"I'm telling you, I don't give a rat's ass about who your wife ran off with, your philosophy of life, any of it. That clear?"
His smile had grown rigid. He looked down at the matches, removed another one from the pile and relocated it behind his shot glass.
"Are you, by any chance, a fisherman, Peter?"
Thorn slid his gaze out to the water, watched a shrimp boat move slowly across the horizon.
"I caught a couple of fish once."
"And why do you fish? For food or sport?"
"Neither," he said. Thorn met his eyes. "I fish to find out what's down there."
The last shred of Harden's grin was gone. Clearly Thorn had violated some ritual of his. Food or sport, the only options allowed.
"My wife," Harden said, very precisely, face under tight control, "Doris abandoned me, and married a commercial fisherman."
Thorn was silent.
"This man," Harden said, leaning slightly forward. "He filled my wife with romantic illusions about himself. He convinced her he was some kind of great white hunter of the seas."
"I'm having another drink." Thorn pushed his chair back.
"No, you're staying put," Winchester said. "I'm telling you a story. You need to hear this. You need to know who you're doing business with and why."
Thorn hesitated, then eased back into his chair, settled his gaze on the swimming pool, an old woman floating on her back looking up at the stream of passing clouds.
Winchester said, "This man stole my wife from me. Beautiful Doris. He seduced her soon after she left me, when she was very vulnerable, and then he took her off behind a big fortress of money. And he hid her there, kept her from me."
His eyes darkened, filling with acid.
"I've always thought," he said, "that it's infinitely more satisfying to beat an opponent at their chosen game. Give them home field advantage, every edge, and crush them there. Much more satisfying. Don't you agree?"
Thorn was silent, looking into those bitter gray eyes.
Winchester said, "Some time after Doris left, I devoted myself to the study of fish. I thought about them, I read, I became something of an expert. And I came to see, Peter, something that I'm sure you've seen as well. Before much longer, commercial fishermen will seem as silly as fur trappers do to us now, buffalo hunters. Silly, irrelevant. Quaint."
Thorn watched a passenger jet rising silvery in the eastern sky. Harden had another taste of his bourbon and set it down, removed a couple more matches from the jumble and set them precisely in the pile he was building.
"That man who stole Doris is crippled now. A sick, dying old fool." Winchester looked up from his work. "But that's not enough punishment for him. No, sir, before he dies, I'm going to take my Doris back before his very eyes, and then for a last measure, I'm going to wreak havoc on that man's world. I'm going to make him witness the destruction of his old way of life."
"Yeah? And how you going to do that?"
Winchester stared at Thorn for a moment, clearly wanting to divulge his scheme, but fighting off the urge. He turned away, focused on a flock of sandpipers whirring along the shoreline. The light had lost some of its hard-edged luster, taking on a lemon tint as the sun inched through a slit in the clouds.
"Oh, you'll see, Mr. Lavery. In due time everyone will see. Mark my word. Everyone will know about it. I'm going to write my name on the world. In great large letters. You could say I'm going to throw open the next Pandora's box."
Harden laughed bitterly, then suddenly closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. He bent his head forward, and he suddenly seemed very tired.
Over the last dozen years, Thorn had met more than his share of lunatics. Men with drifting eyes and minds full of erratic molecules. You didn't talk with people like that. Reason and logic weren't part of their world. You got out of their way. And if they continued to bore in and left you nowhere to dodge, you used whatever tools were necessary to save yourself. Chairs, tables, blunt instruments.
Thorn stood up and scooted his chair around the table and sat down again, shoulder to shoulder with Winchester.
Leaning close, he said, "When do I see what I'm buying?"
Harden drank the last of his bourbon and set the shot glass down. "Soon. Very soon." He smiled painfully and rubbed at the puckered flesh around the adhesive strip.
Clearing his throat, Winchester wobbled on his chair. The booze seemed to have hit him all at once, a hard clip on the jaw that had begun to dizzy his eyes.
"Tell me one thing, Peter. Do you believe a man can transcend his family upbringing? Be a better father than his father was, a better man?"
