She yipped, and beamed giddily at the windshield.
Outside her door a young man with red hair waited for her to finish her conversation so he could open her door.
"Finally," Sylvie said, turning her grin on Thorn again, "I found somebody who can give my daddy a challenge."
"And what does that mean?"
"Somebody good enough," Sylvie said, "you might actually be able to kill the bastard."
CHAPTER 20
"This is Peter Lavery," Sylvie said. "He has a reservation, but it's not till later on this week."
Behind the curved marble counter, the registration clerk typed the name into the computer and stood back, watching the screen. He was a handsome kid of twenty-five or so, white shirt. Dark tan, blond hair trimmed neat, like a surfer gone legitimate.
"Now, that's strange," the kid said.
"Strange?" Sylvie was hugging Thorn's left arm, nuzzling her nose into his shoulder. Playing the newlywed. Thorn, seriously pissed, but riding it out.
"According to this, you already checked in, Mr. Lavery."
"You sure about that?" Sylvie said, dropping Thorn's arm.
"Yes, ma'am, right here, Peter S. Lavery."
"Great," Thorn said. "The more Laverys, the merrier."
In a bruised and far-off voice, Sylvie asked what room the other Lavery was in. The clerk apologized, but he wasn't allowed to give out that information.
"Well, what time did he check in, can you fucking tell us that much?"
The clerk looked at her for a moment, then hit a couple of keys on his computer and said Lavery had checked in an hour ago.
Sylvie asked the kid where the house phone was and he pointed at a table near the distant wall, and she marched over to it. Heads turned to watch this skinny girl with her chain saw haircut, muddy boots, and Raiders jersey tromp past.
Thorn turned back to the counter and began to fill in the registration card. According to the kid, the last available room in the entire hotel was a suite with a Gulf view. Thorn said that would be fine and the clerk asked him for a major credit card.
"Don't even have a minor one," Thorn said.
"Then you'll be paying cash?"
"Unless you'd barter for fishing flies."
The kid smiled wanly.
"So, that'll be two hundred and eighty-five dollars."
"Christ, I don't need it for the whole month."
The kid improved on his smile. Yes, sir, he'd met his share of kidders, wealthy wackos with seven-inch fingernails and beards to their belt buckles. And he was trained to be polite to all of them. You never knew when one might turn out to be Mr. Ritz or Mrs. Carlton. So, by god, when you checked into this place, you got treated right, no matter which mental hospital you'd just escaped from.
"That's two hundred eighty-five dollars per night, sir."
Thorn glanced around at the lobby.
"Hell, I've owned cars that cost less than that."
"So you don't want the room?"
Thorn looked over at Sylvie. She was sitting in a leather chair, curled around the phone receiver, her free hand shielding the mouthpiece. Completely focused on her conversation. He didn't like this hotel, and sure as hell didn't like Sylvie maneuvering him into this situation. But he had the very strong sense that he'd learn far more about the Winchester clan by playing along as Peter Lavery than by trying to strangle the truth out of them one by one.
For a moment, he had a painful glimpse of how Darcy might've felt living with him. Chafing in her limited role. Someone else defining the shape of her life. Thorn had just assumed his rhythms suited her. That silence and seclusion were as comfortable for Darcy as they were for him. He'd thought of her as his double, a complementary other half, his exhalations becoming her inhalations, hers becoming his. But probably she had squirmed inwardly for months as she searched for some challenge that could give her back her own identity, just as Thorn squirmed now, trapped in his role as Peter Lavery.
He turned back to the desk clerk.
"The Gulf view room then?"
"Look," Thorn said, "you sure you don't have anything cheaper? Say in the fifteen to twenty-dollar range?"
"Mr. Lavery, the only place in this town for twenty bucks a night is the Salvation Army shelter. I can call over there and see if they have anything available."
Thorn kept his face as pleasant as he could.
The kid said, "But as far as hotel rooms go, all we got is the Gulf view suite. Two eighty-five, plus tax."
