FOURTEEN
* * *
THERE WERE SEVENTEEN PARTYGOERS ON Sugarman’s list of names, but he knew the phone numbers for only two. He used his cell for both of those, and neither had seen Thorn leave the party. Missy Mayfield, one of Thorn’s old girlfriends, volunteered to round up a search party, but Sugarman assured her it wasn’t necessary.
Rusty called the only three on her list whose numbers she could locate and got the same result. Last anyone had seen of Thorn was when he gave his speech about what a great lady Rusty was. Rusty worked for a while with BellSouth information, trying to finagle more numbers, but it turned out Thorn’s guests were fairly typical Keys folks who either had no phones at all or kept their numbers unlisted.
Lying low for one reason or another was standard behavior in the Keys, where a large portion of the population had come to reinvent themselves, assume new identities, or flee from one mainland nuisance or another. Messy divorces, the justice system, debts, the IRS were high on the list, though Sugar had met a few desperados determined to break away from darker forces, mafia snitches, gangbangers, and former drug mules looking to go straight. Key Largo and Tavernier and Islamorada had such a large population of those shadowy types who placed a high premium on anonymity that asking questions about someone’s past was ill-advised conversational etiquette. It could even get you hurt.
The Friday after Thanksgiving was a busy workday in that island resort. Most on the party list were employed in the tourist trade. Only a few might have the day off—a plumber, two carpenters, an electrician, and the Coral Shores High School librarian.
Rusty and Sugar divided the rest. Sugarman took all the folks living below Mile Marker 95, from Popp’s Motel south. Rusty took Key Largo, where the highest concentration of the party guests lived or worked.
She showered and changed. Came out of the bedroom in black jeans and a long-sleeve blue T-shirt and running shoes, hair still damp. Looking more like her old island girl self than Sugar had seen in a while. He followed her outside into the brittle sunshine. A steady easterly off the Atlantic had pushed the swelling tide high into the lagoon and it was sloshing over the seawall and onto the dock. Feathery white horsetails filled the sky. Winds changing aloft, a sign that things were about to shift below.
“It’s going to be fine,” Sugar said as Rusty got into her Accord.
She put the key in the ignition and looked up at him through the open window.
“I’m not superstitious, Sugar. I don’t have premonitions. But this is different.”
“We’ll find him, Rusty. We’ll find him and there’ll be a good explanation and we’ll all have a big laugh.”
“No,” she said. “This is serious. This is some very bad shit.”
She started the car and backed out.
Sugarman watched her go, feeling a dark fist clenching inside his chest, a gloomy certainty that what she said was true.
No luck with Penny and Jed Thompson, who were home watching a ball game in the tiki hut behind their house. Neither Lisa Lee, who tended bar at Morada Bay, or Jimmy Hankinson, who ran the windsurf concession at the Marriott, were any help. The last they remembered was Thorn’s speech and someone shoving him into the lagoon. A strike-out with Joel Carmel, who operated the bookstore in the Surfside shopping plaza, and another with Randy Schutes, who sold tropical gewgaws and parrot shirts at Island Silver and Spice. Zero with Sharon Jenkins, the hostess at Snapper’s restaurant. Two of Sugarman’s old cop buddies, Shaky Means and Junior Nickerson, were out fishing together. Junior’s wife hailed him on her VHS, and over crackling static Junior said, no, they hadn’t seen Thorn after the speech or the lagoon episode.
Sugarman was down to his last two names when Rusty rang his cell.
“Meet me at Squirrelly Shirley’s,” she said. “Be quick.”
“What?”
She clicked off and Sugar wheeled the Toyota around and hauled ass back up the overseas highway, twice skidding along the shoulder to pass slow-moving traffic, driving like a goddamn Miami idiot, getting some honks and a couple of flipped birds.
It was just after four in the afternoon when he swerved into the lot at Squirrelly Shirley’s Boutique and hustled into the air-conditioned shop.
Shirley and Rusty were behind the cash register. A newspaper was spread out on the counter. The morning Miami Herald, front-page section.
