Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6)

by James W. Hall

  "Bean's a smart man. He wouldn't do it if it wasn't going to pay off."

  "It's all getting fucked up," Echeverria said. "It's taking a weird turn."

  "Doesn't seem weird to me."

  "It doesn't strike you as strange, this guy Thorn is the same one in all the photographs on Bean's wall?"

  "Thorn? He's that kid in the pictures?"

  "That's right. I thought I recognized him, and I asked Bean about it tonight and he said yes. Same guy."

  "Wow."

  "So, I ask you, what the fuck's going on here? Our guy Bean some kind of fairy or something? He got a thing for this guy Thorn, or what?"

  "Shit no, he's no queer. He's straight as a chalk line."

  "You know that, do you? You know that for a fact."

  "Damn right I know it."

  "So what's he doing with all those pictures on his fucking walls? Some kind of fixation bullshit. One of those things, you can't get something out of your head. It drives you crazy. That's what it looks like to me. Bean's crazy about this guy Thorn. Faggot or not—you ask me, it amounts to the same thing."

  "Bean's not gay. He's absolutely not."

  "Then he's crazy."

  "Well, what if he is? Crazy isn't bad. Everybody's a little crazy." Echeverria grumbled. He watched the lightning for a few minutes, then he turned and looked at her.

  "You carrying a gun?"

  "Smith three fifty-seven," she said. "Why? You want to fondle it?"

  "I was just asking."

  "Maybe you wanted to shoot me, but you had to see if I was armed first."

  "If I wanted to shoot you, I would've done it by now."

  Pepper slowed for a car turning off the highway.

  "I had another boyfriend, a French guy. Talked real nasal like he had a head cold all the time. So, you know, I'd heard how Frenchmen could do things to women, make them come over and over. All this great stuff that only Frenchmen knew."

  "But not this guy, huh?"

  "Oh, yeah. He made me come a lot."

  "So? What's the damn story?"

  "That's it. I was telling you about a French guy who made me come a lot. You got to the end of the story faster than I was planning on getting there, so now it's over."

  "Jesus, you're some kind of dumb."

  Pepper let that pass, watching the road, a Winnebago from Tennessee in front of her.

  "You met Tran van Hung yet? The guy paying your salary?"

  Echeverria grunted. Pepper saw him touch the bulge in his pants with a finger, shift his dick around a little. She had him going now. Wearing a tight black turtleneck tonight, black jeans. Knowing she looked cute in black, brought out the olive in her eyes.

  "The Vietnamese guy. You met him?"

  "I've seen him."

  "Well, now, there's a guy who knows about sex. A man you could learn something from, Echeverria. Teach you how to screw from the front for a change, teach you a lot more than that. This guy, he takes those monkey gland shots or something, keeps his pecker stiff for hours."

  "I don't want to hear this."

  "Yeah, we've got this thing we do with hot chili peppers. You know, like the one I dripped on your arm. Burned the shit out of you."

  "This is sick."

  "I dribble it on his dick to cool him off. That's how hot this guy is."

  "Keep your eyes on the road, would you?"

  "A couple of nights ago we're in his hotel room going at it, neither of us could get enough. An hour in, maybe two or three, who knows, somebody starts knocking on the wall. We thought we were being too loud, so we slow down and listen, get real quiet and then we can hear, Christ, it's the headboard in the next room. Like there's something in the air, sex pollen or something, it's infecting everybody around us. Somebody banging away over there too. So we go back to it; a few minutes later, there's more banging. We stop and listen again, and now the banging's in stereo. Both sides of us, bang, bang, bang. Nice, expensive hotel like that, full of rich people. All of them fucking like crazy. Little shrieks over there on the new side, come on, come on, harder, harder. Like a goddamn porno movie going on all around us. So we just stopped and listened. And you know what?"

  Echeverria looked over at her.

  "What?"

