"For the last several years, Mr. Roy Everly has been allowing various scientists to use these dolphins in their research studies."
Roy took a deep breath and peered into the lens. He wore a starched white shirt with a turquoise string tie that seemed to be strangling him. He looked as dazed as a man who'd just stepped out of the wilderness into the bright lights of television.
"So, Mr. Everly, could you tell us, please, what exactly is the significance of the loss of these animals, in scientific terms?" She jabbed the microphone close to Roy's mouth. Across the room one of the barbell idiots said something funny and his friends foamed up with laughter.
"The significance of their loss? In scientific terms?"
"That's right, Mr. Everly. Were the scientists close to any important findings?"
Roy frowned.
"You're not asking the right question, lady. The question is, who the hell did this and why? What kind of world is it where this kind of shit could happen?"
The reporter pressed her earpiece deeper and smiled awkwardly.
"All right then, Mr. Everly, do you have any idea who would do such a thing?"
"A monster," Roy said. "A soulless, bloodless, god-awful monster."
The iron pumpers hooted and cheered and Thorn got down off his stool.
Monica rested a hand on his arm.
"Thorn."
The little man with the grotesque neck was grinning his way.
"What's the point, Thorn?"
"There isn't any," he said. "None at all."
He walked to the other side of the bar. By the time he arrived, the group of muscle freaks had drawn apart and were striking poses, arranging themselves in full display. Lats, biceps, quads, a regular anatomy class. The little man had a single emerald in his left earlobe, and he wore heavy gold rings crusted with jewels on most of his fingers. High-fashion brass knuckles.
"Something funny over here?" Thorn said.
"There is now," one of them said. Head shaved, walrus mustache. His ear was dotted with an identical green stone. Probably their club insignia. Steroids Anonymous.
They were drinking Coors Light. A fresh round just laid out on the bar in front of them. Thorn had never cared for that brand—like drinking carbonated snow.
As he stood there, he felt the bullet scar grow warm. The television was off to a commercial, dogs singing about their relief from fleas.
"Dead dolphins make you laugh? You stump dicks find that real funny?"
"Oh, help me, I'm wounded," the little guy said, pressing a palm to his heart. "The gentleman called us stump dicks. Insulted our masculinity."
"He's partaking of the stereotype," one of his buddies said. "Muscle men with inferior sexual apparatus."
"Go ahead, Dingo, show him what you got. Haul it out for him."
"Slap him upside the head with it, Dingo."
Thorn said, "What I'd like, Dingo, is to hear what's so goddamn funny about dead dolphins. Or maybe you could tell us a knee-slapper about beating up old ladies or having sex with parakeets. Come on, I know you can do it, a guy like you, highly trained sense of humor. Go on, scoff at something for us, show us how it's done. Tough guy doesn't give a shit about anything but making his neck thicker. Tell us a goddamn joke, man, something hilarious about slaughtering dolphins. I want to hear that. We all do, don't we?"
Thorn glanced around the dining room. Several tables full of tourists, some local businesspeople. Nobody moving. All the fish sandwiches growing cold. The dazzling expanse of water was spread out behind them, fishing boats and Jet Skis zooming by, the world on vacation.
"That's who you are, isn't it, Dingo? Big guy who doesn't give a damn about anything. Everything's a fucking cartoon. So go on, tell us something funny, man, we're all ears."
Dingo was giving Thorn the dead man's stare.
"I'm not gonna try to make you laugh, asshole. You aren't going to be laughing for a long time." Saying it very quietly. Same drama coach as all the other tough guys.
Dingo stepped away from the bar. Thorn shuffled back a half step. The martial arts class he'd taken last summer had been all about fending off blows, neutralizing your opponent without hurting him. Shunting his hardest shots off into harmless trajectories. It was a nonviolent defense meant to demonstrate to your opponent that he could not hurt you and you would not hurt him. Though the class ran against his instincts, Thorn had to admit it had twice saved his life, helped him put a couple of very bad men on the floor, desperate for breath. However, that was months ago and Thorn hadn't been keeping up his practice.
