Dead Last
Page 33
“I’m sorry we’re late,” she said. “I got lost.”
“So this is the handsome stranger’s hideaway,” Garvey said, gazing around the grounds, then settling on the house. “Not the manly lair I was picturing. Hell, there’re Nantucket cottages that aren’t this quaint.”
Thorn rinsed the dirt off his hands in the cool waters of the lagoon and climbed up the bank to give them both a light hug.
April touched a finger to his bandaged arm.
“You’re healing?”
“They tell me I’ll live.”
She stepped away and took another look at the surroundings. Facing the ocean when she said, “I invited Flynn to come, but he’s not ready yet. He’s still sorting things out.”
“That door is always open.”
She’d dressed in ankle-length khakis and a subdued tropical print shirt. Her face was thinner, not gaunt, but if she wasn’t careful, it would be soon.
“What happened to your stilt house, the one on Blackwater Sound?”
“It burned down a few years ago.”
“That’s too bad. It was a wonderful place.”
“It was,” he said. “Made some good memories there.”
“And you made some babies too,” Garvey said.
He took Garvey’s arm and guided them over to the Adirondack chairs he’d set up in the shade of a gumbo-limbo.
“I grew up here,” he said. “Same as you, still living in the family homestead.”
“Ocean view,” April said. “Good breeze, what more could you want?”
She looked over at the remaining boulders. Thorn had whittled the pile down to a half dozen. The seawall was turning out to be a lot harder to reconstruct than it was to tear apart.
“Miami Ops, I suppose you didn’t hear what happened?”
He shook his head.
“Even with all the publicity, it still bombed last Thursday. Got cancelled the next morning. Flynn doesn’t mind. His agent found him some commercials to do until something better comes along.”
“He’s a talented kid. He’ll make it.”
He got them settled, took their orders, and brought back a tray of iced tea and some fresh shrimp with his own cocktail sauce.
“And he cooks too,” Garvey said. “Be still my heart.”
April gave Thorn a smile that was only halfway there.
“I got a call from Sheffield,” Thorn said. “About them nailing Gus for Dee Dee’s death. Says they’ve got him cold. That forensic magic they do.”
“Killed his own child,” Garvey said. “What kind of monster does that?”
April closed her eyes for a couple of seconds.
“I need to tinkle,” Garvey said. “You got any clean toilets in this joint?”
“Second door on your left. It’s spotless.”
“Do you need help, Mother?”
“Do I need help? Hell, yes, but the help I need seems to be already taken.”
She winked at Thorn and headed off.
When she’d disappeared inside the house, April said, “I came all this way, and now I don’t want to hear what you have to say.”
“We can do it later. Or skip it entirely and just move on.”
“I killed my son, Thorn. How am I supposed to move on from that?”
She stared out at the empty blue distance, her mouth tight, cheeks ruddy with emotion. If Thorn could have spoken his mind, he’d have told her that the nudge of April’s hand against Sawyer’s, that slight redirection of the ice pick that cost the boy his life, was exactly the kind of ending that Sawyer would have devised. Spreading the blame around in a clever, cynical way. Giving his mother and Thorn a lasting stain of guilt.
“You were very brave,” he said. “You saved my life.”
“Did I? I don’t think so.”
“When you came in the room, I had maybe another minute left before I passed out. Then it would’ve been over.”
She sighed, and held herself very still.
“Okay. Go on, what did he say? He blamed me, didn’t he?”
“No,” Thorn said. “The killings were about the show. All about publicity, about turning the show into a hit.”
“You’re lying, Thorn. I can tell you’re lying.”
He held her eyes, reached out and lay his hand on hers. It was the easiest lie he’d ever told.
“Look, April, you didn’t cause it to happen, and nothing you can do will change anything about it. If there’s a reason why shitty things happen, I haven’t discovered it. But I do know one thing. Going over and over how something came to pass, what you might have done differently, going left instead of right, right instead of left, it’s pointless. You can get lost in that maze and stay lost.”