Thorn was silent. He didn't know the answer to that. He doubted it, though. Nature, nurture. Parents were both. No way to escape all the messages written in your own blood.
"Well, I'm certain of the answer," Harden said. "You see, my own father was a very brutal man, Mr. Lavery. He used to lay my brother and me facedown on that dirt floor in that cabin and thrash us in front of our mother with branches off Jerusalem thorn trees. Trying to teach us right from wrong, he said. But it was torture, plain and simple. Torture for his own amusement. I watched him beat my brother to death that way. Murdered his own son for smoking a corn silk pipe in the barn. I watched my father flog Stewart Winchester till he drowned in his own blood.
"That's the kind of family I'm from, Lavery. Not like yours. Not the good civilized folks in the newspaper business. Tea and crumpets at four. French artwork on the walls. No, sir. I've had a longer trek to make, a greater struggle to reach the point of triumph. A life harder than you'll ever know, Lavery. You and your easy smile, your shallow jokes. You don't know what it's like to have to construct your own existence. Build it all, plank by plank until it's a livable place. A place that a decent, civilized woman could call home. But I have done it now. I've changed myself into a man Doris will love. And when I have your money in my pocket, Peter, my transformation will be complete. I will have wiped the slate clean and begun anew."
Harden was smiling at him now, a boozy sway of his head, but his eyes had begun to pry hard at Thorn's as if he were only a membrane or two away from seeing into Thorn's mind.
Abruptly Thorn stood up, went to the bar, bought a frozen mug of beer for himself, another shot of bourbon for Harden. He handed the bartender his last twenty and carried the drinks to the table, set them down, Harden looking off at the western sky.
He went back for his change, and the bartender was talking to one of his regulars the whole time he was counting out Thorn's money. Having to start over twice before he got it right. When Thorn returned to the table, Winchester was no longer there.
Thorn stood for a moment and surveyed the lawn. A volleyball game among squealing eleven-year-olds, the pool quiet, a few tables occupied beneath the canopy of the outdoor cafe. But no Winchester anywhere.
He looked down at the table and there, sitting beside Harden's empty shot glass, was a neatly constructed log cabin of matches. The head of one match resting on the ankles of another, making a perfect square, then another on top of that. Five stories high. Twenty corpses.
Thorn scanned the grounds again, but saw no sign of Harden. He let go of a harsh sigh, sat down at the table, and raised his mug of beer and brought it to his lips. Then jerked it away. Sloshed half of it in his lap.
Floating on the foamy surface of the beer was a fingerling, a fish not more than two inches long, dead. It resembled the tilapias Thorn had seen at Winchester's farm. Looked identical in every way but one.
This tilapia was a vivid crimson.
CHAPTER 25
Thorn took a checkered cab to the fish and wildlife office on the third floor of the Holiday Inn near the entrance to Alligator Alley. By the time he arrived it was after seven and Judy Nelson and everybody else at Fish and Wildlife had left for the day. He located a security guard sitting at the counter in the coffee shop downstairs and explained what he wanted. The guy took a quick look at Thorn and got back to his coffee.
"You want to leave them a fish?"
"This fish."
Thorn held it up by the tail.
The guard glanced at it. Unimpressed. He was in his late sixties and looked like he might've spent a few decades before retirement as a city cop in some rough Irish neighborhoods. He had a nose that was big enough and red enough that some creative chef might've been able to pluck it off, serve it on a bed of shortcake under a spoonful of whipped cream. Get raves.
"I know a lady works up there," said Thorn. "But she's gone for the day. I believe she'd want to see this first thing."
"And which lady would that be?"
"Judy Nelson."
The guard had a sip of his coffee. Grumbled in his throat. Judy probably had that effect on a lot of men. The ones who thought all women should be toy poodles. Stand up on their hind legs, do pirouettes for the guests. All cute and fluffy. Then get the hell back in the kitchen and serve the damn dessert.
"What's to keep you from bringing the goddamn thing back during working hours?"