Shirley was a cute blonde in her late thirties wearing a low-cut dress that revealed about fifty percent of her famous breasts. The boutique was one of the few clothing stores in the Keys that local men frequented, shopping for their wives or girlfriends, or at least pretending to. Shirley must have known those deeply scooped dresses brought them in because that was her daily uniform. For years that décolletage had paid the mortgage on a nice waterfront house.
“I saw two guys,” Shirley said to Sugar before he could speak. “They came in late, maybe an hour before the party ended. A big one and a little one. The little one was grubby like a derelict. They didn’t look like they belonged together because the big one was dressed nice, muscled up, handsome face, but his eyes weren’t nice. Mean eyes. Dead or something, I don’t know. I’ve been trying to find the right word.”
“What about these two?”
“I was on the porch and they asked where they could find Thorn, and I told them he was in the kitchen.”
“You see them again?”
Rusty flattened wrinkles out of the newspaper.
“No,” Rusty said. “Shirley didn’t see them come back out. But they could’ve gone out the front door. No one would’ve noticed that.”
“Two guys,” Sugarman said. “One big, one little.”
“I never saw them before,” Shirley said. “I knew everyone at the party except those two. This was around two or three in the morning, pretty late. I was a little high. But I remember them clearly. You and Rusty were dancing by the lagoon.”
“You’d recognize these two again if you saw them?”
“Pretty sure.”
“There’s something else,” Rusty said.
She swiveled the paper around so he could see the headline: THREE DEAD IN SHOOTOUT, GOVERNOR SANCHEZ NARROWLY ESCAPES.
“What’s this about?” Shirley asked.
Sugarman took the paper over to the front of the store where the light was better and skimmed the article. Thorn’s name wasn’t mentioned. An FDLE agent who’d been protecting the governor had been the victim of multiple gunshots; also killed were Earl Hammond Jr. and a worker named Gustavo Pinto. Short article, sketchy details. Must’ve been slammed together as the paper was going to press.
“Happened last night,” Rusty said. “About midnight. Coquina Ranch.”
“And a couple of hours later two guys show up asking for Thorn.”
“What’s going on?” Shirley said. “Is Thorn in trouble again?”
“We need more details, Shirley. How these guys were dressed. Anything you can remember, no matter how small it might seem.”
“Okay.”
Sugarman took notes on a sheet of Shirley’s flowery stationery.
It seemed that Squirrely Shirley had photographic recall on matters relating to wardrobe—a job-related skill, she said with a smile of pride.
The two men were wildly mismatched. The scrawny guy dressed like he’d just crawled out of a Dumpster. Gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders. Grungy black jeans, white high-tops. A green bungee cord for a belt.
The other guy, the good-looking one, wore chinos, loafers, a blue button-down. The loafers had tassels and were cordovan.
“Very preppy,” Shirley said. “Not my type. But cute.”
The big guy had medium-length brown hair, stylishly cut. The other had a shaved head. The handsome one worked out with weights, deep chest, wide shoulders, with the pigeon-toed gait of a body builder. The other was more feline, and Shirley said he’d taken a long look at her as he was going in the door, leaning forward, trying to sneak a peek down her top. Smirk
ed when she caught him.
“You see their car?” Rusty said.
“One of those teeny compacts,” Shirley said. “I’m not into cars.”
“Color?”
“Oh, it was weird. Same as Norm Higgins’s Jeep. That military look.”
“Military?” Sugar said.
Shirley came out from behind the counter and walked over to a spinner rack near the side window. She pulled off a pair of pants and held them up.
“Like this. Military.”
“Camouflage,” Rusty said. “A camouflage paint job?”
“Right,” Shirley said. “That’s what I meant. Why does somebody paint their car camouflage?”
“I don’t think it’s because they’re trying to blend in,” Sugar said.
A few minutes later, as they were passing over the crest of the Jewfish Creek Bridge in Sugar’s Corolla, Rusty looked out at the mangroves islands, the watery view.
