Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4)

by James W. Hall

  Harry looked at one brother, then the other. Orlando and Raimondo White.

  "Me and Ray, we been meaning to take a cruise. Just never can seem to find the time. Work, work, work."

  He stood at Harry's window, pressing his nose against the glass, leaving a two-inch greasy smear. The short one, bald, no eyebrows or lashes, like he'd been dunked in acid. Wearing a black T-shirt stretched tight over his beer gut, black pants, shoes. The other one, Ray, was tall with blond hair swept back, ducktail. Jeans, work shirt, tie, a white sport coat. Dressed like a Sweet Briar professor, but with that hair, that face, he could've been one of those seedy beach boys who put the chaise lounges out, and in their spare time picked up elderly women, stole their jewelry.

  Harry leaned back in his swivel chair, laced his fingers behind his head, looking over at the blond one.

  "Now, how can I help you, gentlemen?"

  "Gentlemen?" Orlon smiled, and pulled away from the view. Gave Harry a lunatic grin. "Now, I wouldn't call myself particularly gentle. What about you, Ray? You think of yourself as a gentle man?"

  Ray was examining the painting of Sean and Winslow at fourteen and fifteen. He didn't turn around, didn't reply.

  "Fact is, Harry, my brother here, he's more the gentle type. Ray's what you might call sexually challenged. Inherited a couple of feminine genes, I do believe.

  "But me, I'm afflicted with a terminal case of manhood. I gotta go once a month, get dialysis, filter out all the nasty testosterone. Though so far it hasn't done a fucking thing except make me lose my hard-on for a half hour afterward.

  "What about you, Harry? Where're you on the manhood scale? Just looking at you I'd have to say you're tipping more toward the ladylike end. You have that fussy-fussy, gotta-get-every-hair-in-place look. But, hey, I guess being married to a ballcrusher like Allison, that's gotta be hard on your virility."

  Ray turned back from the painting.

  "Just get on with it, Orlon. And let's go."

  Harry sat up straight, gripped the arms of his chair.

  "Did Patrick send you over here?"

  "That's right, our mutual associate, the ragin' Asian."

  "Wait a minute. I just got off the phone with him an hour ago. What's the matter? What's going on here?"

  "Well, counselor, I guess he didn't like what you spoke about, 'cause he called us up on the cell phone, requested we haul our butts over here, put you in immediate early retirement. Maybe help free up some office space around this joint."

  "What?"

  "We're here to kill you, Harry. Set loose your immortal soul."

  Harry jerked a hand into the air as if to ward off a blow. Then lowered it heavily to the desk.

  "Now, wait just a goddamn minute, you two."

  "Sure, whatever you want, counselor. Always got time to shoot the shit before we have to shoot the shit."

  Orlon grinned back at Ray, but he wasn't looking.

  "Something's gotten screwed up," Harry said. "This is obviously a mistake. A communications mix-up."

  "Oh, wow," Orlando said. "Could that be what we have here? A failure to communicate? Classic Cool Hand Luke situation?"

  "Are you gonna do it, Orlon, or you gonna jerk off all over the man's desk?"

  "I'll call Patrick right now, talk to him. Straighten him out."

  "I wouldn't recommend that," Orlon said. "I'd probably have to shoot you if you pick up that phone. Then the fun's all over."

  Harry set his wrists against the edge of the teak. He was having trouble with his breath. He had a sudden need to piss.

  "Yes, sir, after this is over, Ray, and things are calm again," Orlon said, staring out that window again, "you and me, we gotta take a cruise through the islands. Meet some ladies, give them the benefit of our company, have us a shipboard romance. Dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free."

  "Now listen to me, you two," said Harry. "Apparently Patrick misunderstood something I said. But I have no intention whatsoever of going to the police. We're all on the same side here. We have the same goals."

  "I don't think so, Harry. I mean, nothing personal, but I look around this office, see your taste in things, and I don't see we have a lot in common at all, you and us."

  Harry said, "We're business partners, for god's sake. You and your brother, Patrick and me. We have the same interests. Hell, I'm the one who got you involved in the first place. I put you together with Patrick."

  "So that was you? Me and Ray wondered who referred us."

  "I read about you in my wife's newsletter. You sounded like the men we were looking for."

