Magic City

by James W. Hall

  Thorn leaned against the foyer wall and got his breath.

  After a minute he drew out Alexandra’s cell phone and flipped it open. Summoning the cops was the rational choice. It would have been Sugarman’s method. And clearly that made more sense than forging on, unarmed, into an unknown house and another spray of lead. The accumulated pain was starting to swirl his thoughts. His vision was going in and out of focus, and his breath was ragged and burned his throat.

  He stared at the phone’s keypad and punched in 911, but on the first ring he heard a groan from the adjacent room. A woman in serious pain. He clicked the phone shut, shoved it in his pocket, and pushed himself off the wall.

  The blood trail he’d been following divided a few feet on. One track led into the room where the woman’s voice was coming from, and the other traveled up the stairs.

  In the study, slumped in a leather wingback chair, he found a trim blond woman speaking to herself in a voice so shrill and quaking, it seemed not quite human. The front of her blue shirt was soaked with blood and her lips were smeared with red, as if she’d been feasting on fresh kill.

  She lifted her chin and gazed at Thorn. Her left eye was swollen shut. There were welts on her left cheek where the pellets had struck and bounced away. One slug had punctured her throat. The wound was a ragged tear whose edges fluttered as the woman breathed.

  With her good eye, she watched Thorn approach, then extended her open hand as if begging for alms.

  Her voice was moist and nearly unintelligible.

  She spoke the word twice before Thorn understood that she was demanding he hand over the photograph.

  “You’re Pauline Caufield.”

  She sputtered Thorn’s name.

  “Who’s shooting?” he said.

  The woman’s wild one-eyed gaze shifted to the doorway and the foyer beyond. Her voice was a faint gargle.

  “Lola,” she said. “The bitch.”

  The decent, caring thing to have done was call for paramedics. But Thorn was no longer feeling virtuous toward these people. Let them suffer, let them bleed, let them kill one another off one by one. It was still less than they deserved. People so depraved by political zeal, so embittered from being ditched by a lover, that they’d sacrificed an entire family for career advancement and personal revenge. Together they’d struck down eight souls one winter night and left the survivors to bleed to death slowly over the years. No end, however agonizing, would be fair repayment. Let her suffer, let her die by slow degrees. She had earned the fate.

  The staircase was carpeted with an Oriental pattern, worn away to the fabric backing where generations of footsteps had passed.

  The blood trail Thorn followed up the stairs was surely Snake’s. Fired at by his own adoptive mother for reasons Thorn could not imagine. Some poisoned logic, some madness that drove a woman to shoot at the boy she’d raised as a son. It really didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered but bringing this to a close. There was no wisdom to be had. No insight into the human condition. Thorn wanted only to shut this engine down and go home to Key Largo and stare at the sky.

  On the landing of the second floor, the trail led to the right, down the carpeted hallway. Thorn looked for a place to set aside the envelope with the boxing photo and the Southwoods documents he’d gotten from Gundy, and the Xeroxes.

  He propped it against the wall at the head of the stairs. Then he turned back to the blood and followed it down the corridor until, ten feet later, it came to an abrupt stop. A shut door was to his right, and to his left was a window that looked out on oak branches.

  He swung to the door and twisted the knob, threw it open, and ducked back behind the wall. But no lead pellets came flying out. He stayed there half a minute, then peeked around the edge. It was a bedroom with a four-poster in the center. Cardboard boxes were stacked on the comforter, old newspapers piled along one wall, a set of dining chairs heaped in a corner. A storage room. Empty except for a moth that fluttered through the dust motes illuminated by a single window.

  Thorn returned to the hallway. A mockingbird trilled a song on a branch just outside. He heard the low hum of traffic roll in from Main Highway, and the rumble of that black squall still out at sea. But nothing else.

  He looked up at the ceiling and saw the attic cord dangling at arm’s length. A knob at its end.

  That explained the commanding angle the shooter had. A sweeping view from one side of the house to the other. It also made clear the pellet implanted in his shoulder. Lola had fired straight down at him as he was just feet from the front door.

