Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries)

by James W. Hall

Thorn nodded. Sage advice. “No children yourself, or is Wally enough?”

  When Pauly spoke again, weight was in his words as if he’d been harboring them for years, their energy compounding in his dark interior. “My old man,” he said, then stalled.

  “Yeah? And what was he like?”

  “Never met the asshole. Growing up, not a word about him. Just another Navajo drunk, dumped his wife and kids.”

  A story on his lips. But wavering. Thorn could hear the python rustle across the hardwood floors. He kept his mouth shut, giving Pauly room.

  “Five years back…” Pauly hesitated again. Lying there in silence until he’d collected himself. “Five years, I get an e-mail out of nowhere. Some old fuck in his nineties, a white man, he’s tracked me down, claims he’s my grandpa. My old man was his bastard son. Now this old white man says he has to see me before he dies. Never knew he existed till that e-mail.”

  “So you went.”

  “Fucker wanted to talk. Had something to confess.” Pauly looked at Thorn, back at the ceiling. “Los Alamos. You know about that?”

  “The A-bomb.”

  “Metallurgy, that’s what he did. Physics, chemistry. How Wally got his brains. Skipped a generation, all went to him.”

  “What’d he want?”

  Pauly chuckled without humor. He clenched his jaw. A clash inside him. Words he’d never spoken aloud, and now opening up to a stranger. A guy he didn’t trust. Thorn didn’t know why that happened, but he’d seen it more than once. Had done it himself, turning to some unknown on the next barstool, drunken sharing.

  The python had slung itself out between the two beds. One of the guys.

  “Sad old fuck. Lying there, all the tubes and monitors. Barely keeping his eyes open. Goes on about the bomb, how sad he was for what he’d done, him and the others. What it led to. All the dead. Way it changed everything, made it worse. It’s eating him up, he says, all his life, eating his guts.”

  Thorn lay back on the bed, turning his own eyes to the ceiling, trying to picture what Pauly was seeing.

  “‘Put the genie back in the bottle.’ That’s what he said. Wanted to know could I help. ‘That’s my last wish, son.’ Calling me son. ‘Put the genie back in the bottle.’ I stood there listening to him. Didn’t speak a word the whole time. Hour later he died.”

  Thorn let a few moments tick by. “Never met you before, he gives you a mission.”

  “‘Genie back in the bottle.’ Like that’s possible.”

  “But you’re trying anyway. Make him happy, even though he’s dead.”

  “Can’t put genies back,” Pauly said. “Can’t put anything back. Once it’s out, it’s fucking out. Best anybody can do, slow down the genie. Trip her up.”

  Thorn watched the shadows of a branch sway on the wall. “And that’s why you’re here, under my roof. Wally’s legs, the genie.”

  Pauly was quiet for a minute, drained. “Take a nap, smart guy. You’re going to need it.”

  “One more thing.”

  “Take a fucking nap.”

  “Why’d you save my ass from Prince? Why not stay out of it, let him tear my head off?”

  Pauly closed his eyes for a while as if maybe he’d shut down. When he spoke again, his voice was velvet and slow, back to his late-night radio sound. “I saved your ass because we’re buddies. We look out for each other.”

  “But we’re not buddies.”

  Pauly looked over. “We are now.”

  * * *

  One hundred and thirty-eight mousetraps.

  That’s what Thorn dreamed. Not intending to nap, believing he was too wired, too on guard, just laying his head back on the pillow to relax his muscles, thinking about who these people were. What was going on. The A-bomb, Turkey Point, Prince Key, a fuck-you to Miami. Then he was into the dream, 138 mousetraps.

  His eleventh-grade science teacher. Mr. Jacobs. Coral Shores High, the guy in his late sixties, gray hair, rail thin. Been teaching smart-ass punks like Thorn for thirty years and was still energized. Today in class he was wearing an Indian headdress. Hundreds of bright feathers. No shirt and Pauly’s medallion around his neck. An IV hooked up to his arm, dripping chemo.

  Mr. Jacobs, the Navajo from Los Alamos. Dream logic.

  Thorn and his classmates gathered at the head of the class staring at a terrarium on the table. Big glass box full of mousetraps. All those traps set with yellow Ping-Pong balls. Why 138? Thorn couldn’t recall. It didn’t matter. But he remembered the number.