"I wanted her to have it first thing."
"Not part of the job description, bud. Not even close."
"Is the coffee here that good? You can't get up, use your passkey, put the fish in a refrigerator up there."
"The coffee's pretty good, yeah." He smiled at a redheaded waitress passing by behind the counter. Toy poodle material.
"I guess what happened," Thorn said, "you found yourself a job lets you walk around with that Colt strapped on your big gut, it makes you think you're still cock of the precinct."
The man put his cup down. He wiped his mouth on a paper napkin and set it beside the cup. Slowly, he turned halfway around and fastened his yellowed eyes on Thorn.
"You got business in this hotel, boy, or you loitering?"
The redheaded waitress came over and poured more coffee into his cup, and said, "Look, I could take that fish, put it in a baggie, leave it in the fridge in back. When I come on for the breakfast shift, I'll see Judy gets it. How's that? Sound better than having a fistfight in a hotel coffee shop?"
The security guard was staring at Thorn, things happening in his eyes, twitches of light, as if he were seeing replays of a hundred nights on dark side streets, squaring off with some smart-talking kid. No holds barred. Waiting for what came next, and possessing all the skills to deal with whatever it was.
"Sorry," Thorn said to the waitress. "My testosterone's been acting up lately."
She nodded.
"Gotta watch that red meat," she said. "Stuff is filled with hormones, it'll give you wild urges. Make you want to lift your leg on other dogs' trees. Know what I mean?"
The cop wasn't listening. Still staring into the shadows of those hundred alleys. Everything that sent him out into the mean streets in the first place was looming up again in front of him, dressed like Thorn.
Thorn handed her the red tilapia and thanked her. He asked if she had something he could write a note on, and she tore off a page from her receipt pad. Thorn wrote a quick message to Judy. His room number at the Ritz, and that he'd call tomorrow.
He handed the note to the waitress, asked her to put it with the baggie and thanked her again. He told the cop good night, but the man didn't answer.
Outside in the parking lot, Thorn looked back through the plate glass window of the diner and the cop was staring after him. A thousand nights, a thousand dogs pissing on his trees, each and every one of them still haunting the guy, still vividly there. If Thorn wasn't careful, he knew he could wind up like that, a gruff and cranky loner, hunched over his coffee somewhere, just waiting for some young twit to come up to him, make some crack, set him off. All that testosterone simmering over a low flame for decades until it was reduced to a thick sludge of corrosive bile.
***
It was almost midnight when Thorn parked his VW beside a cow pasture and looked out his window at the Okehatchee moving golden through the distant trees. A nearly full moon was dusting the sawgrass and marshland, shrub and limestone outcropping with a fine film of white flour.
He got out of the car, walked over to the fence. He pressed a finger against the barbed wire, testing its tension. On a barb near his hand, a grasshopper had been impaled, and to his right at one-foot intervals a cricket and a caterpillar were fixed to other barbs. Thorn squinted up at the power line. There, directly overhead, was the moonlit silhouette of a loggerhead shrike. The bird was at attention, surveying his field. These were his insects, both his territorial markers and his rations for tomorrow. Such a damn thrifty creature, so disciplined. So focused.
Thorn climbed the fence post, careful not to disturb the cricket and grasshopper, those lovely meals to come. He hopped down into the shrike's field and headed across the spongy soil toward the Okehatchee.
At the river's edge he headed east. Not sure exactly how far he had to go. A mile, maybe three. But he could take all night if he wanted, so it hardly mattered. He would get there. He would see what he would see. Find what he could find.
In the first half hour the only thing of note he passed was an abandoned pump building. An old concrete-block structure with the rusty remains of irrigation pumps and pipes. He stepped inside the building for a moment, resting from his walk, and saw a battered mattress lying askew on the dirt floor, behind it on the moonlit wall was someone's scrawl. Three on one, having fun.
