Sitting across from him, Cruz was on the phone, her second call since they’d been seated. Speaking softly, a hand cupped over her mouth as she told someone to expect them by early afternoon.
When she finished, she set the phone beside her plate of pancakes and said, “That was our contact in Pine Haven. Name’s Webb Dobbins. It’s his farm Flynn’s group was targeting.”
Thorn watched her cut up her short stack and spear a chunk and tuck it quickly into her mouth, then repeat the process. She wasn’t having any trouble with her appetite.
“What really happened to Tina?”
“Just what I told Sugarman.”
“He didn’t believe your story. And I’m having the same problem.”
“So call her. Ask her yourself.”
She dug her cell from her purse and handed it to him.
“Don’t know her number,” Thorn said.
Cruz recited it to him.
“I had her under surveillance for some time. I know all her numbers.”
Thorn punched it in. Got her voicemail.
“Sorry. Me and my honey are on a little romantic getaway. If I’m not answering, well, you know. I’m otherwise occupied. Whoopee.”
Thorn shut off the phone and set it on the table.
“She’s not answering.”
“She’s probably sleeping it off. She smokes a lot of grass, that one.”
Thorn nudged his plate of waffles farther away.
“Who drove Tina back to Key Largo?”
“You still don’t trust me?”
“I’m working on it. Who drove her?”
“An associate of mine.”
A few minutes later, waiting at the checkout register, his gym bag in hand, Thorn looked out at the parking lot and saw Deputy Randolph speaking to a man in a blue suit. Thorn told Cruz he’d meet her outside and before she could respond he was out the door.
The man in the suit was short and heavyset with a comb-over the morning breeze had flipped up like the hinged lid on a mason jar. He was consulting an electronic tablet while Randolph was unwrapping a stick of gum.
“Thorn,” he said, folding the gum into his mouth. “You’re still here.”
“About to leave. Unless you need me.”
“And who’s this?” the fat man said.
“Guy I told you about, hauled the kid’s body out of the fire.” The fat man looked Thorn up and down but didn’t seem awestruck. “Thorn, this is Detective Dickerson.”
“That fire was arson, wasn’t it?”
“What makes you think that?” Dickerson took a second look at Thorn.
“Like I told Randolph last night, there was a substance in the victim’s mouth. At the time I thought it might’ve been vomit, but now I don’t know. It was heavier, thicker, smelled like spoiled meat. You might be looking at foul play.”
“You a forensics specialist, are you? Come to our small hamlet to share your expertise with the country boys?”
Deputy Randolph must’ve seen the veins rise in Thorn’s throat. He took hold of Thorn’s arm and steered him back toward the restaurant.
“Being an asshole,” Randolph said. “It’s his mission in life. Don’t take it personal.”
Thorn shrugged out of his hold.
Randolph said, “What you told me last night, the goop in his mouth, I passed it on to the ME and he took a look before he started the autopsy. It’s all preliminary, but yeah, seems to be a big wad of ground beef in the kid’s cheeks, more of it blocking his windpipe. And he wasn’t wolfing down a burger. The meat wasn’t cooked.”
Thorn asked him what they made of that, but Randolph shook his head.
“Murder by meat is how it looks. A fire to cover it.”
“You ever hear of that before?”
“No, sir, that’s a new one on me. Hard to picture how a thing like that could happen, you know, the mechanics of it. Not to mention the why.”
Thorn spent a few uncomfortable seconds trying to picture someone being choked to death on a handful of meat.
“One other thing came up,” Randolph said. “Early last evening apparently there was a confrontation, the kid versus some fellow in the drive-through window. Manager told us about it, thought it might be relevant. The incident was captured on the security cam. We just took custody of the disc, haven’t had a look, but I don’t have much hope for that.”
Thorn was staring at the wreckage.
“You want to leave me a cell number, I’ll let you know the outcome of the investigation, seeing you have a personal stake.”
“Not personal. I was just passing by. I did what anybody would.”
“Wish that were true,” Randolph said. “I surely wish that were true.”
“Good luck finding the guy. I’ll check back if I’m free.”