  The wound in his shoulder muscle and the one in his palm and the other in his biceps thumped in unison. The light in the hallway dimmed and came back full strength as if some major appliance had cycled on and off. The plaster walls swayed and the floor felt shaky beneath his feet.

  Thorn touched the phone in his pocket. As wobbly as he was, he still didn’t want assistance. It was, after all, just an old woman with a high-powered BB gun. Nothing he couldn’t handle on his own.

  Thorn reached up and took hold of the knob to the swing-down steps. He forced himself to take two measured breaths before he yanked the cord.

  The springs creaked and the trapdoor separated from the ceiling and tilted down toward him. Then it all came at once. As the door swung open, the cord broke from his grip and the stairs began to clatter down, and in the next instant a human body tumbled on top of him and drove him to the floor.

  The back of Thorn’s skull smacked the carpet and the light in the hallway fluttered to twilight, then slowly revived. The man who was sprawled on top of him was muscular and heavy and pinned Thorn flat to the floor as if by his weight alone he meant to crush the air from Thorn’s lungs.

  When his eyes finally cleared, Thorn shoved at the man’s chest, heaved, and punched until he realized the body wasn’t punching back. He swiveled to the right and pried himself loose, thrusting the man away.

  Snake Morales rolled onto his stomach and was still. Threads of blood leaked from both his ears. Somehow Lola had managed to disable him long enough to fire her pellet gun into his brain.

  The air flooding down from the attic was hot and dry and full of dust and the smell of rat shit and rotting wood. Thorn took hold of the handrails and mounted the steps.

  He was prepared to take as many pellets as required to rush Lola and disarm her. But she didn’t fire, didn’t make a sound as he surfaced into the overheated air. She was sitting in a rocking chair that was wedged into the far corner of the space.

  She wore a brown shapeless robe with gold bands around its sleeves. Sandals on her feet and a single gold chain around her neck. She had the look of banished royalty. A queen dethroned and exiled to the prison tower. Her red hair was loose and hung across her shoulders. In her lap the black molded air pistol was trained at Thorn’s face.

  He’d been stared at by more than his share of freak jobs and killers, but he’d never felt so invaded by a pair of eyes. Thorn tried to reconcile this woman sitting before him with the amorous beauty who’d been leaning against that fancy car, staring at the profile of her lover, Jorge Morales. But no vestige of that devoted woman in the photograph looked out of the remote and glassy eyes of Lola King. As though sometime after that photo was taken, when Jorge Morales cast her off, whatever fragile connection Lola had maintained with humankind was severed.

  Thorn stood his ground and measured the distance to her rocker.

  The gears that operated the stairway must have been on some kind of spring-loaded return. For as Thorn took his first step toward Lola, the trapdoor cranked and heaved, then slammed heavily shut behind him. He whirled toward the noise and realized as he was going around that this must have been the same mistake Snake had made. A diversion that gave Lola just enough time to rise from her rocker, step close to Thorn’s head, and point her pistol into the dark, welcoming center of his ear.

  Thorn fell away from the shot and wrecked her aim by just an inch or two. The pellet tore into th
e muscles of his neck. A bolt of voltage ran down both arms, and he felt a warm numbness spread across his back. He rolled away onto the plywood floor. Lola followed him, attacking with two more shots that planted bits of lead near the base of his spine.

  He found his feet, ducked his head, and rammed his shoulder into her gut and drove her backward, his arms wrapped around her narrow waist. A football tackle. He shoved her toward the front of the house, toward the wall of louvered slats she’d used as her hunter’s blind. He meant to ram her as hard as space and strength allowed, hammer her backbone against the timbers of the attic wall. Knock her unconscious or paralyze her; it hardly mattered.

  But the floor-to-ceiling wooden louvers were as decayed as the rest of that old house and the frame gave way as Lola’s backside smashed against it. Wood gone soft and useless from years of neglect. It offered no resistance but exploded in a gust of chalky powder, and Thorn was suddenly standing on his tiptoes, tilting forward, two floors above the flagstone drive with nothing but his balance keeping him and Lola in place.