  Ray laughed, shook his head in wonder.

  "Now, that's rich. Husband finds jobs for the guys his wife is trying to lock away. Hey, there's a well-balanced marriage."

  Harry's head sagged. He stared down at the grain in the wood. Mind dulling over, going into shock. He'd never really noticed the wood grain before, the swirls where sap had once coursed through the trunk. Drifting away into a thought about wood, trees, the forests of his boyhood in West Virginia, those dense pines behind his house, huge vines strangling them.

  When he lifted his eyes, Orlon grinned at him, expectant.

  "First thing in the morning," Harry said. "I'll go to my bank, do some rearranging, get you a large sum of money."

  "How large?"

  Both of them looked into his eyes now.

  "I could free up half a million by noon."

  "That much?"

  Orlon dug into his pocket and produced a small black handgun. Just held it casually down by his leg, gripping it around its girth, not by the handle.

  "Seven hundred and fifty thousand," Harry said. "I could go that high."

  Orlando let out a wolf whistle.

  "You're a prosperous man, Harry Farleigh. You've done all right for yourself. Yeah, sure, we'll be happy to take some cash off your hands, Harry. We can always find a use for American currency."

  "Just go on, Orlon, shoot the man, quit fucking around. We're not taking his pathetic money."

  "Shoot him, Ray? Just shoot him and walk out? That the way you'd do your movie? A couple of pops through the heart, bang, bang, man slumps over in his chair. Cleaning lady finds him later, swivels his chair around, screams. That the film cliché you got in mind for this fellow?"

  Harry pushed himself to his feet. He looked at the door, suddenly picturing himself walking over to it. Take them by surprise — he'd open it, walk out, a dash down the hallway, use his superior knowledge of the office layout to lose them.

  Orlon was staring again at the window.

  "Hey, how high are we, Harry — this office, I forget. Twenty floors?"

  "Twenty-six," he said.

  Harry looked at the door, his fantasy crystallizing like a dream he was shaping. Sprinting down the hall, gunfire behind him, he ducks through the coffee room, a mad dash down the narrow back hall to the stairwell. Harry the track star, Harry in retreat. Brave Harry. Discretion, the better part of valor. Harry taking the stairs, nimble-legged, going down a floor or two, then hopping on the service elevator, riding to ground level, out through the lobby, breaking through the front door, taking deep gulps of air, fists in the air. Victory cheers.

  Orlon picked up a large glass ashtray that lay on the side table next to the client's chair. Shifting his pistol to his left hand, he held the ashtray in his right, took aim. Then the small man rocked back and forth, imitated a pitcher's windup, bringing the ashtray to his chin, pumping his leg like Koufax. He hurled it at Harry's window, hit near dead center and the ashtray bounced off, whacked the side of the desk. Not even a crack in the glass.

  "What the fuck, Orlon?"

  "I suspected that," he said. "Up this high, the way the wind must gust up here. Thing is probably three inches thick."

  Harry glanced at the door again. No. If he had any hope at all, he'd have to negotiate his way out of this. Use what skills he had, talk, compromise, finesse. He was a diplomat, after all, a man who had spoken on behalf of his
nation, swimming with more dangerous sharks than these. Men with their fingers on powerful buttons. World-ending buttons.

  "Mr. Farleigh," Ray said. "Before my brother does what we came here to do, the thing that's got to be done, I wish you'd tell me one thing. Something bothering me."

  "Look," Harry said. "It doesn't have to happen like this. You don't need to get blood on your hands, put yourself in jeopardy. I can simply disappear. Patrick would have no way of knowing. And anyway, listen, the three of us, we're all Americans. We're not like that man. He's a Muslim, for god's sake. It's like he might as well be from another planet. What he believes, the way he looks at the world, his language, everything. But the three of us, we're Americans, we stick together. We help each other. That's the way it's always been with our people."

  "He's good," Orlando said. "The man's got a silver tongue."

  Ray's eyes were chilly, squinting at Harry.

  "Everybody's tongue turns silver when they face a gun."

  "All right, here's what I'll do," Harry said. "I'll walk out the door, no one will ever see me again. Gone, like that. Your job is done, no guilt, no crime, free and clear."

