Beside him, Moses braked hard and cut the wheel. Ahead, springing up in the halogen glow, were all the tacky dive shops of Key Largo—the gas stations, seashell stores, sub shops, everything closed up, the highway empty—then Moses swung left, making a U-turn onto another road, this one darker and surrounded by woods on either side. Snake country. Crazy-ass armadillos, frogs big as pumpkins, and other unspeakable creatures lived out there in the mangroves and weeds.
The GPS told them to turn right in one mile.
Jonah said, “I’m catching the vibe. Approaching mayhem.”
They went a quarter of a mile, a thought coming to Jonah all at once, a flash of otherworldly inspiration.
“Listen, Mo. I got a what-if for you.”
Moses was silent, waiting.
“What if we don’t kill this guy?”
“Then we don’t get paid.”
“But, I mean, what if he disappears the way our man wants, but he’s not actually dead? We got him prisoner.”
“And why would we do that?”
“So we could grill his ass till we find out what the deal is. Then we figure a way to leverage that into a major payday.”
Moses was silent. He drove, ignored two phone calls, drove some more.
“Screw our benefactor? The man’s been good to us.”
“He’s exploiting us. Using us for scut work. We’re his bitches, man.”
“No way. Too dangerous.”
“Just think about it. We interrogate this guy. Find out what kind of scam he’s into, why our guy wants him terminated. Turn that into a bargaining chip. For once in our fucking lives we negotiate from a position of strength.”
Moses was silent. Driving slower.
“That could work, right? How’s the big guy know the difference? This Thorn creature disappears. We get our two grand. Once we have the lowdown, we use what Thorn tells us to better our position.”
“You talking about blackmail?”
“I’m talking about finding a way to cut ourselves into whatever’s going down.”
“What if Thorn doesn’t know why he’s being whacked?”
“He’ll know. Shit, everybody knows why they’re being whacked.”
“But if he doesn’t?”
“Okay. So if he comes up empty, I snuff him later, and nobody’s the wiser.”
Moses continued to slow. Then he looked over at Jonah.
“This from some TV show you saw?”
“It came from my own freaking creative lizard brain, man. I’m no plagiarist.”
Moses was down to five miles an hour. The electric motor kicking in. The whir of it humming through the floor.
“Maybe you’re not crazy,” Moses said. “Or maybe I’m losing it.”
“So you like it?”
“Keep him where?”
“You want to work those phones the rest of your life, Moses? ’Cause that’s what I see. Scribble down this bid, that bid. A hundred here, a hundred there. Paying our room and board from taking those hunters out to shoot big dumb animals. Just scraping by.”
“Keep him where?”
“The pit,” Jonah said.
“The pit?”
“Place I found near the cabin, back in the second pasture. I told you about it. I cut a hatch in the wood cover to see what was down there, you know that place.”
“Put him in the pit.”
“Yeah, dump him down there, we can interrogate the guy to our heart’s content. Our own private Guantanamo.”
The voice on the GPS told them to turn right in two hundred feet. Moses slowed the Prius, made the turn, heading up a dark bumpy road.
“Say yes, Moses. Come on. You know it’s a good idea.”
There were a dozen cars parked along the shoulder. Junkers and a few nicer models, a couple of pickups, some Harleys.
Ahead about a hundred yards the night was lit up. There was the thump of a heavy bass, rock music, loud speakers, a band maybe.
“Somebody’s having a party,” Moses said.
“Thought this guy was a hermit, just him and the girl out in the woods.”
“Apparently hermits have parties.”
“Your destination is in one hundred feet,” said the GPS. “This could be a very dumb idea,” Moses said. “This could come back to bite us in the nutsack.”
“You have arrived at your destination,” the GPS woman said.
“We’ve arrived,” Jonah said, grinning, and put his fist up for a bump.
Moses shook his head one more time.
Then he raised his fist and went knuckle to knuckle with his kid brother.
