Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3)

by James W. Hall

  Fact was, he wasn't really much of a nature guy, except for liking to fish. He was definitely no Thorn, who lived without air-conditioning, hot water, TV, VCR, microwave, never seeming to miss any of it. Only reason Thorn had his house wired for electric at all was to power the refrigerator, and then mainly to keep his beer cold. But not Sugarman. He admitted it. He'd sold out, was a soft modern guy, hooked on conveniences. Loved microwave popcorn.

  About the best thing Sugarman could say about the Everglades: it was nice not to have to look at billboards for a hundred miles. Driving the whole width of Florida, not a single advertisement. Probably the only hundred mile stretch like that in the state. That is, if you didn't count the alligator wrestling or airboat ride or bingo parlor signs. All of them put up by the Miccosukees, the only people with the right to advertise, it being partly their reservation land.

  Mostly the Everglades made him sleepy. Two hours of that straight, empty two-lane blacktop road. You could just leave your steering wheel lock on, the Club or whatever it was called, not even give a twitch to the wheel for two hours. One slash pine looking just like the next, one wide open savanna an exact replica of the last one. Like your car wasn't really moving at all, the way they did it in movies, a guy holding the steering wheel but not really steering, landscapes showing outside the car windows, but dull scenery, nothing you'd really pay attention to.

  Only today, coming across the Glades, he was wide awake. Major electrical current passing through him. He hadn't even exchanged a word with Doris Albright in the last twenty miles, but still, it was like they'd just finished having an intimate, revealing conversation. That's how it felt in his bloodstream, how alert he was, how aware of her sitting there next to him in the Mustang as he drove. Her scent in his nostrils, her every little movement registering in his peripheral vision, some crazy Gene Krupa-drummer going triple time in his pulse.

  Sugarman was too polite to stare at her, too nervous to glance over, afraid she might catch him and he'd have to say something. Keeping his eyes fixed on the road, or taking an occasional look out his window. But all the while with a clear picture of her in his mind from when he'd picked her up at her house this afternoon, opening the passenger door for her, and Doris smiling, giving him a mildly surprised look like she wasn't used to men being so gallant. Which was hard to believe, seeing how striking a woman she was, and the social circles she must've traveled.

  She was dressed in a lime linen jacket with turquoise Bermuda shorts, and some kind of silky white T-shirt under the jacket. Beige ballet slippers with little bow ties. A gold braided belt. Her hair loose today, thick and clean and white-blond. He could smell her perfume when he opened the door for her, a faint fragrance, clean with a crisp citrus edge.

  All the trouble he'd had with Jeanne over the years, he'd been feeling the ties loosening between them, and lately he had to admit he'd been looking at other women more seriously than he ever had before. Been aware of their clothes, how they moved and smelled, letting his imagination loosen up a little.

  But at the same time still hanging in there with Jeanne, being a hundred percent faithful. Despite her constant anger, her belittling him, her depression. And all her damn hobbies, most of them expensive in one way or another, that put more strain on the marriage. And, of course, there was that one hobby of hers a couple of years ago, her little fling at adultery.

  Now, that had put a major stress on things. Sugarman having to suddenly study up on open marriages. What he found out was, Jeanne only wanted it halfway open. Her half. She'd told him she'd become convinced she could find religious salvation through vaginal orgasms. See the face of God from having a man's penis moving around inside her. And not necessarily Sugarman's penis either.

  She took to having orgasms with whoever she could, including the preacher at their church, the very guy who'd given her that stupid idea in the first place. Also with a couple of the men in the congregation. All of them getting together for private prayer meetings every Wednesday and Saturday. That's what they called it, prayer meetings. Jeanne even admitting to Sugarman that on some of those occasions she'd tried it with a woman or two, and Lord knew what else. Sugarman wouldn't even let himself think about that. Damn, he was still reeling from that time, and here it was three years later.

  "Want to listen to the radio?" Doris said.