Thorn pulled the wad of battered bills from his pocket. A few tens and twenties, mostly ones and fives. His savings for the last couple of years. Somewhere near four hundred dollars. It'd seemed like a huge roll when he took it out of a drawer at home, even seemed silly taking along so much.
He peeled off the cash for one night's stay, and didn't even bother counting what was left. Probably just enough to tip the bellman.
"So, you'll be staying with us for only one night?"
"Christ, if I spent two nights in this place I'd have to take out a second mortgage."
The clerk smiled tolerantly and tapped the silver bell on the counter. Thorn turned to see Sylvie coming back across the lobby, the fizz back in her eyes. Jauntiness in her step. She took hold of Thorn's arm and gave him a determined nod.
"Lights, camera, action," she said.
They followed the young black man in blue shorts and white shirt who was carrying Thorn's bag to the elevator. The bellman glanced at Sylvie as they all stepped into the elevator. He pressed the button for their floor, and smiled to himself as he stared at Sylvie out of the corner of his eye.
Man, you won't believe the one I had today, bony little thing, didn't weigh but ninety pounds, and her hair, holy shit, it looked like she'd just come in from a hair-spray hurricane.
***
"In the nick of time," said Sylvie when the door to his suite was closed, the bellman tipped and gone. "A minute later and Lavery would've been on the phone to Daddy, and hell, you and I would've had to spend the afternoon shopping for caskets."
"Sit down." Thorn pulled a desk chair away from the padded leather table. "We're going to talk."
"What's your rush, big fella?"
She began to prowl the suite. Thorn followed her impatiently. This time he wasn't letting her out of his sight till he found out what she knew about Darcy.
The suite was done in coordinated greens and blonds. Couches, leather wing chairs. A thick pile rug of a soft spun gold. On the walls were elegant watercolors of birds and plants, botanical drawings that resembled Audubons or some other primitive Florida naturalist. In the corners of the room were planters with silk plants of the highest authenticity. The Ritz people had also supplied the room with six telephones. A ten-foot-high glass-front secretary jammed with hotel stationery, a set of French doors leading to the balcony, another set connecting the living area with the bedroom. Four terry cloth robes hung in the large closet, and in the bathroom Thorn watched Sylvie paw through an array of brightly colored bathroom supplies, enough to last a normal person a good six months.
"You see this?" she said. "There's even a goddamn phone next to the john. You run out of toilet paper, just call the front desk. Jeeves, my man, bring me up another roll."
"Okay, Sylvie. Enough of this bullshit. I want to hear it. Start at the beginning. The whole story. How you met Darcy, everything."
Thorn followed her back into the bedroom and he sat down on the foot of the bed.
Sylvie walked over to the double glass doors and stared out at the wide stretch of beach and blue Gulf. She turned back to him, eyes blipping around the room. Since calling Lavery in the lobby she seemed to have tuned in to a new channel, this one piping even more frantic music than usual into her pulse.
"And what's Peter Lavery doing here? What's the deal?"
A half-serious expression washed across her face and she said, "Peter Stuyvesant Lavery, that's who you are. Grandson of Junius Lavery of Atlanta. The newspaper Laverys. You're a trust-fun
d baby. An environmental kook, very big on sponsoring windmill research, harnessing wave action, lots of crackpot things like that. You got into tilapia a few years ago, threw a lot of money at a fish farm in Thomasville.
"Lots of people think you're a total loon. Got feathers for brains. In love with the snail darter, the spotted owl. Come to think of it, maybe that's why we hit it off on the phone. You and me, loons of a feather. We been talking to each other for the last three months. Negotiating this deal. My dad let me do it. He's very big on giving me responsibility, including me in his plans. Thinks it'll win me over. Make me into an adult."
"What's the arrangement?"
"You're here to give my daddy a million three in cash."
Thorn's heart faltered briefly.
Sylvie said, "I don't know why Harden made it such a weird number. If it'd been up to me, I'd've rounded it off to a flat two million."
"What's it for? He selling Lavery the farm, his land?"
"Oh, no. Not a chance. That's our little house on the prairie. Home sweet home."