Across the parking lot, Cruz motioned for him to join her. She was waiting at the rear of a brown four-door sedan, an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, one of those gas-swilling mastodons from twenty years back. The trunk was open, her gear and the green duffel stowed inside. Thorn tossed his gym bag beside the other bags. When he slammed the trunk and straightened, Cruz was in his face.
“Now listen. The two people you’re about to meet, they’re members of my team, but they can be quite volatile. So I’m asking you, please, don’t antagonize them. The less you interact with them, the better. They don’t need to know anything about you, and you don’t want to know anything about them. Keep it impersonal. Clear?”
“I’m feeling a little volatile myself.”
“Control yourself. Don’t run this off the rails. There’s a lot at stake.”
The guy was sitting behind the steering wheel and in the seat behind him was a pale, emaciated young woman with gigantic sunglasses that hid half her face and a baseball cap cocked sideways. She wore a baggy black sweater and jeans ripped at the knees, and was scrolling through messages on her phone and didn’t look up as Thorn and Cruz stepped close to the Olds. There was something vaguely familiar about her but Thorn couldn’t say what.
Cruz knuckle-tapped the guy’s window and he cranked it down.
“This is the man I told you about.” She gestured with her chin at Thorn.
The guy continued to stare out the windshield at the charred ruins of the burger joint.
The young woman in the back rolled down her window.
“Hey, me and X were thinking of going retro, boys up front, girls in back. Can you dig it?”
When they were seated, Thorn riding shotgun, Cruz introduced him to the driver a second time. The man didn’t say a word or look over, and he didn’t offer his hand and Thorn didn’t offer his. An instant bristling standoff, the kind of hairy-chested ritual Thorn had experienced since he was old enough to make a fist. Two guys thrown into the same small cage with the clear understanding that only one of them would be coming out with his manhood fully intact. In recent years Thorn had lost interest in such bullyboy contests, but the mood he was in this morning brought it all back.
“X-88,” Thorn said. “Is that with numbers or you spell it out?”
The guy looked over at Thorn. He was swarthy, in his late twenties, heavyset with overripe lips and a gleaming shaved head. Big arms swelling the sleeves of his black polo shirt. A fleshy beer keg, thick in the chest, thicker at the waist. But it didn’t look like fat to Thorn.
“88,” he said. “It’s a number. Maybe you never counted that high.”
“Good one,” Pixie said.
“You use a hyphen or go without?” Thorn said.
“It’s a nickname, Thorn,” said Cruz. “Give it a rest.”
“He’s giving you a ration of shit, X,” Pixie said.
Thorn glanced back at the young woman.
“What? He needs an interpreter?”
“Thorn?” X said. “Is that with a prick or without?”
“Out of the park,” Pixie said, clapping her hands. “Slam dunk.”
“Okay, knock it off, all of you. We’re on the same side. Where we�
��re going, what we’re doing, we can’t be at each other’s throats. I’m warning you. Stop the smartass. His name is X-88. Numbers, hyphen. Call him X if the ‘88’ is too much for you. And you too, X. From now on we need to depend on each other, so let’s get started, no more bullshit.”
They got on I-95 and rode in silence for a long while, passing through Jacksonville, taking the high bridges across the St. Johns River, then out of the city and into Georgia. Passing through the coastal lowlands, the flat watery bayous and marshes, saw grass, palmetto, live oaks with beards of moss.
After another half hour of quiet, X pulled off the interstate, turned into a service station, and got out to pee. Everyone else stayed put.
“In case you’re interested,” Pixie said, “me and X-88 are hardline vegans, straight-edgers. We don’t do drugs, eat meat, cigarettes, coffee, anything that pollutes our bodies.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“X has hyperosmia,” Pixie said. “A very rare condition. He smells in high definition like a dog, you know, only unlike a dog, he can actually describe what he smells, put it in words, which is an art form if you ask me. Like how a wine connoisseur talks, you know, a special vocabulary.