  "It doesn't work. Sorry."

  He glanced over at her, met her eyes. She smiled again and he smiled back, then looked again at the road, having to jerk the wheel a quarter turn, bring the car back into their lane.

  "I appreciate your doing this, you know. Though you didn't really have to. I could've brought my car. I know the way to the farm. It's just that I didn't realize he was still there. I thought he would've left that place by now."

  "Oh, I needed to come over here anyway. I got a friend doing some work for me in Naples. Guy you saw in my office a few days ago. Thorn. An old friend from high school. We're working together on an investigation, and it just happened to bring him over here too, so I thought, why not?"

  Not telling her the complete truth, that he was coming over here because Doris had finally told him her ex-husband's name. Winchester, Harden Winchester. Bingo, double bingo. Same name as the girl in the video, same as the man who raised tilapia. Sugarman not having any choice really. Having no luck locating Murtha, so he decided to follow the hottest trail, told Doris he'd drive her over to the west coast.

  "Actually, me and Thorn go back even before high school. Old friends. I used to go fishing with him when I was six, seven years old. You don't find many friends you go that far back with. But Thorn's one. He and I, we're like brothers."

  Sugarman thinking, shit, there he was again, babbling, filling the air with nervous noise. Like in high school, going out with girls, sitting there beside them, never having the first idea of what to say, and gradually concluding that hell, he must be IQ deficient, at least in communication skills. Then, after marrying Jeanne the year they graduated, it didn't bother him much anymore. Jeanne doing ninety percent of the talking for both of them. And still doing it.

  But now here it was again. Sugar, the tongue-tied dullard, making absolutely no progress in twenty-five years.

  She didn't say anything for a minute, and Sugarman could feel her looking at him.

  Then she said, "Did you find out what Harden does for a living now?"

  "He has a fish farm. Raises a fish called tilapia, I understand."

  "Fish farm?" She stared at the side of his face. "Somebody can get rich raising fish?"

  "Rich? I don't see how."

  "But he said he was very wealthy. When he came to see me last year, he told me he'd made a whole lot of money and he assumed I'd be so impressed, I'd come back to him."

  "But you weren't."

  "That's right, I wasn't."

  "I guess some women might've been."

  "Well," she said. "That wasn't why I left him. Money never entered into it. Money's the least part of happiness."

  "You tell him that when he was there?"

  "No, I just told him to get his sorry ass off my porch before I took down my husband's twelve-gauge and filled him full of goddamn rabbit pellets."

  Sugarman glanced over at her.

  She said, "My language shocks you?"

  "Well, coming from you, yeah, a little."

  "I may buy my clothes at Neiman-Marcus these days, but part of me is still a girl from the hills of Tennessee. And I damn well know how to use that twelve-gauge too."

  Sugarman watched the road for a minute. He passed a slow-going Winnebago. When he was back in his lane, he said, "You chased your ex-husband away like that, he might not be real friendly this time around."

  Another boring mile went by.

  "To be completely honest," she said, looking out her window, taking her time, "it's not Harden I want to see anymore. I should just level with you. I've decided I'd rather lose my business than take money from that man. I dread being anywhere close to him again. I loathe
him, even after all this time. But what it is really, I want to see my girls. Want to talk to them, see if they're all right."

  "Girls?"

  "My two daughters."

  "They still live with him?"

  "From what I can gather, yes."

  She sounded like she didn't want to go any further down that road, so Sugarman let the silence grow again. Watching the traffic start to thicken as they came out of the Everglades and into the outskirts of Naples.

  "Are you married?"

  Sugarman said yes, he was.

  "You don't sound so sure."

  Sugarman glanced over at her, back at the road.

  "I think what it's called," he said, "is a dysfunctional marriage."

  "God, I hate that word," Doris said. "You hear it all the time. But what does it mean? Have you ever seen a functional marriage? I mean, is that good, is that what marriage is supposed to be, a well-oiled machine or something? Why not just say bad marriage or good marriage? Dysfunctional, what garbage."

