Dead Last

by James W. Hall

  So far the duo had brought down Nicaraguan white slavers, a group of cyberscammers from Ukraine, Iranian counterfeiters, a ruthless gang of Koreans smuggling endangered parrots, Haitian loan sharks, Columbian child-smut peddlers, and other exotic barbarians. Without the vigilance of the Ops team, it seemed Miami would be drowned in a tsunami of evil.

  Gus sold the Exposure Channel on that broad outline and on the show’s tricky tone. One minute it was tropical noir with gritty violence, demonic bad guys, and back-alley crime, then it swung to flashy beaches and bikinis, tongue-in-cheek one-liners. That was the test for Sawyer, tight-roping that line between dark thrills and goofs.

  Gus was strolling over, phone to his ear, watching Sawyer.

  Sawyer got out and waited for him in the shade of a banyan tree.

  Gus came close, still listening to the voice on the phone.

  Face empty, eyes locked on Sawyer.

  No good-bye, just snapped the phone shut, slid it into his jeans pocket. Gus doing black today. The jeans, a silky T-shirt, black loafers, glossy black wraparounds cocked up on his forehead.

  “Understand you were in Dallas.”

  “I was.”

  “Dee Dee says you went to see Danson.”

  “He was going to be there on business, invited me for a sit-down.”

  “There on business. That’s your story?”

  “It’s not my story, it’s what happened.”

  “He invited you, what, like called you on the phone, said, Hey, Sawyer, come out to Dallas, I’d like to play footsie?”

  “His secretary called. Didn’t say what it was about.”

  “So behind my back you decide to go see the studio’s top money guy.”

  “Come on, Gus. It wasn’t like that. He called me. I thought I could work the generation thing. Shoot the shit, get Danson on our wavelength. I went on my own nickel. It didn’t work out.”

  “And for some reason you didn’t tell me about this meeting?”

  “Secretary suggested I should keep it hush-hush.”

  “And you took that to mean you should keep me in the dark.”

  “I’m sorry, Gus. That was wrong. I should’ve alerted you. My bad.”

  “Funny,” Gus said. “On the phone just now Danson said none of this happened, there was no meeting.”

  “That was him you were talking to?”

  “Him, yeah. Dee told me your story. So I rang him, asked him what the fuck was going on, he said I’m mistaken, there was no appointment with you or anyone else on Saturday. Not on his schedule; he hasn’t been in Dallas in years. Has no reason to call you.”

  “Then something’s fucked up,” Sawyer said. “His secretary, Millie, she said two P.M. in the Ritz-Carlton lobby, Danson wanted to discuss the show. I waited two hours, no Danson. Called his office, nobody there on Saturday afternoon. I’ve called half a dozen times, they put me on hold, don’t come back. I’ve e-mailed, left messages. The guy stood me up.”

  “Somebody’s played a trick on you, son. Somebody conned your ass. People like Danson don’t call writers. I’m the show runner here. Danson talks to me, then I talk to you, the cast, and the rest of the crew. That’s how the food chain works, babe. You don’t go having clandestine meetings with a studio guy. It doesn’t happen.”

  “Who would con me into something like that?”

  “Unless, of course,” Gus said, “you got some whole other thing working in Dallas you don’t want anybody to know about. Is that it, Sawyer? You got a piece of ass stashed out west?”

  “Danson stood me up. We had a meeting at the Ritz for two, he didn’t show. That’s the truth.”

  Gus rubbed his chin and glanced off.

  “If you say so, kid. You keep telling that story. See where it gets you.”

  FOUR

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON, WHEN SUGARMAN PULLED his Honda into the crushed seashell drive, Thorn was down by his boat basin prying loose a small boulder from the seawall. He carried the limestone chunk to a patch of lawn twenty yards from his house, dropped it at his feet, glanced toward Sugar, then turned and walked back to the seawall.

  It was coming up on two weeks since Rusty’s death. Everywhere he looked he still heard traces of her voice or caught hints of her sun-baked scent.

  Sugar shut his car door and came over and stood waiting by the rock.