Rusty as he was, he managed to brush aside the first two chopping blows that Dingo threw, and slid away from a stiff karate kick and a leaping side kick. Dingo was a lot quicker and more limber than he appeared. Thorn's sidestepping only seemed to fire Dingo up, and he heard the guy's friends cheering and chairs scraping behind him and the voice of the bartender yelling for them to take it outside, and he felt the scar on his shoulder growing hot, the strange energy those dolphins had beamed into it.
He dodged another low kick and watched as Dingo feinted with his right hand and ducked his shoulder, looking for a chance to unload with a crushing left hook to the body. And all those hours Thorn had spent in the gym last summer choreographing countermoves had taught him how to handle that particular blow when it came, to step inside the punch, swivel and hook the arm around his waist and use his opponent's weight and the momentum of the stroke to spin the attacker harmlessly away.
But instead, Thorn halted abruptly, held his ground, kept his guard up. He'd decided he didn't want to demonstrate anything to this guy. He didn't want to tire him out, convince him that fighting was useless. What he wanted was a lot less complicated, a lot less philosophical.
He watched Dingo slit his eyes, inch forward. Smiling coldly at Thorn's possum trick. As Thorn held his ground, the small man showed him again that feint with the right, the load-up with the left, Dingo the one-trick pony.
Dingo circled right, then came back quickly to his left and let go with the punch. Thorn's blocking jab was a half-second late, and the blow glanced off his forearm and grazed Thorn in his right ribs. The lights in the room broke apart, turned to sparkling confetti as the breath blew out of his lungs. He heard cheers, Monica's shout. He saw the brilliant outline of Dingo's body as the man stepped back to admire his handiwork.
A block of cement had fallen on Thorn's ribs from ten feet up. Little guy like that, a foot shorter but probably ten pounds heavier than Thorn. Zero body fat. Clearly this wasn't the day to play rope-a-dope. One more cement block and Thorn was going to be orbiting the Milky Way.
Slumping forward, hands on his knees, Thorn managed to keep his head tipped up, watching the small man who didn't give a shit about dolphins, who found their massacre funny, watching this man inch forward and rear back, cocking his thick right arm, aiming for the soft bone above Thorn's left ear.
With a groan, Thorn swung his head to the side, sucked down a painful breath, and shot a right hand at Dingo's throat. Made contact with his Adam's apple. Not much weight behind the blow and not much behind the next one or the one after that. Just enough to turn his voice box to mush and send Dingo backpedaling toward his friends. That husk of muscle hadn't protected him. He clutched his throat like a man strangling on his own breath, a drool of blood appearing at the corner of his mouth.
In two strides, Thorn had him by the front of his T-shirt. He set his feet and spun and hurled the man toward the bar, at the last second steering Dingo's face into the brass railing. Dingo lifted his head, nose mashed a half inch to the right, eyes fogged, blood bubbling from his mouth as if he'd been feasting on fallen game.
"You happy now?" Monica was at his side as Thorn limped toward the door.
The other carnivores gaped at Thorn and didn't budge, apparently content with the current alignment of their noses. On the telephone the bartender was describing the event to the sheriff's dispatcher, making it sound like a bigger deal than it was.
Outside in the sunny parking lot, Thorn halted by Monica's ancient Chevrolet Impala. Its blue paint had faded almost to white.
"Jesus, Thorn. What the hell was that about?"
He didn't reply. It was about nothing. About everything. Monica opened her door and got in behind the wheel. Thorn climbed in the passenger door. The vinyl seats were simmering. They seared the back of his thighs. The pain felt fine, just right.
"I saw a suspicious-looking guy at the dolphin tanks yesterday," he said.
"What?"
"Red cap, aviator sunglasses. Tall with a beer belly."
"That's suspicious? Red cap, sunglasses?"
"He wasn't looking at the dolphins or the people swimming, he was checking out Roy. Watching all the mechanical stuff very carefully, like maybe he was casing the place so he could come back later and tear it apart."
