The Big Finish

by James W. Hall

  Above him a breeze stirred the limbs. Flynn lifted his head and listened to them rustle, tried to make out any human sounds the wind might be concealing. Around him the strawberry scent of evergreen was banished and overwhelmed by the harsh reek of hog manure. The stench of it had given Jellyroll and Caitlin headaches all week. Their eyes reddened and Caitlin’s throat was raw. But their suffering was nothing compared to those in the communities living downwind of the farm. It’s why they’d come. To give voice to the voiceless, stand against the powerful.

  Most of all they were here to mobilize the locals and bring attention to the outrageous crimes committed against them. Only they hadn’t counted on unearthing something like this. Their discovery had been unintentional but they saw immediately how volatile their information was.

  It was well after midnight. Flynn was in the middle of a reverie about Thorn’s oceanside house in Key Largo, surrounded by dazzling blue waters that teemed with manatees, brightly colored reef fish, and rolling tarpon, and the sky above it thick with pelicans and ospreys and roseate spoonbills, a gorgeous, Technicolor, heart-soaring vision.

  When the intruders came, the rustle of the dried leaves jerked him alert and Flynn barely stifled a panicky yelp.

  After he steadied himself, he leaned out for a glimpse.

  Twenty feet away, out on the dirt track, the point man was carrying an automatic weapon and crouching low. The man flanking him held a shotgun. The man in the lead wore night-vision goggles, training them forward as he moved toward the campsite.

  Silently, Flynn came to his feet, pressing his back to the pine. He raised the whistle to his lips. If he blew it now with the men so near, there’d be no escape for him. If he waited till they passed, the others wouldn’t have time to get away.

  Shit. He’d set up the watch post too close to camp. He saw that now. Stupid mistake. Should have realized it long ago and moved farther up the trail.

  Halting, the point man seemed to sense a presence nearby. In the moonlight Flynn saw the snowy bristles of his flat-top. A guy in his sixties, Burkhart was his name, the duly elected sheriff of Winston County and head of security at Dobbins hog farm. A cold-eyed guy with a military bearing, he’d confronted Cassandra in town a few days ago. Reached out a big hand and trickled his fingers across her cheek. Drawling with mock courtesy, a threat masked in avuncular concern. It might be better if she and her friends stopped stirring up trouble and got their sweet asses out of town and didn’t return. This, he told her, will be your one and only warning. You’re a grown lady, so you’ll have to decide, but he’d hate to see any harm come to such a sweetheart.

  When Cassandra knocked his hand away, the man laughed, calling her a spitfire, and grinned into her eyes as though they’d forged an intimate bond.

  Flynn moved behind the tree, squatted down and patted a hand across the ground. He risked another peek around the trunk. Both men had halted. They’d begun to scan the area, panning their weapons in a slow circle.

  On the ground a few feet away Flynn found a rock—something from his storehouse of Hollywood clichés. Toss it into the nearby brush, misdirect the bad guys, and while their heads were turned, make a run. Most of the clichés Flynn had absorbed from his thousands of hours of film study were bogus, never worked offscreen, but he hoped, by God, this one might.

  He stepped back from the pine, keeping the trunk in the attackers’ sight line, and he hurled the rock over their heads back into the woods behind them. It clattered into leaves and fallen brush. The man behind Burkhart swung around, tracking the noise, taking a step or two away from Flynn’s hiding place, but Burkhart wasn’t fooled. One-handed he adjusted his goggles and began a slow sweep of his weapon in Flynn’s direction.

  Flynn ducked back behind the tree. His chest so constricted, he couldn’t draw a breath. The man hissed to his partner and Flynn heard the dry crackle of their steps fanning out around him.

  Flynn brought the whistle to his lips and blew two sharp blasts. He blew twice more as he was sprinting away, the automatic fire shredding the trees around him, strafing the branches, spurting the dirt at his feet. The deafening bursts of gunfire made any more warnings unnecessary, but Flynn blew the whistle twice more as he raced through the darkness, leading the men deeper into the pine forest that smelled so lovely.