  They teetered for another few seconds in that grim embrace, with Thorn still gripping her around the waist, his shoulder planted in her belly, fighting for his equilibrium while Lola held perfectly still, suspended thirty feet from the earth.

  Inches from his eyes a wasp nest hung from a timber like a gray paper flower, the wasps circling their hive on full alert.

  In his arms Lola released the one-handed clutch she’d taken on the back of his shirt and twisted her torso in his grasp. Thorn was just about to win the battle against gravity, tipping his weight back toward the safety of the attic, when he felt the hot muzzle of her air pistol settle against his ear and screw down tight.

  He let her go. Gave a shove and stepped back. She fired twice as she fell. One pellet struck him square in the forehead and knocked him back against the trapdoor. He lay there for a moment, stunned. Then under the strain of Thorn’s weight, the stairway door began to open.

  He lifted his head, struggled to rise like a boxer trying to beat the count. But his head sagged back and the floor continued to give way. One final time he tried to roll to safety but was too weak, too slow.

  Beneath him the steps swung open and unfolded, and Thorn thumped and rolled down them to the corridor and came to rest beside Snake Morales.

  When his head cleared a little, Thorn reached out and touched a finger to Snake’s throat but found no pulse, only a quickly fading warmth. Thorn drew back his hand and closed his eyes, and his last feeling before spiraling down into oblivion was something close to brotherly remorse.

  It was ten or fifteen minutes before he moved again. First opening his eyes, sorting out his location, and the events of the previous half hour. Lola plunging two stories to the driveway. The origin of the knot in the center of his forehead.

  He got to his knees and decided that was plenty far enough for the moment. The mockingbird outside the window continued to sing as if the world had been proceeding just fine without Thorn being conscious of it.

  He struggled to his feet and started for the stairway, but it moved away from him, then moved again and again after that. So he settled for the wall where he’d left the envelope and planted his butt against it and rode it to the floor and eased himself down onto the worn carpet.

  He picked up the envelope and set it in his lap.

  A lone wasp buzzed by his face and dropped on the rug at his feet. For a moment it explored the frayed carpet, then finding no useful nourishment, it lifted off and sailed at the windowpane. It bumped against the glass and vectored off in another direction and was gone.

  Outside that window Thorn saw the black storm had been coaxed north by steering currents. The raging clouds, the booms of thunder, the ragged spears of lightning paraded just offshore. Marching up the state to find another point of attack.

  Feeling no great sense of urgency, Thorn decided to stay right where he was until the walls of the house stopped moving. Then he would try another time to stand, to walk, to leave, and make his way back home to Key Largo.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Sugarman and Thorn and Alex briefly occupied nearby rooms at Mariners Hospital in Tavernier. Sugar required surgery to repair his lacerated artery, and hours of transfusions. Thorn was sitting beside his bed when Sugar finally woke and smiled and asked what day it was and fell back asleep before Thorn could reply.

  Fifty-three stitches were needed to sew up all the holes in Thorn’s hide. Some nerves had been compromised in his back, and the pain he felt seemed distinctly out of proportion to the size and number of his wounds.

  Alex was transported up to Baptist Hospital in Miami, where new surgery on her arm and shoulder took place. After twenty-four hours Sugar and Thorn were discharged from Mariners and they went together to Thorn’s house to recuperate.

  Ballistics showed the pistol used to murder Alan Bingham was the same one that cut down Lawton Collins and wounded Alexandra. The .22 revolver had not yet been recovered, but with Alexandra’s testimony, the blame for both deaths was placed squarely on the Morales brothers.

  Alex claimed to have passed out immediately after being shot and therefore had not witnessed the clubbing death of Carlos. She was holding to that assertion despite serious attempts to shake her statement by the county’s lead homicide detectives. It was her parting gift to Thorn, protecting him from the legal jeopardy he had rightly earned.