  Mr. Jacobs was chanting an Indian ritual song. The class circled the terrarium like a tribal fire. Twenty-five smart-asses making jokes. Mousetraps covered the bottom of the glass case, each wooden base flush against the other. One thirty-eight. Jacobs opened the lid.

  Holding up a single red Ping-Pong ball. See this. An electron. A stray electron. He gave his headdress a shake, feathers fluttering.

  Dropped the red ball into the glass box, shut the lid. The red ball sprang a trap, a yellow Ping-Pong ball exploded, set off another trap, then a few more mousetraps sprang shut, firing their balls against the glass walls, ricocheting, setting off more traps, and then whoosh, in a handful of seconds, all the traps fired. One thirty-eight. Terrarium full of exploding Ping-Pong balls, a whirlwind, a crazy yellow chain reaction.

  Nuclear fission.

  Like that. Whoosh.

  Thorn dreaming it as vividly and real as the day it happened. Whoosh. That high school science guy wearing an Indian headdress, hospital tubes attached to his arms.

  THIRTY-ONE

  “EVERYBODY’S GONE.” A WHISPER NEAR his ear.

  “Gone?” Thorn heard himself speak the word, still groggy with dreams, a bleary residue from his midday nap.

  “I sent them away, food shopping.” Leslie was alongside him on the bed. Her body flush against his. “We don’t have much time. Half an hour maybe. Are you awake?”

  Lips next to his ear, the tickle of her breath, her head sharing his pillow.

  Thorn was back from the mousetrap dream and others he couldn’t recall. Turning, he found her face inches away, seeing the fine down on her cheeks brightened by the streaming sun. Light rippling on her skin.

  He drew back an inch. Blinked. Her eyes were bemused. She reached out and touched the stubble on his cheek and with a finger traced his jawline as she had on his dock that day a year ago or more when she’d dropped by. Her fingernail crackling against the bristles.

  “What is this?”

  “This is me lying next to you.”

  He opened his mouth, but she touched a shushing finger to his lips. “Twenty minutes. Do this for me.”

  What he saw was the fourteen-year-old, the waif on his dock. The troubled eyes, her sad, bruised aura. “No, Leslie. No.”

  “Because of the age difference?”

  “That’s one thing.”

  She slid her hand to the top button on his shirt, undid it. Smile gone, a serious look, a determined eagerness. “Doesn’t bother me you’re so damn old.”

  He gripped her hand, halted it. “You’re not serious.”

  “Dead serious. Since the first, your dock, the snappers, those long afternoons, the talks we had, I imagined this.”

  Yes, he remembered the talks. Mostly Leslie’s terse retelling of nights in the trailer park, the rough, horny men who screwed her mother, leaving behind tiny bags of white powder, then sauntered down the hall to shake the knob on Leslie’s door. Wanting a slice of ripe dessert. She’d managed to keep them away, blocking the door with furniture. But someday it would happen. The door wouldn’t hold.

  Once she’d mentioned a couple of names, guys who’d pounded and budged the door open. Those two Thorn tracked down, the first a redneck with gaudy jewelry and a cowboy hat, the second a black dude whose truck had giant wheels, loud exhausts, and fuck-you decals. Both sneered at him when he asked if what Leslie had told him was true. Both he left unconscious, broken teeth, bloody, the redneck’s right arm busted up, Thorn’s own knuckles sh
redded. Neither bothered her again.

  “You think you owe me something? You’re wrong.”

  “Not about owing. About wanting.” Her fingers trickled down the front of his shirt, slid along his belt.

  He caught her wrist, held it firm. His goddamn prick hardening anyway. “It won’t work,” he said, but no longer believed it.

  She pried free of his grasp, brushed a hand against his crotch, gripped its length through the cotton fabric. An appraising smile. “Seems to be working fine. For an old man.”

  “Leslie, I understand what you’re trying to do.”

  “You damn well better.”

  “I’m going along on the attack. You don’t need to win me over.”

  “Then just lie there and I’ll carry on without you.”

  “Stop.”

  “This is it,” she said. “This is our chance.”

  “I don’t feel that way about you.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I feel enough for both of us.”

  “No, goddamn it.”

  “Just a kiss. Grant me that. A kiss.”