“This is my fault.”
“Stop it, Rusty.”
“Thorn wanted to be John Beresford Tipton,” she said.
“Who?”
“A character in some fifties TV show. Back in September I was watching an episode on cable, Thorn came in, sat down, and sat through the whole thing. I don’t think he’d ever seen an entire TV show before.”
“Must’ve been pretty good.”
“It’s called The Millionaire. John Beresford Tipton is a retired industrialist. You never see his face, he’s always sitting in a high-backed chair. Every week he gives away a cashier’s check for a million dollars to some complete stranger. It’s his hobby, what keeps him amused. He stayed anonymous, his personal secretary delivered the check to someone Tipton picked out, and the show was about how the money changed that person’s life. Sometimes for the good, but a lot of times it turned into a disaster. I can’t remember which episode Thorn saw. Probably a good result. He never said it, but I think that show planted the seed. You know, how he acted that day on the boat, wanting to do something big. Stand behind the curtains, pull the levers, and make the world a better place.”
Sugarman looked over at Rusty. She was staring out her window, her shoulders quivering. He reached over and cupped the back of her neck. In a moment she grew still, lowered her head, then raised her arm and covered his hand with hers.
“We’ll find him,” Sugarman said. “I promise you, Rusty. We’ll find him.”
She removed her hand and he withdrew his.
“I did my due diligence on this transaction,” she said, sounding like she was trying to convince herself. “I spent a lot of time thinking it through, researching the land, the people involved. But I should’ve known something was fishy.”
“This isn’t your damn fault, Rusty.”
“What if these two goons came down and took him off and killed him and hid his body? We might never know.”
Sugarman slowed for a line of traffic that was stacking up behind a Winnebago.
“I don’t accept the premise.”
“Why?”
“What would killing Thorn accomplish? He’s already agreed to the deal. It’s in the pipeline, right?”
“It is and it isn’t.”
“How’s that?”
“The documents are done, but there’s still the closing. It’s scheduled for this Tuesday afternoon in Tallahassee. The three parties sit at the table—Division of State Lands, Thorn, and Earl Hammond. Thorn signs over the Sarasota land to the state, accepts their check, and he endorses it to Earl Hammond. Then Hammond signs over Coquina Ranch to the state. Florida gets three times more land than they would have otherwise. Hammond walks away with half a billion dollars; Thorn’s divested himself of a good chunk of Bates International and done one hell of a good deed in the process.”
“Okay, if somebody’s trying to kill this deal, why bother with both Thorn and Earl Hammond? Remove either one of them and there’s no deal.”
She brushed dust off the dashboard. Turned the sun visor down, then turned it back up again.
“There were red flags. But I ignored them.”
“What?”
“Earl Hammond was in a big hurry to give the land away. A real sense of urgency. Margaret Milbanks, she’s the head of Division of State Lands, she said Earl got very agitated when he found out the Florida Forever fund was depleted. He wanted the land to be sealed up in a preservation program as soon as possible. Money wasn’t an issue. He seemed ready to donate it for free as long as it was preserved.”
“There’s lots of groups who’d be happy to take a couple hundred thousand acres off his hands.”
“That’s the point,” Rusty said. “If Thorn’s not at the table Tuesday, and the particular deal I structured fell through, Earl Hammond could still give the land to the state or find a private conservation group and make a donation. Taking that land off the table, that was his goal. So if the idea was to kill the deal, then removing Thorn was irrelevant.”
“Maybe somebody doesn’t have the complete picture. They’re carpet bombing when they could’ve just done a surgical strike.”
Rusty was silent. She stared ahead at the road.
“So what do we know about the rest of the Hammonds?”
“Not a lot,” she said. “Earl had one son, Earl the third. He and his wife died way back, some kind of accident, avalanche, skiing or something. Earl and his wife raised the two grandsons, Browning and Frisco. Frisco’s a cop in Miami.”
“What kind of cop?”
“Horse cop. Whatever they call it.”
“Mounted unit.”
