Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3)

by James W. Hall

  Neither of them spoke. Thorn giving the doctor the blankest look he owned. Let Ralph Mellon draw whatever conclusion he wanted. Thorn had been asked this secret-handshake question before, by men who used it as their sole measurement of worth. Was he one of those who wriggled down into the bowels of hell and were baptized in that slime and putrefaction? Because if he wasn't, he was not worth a thimbleful of their piss.

  Thorn never tried to explain his lack of military service. He'd met enough Vietnam guys to know he'd missed the right war. Far as he was concerned, the ones who ran to Canada or burned their draft cards had earned themselves a statue in Washington just as much as the others had. As for Thorn, he'd not even known the war was going on until it was almost over, living as he always had, exposed to the weather and the seasons, focused on the migrations of fish and birds, but not the least aware of the dips and flashes of national events. So secluded, he had not even heard the name of that distant country until one night it came booming out of a jukebox in a bar down in Islamorada: One, two, three, four, I don't give a damn. Next stop, Vietnam.

  They were dead wrong, of course, those vets who believed in the sacredness of what they'd learned in 'Nam. Hell, Thorn hadn't been to any wars, but he knew more than his share about civilian combat, the degradation, the savagery humans performed on one another. He knew betrayal and loss, he knew gore. He'd fought against an enemy he couldn't see, done it on battlegrounds without front lines, everyone out of uniform. He'd put himself in the line of fire. Felt the rip of lead through his flesh. He'd taken human life.

  And he wasn't proud of any of it, didn't flaunt it, or test others with the grim knowledge he'd acquired. And he was absolutely certain of one thing — exposure to violence didn't confer any wisdom that mattered.

  Dr. Ralph Mellon shifted himself on the leather couch.

  "Am I to understand by your silence that you don't think highly of military service?"

  Sugarman pulled one of the mourner's chairs away from Sally's desk, turned it around backward and straddled it. Thorn walked over to the office door and turned the dead bolt.

  "You got anything on tap this afternoon?" he asked Sugar.

  "Nothing pressing."

  "Look, boys . . ."

  Thorn said, "I don't believe I have any engagements till late next week."

  "Ditto to that," said Sugar.

  "Now, come on. Stop this."

  "What'd you see?" said Sugar. In that cop voice he could still summon. Flat, empty, but with a little buzz hidden in it, like the sound of a dry fuse burning.

  "I told you, boys, I'm going to have to speak to Sheriff Rinks about this."

  Sally Spencer knocked on the office door. She called out their names, but no one responded. Ralph Mellon's wife came to the door and spoke his name with some concern, and the doctor called out that he was all right, just a minute more, staring bitterly at Thorn.

  Five minutes later Sally knocked again. But no one moved. A few minutes after that Mellon's wife came around to the outside office window and rapped hard against the glass, pressing her nose to the glass. But Thorn went over and twisted the little rod for the blinds, and that was the last of Mrs. Mellon.

  A minute or two later the doctor rose from the couch, and Sugarman stood up too, and he and Thorn blocked the doorway. Hands at their sides, giving the big man the unblinking stare. Mellon shook his head helplessly and took his seat again, saying as he sat that, by god, the sheriff was going to hear about this. False imprisonment, kidnapping. He'd make things rough on them if they didn't open the door right away. But Thorn looked over at Sugar, and Sugar looked back at him.

  "You pissing on yourself?"

  "Not yet," Sugarman said. "You?"

  "Dry as bone," said Thorn.

  Mellon harrumphed, wriggled his big butt against the leather, and seemed to settle in. Accepting the challenge.

  It was three thirty-eight by Sally's cuckoo clock when they began their standoff. Thorn parked himself in her green leather swivel chair, rocked back, put his feet on the desk and his hands behind his head, staring across at Dr. Ralph Mellon. And he began to practice his well-cultivated skill of contemplation.

  For over thirty years he'd been a fisherman of one stripe or another. He'd learned a lot about waiting. He knew how to disengage his mind, drift through a twilight of half-thoughts, a semi-doze, while part of him was still wound tight and watchful. He knew how to sit, where to rest his hands, when to give himself the mild stimulations of memory or the stronger jolts of fantasy to keep the brain from shutting down completely.

