Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6)

by James W. Hall

  "Good to see you again, Greta. I gotta say, for looking so bad, you look pretty good."

  Yes, now she knew. It was that other life. Greta on two legs. Greta marching through the offices of the DEA on her way to meet her first supervisor. The remarks ricocheting around her as she walked. This one was the worst offender. Carlos Echeverria. "Hey, man, I want to work undercover with that broad. Strip search, strip search." Worse than an adolescent.

  She stared at the tall, potbellied man, and she forgave him everything. None of that mattered. The insinuating looks, the salacious quips. Carlos Echeverria had saved her. Her colleague had pulled her from the dark sea of troubles and was whisking her back to safety. From this moment on the man had her unending permission to stare at her breasts.

  "Jesus," she said. "Am I glad to see you."

  Echeverria gave her the wolfish smile.

  Greta pushed herself higher and looked out across the water.

  "Brad's been real worried about you. He's got me searching all over Key West, talking to Greyhound bus drivers, see if they remember picking you up, people at the airport, taxi drivers. Even got me following the nurses from the pain clinic back to wherever they live, poking around in their houses. I mean, I been busting my ass trying to find you, Greta."

  "They got me on drugs, Carlos. I need to get to a doctor quick."

  "Tonight Brad's watching the doc's comings and goings. Got me doing the shit detail. Shadowing Pepper Tremaine, see what I might be able to dig up on her."

  Greta swung around, got her bearings. They were headed out to sea.

  "Where're we going?"

  Carlos kept his hand on the throttle, rolling the chrome wheel to the right.

  "Brad's very worked up over you, Greta. Not thinking too straight these days. Kind of strikes me as odd how involved he is in this case. Like maybe there's something personal going on here, something more than just a professional interest in your welfare. I've gotten that feeling."

  "Carlos, what's happening? Where're we headed?"

  He smiled at her, backing off on the throttle.

  Then she saw the old wooden cabin cruiser looming in the dark.

  Miss Begotten.

  "Echeverria! Goddamn it, talk to me."

  "Truth is, I been having some interesting personal thoughts about you myself. Remembering that week you started at DEA, how you were around the office, nose way up in the air, all haughty in those suits, Miss Ultra Professional. Well-pressed dark suits, but always careful to show just a teensy peek of cleavage. Which always struck me as odd. Like it's fine if you wanted to wave your nookie around in the air, get some mileage out of being sexy, but it wasn't fine for us to notice."

  "What're you doing, Echeverria? What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

  He drew the inflatable up to the rear platform of the cruiser.

  "You women, it pisses me off sometimes how you get to have it both ways. You make a career out of wagging your goodies in our faces, but the second somebody takes the bait, makes a comment, a little friendly pat, hey, you're all righteous and insulted, yelling for the harassment squad to come nail our ass, like you hadn't just spent an hour before work getting your tits all set up so they look like they're about to spill out of your fucking blouse. I say that sucks. That's what I say. I say that's a fucking big-time double standard."

  He idled close, cut the engine, then leaned out and lashed the starboard line to one of the cabin cruiser's stern cleats.

  "Imagine my surprise," Echeverria said, turning back to her. "Pepper hands off the raft, I come tooling out here to spend a quiet evening of guard duty, and my captive is gone. Imagine my shock and dismay. Who would've thought in the time it takes to get a raft to shore and back, a cripple like you would've jumped ship and gotten halfway to land. Christ, was I ever crazed there for a second.

  "I mean, the doc is already pissed at me, ready to cut off my rations. Two years, getting a nice steady retainer, all I have to do is alert him to any heat coming down from DEA, and then look what happened. Greta Masterson, working undercover for the big man himself. Jesus, the very thing I'm supposed to keep from happening. And if it hadn't been for your sweet little old mother, we would never have known."

  "What about my mother?"

  "She called. Looking for her little girl. The call got routed to me. Now, there's a lucky twist of fate, wouldn't you say, Greta? Fucking lucky indeed. Otherwise, today we'd all be out of a job."

  "This won't work, Carlos. Brad's going to find me. You know he will. The best thing you could do right now is take me to shore. Maybe Brad can find some way to keep this off your record."

