Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3)

by James W. Hall

  Thorn thought about it for a moment, gazing out at a tree farm, long arcs of water shooting out over the rows of palms.

  "You gonna be sick?" Judy said.

  Thorn said no.

  " 'Cause I had that happen, you know. Guy from Washington, down here two weeks ago to audit the hardware, make sure none of the agents had stolen any typewriters, that kind of thing. So we were riding along like this, and he kept pestering me to see what I looked like without my nose. I showed him and a second later he puked all over the dashboard. We got him cleaned up, and the asshole spent the rest of the day trying to make it up to me, ended up asking me out for a date. Wanted to take me dancing, for christ sake. I said, 'Look, honey, you think I'm going dancing with a guy, he pukes when he looks at me? Come on, get serious.' "

  She glanced over at Thorn again.

  "You sure you aren't about to be sick?"

  "I'm fine," said Thorn. "I was thinking about something else."

  "Sure you were, honey. Sure you were."

  "I was thinking of all the sun I've gotten. No sunscreen, no hat."

  Judy Nelson was quiet.

  "And how they used to tell us in school, all that sunshine was making us healthy, the darker our tans, the more vitamin A."

  "Vitamin melanoma is more like it," Judy said. "Hell, I spent so many years in the sun, I didn't even know I was a natural brunette till this nose thing happened and I started staying in the shade. I thought I was real blond. What a goddamn disappointment."

  Thorn chuckled along with her.

  "Lucky for me," she said, "I never was a slave to men's approval."

  She was quiet for a moment, pulling out to pass a tractor that was hauling a large water tank. When they were back in their lane, she said, "So, you gonna tell me why you want to meet Winchester?"

  "I've got an interest in fish farming."

  "What? Thinking of going into the business?"

  "Maybe."

  "And you want to spy on the competition? That it?"

  "Not spy, exactly. I just want to see if the whole operation is too complicated for a guy like me to take a chance on it."

  He could feel her staring at him, but he didn't look her way.

  They watched another mile go by in silence. Traveling east now, beyond farm country, the land growing soupy, more barren, trees sparse, sawgrass and palmetto, the brown distances opening up. That wide empty plain of the Everglades.

  Its beauty was so subdued most people had trouble savoring it. Plenty of times Thorn had run into tourists who'd driven across the Glades for hours looking for the spectacular views, and not seeing anything special, wound up thinking they'd been on the wrong road.

  True, it was no Grand Canyon. But then, any damn fool could get out of his car and stand on the rim of that incredible gorge and look down and have an easy rush. But this broad empty space was a hell of a lot more demanding. A stark place, monochromatic at first glance. It was a place you had to wade out into. Had to train your ears to uncover the faint sounds, sharpen your eyes enough to tell one vague gray from another. That was one of the problems. People were so glutted on the garish, the loud gimmicks of Disney World, the neon extremes of the new Florida, they didn't appreciate grays and browns anymore. The nuances of dull greens.

  The result was, a lot of people were willing to part with what they took to be nothing but a colorless mosquito breeding ground. Willing to let the machines gobble away at it, mile by mile, drain it, pave it, let the cardboard housing developments sprawl farther and farther into that place where most of south Florida's rainfall and half of the wildlife was spawned. That sweet fertile heart of the state.

  Thorn looked down at Judy Nelson's gel-filled nose.

  "So tell me about this particular fish," he said. "What the hell's so special about it that the government has to send their crack agent out to inspect?"

  She smiled at that, reset her hands on the steering wheel, glanced out her window at an old yellow school bus straining to pass them. It was full of sleeping laborers.

  "These fish are getting to be a damned nuisance."

  "How's that?"

  "They're too successful," she said. "Flood canals down here are chock-full of them these days. A lot were released by Florida Freshwater Fish and Wildlife Commission people a few years back. They thought tilapia might fill a niche in the ecosystem. Eat some of the algae that's choking the waterways. Instead, that goddamn fish turned out to be worse than the algae. Filled the whole system. Now, ten years later, it's the tilapia that's choking the canals. They're the goddamn kudzu of marine life. Weeds with eyeballs is how I think of them. Crabgrass with gills."