  Furthermore, the investigators and DA decided that after fatally shooting Snake Morales with a pellet gun, Lola King, apparently in a fit of despair, had thrown herself from the second-story attic of her Coconut Grove mansion. Bloodstains in the study of the house, especially those on a leather wingback chair, remained a mystery, as did similar stains on the second-floor landing near the stairway.

  A sniper in the Key Largo woods had killed Stanton King and wounded Sugarman, then vanished. In the hospital Alexandra Collins named the shooter as Pauline Caufield, and hours later a woman matching her description was stopped at Miami International, trying to buy a first-class ticket to Quito, Ecuador, with an invalid passport. Pauline Caufield’s name was on the federal no-fly watch list, but somehow the slender blond woman managed to escape airport authorities and was the subject of an ongoing manhunt.

  The next day’s paper carried the story of the King family’s disintegration. But without any mention of the Southwoods operation, the story lacked a centerpiece motive. Sugarman’s cell phone rang constantly and a couple of reporters showed up in Thorn’s driveway, but he told them that Sugar was not yet ready to talk. The police took preliminary statements and promised to delve further when Sugar was up to the task. But they didn’t seem particularly inspired. They had Lawton’s killer and they had a murder-suicide explanation for Snake and Lola, and seemed in no hurry to complicate their investigation.

  Alexandra persuaded Dan Romano, her old boss at Homicide, to use the Miami PD computer to run a background check in hopes of narrowing down Caufield’s current whereabouts, but the data available on Pauline Caufield was nonexistent. A woman who appeared to be even more anonymous than Thorn. Even the white Ford left behind at the King estate was a dead end. It was registered to TransAmerica Construction Corporation, but no one at the company had ever heard of an employee by the name of Caufield.

  As to the shooting death of Edward Runyon on Le Jeune Road, dozens of eyewitnesses came forward to positively identify Snake Morales as the man who gunned him down while he sat in his green Jaguar. However, there was far less agreement on the description of Snake’s sidekick in that shooting episode.

  Some witnesses portrayed him as tall and blond and decidedly Anglo. Others were sure he was short and dark and Hispanic. A prominent attorney who had been passing by the scene at that precise moment, a man named Mo Chonin, was willing to stake his reputation on the fact that Snake’s accomplice was a stocky woman with tattoos covering both arms. The end result was that no artist’s sketch of Thorn was ever posted and no one from law enforcement had come knocking
on his door. At least so far.

  Alexandra called several times to check on Sugar, and even though Thorn spoke to her on each of those occasions, nothing intimate passed between them. Alex responded to each of Thorn’s apologies and his attempts to discuss their future with long, unbroken silences. She was not unfriendly, but that was the most he could say. He truly couldn’t blame her. Maybe a year from now, when her suffering had slackened, there might be a chance for them. But Thorn wasn’t holding out much hope.

  He lay in the sunshine and nursed warm beers, and spent the long hours while Sugarman was drowsing thinking the situation through. At this point he was free to simply walk away from the whole affair, lucky to have survived with as little scarring as he had. But he had made a vow to Shepherd Gundy and his wife, and every hour that passed without his taking action made the simmer of guilt in his belly grow.

  On their second day out of the hospital, he and Sugar were finishing breakfast on the dock that rimmed the lagoon. Thorn with his shirt off, letting his wounds take some air before he cleaned them again and refreshed the bandages. From his tumble down the stairs, he’d bruised some muscles and done some undiagnosed harm to internal organs. It hurt to stand up or sit down or lie on the bed. Hurt to go up stairs or go down them. There wasn’t a position he’d found that didn’t hurt. But he was still looking.

  Sugarman had just finished reading the latest piece in the Herald. A follow-up from the day before, mostly a recounting of what they already knew, with a few quotes from Stanton King’s neighbors, who were appalled such violence could happen on their lovely street.

  “The tribute to Lawton, that was nice, very moving.”

  “Not long enough by half,” Thorn said.

  Thorn watched a platoon of pelicans riding the morning breeze.

  “What you should do, you should send a dozen roses to the clerk at the porn shop. She must’ve had a crush on you, stashing the baseball bat or whatever the hell she did with it. Not to mention giving the cops a bad ID.”