“You can do that? Just move on, let go of the past.”
“I try. I work on it every day.”
She looked out to sea, and after a moment she began to weep quietly and without embarrassment.
Thorn kept his hand on hers until she’d weathered the moment.
Sniffing, she gave his hand a squeeze, then bent forward and pulled a Kleenex from her purse and blew her nose.
“Some day,” he said, “I’d like to get to know Flynn better.”
“And Flynn would like to know you. He just hasn’t realized it yet.”
A snowy egret touched down on the wooden dock and bent forward to stare into the dark mirror of the lagoon.
“Listen,” he said. “Before Garvey gets back…”
“Yes?”
“I wonder if you could do me a small favor.”
She smiled. There was weariness in it and the ache of sadness, but there was courage too, and a sturdy resolve that balanced out the pain.
She kept on smiling.
“Name it,” she said. “It’s yours.”
THE MIAMI HERALD
Monday, August 16
Buddha Hilton, in the Line of Duty
By April Moss
Buddha Hilton, elected sheriff of Starkville, Oklahoma, at the age of 19, died in the line of duty while playing a crucial role in ending the violent rampage of the man who came to be known as the Zentai Killer.
From an early age Ms. Hilton pledged herself to a life in law enforcement. Her dream was to repay in some measure the citizens of her small Oklahoma town for their generosity and love. It was those citizens who had once liberated Ms. Hilton from nightmarish captivity and it was they who helped give her a fresh start in life.
Held prisoner in a darkened room where she was tormented by her father throughout her early childhood, Buddha was rescued from her ghastly conditions by an alert social worker who spotted Buddha wandering about in distress in the front yard of her father’s rented home.
“There wasn’t a person in town who even knew that little girl existed till that day,” said Millie Janks, the social services professional who came to Buddha’s aid thirteen years ago. “People had suspicions about her daddy, but no one could have imagined the horrors that were going on inside those four walls.”
The Starkville of Buddha Hilton’s youth was a more robust town than it is today. Before the interstate highway was built linking Dallas with Oklahoma City, Starkville was directly on one of the main routes between those two cities, and the citizens of Starkville enjoyed all the economic benefits of the traffic flowing through their area. But the motels and restaurants and shops and service stations that flourished when Buddha Hilton was first starting school are mostly boarded up these days. Along with the dwindling population came shrinking resources, including police and fire rescue services.
“We couldn’t afford to pay her nothing,” said Starkville mayor, Wally Bryant. “I told her she’d be perfect on some big city police force. I encouraged her to send her resume for some jobs in the larger towns hereabouts, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was a Starkville girl through and through. She wanted to make sure nothing like what happened to her ever happened in this town again. Even if it meant living on next to nothing.”
In her hi
gh school years, Buddha had been a star pitcher on the Starkville Wildcats, a girl’s fast-pitch softball team. She was so talented she received scholarship offers from several colleges in the region, but turned them down because she wanted to live out her dream of keeping watch over her hometown.
One scout for the National Pro Fastpitch league was so impressed by Buddha, he offered her a contract on the spot. “She said no and no and no,” recounted Jeremy Blattner. “The girl had a seventy-mile-per-hour riseball, she could toss a two-hundred-foot frozen rope and somehow, she had the soft hands and lightning reactions of an infielder. Gritty, gutsy and quick. She could’ve made some serious money.”
But it was no and no and no to leaving Starkville. Her heart was there and her adoptive mother was there, and all her friends and neighbors were there, and even though some of the memories were bad, all her memories were there.
After graduating high school, with job opportunities scarce, Buddha spent a year in the stock room at a Wal-Mart superstore near the new interstate. “She absolutely hated that job,” said Buck Todd, a friend of Buddha’s from high school who worked alongside her at Wal-Mart and is now assistant manager of the store. “She wanted to be doing something meaningful with her time. She wanted to lend a hand to people.”