  Same age as Thorn. Swedish mother, Jamaican father. Former sheriff’s deputy, now a private investigator. As tall and fine-looking as an A-list Hollywood charmer. His chiseled bone structure had been polished smooth by the years. Steadfast as anyone Thorn had ever known, Sugarman was first in line when the hard chores were assigned. Thorn’s trusty wingman. But always ready to get in Thorn’s face when required. Faithful Sugar. Loving, strong, bull-headed Sugarman. A rock.

  Exactly the last person Thorn wanted to see just then.

  “You need help?”

  Thorn grunted and marched back to the seawall. Sugar tagged along to the water’s edge.

  “Nice to see you’re finally out of the hammock, up and doing.”

  As Thorn squatted and jimmied loose another boulder from the muddy embankment, Sugarman crouched and started prying free the one adjacent to it. Pitching in, uncomplaining. He followed Thorn back to the open lawn, lugging his own jagged stone. He dropped it a few feet away from where Thorn stood.

  “Not there,” Thorn said.

  “Okay, where?”

  “It’s going to be a circle.”

  “All right, good. A circle. How big?”

  “Big,” Thorn said.

  “We gonna make a campfire? Get drunk, sing manly songs of yore. ‘Give me some men who are stouthearted men who will march…’”

  Thorn turned away and headed back to the rocky seawall.

  They toted rocks in silence for half an hour, Sugarman respecting Thorn’s black mood. They made a few dozen trips, carrying forty or fifty stones. By the time they were done, the southern end of the seawall was dismantled, and the circle in the grass had a ten-foot radius.

  “Next high tide, your yard’s going to flood. But I guess you knew that.”

  Thorn didn’t reply.

  “Am I invading your privacy? Wink your right eye for yes.”

  Thorn stared at him and said nothing.

  He and Sugar had been buddies since the schoolyard days. Thorn, a loner by choice; Sugar, an outsider by blood. The oddball kid who was half black, half white with a face too pretty for his own good. A bully attractor. At six years old Sugar learned to fight, a necessary skill for a cute kid with his racial mix. Too many times to count, when the tough boys ganged up on him, Thorn jumped in. Their friendship was forged in those kunckle-busting brawls.

  Lifelong friends, Sugar and Thorn had survived the usual traumas and tragedies. They’d also endured some traumas not so usual, episodes of bloodshed and savagery that teetered on the edge of illegal. They had, more than once, been forced to extreme and messy forms of justice. Those were episodes they never rehashed, the side of their bond that stayed in shadow.

  Once the circle of rocks was done, Thorn stepped back and eyed it.

  “Now what?” Sugar said.

  Thorn shrugged, so dazed by the thrum of his racing blood that at that moment he couldn’t recall why he’d wanted to construct the circle.

  “Well, okay then,” Sugar said. “On another matter entirely, just in case you’re interested, I took care of that business in Sarasota. You’re now totally cashed out of your controlling interest in Bates International, which, I have to admit, involved some dollar figures so big I can’t bring myself to say them out loud. So many zeroes, my throat constricts. Suffice it to say, you’re no longer a corporate mogul. Bates is broken up, pieces sold off; all profits owed to you have been transferred to seventeen different charities. Mainly greenies, but a few others, early education, homeless shelters, battered women, abused kids. I followed Rusty’s outline. You guys made a lot of good souls very happy. I got the list right here.”

  Sugarman
dug a folded paper from his jeans pocket and held it out.

  Thorn took the sheet, balled it up, and tossed it into the circle of stones.

  Sugarman looked at the paper and said, “I thought cutting you loose from Bates was going to be complicated, but it wasn’t. Turns out Rusty began the process before she got sick, did the paperwork to divest you of all the titles, rewriting charters, scrubbing your name from the minutes of board meetings. So you’re out of the picture entirely. It’s like all that never happened. And best of all, Thorn, you’re penniless again.”

  “Good.”

  “I mean, dirt poor, destitute. Insolvent. Don’t have a pot to piss in.”

  Sugarman was devoted to his thesaurus.