  If his friends had followed their evacuation plan and fled into the darkness on foot, heading down the bank to the canoes, everything might have worked out differently. But they panicked, or Cassandra overruled them and herded them into the van, unwilling to abandon their vehicle and gear. He heard the van’s engine cough and fail to catch, then turn over again. The damn starter motor had been cranky for weeks, but they were short on cash and hadn’t replaced it. He heard one attacker change direction, rushing toward the campsite, and he heard the engine sputter to life, then the bark of gunfire, howls of rage, and even louder howls of agony.

  Flynn veered toward the camp, sprinting low. He didn’t know what he could do to help the others, but he had to try.

  All around him the pine forest was thick with scent. It was that rich odor he was thinking of, the sappy sweetness of evergreen, when he felt the hard electric tug on his shoulder, then another in his leg, and a second later a stinging spray of buckshot, then a creamy warmth spreading down his back.

  After a breathless moment, he felt a surge of unexpected joy, a release from the tension of these last few days, these last months, an exhilarating letting go, and for the next hundred yards as the mindless bullets ripped apart the air around him, Flynn Moss seemed to float above the rough terrain, fearless and strong, his feet barely grazing the earth as he saw the moonlit water up ahead, the silver current that streamed through this fertile countryside, flowing and flowing, as all rivers did, their waters inevitably returning to the welcoming sea.

  TWO

  A WEEK AFTER THANKSGIVING, AN early afternoon in December, Thorn sat at a computer console in the Key Largo library, once again searching for news of his son, Flynn Moss.

  He’d propped Flynn’s latest postcard against the base of the monitor and was scanning the rows of photographs Google search had selected for him when he typed in the words “Marsh Fork, Kentucky.” None of the images on the computer matched the green hills and lazy blue sky of the postcard.

  On his screen there were maps of the area, placing Marsh Fork in the eastern end of the state near the West Virginia line, and there were images of miners with coal-smudged faces and hard hats standing shoulder to shoulder and staring into the camera with a resigned weariness. And photos of Marsh Fork Elementary School, a one-story, tired-out brick building surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. But most of the photos featured protest rallies inside gymnasiums or in green rolling fields or in front of Marsh Fork Elementary.

  The protestors held up hand-lettered signs demanding the governor save their kids, save their elementary school, save their community, save their mountains. A few rows down from all the protest pictures were some images taken from a mile or so in the air that showed a lush green mountain range pockmarked with the gray flattened scars of mountaintop removal, a mining technique that wiped out the forests and blasted away the rivers and streams and obliterated the mountains one by one as giant cranes scooped out the black shiny coal.

  There were aerial shots that included both the elementary school and a huge pond carved into the mountains just a half mile above the school. A caption described the pond as filled with three billion gallons of coal slurry. Thorn had to look that one up and found that coal slurry was the by-product of mountaintop-removal mining. A highly toxic blend of dissolved minerals. The Web page that listed the toxins in a typical slurry pond was full of multisyllable chemicals from benzidine to dimethyl phthalate. Thorn didn’t need to look up any of those. The images of the foul brown liquid made it obvious.

  Nobody sane would want their kids attending school in that brick building a half mile downhill from a few billion gallons of toxic sludge held in place by earthen walls.


  A few weeks ago when Flynn sent this postcard, this was where he’d been, Flynn and his cohorts in the Earth Liberation Front, the group of eco-avengers he’d gotten mixed up with late last year. The postcards had been arriving regularly at Sugarman’s office. Sugar, Thorn’s closest friend, ran a one-man private investigation agency and because of that, Thorn usually deferred to him in matters of logic, but since these postcards started arriving, he and Sugar had been at odds over what they signified.

  “He’s sending you a message,” Sugar said.

  “A few words would be a message. These are blank. This feels more like taunting, showing off, trying to prove he did the right thing by joining up with these people.”

  “He wants you to know where he is, that he’s safe. He’s trying to reassure you, keep the lines of communication open.”

  “Then he should include his goddamn address.”

  “You know he can’t do that. He’s got to stay at arm’s length.”