  For the first few minutes he let himself crave various forms of drink. And for a while after that he listened to the traffic out on U.S. 1. He thumped his thigh in time with different songs that played in his head. He kept his eyes on the doctor, the big man with his eyes on the rug, now and then shifting uneasily on the couch. And finally Thorn thought of Darcy Richards. Her body lying in that bright cool room twenty yards away. Her empty face.

  Without destination he began to wander the time he'd known her, before they were lovers, back when she was simply his close friend's tagalong little sister. Good with a spinning rod, mildly clairvoyant about locating fish, Darcy had been in his life for many years before she'd stirred his carnal feelings. He'd loved her as a sister before he'd loved her the other way.

  At four fifteen Sally tried the door again, pleaded that she had a service ready to begin in thirty minutes and she absolutely needed to come into her office to get everything set up for it. Sugarman stood up, stretched, did a couple of toe touches. The doctor called out to Sally that he was being held hostage, and that Sally should call the sheriff and have him send help. When he'd finished, Sugarman told her to cancel that last message.

  She was silent outside the door.

  "You hear me, Sally?"

  She hesitated a moment, then said, "I hear you, Sugar."

  "We got to do this. Now, you help us, okay? Be cool."

  "Okay," she said. "Okay, Sugar."

  And Dr. Ralph Mellon crossed his arms over his big chest, settling into what looked a great deal like a teenage pout.

  As the silence grew, Thorn thought some more about Darcy Richards. He snaked back through the last few weeks, began to prowl the hours, trying to locate the day, pinpoint as near as possible the exact moment when the worry had begun to settle in her smile and deaden it. At first he confused days with other days, then after much struggle he got things back in rough chronological order for a while. But a siren passed by out on the high way and Thorn lost his concentration and scattered the moments again into a crazy snarl. Finally, methodical and focused, he ticked backward through the last two weeks, day by careful day, narrowing it, and narrowing it some more, until at last, finally, he fixed it to a single weekend.

  Yes, a weekend when she'd been very quiet. Uncommunicative. Thorn noticing but saying nothing. The first weekend of August. Lobster weekend, that madness happening all around them, the invasion of tourists, the gluttony, the orgy. Thorn in a cranky mood. Refusing to go out of the house till it was over. Yes. That was it, that weekend.

  Thorn took a long breath. He watched Dr. Mellon sweat. He watched the light fluttering against the blinds. Listened to the big trucks boom past on the highway, carrying their heavy loads down those hundred miles of highway and bridges to Key West.

  The first weekend in August. Darcy's eyes without sparkle, her head slumping a millimeter. Quiet, and at loose ends. Reading for a while, putting the book aside. Walking out onto the porch, looking off, searching the distances. Thorn with his flies, looping, knotting the bright strings, the tufts of fur and feather around the spines of steel hooks. Business as usual.

  Darcy paced the house, picking up her book again, lying back with it propped before her, staring up at the ceiling. It was there in her face. It was so clearly there. She said nothing, but that shadow across her eyes, that nervous silence, it was unmistakable. So goddamn clear, now that he pictured it all again. He should have said something
then, cut its head off before it grew huge around them and squeezed the air from their lives.

  But no, Thorn had said nothing. Avoiding the problem. He'd had his lifetime dose of trouble already, and was in no hurry to whip up any more. And Darcy knew that. She knew he'd retreated again. Maybe she'd kept quiet about the problem not just because she wanted to solve it herself. Oh, maybe there was some of that. But some part of it had to have been to spare Thorn. So he could keep larking along.

  At five twenty-five, with organ music and quiet singing coming from the chapel, the murmuring of voices from out in the foyer, Ralph Mellon took a long breath, blew out a harsh sigh, and rose to his feet in a great gush of primary colors.

  "Okay," he said. "Enough is enough."

  "So what was wrong with her hand?" Thorn said, bringing his feet down from the desk.

  "You two," the doctor said. "You're crazy. Both of you."

  "Good point," said Thorn. "Wouldn't you say, Sugar? We're all a little crazy down here in the Keys."

  "It's the water," said Sugarman. "I think somebody's been dribbling something in the pipeline. Mescaline or something. It's turned us all into raving lunatics."

