Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3)

by James W. Hall

  Sylvie said, "We'll treat it like it was a drug deal. Which in a way it is. So what we do is, we put the million three in a suitcase, we rent a luggage locker at the Naples Airport. You meet Harden there, give him a look at the money, then close the locker back up and put the key in your pocket. He won't try anything with all those people around. Then the two of you go back to the farm in separate cars. That's so he can't drive you off somewhere, whack you and take the key. Then once you get to the farm, he delivers the fish to you. You hand over the locker key, back away to your car, and drive off."

  "And where's all this cash coming from?"

  "You let little Sylvie worry about the details."

  "That's a pretty goddamn big detail. A million three."

  "I got it covered, Thorn."

  "Yeah? And when do I get to kill him?"

  Sylvie shushed him, looking around to see if anybody'd heard.

  "That comes next," she said quietly.

  They watched as a muscled-up lifeguard passed by, giving Sylvie a close look. Not sure she belonged here, dressed like one of the Joads just in from Oklahoma.

  Sylvie said, "On that long empty road near the farm, we're going to ambush him. You leave the farm, head back to town, Sylvie'll jump out and wave you down. You pull off on a side road and we wait for Daddy to come past for the money. When we see him coming, I'll pull Lavery's car out of the side road, drive into his path. He throws on the brakes, maybe even collides with the car. That's when you come out of the ditch and mow him down. Guns blazing. It's the only way. A sneak attack like that. Anything else is too dangerous."

  "You're serious."

  "Aren't you?"

  Thorn stared into her black eyes and said nothing.

  "Believe me, Thorn. You gotta shoot straight, gotta kill him quick, or else he'll find a way to put you away. Defunct. The man's a trained assassin. You gotta be quick. Mongoose quick. He's the best there is."

  Her voice cheery, smiling like she'd just invited him to escort her to some formal ball where they would be the guests of honor.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, massaged his forehead. When he opened his eyes, she was smiling expectantly.

  "Forget it," he said. "I'm not going along with any of that crap."

  "Why?"

  "It's stupid."

  "Oh, no, I know the real reason why. You're just a typical goddamn man. Gotta be running things. Can't give a woman any credit for having brains. That's what it is, isn't it? You're a sexist shit, Thorn. That's it. Admit it. Gotta be in control."

  She turned around on her stool, picked up the remains of her drink, and took a petulant swig. She smacked the glass down.

  "It's true," Thorn said. "I treat women different than men."

  "I knew it."

  "Because if you were a man, Sylvie, I'd have dragged your ass into the woods by now and slapped that shit-eating grin off your mouth, and I wouldn't have stopped slapping you until you told me the truth about what was going on. That's the kind of sexist I am. But you know, now that I think about it, I believe I'm having a major awakening. Yeah, I am. I've suddenly seen the light. And you know what? I'm going to start with you, Sylvie. You can be my first woman to get complete gender-neutral treatment."

  She looked at him for a moment, the loony expression dying away, replaced with a flat, bland stare. The first time she'd let him see the face behind the goofy grin. She turned her eyes down, stared into the pink foam left in her glass.

  "I need proof," Thorn said. "If you want me to believe what you're saying about your father, I have to have absolute proof."

  "Proof he's a killer?"

  Thorn leaned in close to her and spoke quietly.

  "Proof he murdered Darcy."

  "Proof?" she said. "You don't trust Sylvie? You can't just take her word for it?"

  "No, I can't."

  "You sure?" Sylvie climbed down off the bar-stool.

  She tugged on the hem of her Raiders jersey, stretching the fabric tight over her chest. Showing him a little of what he was missing. Then yawning, lifting her arms into the air, a sexy little demonstration, loosening up all the equipment.

  "You know, I'm awful sensitive," she said. "My tissues are just chock-full of nerve endings. I can be a bronco in bed. Some people have a hard time even staying on."

  She crossed her arms and cupped each breast in the opposite hand. Gave them each a little squeeze.

  "Not interested."

  Sylvie let go and sat down on the stool again.

  "You have some sex problem Sylvie should know about? Enlarged prostate, something like that?"

  "I'm just as healthy as can be."