  "Best thing you could do right now, Greta, my girl, is shut the fuck up."

  With the raft rocking in a mild swell, Echeverria wobbled over to the side and stepped across to the dive platform.

  "Now you scoot over here, young lady. I'll get you dried off and into a new nightie. If you're good, I'll read you a bedtime story. And if you're real, real good, well, I might even introduce you to the frightful hog I keep in my shorts."

  Grinning, Echeverria leaned over the side of the raft for her and Greta pivoted on the floor, swung herself up as high as she could manage, and screamed, then screamed again, aiming her voice at the nearest lights, a sailboat several hundred yards to the east.

  And though her voice was ripped apart by the breeze and blew in useless tatters out across the dark harbor, she continued to scream until his heavy hand clamped over her lips and he wrenched her backward and pulled her up into his meaty arms.

  While Greta continued to warn and threaten him, Echeverria carried her onto the boat and maneuvered her down the narrow passage to her cabin. He lay her on the bunk and stood above her staring at her breasts.

  "You're in enough trouble already, Echeverria. Get it out of your mind. It isn't going to happen."

  "Sure it is," Echeverria said. He reached out and ran his fingers over the damp fabric of her surgical scrub, outlining her right breast. She slapped his hand away. "All right, then," he said. And he cocked his arm and clipped her hard against the temple.

  In a black dazzle, she pushed herself upright and tried to jab him in the groin, but he easily swatted her groggy punch away.

  "It's gonna happen, Greta. Fight all you want, it just makes me harder."

  For a moment she stared into the twisted fire of his eyes. Then she lay back on the mattress. The morphine had begun to work, drawing her down into its humid chemical embrace. She closed her eyes and watched a thousand tiny stars explode in the black sky.

  CHAPTER 14

  Key West had never been Thorn's idea of paradise. Going there was always problematic, like visiting a black sheep uncle. Some charming bachelor who leered at all the ladies and their daughters and had a long history of sophomoric pranks. A fascinating but vulgar man, who only children and lunatics adored because somehow they managed to overlook his dark self-loathing and saw only his exuberant hijinks.

  There was always something new and gorgeous missing from Key West, some landmark drenched in history destroyed by the very men who should have been its staunchest guardians. It was a town that flaunted its obsessions, exaggerated and mocked every craze it embraced. Its endless celebration of the perverse was tiresome and shallow. Even its most exquisite parts were flawed, as more and more of the stately Victorian mansions that made up the island's charming core suffered from the dry rot of absentee ownership. Some eccentric tycoon's fourth home, closed up for eleven and a half months of the year.

  Yet despite all that, despite the tawdry vendors, the throbbing all-night bars, the steady onslaught of bulldozers, rapacious politicians, the endless supply of grabbers and takers, the island still had a powerful allure. Its blend of watery light and cinnamon breezes, its banyan-shaded streets clogged with clunky bicycles and rented mopeds and red Harley choppers piloted by grandmothers in bikinis, its iguanas with diamond chokers, its happy, raunchy, thumb-in-your-eye parade of goofiness always cheered Thorn, gave him hope tha
t the string of islands he called home, at least for a little while longer, had not been tamed.

  With only a quick stop in Key Largo to pick up his gym bag of clothes, Bean junior and Thorn made it all the way to Key West before noon. Bean drove with nervous care, as if he wasn't used to handling the large red hearse with white leather seats—a car in such gaudy bad taste that almost anywhere else but the Florida Keys it would have drawn whoops of ridicule.

  For much of the three-and-a-half-hour drive, Bean gave a long and detailed summary of the decades since their boyhood days. Thorn asking just enough questions to keep Bean moving ahead. Relieved to sink away into the shape and texture of someone else's life.