  Mellon stepped out into the middle of the floor. He seemed to have grown softer in the three hours of sitting on the couch. To have lost some height, gotten pudgier, glands withering inside him.

  "Okay, goddamn it."

  "So tell us what you saw, Doc. In her hand."

  "All right, all right," he said, veins crosshatching his temples. "Well, for one thing, your friend's assailant was not some ordinary, generic killer."

  "How's that?" said Sugarman. Interested, not pressing too hard. Didn't want to frighten him into another three-hour pout.

  "This particular hand lock," the doctor said. "I believe it could be the signature of someone who's had training."

  "Go on," Thorn said.

  "The killer crossed your friend's fingers very precisely, her two middle fingers. Then pressure was applied, probably with the killer's thumb, to the motor end-plate that lies between the scaphoid and the semilunar bones."

  The doctor reached out for Thorn's hand, and Thorn stepped over and extended it. Mellon gripped his hand lightly, and pressed his thumb into a tender wedge of flesh just behind his knuckles, and Thorn winced as a jab of heat ran up his arm.

  "Yes," the doctor said. "Something like this, I suspect, but executed with considerably more force and precision. All of which severely damaged the major efferent nerve fiber, the motor nerves that run the muscles in the hand and arm. In other words, gentlemen, the killer effectively paralyzed her right arm."

  Thorn glanced at Sugarman, met his eyes. He wasn't sure about this guy. Like Thorn, Sugar didn't seem certain how much the doctor was playing with the truth here.

  "What're we talking about?" Sugarman said. "A professional? Is that what you're saying?"

  "Better than a professional," Dr. Mellon said, giving a tut-tut click of his tongue. Thorn drew his hand away from Mellon's grip. His fingers numb, tingling. "This is state-of-the-art. This is the kind of subtlety that is taught only at the very best schools. And I don't mean Harvard."

  He tried an ingratiating smile, but it didn't catch on with either of them and gradually shriveled on Mellon's lips.

  "So tell us, Ralph, just how do you know so goddamn much about state-of-the-art killing?" Thorn said. "You get a lot of that up there in Ft. Lauderdale, the old fogies knocking each other off with hand grips?"

  The doctor took a long, slow taste of air, looked back and forth between Sugarman and Thorn. Then wistfully at the door. Stood there, hovering for a moment, sweating heavily now, his gaudy beach outfit starting to give off a faint reek of synthetic fiber B.O.

  "Let's just say it's something of a hobby with me, studying martial art technique, the physiology of it."

  Thorn smiled bleakly.

  "Long day at the morgue, you come home and sit down with a martini and a good book on high-tech murder techniques."

  Thorn looked over at Sugarman, shook his head in wonder. Then back at the doctor.

  "Who're we talking about here, the CIA?"

  The doctor clamped his mouth, glanced again at the door. He shook his head several times. Trapped by wackos. Muttering something to himself.

  "Or maybe NSA, FBI," said Sugarman, the helpful cop. "Or one of the lesser-known abbreviations."

  Thorn took a step, came within a short right jab of the doctor.

  "Is that what you do, Mellon? You work for these guys? Show our boys where the pressure points are? Teach them how to be quick and quiet? Invent some new tricks, do you?"

  "I consulted once or twice," he said. "Back in the sixties. Almost thirty years ago. That's all, nothing more than that."

  "You fucking prick."

  "Easy, Thorn," said Sugarman. His voice hypnotically slow, as though he were trying to coax a cobra back into its basket. "The doctor's just helping us out here. He's taking time off from his vacation to share with us his scientific expertise."

  "This asshole trained people, Sugar. For all we know he taught this little finger trick to the guy that killed Darcy."

  "That's not true," the doctor said. "I certainly did not teach anyone this hold."

  He stepped past Thorn and moved to the door. Six seven, three hundred pounds of hibiscus. Thorn made a move for him, but Sugarman put a rough hand on his shoulder and held him.

  The doctor unbolted the door, opened it. He turned around then, his face beginning to fill with color again, running through a small series of facial tics as if he were hastily reprogramming all those mannerisms of browbeating and pomposity he'd abandoned in the last few hours.