SEVEN
* * *
THORN WAS DUMPING ICE FROM plastic bags into the washtub where the last of the Red Stripe bobbed in tepid water. He was in the kitchen next to the tile-covered island where all the chips and dips and carrots and celery and burgers and buns and fried grouper fingers and shrimp and fish tacos and condiments had been set out neatly a few hours ago. Now the kitchen was in disarray. Since sunset dozens of people had wandered in and out, helping themselves to food and drink—not many neat freaks among them. Friends, and friends of friends, and complete strangers who heard about the party on Key Largo’s coconut telegraph.
Thorn was an hour past tipsy. The walls were not yet rotating, the floor was still solid beneath his feet, but there was a wavery blur at the edge of his vision, and he was no longer capable of complex sentence structures. Not that they were ever his forte.
Outside, next to the lagoon, in the golden glow from a dozen mosquito torches, Rusty was doing a courtly waltz with Sugarman. Three guys were swaying around them like moths worshipping a flame. This was Rusty Stabler’s Circe routine, turning a lot of reasonably intelligent males into snorting goofballs. Everyone was smiling. Good for her. Good for Rusty.
An hour earlier, Thorn had stepped up onto a chair and clinked his beer bottle with a spoon, and when the rabble quieted down, he toasted Rusty’s incredible smarts and good looks and good humor and good everything else he could think of. A long list of fine attributes.
It went over well, with people interrupting, making fun of him, making fun of the idea of a toast, making fun of his speaking publicly in the first place. Everyone laughed a lot, and Thorn finished the toast to a wild cheer and whistling. Rusty came over to him and gave him a full-frontal wet kiss, and there was more hooting and poking fun at Thorn for the public display of affection, for being sentimental, and for being happier than anybody had seen him in quite a while. Thorn had been toying with the idea of making a public marriage proposal, getting down on one knee. He had the two-carat diamond solitaire ring in his pocket, something Kate Truman, his adoptive mother, had left him. It was there just in case he worked up the nerve.
But everything was so helter-skelter, with so much ridicule, jeering, whistling, and hooting, Thorn believed it might be better if he saved the proposal till later, when he and Rusty were alone. More romantic. And just in case she said no. Given Thorn’s history, all the disasters and upheavals he’d attracted, a woman with any sense would turn him down. And Rusty had a lot of sense. So he decided to wait. Sober up, do it in the bedroom with the lights low. If she refused, she refused. They could work out some other kind of arrangement. It didn’t have to be marriage. Nothing magical about a legal document. Thorn didn’t have a single legal document to his name as it was. Another good reason to wait and do it later.
After his speech he danced with Rusty. They danced slow, and they danced fast, then slow some more and even slower. Sweat soaked through his blue-and-yellow shirt with the oversized hibiscus flowers on it, his one and only party shirt. Sugarman broke in to take his turn, not with Rusty, but with his pal Thorn. Thorn went with it, the two of them putting on a giddy show, spinning and dipping. Sugar and he pranced around for about half a minute before someone shoved Thorn from behind and sent him splashing into the lagoon. He swam around out there and took more shit from his friends and their friends and a lot of complete strangers who’d s
hown up for the free beer.
He guessed it was a good party. He hadn’t thrown a lot of parties over the years, and this was by far the loudest, the biggest. As the night wore on, more people were pushed into the lagoon, including Rusty.
All those wet dresses and blouses and T-shirts clinging to those pretty breasts and rounded hips changed the atmosphere. A few couples slinked away into the shadows and came back later, smiling and holding tight to each other. Someone cranked up the music, which seemed to drive the mosquitoes back into the mangroves. A couple of Monroe County sheriff deputies showed up, not to shut down the party, because Thorn’s nearest neighbor lived a long way off, and that neighbor, a retired math professor, was at the party enjoying himself with a couple of younger ladies, but the deputies were off duty and had heard about the party and wanted to visit with Sugarman, their old buddy. And they wanted free beer.