  "Hey, I bet I know what it is, why you're being so cool to Sylvie." She edged close, a few inches between their lips, and whispered, "You don't want to have sex before the big game. That's it, isn't it? It's not that you got a problem with me. It's that game-day thing. Saving your sperm for the big fight."

  "Did you ask Roy Murtha to kill your father too?"

  She jerked back from him. Looked down, fiddled with her straw for a moment.

  "Is that what he told you?"

  "Maybe."

  "Roy's a goddamn liar," Sylvie said, keeping her eyes on her drink. "Told Sylvie he cared about her, but he didn't. He didn't give a shit about Sylvie."

  "He refused you, said he wouldn't have any part of it."

  She stirred the pink foam with her straw. She said nothing, her eyes on his, but the sight was going out of them as she began to drift inward.

  In a lazy voice she said, "I'll drop that airport locker key by your room later on. You be at that locker at three o'clock. Don't be late. Harden's a stickler for punctuality."

  She turned from him and waved at the bar man and called out for her check.

  "You're going to give me the key to some locker with over a million dollars in it?"

  "That's right." She swiveled around to face him. "I trust you, Thorn. Even if you don't trust me."

  "I'm not doing it," he said. "I'm not playing your game. I'll get the proof on my own."

  "Tomorrow you'll have the key. Then you can decide if you want to play or not. Three o'clock at the airport. I'm telling Harden that Peter Lavery will be there. You got till then to decide."

  "Tell him whatever the hell you want."

  She hummed to herself and examined Thorn with a mixture of exasperation and respect.

  Coolly, she said, "The way you live, Thorn, that house, no telephone, you're this real nature guy, aren't you? Granola, alfalfa sprouts. Walden Pond kind of person."

  Thorn was quiet, watching a grim smile reshape her lips.

  She said, "Well, Mr. Antelope Lover, you just might be interested to know what my father is going to do. Want to know?"

  "I'm listening."

  "As soon as Daddy gets Lavery's money in his hands, he's planning to let all the tilapia go. There's a few million fish in those ponds, counting the fingerlings, the larvae, and he's going to set them all free at once. Release them into the Okehatchee.

  "A couple of days later they'll be in the Gulf, and by Thanksgiving they'll have migrated around the tip of the state and be in the Atlantic. And before the year's over, he says the only damn fish you'll find anywhere will be tilapia. They reproduce so fast, they're so aggressive, they'll beat out all the other fish and it won't be long, maybe a year or two, before they start to strangle the whole damn ocean, strangle it with themselves. That's what Harden's going to do, that's his plan. Cripple the whole ocean. Cause a major catastrophe. Whatta you think about that, Mr. Thoreau?"

  "Why would he do something like that?"

  "Why don't you ask him?"

  "I don't believe you, Sylvie."

  "The whole ocean," she said, her eyes bleak. "Tilapias, tilapias, tilapias. Just think about it, Thorn. 'Cause that's what's at stake unless you throw in with Miss Sylvie. The whole goddamn ocean."

  Her eyes strayed off over his shoulder. Sylvie set her glass down.

  "Oh, shit. End of c
onversation."

  Her face drained as she climbed off the stool.

  "He sees us like this, he'll know something's cooking. You're as good as dead."

  She edged down the length of the bar.

  Thorn looked around, following her stare, and it took him a moment or two before he saw Harden coming out of the lobby, start down the winding brick path toward the pool area. Thorn looked back for Sylvie, but she was already on the other side of the tiki bar, headed down the wooden stairway to the beach.

  CHAPTER 24

  Thorn's throat clenched shut. He could feel the bright ping of blood pressuring hard against his eardrums as if he were sinking deep and fast into a sunless sea. He stood his ground and forced down a long breath, held it, then let it out slowly, trying to decompress, reminding himself who he was now, his part to play. Not a man smoldering for revenge, but Peter Lavery. Rich boy from Georgia. An ecological businessman.

  Winchester had changed into a white polo shirt, burgundy tennis shorts, and a pair of leather sandals. He had on a white Panama hat with a bright red band. Dapper guy. But moving with a fluid poise that Thorn recognized now was more than just athletic suppleness.