From her one year of working retail, Buddha managed to put aside enough money to pay for the laser removal of some of the facial tattoos her father applied when she was a toddler. “Those tattoos,” said Buck Todd, “they bothered her off and on, but when she tried to get some of them taken off, it bothered her even more. Not the pain, but something else.”
“I would’ve done it for free,” said Dr. Edward Molk of the Juniper Laser Clinic. “I told her that when she walked in here. ‘I’m waiving my fee. No charge for anything.’ As long as it took, I’d work for nothing. But no, sir, that wasn’t how that gal worked. If she couldn’t pay for it, she wouldn’t have it.”
Under her watchful eye, crime virtually disappeared in Starkville. But Buddha’s positive impact on the area extended beyond her duties as sheriff. A regular at the local swimming hole where drunks and daredevils routinely climbed up the eighty-foot cliffside to plummet into the icy waters of Miller’s Pond, Buddha several times saved the life of an intoxicated diver who didn’t resurface after his jump.
“Johnny Joe is a big man,” said Trixi Moffett, his wife of twenty-three years. “He’d make three of that girl. Plus he’d been drinking whiskey all afternoon that Saturday, and whiskey always sets him off.” As often happens with drowning victims, Johnny Joe Moffett panicked when Buddha pulled him to the surface. He fought against her efforts and climbed atop her and held her under, but somehow Buddha Hilton still managed to overcome this bear of a man and haul Mr. Moffett safely to the rocky shoreline. “Johnny Joe didn’t even thank that girl,” said Judy Ethridge, who’d been swimming at Miller Pond that day and witnessed Buddha’s bravery. “He just vomited a little and stomped off to his truck. But it didn’t bother her none. Buddha was like that. I never met a single person like her who’d always go the extra mile for you, no matter what. She was just born a saint, I guess.”
Like many of her fellow citizens in Starkville, Mayor Wally Bryant was shocked to learn that Sheriff Hilton had been overpowered by an assailant. “Buddha put her time in at the gym and there’s not a man in this whole county who’d voluntarily step into a boxing ring with that girl.”
Talk of Buddha’s death in Trueblood’s Café on the once-bustling main street of Starkville mostly centers on the mystery of her violent end. “The man that killed Buddha Hilton must’ve blindsided her,” said Sally Mayfield, owner and chef at the diner. Mayor Bryant had another theory of what happened that night in a Miami motel. “If Buddha had a flaw, it was probably that she could be too trusting. She thought the best of people, despite all evidence to the contrary, some of which she’d experienced firsthand when she was just a child. But despite that awful childhood, she always saw the good in people, even when there wasn’t much good to be seen.”
Services were planned to honor Buddha Hilton at the Starkville Elks Club, but the turnout was so large that at the last minute the venue was changed to the Starkville High School football stadium. Hundreds attended and over sixty of her fellow citizens came up to the microphone on the makeshift stage to pay tribute to her memory.
Also by James W. Hall
Silencer (2010)
Hell’s Bay (2008)
Magic City (2007)
Forests of the Night (2005)
Off the Chart (2003)
Blackwater Sound (2001)
Rough Draft (2000)
Body Language (1998)
Red Sky at Night (1997)
Buzz Cut (1996)
Gone Wild (1995)
Mean High Tide (1994)
Hard Aground (1993)
Bones of Coral (1992)
Tropical Freeze (1990)
Under Cover of Daylight (1987)
Essays
Hot Damn! (2001)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James W. Hall is an Edgar and Shamus Award–winning author whose books have been translated into a dozen languages. He has written four books of poetry, a collection of short fiction, and a collection of essays. This is his seventeenth novel. He and his wife, Evelyn, divide their time between South Florida and North Carolina.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DEAD LAST. Copyright © 2011 by James W. Hall. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hall, James W. (James Wilson), 1947–
Dead last / James W. Hall. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
e-ISBN 9781429982306
1. Thorn (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Serial murder investigation—Fiction. 3. Miami (Fla.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A369D43 2011
813'.54—dc23
2011026758
First Edition: December 2011