  "What I want to know, Harry," the blond one said. "I stand here, I look at the painting on your wall, your pretty daughters. And I'm wondering, just for my own edification, nothing riding on the answer — can you tell me how it could be, a guy shoots your daughter, pretty girl like she was, your own flesh and muscle, shoots her dead, and a month later you're still doing business with the man? How can that be? I want to know this."

  Harry leaned forward, thighs against his desk. He tried for a hard look but his face felt rubbery, out of control.

  Ray said, "Somebody killed a member of my family, I wouldn't stop till the man was hunted down and dealt with. But you, Harry, you keep on associating economically with this man. This is beyond me. This is truly beyond my psychological scope. I don't believe greed alone can account for it."

  Harry opened his lips, closed them again.

  "Silver tongue's gone," Orlando said.

  Harry closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead, an oily sweat thick as jelly.

  "Sure I was upset," he said. "I loved Winslow."

  "Upset, Harry? That the strongest phrase you can come up with? 'I was upset.' "

  "What do you want me to say?"

  Ray said, "I don't mean to psychoanalyze you or anything, but maybe what it is, Harry, maybe you don't have any sympathy for other people's suffering. Could that be, you're just not able to experience anybody else's pain but your own? No compassion? No pity? Got a little faulty wiring in your frontal lobe, maybe.

  "I mean, I got my reasons for asking you this. Something similar my own family is working through. So I'd be interested to hear your idea on this."

  "Jesus Christ," Orlon said. "You don't ever give up, do you, Ray? Always gotta be tweaking me.

  Orlon raised the gun, aimed at the window and fired. A silvery spiderweb erupted around the bullet hole, deep cracks sprouted. Harry felt the blood leave his body.

  "Now, that's what I like about a twenty-five," Orlon said. "It's ultra-quiet. You squeeze off a few rounds, a room like this, door closed, nice thick carpets, nobody notices. Sounds like somebody's hammering on the wall, maybe hanging a painting. Or they popped a champagne cork, celebrating another big win.

  "But then the drawback is, it takes three or four shots sometimes to put a guy away. Or like with that window, something thick like that, one shot won't do it. But then, hey, there's trade-offs, right? Right, Ray? Always trade-offs."

  Orlon fired the pistol again and the slug struck a foot from the first one. A single jigsaw piece of glass fell lazily away.

  "Go on, Harry, don't mind me. Argue with Ray. Defend yourself. Don't let him bad-mouth you like that. He's always doing that, you know. Does it to me all the fucking time. Mother Teresa White, Saint Ray, Our Lady of the Perfect Life Ray. Go on, Harry, make your case. Stand up to him."

  "I don't know what you people want from me."

  "Tell him, Harry," Orlon said. "Tell him how it's guys like you and me, mean sons of bitches, us no-pity bastards, when it comes time to shovel the shit, it's gotta be guys like us that do it. We don't even have to pinch our noses.

  "Tell him, Harry. Guys like Ray, man, they depend on us. We're the ones pick up their garbage, clean out the monkey cages, shoot the people need to be shot. Maybe we don't make the best party guests, maybe we're a little uncouth around the edges, but hey, we got other virtues."

  Orlon fired again, knocked loose a thick platter of glass.

  "Shit, without people like us the world wouldn't run at all. Right brain, left brain. Right heart, left heart. Tell him, Harry. It takes the both of us. We can't be like him and he can't be like us. It takes the both of us to make things work. People up here on the twenty-sixth floor, flushing their johns, never thinking of all the work it takes to get their shit where it's gotta go. Never realizing there're guys like us who crawl into the sewer pipes when things stop working right."

  Orlon stabbed the pistol toward the window and fired two quick shots. A slab broke free and tumbled away. Wind filled the room, papers blowing from his desk. Lifting his tie.

  "Okay, Harry. Time to go," Orlon said.

  "What?"

  Reloading, Orlon said, "Express elevator is waiting, Harry. You're an attorney, you should be familiar with the laws of gravity."

  "Go on, Harry," Ray said quietly. "It'll be all right. Everything'll work out better if you do this yourself."

  Harry laughed. He licked his lips, looked at the gash in the glass, felt the cool wind, fresh with a hint of the sea.

