Magic City

by James W. Hall

  Thorn was well acquainted with the doomsayers who made careers out of lamenting the lost Florida. There was a lot to lament, of course. But like it or not, Darwin had a point. The bitter truth was that every species either adapted or disappeared. Nothing complicated about it. For Thorn, the creatures worth celebrating were those still hanging on, the tough birds, the resourceful reptiles, the sluggish manatees dodging propellers. Bully for them. Finding their way through the maze, outliving their delicate cousins. Burrowing into a niche and making do. If this land he loved was to survive, it would be because the native creatures hung on, won their daily skirmishes with bulldozers, managed to cope and multiply. Thorn was rooting them on.

  The ibis turned to watch Thorn and Lawton climb from Alexandra’s Toyota, then fluttered a few yards away and resettled in the tall grass next door, not far from where Thorn had pitched the revolver.

  Across the street Alan Bingham’s car was still parked in the drive. The street was quiet. No mowers, no cars passing by, no one walking a dog. A working-class area with the ghostly feel of a neighborhood recently evacuated for some dreadful cause that Thorn and Lawton were oblivious to.

  Lawton halted on the sidewalk and stared off toward a swath of cobalt blue beyond the rooftops.

  “They wouldn’t let Cassius try on a shirt.”

  “What?”

  “A short-sleeve shirt lying on a sale table, two dollars, ninety-nine cents,” Lawton said. “It was in the newspapers. Happened at Burdines, the downtown store, sales clerk refused to let Cassius try it on. Company policy. Negroes couldn’t try on clothes ’cause it would contaminate them and no white person would ever buy anything there again. Cassius didn’t make a stink out of it, just left the store. Here’s this kid, he’s got an Olympic gold medal hanging around his neck, and they wouldn’t let him try on a frigging shirt.”

  “Things have changed in forty years,” Thorn said.

  “Oh yeah?” Lawton headed down the front walk. “What planet you been living on?”

  Thorn unlocked the door, stood aside for Lawton, and when he stepped inside himself, he found the foyer blocked by Alexandra’s roll-on bag.

  “It’s about damn time she got back,” Lawton said. “Leaving her old man in the hands of an unreliable doofus, what kind of daughter would do that to her defenseless old dad?”

  “Something’s happened. She just left a few hours ago.”

  “My ass. It’s been weeks. Don’t try to play with my head, boy.”

  Thorn stepped past him, took a quick glance around the kitchen, and saw that the pistol was gone. He headed at a trot down the hall, calling out her name.

  He pushed into her bedroom but found it empty. He called her name again, but all he heard was the raucous voice of the television that Lawton had switched on in the Florida room. Flicking through the channels in an endless search for some show he could never find.

  Thorn walked across the hallway to Lawton’s bedroom and opened the door, realizing as he did that he’d never seen it shut before.

  When he stepped in, he was confronted by piles of Lawton’s clothes scattered about the floor, drawers yanked out, contents tossed, the mattress flipped off the bed and gashed open in several places. Pillows disemboweled, paintings ripped from the walls, their backings torn off. The side table was on its face, chairs overturned, the tiny bathroom ransacked as well. Apparently by the time the looters reached the green-tiled lavatory, they’d lost patience and changed from searchers to destroyers. The mirror was shattered, toilet seat broken off, shower curtain dumped in the tub, tubes of toothpaste and shampoo and hemorrhoid cream had been squeezed flat, their contents smeared across the countertop and the windowpanes.

  Thorn headed for the door and had one foot in the hallway when he caught movement to his right. He swung back and scanned the small room but saw nothing. He bent down, flipped aside the mattress, revealing only more of Lawton’s garish collection of Bermuda shorts and peacock shirts.

  He stood and listened. Then ticked his gaze from one side of the room to the other until he thought he saw a small shrug of the white comforter that was humped by the overturned dresser.

  Next to the comforter a kitchen knife was stuck in the oak floor. It was cocked at a severe angle, its point buried half an inch into the wood.