  Lonely prep school days in Vermont, homesick for the tropical Keys, followed by a grueling four years as a premed major at Harvard and a tour in Vietnam, where he was an intelligence officer. After Bean was badly wounded he was sent to rehab in Bethesda. When he was back on his feet, he returned to Harvard to attend med school. After a stint at Johns Hopkins, he spent the next fifteen years working as an anesthesiologist, bouncing from operating room to operating room around Florida, until just a couple of years ago he'd hooked up with the VA system and now was developing a specialty in the treatment of chronic pain. Never married, though he'd been close a couple of times, once during med school, once in Orlando. Though these days he considered himself wedded to his career. No time for a social life. And Key West was hardly the best place for a man like him to find an acceptable spouse. He'd only come there because the VA hospital was looking for a head anesthesiologist and he'd been between jobs at the time.

  But even after three hours of information, numerous anecdotes about his fiancées, the family backgrounds of his college roommates, the Asian cities he'd visited on R and R, Thorn felt curiously uninformed. As if Bean had given the emotionally sanitized version of his history, a carefully edited concoction that kept the real man safely hidden.

  "And you?" Bean junior said as they were cruising down Roosevelt Boulevard, Key West's burger and fries thoroughfare. "How'd you spend the last thirty?"

  "Short version or the long one?"

  "The long one, of course."

  "Fishing," Thorn said. "And tying flies."

  Bean junior smiled.

  "Ah, yes. The simple life."

  "I try."

  Thorn was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a dark green button-down. Once again Bean was dressed in a studiously casual style with drapey white trousers and what looked like a silk T-shirt.

  "You're too much, you know that, Thorn? So full of shit."

  "You're not the first to notice."

  Bean's lips twitched as he wheeled the red hearse sharply into the parking lot of a Jet Ski rental shop and jerked to a stop. He swiveled in his seat, a flush rising into his cheeks. He seemed to be trying hard to swallow back the words that were forming in his mouth.

  "Fishing, tying flies. Yeah, right."

  "What is it, Bean? What's the problem?"

  "No problem." He turned back to the steering wheel, reached for the ignition key, then halted and looked across at Thorn.

  "You don't think I've heard about all the shit you've been into?"

  Thorn was silent, watching Bean try to fight off the anger, his mouth working like a man chewing taffy for the first time. He sat back in his seat, took a deep breath, but it was no use, the rage was boiling up into his throat.

  "You think Dad doesn't tell me every detail he hears about you? Caught this bad guy, brought him to jail, risked your life to save this person or that one. I heard it all, Thorn, every goddamn particular. If you wake up with a sore throat, I know it by noon. You sneeze, I grab for the Kleenex.

  "And you sit there, still coming on like you did when we were kids. Mr. Walden Pond. Big-time bird-watcher, student of the clouds, on a first-name basis with every goddamn fish in the sea. Never grew up, not a care in the world. Well, screw that, Thorn, don't try to con me. You might be able to pull that off with your cute young girlfriend. Maybe she buys that Mr. Natural happy horseshit, but it doesn't fool me. I've had my nose rubbed in your life for the last thirty years. And all those years our parents hung out together, who'd they talk about? Who was the kid who got all the airtime? Well, it wasn't me, Thorn. I'll tell you that. It wasn't fucking Bean Wilson, Junior, no sir."

  Thorn watched a barefoot young woman in torn jeans and a red bikini top approaching along the dusty shoulder of the road.

  "You been saving that up for a while."

  "You're goddamn right I have."

  "Well, now you're rid of it."

  "If only it were that easy."

  "Maybe you should drop me off at the bus station. I can catch a ride back up to Key Largo. This doesn't look like such a great idea."

  Bean sat back in his seat and stared ahead out the windshield. The young woman had jet-black hair, which she wore as short as Monica's. She looked like a runaway who'd traveled a few miles too far and had used up the last of her bread crumbs days ago. Thorn felt the cold knot harden in his gut. He was hearing an echo of his words to Monica last night. The bitter tang of them still on his lips. Telling the woman he loved that he didn't love her.

  The traffic roared past on Roosevelt, and Thorn looked over at Bean, watched him concentrate on taking a breath and then another one. The anger still glittered in his eyes, but as he continued to breathe carefully, the veins in his temple subsided, the flush drained from his cheeks.