So it went on like that. Good music, a lot of old favorites, country and classic rock. That reggae tune Thorn liked, “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?” Some Mary Chapin Carpenter, Dixie Chicks, a few ancient Beatles, Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Marley. Some more country, Lucinda Williams, that daughter of a poet and a poet herself. A few cuts of Crosby, Stills, and Nash and a little ZZ Top. Around midnight a Jimmy Buffett number came on, a song from back in the day when the guy still had that gritty edge, before he got so slick he became the John Denver of the Keys. For three minutes everyone became parrotheads and sang along to that one.
Now Thorn was ready for all of them to go home. It was nearly three in the morning and he believed he’d celebrated just exactly the right amount.
He liked his friends and he liked the strangers and he liked all the noise and commotion, but now he was ready for it to end, but the party wasn’t thinning out and had the look of one that winds up with everyone sitting on the edge of the lagoon, or swimming in it and watching the sun come up over the Atlantic. A party where you had to wake people up who’d passed out in the grass and the beach chairs and on the living room couch, wake them up tomorrow at noon and hand them aspirin and a glass of water and send them on their way. Probably better than forcing them out on the overseas highway drunk in the middle of the night. Probably better than that.
Thorn dumped the remaining bags of ice into the washtub and opened another Red Stripe, definitely the last he was going to allow himself that night, and he was headed outside to join the fray when two guys blocked his way, then came into the kitchen, making him walk backward three or four steps.
One athletic, good-looking guy, the other was slinky with a shit-eating grin. He hadn’t seen them around Key Largo, and he was pretty sure he hadn’t seen them earlier at the party. Arriving too late for anything good to come of it.
The shit-eater was blinking against the kitchen lights like some troll who’d just emerged from under his dark bridge.
“You Thorn?”
Thorn said yes, he was in fact a man by that name.
“Girl outside said you were in here. Blonde with tits big as Ohio.”
“That’s Squirrelly Shirley,” Thorn said. “Runs a dress shop. You in the market for a dress?”
The shit-eater grinned and looked over at the big guy.
“Oh, boy, this one’s cute.”
“You, on the other hand,” Thorn said, “are not so cute.”
Thorn was watching the athletic one amble around the kitchen, searching for something. He was looking at the appliances and the knickknacks with a possessive air, like a shopper who could afford anything in the store.
“Party’s winding down,” Thorn said.
“No, it’s not,” the runty guy said. “We just got here. We’re the party now.”
The athletic one, muscular shoulders, dressed like a schoolteacher on the first day of class, picked up a notepad that Rusty used for grocery lists.
He took a pen from the glass jar on the kitchen counter.
“What’s going on?” Thorn said.
“Name’s Moses,” the big one said. “You have permission to call me that.”
Moses set the pad on the counter in front of Thorn. He set the pen beside it.
“And I’m Jonah,” the other one said. “Like the fucker in the whale.”
“You need to write a note,” Moses said.
“A note?”
“Yeah, a note to your friend Rusty. Apologize. Tell her you’ll see her later, maybe a few days from now. You went on a trip or whatever.”
“What do you guys want?”
“I know what he should write,” Jonah said. “Yeah, yeah, this is perfect.”
He picked up the pen and held it out to Thorn.
Thorn was drunk, prickly, ready for bed, not focusing a hundred percent. Maybe not even fifty. He’d taken an instant dislike to these two but was trying to remind himself he was the master of ceremonies. The host of a party and he’d assumed all the responsibilities of that position. The primary responsibility as he saw it was to be tolerant of friends and strangers, whoever showed up.
So there he was, trying to be polite long after he’d stopped feeling polite.
“A girl left me this exact note one time,” Jonah said. “It’s good. It’s just right for this occasion.”
“Take the pen, Mr. Thorn,” Moses said.
Thorn took the pen. For an instant he thought he should stab the big guy in the face with it and see where that led.
“Now write this,” Jonah said. “ ‘I just need some time alone to think.’ Use those words. ‘I just need some time alone to think.’ Then sign your name.”
“What the hell is this?” Thorn said.