  "And Winchester? What's he like?"

  "Harden Winchester," she said, and smiled at the windshield. "Hell, some days when I'm bored, my brain getting sluggish, I make the drive out here just to spend some time around Harden. Man has these slow, Texas manners, even drawls a little, but he's got a damn power plant for a brain."

  "He married?"

  She turned her head to him, her eyes with that look people sometimes have when you've come too close to their secret stash.

  Judy shifted her eyes back to the road.

  "You'd have to be a special woman to live with Harden," she said. "The man gives off a hum, day and night. Being beside him, it's like standing next to a couple hundred pounds of uranium, he's buzzing away all the time."

  Slowing for a sharp curve, Judy said, "I never been real sensible when it came to picking men. But let me tell you something, if Harden Winchester was available, I'd be on him like a cat on a lizard. Unfortunately, the man's eyes are fixed on the horizon. He's after something a lot bigger than Judy Nelson."

  "Sounds like a crush to me."

  "More than a crush," she said. "More than that."

  Thorn watched a flock of ibis banking south above a line of slash pines.

  Judy was silent for a mile or two. Slowing down a little, forty, thirty-five. There were cattle on both sides of the highway now. Big Angus bulls sunning in the grass with white egrets standing on their backs pecking happily at the insects fastened to their hides.

  She slowed the pickup even more, braked, and guided them off that narrow two-lane onto a narrower side road heading deeper into the Glades. A soft sandy road with deep tire tracks.

  "People call tilapia the Jesus Christ fish. You know that?"

  Thorn said no, he hadn't heard.

  She looked over at him and said, "You religious, Thorn?"

  "I can be. Under the right circumstances."

  She smiled, her face softening.

  "Folklore has it that tilapia was the fish Jesus used to feed the five thousand. The multitudes."

  "A miracle fish."

  "Yeah. Some people seem to think so."

  Thorn looked out the windows. Nothing synthetic in any direction. Just those slash pines, loblolly pines, stoppers, palmettos, sawgrass, a few twisted cypress trees, the long slow glide of hawks. Clouds mushrooming in the east, darkening at the edges.

  "I think what it is," Judy said, "like with a lot of things, tilapia do fair to middling in their native environment, average, not great, not bad. But soon as you move them away from home, all the rules change. The checks and balances they had back home are all different. New temperatures, new ultraviolet light rates, whatever. So, in the new place, they either wither up and die or they flourish. With tilapia in Florida, it's the second. These fish are growing like mold in a hothouse. Nobody really knows what impact they're going to have, long-term. That's why we gotta watch them so careful."

  Thorn watched her steer the pickup around a sharp bend, the sand getting deeper, darker. Mixed with the loam and marl, the crushed sea-shells. This enormous piece of real estate so recently risen from the sea.

  "You ever eaten one?"

  "I have." She picked up her nose from the seat between them, gave Thorn a warning glance — a chance to look away. Then she snapped the nose back into place.

  "They any good?"

 
"You've probably eaten them too, and didn't know it. Tastes enough like snapper, they get away with substituting it in restaurants these days. Flaky white meat, broils up nice, not much flavor really. Kind of like tofu. Tilapia's so bland, whatever seasoning you put on it, that's how it tastes."

  "I've never worked up much excitement for tofu."

  "Oh, well. Nothing wrong with a little bland now and then. It's the American way. If you can make it taste enough like chicken, you can make a million bucks off it."

  Thorn looked out his window, at the expanse of federal land. Cypress and pine, palmetto scrub. Clouds growing dingy in the east. A stand of trees in the distance where a colony of ibis was roosting. The big white birds crowding the limbs like outrageous blossoms.

  "I like my fish gamy," he said. "A thing grows up in a breeding pen, its gotta be dumber, slower than something in the wild. If I eat an animal, I want it to be one that died fighting."

  "Hey, get with the program, Thorn. We all gotta start gearing up for the twenty-first century, my friend. It's going to be the age of man-made everything. You can just forget gamy."

  He looked out his window at the brown sweep of empty miles.

  "I haven't learned to stomach the century we're in yet."