  Her mouth moved to his. Slowly, tempting. And he allowed that much. Believing this was an act, an attempt to finalize the deal. Bring him solidly into the fold. Confirm with their bodies that Thorn was committed.

  Her lips grazed his, light and teasing, searching for a fit, elastic, Thorn resisting, his body taut, withheld. Then, goddamn it, okay, the kiss became real. Her tongue slipping in, seeking his. Her warmth, her sleek skin, the snug fit.

  By fractions Thorn’s restraint melted, then melted more, until he didn’t care what her reasons were, didn’t care if this was a test, didn’t care about their age or their shared history or anything else. She was no longer that girl on his dock.

  They worked in unison to make the kiss come alive, to disappear into each other. It had been so long. He’d lost count of the months of abstinence, and he was there with Leslie, rekindling old reflexes, warming up memories of other kisses as deep and exploratory, as briefly hesitant, then no longer so.

  They breathed into each other, a mutual resuscitation, all reluctance gone, a blind fumbling of hands and thickening of breath, with mouths joined, the softness of her, the power just below the skin, Leslie Levine, a troubled waif, but now a woman who’d outgrown all that, gotten strong, a woman who knew her way, was making risky, bold decisions. This being one, an act committed in full daylight, the door of his childhood bedroom ajar.

  She stripped off her shirt. No time for unbuttoning. She motioned for Thorn to raise his arms and she dragged his off. A rushed impatience as if something were appearing from a long way off, something coming fast toward them, a dark onrushing mass, and they must hurry before the certain collision, this woman, stronger than her slim body appeared, rolling upright and planting herself on him, his hands reaching out to cup her bare breasts, to learn their shape and weight, watching her eyes shut as she sat astride him, pants still on, Thorn fully hard, pushing into her crotch.

  She groaned deep in her chest like an animal feasting, her hands gripping his hands, clenching them harder against the small, perfectly rounded flesh, nipples jutting between his fingers; she rocked her head back, ready to howl. A long time coming. Beginning in his own prehistory, and hers, a bond he’d never admitted, one more deeply rooted than he imagined. The two entangled now in something complicated and serious.

  This one time together would be all. This one time.

  She shuddered and peeled away his hands and bent forward and kissed him, pressed her lips so hard, so insistently, he could not return the kiss. She tore open his shorts. He arched up, lifted his butt from the bed, and let her drag the shorts away. And she dismounted, whisked her own pants off, slung them toward the door.

  From the bedside she bent over him and took him into her mouth, drawing him in, all of him. Back and back against the tight fit of her throat, down the length, then holding him still, she swiveled, brought her narrow butt to him. Thorn on his back, Leslie lowering herself onto his mouth, the soft patch of hair, its tart, intricate folds, spreading open, opposite poles joined, mouths devouring, Thorn learning his way among the petals while she worked her tongue over him, sampled each ball, drawing them in, holding them, letting go, then swallowing him again, all of it, so deep, so sure, Thorn found himself close to the edge, too close, teetering, and began to withdraw from her mouth inch by inch until he was free.

  She rose and came back around, straddling his chest, bent forward, brought her mouth to his, a sticky kiss. Long and fragrant.

  Caught in the undertow, the flood of pent-up nights alone, an unspoken ache of voluntary isolation. Starving himself. Believing himself unfit for anyone. Now this, breaking his fast with Leslie, a woman risen from the dead, a plotter. Damn him. Damn his body, his predictable hungers, the froth that replaced his reason, the heady, downward, unblinking plunge. Bingeing on Leslie.

  A kid who’d fallen in love with an older man and managed to jigsaw the pieces into place so that years and years later on, Thorn was inside her, inside the slick, tight groove of her. Slippery skin in the overheated room, his and hers, oily hands, oily flesh, no place to hold, no purchase. Like the snake on the floor, the python writhing restlessly beneath the bed, its greasy, powerful body.

  He couldn’t hold on. She was underneath him, then she was atop, riding him, up there, high against the ceiling, all of it finally, finally, finally overtaking her. Leslie shook her head from side to side, no, no, no, as if trying to cling to a few last precious seconds, shaking her head as if to sling away a drop of sweat tracking across her face. Mouth wincing, an ecstatic grimace. A song rose inside her chest, all vowels, chords so low and deep their echoes might vibrate in the walls of this room for years.