  Standing next to him this morning, Thorn had registered the man's vigor, but he hadn't tried to give it a more accurate name. Now, seeing him from a hundred yards away, it was obvious. He probably worked out with weights, stretching, running perhaps. But that wasn't the point. What was unique about him was that all that strength was coiled around some volatile core. A lazy tiger stroll. Graceful and deadly.

  As Winchester passed the Olympic pool, he spotted Thorn, and headed his way, and every motion he made was light-footed and precise. Carrying himself with extreme caution, as though the slightest jostle might cause the unstable gases bottled up inside him to detonate. Level everything for miles around.

  They shook hands, smiled, nodded silently. A pantomime of civility. Winchester asked Thorn what he was drinking, then went to the bar and brought back two drinks and took the seat across from Thorn. Harden raised his shot glass and toasted Peter Lavery's health and the success of their enterprise. Thorn did not touch his beer, but watched as Harden took a small sip of his whiskey.

  "The bellman told me I could find you out here. My god, Lavery, you've only been here an hour or two, and already you've made quite an impression on these people."

  "Must be my Pepsodent smile."

  Harden picked up the small box of matches sitting in the ashtray and rattled it like dice in his fist.

  "I feel I know you already, Peter. That article Sylvie found about you in Fortune, very thorough."

  Thorn shifted in his seat, touched a finger to the damp label on his beer bottle, then peeled it away, rolled it into a damp ball and set it in the middle of the table.

  He tried for a hint of Georgia in his voice, honeysuckle and moonshine.

  "Take it from the son of a newspaper man, Mr. Winchester, don't ever trust journalists. They're shitty listeners. Usually so full of themselves, they only hear every third word you say. What facts they don't get completely wrong, they find some way to twist."

  Harden smiled, one skeptical man of the world to another. Thorn got a breath down and let go of it as casually as he could manage. The two of them sitting in the shade of one of the small umbrella tables. Both looking out at the beach crowd, the stream of handsome people strolling past. Three-hundred-dollar-a-day folks, scrupulously slim. While out in the western sky, huge clouds were foaming up, thick white concoctions that flirted with the sunlight.

  "So tell me, Peter, is it true you and Warren Beatty are close friends?"

  Thorn kept his eyes on the clouds.

  "Everybody wants to talk about movie stars."

  "Well, is it accurate?"

  "That, Harden, is exactly why I never read anything they write about me. Just so much bullshit."

  "Don't even know him?"

  "Oh, I've met him. At gatherings. We've talked, but I would never call Warren a friend."

  "You didn't invest in his picture? One about the gangster?"

  Thorn inspected him carefully.

  "Are we playing another game here?"

  "What?"

  "Because if we are, just tell me. Give me a couple of the rules, and I'll play with you. I like games. I'm good at them. But I like to know the rules."

  "Hey, hey. I just wanted us to get to know each other better. No offense. I didn't mean to pry."

  "Then don't."

  Harden continued to smile, an unblended, hundred-proof grin. It seemed to be thriving on some deep-rooted pleasure he could barely contain. As if at any moment he were going to stand up, whoop out some patriotic song, try to get the whole bar crowd to join in.

  Thorn glanced at the length of adhesive tape running across Winchester's right knuckles, and with brutal clarity he saw again the white, bloodless puckers on the back of Darcy's lifeless hand. And that image dissolved into another of Darcy underwater, thrashing, slicing at the bastard's hand that was gripping hers.

  Thorn drew his own hands off the table, put them in his lap. Made two hard fists and ground them against the underside of the table. Wanting, by god, to throw the thing over, hurl himself on this cocksure bastard, tear flesh from bones. But no, he stayed still, kept the quiver out of his face, riding this thing out to its last stop.

  "I'm a very happy man today, Peter. This is the final stop on a long, long voyage. The payoff for years of work. A celebration day."

  Thorn took a sip of his beer and steered his eyes away from Winchester. Trying to cool the hot twist of anger growing in his throat.

  "So, Peter, I'd like to tell you my story, how I got to this point. Would you like to hear it?"

  Thorn looked at him squarely.

  "No," he said. "Not particularly."

