Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries)

by James W. Hall

  Finally Thorn drifted over and offered her a few tips on her casting technique and showed her how to grip the rod when jigging her bait, and gradually the girl got the hang of it. Later, he made sandwiches, and when Leslie wolfed hers down in three bites, he made another. The next afternoon she returned. A week, another week, a month and another month.

  For most of that school year Leslie Levine apprenticed herself to Thorn, eventually applying herself to the craft of fly-tying and learning to fish the flats in Thorn’s skiff. Raised by a single mom who traded sex for cocaine, Leslie was more of a lone wolf than even Thorn. But the bond between them grew until Leslie began to confide in Thorn a few details about her grim childhood.

  After four or five months, she’d mastered every lesson Thorn had to teach, and her visits became sporadic. Then one day, without a formal good-bye, the visits ceased altogether, and Thorn later heard the young woman had attached herself to Mary Jo Prentiss, her high school biology teacher, a specialist in Florida reptiles and a strident environmentalist. A couple of years later, Thorn read in the local paper that Leslie had won a scholarship to the public university in Miami, where she planned to major in biology.

  He’d heard nothing more about her until last year, when Leslie paid a surprise visit, appearing at Thorn’s dock at sunrise one morning in a sleek flats boat. She’d matured into a striking young lady, lithe and vibrant, her chestnut hair worn boyishly short. She said she was working temporarily for some Florida state agency that had hired her to do a crocodile census in the Upper Keys. Leslie invited Thorn along for a tour of local croc habitats.

  Sitting in the bow of her boat was another woman, gaunt, with flame-red hair loose down her back. Her tall frame was hidden beneath a bulky jacket and loose jeans. Her hiking shoes were battered and her skin sunburned and roughened by weather as if she’d been hiking for months through some unforgiving terrain. Leslie never introduced the young woman, just made a quick don’t ask shrug.

  The three of them spent the morning cruising the familiar back bays of the Upper Keys, Thorn marveling at Leslie’s ability to spot bashful crocs from long distances, sneak up, lasso them, haul them to the boat, tag and release those toothy creatures as effortlessly as if they were backyard lizards. At sunset, before she left, Leslie stood out at the end of Thorn’s dock and thanked him for sharing those hours with her as a teenage kid. The red-haired woman sat silently in the bow of the boat, staring forward as she had all day.

  “You got me started on all this.” Leslie gestured at the open water, the mangrove islands, the reddening sky laced with threads of purple and green.

  Thorn said he was glad to have played a part in Leslie’s education.

  “It was more than that,” she said. “You gave me a reason to go on.”

  Thorn smiled, opened his arms, and Leslie stepped into an embrace.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said, when they parted.

  “Does it ever piss you off, Thorn, what’s happening to it all? Losing these beautiful places.”

  “Hell, yes,” he said. “But mostly it makes me sad.”

  With her fingertips she brushed the stubble on his cheek, held his eyes for several seconds, an intimacy that gave him an uneasy buzz. Then her look dissolved, she turned, climbed into her skiff, started the outboard, and was off, her passenger’s hair blazing against the darkening sky.

  Thorn stared out at his lagoon, at the cormorant still hunting minnows.

  “How’d it happen?”

  “Only witness was Leslie’s assistant, a guy named Cameron Prince. Spotlight failed. Leslie tripped, a croc went for her. Prince went for help, but it was hours before any arrived. They couldn’t locate the croc or Leslie. The animal dragged her off. Between the crocs, gators, and every other damn thing with teeth and claws out there, well, you know.”

  “Leslie Levine, Jesus Christ.”

  “I thought I should tell you.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Thorn settled his butt against the seawall.

  “I know. Everybody’s pretty shocked.”

  “No. I don’t believe it could’ve gone down that way.”

  “Nothing suspicious about it,” Sugar said. “It was dark out there, the mother croc was moving her babies, Leslie stumbled over the damn thing. Accidents happen. People get careless, even a pro like Leslie.”

  Thorn shook his head. “Not her.”