  "It was better than doing it, listening to somebody else doing it. Just hearing them through the wall like that, it made me weak inside. The woman moaning, rooting her guy on, the man huffing like a bull. And it was like I could see them, a vision like, how they looked, how they felt about each other, the way their love was. And then after a minute or two of that, Tran reached over in the dark and touched me on the breast, just a hand stroking across my nipple, very light, almost like a puff of wind, touching me like he'd done a bunch of times already, and just like that, all at once, a wave of goose chills raced up my back and my heart exploded. I had an orgasm, Echeverria. A major, class-twelve orgasm. Just that one touch and I melted. Now, that's weird."

  She looked over at him.

  Echeverria was staring out his window.

  "If you're nice," Pepper said, "I can tell you sex stories all the way to Key Largo. Okay? You listening to me, Echeverria? You big, dumb, come-from-behind Cuban."

  "Basque," he said.

  "You like my stories, you big Basque?"

  "They're all right."

  "Well, you let me know if I get too dirty for you, okay? You tell me, and Pepper will just shut her mouth and we'll whistle old songs or shoot our guns out the window to kill the time. Okay? You'll tell me when to quit, and I'll quit. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  So Pepper talked all the way to Key Largo. And she talked all the way down the street where the dolphin tanks were, and past them, and kept talking even for a little while after she'd found a nearby street without houses on it and parked. After she stopped, they sat there a few more minutes to let the air cool off. Two hours talking and she hadn't even gotten through half the men she'd been in bed with. Describing the things she'd done, all the little tricks she'd picked up over the years, things men liked, things that drove even the quietest guys out of their heads.

  "That was better than our last trip together, wouldn't you agree?"

  He made a noise in his throat. He agreed.

  "So you ready to do this thing now?"

  Echeverria grunted.

  He'd been rubbing that pointing finger back and forth against the length of his dick for the last hour while Pepper told her stories. Doing it real sly like she wouldn't notice. She knew his face was hot. She believed he'd finally had some kind of little orgasm about a mile or two back in Tavernier. Groaning quietly, pressing back into the leather seat. She bet his heart rate was about double what it was an hour ago.

  Pepper had found it was a pretty reliable rule of thumb—somebody said they didn't like to hear dirty talk, it was usually because they knew they liked it a little too much.

  "You got a wife, Echeverria?"

  "Yeah."

  "You have sex with her?"

  "Not so you'd notice."

  "Then where do you get your fun?"

  "I'm not real big on fun."

  He looked ahead out the windshield down the long, empty street. A tall white bird with orange legs was standing down there in a pool of streetlight like he was lost.

  "That why you raped Greta?" she said. "You so horny you have to use a cripple to get off?"

  He looked over at her.

  "Maybe you should quit now," he said. "While you're ahead."

  "If I were to tell Bean about you raping her, you'd be a dead man. You know that? She's his next experimental subject. They're hard to come by and he doesn't like them getting hurt, not even a little bit. It can throw everything out of whack. All her chemical balances, everything. He'd kill you if he knew. Kill you in a second."

  "I'm not afraid of that legless twit."

  "It wouldn't be him who'd do the work. It'd be me."

  "Oh, boy, now I'm really scared."

  "You raped her a couple of times, didn'
t you? That's what she said."

  "I might have. I didn't count."

  "If I told him, you'd be dead by morning, riding the outgoing tide. He gives me an order, it doesn't matter what I think about it, I have to do it."

  "But you're not going to tell him, are you?"

  "I don't know," she said. "I haven't decided yet."

  Echeverria slid lower in the seat.

  "All right then," he said. "What exactly do you want from me?"

  "I don't know that yet either. But when I do, you'll be the first to know."

  He looked over, shook his head, a tired smile came to his lips.

  "You're a piece of work, Pepper. A piece of fucking work."

  "Glad you noticed finally. You big dumb Basque."

  CHAPTER 20

  Dr. Wilson told us to come talk to you, Roy. But we can't talk to you if you're asleep."