Sylvie walked over to the French doors and drew them open. A warm rush of sea air flooded the room. And he heard the quiet sift of the Gulf waters washing against the long flat beach below. Thorn took a deep breath, the air so different here from the breezes on the other coast. Not the brawny, starched-shirt smell of the Atlantic coast. The air back home was always moving, buffeted by trade winds, those pure African breezes that arrived each day cooled and sweetened from their long journey across open ocean.
While on the Gulf coast the air was yeastier, a sulfurous brew tainted by swamp fumes from the nearby tidal marshes. And by millions of starfish and periwinkles and cowries that the tide dragged ashore each night, and which each morning lay in thick crunchy masses on the beach, rotting in the sun all day, the flecks of meat still inside them releasing a rank incense.
This was the coast where the ocean was not an ocean at all, but a large, shallow bay that lay stagnant and unstirred by powerful currents. No Gulf Stream here to keep things moving. Just a huge drowsy cove rimmed by Yucatán, the Cajun coast, by Texas. Out there beyond the horizon were the oil rigs and pots of bubbling crawfish gumbo, the steep Aztec pyramids. All of that giving its funky spice to the gust filling his two hundred and eighty-five dollar room.
Turning from the window, Sylvie stood with her back to the bright afternoon light.
"My daddy murdered Darcy," she said. "Or had you already figured that out too?"
His veins tightened down hard, and he stared at Sylvie but could not see her clearly for a moment, the blinding sun, the pressure in his heart.
"I was with him," she said. "We were on that other boat, the one anchored a couple of hundred yards away. Did you even see us over there?"
"I saw a boat, yes."
"I'm sorry," she said. "It wasn't my idea. I liked Darcy, she was nice. She was just trying to help me. I don't know how she did it, but she found out where the farm was. And one day she came over here just like you did.
"I got her alone for a while and told her about what Harden was doing. His schemes and everything. Then she met him, the two of them talked. But he fooled her. Turned on his goddamn charm. So she left me there, drove off, completely twisted around about which of us was telling the truth, me or Daddy. But even if she didn't rescue me, I gotta say, she was a very nice lady. And now I wish I hadn't told her anything. Hadn't got her involved. Maybe she'd still be alive. I feel guilty about that."
Thorn came to his feet. He marched across to her, shoved her backward, pinned her against the wall beside the sliding door. Tipped her chin up, holding her with the other hand hard against her sternum.
She scowled at him and her eyes seemed to clear for the first time since he'd met her.
"You're sorry?" he said. "You're fucking sorry!"
She struggled to speak.
"Don't bullshit me, Sylvie. I'll strangle your skinny little neck if you do. I want to hear the goddamn truth. Every single detail."
She nodded, swallowing hard. He lessened the pressure.
"Harden killed her. He did. It's true. Just like I said. That's all there is to it. No details to it. She was sniffing around, Harden got worried, so he killed her. Followed you out to the reef, put on his air tank, jumped in, swam over there and killed her. He was going to kill you too, but he decided not to."
Thorn let her go. Stepped back.
"Jesus," she said, rubbing her chest. "Fm glad you finally got fired up. 'Cause, by god, you're gonna need every bit of that juice to go up against my daddy."
"I'm fired up, all right."
"So you up to it? Think you can handle a sixty-year-old man? A geezer in his twilight years?"
"If I had to."
"Oh, you can. I know you can. You're just the man for the job."
"Was Harden in the CIA, an agent, something like that?"
"Wow," she said. "Now, how in the world did you know that?"
Sylvie kept her back against the wall, rubbing her chest. Thorn, a yard away, staring at her.
"And what'd you tell Darcy that got her killed?"
"Just about the fish, about what Harden's doing, his big game plan." Sylvie pushed herself away from the wall, stepped close to him.
"Which is what?"
"I don't think I know you well enough to tell you that. Not yet anyway." Giving a flirty tilt to her head. Putting a coo in her voice, saying, "Listen, there's no reason to be afraid of Harden. He's dangerous, but I can fix it so you're on equal footing with him. Don't worry about that. Sylvie's got a scheme. It'll work."