  "All right," he said finally, turning back to Thorn. "Look, I'm sorry. I apologize for going off like that. I've got a lot of hostility floating around inside me. But it wasn't fair to unload on you. I'm sorry."

  "Listen, Bean, the only goddamn reason I'm here right now is because you and your dad convinced me there was some hope I could get better down here. But if you're as pissed off at me as it sounds, then I sure as hell don't see any reason I should stay. I can find a rehab place in Miami."

  "Hey, I said I'm sorry. Really, I apologize. I have a lot of stored-up shit. It's not your fault. I'm not angry with you. I just get all twisted up inside and things fly out of my mouth."

  Thorn watched the young woman hesitating a few yards away, sizing up the situation.

  "Can you forgive me, Thorn?"

  Thorn blew out a breath.

  "Sure," he said. "It's okay. Forget it."

  The young woman approached Thorn's window. She stooped down and mouthed some words through the glass, then rubbed a hungry hand across her belly. Her face and arms were covered with raw patches, as though she'd been dragged along the highway behind somebody's car.

  "You got a dollar? All I have is my last twenty."

  But Bean didn't seem to hear. He reached for the ignition key and Thorn saw his hand stutter in the air. Then he stiffened and sucked in a loud breath, fumbled the keys and they spilled to the floor. While Thorn stared, Bean's back went rigid and his face crumpled as if some harsh spark of voltage had just shot up his spine.

  "Hey, you okay?"

  Bean tried to speak, but he bit the word in half as he lurched forward and slammed his forehead into the steering wheel. Thorn grabbed for his shoulder.

  "Bean. Hey, what the hell!"

  Small barks of torment came from deep in his throat. Panting hard, he seemed to gain control for a moment and lifted his head from the wheel, blood seeping from a cut at his hairline.

  Then it took him again, harder this time. It seemed to clutch him by the front of his shirt and shake him from side to side. Bean gasped, yelped as he tore the seat belt loose, and swung around toward Thorn, moving with the fury of a man on fire. Shivering violently, he flattened his back against his door and took hold of his right knee and wrenched the leg up and smacked down his heavy white tennis shoe in Thorn's lap.

  "Leg," he groaned. "Rub it. Leg."

  Quickly Thorn rolled Bean's pants leg up. He reached out, but his hands froze in the air.

  Gold rivets ran up Bean's shinline. The leg was made of white plastic.

  "Rub
it, goddamn you. Rub the fucking thing!"

  Thorn gripped the plastic, cold and unyielding, and began to massage.

  Grinding the back of his head against his window, Bean clenched his eyes against the welling tears while a series of small wet whimpers escaped from his throat. At the window the girl stood transfixed, watching Thorn knead the hard, white, artificial leg.

  ***

  "Hold still, damn it," Pepper said.

  Pepper and Tran van Hung were standing in the bathroom in front of the mirror, both of them naked. Pepper was applying chocolate lip liner to Tran's narrow mouth. When she was done she was going to fill it in with a dark chocolate shade with plum undertones. Very chic, the cosmetics girl at Sears had told her.

  She had the bathroom shade open for the light. A gorgeous view out the Bahama shutters—the patio and central gardens of the Marquesa Hotel, a big coconut palm with its fronds trickling in the breeze, rich tourists lazing glamorously around the beautiful pool. Best hotel in Key West, she'd been told, and she believed it now.

  "I look like a geisha girl," Tran said.

  "No, you don't. You look fine. Now hold still."

  "Geisha girls are okay," Tran said. "That was a compliment."

  "You men don't know how hard it is. You think we just look this way without any work. But hell, you've got to get a steady hand, got to know all kind of things about complementing your coloring, adjusting your skin tones, shading, about foundation and blush and highlighters and contours. A woman's got to be a goddamn artist just to get by."

  "You're pretty any way. Paint or no paint."

  "It'd be easier," Pepper said, "if you and me had the same skin tones. But you're more a deep autumn color and I'm warm autumn. You got bronze tones, olive, and I'm more ivory and beige. If I were doing you for real, I'd have to go out and buy cinnamon blush. But you'll just have to settle for my salmon." She held his chin in her hand while she finished outlining his lips.