  The huge man was sitting on the side of his bed. He wore cotton pajamas, pale pink with booties. Booties like a ten-year-old. On the chest of his long-sleeve pajama top a half dozen white lambs were lined up waiting to jump a wood fence. Roy was hunched forward and kept rubbing his eyes, sniffing like he'd been crying in his sleep. Face all bloated. Must've weighed over three hundred pounds. Pepper hated to think how many trigger pulls it would take to bring this one down and keep him there.

  Echeverria had jiggered open the front door, and they'd walked right into the dark house that smelled of VapoRub, mildew, and piss. And they'd found his bedroom right away from following the sound of frog croaks and cricket noises and the loud rumble of a mountain stream running over rocks. A little machine beside his bed was making the racket. First thing Echeverria did was walk over and shut the thing off.

  Roy was flinching against the bright lights, massaging his face. Echeverria had walked around the room and turned on each and every light. Even the one in the bathroom, and another in the closet. An air conditioner rumbled in one of the windows.

  "Frogs help you sleep, do they?" Pepper said.

  "Who the fuck are you?"

  "Dr. Wilson's research assistants," Echeverria said. "He told us to come speak with you, said you were curious about something and we should explain it to you."

  "He sent you here? Bean junior?"

  "That's right," Echeverria said.

  "Frogs would keep me awake," Pepper said. "Crickets and all that water noise. I like it quiet when I sleep. Just the sloshing of the waves against the hull is enough for me."

  She was looking around at Roy's room. Posters taped to the walls, rock bands she'd never heard of. Guys with lots of vampire makeup and tattoos. Another poster of Donnie and Marie Osmond from before Pepper was born. Stuff a big dumb kid would listen to. There were stacks of magazines bundled in one corner, and a black computer on his wicker desk and a small television mounted on a swivel rack in the ceiling. Roy could lie in bed, head on the pillow, and watch his favorite cartoons. In another corner of the room there was a little white refrigerator so he didn't even have to hike to the kitchen when he wanted a cold one.

  "You're research assistants?"

  "Yeah," Pepper said. "We're here to fill you in, whatever you need to know."

  "You came in the middle of the goddamn night. Broke into my house."

  "Front door was open," Echeverria said. "We tried to make it during regular business hours, but we've been real busy, this was the only time we could fit you in."

  Pepper was studying a photograph in a cheap black frame cocked up on his dresser. Taken a long time ago when this guy was a kid, geeky as hell in a white dress shirt and shiny black pants, black graduation robe and mortarboard. Some big blond woman stood beside him out in the sun, a woman who looked like his mother. Roy was holding up his high school diploma very stiffly, like he was making fun of how the photographer was trying to pose him. Neither mother nor son were smiling. Looked like they'd just had a fight and wanted to kill each other at that moment, waiting till the photographer was finished to get back to it.

  "Listen," she said. "You wanted to know about dolphin endorphins, right?"

  "Yeah, that's right."

  "And you thought the doc might be able to help you out."

  "Yeah."

  "Why'd you think that?"

  Roy was looking up at her, his moon face all red and rashy looking.

  " 'Cause Bean junior does research on dolphins, I thought he might've heard something, you know, through his connections with drug companies."

  Echeverria stepped closer to the bed. There was a dark stain near his zipper. A credit to Pepper's storytelling ability.

  Echeverria said, "Where'd you get this interest, Roy, dolphin endorphins—you dream that up yourself, did you?"

  "Myself, yeah."

  "Nobody else."

  "Whatta you mean?"

  "He means, do you have a partner, a group of friends or something, you sit around and talk about these things with?"

  "No, I'm alone."

  "Alone, Roy?"

  "Me and my mother, that's all. I don't tell her anything."

  "You believe him?"

  "No," Echeverria said.

  "You aren't research assistants. Who are you?"

  "Sure we are," Pepper said. She glanced around the room again, used both hands to sweep the hair back off her face. "You ever hear of the rat-tail crush test, Roy? It's the way we research assistants test out new local anesthetics, see how well they're working. You shoot your experimental painkiller into the rat's tail, then you put the tail in a precision vise and start clamping down little by little, all very measured, you keep cranking until the rat squeals. That's how you know how well the drug's working. Sounds primitive, I know, but that's the way we do it. Research assistants like us."