  “You’re also safely back below the sweep of radar. Records expunged, history obliterated. You’re nobody. Less than nobody. Far as the world of capitalistic free enterprise is concerned, Thorn never existed.”

  “It’s a happy day,” Thorn said.

  “I don’t know if you saw the obituary in the Herald.”

  Thorn was staring out at the lagoon.

  “That woman, April Moss, did some excellent research. There’s stuff in there I didn’t know about Rusty. About the marine studies program getting started. How rough it was for Rusty as a guide. April went above and beyond. It was very generous of her.”

  Thorn stood his ground, weathering the moment.

  “I called her after it came out and thanked her. She said to tell you hello. Tell you how sorry she was for your loss. We talked for a while. She’s a good lady. Smart, sensitive. I didn’t realize you two knew each other. How come I never heard of her before?”

  “It was a long time ago. Very brief.”

  “Back in your one-night-stand days?”

  Thorn didn’t reply.

  “Well, she’s nice. And she’s single.”

  Thorn turned and squinted at him.

  “Rusty’s not gone two weeks, and you’re trying to set me up?”

  “Hell, no. I liked her. I was thinking of asking her out myself.”

  Thorn was silent, looking at the circle of stones.

  “I brought you a copy of the obit in case you didn’t see it.”

  Sugar drew the clipping from his shirt pocket and held it out to Thorn.

  “I saw it.” Thorn turned and walked back to his house.

  He went inside and returned several minutes later with an armload of framed photographs and a table lamp. He heaved the junk into the center of the circle and went back inside.

  When Rusty died, some crucial atom inside him had cracked apart and all the wild-eyed craziness that was stabilized by her presence went into a state of fission. Attractive and repulsive forces, knocked out of equilibrium, were releasing some mind-melting pulses. He’d tried to contain the meltdown but apparently it was too late. The chain reaction was under way.

  Thorn knew this would be finished only when it had run its course, when all the electrostatic forces had neutralized their equal and opposite valences. Until then he could only stand apart and observe the mad electrons radiating around his body, and listen to the delirious hum in his head like some turbine spinning ten times past its tolerances, and observe himself committing acts he only dimly comprehended.

  For the next two hours, while Sugarman watched from a lawn chair, Thorn made trip after trip into the house, returning to the circle of stones and pitching more of his accumulated possessions onto the heap.

  Things he’d purchased himself, gifts from friends, items he’d inherited, objects he’d made by hand like his collections of carved wood plugs and bonefish flies, which for many years had been his sole source of income. He tossed a hinged maple box containing a hundred hand-tied flies he’d set aside for his own use some day, a day that had never come, and never would.

  He carried out rods and reels, three mounted fish he’d caught as a kid, his first clumsy attempts at taxidermy, a half-deflated basketball, a pair of old prom shoes still glossy under decades of dust, scuzzy flip-flops and ragged sneakers he’d outgrown years ago that were forgotten on a back shelf in a closet down the hall, and the dresses and flowery skirts of women who’d shared his bed for a time and left them behind in the haste and confusion of their final getaways. Sarah, Monica, Darcy, Alexandra, Rusty, and the others. A string of hard-nosed, beautiful ladies.

  He hauled out an assortment of straw sun-hats his adoptive mother, Kate Truman, used to wear when she was fishing with her husband, Dr. Bill. The woman had died twenty years ago, but the hats were still haloed with the lilac scent of Kate’s favorite perfume.

  He threw her hats on the pile, along with cardboard boxes containing documents Kate had accumulated: tax statements, paid receipts, and income ledgers from her fishing guide business decades past; a vast hoard of paper where dozens of palmetto bugs scurried for safety, stacks of papers that were irrelevant when they were filed away, and were a hundred times more irrelevant every year thereafter, yet Thorn had never had the heart to toss any of them out until that day.

  When the mound grew to the edge of the rock circle, Thorn walked to the boat house north of the basin and took down a can of kerosene from a high shelf. He brought it back and walked around the edge of the circle, splashing it over the pile.

  “Your flies, Thorn? You’ve got thousands of hours invested in that.”

  “You want them, take them. Now’s your chance.”