  Thorn grabbed the edge of the spread and yanked it aside, and Buck, the sweet, intelligent yellow Lab, wobbled to his feet and trudged toward Thorn. He made it about a yard before he groaned and settled back to the floor.

  Thorn squatted beside him and explored his coat gingerly until he found the damp spot behind one ear. The dog yelped and drew back.

  “What the hell’re you doing!”

  Lawton stepped into Thorn’s field of vision. He was gripping an aluminum baseball bat in his right hand.

  “Look at this place. You goddamn weasel. You attack my dog, you tear up my bedroom. That’s the last straw. You’re doing some hard time for this.”

  Lawton pointed the baseball bat at him, but his words had no muscle. Going through the motions. Exhausted from his grueling day.

  The bat was a memento from his police softball league in the final years of work. He’d batted lefty, averaging .340 against much younger men. A few weeks back Alex had told Thorn about his athletic feats, her smile full of a daughter’s pride.

  “Listen to me, Lawton. Those same guys were here again looking for the photo, and they ran into Alex and Buck.”

  “Yeah? Who’re you all of a sudden, Dick Tracy?”

  Thorn squatted beside the dog and touched his ruff. The Lab looked up at Thorn, eyes still fogged. He fingered Buck’s skull near the blood-matted patch and the dog winced and began licking his lips.

  “Got to get him to a vet,” Lawton said.

  “We will, but we need to find Alex first.”

  “Alexandra,” Lawton said. “She went to Tampa. Her and Buck.”

  Thorn went room by room through the rest of the house. It took five minutes, every closet, under every bed, behind every door. Nothing out of the ordinary, except Lawton’s ransacked room, Alexandra’s luggage at the front door, that carving knife, the missing pistol.

  The only scenario he could assemble was that she’d arrived, heard the two shitbirds tossing Lawton’s room. Maybe Buck beat Alex back there and the two men snared the dog and clubbed him. Alex heard the fuss, grabbed the knife from the kitchen, and confronted them. After that, it could go anywhere. She could’ve chased them off, or captured them, hauled them away to jail.

  But he knew those story lines weren’t likely. She’d never leave Buck in such condition. The only other choices were ones he wouldn’t let take shape in his imagination. Alex hurt, Alex kidnapped, and goddamn it, Alex dead.

  Back in Lawton’s bedroom Thorn found Lawton slumped on the edge of his box spring. Buck stood over a water bowl, lapping.

  Lawton raised the bat and took a loose-gripped, easy swing.

  Buck finished with his water and went over to the comforter and lay down, watching Thorn with a bleary look. Head up, chin tipped down, the dog’s ears drew back in a cringe of guilt. He’d failed to protect his master.

  “That dog’s not right. He needs medical attention.”

  “He’s tough, he’ll be okay,” Thorn said. “We need to get started. You up to this, Lawton? Or should I take you back to Harbor House?”

  “Up to what?”

  “We have to find Alex.”

  “Yeah, how you planning on doing that?”

  “We’ve got an excellent search dog, and you’re a first-class police detective,” he said. “That should be enough.”

  Lawton found a lost smile, and his lips held it for several seconds.

  “Ready, Buck?”

  The dog lifted his head, thumped his tail. It was Alex’s command, prepping the dog for work.

  From the clothes hamper, Thorn retrieved the blouse Alexandra wore the day before, and in the foyer he squatted in front of Buck. He passed the material below the dog’s nose
and Buck stiffened to full alert. His eyes were sharp and questioning. Her? Not her?

  Thorn got the dog’s lead from the table by the front door and clipped it on, and the three of them walked outside into the grass where the flock of ibis had been dining on worms and beetles.

  Lawton tagged along, running his palm up and down the smooth cylinder of his bat.

  “Used to love them low and inside,” he said. “Crank those suckers a hundred yards. Never played high school ball. No time for that fiddle-faddle, but I could’ve made the team if I’d tried. Coach was after me all the time to come out, and I wanted to, but times were rough and I had a bakery job. Sweating my ass off with all those ovens. Man, that was work. That was the real McCoy, that job, sweat and more sweat. But those smells, oh man, I loved those cinnamon buns.”