  Echeverria was staring at her.

  "What're you talking about?"

  "I'm explaining to Mr. Everly that we're not some weirdos walked in off the street. We're scientists, digging around for the truth."

  Echeverria shook his head and sat down on the bed beside Roy. Pepper saw the butt of his Colt sticking out under his sport coat.

  "So, Roy. You call the authorities, tell them about your concerns, did you?"

  "I'm not talking anymore. Get out of here."

  Roy wouldn't look at Echeverria. If he turned his head to the right they'd be touching noses, but Roy was staring at the door, probably trying to figure how many gunshots he'd have to take before he could make it out of the room.

  Echeverria reached back and pulled out his Colt and rested it on his knee. Long silver noise suppressor screwed on the end of the barrel.

  Roy tipped his head to the side and peeked at it sitting there.

  "You're the fuckers who killed my dolphins."

  Pepper was opening her mouth to reply, when a loud cackle of laughter came from beyond the door. Echeverria lurched to his feet and stepped away from Roy and lifted the pistol. The laughter came again like somebody'd turned on the TV too loud in another part of the house.

  "What's that?" Echeverria said.

  Roy kept his mouth clamped.

  "Go see what it is," Echeverria said.

  "She doesn't know anything. I swear. I don't tell her a goddamn thing about my business. She's just a dotty old woman."

  Pepper went to the door and opened it onto the dark house and the laughter sounded again. She followed it down the hallway to the last room. She drew out her pistol, pushed open the door, and the haw-haw-haw was even louder.

  After waiting a few seconds, Pepper stepped into the darkness. The room smelled worse than the rest of the house. Like the windows had never been opened and the sheets hadn't been changed in a year, or the bedpan, or the cat litter. Down in a crouch, the pistol out in front of her, Pepper felt around on the wall for the light switch and flipped it on.

  An old woman sat in the wingback chair beside the bed. She was dressed in a pink chiffon party dress with a big red sash and bow around her waist. The dress came only to her knees and there was a rhinestone-studded clutch bag
sitting in her lap. She was barefoot, but on her head was the mortarboard from the photograph on Roy's dresser.

  "You the mother?"

  The woman lifted a small plastic box shaped like a set of dentures and she aimed it at Pepper and mashed a button on the thing and the cackling laughter sounded again. Only this time the laughter was running out of juice and trailed off into just a little buzz.

  "Need new batteries," the woman said.

  "I'll say you do."

  The woman lifted the laughing box again and pressed the button, but this time only a last little snicker made it out before it died.

  "Your son dress you like that?"

  "Roy," the woman said. "Where's Roy?"

  "Roy's been making fun of you, lady. The clothes he's got you wearing."

  There were too quick pops from the other room. If Pepper hadn't known better, she would've thought they were opening champagne over there. Getting the party started.

  "Well, I guess it's time to go," Pepper said. "It was real nice meeting you."

  She walked out into the hall, then stopped, turned around, and came back in. A whole lot of people were depending on Bean and his research. There were people sobbing in pain every hour of the day waiting for him to get the formula right. It was a hell of a responsibility. You couldn't be too careful.

  Pepper went back into the room. She set the Smith on a dresser top and took out the Flaming Canary chili pepper she'd carried along for a snack, and her #15 scalpel.

  "So, Granny, you familiar with the miraculous effects of capsaicin?"

  The old woman aimed the dentures at her like a ray-gun and pressed the useless button.

  "Capsaicin is the chemical in chili peppers that burns so bad. It's what they use in arthritis creams these days. You know about that?"

  Pepper moved closer to the woman. She stared at Pepper, at the scalpel and the small green pepper.

  "What happens is, capsaicin hits the nerve endings and burns like hell, and all that burning depletes the Substance P, that's the neuropeptide that transmits pain signals to the brain. All the Substance P gets used up dealing with the pepper juice, which then reduces the sensation of pain in that area. You use pain to make pain stop. That's how it works. You overload the receptors and they get tired and quit."