  Sugarman looked over at her, the woman tapping her knuckles against her window, glaring out, getting upset over a word. Never met anybody like that.

  "It's the word my wife uses," Sugarman said. "Came from her books, the ones she's always reading to see why she's so unhappy. Told me she's trying to figure out how she could have made such a stupid mistake, a white woman, pretty as she was, full of talent and pep, marrying a black man without any spark. A thing like that never could work. What was she ever thinking about? She uses a lot of words right out of those books to explain it to herself."

  "Spark?"

  "That's how she talks. Spark. Dysfunctional. Addictive personality. Toxic parents."

  "Toxic parents!" She waved the phrase away like a bad smell.

  "I know, I know. It's strange stuff."

  "You're awfully casual about it," she said. "I think I'd be mad as hell, my spouse talking like that about me."

  "I'm not mad at her," Sugarman said. "And not sad either. The way I feel, it's something in between. I don't know what the name for it is."

  A half mile ahead was the first traffic light they'd seen for two hours, ever since entering the Everglades. Sugarman slowed to a stop. It was a relief to see some signs of civilization again. Houses, 7-Elevens, trailer parks.

  "I think the word for what I am," he said, "is lonesome."

  She was quiet, but he didn't need to look over to check if she'd heard him. He could tell the way her silence was, denser than it had been before. She was thinking about what he'd said. The two of them, right out of deep center field, having a conversation, a fairly good one, and Sugarman not even knowing this woman, feeling totally out of her league. But still, suddenly finding it easy to speak to her. Cured of his knotted tongue.

  A minute or two later, he pulled off at a gas station to fill up. And when he'd drawn up to the pumps and turned off the ignition, Doris Albright reached over and lay her hand on his where it was resting on the seat between them. He looked down, her hand cool and slender and white, nails uncolored. A large simple diamond on her ring finger.

  "I have one of those too," she said.

  "One of what?"

  "A dysfunctional marriage," she said, still holding his hand. "It wasn't that way before Philip got sick. Oh, no, just the opposite. But that's what it is now."

  The look in her eyes held for a moment, sorrowful, then her face relaxed, and her mouth made something close to a smile.

  "I really hate that word," she said.

  "Yeah," Sugarman said. "So do I. I hate its goddamn sorry ass all to hell."

  ***

  Thorn demanded to speak to the manager. In a minute or two a thirty-year-old kid with curly red hair and a blue silk suit came out of his office smiling broadly, and ushered Thorn inside, sat him down, and proceeded to assure him that there was no damn way he could reveal another guest's room number. It was hotel policy to insure all their guests' absolute privacy. Even if that guest is in danger? The manager lost a fraction of his smile. What sort of danger? But Thorn had no reply, nowhere to go with this without alerting the local cavalry, and he wasn't ready for that, wanted to peel away another layer before this went public.

  As he stalked out of the office, an alarm siren began to sound somewhere in the hotel. The desk clerks looked nervously at each other and the manager hurried out of his office, glared at Thorn, then picked up a phone at the front desk and began to speak to someone.

  Thorn located the stairway and hiked up the stairs to the second floor and marched down the long yellow hallway. He did the same on the third floor, the fourth, all the way to the top. No sign of her. He rode the elevator back down, checked the beauty shop, the sundry store, the bar and restaurant. Nothing.

  By the time he decided to try the hotel grounds, the alarm had shut off and Thorn felt a headache beginning to stitch itself to the back of his eyeballs.

  He walked out onto the spacious terra-cotta veranda, scanned the grounds for a moment or two, saw no Sylvie anywhere, then headed off at a lope past the putting green, down a wooden walkway that led into a thicket of trees.

  It was a dense stand of buttonwoods, leather fern, gumbo-limbo and strangler fig. Mangroves, black and red, growing from a lagoon whose surface was coated with a bright green slime. Apparently that swatch of tidal marsh had been left intact by the hotel for the edification of its guests, because little wooden plaques were spaced along the walkway identifying some of the vegetation.