The slinky guy, Jonah, lifted his gray sweatshirt with one hand and whipped a chunky black handgun from his waistband and showed it to Thorn.
“Write those words.”
“I just need some time alone to think.” Moses was looking out the kitchen windows, checking the crowd. “Do it, Thorn. Do it now.”
Thorn bent over the pad and scribbled the words. This wasn’t a joke. That was clear. But his reasoning skills were so impaired, as hard as he tried, he couldn’t think of a good reason not to write the words he’d been ordered to write. So he did.
“The bitch that left me that note,” Jonah said, “I never heard from her again. She’s out there somewhere, still thinking.”
“Now, where’s the back way out of here?” Moses said. “So nobody gets hurt. We wouldn’t want that. People getting shot through the heart at a nice party like this. People dying left and right.”
Thorn led them through the length of the house, out the front door, outside into the darkness. No longer quite so drunk. Looking for an escape. Looking for a way out of this that wouldn’t endanger anyone at the party. Shoved along by the slinky guy, poked in the spine with the unfunny end of a pistol.
The two men with Old Testament names marched him away from his house. Outside in the shadowy drive Moses told him to halt and to raise his hands. Thorn complied and Moses patted him down and found nothing in his pockets—no guns, no knives, no leather saps, not a wallet or a key chain.
As Thorn was lowering his hands Jonah made a huffing noise like the chuckle of an addled child, and a second later he cracked Thorn in the skull, and Thorn’s knees sank, while far away Springsteen crooned on behalf of all the ordinary Joes.
Floating about ten feet above the scene, the part of Thorn that was still conscious watched his body lifted and carried, then wedged into a tight place. For some indeterminate period he viewed a spool of the evening’s events, disconnected images and snatches of conversation, the lagoon, the mosquito torches, his friends and some strangers splashing drunkenly in the warm water, Thorn giving his speech in Rusty’s honor, suffering the good-natured ridicule. He saw himself writing a note, words on a pad of paper. A note for Rusty. Though he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d written.
Sometime later he came awake in the cramped backseat of a small car.
He might have been missing in action for f
ive minutes or an hour. His head was hooded by rough material that smelled vaguely like a feed sack. The hood was held in place by an elastic cord lashed around his throat. Behind his back his hands were so numb he could not tell what material the cuffs were fashioned from. Plastic, steel, leather, or something else entirely.
For a while he tried to focus on the turns the car made. That’s what you were supposed to do when you were kidnapped. He remembered that much.
They seemed to travel in one direction for many miles, maybe as long as an hour. No doubt heading north on US 1 back to the mainland, then after that, there were too many choices to be sure.
The passenger window was open and the rush of wind hid sounds from beyond the car. Three or four times he heard the crack of gunfire close by, then the voice of the big man speaking. Afterward there was no more shooting.
Only later, much later, when the car turned off the pavement and began to jolt across the washboard ruts of a back road, Thorn got a sense of their location. Through the rough fabric he smelled the fertile night air of the Florida countryside, pine resins and grasses, pennyroyal and sage, the faint honeyed taste of slash pine. And as the car slowed to a crawl, he made out what he believed was the jug-o-rum croak of a bullfrog and a series of low whoots that might be a great horned owl.
Impossible to pinpoint from a whiff of breeze and shred of sound, but his senses were telling him they’d landed somewhere in South Florida’s interior, out in the untamed pineland well inland from the coast, a vast area north of the Everglades that was home to cattle ranches and sod and tomato farms and sugarcane fields, a region so remote, so desperately lonely that the closest shopping mall or fullsized grocery store was hours away toward the bright lights of the coastline. The only prominent structures in that wild place were the occasional church or slaughterhouse.
The car came to a stop and the men got out. Neither of them spoke as they muscled him from the car and prodded him across rough terrain studded with rocks and scratchy plants that scuffed his bare ankles. At one point he tripped over a stone and pitched forward but the larger man caught him and hauled him upright, then shoved him onward. In that brief contact, Thorn got a sense of the man’s strength, and there was nothing comforting in that knowledge.
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