  “He wants me to know what he’s up to, but he doesn’t trust me.”

  “The stuff he’s doing, he’s got to be cagey.”

  “Why send them to your office? Not directly to me?”

  “Somebody could be snooping on your mail.”

  “Come on. Who would do that?”

  “Whatever federal task force is hunting ecoterrorists.”

  “Flynn’s no terrorist.”

  Sugar didn’t reply. He was tired of arguing that particular semantic issue.

  “Okay, sure, he’s misguided, getting involved with these people. But he’s well-meaning. This is civil disobedience, nothing worse.”

  “So he’s not a terrorist. Fine. Use whatever word makes you happy. Point is, if he’s caught, the kid’s going to do some serious time. He’s known to the feds and so are you. Since you’re his father, I wouldn’t be surprised if your mail is being monitored.”

  “They would do that?”

  “That and more. If you had a phone, Internet access, they’d be all over that too.”

  Thorn spent a while longer scrolling through the images of Marsh Fork, Kentucky. Groups of forlorn women locked arm in arm marching somewhere, cops in riot gear blocking their way. More country folks, men, women, and children having a sit-in at the Kentucky governor’s office. Save Marsh Fork Elementary.

  He moved the computer mouse to the heading of the Google page and touched the arrow to “News.” He hesitated, glanced around the library. The place was so quiet, so polite, the world of books and reading and thoughtful people. No one protesting. No one risking their lives for a higher principle.

  The young librarian with purple hair and five nose rings was watching Thorn from behind the circulation desk, sending him “I’m available” smiles. Her name was Julia, and on several previous occasions she’d helped Thorn with the computer when the damn machine confounded him. A couple of times she’d asked about the postcards, but Thorn told her nothing. Julia had a pretty face and dark, striking eyes. Years ago he’d dated her aunt, a highway patrol officer who lived down in Lower Matecumbe.

  When Julia winked at him and cocked her head coyly to the side, Thorn gave the young lady a cool disinterested smile. Julia read the look correctly, sighed, made a wistful nod, and got back to work. Game over.

  Good. Thorn wasn’t about to trifle with the daughters of women his own age. In Key Largo such men were not uncommon, but Thorn was determined not to become one. He’d gotten dangerously close a few times over the years, but lately some fuse had blown in his libido and his attraction to younger women had faded.

  Still, Thorn continued to consider himself as relatively young, hovering somewhere between late twenties and early thirties, still in his twitchy prime. Though what he saw in the mirror was brutally at odds with that sensation. He was getting close to being twice the age he felt himself to be.

  He clicked the mouse and went to “News.” Though he’d heard nothing about it at the time, Marsh Fork, Kentucky, had been the subject of dozens of newspaper headlines and sensational TV stories in the last few weeks. That earthen dam had given way. A couple of billion gallons of waste slurry had sluiced down the hillside and swept away the one-story brick school in a toxic tsunami. Another school would now be built in a safer location. Exactly what the parents and the assorted protestors had been campaigning for all along.

  The catastrophe had occurred around two in the morning on a weekend. That night the single security guard must’ve been alerted to what was coming and had called in sick.

  No one was killed. No one injured. Dynamite had been set at four locations along the downhill portion of the dam. No group had taken credit for the sabotage, but the Earth Liberation Front was targeted in the investigation because they’d been the most outspoken critics of the dam and organized the local protests and the sit-in at the governor’s office. And after the dam burst and the destruction of the school, no ELF members could be found anywhere in Marsh Fork.

  It fit their pattern. An attack on the despoilers of the environment that was carefully calibrated to cause strategic harm to property without loss of life. Then they vanished.

  Thorn scanned a few of the articles, searching as he always did for Flynn’s name or any mention of Cassandra, the red-haired woman who led the band Flynn had gotten mixed up with last summer. Thorn met her and one of her badass lieutenants when the ELF gang commandeered his isolated house in Key Largo to use as a staging area and escape route after their attack on Turkey Point nuclear plant.