“He can smell your breath, tell you what you had for lunch, or you hide something, he’ll walk right over and dig it out of where you put it. I didn’t believe it at first until he showed me. My bra, lipstick, a toothbrush. I hid them, in like two seconds, he found them. He’s freaking amazing.
“And he knew who slept on that motel mattress the night before us. Some long-haul truck driver and a black girl he’d picked up at a truck stop. He could smell the particles they left behind. And traces of the others before the trucker, layers of scent, like archaeology, how long they stayed, if they had sex or not. Most didn’t, in case you were interested.”
“And you believe all that?” Thorn said.
“It’s genetic, from when his mother was pregnant with him, she was heavy into meth. That’s what his doctors think. It corrupted his DNA. It wasn’t so bad when he was a kid, but the older he gets, the more acute it is. Lately it’s really been bothering him, the last month, giving him headaches, all the odors swarming the air all the time.
“He’s studied the science of it to see why he’s like how he is. He’s seen specialists, neurologists, he’s been CAT scanned to see what’s going on inside his brain and what they told him, it’s because his hippocampus and frontal cortex are different, a lot larger. He’s got all these extra neurons in his olfactory bulb. There’s nothing he can do about it, just accept it. Sometimes, all the smells in the air, it can overwhelm him, that’s what he says. You don’t believe in science?”
“Enough,” Cruz said.
“And let me tell you, he inherited his old lady’s cranked-up metabolism too, because X has stamina, I mean serious staying power. Shit, only guy I ever met could outlast me. I’m telling you, some mornings I can barely walk.”
“Stop it,” Cruz said. “Our private lives are private.”
“You’re such a prude.”
“Try to act professionally, Pixie. Just this once.”
“That’s a shitty attitude. Boundaries, repression. Me, I’m into total transparency. Pixie, the permeable membrane. Share everything. It comes into my mind, it’s out of my mouth. Just skips right over my brain. I mean, keeping secrets, shit, it gives you cancer, you never heard that?”
“You’re making an ass of yourself.”
“Where’d you pick up these idiots?” Thorn asked Cruz.
“Drop it, Thorn.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Pixie. “She didn’t pick me up anywhere. I popped out from between her legs. I’m Pixie Cruz, Mommy’s worst nightmare.”
Cruz frowned out her window and her reflection revealed the face of the woman she might become in a decade or two. Sallow skin, sunken cheeks, eyes hollowed out, whittled away to almost nothing.
Pixie said, “Mom lost the daughter she loved, the good girl, white sheep. She’d just as soon I fuck off, disappear somewhere. Isn’t that right, Mom? But she puts up with me because she’s crazy about X because he’ll do shit she doesn’t have the guts for. He’s a badass, a total badass.”
Cruz massaged a temple as if to ease a sudden headache.
“Thank you, Pixie,” she said. “Thank you for never disappointing.”
X got back in the car.
He registered the strained silence, looked back at Pixie, then at Cruz and said, “I miss anything good?”
Thorn leaned over and blew a breath in X’s direction.
“What’d I have for breakfast?”
“Coffee,” he said. “Black. Last night you had a bite of a fried-fish sandwich. A couple of french fries with ketchup. At the moment you’ve got acid indigestion.”
“He get it right?” Pixie said.
“Like a speaking dog,” said Thorn.
“See,” Pixie said, “what’d I tell you? He could do Vegas. X-88, the Amazing Sniffer. I could see it. Me in a tight gown, showing some boob, bring people up from the audience onstage. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”
“Vegas sucks,” X said. He put the car in gear. “All that phony shit, the canals of Venice, Eiffel Tower. It’s Disney World on Viagra.”
“Well, Branson then,” said Pixie. “There’s lots of venue possibilities. Soon as we finish with this deal, we’ll kick around ideas. You got to cash in on your god-given gifts, share them with the world.”
“And you, Pixie,” Thorn said. “You have any god-given gifts?”
“Damn right, just ask X. He’s experienced a few.”