She walked past Thorn, gave a little flounce as she passed, and went on into the bathroom. She came back out with a miniature bottle of mouthwash, twisted off the cap and poured the blue liquid into her mouth. She walked around the room swishing it, then went over to the balcony and leaned over the concrete balustrade and spit the stuff into the breeze. Then she tossed the bottle over the side and came back into the room.
"So, Thorn, what do you like to do? You know, in your secret life, what have you always wanted a woman to do to you?"
"What kind of boat was it, Sylvie?"
"Boat?"
"What kind of boat did Harden and you take out to the reef?"
She turned away from him, walked to the balcony doors.
"You're difficult, Thorn. Sylvie's gonna have to work extra hard on you."
"What kind of boat, Sylvie?"
"I don't know. A rental. I don't know anything about boats."
"Okay, listen," said Thorn. "We're going to the police. We're going right now."
Sylvie swung around.
"You're kidding me."
"I'm not kidding. We're going to the police."
"Hey! What happened? Where's your heroic spirit? It evaporate? Where's your goddamn primal urge for revenge?"
"We're giving it to the cops. You tell your story and that's it."
"Oh, Jesus Christ, Thorn. Look, first of all, I never said I actually saw anything. I stayed in the boat while he swam over there and swam back. That's all I can say for sure. I wasn't any eyewitness to what happened underwater."
"You tell what you know, and I'll fill in the rest. It'll be enough to put him away."
Thorn stepped over to her, took hold of her upper arm and started to pull her to the door. She jerked away. A wild look in her eyes.
"I don't believe this. You'd let a bunch of lawyers decide what happens to Harden? You'd just give up on this?"
"That's right. That's exactly what I'm going to do."
She paced around the room for a moment, mumbling to herself. Then she stopped and took a seat in the leather chair, and Thorn came over and pulled out the other one and sat across from her. She played with the fringe on her cutoff jeans, keeping her eyes down. She pinched loose some fringe, then looked up and stared at him, dark eyes, a look of sulky challenge.
"You ever see Casablanca, Thorn? Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman?"
Thorn didn't answer.
"First movie I ever saw. I was only eight, nine. My mother took me. I remember her crying in the dark. Me on one side of her, my sister, Gwyneth, on the other, and Mother crying between us."
Thorn watched Sylvie's eyes cloud, watched her begin to breathe through her mouth.
"We sat through that movie twice. The second time, all of us cried. Humphrey Bogart so bitter and hard on the outside, but turning out to be a hero after all. Ingrid Bergman making him love her, and turning him into a hero, making him do what she wanted him to do. All three of us sat there and cried and I decided right then, Thorn, right at that exact second that I was going to have to learn how to be a woman like that if I was going to survive in the Winchester family. I was gonna have to learn how to be Ingrid Bergman. That's what all three of us were thinking. How the hell do we turn Harden into Humphrey Bogart?
"But see, now I understand something I didn't know then. Some men are so mean and spiteful and cold through and through, nobody can make them love. No one can do it. Not Ingrid Bergman. No one. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try."
Thorn stood up.
"Let's go, Sylvie. We're going to talk to the police."
"I can't," she said softly.
"And why not?"
"If I go into the Collier County police station one more time and tell them what Harden's done, they're going to strap me to a stretcher. 'Cause, see, I already been in there so much, they got a chair with my name written on it. They wave me right on in to see the county shrink, don't even bother to take a statement from me. Last time, they said, that was it, no more. Next time they're going to ship me off to the rubber prison."
She smiled bitterly.
"So, I'd say, as witnesses go, I'm not going to do you a whole hell of a lot of good. And even if you go along, they're just going to think you're under my spell. Just as wacko as I am. It won't work. You're going to have to trust Sylvie, get your own justice. Isn't anybody going to get it for you."
"I'm supposed to believe this hooey. Christ, I haven't heard anything coming out of your mouth yet that sounded like it was even a distant relative to the truth."
Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3) Page 20