  Sugarman made no move.

  “I wouldn’t want to hamper your fun. But buddy, you might want to wet a line again someday.”

  “Then I’ll tie some new flies.”

  Thorn dug a wooden match from the pocket of his shorts and scratched it against a stone. He held it out, studied the flame for a moment, then bent down and touched it to a framed photo taken aboard the ancient thirty-foot Chris-Craft, the Heart Pounder, Thorn at sixteen, shirtless, his hair longer and blonder than it ever was again. Thorn was grinning at Sugarman, who with Kate Truman’s help was holding up a sailfish he’d just hauled from the blue-green waters at the edge of the stream.

  Thorn watched the fire take hold and when he was sure it was fully caught, he plodded back to the house to resume his cleansing.

  FIVE

  FOR THE NEXT FEW HOURS while the bonfire raged, Thorn hauled out more junk. At midnight gusts of sparks were still swirling skyward. Sugarman dozed in the Adirondack chair, waking up now and then when Thorn crashed a table or bookcase into the flames.

  Around two in the morning, Thorn carried out two suitcases, set them on the grass near Sugarman’s chair, and nudged his friend’s leg. Sugar woke, his hand swatting reflexively at a mist of mosquitoes.

  “Something for you.”

  Sugar stretched and rubbed his face. Most of the smoke was riding out to sea on the off-shore wind, but a thick haze had collected around the sheltered dock lights and hung like melancholy fog.

  Thumbing open the latch of one suitcase, he took a look.

  “Well, at least you haven’t completely lost your mind.”

  The case was packed with books, some Thorn had reread many times over the years. A collection of paperback sea stories, mysteries, and adventure yarns, and some bird guides and books on weather and Florida history. His Travis McGee paperbacks, some Rudyard Kipling, Patrick O’Brian, and the complete Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

  “There’s more inside. In boxes. Take them with you. Give them to your girls, donate them to the library, or keep them, I don’t care.”

  “Listen, Thorn.”

  “Don’t try to talk sense to me, Sugar.”

  “Oh, I know better than that.”

  “I’m starting fresh,” he said.

  “That’s what this is about? Starting fresh?”

  “Call it simplifying. All this shit was weighing me down.”

  “Thorn, you got fewer possessions than anybody I know.”

  “Now I have less.”

  They stood watching the swirl of the bonfire.

  “In the past, when the bad shit
came raining down,” Sugar said, “there was always a path to justice. Some righteous action to take. A person to track, clues to unravel. But this is different. Rusty got sick, she fought it and lost. It was a natural chain of events. There’s nothing to fix, no way to make it right. You can’t track down God and punch him out.”

  “What God?”

  “Okay, okay. You’re going to do what you’re going to do. I can’t stop you, and I’m not about to try. But before I leave I got two things to say.”

  Thorn stayed put. He was weary beyond endurance. The scream in his head had died to a vicious hum. Nothing he couldn’t manage. He’d had tequila hangovers that were worse.

  “You won’t remember this, but I been planning it for a year. Tomorrow I’m taking Jackie and Janey to the Grand Canyon. We’ll fly to Phoenix, rent a car, be gone ten days, seven hiking, plus the out-and-back travel time.”

  His twin girls were teenagers, living with their mom in Lauderdale. A nincompoop judge had found her more competent than Sugarman.

  “So?”

  “So I’ll change my plans, call off the trip if you need me.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Thorn, you’re halfway around the bend. You’re having a last-straw crack-up. One thing too many, one thing more than even Job had to handle. Because Rusty was healthy one minute, gone the next. Because she was the first woman in years that could take your bullshit and keep smiling while she gave it back with a double scoop. And because you just spent the day burning everything you own.”

  “I’m not half done.”

  Thorn heard the rage in his own voice, but was powerless to stop it. He was skidding down an oil slick highway with no brakes, the steering wheel useless in his hands. Sugarman in his headlights.

  “Okay, so I’ll be gone till a week from Sunday. I’ll have my cell. You need me to come back, call me. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “That’s one thing. What’s the other?”

  “You need to promise me you’re not about to take your own life.”