  Buck swung his nose back and forth a few inches above the ground and led Thorn to the end of Alexandra’s sidewalk. Then turned left and followed the trail up the walkway toward the spot where Snake had parked earlier.

  The dog kept tugging till he reached the shade of a gumbo limbo and pulled Thorn off the sidewalk, across the grassy swale to the curb.

  Then halted. Trail’s end.

  Thorn looked up and down the empty street.

  “They took her away in a car,” he said.

  Lawton cocked his bat over his shoulder, took aim at the trunk of the gumbo limbo, and did a slo-mo swing that ended in a tap against the tree. Then he looked off at the distant sky as if following the ball’s trajectory.

  “Going, going, gone. Downtown, baby, downtown.”

  Buck looked up at Thorn, awaiting further orders.

  But Thorn had none. Standing on the curb, staring out at the deserted street, he was trying to remember what Alex said one afternoon about Buck’s abilities in urban landscapes, all that asphalt and concrete where scent trails were continually contaminated by foot traffic and car tires, and even the very bacteria that scent was composed of was destroyed by so much carbon monoxide floating on the breeze. Alex had once mentioned cases of dogs tracking scent trails while hanging their heads from the windows of moving cars. Guiding their master through freeways and city streets. Improbable, perhaps, but at the moment it was all Thorn had.

  “Let’s get the car, Lawton, come on.”

  As he bent forward to turn the ignition key, the cell phone in his pocket dug into his waistband. Thorn eased back and pried the phone from his pocket.

  He didn’t remember when or where he’d done it, but somehow he’d managed to switch off the phone.

  He punched the ON button, waited till the gizmo tinkled and came fully alive, then pressed the speed-dial number for Alexandra and listened to it ring.

  After six buzzes he was about to punch off when there was pickup.

  He pressed it hard against his ear.

  “Alex? You there? Alexandra?”

  For a moment he heard only silence.

  Then Snake Morales spoke in the languid cadence he’d used earlier.

  “Would this be Mr. Thorn I’m speaking with?”

  “Snake?”

  There was a pause, then Alexandra’s voice came on, strained but unhurried.

  “I’m okay, Thorn. Bring them the photograph. Just keep it simple. No one has to get hurt.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “The shitbirds kidnapped Alex?”

  “That’s right.”

  Thorn pressed the tiny cell phone to his ear while he drove north on I-95. Just one of the gang now. Every second driver blowing past him was doing the same thing, yakking away on his phone. Giant SUVs roaring up behind him, braking hard a few feet from his bumper, the driver one-handing the wheel at eighty-five, then cutting around him. Thorn, a newly converted city guy: When in Miami, do as the assholes do.

  “Did you make a copy of the damn thing?”

  “I don’t give two shits about the photo, Sugar. They want it, I want Alex. It’s a simple swap.”

  “Doesn’t sound simple to me, man. Sounds like you need some serious backup. This is nuts, Thorn, you and Lawton and that banged-up dog. I wouldn’t do it, man, way too risky.”

  “I can handle these two.”

  “I won’t even try to convince you to call the police.”

  “Don’t know what it is about me and the cops. Oil-and-water thing.”

  “You’re up there, it’s less than a day, and you’re into this shit.”

  “I was minding my own business. This found me, Sugar.”

  “You’re always minding your own business.”

  “You in your car yet?”

  “I’m doing seventy-five on the Stretch, passing a Winnebago at mile marker one-eleven. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes, tops. You can wait that long.”

  “Waste of your time, Sugar. Appreciate your concern, but I’m going ahead. I just thought you should have a heads-up in case we get a bad outcome. A place to start if I don’t come back up for air.”

  “Aw, shit, Thorn. Pull over, man.”

  “I’m just jerking your chain, Sugar. This is a simple business deal. We each want what the other one has. Nothing complicated. Low-risk.”

  “These are bad guys. And it’s two against one.”