  "Well, let me tell you something, doll, you want to get along with Harden, I'd just keep quiet about that wild versus penned bullshit. He's a goddamn missionary for these fish. Talks them up all the time."

  She slowed for a deep trench, slewed across it at an angle, but kept the pickup moving.

  "So when you come out here," Thorn said, "what're you supposed to inspect for?"

  "Pretty routine," she said. "Just gotta watch they don't add more ponds than their license allows for. Harden's licensed for seven. I forget the total water volume he's allowed, but it's considerable. The main thing, though, is to make sure the place is secure."

  "Secure?"

  "Oh, you know, some of these yahoo fish farmers, they get a crop of fingerlings that are running small, they'll lay a sewer pipe over to a canal, pump the runts out. Like flushing alligators down the toilet. Doesn't get rid of them, just gives the state something else to spend its money on."

  "Florida's in the fish killing business now?"

  "Not yet, but it keeps going like it is, someday we might have to. Trouble with fish toxicants is, they kill everything, not just tilapia. So for the moment, we gotta make sure the fish farmers dispose of their larvae properly, don't run any risk of letting fish get free, add to the problem we already got."

  Judy wheeled them around a sharp turn, almost lost traction in the sand, but kept working the gas pedal through the corner. As they rounded a bend and looked down a short straightaway at a metal gate, Thorn said, "So, who am I supposed to be?"

  "What?"

  "Who am I going to pretend to be?"

  "All right," she said. "Let's see." She slowed the car while she thought. Then swung her head around smiling. "How about district supervisor? You're in from the Atlanta office. Taking a day off from your desk job to see the lay of the land. Get oriented."

  "In other words, I'm your boss."

  "You think you're up to that, kiddo?"

  "Judy, I don't think there's anybody could be up to that."

  "You got that right, Thorn. You definitely got that right."

  She pulled to a stop at the gate and got out of the car. In the shrubs beside the gatepost someone had nailed a small sheet of plywood to a poisonwood tree. Spray-painted in fading black letters it said, THE FUNNY FARM.

  Judy Nelson pushed the gate open and walked back to the car and got in.

  "Funny Farm?"

  "These Winchesters," she said. "They're a laugh a minute."

  Judy took them down a long bumpy road, the sand becoming something less than sand, and that becoming something closer to water. Finally, she slogged the truck through a sharp left turn, and all at once they were facing Sylvie Winchester and a man who had to be her father.

  Sylvie in cutoff jeans and a black long-sleeved Raiders jersey and muddy cowboy boots. The shirtless man was thick-chested and bald, with a silver gristle of beard. He had a sunbaked boxy face, and what hair he had was skinned close. All he wore were yellow gym shorts and tennis shoes. He was holding a shovel at port arms.

  As Judy turned off the engine, the man's face lost its tension and rearranged itself into a wide smile. Then a half second later, Thorn registered something else, some darting glance his way that diluted the man's smile by half. Harden Winchester seemed to have gone on full alert.

  A hundred yards behind where the two of them stood, Thorn saw several earthen-banked ponds the length and breadth of football fields. And off to the west were half a dozen smaller tanks no larger than backyard swimming pools. Aluminum frames arched over the smaller pools like the rigging for a winter hothouse. And a complex system of white PVC pipes led across the surface of the weedy dirt from pond to pond, and eventually converged at an aluminum Quonset hut.

  To the east, surrounded by a bright green lawn, was a small house built of gray weathered wood. Pioneer construction, a wood cottage with a Cape Cod design, probably hammered together a century ago from trees now extinct. It had a screened porch that ran the full length of the front, a high sloping tin roof with cupolas and dormers. And Thorn noticed that on the windows of a single room at the front of the house someone had attached a set of burglar bars.

  Next to the house was a tall windmill of iron girders. Its blades turned lazily in an airless breeze. Further to the east the sky was filling with thick swipes of gray putty, the afternoon storm clouds, darkening and crowding together out over the heart of the Everglades. Though they were fifty miles away, they still flavored the light overhead with a silvery tinge.