“That’s it. And the second son, the younger one, Browning, he runs the ranch, day to day. Wife’s name is Claire, college sweethearts. In their late twenties. It was Browning who started the safari operation. Fancies himself a businessman.”
“Okay, so let’s put it on Browning. Just brainstorm that.”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, number one, you got an obvious motive. Grandson’s afraid he’s cut out of the will, so he offs the old man, takes care of Thorn for good measure.”
“Makes no sense, Sugar. If Browning’s greedy, all he has to do is sit around a few weeks, let the deal play out, and a fortune falls in his lap.”
Sugarman worked on that for a minute, watching a couple of northbound crazies race past at over a hundred. No rules out there on that lonely stretch of road.
“Okay, all right. So is five hundred million what the land is worth on the open market? I mean, if the ranch suddenly belongs to Browning, could he sell if for more than that? Maybe that’s his motivation. Screw the deal Earl was working on, make his own deal with higher numbers.”
“Five hundred is top dollar. And trust me, there’s not a big market for two hundred thousand acres of ranchland west of the lake.”
“The grandson doesn’t have his facts straight. He gets wind of Earl disposing of the land, but doesn’t know about the five hundred.”
“A stretch,” she said.
“All right. So what’s with this urgency thing? Earl was in a hurry to get this done. Why’s that? Was he sick?”
“Not that I know.”
“So why was he so juiced to protect the land? Protect it from what?”
“Good question.”
“I mean what do you protect land like that from? Like you say, it’s the middle of nowhere. No highways anywhere close. Clewiston, Palmdale, for christsakes. Trailer parks and barbecue joints. Nobody’s going to build a housing development out there, sugarcane fields on one side, Everglades on the other, at least an hour from the city. So what was Earl Hammond afraid of? What’s making him move so fast?”
He slowed for an RV with Michigan plates, tooling along at thirty.
He dug out his cell, scrolled through his directory, and found the number.
“What’re you doing?”
“Shaking the trees, see what falls out.”
“Sugar.”
“Old friend of mine works in Miami PD. Twenty years ago we did a couple of tour
s at the sheriff’s office in Key Largo. He went up the ladder, I jumped off. But he’ll remember me.”
“This guy might know Frisco?”
“Oh, he’ll know him.”
“The Miami police department can’t be that small.”
“Mullaney knows everybody on the force. He’s the chief.”
Sugarman made the call, but Mullaney was in a conference. He left a message with the chief’s aid, his cell number, told her it was urgent. She seemed too brisk to Sugar, less attentive than he would’ve liked, so before she dismissed him, he told her he was calling in regard to the incident with the governor. That gave her pause.
“You have information about the shooting?”
“I do,” he said. Somewhat true. True enough.
“Well, FDLE is handling that. Young woman named Anne Donaldson. I’ll transfer you to someone who can give you her number.”
“Tell Larry I called, give him my cell,” Sugar said. “He’ll want to talk to me.”
He clicked off, slipped the phone in his pocket, and looked over at Rusty. She was on her own cell, listening intently. A few moments later, she said a quiet “Thank you” and snapped her phone shut.
“Who’s that?”
“Margaret Milbanks, State Lands.”
“And?”
“Other than two lawyers in her office that put the deal together, no one knew Thorn’s role, his name, or any of the particulars. Except for one other.”
Sugarman waited.
“Margaret’s boss,” Rusty said. “Governor Sanchez.”
“Well, well,” he said. “The circle tightens.”
“Sugar,” she said. “What’s the plan? You and me. What are we doing?”
“Plan?”
“We’re just going to cruise up to the front gate at Coquina Ranch? That what you think? Start asking questions while a triple homicide investigation is underway?”
Sugarman pulled out into the passing lane and floored it past the Winnebago.
“Sugar, you ran out of Squirrelly Shirley’s, jumped in the car, headed up the highway. I thought you had a plan.”
He smiled at her. She was a pretty woman, one of those lucky ladies who flourished with age. If not for Thorn . . . if not for that lucky bastard . . .
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