Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4)

by James W. Hall

  "I seem to recall an interest in hiking, camping, the outdoors," Patrick said.

  "We stopped that," Sean said. "I got interested in sports, Mother started with the ape thing. Dad went with golf."

  "I see," Patrick said. "And Winslow?"

  "Photography."

  "She was the artist in the family," Harry said.

  It almost killed the conversation. Winslow's name sucking the air out of them. Everyone had a sip of their drink. Then Sean excused herself to go to the bathroom. Harry and Patrick stood and watched her make her way across the room. Floral knit dress, short. Great legs. Like Harry's. Always proud of his legs, Harry was. Wore shorts all weekend to show them off. In his sixties now and the old legs were still damn shapely.

  "Sean has become a fine woman," Patrick said as they sat. He touched a finger to the rim of his glass. "You must be extremely proud."

  "She's a good girl. Stubborn sometimes, a real bulldog. Favors Allison in that regard. But good, yes."

  "Would you like to talk about Winslow, what happened?"

  "No," Harry said. "I wouldn't. Not at all."

  Harry flagged down the waiter and ordered another gimlet. When the young man was gone, Harry rattled the remaining ice, took a last small sip, pushed the drink aside.

  "You have very good table manners," Harry said. "I've been watching you."

  Patrick eyed him cautiously. Harry knew he was drunk, knew he shouldn't be trying to put two words together, but he was getting a rush of feeling, sitting here with Patrick and Sean, a wisdom flood, or at least it felt like wisdom.

  Harry said, "The family I came from, I never saw my father use anything but a spoon. So what did I do? I went to Yale, for chrissake. I became a diplomat. I wound up eating with queens and sultans and princes. I learned the best table manners in the Western world. That's what I did. I followed my weaknesses. First you learn table manners, then you have dinner with the people who run the world, then later on you make lots of money doing favors for them."

  Harry could see through the haze that Patrick wasn't paying attention. Listening, but with his eyes disengaged. Harry had learned to read the eyes. The eyes were everything. Little captions under the photograph telling you at every second what a person was thinking. Harry had played political poker with some of the best. He knew Patrick was ticking off the seconds till Harry was through, looking for a space long enough to interrupt, say something, whatever he'd come twelve thousand miles to say.

  In no hurry to hear what that was, Harry said, "Sean's granddad — now, there was a man with table manners of the highest caliber. The man who gave me my first job. Yes, sir, I worked in his little law firm here in Miami, served a year or two there, on the weekends I would play Daniel Boone with him and his cronies, hunting, fishing, booze. Shooting gators, for god's sake, bears, wild boars. Got to be very buddy-buddy with the old man. Even ran off with his daughter. God help me. I fooled old Julius Ravenel, I fooled him and I've been fooling all the other Julius Ravenels for years to come."

  Patrick pushed his drink aside.

  "Harry, we're running out of time."

  "We are?"

  "With De Novo. It's not moving on schedule. We're weeks off the target date."

  Harry had a sip of the gimlet, put it down.

  "Look," he said. "Good work takes time. Yeah, there've been some hitches, but basically, as these projects go, things on this scale, we're staying pretty close to schedule."

  "Not close enough, Harry. I don't like it. The sultan won't like it either when he learns of it."

  "Hey, there're some things even the richest man in the world can't change."

  Patrick smiled delicately.

  "Then it would be the first time," he said.

  The young man picked up his unused spoon, drew a curving line in the tablecloth, concentrating on his work. Then he set the spoon aside, looked back at Harry.

  "What are you going to do to speed things up, Harry? Tell me specifically, what will you do to motivate Rantel?"

  Harry Farleigh had been doing business with Patrick for two years now, but damned if he wasn't having a hard time just now seeing Patrick as an adult. The other image was still too strong, that boyish face from Harry's last tour of Brunei. The seventeen-year-old kid who'd had a few thousand girls in Brunei mooning over him, but had ignored them all so he could moon over Harry's daughters.

  Harry glanced up as the waiter set the fresh gimlet on the table. He picked the old one up, but Harry nabbed it from him, polished it off, then handed it back.