Thorn pushed on through the scrub oak and thick palmetto and weedy underbrush, all of it densely clumped to the river's edge. Raw twigs scraped at his exposed flesh, thistles pricked his ankle. He might make better time doing a dog paddle up the Okehatchee. The ground slippery, the estuary brimming to the banks as it inched slowly inland like a golden lava flow.
After another half hour he was perspiring heavily and the mosquitoes had come in thick ravenous clouds to drink from him. Finally he could stand it no more and stooped down beside the river, scooped up two handfuls of mud and smeared it on his face and neck and ears. Another scoop to cover his shirt, front and back. Another for his hair.
He continued on with the swarm of mosquitoes and gnats in an angry tizzy at his ear. Thousands of them. And Thorn, the mud man, their only hope for blood, luring them further upriver. He had to stop again for a few more glops of rank sulfurous earth to cover some spots he'd missed. Then got back to his sweaty hike.
A mile or two later the night darkened suddenly, and Thorn looked up to see the moon sliding behind a heavy wall of cumulus. Muffled back there, the moon filling the clouds with gray light.
As he was feeling his way forward through the new murkiness, he missed a step. He lurched to his left and his foot slid down the bank. He thrashed his arms for balance, and by sheerest luck found a grip on a rough vine. He caught his breath and hauled himself back to safe ground.
Thorn bulled ahead through the thicket, branches snagging on his shirt, fingernails clawing at his cheeks. Completely blind, fumbling forward with outstretched hands, feeling foolish, thinking now this was a dangerous mistake. He'd lost his way, must certainly have passed the farm by now. He'd have to double back, cover those same arduous miles again, pay better attention.
He ducked below a heavy branch, pushed through a matting of vines and branches, and stumbled into a clearing. He caught himself, then started forward just as the moon broke free and lit the land before him. Thorn stopped, held still. He couldn't breathe.
Ten feet ahead in the center of the clearing were two very large alligators. One had climbed onto the back of the other and was satisfying himself with small thrusts. One hell of a beast with two backs. Both of them facing Thorn, oblivious. The bottom gator had some bloody meal in her jaws, munching the remains of an anhinga or some other hapless bird. Probably an offering from her mate.
Just then the moon disappeared again, and darkness rushed back into the clearing. Thorn waited a moment, then took a half step backward, and under his foot a twig cracked. He didn't wait to see how those two would react. He turned and dragged branches out of the way, scrambled b
ack along the path he'd come, no longer concerned about noise, just retreating as fast as he could, to leave those two in their moment of delight.
He made fifty or sixty yards back along the riverbank before he stopped and stilled his breath and listened. And heard no rustle in the bushes, no scrabbling nearby, only the sweet ring of silence. Just the airless, empty dark. He stood there for a moment, letting his heart attune itself to the quiet. It was peaceful, utterly still, and Thorn felt at that moment some uninvited prayer begin to rise inside him. A benediction of thanksgiving to the goddess of moon and clouds for having seen fit to light his path at such a lucky moment.
With his breathing still ragged, Thorn leaned against a small live oak, the mud on his skin caked hard now. Brittle. He couldn't grin or speak without pinching his own flesh inside the rigid mask. With his weight against the tree, he listened to the night and felt himself sinking away into that absolute quiet.
When a needle scratched against the grooves of a phonograph record a few hundred yards away, it took a few seconds for Thorn to hear it, so far gone inside his own meditation was he. But then he stiffened, pushed away from the tree. It was an opera he didn't know, an antique recording, the lone soprano climbing steadily up a steep path to some lofty emotional peak.
He edged a few yards toward the music, passing through the perimeter of the pine forest, and halted beside a cluster of tree ferns and thatch palms. He listened to the woman sing, and stared into the blackness until at last the shape of the lightless house materialized.
Carefully, he headed forward toward the singer, the other buildings slowly taking form as he approached. The huge tilapia breeding ponds glittered in the shadows. With his eyes fixed on the darkened house, Thorn stumbled again, over some root or pipe, and he fell headlong onto the mushy ground. This time he stayed there, breathless, flat on his stomach listening for any sign he'd been heard.
Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3) Page 24