As she talked, Thorn watched the manager making his rounds, barking orders at the waitresses, hovering behind them as they served their drinks, stepping in to rearrange the glasses an inch this way or that, or to set down a forgotten coaster. As he circled the room the guy helped himself on the sly to drinks left on abandoned tables. Thorn watched him sneak down the dregs of two beers and a whiskey sour.
When Bonnie finally decided she must be on her way, it was late afternoon and most of the bar's tourist trade had swarmed off to Mallory Square for the sunset silliness. Thorn finished the last of his beer without her.
He could feel the pressure in his external bladder; the plastic bag strapped around his waist was tight, probably about to overflow. He looked around and smiled at the man paying the check at the table next to him, then waited till that gang had cleared out before he unzipped himself beneath the table, whisked one of Bonnie's margarita glasses out of sight, and refilled it with his own frothy elixir. He half-filled his beer glass too, a parting gift for his thirsty host, and with a pleasant nod to the bare-chested manager, Thorn rolled out onto the sidewalk and headed back toward the clinic.
He was an hour past tipsy and for the next block he coasted along, blissfully unaware of his paralysis. The muscles in his arm had recovered, and now he simply stroked his wheelchair forward with the effortless ease of a man long accustomed to such conveyance.
Just as he was about to cross Eaton, he saw the man coming toward him. Shambling along in dark pants, white shirt, shiny black shoes. Tall, with that potbelly shaped like the helmet of a Hun. Thorn backed away from the curb and stared at the man. He knew he was drunk, knew the heavy doses of steroids he'd been getting had heated his blood to a feverish boil, but he would have recognized that man through the thickest haze.
Just to be double certain, he set a red baseball cap on the man's head, tipped it down low, then pressed the aviator sunglasses with the gold frames against his eyes. It was a perfect fit.
As if Thorn might need more proof, at that moment the man stepped out into Eaton and dug his thumbnail between his two front teeth and gouged loose a particle of food and flicked it into the street.
The man from the dolphin pools was crossing the intersection of Eaton and Duval, coming directly toward him, and following a half step behind, in a pair of neatly pressed blue Bermudas and a yellow tennis shirt, was old Doc Wilson's good friend, Brad Madison.
CHAPTER 18
"You're drunk."
"Damn right," Thorn said. "You would be too."
"I guess I would be," Brad said. "Christ, I'm sorry, Thorn. What's happened to you, it's a terrible thing."
"Yeah, tell me about it."
They were sitting in the rooftop bar at the La Concha Hotel. Tallest building in downtown Key West, a three-sixty view of the island and surrounding waters. From up there you could keep tabs on the great wall of condos and hotels that had almost finished circling the island, the same wall of concrete that was moving mile by mile to ring the entire state, blocking the water from the riffraff. Soon, if they wanted to walk the beaches of their state, they'd damn well have to rent a two-hundred-dollar room for the privilege.
Thorn was nursing a tall frosted glass of seltzer water. Across the small round table, the man named Echeverria was munching the second of three cherries from his cherry Coke. Behind him the sunset was a major disappointment. Mostly grays, just a single horizontal band of red along the horizon, which was slowly dissolving into a purple splotch. A sunburned woman at the table next to them had given the sunset a C minus. She said she was going to ask for her money back. From whom? one of her table-mates asked. From God, she said. And there was a round of dizzy laughter.
"I just got off the cell phone with Doc Wilson," Brad said. "He told me what happened to you. Must've gone down right after I saw you the other day."
"That same night," Thorn said. "A prowler."
Echeverria had big hands, long thick fingers, nails chewed to the quick. His cheeks were spiderwebbed with tiny veins and his jowls had the loose and oily look of a man who had not been eating his vegetables. He seemed monumentally uninterested in Thorn, and his small eyes kept moving around the outdoor bar as if he were awaiting the arrival of a very hot date.
"When we saw you come out of the clinic in the wheelchair, I was stunned. So I called Wilson to find out what was going on."
"You saw me come out of the clinic."
