden was silent.
"You Harden Winchester?"
"I am."
Sylvie stepped back, kept her eyes away from the UPS man's, looking at the package in his hand, at Harden's hands, hanging easy at his sides. Her father seemed relaxed, unsuspecting.
Frank Witty handed the clipboard to Harden for his signature. Frank Witty, the fishing guide from Key Largo. Turned out Frank had been in the U.S. Marines, served in Desert Storm. A halfway worthy opponent for a change.
Sunday night, Monday night, and last night Sylvie had fulfilled Frank's sexual fantasies and then fulfilled them again. Hours together, hours of sweat. Last night Frank had come all the way to Naples. Sylvie snuck out and met him. Both of them naked on the motel sheets, sweat drying in the air-conditioned air, Sylvie asked Frank Witty if he liked her well enough to step into a ring of fire for her. Would he step in and rescue her?
And he said yes, of course he liked her that much. More than that. Sure, she said, that's what they all say.
"What kind of ring of fire?" Frank Witty asked her.
"Never mind," she said. "Don't promise Sylvie something you can't deliver."
"Try me," Frank said. Blond hair, sincere eyes. His ring finger with that white rim of fresh flesh. Three nights together and Frank primed and ready. A record for Sylvie. Three nights. The previous record was six. That was Mr. Joseph McCabe. Or was it Mr. Tommy Matkov? She wasn't sure anymore. It was such a blur lately. Men, men, men.
Try me, Frank Witty said.
So then, just last night, Sylvie told him about Harden, described things he'd done to her. Years of coming into her room in the middle of the night, lying beside her, stroking her flesh, entering her, making her scream.
Frank Witty said nothing for a minute.
Sylvie, the cumulus, becoming the abused daughter for Frank, see if that registered on his scale. Made him mad. If not, she'd keep on searching until she found the story that stirred him. Men were so easy that way. They had no trouble believing in other men's evil. They knew that every dark imagining was possible. It was part of what made them men. For Sylvie it was only a matter of time, hunt and peck, probe and listen before she found Frank Witty's button. But this was quick, superquick.
"Your father raped you?"
"For years," Sylvie said.
"The fucking bastard."
"Since I was four. Maybe even before that."
"We'll go to the police."
"I already have. They're scared of my father. He has some powerful connections. Judges, senators. It's no use."
Frank was quiet, staring up into the dark. Sylvie had caught the fishing guide on the first cast.
She told Mr. Frank Witty how remote the farm was, how easy it would be to do anything out there and hide it. Her father without any social life. No friends coming to look for him, see where he was when he no longer drew breath on this earth.
"You want me to kill your old man?" Mr. Frank Witty said in the dark, naked on the sheets beside her. "That's what you're asking me to do?"
And Sylvie touched him again between his legs, let her fingers rove.
"I'm not asking you to do anything, Frank," Sylvie said. "Long as you don't mind sharing me with my father."
He was silent, lying still beside her. But his penis was thickening in her hands.
And then she told him, even if he wanted to help her, there was one very big complication. Her father was a trained killer. The United States Government had sent him to special training camps to show him the best ways to do it. Then for twenty years he'd traveled around the world to erase people who threatened the American way of life. He worked undercover for the State Department most of the years Sylvie was growing up. Libyans, Iranians, Saudis, Nicaraguans, Iraqis, Vietnamese, Cambodians, French, even British. He killed them all. Harden confiding in Sylvie once in a drunken moment. Nineteen people. "I reshaped history, girl. These hands reconstructed the world. Kept it from going off in the wrong direction." Sylvie mixing truth with the rest of it, giving the story a smooth, consistent texture.
Sylvie told Frank Witty that Harden liked to brag that he and a dozen other men like him had more effect on world events than all the presidents and bullshit senators and congressmen put together.
"Jesus," Mr. Frank Witty said in the dark. Sylvie's fingers working down there. Finding his hot places again, finding the squirm trigger, the rigid-as-iron trigger. "I knew guys like your father in the Marine Corps. Gung-ho, first hand in the air. Do anything for the old U.S. of A."
"He's an old man now," Sylvie said. "Feeble, slowed way down."
"I hated those guys."
"Think you could handle it?" Sylvie said. "Kill a sixty-year-old man? Shoot him when he wasn't expecting it. Rescue Sylvie from a monster." Sylvie nuzzled close, her hand riding up and down his slightly curved penis.
"Why don't we just run off? We could go tonight," Mr. Frank Witty said. "He'd never find us."
"He'd find me. He would. He always does. It's like I got a little radio beeper planted inside me, he follows the waves, finds me, brings me back. Believe me, I tried and tried."
"We could get on a plane. Pick a destination at random. Disappear."
"My father isn't going to let you have me. No man is going to take me away from him. He's like that. He doesn't mind if I screw around with guys. But he'll never let me move away, live with somebody."
"He can't do that. You're an adult."
"Oh, he can do it, all right. He does whatever he pleases."