X’s mouth remade itself into something resembling a grin, but it was a misshapen thing, as if smiling was not in his repertoire. He gunned the big car up the ramp back onto the interstate, mouth spread wide, showing a set of large teeth. X’s head was tilted back a degree or two, listening to Pixie begin what became an hour-long monologue, a grand tour through her sexual history, from losing her virginity at ten to a man selling magazines door to door, to the months she turned tricks in parked cars outside her junior high, then the year she spent in juvie for some bullshit charge of dealing crack, and a few months with a South American coke dealer, living with some other girls in his penthouse on Brickell Avenue, a big-time view of Biscayne Bay, servicing his friends, men and women who were partying at his condo, all the time Pixie was picking up new ways to please a man, a great education, prepping for X-88.
Cruz shut her eyes and rocked her head back against the seat with the exhausted look of one who’d long ago given up trying to regulate her daughter.
Thorn listened for a while, then turned his attention to the distances of the Georgia countryside, the blue sky broadening and deepening in color in the east as the sun pushed higher, watching the lazy, halfhearted flights of egrets and herons, rising from the waterways, elongating their bodies, catching the updrafts like spirits ascending rapturously, puncturing the blue skin of the sky, as if they were reentering the heaven from which they’d descended. And every bird he saw, every wisp of cloud, each leaf tumbling in the breeze reminded him of Flynn, the shadows cast by trees, each ripple etched in the silver marsh spreading eastward toward the sea was Flynn, his only son, lost to him out there in the vastness beyond the limits of sight and touch.
THIRTEEN
HERBERT SHUBERT LIVED IN A forest west of St. Augustine, a home with no plumbing or power, just sheets of scrap plywood nailed to some trees, formed into a box with a roof made of a blue tarp he’d stolen off a house back near the interstate after a hurricane ripped away all its tiles.
Up at dawn, Herbert was foraging near the asphalt two-lane. That’s what he did with his daylight hours. Scavenging the amazing shit people threw out of their cars. Half-eaten burgers, pizza slices, beer cans with a couple of swallows left, half-smoked cigarettes, sunglasses, shirts, pants, belts, socks, even a wallet once, with cash money and love notes folded up in the pockets.
It was usually kids coming way out in the
woods to park and fuck. He’d seen some filthy sex out here. Seen some porno stuff and homo stuff late at night in the glow of the interior lights. Kids trying out their bodies. Making orgasm screams.
Once or twice Herbert had been tempted to mug one. Almost worked up the nerve, but stopped when his mother spoke to him and warned him that he’d surely fuck up and his victims would escape and bring back the cops and throw him in the lockup again, with the gangbangers, spastics, and the howlers. He didn’t want to go back to jail.
For an hour he worked up and down the shoulders of the road, scrounged a few butts, a half-smoked cigar, found a banged-up Zippo lighter with its insides dried out. Toward the end Herbert found a pair of black silk panties that were big enough to fit him. He sniffed them and damn if they hadn’t been worn recently. What must’ve happened, one of the fuckers parked out in the woods probably lost them, or some wild party girl flung them out of a moving car. He stuffed them in his pocket for sometime when he might want to dress up.
On the way back to his shack he crossed the sandy path that ran near his place and saw fresh tire tracks rutted deep in the sand. He stared at them, followed them to where they stopped about a half mile from the road. He hadn’t heard anybody over here last night, no pleasure screams, not a damn human sound, but then he’d been drinking the half jug of red wine somebody left at another lover’s lane a mile in the other direction. So that might explain it. Drunk. Sorry he’d missed it. He liked to watch the fucking or just listen.
He poked around where the tire tracks ended. Scrounging for food scraps or beer cans or used condoms. He saved rubbers. Had a nice collection, different colors and sizes he hung around his shack for decoration.
Scrounging in the woods, he heard something. He listened some more then headed off that way into the brush. And a few feet later he heard the snort and snuffle and he knew it was the bear, an old bear that lived way back into the woods. They’d crossed paths a few times, and they got along, you could say, the bear keeping his distance and Herbert keeping his. That snorting bear heard Herbert approaching, treading on sticks and dried leaves, and the bear got up from whatever he was doing and snuffled on out of there, not in a big hurry, but going away, finished with his business.
The Big Finish Page 10