  Winchester's smile emptied, but his lips held the pose, and while his eyes lingered on Thorn's, he lifted his shot glass and took a small, neat bite of the bourbon and set it down.

  "Of course you do."

  Harden slid open the matchbox and dumped the matches onto the table. He stirred his finger through them.

  "Before I met my wife," he said, and shifted his gaze away toward the building clouds, "all I aspired to was a career in the military. I grew up in a drafty log cabin with a dirt floor, for christ sakes. A clodhopper from West Texas. I couldn't put two words together without one of them being fuck or shit. I was one coarse, uncivilized son of a bitch. But the moment I met Doris Carter, everything changed. I fell so deep and hard for that girl, everything changed. Christ Almighty, I started writing her poems, if you can believe it, poem after poem. Went to work on my manners, my deportment. God, I would have done anything for her."

  "But she left you anyway."

  His smile dimmed, eyes sharpening as he looked again at Thorn.

  "And how the hell did you know that?"

  "I could hear its footsteps coming across the stage."

  Thorn reached across the table and tapped Winchester's bandaged hand.

  "How'd that happen?"

  Harden glanced at his knuckles and shrugged.

  "It's nothing. I don't even remember."

  Harden picked a couple of the matchsticks from the pile and positioned them meticulously behind his shot glass. He lifted his eyes, moved them off to the distance, head tipping back, a dreamy, self-satisfied smile surfacing.

  "Yes," he said. "It's true Doris abandoned me eventually. And I have to admit now, she had every reason to. A lifetime in the military had made me cold down at the core. Add to that the fact that I traveled a great deal, left Doris for weeks, even months at a time, all alone out there on that desolate piece of land. And when I came home there was always a readjustment period. The nature of my work, the brutality of it, made it doubly hard to be a part of that feminine world."

  Thorn took another taste of his tepid beer. Staring at that adhesive. Harden leaned back in his chair, took an expansive breath, and once more lifted his gaze up to the distance.

>   "First time I saw Doris Carter, she was only fifteen years old. I was thirty. Posted at Fort Campbell, on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Doris was a high school girl, a cheerleader for her football team in Clarksville, Tennessee.

  "I remember sitting in the bleachers with some of the boys in my battalion. Pimply kids not much older than she was. Taking some R and R on that chilly October night, watching the local hayseeds gallop up and down the field. And there she was in a sweater and short skirt. Doris Carter. Long blond hair and long slim legs. Everyone noticed her. She was like that. Walked onto the field, and every eye in the bleachers turned her way.

  "And my god, I stole that girl from her big dumb boyfriend, from her Cadillac salesman father, from her cookie baking flirt of a mother. A couple months is all it took, but I walked off with her. That night in October, all my boys were whistling at her, stomping their feet, and I knew the very second I saw Doris Carter, I was going to make that woman love me."

  "Stop it," Thorn said.

  Harden turned his drowsy smile on Thorn. He ran a hand across the gray bristles on the side of his head as if he were combing the ghostly memory of a ducktail.

  "What is it, Peter?"

  Thorn drained his beer, set it down, and began to look around for the waitress. He knew he'd be better off encouraging Harden to ramble on through his autobiography. He just might learn something useful that way, some chance remark that provided the final proof of his guilt. But Thorn couldn't bear it, hated the dreamy rush of emotion in Winchester's voice. His talk of love. Hated the fever in his eyes, that sweet glow they took on when he spoke of his lost wife.

  "Just spare me, okay? I don't want to hear your goddamn life story."

  "What is it? Do personal matters make you nervous?"

  "Look, Winchester, if it doesn't have a dollar sign at the beginning of it, I don't want to hear about it. Okay? I don't care who you are, how you feel about women. We do our business, get it over with, and we go our own ways. You understand that? We're not going to be bosom buddies, we're not going to bare our souls, or bond, or any of that shit. I got enough friends already. What we are is business associates, that's all."

  "Well, you see," Harden said, "I have a slightly more complex view myself. I wouldn't be doing business with you at all, Peter, if it wasn't for love. Love and work, they're mingled for me. I mean, the only reason I've devoted myself to raising tilapia at all is because of Doris. Because of her and who she ran away with."