Sylvie went quiet. Spent the next hour using her mouth, her fingers, her ass, to give flesh to Frank Witty's dreams.
"I have a deer rifle," he said when they were lying still again. Saying it quietly, his voice different. "A deer rifle with a scope," he said.
Sylvie rolled up on an elbow.
"No good," she said. "It has to be close range. I know my father. You wound him, anything but a through-the-brain head shot, he'll manage to slip away. Then both of us will be dead."
"And how the hell do I get that close?"
Sylvie said nothing. Let him answer his own problems. They lay there for a half hour without talking or touching. She could hear Frank thinking. Finally he rolled over to her.
"I have a friend, a high school buddy," Mr. Frank Witty said. His voice was solid now. He was there fina
lly. Sylvie bringing him to that decisive point, making a hero out of him. "My friend drives a UPS truck in Key Largo. I think he'd loan it to me if I asked him."
"Whatta you gonna do, try to run over my daddy with a UPS truck?"
"No, I got an idea."
"When're you going to do it?" Sylvie said.
"I don't know. When would be good?"
"My father has sex with me every single day," she said.
She could hear Frank swallow in the dark.
"Tomorrow then," he said. "I'll have it tomorrow."
"You sure?"
***
And now under the hot noon sun, Sylvie watched as Harden signed his name on the clipboard, and Mr. Frank Witty kept his eyes down, watching Harden's hands. Over and over Sylvie had warned him whatever he did, not to look at her, warned him to keep his eyes nailed to Harden. Like Lot's wife, don't don't don't, whatever you do, don't look back. Don't, don't let my father see what's in your eyes for me.
But as Sylvie watched, Mr. Frank Witty did exactly that. The fishing guide from Key Largo ticked his eyes her way and smiled, and at that exact second Harden glanced up and caught the look, and Mr. Frank Witty sensed what had happened and stumbled back and twisted his arm behind him, grabbing for his handgun wedged in the small of his back, but it was too late, another tragedy, because Harden had seen what was in Frank's eyes, the desperate love, registered it, and he reacted a millisecond faster than Frank Witty, flashing his hand out and gripping the man's upper arm, twisting to the left, and at that moment, the muscular man with the blond hair, the thick chest, Frank Witty, the marine, the recently divorced fishing guide who had kept himself in shape, running, lifting weights, the man who had lived out all his sex fantasies with Sylvie in three nights together, this man sagged in Harden's grasp, knees relaxing, going down. The Vulcan death grip. Bones giving way, muscles loose, Mr. Frank Witty's face slack and empty and bloodless. His eyes on Sylvie as he drooped.
And what happened next, Sylvie had seen many times before. Her father making a quick step, a dance move, turn your partner, do-si-do, behind him, lift his arm, a tango of death, Harden's gristly wrist pressing across Mr. Frank Witty's Adam's apple, throttling him, the man's eyes going groggy, then her father bending the celery stalk that was his neck, snapping it, and Frank was dead. The pistol fell from his hand, the man in the UPS suit dropping motionless at her feet.
"Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie," Harden said, looking down at the heap. "Jesus God, girl, this poor bastard was so slow, he never had a prayer. Like a goddamn lamb to slaughter. You should be ashamed, Sylvie. Ashamed."
He walked over to the storage shed and came back with a shovel. Sylvie stayed there and watched as her father raised the point of the shovel above Mr. Frank Witty's head. Then she lifted her eyes to the large clouds rising over the Glades. Cumulus. Forcing herself to look for shapes, Santa Claus, rocket ship, gorilla, sailboat, as Harden brought the sharp-bladed shovel down on Mr. Frank Witty's throat, again and again.
CHAPTER 18
Wednesday as Thorn was on his way out his drive, Sugarman's Mustang pulled in off U.S. 1, blocked his path. They both got out, met at Sugar's car. Without a word Sugarman spread a file folder open on the hood. A hot breeze off Blackwater Sound riffled the pages, but Sugar held them in place.
"It was right there in the file cabinet," Sugar said. "My two clients, First Federal and Murtha's Liquors. Then there was this one. My third client, the one I didn't know about. In alphabetical order and everything, the Winchester file."
On the top were photocopies of two library articles on tilapia. Both were written by Dr. Paul Ludkin. After that was a sheet from a yellow legal pad. A list of words in Darcy's hand, tilapia, Ludkin, Seamark, Winchester. Then on another yellow page was an ink drawing, what looked like a map of the Naples area. At a location well inland from the Gulf she'd drawn a star.
"She went over there?"
"Must have," Sugarman said. "Look at the next one."
The second page was filled with Darcy's shorthand prose, notes to herself as she tried to sort out the situation. Sylvie claims ongoing incest. Vague about encounter with Murtha. Angry at him. Doesn't want to talk about it. Very excited someone would take interest in her. Strange girl. Funny, quick, but scatterbrained. Checked with Health and Rehabilitative Services, Naples office. Dorothy Hobson, caseworker. Had a file on Sylvie. Won't reveal contents, but implied the file is extensive, and Sylvie may have "reality problems."