Monica studied him for a moment. A stinging light flittered in her eyes.
"I'll drive you down to the sheriff's office. You can describe the guy to them." In her voice was the quiet burn of ice. "If that's what you want."
"All right," Thorn said. "For all the good it will do."
"Yeah, well, you did a lot of good back there now, didn't you? A barroom brawl. What the hell was that supposed to accomplish?"
"It was the way he was laughing."
"He was an asshole, Thorn. You could pound on him for a year, he'd still be an asshole. What's the point?"
"I had to do something."
"Start a fight, hit a guy in the throat. Wow, that makes the world a better place. Very mature, Thorn."
"I was supposed to walk out of there, go home, tie more flies. Catch some fish, brush it all off?"
"You wasted your time with that guy, Thorn. He's not the problem with the world."
"Maybe he is."
Monica looked off at a line of palms along the highway. She took a long breath and let it out. Cleared her throat and set her shoulders. She looked at him briefly, then back at the roadway palms.
"I had a friend in college," she said, then halted and shook her head.
"What?"
"Nothing," she said. "Never mind."
"You had a friend in college."
She looked back at him, grimacing as if she doubted it was worth the effort.
"Okay," she said. "All right. His name was Paul Nottoli. An art major friend. We were very close. Smart kid, very talented. Professors were in awe of him, art dealers coming up from New York, talking to him about doing a show. Paul wasn't blown away by any of it. It was like fine, okay. Happy, but not overwhelmed."
Thorn watched the body builders troop out of Sundowners and get into a blue Ford van. Dingo looked over and did something with his eyes that was supposed to vaporize Thorn. It didn't work.
"Then, his senior year, right after Christmas break, Paul's parents and kid sister were killed in a home invasion back home in Virginia. All of them tied up and shot. The family was very close. Very close. When Paul came back to college, he could barely function. A month later he quit, just left, didn't tell anybody but me where he was going. He drove to San Francisco, joined a Buddhist temple. Zen meditation. He'd been playing around with Zen for years, but all of a sudden it was extremely important. He put aside everything, college, a great career, all so he could find some peace."
She was gripping the steering wheel, staring straight ahead out the windshield, navigating the back roads of her memories. Thorn watched the blue van pull out of its space, back slowly in their direction.
"So Paul's in San Francisco, one day he's sitting, doing his meditation with maybe thirty, forty other people. He's been there a few months, working very hard, dedicating himself and making progress, feeling that particular day like he's flirting with a major breakthrough, when outside in the alley a woman screams.
"A second or two go by and it's clear what's happening. Her head is beating against the opaque windowpane. Everyone in the meditation hall could tell the woman is being raped. Paul and a couple of others jump up, but the Zen master orders them to sit back down. He tells them this had happened before, and it would happen again and again. This was the way the world was. Nothing they could do would change it. He tells them to listen to the woman's voice, to remind themselves why they were there. For them to use the horror of this woman's pain to spur on their own pursuit of salvation."
Thorn looked over at Monica. She was gripping the wheel, giving it little nudges as if the car were hurtling out of control.
"The Zen master told them they had to choose. Did they want to wrestle endlessly with the problems of the world, or did they want to solve the most important problem? It was only ego that made them think they could deliver justice, that they could judge who was right, who was wrong. And anyway, if Paul or any of the others went out in the alley and tried to save that girl, how would they know where to stop? There's always someone screaming in the next alley and the one next to that. A mugging, another rape. Always sirens in the distance. Always another problem. Where does it end? When do you stop trying to save others and get back to the thing that matters most? The reason you're here in the first place. To save yourself. To find understanding."
"And if that was you in the alley?"
"Sure, it's terrible," she said. "The world is full of awful things, rapes, murders, slaughtered dolphins. But you can't take on every problem. Right every wrong, feed every hungry person, give a dollar to every beggar. It's just not possible."
"So what'd he do, your friend?"