  Sugarman opened his mouth to say more, then shut it.

  Thorn kept his eyes on the open water beyond the lagoon. His face was inert. Eyes focused inward. A fine mist sheened his forehead as if he had a low-grade fever. He didn’t believe it. Not her, not Leslie Levine.

  THREE

  AUGUST 8, TWO MONTHS LATER

  FROM SEVENTY FEET UP, BALANCED on the narrow railing at the top of his cistern, Thorn could only make out the man’s general features. Bulky guy, pale-yellow hair parted precisely. Black cargo shorts and a camouflage T-shirt.

  Ten minutes before, the man had parked in the gravel drive, gotten out, and started snooping around Thorn’s property as if taking an inventory, about to make an offer on the land. It wouldn’t be the first time Thorn had to chase off an overzealous Realtor.

  Thorn dabbed the white plumbing grease into the fitting, smoothed it into the groves, then with his wrench tightened the two-inch pipe to the valve. Gave it one final crunching turn and wiped the excess grease away with the rag from his back pocket. He reached high and levered open the main valve, heard the squeal of water pressurizing the pipes, and watched for any leaks around the fitting. When he saw none, he wiped a fingertip around the joint to be sure it was dry. Praise the Lord, it was.

  Scratch another chore off the unceasing list around his aging Key Largo home. Another finger in another leak in the ever-growing dike. Lately Thorn seemed to be running out of fingers. Barely staying ahead of the rising tide of decay.

  Between the harsh subtropical weather testing every surface, the briny breezes off the Atlantic aggravating each patch of rust, the wooden house shifting restlessly on its foundation, the heart-of-pine planks shrinking and expanding with each twitch in the barometric pressure, he was spending half his waking hours staying even with maintenance. Precious time subtracted from tying his custom bonefish flies, the work that paid the bills, bought his food and an occasional luxury such as a six-pack of Red Stripe beer.

  Twenty-five yards below, the man was still making himself at home, pacing the dock beside the lagoon, checking out Thorn’s sixteen-foot flats boat, and bending down to peer through the windows of the Heart Pounder, Thorn’s ancient Chris-Craft docked just forward of the skiff.

  Arrogant bastard, not even going close to the house, knocking at Thorn’s door or calling out hello to see if anyone was at home.

  But Thorn stayed put. He wanted to see what the guy was up to, and, hell, he was in no hurry to come down from his perch. It had been years since he’d climbed the cistern tower, and he’d forgotten the dazzling views. On such a cloudless day, he could see several miles east toward the blue slit of the horizon and make out the hazy outline of the Carysfort Reef lighthouse. Just beyond it a cargo ship was steaming north along the Gulf Stream.

  Closer in, the swirls of sapphire water and bottle green and turquoise interlocked like thousands of intricate jigsaw pieces, and just off Thorn’s shoreline the shallow sea turned an eggshell blue where patches of white-sand flats lurked three or four inches below the surface. Just now it was low tide and a languid breeze was spreading riffles across the coastal waters, while farther out the ocean had a gentle roll.

  In the other direction, west, was the Florida Bay, and beyond that the vast and spreading indigo of the Gulf of Mexico. Where else in the world but the Florida Keys could you watch the sun erupt from one sea and hours later see it melt away into another?

  A hundred yards offshore, a single skiff was working the edge of the neighborhood flats, searching for late-afternoon schools of bonefish. Ollie Davis was up on the platform, poling the vessel north wh
ile his client perched on the bow and cast his fly onto the flats.

  Thorn watched Ollie steer the skiff along the edge of the flat and saw the client’s herky-jerky casting stroke and clumsy retrieve. The guy wobbled on the casting platform as if he might pitch overboard at the slightest rock of the boat.

  Ham-fisted bunglers like him were one reason Thorn retired from his own guiding career. After all those hours in a small boat with razor-pronged hooks zinging past his face, he’d been tagged more times than he could recall.