  "Don't worry, son. I'll call them first thing tomorrow, crack the whip. Raise some hell."

  Harry saw Sean stopping to speak with someone at a table across the room. A couple her age. Patrick brushed a crumb from the white tablecloth, held his tongue till the waiter was gone.

  "Harry," Patrick said. "Are you prepared to lose the De Novo project?"

  Harry bumped his glass, slopped some booze onto the linen tablecloth. Patrick watched the stain spread.

  "Now, wait a goddamn second."

  "You wait a second, Harry. I've spoken to you repeatedly about this, but things are not moving. Not moving fast enough. And as you know, Harry, the sultan is to select his new Minister of Finance and Economic Development in January. Two months from now. I want that job, Harry. And I would find it most embarrassing to explain to his Majesty that phase one of the De Novo project is far behind schedule."

  "Look, I'll do what I can."

  "I've heard that before, Harry. It's not good enough anymore. I am very close to pulling the plug on Rantel, handing the project to the French. At least then, his Majesty will have evidence of my decisiveness."

  "Look here," Harry said, leaning forward across the table, trying to bring Patrick into focus. "Rantel is eighty million dollars past the design phase: architects; drawings; foundations being poured. Christ, there's a contract. Everyone's already signed off on De Novo."

  "Is that right, Harry? Is that what the partners in your prestigious law firm believe? Do they think they wrote an ironclad contract?"

  "The sultan wouldn't do that."

  "The sultan doesn't deal with details like these anymore. It's strictly my call, Harry. I picked Rantel, I can choose another firm to replace them."

  Now Sean was coming slowly across the room. Patrick had his eyes on her. Sean was walking like she knew she was being watched. A womanly sway, the hint of coquettishness. Something Harry had never seen before from her. Something he didn't even know Sean could do.

  "De Novo translates to over three billion dollars for your nation's economy, Harry. Ten years of steady work for Rantel. Ten years of fat retainer fees for you. And you are willing to lose all that?"

  Harry stared at Patrick for a moment. Hard eyes, a glaze of indifference. Not bluffing. Perfectly willing to dump Harry. An icy-hearted bastard, exactly the skill required to do business on the scale he did.

  Patrick leaned close, lowered his voice.

  "You have two weeks to show me that I have not made a mistake with you, Harry. I am returning to Brunei and I will watch carefully what Rantel accomplishes in this two-week period. If there is not an immediate and dramatic surge in construction, then it's over for you, Harry. It's finished."

  Patrick glanced up as Sean approached and his scowl dissolved smoothly into a smile. He pushed his chair back and stood up. He drew back Sean's chair and she sat.

  Harry watched them look at each other. And in a sudden moment of recognition Harry Farleigh remembered how as a child he had often been so hungry, so utterly famished that he had gone outside into the snow, kneeled down and scraped away the black crust of coal soot, then eaten scoop after scoop of the white, lifeless stuff. He remembered the feeling now as he looked at his daughter and Patrick Sagawan sharing their smile. A cold, sickly emptiness in his gut.

  ***

  It was after midnight, the moon directly overhead. Three-quarters full, giving the beach a powdery luminescence. On Ocean Drive the traffic was at a stan
dstill, the garish parade of gender-benders just getting under way. From where Sean and Patrick stood, their backs to the surf, the neon from the art deco hotels was creating a feeble halo that filtered out to the beach, penetrated the first row of palms then dwindled finally to darkness.

  They sent Harry home in a cab, then took the Porsche for a cruise, Patrick driving, and wound up here. Only a few words along the way, the silence okay with Sean. Nothing uncomfortable about Patrick. He'd glanced at her a few times on the causeway over. She'd held his eye once and they'd smiled like old pals sharing a delicious secret.

  Now they carried their shoes, Patrick with his cuffs wet, taking deep breaths of the night air. Finally it had cooled. Seventies again, a weak cold front the night before had eased the temperature back ten degrees. Dried out the air.

  "It smells like neon," he said.

  "What does?"