  He’d done what he could to thwart that attack and pry Flynn loose from the band of environmental crazies, and he partly succeeded, but after the mission ended that violent night, Flynn walked over to Thorn, embraced him, said he loved him but he’d had a change of heart about this ELF cell. He’d decided to go all in, dedicate himself to their goals, become a full-fledged member. Then he climbed into a green panel van with his new comrades and drove away into the summer night.

  Since that moment there’d been seven picture postcards. With a little research on each location Thorn found the same pattern repeating each time. An environmental outrage committed against a community, followed by some kind of violent attack in response, each one an attempt to solve the issue or at least bring it to the public’s attention. While they didn’t all work as neatly as the Marsh Fork venture, Thorn continued to be sympathetic to their cause. Though he had to admit, it was hard to tell if Flynn’s group was accomplishing anything of long-term value.

  In any case, Flynn was now an outlaw, and though his name was not mentioned in any of the news stories Thorn found on the library computer, Thorn’s friend Frank Sheffield, the agent in charge of the FBI Miami field office, had assured him that Flynn Moss was indeed on the extended Most Wanted list. Not hanging on the post office walls yet. But damn close.

  Ordinarily Thorn wouldn’t go near a computer. He lived in a clapboard-sided house built by his adoptive father. Surviving just fine in primitive simplicity with electricity generated by an ancient windmill and water heated by pipes exposed to the ceaseless sunshine of the Keys. His basic needs were few, his food and beer bought with the meager funds he made tying custom bonefish flies. His clientele was a faithful group of old-time Conchs and a set of young fishing guides who found in his handiwork a certain practical magic. His flies caught fish—more fish than their own handcrafted lures. Maybe not a lot more, but enough to tip the balance in their favor and bring those guides to Thorn’s door.

  Following the travels of Flynn Moss had become for Thorn a ritual of self-inflicted emotional pain, a masochistic habit he couldn’t break. His heart pitched and twisted when he sat down before the public computers and began to read the details of Flynn’s latest exploits. He wanted his son to return home safely, give Thorn a chance to make amends for all he had and had not done. But with each new stunt, the likelihood of that diminished. Off and on for the last two weeks he’d been tormented by the Marsh Fork postcard before he finally summoned the will to come to the library and confront his son�
��s recent escapades.

  Until a year earlier, Thorn hadn’t known he had a son. Flynn was the product of a weekend fling decades back and only through a series of flukes had Flynn’s mother revealed the truth and allowed father and son to meet.

  An actor by profession, Flynn was a handsome, high-spirited young man. Initially, after discovering Thorn was his dad, Flynn’s reaction was icy and distant. But months later, unknown to Thorn, he began to move in another direction. Inspired by a single visit to Thorn’s primitive home in Key Largo, impulsively Flynn Moss bought a boat of his own and began to explore the waters of South Florida, some dormant outdoorsman gene awakening in his bloodstream. He began attending Sierra Club meetings, got involved in local environmental causes, and quickly grew more radical than the other members. In a matter of months, Flynn was recruited by ELF. And so it happened that within only a year of his visit to Thorn’s spartan home, Flynn had quit his TV acting job, engaged in an assault on a nuclear power plant, then disappeared into the eco-underground, a fugitive on the run.

  It weighed on Thorn, shadowed him through his daily chores, his hours of solitude beside the bright waters of Key Largo. For months he’d been plagued with guilt and a helpless simmering anger. Blaming himself for Flynn’s dark turn and trying to imagine a way to undo the harm he’d done to his son.

  Thorn sat for a while staring at the brittle light coming through the high windows and watching the clouds drift by. Those windows, those walls, that library had been built three decades earlier, part of a package deal the developer of the shopping center was forced to accept to mitigate the loss of the many acres of hardwood hammock that were bulldozed. After all that time only a few old-timers around Key Largo remembered those trees where Thorn and Sugarman and some of their buddies had tramped around as kids and built a secret fort where they held council meetings, making up adolescent fantasies about girls their age, tales of derring-do and mystery that always concluded in saving the skin of the girl in question and, of course, winning her undying love.