The blue van was parked right behind them now. Ten feet away. Windows tinted so dark, the muscleheads could be aiming shotguns at them, it'd be impossible to see until the windows exploded.
"Paul went through the window."
"Hip, hip."
She looked over at him.
"The rapist slashed Paul across the face. Then the man slit the woman's throat and walked away. The woman died. Paul nearly did."
"Good God."
"He wasn't allowed back in the Zen center either. I haven't heard from him in years. I don't think anybody has."
Thorn heard the wheels of the van crunch across the gravel and he turned. As the van passed by, the sun caught the side glass at a different angle and Thorn could make out four butt cracks pressed hard against the windows. Four hairy moons rising in the west.
"It's not worth it, Thorn. That bodybuilder might've had a gun, or one of his buddies. You could've been killed in a barroom fight. For what? Some trivial bullshit?"
Monica shook her head. A sweat stain was darkening the center of her denim shirt. It was shaped like a heart. Not a pretty pink valentine, but that dark lump of muscle that drove her body.
"Okay, you're right" he said. "I was an asshole. I should've just walked away."
"Look, Thorn, I feel terrible about the dolphins too, but it isn't something worth losing your life over."
"Okay," he said. "You're right."
"Nothing's worth that. No war, no cause, nothing."
"Nothing?"
Monica looked at him for a long moment.
"Nothing I've ever encountered."
Thorn stared into the endless blue of her eyes. Finally she let go of a breath and looked away. She started the car, pulled out of the lot and onto US 1.
Thorn looked out his window as she brought that big car up to speed. He snuck his hand around to his bruised ribs. Growing more tender by the second. He slid a finger inside the arm of his dark green T-shirt and touched the bullet scar. It had stopped tingling. It was no longer warm. Just a scar again, thickened flesh.
***
In the second-floor laboratory at the Eaton Street clinic, the doctor gave Pepper Tremaine another chemistry lesson as they worked from midnight to dawn. He took her through each step of the process, saying aloud everything he was doing. Someday soon Pepper was going to take over this part while the doctor spent his time on marketing the drug.
First, he filled a small-gauge syringe with a saline solution and inserted the needle into the
spinal column and forced the fluid through. Then he isolated the bone marrow cells, washed them and suspended them in an assay medium. After that he acidified the sample using hydrochloric acid and then passed the solution through a Sep-Pak column. He showed Pepper how to wash the column with trifluoroacetic acid and elute it with methanol. They dried the resulting solute with a nitrogen stream.
That residue was what they were after. A powder so fine it was nearly invisible.
From ten that evening till four the next morning the doctor took her through the whole process, step-by-step. Pepper kept up with him, stayed focused, because that's what he wanted from her, what he expected. At the end of it, they had enough powder for two more injections. Eleven dolphins, two more shots.
CHAPTER 4
Greta Masterson spent her last afternoon in the Eaton Street clinic watching television in the sitting room. It was Tuesday, but her body still felt relaxed from the Sunday swim with the dolphins up in Key Largo. The other disabled vets also seemed more calm than usual. Eight of them hanging out, waiting for their suppertime injections.
Only Randy Gale had fallen back into his normal funk. Randy sat in the corner of the room in one of the folding metal chairs and stared at the painting of Christ that hung on the wall. A dark oil of the Crucifixion, the one with four soldiers squatting below the cross on a blanket as they threw dice for the purple robe. Randy had no arms. He'd lost them over twenty years ago in a land mine explosion, but he still felt them there. He imagined that they were sticking straight out to his sides. Randy felt compelled to turn sideways to get through doors. He couldn't walk down the sidewalk in Key West without angling away from people. Christ on an invisible cross. His phantom arms cramping constantly from the strain of holding them upright.
But everyone else seemed to have stashed their pain for the afternoon, watching the soaps, then the talk shows. A couple of the older amputees drinking Budweisers, the cans hidden in small paper sacks. Ginny, one of the two Desert Storm spinal cord paraplegics, was doing wheelies in her chair beside the window that looked out on Eaton Street.
Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6) Page 3