  "The breeze."

  "I don't think neon has a scent."

  "But if it did," Patrick said, "if green and pink were blended in equal parts, a dash of blue, it would smell like this."

  Sean looked out at a passing yacht. Maybe a mile offshore, the sky choked with stars. The mild splash of the surf. Patrick turned away from the hotels, stared out into the dark with her.

  "Do people swim in this ocean?"

  His shoulder brushed hers.

  "Yes, of course. They do everything in it."

  "Everything?"

  She smiled.

  "Everything," she said.

  A couple passed them, speed-walking, disappearing quickly into the dark. Patrick and she began to walk, heading north out of the range of the streetlights of South Beach, moving into the heavy shadows behind the last few derelict hotels.

  New money had continued to flood into South Beach. If it lasted a little while longer, every single building out there would be refurbished soon. But someday not far off, Sean was certain the boom would finally die. The trendies would roller-skate off to the next fair-weather spot, and the beach would once again be on its own, and would have to coast for another forty years on the momentum of all this hoopla. Probably drift back finally into comfortable shabbiness, all the neon fizzing out, the lawn chairs reappearing on the front porches of the hotels, congregations of grandmothers hobbling out to take back their seats in the sun.

  Patrick halted, faced the sea.

  "Shall we see how far we can swim? Beyond the horizon perhaps."

  "I don't think so."

  "But you are a swimmer, aren't you? Why not?"

  "This dress is why not."

  "I'm going," he said. "I want to swim in the neon sea."

  He dropped his shoes and waded into the surf, kept going, not shedding his jacket or shirt. As he moved into chest-high water, he called out for her to join him.

  He began to swim, a good stroke from what she could tell, strong and even, perhaps a little stylized, taught to him by someone more concerned with form than function. She saw him stop and wriggle out of his jacket and toss it aside. Watched the current carry it north. Sean felt herself walk into the water, drawn by Patrick's rashness, his childish pleasure.

  Sean unzipped her dress, stepped out of it. Balled it up and tossed it back on the beach. Black panties and matching push-up bra. She waded out, to her knees, her waist, felt the cold slap of water against her flesh, had to duck her head beneath the curl of a sudden wave.

  When she resurfaced, swimming now, she could barely make out Patrick treading water fifty yards ahead, a path of moonlight lay before him like a golden highway that circled the earth.

  She swam toward him, head up, keeping him in view. When she'd closed in to twenty yards, he turned and resumed his stroke, leading her farther out, into the deeper rollers, the black sea.

  She followed, gaining on him, a yard, another yard. He was faster than she'd thought, but not as fast as she was. She'd trained for this, had put in her weekly miles at the university pool. Could swim for an hour at this pace if she needed to.

  She seized his ankle, held on against his flutter kick. Hauled him to a stop. He sputtered and treaded water in front of her, then both of them looked back for a moment in silence at the beach. Riding up and down on the smooth waves, losing sight of land, then seeing again the vague pastel lights of the hotels, the headlights, but little else.

  "It's beautiful out here, isn't it?"

  "Spooky too. A boat could come along, bam."

  "Is that who you are, Sean? Who you've become?"

  "What's that mean?"

  "Are you frightened of things?"

  "Some things, yes. Boats that can't see you."

  "Are you afraid of me?"

  "Should I be?"

  His teeth were moon-white, hair a dark sparkle.

  "You should be terrified," he said. "Absolutely terrified."

  She swiveled around, started a slow breaststroke toward shore. Patrick swam alongside her.

  "Have you ever done this before? A midnight swim."

  "No," she said. "Have you?"

  "Oh, no. I have been saving it."

  She was silent, feeling him stirring the water beside her.

  "Do people make love in this ocean?"

  She stopped swimming. Treaded beside him.

  "Yes, I suppose so. The ones who are ready to make love."

  She began her breaststroke again. He was quiet, swimming beside her. She glanced over but couldn't make out his expression.

  On shore, she found her dress and stepped into it, clammy against her skin. Patrick put on his shoes, tucked in his shirt. He came over to her, stood quietly beside her, looking up at the neon hotels with a sheepish look.