  Sylvie broke away from her father and walked jauntily over to Judy's window and said hello, and she pressed her cheek to Judy's, and gave Thorn a wink and a slow secret grin, then pulled her head back out the window.

  "Daddy, come here," she called. "Look who Judy's brought with her."

  Harden Winchester strode to the pickup, shifting the shovel to one hand. Judy and Thorn got out. Winchester went over to Judy Nelson and gave her a quick peck on the cheek, then aimed his eyes across the roof of the truck and settled them on Thorn. The man had washed-out gray eyes. His hide was as tough and weathered as the wood of that house. A handsome man, but with a shifty light in his eyes. His smile was blurred at the edges as if some fraction of it were a grimace.

  "And who do we have here?"

  Behind Harden, Sylvie smiled mischievously at Thorn. Letting him marinate for a moment or two more.

  "Can't you guess, Daddy? Who is it we've been expecting?"

  Thorn started around the front of the truck, his gut tightening. This big-jointed man took a new grip on the shovel. He watched Thorn approach.

  "Don't be impolite, girl. If you know the man, introduce him." As Thorn stepped forward, Harden ticked his eyes up and down him with professional astuteness as if he were registering a dozen minor details that he'd ponder later.

  "It's Mr. Lavery, Daddy," Sylvie said, grinning at Thorn. "Mr. Peter Lavery."

  Judy glanced at Thorn, and he turned his face away from the Winchesters and gave her a helpless shrug. He turned back as Harden reached out his hand. Thorn shook it, a chunk of callused flesh as unyielding as any he'd ever touched.

  "Well, you're a day or two early, Mr. Lavery."

  Thorn drew his hand out of the solid grip.

  "My plans changed," he said. "Things were a little slow in Thomasville, so I thought I'd come on down."

  Sylvie jerked her head around, stared at him.

  Thorn said to her, "I been doing my homework, Sylvie. You been doing yours?"

  Harden glanced between the two of them, eyes uncertain.

  "Two in one day, Sylvie?" he said. "Another UPS delivery?"

  "Come on, Daddy, give me a little credit, okay? For once?"

  Harden's eyes shied away from her as though he'd decided to let
all this ride for the moment. He turned to Judy and asked her in a careful drawl if this was an official visit.

  "Not really," she said. "I was just helping . . ." She looked at Thorn. "Helping Mr. Lavery find his way out here. He called the office, and I volunteered. "

  "Called the office, did he?"

  "A courtesy call," Thorn said. "I always like to touch base with the local fish and game people."

  "Well, I'm sure sorry he bothered you, Judy. Lavery was supposed to let us know when he'd checked into his hotel, and we were going to come get him, show him the way out here. At least that's how I recall the plan. But then, since Sylvie made the arrangements, I suppose things could've gotten a little botched."

  "Daddy lets me be his private secretary," Sylvie explained to Judy. "Chief bottle-washer and full-time gofer for Winchester Aquaculture Incorporated. "

  "She's learning," Winchester said. "Slowly but surely. A little responsibility goes a long way with this one."

  Sylvie lifted herself up onto the square toes of her cowboy boots. Rocking her head back and smiling at the darkening sky, her mouth clamped hard.

  After a minute or two more of strained pleasantries, Judy refused for the second time Harden's offer of lemonade, and gave everyone a polite good-bye and with a private smile to Thorn, she got back in the pickup and left.

  Thorn stood in the middle of the long sandy drive with Darcy's fuchsia overnight bag at his feet and watched the contrail of dust from Judy's truck rise up behind her.

  CHAPTER 19

  Harden stared at the overnight bag, then back at Thorn.

  "You're traveling pretty light, Lavery."

  Fidgeting with her shirttail, Sylvie stood at her father's shoulder, faint worry beginning to ripen in her eyes.

  "Actually," Thorn said, "I didn't plan to stay very long."

  "But you did bring the money?"

  Thorn glanced at Sylvie, but she'd bowed her head and was peering at the ground, all her playfulness evaporated.

  Thorn glanced over at the long road out of there. Miles and miles from anywhere he knew. A half day's drive from home.

  "Well," Harden said, "did you?"

  Sylvie pawed at the sand with the toe of her boot.