"We have it under surveillance," growled Echeverria, his eyes following the hypnotic gait of one of the waitresses.
"What is this?" Thorn said.
"Maybe we should wait till he's sobered up." Echeverria sucked the last of the cherries off the stem, dropped the stem on the floor.
"We're in a bad situation here, Thorn."
"He's drunk, Brad. Guy can barely keep his chin off his chest."
Thorn turned his head and stared into Echeverria's eyes.
"I may be drunk," he said. "But I know who you are, asshole."
"What?"
"I know who you are and what you've been doing," Thorn said. "I just don't know why yet. But I will."
"What the fuck're you talking about, you wacko? I've never seen you before in my life."
"Thorn?" Brad reached across the table and gripped his arm. "Hey, what the hell is this?"
Thorn kept his hold on Echeverria's eyes until the big man tried to swallow away the lump of worry growing in his throat, then Thorn broke off and turned to Brad.
"Sorry," he said. "Must be these drugs. I'm getting twitchy, all the shit they've been pumping into me."
He looked back at Echeverria and smiled.
"This guy's out of it, Brad. Forget him."
"Thorn, listen. We could use your help. We're in a very difficult posture at the moment, and just by the sheerest piece of luck you're in a position, you could be an enormous assistance. I have to get up to Washington tonight for a meeting I absolutely can't miss. But Carlos is staying here at the Casa Marina Hotel. He'll be acting as your contact until Tuesday when I can get back down."
"My contact? You're getting a little ahead of yourself, aren't you?"
Thorn took a sip of his seltzer. He was dead sober. Give him a white line to tightrope. Order him to close his eyes, touch a finger to his nose. Hell, he could build a house of cards standing on one hand, count backward from ten thousand. Every time he took another look at Echeverria he got a few degrees more sober.
"Look, Thorn," Brad said. "I'm not going to plead with you, but we need some eyes and ears inside that clinic. And we need them bad. You could do it. Doc Wilson told me about some of the things you've been into in the past. I think you're just what we need."
"I'm still listening."
He smiled again at Echeverria. He liked smiling at the man. It was the most fun he'd had in months, smiling at the guy that had something to do with slaughtering the Key Largo dolphins. And it wasn't too much of a stretch to guess he might also be smiling at a guy who also had a little something to do with putting him in that aluminum chair.
"It's a long story," Brad said.
"If you're buying the seltzer," Thorn said, "I've got the time."
Ten minutes later Thorn was fully informed of the situation and he was more sober than he'd been in years. A woman named Greta Masterson was missing. She was a DEA agent and had been investigating Dr. Bean Wilson, Jr., for possible diversion of narcotics. All this was an off-the-books DEA operation. Brad had wanted to protect Doc Wilson's son from a major scandal, possibly losing his license. If the suspicions proved true, he'd been planning to sit down with Bean, lay out the evidence, maybe bring Bean senior in on it, shame the boy into going straight. It had sounded easy, humane. The right thing to do. But then Greta disappeared. And now it was at a whole different level of seriousness.
"What do you think, Thorn? Will you help us, be our eyes and ears? Talk to Bean, see if something he says might give us a direction."
Thorn sat back in his chair and looked around the outdoor bar.
The woman who'd wanted her money back from God had left too soon, missing an off-the-chart sunset.
Half the sky had ripened to a flawless crimson that was only produced when sufficient pollution was floating in the atmosphere, enough to absorb the blander wavelengths. Unmuted by blues and yellows, that brilliant cherry light had stolen up from the sea and seemed to be blistering the air.
Thorn had spent much of his life on the sunset side of Key Largo and had watched the sky light up over Blackwater Sound for so many years that by now he had as many words for red as Eskimos had for snow. But the best sunsets were more than color, they were topographic displays, three-dimensional maps of the heavenly terrain. And that night's clouds were a wild collection—a dozen shapes and textures set against the backdrop of scarlet corrugations like some gigantic plowed field of blood that reached high overhead and faded off to the north and south into purplish clumps of ripe bougainvillea blossoms. Along the horizon a few scarlet barracudas were schooling among the twists and swirls of vaporous crimson coral fans. There were patches here and there with the texture of crushed velvet, and other swatches as slick and glossy as puddles of oil paint. It was the kind of sunset Monica and he would stare at wordlessly. Daunting and huge and impossible to absorb.