  Thorn matched hers with his own grunts and heaves. All hesitancy gone. The coiled spring that was tightening for months, tightening until finally it was sprung, released in one long, unclenching surge. Fission and fusion. And everything went out of him as she collapsed against his chest, their naked bodies slicked with sweat, smearing themselves against each other, shadowing the sheets, sweat burning his eyes. Both of them winded, amazed, chuckling in the giddy, thudding after-thrall, while beyond the window a noon sun rang like a relentless chime above the trees.

  Then a car’s horn.

  Sugarman’s twin toots. The long crunch of tires on gravel.

  Thorn slid away from her, was off the bed and out the bedroom door, jogging across the living room, through the kitchen, out the French doors, naked, still erect, panting, waving both hands at Sugarman to go away, leave, back up, get the hell gone from this place. Go, go, go.

  “What is it?” Out of the car, standing, staring at his naked friend.

  “Damn it, Sugar, go, now. Now, goddamn it. Get in your car and go.”

  “Aw, shit. What’d you do, Thorn? What the hell did you do now?”

  Thorn’s prick was wilting. Heart still at redline.

  Sugarman’s gaze shifted left, to the slow tread of footsteps on the rock. Her bare feet padding across the sharp, pulverized stone. Thorn turned and watched her come. In her hand the .38. She was naked. Body glistening.

  “Hello, Sugar.”

  “Leslie?” His eyes slanted away from her exposed body. Shy Sugar. Polite Sugar. “You’re alive. Thank God.”

  Thorn said, “A gun, Leslie? A goddamn gun?”

  “Come inside. Both of you. We’ll talk. We’ll figure this out.”

  Before they could take a step toward the house, Thorn’s VW rolled into the drive, Cameron crammed behind the wheel, Pauly riding shotgun, with Flynn and Wally in the back. Grocery bags in their laps.

  Leslie walked toward the VW, waving the .38 at Cameron, directing him to pull in behind Sugar’s Honda. Holding both hands up to measure the distance between bumpers until Cameron tapped Thorn’s car against Sugar’s, blocking him in. Tree in front, Thorn’s Beetle behind.

  The four of them piled out, Wally gawking at Leslie, coming closer. “Not bad. Little p
uny in the tit department, but all in all…”

  Pauly told him to shut up.

  Leslie went over to the driver’s window of Sugar’s Honda, reached in and grabbed the ignition keys, slung them toward the lagoon, where they splashed. Then she turned back to the gathering.

  “This is Sugarman,” Leslie announced. “The man I told you about.”

  Flynn was staring at Thorn, small, outraged shakes of his head.

  Leslie handed the pistol to Cameron.

  “Take him inside, make him comfortable while we get dressed.”

  “That’s it?” Flynn said. “No explanation?” He waved at her nudity.

  “It’s what it appears to be. Why? Is that a problem?”

  Thorn watched his son absorbing this. Eyes flinching as if he’d taken one blow and was waiting for the next.

  “When do I get my turn?” Wally said.

  “Everybody inside,” Leslie said. “Put the groceries away, it’s time we discussed the plan.”

  “And him?” Pauly nodded at Sugarman.

  “He’ll be staying. Our guest. Cameron will watch over him.”

  “And afterwards, when it’s done? What then?”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “When it’s done, we’ll see.”

  Sugar shot Thorn a look. Man, oh, man. What the ever-loving shit had Thorn done now?

  Thorn said, “We’re shutting down Turkey Point nuke plant.”

  Sugarman nodded as if such a thing were completely routine.

  Flynn stripped off his T-shirt and handed it to Leslie, and she slipped it over her head and tugged it to cover herself. A minidress.

  She said, “We’re not going to harm anyone or do any permanent damage. It’s a publicity stunt to draw attention to the environmental dangers of nuclear power.”

  “You’ll be breaking the law though,” Sugarman said.

  “Wrong answer,” Wally said.

  Leslie came forward and stood in front of Sugarman. “It’s an act of civil disobedience. We’ve tried repeatedly to make our voices heard through all the normal means—public petitions, demonstrations, education seminars, speeches at commission meetings. We’ve tried to use the political process, but the entrenched power is too strong. No one listens, no one is responding. So now we’re stepping outside the law. Yes, it’s true. We’re putting ourselves at risk for what we consider a greater good.”