" 'Reality problems,' " Thorn said.
"Hell," Sugar said. "That may be what I got."
Her notes ended with a brief description of Harden Winchester. Charming man. Smart. Manipulative? Early sixties, seems younger. Extremely revved up. Shocked at mention of red tilapia, tried to cover his surprise, but it was there. Claims he knows nothing about such a thing. If Sylvie is being sexually abused, why couldn't she just leave? Answer: that codependent thing. Sounds bullshitty, but I guess it could be true. Some women can't leave. Scared weak. Dependent. But which one to trust? Father or daughter? And what about the pistol in the videotape?
And the final line was, Whole thing starting to feel like a dead end. Maybe misconstrued everything. Probably should bring Sugar in. Have him look at video. See what we do from here, if anything. Quit fantasizing, playing Nancy Drew.
Thorn stared at the page, brushed his fingers across her elegant handwriting, so controlled, so neat. Then he lifted his head and looked out at the dark sparkle of the empty bay. A single brown pelican drifted ten feet above the water, giving its cumbersome wings a single flap, then sailing on out of view.
***
Thorn drove the VW twenty-odd miles north to pick up Krome Avenue, then to Tamiami Trail, and made the peaceful hundred-mile drive west across the Everglades in a little over two hours. He found his way to the Fish and Wildlife office by three. They had a room in a Holiday Inn near the entrance to Alligator Alley.
He sat in the parking lot of the hotel, his mind going back to Broken Conch Reef, hand exploring the lobster hole, another part of him back in his stilt house, still feeling the numb and hollow anger, the last vibrations of two dozen bullets blasting through his floor. Then out on the skiff last week, the tarpon taking his fly, running, Thorn turning and seeing her body.
His veins were clogged with a thick brew of rage. He knew he was no Sugarman. He didn't give a goddamn about the fine points of sportsmanship. This wasn't a matter of chivalry or table manners. When he found Darcy's killer, he was going to knock him on his ass and if he got the chance, cleat him in the face. And if the son of a bitch came back to consciousness, he'd put him down again, keep him pinned till the man was gone. And when that was done, maybe Thorn would just drive the VW up the road a way and locate that linebacker, Mr. Langstaff, the eye gouger. See what he was up to. Have a polite chat with him too.
Judy Nelson, assistant investigator for U.S. Fish and Wildlife, was over six feet tall, weighed fifty pounds or so more than Thorn, and as they were shaking hands in the doorway of her office, she informed Thorn that just last month she'd acquired a false nose.
The doctors had to slice the real one off, it was so eaten up with skin cancer. The new nose was gel-filled, she told him, and could fool most people if she took the time to get her makeup right, caulking around the edges of the thing, then feathering the hypoallergenic cream so it blended with her skin tone. None of which, Judy said, she'd bothered to do this morning. She hoped Thorn wasn't too grossed out by it. He said he wasn't.
She was wearing a green government uniform with gold patches. A small silver badge. She had her dark brown hair tucked up under her hat, no jewelry, quick, probing eyes, and a voice full of rough sand. A three-pack-a-day rasp. Maybe Coach Hardy had been right, after all. Judy had a brawny, intimidating manner that would've demoralized any number of Thorn's jock buddies, past or present.
They took the elevator downstairs and Judy led him outside and they got into the green government pickup. Windows down, no air conditioner, they rumbled ea
st along U.S. 41, the afternoon sun baking the oils from the asphalt, sending wavy undulations into the air in front of them. Ten minutes out from her office, Judy cleared her throat significantly, and asked if Thorn minded if she took her goddamn nose off for a while. The thing was hot, like wearing a toupee she guessed, and he said, hell no, she should be comfortable, he didn't mind a bit.
So she squeezed hard on the bridge of the artificial nose and Thorn heard a sharp plastic snap. She pulled it off and lay it on the seat between them, and while she adjusted her sunglasses, she kept her face forward. Thorn did too.
They turned off 41 and headed north along a county road, the asphalt rougher back here. RV parks, sod farms, a few avocado groves, a deserted industrial park, a dilapidated honky-tonk, houses with windows boarded up, the highway stretching long and empty before them.
"Well," Judy said. "Want to have a peek? Get it over with?"
Thorn paused for a moment then said, okay, sure, let's get it over with. And Judy took off her sunglasses and turned her head slowly and let him have a good look at the trapezoid-shaped scar tissue in the middle of her face. A complex white plastic fastener poked up in the middle of the trapezoid; the skin was raw at its edges. A single hole about the size of a dime had been cut through a patch of gleaming flesh just below the snap.
"Now we got that behind us," Judy said.
"Doesn't look that bad."
"Hell it doesn't," she said. "Looks like one of those goddamn Star Wars monsters, that bar scene with all of them drinking radiator coolant. It looks like shit."
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