  "I never saw this grip before," he said. "Because we didn't teach it. We weren't that sophisticated. Things have progressed since then. Apparently they've progressed quite a bit."

  "Get out of here," Thorn said. "Get out of my sight."

  The big man snorted, tasting freedom again, the old ways, and he eased out the door and pulled it closed behind him. Thorn kicked it the last inch shut, turned around and went over to one of the chairs and dropped into it. He stared up at Sugarman.

  "Is he full of shit, or what?"

  Sugarman shrugged.

  "Rinks claims he's the best around. Major authority on all things postmortem. And hell, the government's been known to use medical people that way. Not that surprising, really."

  "I'd like to make that asshole into something postmortem."

  "Weil, for right now," Sugarman said, "we got to get you home and halfway cleaned up. Wake's supposed to start at eight thirty. Unless you want to just call the whole damn thing off."

  "No," he said. "I can handle it. I just need a drink or two; I'll be all right."

  Just then the organ music swelled, vibrating through the cheap walls of the funeral home. They looked at each other and listened to it. A requiem Thorn didn't recognize. A slow gray hymn in a minor key. A melody some maestro had composed a century ago, for just such a day as this.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sunday evening, nine thirty, and Sylvie was dressed in one of her two bar outfits, the Key Largo one. Red spandex dress, hem at mid-thigh. So tight it looked like she'd been dipped in warm blood. Wearing a black five-gallon Stetson with a turquoise band, black cowboy boots that had red scrollwork, and earrings made of green stones, which dripped like candelabras from her ears and clicked when she turned her head. Looking cute. A bronco rider. A girl who could hang on tight, and given the chance, could dig in the spurs.

  The country band was finishing a set when she walked into Snappers, a wood-frame bar and seafood joint two miles north of Tavernier on the ocean side. On her way across the empty dance floor heads turned, and male voices fell into the sex warble, sizing her up, her availability, her squirm potential. Coming to favorable conclusions, it sounded like to Sylvie.

  She walked down the length of the bar, peering at their hands till she found what she was looking for. She stopped in front of two beefy ones in T
-shirts and sunburns, and asked if the stool between them was taken. They made room for her.

  The two of them had matching sunglasses hanging from leather straps around their necks, and each pair of dark glasses had those blinders on the sides. Easy prey. A couple of fishing guides, spending the night in a dark bar trying to get the sun-dazzle out of their eyes.

  Sylvie perched herself up on the wooden stool, looked across at her reflection in the windows behind the bar. Gave her cowboy hat a slight tilt to the left. Smiled.

  The lady bartender eased in front of her, gave the two fish guides an eye roll, then asked to see Sylvie's ID.

  "Twenty-seven years old."

  "I need to look at it, honey."

  "You show me yours, I show you mine."

  "Yeah," one of the guides said. "Let's see yours, Sharon."

  "Twenty-five in October," said Sylvie. "October twelfth."

  "She's legal, Sharon. Don't hassle the lady."

  The blond fishing guide leaned his forearms against the bar and made eyes at the barmaid.

  "Shot and a beer," Sylvie said. "Budweiser, Wild Turkey."

  The bartender considered her for a moment, leaning forward and peering at her like she was trying to see if Sylvie had any breasts, which she didn't, even though the spandex was designed to push up all her extra chest flesh into the bra cups. That still didn't produce enough mass you could call breasts.

  Down at the other end of the bar a waitress started calling out drink orders, and the barmaid frowned and went down there.

  "You take that thing off just for tonight, or was it for good?"

  "What?" the blond one said.

  Sylvie tapped a fingernail against the guy's ring finger. A white fleshy stripe where his wedding ring used to be. The dent of the band still visible.

  "Oh, that," the blond guy said. "That's gone for good."

  "Damn right," his buddy said. "Fuck the bitch. Gone for good."

  "What'd you do?" Sylvie said. "Screw around with other women? Drive her off?"

  The two fishing guides glanced at each other; the dark-haired one shook his head and gave some kind of warning look to his buddy. Then the blond one muttered something back that Sylvie couldn't hear and his dark-haired buddy swigged the last of his beer, shook his head at his friend, glanced once more at Sylvie, and moved on down the bar to a group of rowdy guys throwing darts.