  "You live in a beautiful place. So full of life."

  "Brunei is beautiful too," she said. "Better than this."

  "Do you think so?"

  He looked closely at her.

  "Do you think of Brunei often?"

  "Yes," she said. "All the time."

  "I'm glad," he said. "That was a very special year, a glorious season in my life."

  "We were young. No one had died yet," she said.

  "True," he said. "No one had died."

  She searched for a clear view of his eyes, but could see nothing through the slab of shadow he'd stepped into. Finally, she stepped close to him, reached out and took hold of his chin and guided his mouth down to hers. As she kissed him, he stepped close and his arms rose up slowly to hold her.

  She meant it to be a perfunctory kiss. A friendly thanks for a memorable night. But the kiss went on, much softer than she'd imagined, more inquisitive than assertive. Sean felt her stiffness and restraint begin to sink away, felt her eyes go slowly blind behind her lids.

  And she pictured again with perfect clarity Winslow's mysterious smile that day at Singapore's Changi International Airport when she'd returned from her farewell rendezvous with Patrick. Now it was Sean's turn. She was kissing that same boy her sister had kissed, the one who'd turned into this man. Sharing with Winslow her long-ago secret, feeling a communion with her across the wide gulf of silence between them.

  She kissed Patrick, kissed him till she almost lost the strength to stand.

  ***

  The orangutan spent Tuesday night trying to pick the lock on his cage. He used a piece of straw, reaching his hand out the bars, and crooking it around so the straw entered the lock mechanism in the same way that his keeper had used a key.

  He spent an hour, then another hour, working at the lock. The warehouse was very quiet. Sometimes a noise came from the back room where the owl was, or the mice would scrabble through their sawdust, burrowing down.

  The air conditioner turned on for half an hour at a time, and when the temperature in the warehouse dropped to eighty, it would shut off. At eighty-six it would turn itself on again.

  The orangutan was very patient. He was full of food and water now, and the gibbon in the cage above him had finally died, which meant there was no more of his drool or feces dripping down through the bars of the cages, soiling
the orangutan.

  When he stuck the stalks of straw into the lock, each of them bent. So the orangutan spent some time searching through his bed for a stronger piece. He couldn't find anything that seemed right, so he reached through the bars of the cage and tore free the ID tag that was wired to the door.

  He sat in the corner of his cage and uncoiled the wire, then straightened it. He bent the wire in half, doubling it side by side, then twisted it till it was straight and much stronger than a stalk of straw.

  He reached through the bars again and inserted the wire into the lock and poked. There was a noise inside the lock but the cage door stayed shut.

  For most of the night while the orangutan worked on the lock, the air conditioner made a bad noise, straining. As the sun finally began to shine through the dirty windows of the warehouse, the motor gasped loudly and began to smoke.

  The orangutan slept for a while, then woke and began to work with the twisted wire again. By three in the morning he was growing very thirsty. He made the sign for fruit a few times.

  It was almost dawn when the lock made another noise. The orangutan became very still, working the wire carefully until finally his cage swung open.

  As if to celebrate, he extracted the diamond ring from the pocket of his cheek and examined it for a long while before replacing it in his mouth. Then he pushed open the door to his cage and jumped down to the floor.

  CHAPTER 18

  Wednesday at ten-thirty Ray went for his weekly visit to his shrink, a pretty, auburn-haired woman with an office on Red Road. There were dentists on both sides of the shrink's office — oral surgeons, they called themselves. Each week Ray sat in the lady psychotherapist's darkened office, sunk deep in a comfortable chair with drills grinding away through both walls. Sometimes, from just sitting there, he got a sympathetic toothache.

  The shrink, Tricia Capoletti, sat in a green leather chair across from him. This week she wore jeans and a man's blue denim work shirt with a string tie and a brown corduroy jacket. A few weeks back she'd let it slip that she was just a year out of psychology school, so Ray figured she hadn't learned yet how to dress like a professional, still thought of herself as a college student.