Echeverria glanced at the sky and looked away. Brad turned his eyes that way and took a breath and let it go as if it were the first time he'd remembered to breathe that day.
"Sure, I'll help you," Thorn said, turning his grin on Echeverria. "If it means I get to hang with my old pal here."
He lay a hand on Echeverria's and the big man jerked away from his touch.
While Thorn continued to beam at Echeverria, Brad thanked him. After a few minutes of strained silence, Brad paid the check, shook Thorn's hand, told him that they'd be in touch, to just keep his eyes open, don't go snooping, don't bring up Greta's name, anything like that. Thorn said sure, he could be tactful, no need to worry about him. A last grin for his pal, the dolphin killer. And the two men left him there with the fizzless remains of his seltzer.
When they were gone, Thorn looked back at the sky, still rippling with rosy light, and the harp string that was strung tight through the center of his chest plucked itself and a triple note, deep and resonant, thrummed through his gut. Monica.
He had spent the day not thinking about her. He had been doing a damn good job of it. It was something he'd trained at for a long long while. Blocking out difficult thoughts, holding emotions at bay. It was one of his great talents. Olympic-class repressor. A necessary ability for a man who cycled through women at the rate he'd been doing lately.
Although, of course, his were always serious relationships. Only a handful of one-night hoot-and-hollers. It was how he preserved his self-respect, how he'd made the saga work on his behalf, a tragic tale of Thorn's failed attempts at love. Always something tripping him up. Some boomerang sailing in from offstage upsetting his best intentions. And that's what had happened with Monica as well. A crack on the head, a crack on the spine, and he'd martyred himself to this new condition, told her good-bye, kissed her off.
But he didn't believe it for a second. Get enough booze circling his veins and the veritas was impossible to ignore. The only boomerangs doing any damage in Thorn's life were the ones he'd tossed himself. Maybe there was some fraction of random chaos in the events of any moment, but not enough to let anybody off the hook. The undoing of his affair with Monica was his own doing. There were no quarks or radio waves or pulsars beaming down from some control booth out in the dark heavens. Thorn had thrown the curved wood into the air and it had spun and tilted and looped back to knock him in the spine.
He'd punched Dingo the body builder. But Dingo was no boomerang, no midnight prowler. He was the kind who sailed off in his own peculiar trajectory of self-absorption. By now he was in a gym somewhere studying his body in the full-length mirror, pumping the barbells, perfecting the symmetry of his grotesque physique. The memory of Thorn, just one more goad.
Thorn had a sip of his dead seltzer and set it down on the glass-top table. The sunset watchers had gone. Now it was only Thorn and the serious drunks. A lot of veritas floating around that rooftop.
If he had it right and the world was truly stitched together with a million cobweb threads, and every jiggle here caused a jaggle there, every hop and skip produced somewhere along the network of entanglements a mirror duplicate skip and hop, then Thorn had only himself to blame for anything that happened. He'd done this to himself, paralyzed his own body because he'd tripped the tripwire that he himself had hidden in the grass. He had asked Doc Bean to look into the connection between torturing dolphins and their brains and spines and later that night the boomerang he'd sailed into the atmosphere spun back and gorked him. Doc Wilson had called his son and told him of Thorn's questions, and that same night Thorn was attacked.
Goddamn Bean, with his half a body and his lifelong hurt and his obsessive photographs. Those snapshots lining his walls told a far more bitter story than the one Thorn remembered from their shared youth. But that's the way it went. No matter how bound together two people were, no matter how many shared afternoons and mornings and midnights there were between them, every memory was edited by the heart. Each snapshot pasted on the endless walls of memory was cropped and tinted and arranged in an order that tried to tell their private story, make some small sense of their chaos and hurt.