  The day finally came when he hit his limit. He had turned his back to a client to relieve himself over the stern, and on a careless backcast the angler hooked Thorn in the crotch. The Miami smart-ass holding the rod thought Thorn’s plight was damn amusing. Even tried to take a snapshot of him with his shorts at his knees, grimly extracting the hook.

  Thorn dropped the pliers, tore the camera from his client’s hand, and sailed it. When the asshole got huffy, Thorn shouldered him over the side as well and wouldn’t let him back aboard until Thorn had removed the hook from his privates.

  That was to be Thorn’s last day showing strangers how to fish the flats. He never regretted the decision. Now when he went fishing, he mostly went alone, which was usually more than enough company.

  Thorn took another moment to absorb the view, watching the blades of his Aermotor turn in a lazy breeze. That windmill was next on his to-do list. Time to lubricate its gearbox, grease the pump pole swivel, and tighten the connections and track down fraying and cracking in the wiring. His house lights had been flickering more than usual lately.

  By the time he climbed down from the cistern, his visitor had completed his tour and was on his way back to his car. Thorn caught up, tapped the guy on the shoulder.

  At ground level, he made the intruder for at least six-six. A half foot taller than Thorn, and heavier by over fifty pounds of ripped, densely veined muscles. The stranger turned slowly and, after appraising Thorn for a moment, drew in a long breath and smiled with contentment as if the air at his height had a finer bouquet than anything groundlings like Thorn could imagine.

  “Can I help you?”

  The man studied Thorn for several moments. “I didn’t realize anyone was home. Sorry, I’ll just be going.”

  “What do you want?”

  “All right, then. How tall is your water tower, about sixty feet?”

  The man was in his late twenties, with wide-set eyes and thin lips, and the kind of well-crafted bone structure some women probably found beguiling. His camouflage shirt seemed spray-painted to his thick chest and narrow waist. Muscles so ridged and jagged he might’ve been chiseled from a slab of volcanic rock. The kind of freak-show he-man you’d expect to find juggling cannonballs in some traveling carnival.

  Thorn had run into more than his share of bruisers and goons and had vowed to steer clear of them in the future, never again engage, to slam the door, do a one-eighty, whatever it took to preserve the tranquil cycles of his ordinary life. In the past year he’d kept that vow and gradually a familiar shell of seclusion had regrown around him. The silence, the natural phases of the weather, and the ebb and flow of the seasons were once again the shaping rhythms of his days.

  After last year’s bloodshed and turmoil, he’d finally managed to reclaim his old pattern—spending his days tying flies, doing sweaty labor around the property, cooling off with an afternoon swim, fishing for his dinner. At sunset taking aimless cruises with Sugarman through the sounds and coves of the backcountry, watching dolphins surf their wake, listening to Sugar gripe good-naturedly about the tedium of his work as a PI. Or on rare occasions Thorn would give a lady friend his complete attention while she discussed her troublesome kids or her ex-husbands and her fruitless search for genuine love.

  But also in those months of isolation his reflexes had slowed. Otherwise he would’ve acted on his first impression and turned his back on this intruder’s gloating smile and gone resolutely back to his chores.

  “I asked you about the tower,” the big man said.

  “That’s why you’re here, to look at my cistern?”

  “I’ve been studying them because one day I’d like to build one myself. How tall is yours?”

  “Seventy feet,” said Thorn. “Six inches.”

  “Three-thousand-gallon tank?”

  “Around there.”

  “So that gives you a smidge over thirty pounds per square inch of pressure in the house. Minimal, not much more than a trickle.”

  “I never measured it, but a trickle sounds right.”

  “Hard to take a shower in a trickle.”

  “I manage.”

  “Can’t run your dishwasher.”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “Barely enough to flush your toilets.”

  Thorn took another dip into the shallow pools of the man’s eyes. “You don’t look like a building code inspector.”

  “And what do I look like to you?”

  Thorn couldn’t find a word that captured the full measure of his distaste. “Exactly what kind of bullshit are you selling?”

  “Right now I’d like to know how you heat your water.”