  “They’re a couple of sad cases.”

  “Hey, wake up, Thorn. They kidnapped Alex, they nearly killed Buck, they pointed a gun at you.”

  “But I had a super-healthy breakfast this morning. Big plate of fruit and soy sausage. They’re the ones in trouble.”

  “Listen to me, you jerk, stop being cute. You go running in there half-cocked, you put Alex in danger, and Lawton, not to mention your own damn self.”

  A guy in a black-windowed Hummer cut in front of him, missed his bumper by a whisker, then swung into the next lane, flying.

  “It was a very little pistol they had,” Thorn said. “Bullets so tiny, they wouldn’t scratch my leathery hide.”

  “Jesus Christ, Thorn.”

  “I’ll be fine, Sugar. I’ll handle it with my usual dexterity.”

  Sugarman was silent for a long moment.

  Then he said, “The Liston-Clay fight? Back in ’sixty-three?”

  “It was 1964. But yeah, Clay-Liston. The first one.”

  “And Meyer Lansky is in the shot?”

  Thorn said yeah, him and the former mayor, Stanton King, back in the sixties.

  “So this is a mob thing?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t give a rat’s ass. But these two guys that have Alex, they’re the ex-mayor’s adopted sons. Forty years ago their parents were murdered by Cuban spies, same night as the boxing match. So I’m thinking more likely this is about some Cuban political bullshit. Not boxing or Lansky. It could be a coincidence the mayor and Lansky are in the same row.”

  “Did you talk to Alex? You sure they have her?”

  “Yeah, they got her all right.”

  “That’s all? Just ‘meet us at the graveyard, swap the woman for the photo’?”

  “Gave me a one-hour deadline. And, oh yeah. Don’t bring the police.”

  “That’s original.”

  Thorn looked in the rearview mirror. In the seat behind Lawton, Buck had his face out the window, ears flapping, sucking down seventy miles an hour of scent. Lawton was snoring. His cheek against the headrest, chin touching his shoulder. A sad, faraway look.

  “Make a copy of that photo. Stop at a Kinko’s, it’ll take two seconds. Give the punks the original, get Alex back, we can figure it out later.”

  “I’m telling you, Sugar, I don’t give a shit what it’s about.”

  Thorn put on his blinker and moved into the far right lane. Since he’d been on 95 he hadn’t seen anybody use his blinker. Cars darting and weaving so fast, there was no time to blink. Signaling intentions, another obsolete courtesy.

  The blood was drumming in Thorn’s throat. Jacked up over Alex, now the insane drive up I-95. He couldn’t remember the last time his reflexes were firing at such a rate.

  “Man, I need to go back t
o driving school. I’m a few steps behind the state of the art.”

  “You’re acting like this is a joke, Thorn. That’s a bad sign.”

  “It’s how I cope, Sugar. You don’t want to know how I really feel about putting Alex in the middle of this bullshit. Okay?”

  Sugar was silent. Letting Thorn’s outrage hang for a moment. When he came back, his voice was quieter than before.

  “Give me the address again. West Dixie, I got that. The number.”

  “It’s a cemetery. North Miami, couple of blocks west off Biscayne Boulevard, south of 163rd. Go straight into the graveyard, take the first right, and stop halfway down the row. Those are my instructions.”

  “I know that place,” Sugar said. “Jamaican gangs machine-gunning Haitians for turf. Crack houses. It’s a war zone, man.”

  “It just gets better and better,” Thorn said.

  “Look, man, don’t go crazy on me. Pull over where you are, side of the road, wherever it is, and just wait for me. Do that for me, a favor for a friend. Pull the hell off and wait half an hour. It’s nuts to go charging in there all wild-eyed.”

  “I’m calm,” Thorn said. “I’m solid ice.”

  Another NASCAR hero slashed into Thorn’s path from two lanes over and braked hard to make his exit. Thorn had to double-pump his brakes and his hand went on the horn, but he stopped himself.

  “I’m relaxed,” he said. “I’m the goddamn Buddha.”