  "This is a gag, right? To scare me. Okay, okay, you did your job. I'm sufficiently warned."

  Ray shook his head sadly, and Orlon fired the pistol once more and knocked loose a sharp incisor of glass. Then he started around the other side of the desk.

  Harry edged away from him toward the window.

  "Do the right thing, Harry," Ray said. "The honorable thing."

  Harry kept backing up, saying, "I don't know what happened out there in the jungle. I mean, I have no way of knowing the truth. All I know is, you two were supposed to kill Allison. Patrick started worrying she'd stumble onto what we were doing right under her nose. But instead of shooting Allison, someone shot my daughter. Sure I was hurt. Sure I was angry. But what could I do? Life has to go on. Business agreements have to be honored. Sometimes things are bigger than a single person."

  "That the arrangement, was it?" Ray pulled out the client's chair, sat down, watching Harry. "You saved yourself some alimony, found somebody who'd pull the trigger on her? Patrick's got his reasons for killing her, you got yours, we got ours, everybody's happy. United against Allison Farleigh. That what we walked into here? A domestic war zone?"

  Orlon was a yard away, closing in. Harry inched toward the window, eyes on Ray, appealing to him, the one he'd decided was the real boss here, the one with more than a gun. Wind poured into the office. His framed diplomas rocked, the painting of his girls, the papers on his desk swirled onto the rug.

  "You can't trust Patrick," Harry said. "He'll use you, then throw you away, just like he's trying to do to me. He'll murder you, and no one will ever find your bodies."

  "We know that," Ray said.

  Orlon smiled, stepped closer, taking aim with his pistol, sighting on Harry's face.

  "If you let me live," Harry said, "I'll make sure Patrick is neutralized. Put away for good. I can expose what he's been doing. The three of us can make a deal with the court, testify against him. We'll walk. I can see to that. I know people."

  "Could you get our records expunged, Harry?" Orlon was grinning at him, inching closer. "I always wanted my record expunged. Could you do that? Go all the way back to grade school, clear everything up? Give me good deportment grades. Now, I'd truly like that."

  "We don't need your help, Harry," Ray said. "We're going to handle Patrick our own way. We don't need a deal. But thanks for think
ing of us."

  Orlon beamed at Harry, lost in his ecstasy. Drawing close, a yard between his pistol and Harry's face. Harry could feel the shards of glass beneath his leather soles.

  "I could be your attorney. Pro bono, of course. Your own personal legal aid for the rest of your lives."

  "We're going straight, Harry. We don't need a lawyer."

  "Wow, the man's running low on goodies," Orlon said. "Scraping the fucking bottom of his bribe bag with that one."

  Ray, using a dreamy voice, said, "Now why don't you just climb up there, Harry. Into your window. Make it easy on yourself. Just think of your daughter. The dead one. Maybe she's down there in the street, waiting for you. Maybe she'll forgive you for what you let happen to her."

  Harry swallowed, took a quick slug of air, all he could manage. Feeling woozy, as if he were dropping already. Dropping through twenty-six stories of air.

  Unaccountably thinking again of West Virginia, the woods behind his house. A tree he used to climb for a view of the valley, the spire of the Baptist church, the mines, a handful of dingy houses. Up in the tree, Harry liked to stare out beyond his shabby birthplace, those foggy miles that led to Washington. Harry having fantasies. Tree reverie. Imagining a life beyond the valley, imagining Paris, imagining London and Zurich and Rome. High in the dreamy branches of the tree.

  Orlon jammed the pistol against his back. Nudging him to the windowsill. He snapped Harry's suspenders once, twice. The brothers were talking, but Harry heard only a vague buzz. Drawing himself up onto the sill. A strong breeze in his face. Standing before the ragged hole in the glass. Miami spread beneath him, streetlights on. Buildings lit with colored lights. Biscayne Bay a black emptiness.

  Harry stood before the shattered window, high up, like being in that old maple with its easy branches. Much simpler to climb than it appeared at first. Like just about everything had turned out for Harry, easier to master than he'd expected, even the roads leading from his valley. No one was out there blocking his way. Harry had made his escape. Left his town, went swiftly up the ladder. Amazing how easy it was, how effortlessly it all happened. Money, power, luxuries. Amazing how little fun any of it had been.