  But no one was reading them. And Thorn didn't stop either. He went through the hammock and out to the wide stretch of blond sand, and walked along the water's edge to the south for a while, squinting into the distance. Then retraced his steps and walked north a few hundred yards. No Raiders jersey anywhere.

  He crossed the tidal marsh on a different walkway, rounded the corner of the outdoor bar and there she was on one of the stools of the tiki bar. In her hand a tall frosted glass half filled with something pink, and Sylvie with her lips puckered around the straw slurping up the other half.

  And as much as it jolted him to admit it, Sylvie looked stunning there. An untamed vitality about her. The sharp facets of her cheekbones, the porcelain skin, those tense black eyes. Even her disheveled hair that seemed plagued by a dozen competing cowlicks, seemed to enhance the charm. Until that moment he hadn't thought of her as a sexual creature. And even now this warm itch of attraction struck him as deeply perverse. She was little more than a child, certainly some fraction crazy. Darcy dead only a few days. Yet there it was. Walking toward her while she drank her cocktail, Thorn felt that familiar twinge in his gut, like something shifting deep inside him, some internal organ that had suddenly come awake.

  CHAPTER 23

  When Thorn reached her, she set the glass aside, patted her lips with a paper cocktail napkin, and gave him a loose smile.

  "Where've you been?"

  "Here," she said. "Quenching my thirst."

  "Where's my pistol, Sylvie? What'd you do with it?"

  "You don't need to yell."

  "Where is it?"

  "In a safe place, don't worry about it."

  "Where, Sylvie?"

  Slowly she lifted her Raiders jersey and let him have a peek. The .357 was mashed against her belly.

  "Your pistol's acquiring intimate knowledge of Sylvie."

  "Give it to me."

  She made a sulking frown, and glanced over his shoulder at the other patrons.

  "Now?"

  He held out his hand, and after a hesitation, she tugged the .357 out of her waistband and clapped it onto the bar.

  The bartender and a couple of drinkers looked up at the noise, but Thorn bent forward and propped his elbow on the bar, managed to shield the weapon from their view. He slipped the pistol into his lap and opened the cylinder. Two rounds gone. He slid it under his shirt, tucked it into his jeans.

  "So whatta you say, Thorn? Want to take the afternoon off, put your quest on hold for an hour, fool around with Miss Sylvie? Climb the stai
rway to heaven?"

  "No, thanks."

  "We got time. Doesn't take Sylvie that long. And I'm sure I can get you airborne pretty quick."

  She picked up her drink, held it to her lips, and tongued some of the pink slush into her mouth.

  "Looks to me like there might be some loose boards on that stairway."

  Sylvie slammed her glass down.

  "Jesus Christ, Thorn. You keep saying those things. Sylvie's crazy. Sylvie's a loon. But have I done anything that's fucked up? I got you out of all that gunfire at your house. It was my quick thinking that saved you out at the farm, turned you into Peter Lavery. If Harden had found out you were Darcy's boyfriend, you'd be dead right now."

  "What'd you do, Sylvie? Where's Lavery?"

  "I ran him off," she said. "Big baby. Took one look at your pistol and he started packing."

  "You fired two shots from this."

  "I know that. I went down the beach, a mile down where it's deserted. I knocked a tin can off a stump, working on my aim. I figure I might just have to shoot Harden my own self. Since it looks like all the men I'm surrounded by are so lily-livered."

  "I don't believe you."

  "I ran him off, is all I did. We couldn't have him hanging around, now could we? He'd screw up everything. Get us killed more than likely."

  "You're lying."

  "Look, I've got a plan," she said. "I've been thinking about this a long time, and now I know how we're going to do it."

  She swiveled around on her stool and began to watch the kids splash in the shallow pool, chaises full of old folks turning red in the late summer sun. Thorn stood beside her.