"Anything else?" the Jamaican waiter asked him.
"I need to get her back."
"What?"
"A woman," Thorn said. "I told her I didn't love her, but I do."
The waiter looked at him for a moment.
"Well, then," he said. "She's got every right to despise and revile you."
"Yes, she does."
"What you need to do, you need to fall on your worthless knees and beg her to forgive you. Tell her you love her madly. You always loved her. And for once in your puny, worthless life, you should mean it."
Thorn looked out at the darkening sky.
"Thanks."
"Can I get you anything else?" the waiter asked him.
"No," Thorn said. "I believe I have everything."
"Right on, brother."
Thorn watched the darkness eat away at the edges of the sunset until the rooftop bar was nearly empty and the sky was completely drained of light.
CHAPTER 19
An hour past midnight, Pepper was driving the hearse north on US 1. The black sky out over the water pulsed with strokes of lightning as they passed through Sugarloaf Key, heading back up to Key Largo—Pepper and her favorite traveling companion, the tall guy with the belly. Finally took his sunglasses off and his baseball cap, showed her his bald head, and finally told her his name. Echeverria.
"What is that, Cuban?"
"It's Basque."
"What the hell's that?"
"In the north of Spain, industrial. Basques are the supermen of Spaniards."
"You're a superman?"
"I can be," he said. "If the situation arises."
"I had a Cuban boyfriend once," she said. "Only way he'd have sex was from behind. Didn't want to look at me. Now, what kind of thing is that, you're making love with a guy, he can't stand to see your face."
"I don't like women who talk like that."
"Like what?"
"Dirty. Gutter shit."
"I don't care if you like me or not. I was making conversation. We're in the car together like this, it kills the time driving along. We got two hours, and what, we're supposed to look out the window the whole time? Whistle songs?"
"Did you like it when he fucked you from behind?"
"I liked it fine."
"Then what're you complaining about?"
"It's not normal. The guy didn't like kissing or anything from the front. I couldn't even suck him. I never met a guy didn't like getting sucked. Except this Cuban."
Echeverria looked out his window. She thought she saw was a bulge growing in his pants. For a guy who didn't like gir
ls who talked dirty, he seemed to be liking her just fine.
Pepper had never considered herself highly sexed. Just a normal woman, normal appetites. But in the month she'd spent hanging out with Tran van Hung she'd gotten seriously revved. Tran wanted it all the time, day, night, afternoon, standing up, in the shower, slopping around in the tub, in the car, at restaurant bathrooms. Soon as he finished one session, he was looking for a way to start the next. And Pepper must've caught the fever. The way the guy wrapped himself around her until she couldn't tell them apart, she'd be looking at an arm or a leg in the dark while they were humping and would have to reach out and pinch it to see if it was hers or his. A couple of snakes.
"So what do you know about this guy Thorn?"
"Thorn?"
She glanced over at him.
"Yeah, you know anything about him?"
"Not much," Pepper said. "He's some kind of old friend of Bean's or something. Apparently he just had a nasty accident."
"Well, if you ask me," Echeverria said, "it wasn't nasty enough."
"How you mean?"
"I met him this afternoon, it was like he recognized me from somewhere. Going after me like he knew something he shouldn't."
"A trained professional like you," Pepper said. "Hard to imagine anybody'd have any dirt on you."
"I don't like it," Echeverria said. "It's too cute. The doc brings this guy into the clinic, knowing he's been snooping around about the dolphin thing. It's like some bullshit spy movie. Trying to be too clever, buddy up to your enemy. So now Brad Madison recruits this guy to sniff around with the other patients. Does that bother Bean? Not a bit. Now the doc gets the bright idea he can feed Brad info through Thorn, send him off in the wrong direction. Tell him Greta was having a fling with one of the vets, some crap like that. They ran off together. Another bullshit story stacked on top of a Leaning Tower of Bullshit. But we don't need any of that. It just makes things more complicated. It's stupid. The way a civilian thinks."
Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6) Page 17