  Thorn sighed. He had to give the colossus credit for sheer gall. “I’ve worked out a deal with the sun.”

  “Solar panels?”

  “Exposed water pipes on the roof.”

  The man nodded judiciously. “Primitive, but workable. And cloudy days in winter?”

  “A week or two of shivering.”

  “And the windmill, that’s your power source?”

  “When there’s wind.”

  “So you’re one of those.”

  “I’m not one of anything,” Thorn said.

  “Oh, sure you are. You’re a back-to-nature true believer. Self-sufficient. In touch with the ancient ways.”

  “You’ve got it wrong.”

  “I don’t think so. I look around and I see a guy living the pioneer life. Hard-ass maverick, don’t-tread-on-me philosophical view.”

  “I don’t have a philosophical view.”

  “Everybody does. Whether they admit it or not.”

  “The man who raised me built that cistern. In his day it was the only way to get freshwater in the Keys. There was no pipeline coming down from Miami. That’s not philosophy, that’s survival.”

  “But you’re still unconnected to the public water system. You made a choice to stay true to the old ways. You’re bucking the modern world.”

  “You have a name?”

  The man considered the question for a moment, taking another leisurely look at Thorn’s acreage. “I apologize for intruding on your privacy. I’ll be taking my leave. Have yourself a glorious day.”

  Thorn’s memory wasn’t what it used to be, so he had to repeat aloud the string of numbers, then repeat them again as he walked back to the house to scribble down the asshole’s license plate.

  FOUR

  “YOU’RE NOT GOING TO TELL me what this is for?” Sugarman sat behind his desk, looking at the numbers Thorn had scrawled on a scrap of paper.

  Sugar’s PI office occupied the narrow space next to Key Largo’s premier beauty salon, the Hairport. Running the length of the wall his office shared with the salon was a shadowy one-way mirror, a legacy of the previous owner of the beauty parlor, who’d believed it necessary to spy on her employees.

  Sugar often toyed with the idea of walling over the mirror and disconnecting the speakers to make his office appear more professional, but he could never bring himself to do it because the constant bustle next door distracted him on slow afternoons, not to mention how much he prized the tidbits of Key Largo gossip and the invaluable insights into the riddle of the female mind. Plus watching what happened next door could often be a serious turn-on. The young ladies knew full well about the mirror, and like most women, they found Sugarman a winsome fellow, so they sometimes put on shows for his benefit.

  “I did tell you,” Thorn said. “Some pushy guy shows up at my house.
He refuses to identify himself.”

  “And now you’re going to track him down and do what?”

  “Can you do it or not, Sugar?”

  “I usually get paid for this service.”

  “I’ll buy you a Red Stripe. Take you on a boat ride.”

  “You’d do that anyway.”

  “Nope, not anymore. Not until you give me this guy’s name.”

  “It’s just some Realtor looking for cheap land. You’re overreacting.”

  “This guy was no Realtor.”

  “You’ve gotten bored, now you’re out trolling for trouble.”

  “I’m not bored, and I’m sure as hell not looking for trouble. Are you going to help me or not?”

  “All right. Just to placate you. Simply to dulcify your savage breast.”

  Vocabulary building was one of Sugarman’s hobbies, and Thorn was regularly subjected to his latest acquisitions.

  Sugar tapped his keyboard. Waited. Tapped some more.

  Thorn watched through the window as Molly Bright, the owner of the Hairport, ripped a long strip of adhesive tape off the inner thigh of the high school principal, Dorothy Sherman, a woman of advanced age and surprising hairiness. The speakers were turned off, so Thorn couldn’t hear the exact curse Dorothy screamed, but it was sufficiently colorful to produce hoots from several of the other haircutters and their clients.

  “Brazilian wax,” Sugar said. “One of my favorites. Yet another reason to be grateful you’re a man.”

  He tapped a few more keys and watched the screen. The computer made a beep and Sugarman squinted and leaned forward. “Jesus. Your instincts are sharp. This was no Realtor.”