Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3)

by James W. Hall

  But the diva sang on, her solo becoming slow and wistful. He lay on his belly and listened to the song for a moment or two more, then with a quiet grunt he pushed himself to his feet, and moved off toward the nearest storage building.

  Halfway down the length of the building, he found three fifty-gallon drums. He pried off one of the lids, then wrenched his face away from the caustic fumes. White granulated chemical filled the drum, probably the thing Sylvie had mentioned, the fish killer. Eyes stinging, he replaced the lid and moved on to the other barn, and found what he had come this far to see. The boat trailer he'd glimpsed that afternoon.

  Thorn wiped the tears from his eyes and listened to the opera spiraling on. Now two tenors were dueling over the heart of the soprano. He moved close to the boat and ran his hands along its slick hull. A new Grady White, twenty-two feet. Felt the salty crust of a recent day at sea. He came around to the stern, climbed the dive platform, and hauled himself aboard.

  The barn hid the house from view, but the opera played on and Thorn felt himself mildly swayed by it, the tragedy, the yearning in that woman's voice. Felt some part of him that had hardened to ice in the last week, growing watery and warm.

  He opened the storage box beneath the console seat. Found orange life vests and a compressed-air signal horn. A plastic whistle, boat hook, first aid kit. Standard gear. And there was nothing in the bow compartments but anchor line, fishing equipment, and a moldering towel. He walked back to the stern, squatted and drew open the last of the Grady White's storage compartments. Inside it were two fins and a single diving mask. He held the fins up to what light there was and fit his hand inside the molded shoe of one of the flippers. Then pressed the mask to his face.

  "Jesus," he whispered. "Jesus Christ."

  They were far too small for Harden, both the mask and fins. Sitting on the gunwale, he stared up at the murky sky, absorbing this. Trying to comprehend this family, the machinery of its madness. Getting nowhere. But it didn't matter anyway. The intricacies of the Winchesters' psychology, the reasons for the particular twists in their pathologies. He didn't give a shit about any of that. With a clever enough lawyer, a string of professional experts, even the most horrendous acts could be justified. Every culprit could be made to seem a victim of one brainwashing or another, a helpless casualty of negative conditioning. Poverty, race, drugs, sexual abuse. The great escape clauses of the age. But as far as Thorn was concerned, all that was bullshit. Only conduct counted. Behavior was everything.

  With his heart floundering, Thorn set the mask and flippers back in the compartment, and he squatted down beside the one scuba tank in the transom rack. He fastened the buckles on the webbed belt and checked its girth. Less than twenty inches. Of course. Of course.

  He rose and stood by the leaning post and listened to the music swell again. The opera seemed to be recounting some painful love affair where passion had died and been reborn as spite. Over head the moon was moving in and out of patchy clouds, and in a moment of relative brightness Thorn caught the glint of polished metal on the console shelf. He came around the leaning post and stood before the wheel.

  He didn't move for it immediately, just breathed, felt the air burn his lungs, savoring this moment. Darcy's Medlon diving knife with the serrated blade, the rubber handle. A grim little souvenir from a boating trip on an August afternoon. Not a murder weapon, so no one had bothered concealing it. Thorn could hear Sugarman's inevitable response. The knife was meaningless as legal evidence. And yes, even Thorn had to agree with that. No matter whose fingerprints were on it, no matter if the knife could be positively identified as being Darcy's, there was no jury that could convict anyone for merely possessing it. The thing was utterly without meaning. That is, except in the courtroom of Thorn's heart.

  Finally, he reached across and picked it up, held it out to the moon, watched it catch a ray of light and fire it off into the dark. In the distance, the soprano's voice was aching, reaching beyond her human limitations, as if she were straining toward some ecstatic realm, past all pain and doubt. Reaching up for that golden place, Eden before the fall, some perfect summery childhood, a timeless, peaceful place that seemed to exist only in music and fairy tales.

  Thorn tested the blade against the back of his hand, shaved away an inch of hair. Still razor-slick from hours against her whetstone. And as Thorn was wiping the blade clean against his leg, someone jolted the needle against the record, made a grinding scratch, then lifted it up, and the soprano was cut off mid-crescendo. The heavy silence once more filled the night.

  Thorn hurried to the stern, leaned out to peer around the edge of the aluminum barn. The house was still dark. He turned and started down the dive ladder, was just about to hop to the earth, when the hard smack of a rifle sounded, and a half second later a bright hole exploded in the backside of the barn.

  He sprinted for the woods while more shots tore through the leaves around him. With the knife in his right hand, thin branches whipping him in the face, he ran toward the river. Opened up his stride, thinking of those copulating alligators who lay in the woods ahead, and he veered away to the west.

  Floodlights lit up the Winchester farm behind him. A beam of light panned jerkily across the woods, a few hundred thousand watts brightening the ground beside him, then passing across his back and moving on. More shots, several in a row, an autoloader, shredding the pines a few yards to his left.

  Thorn dodged right, pushed through a clump of palms and stumbled into the clearing again. The gators had finished with their laborious love. They watched him halt before them, this strange dirt-covered creature. The bigger one, the male, took two quick steps, angling to Thorn's right. The female held her ground. A pincer movement. Neither seemed particularly drowsy from the afterglow.

  A few hundred thousand watts probed the brush just to the east, working its way closer and closer to where Thorn was having his standoff. He watched the light approach, and set his feet, made up his mind. He took a good breath, then broke into a run, feinted right, and cut left — old swivel hips — and sprinted directly at the small gator, watched as it pushed its heavy body up off the ground and opened its jaws at his approach, and Thorn cut left and broad-jumped over the gator's back, staggered once coming down as more shots sounded behind him. He found his footing and raced on toward the river.

  A few feet from the bank he tripped again, and caught himself against a tree. His right foot was severely tangled in some kind of netting. He jerked and dragged his shoe half-loose, got to his knees, and clawed at the mesh fabric.

  The beam of light shone in the trees above him, jerking in rhythm with his pursuer's stride. Thorn unraveled another strand of netting, ripped free from the rest. And the light passed abruptly across the ground where Thorn was huddled, illuminating for half a second a torn brown shirt lying at his feet. A shirt with a UPS label stitched to it. And on its next pass, the light flashed across the netting, and revealed beneath the camouflage a meticulous stack of corpses in various stages of decomposition. The stench of lime and decay instantly filled Thorn's belly, and acid brimmed at the back of his throat.

  He dove forward into the brush and was suddenly at the river's edge. He stood for a second figuring the odds. Gunman versus gators. He watched the beam lighting up the opposite bank, heard the trampling draw closer.

  Making his body as sleek as he could, he dove into the river, hardly a splash, and sank below the surface, and yes, oh yes, once again the goddess of the moon and clouds had heard his prayer, and in the last hour had turned the earth sufficiently on its axis so the tides were once more rolling out to sea.

  He kicked his feet and churned his arms and stayed inside the dark current, kept his head a few feet underwater. A minute, two minutes, swept forward by the warm flow, doing only the small work of keeping his trim, staying a few feet down.

  Finally, when his chest began to ache, Thorn rose to the surface, took a deep breath and listened. He could hear a voice calling out indistinctly far upstream. A
nother gunshot, and one more after that. He drifted on the surface for a mile, two miles. On his back, looking up at the great spray of stars. And at last, soggy and exhausted, he climbed up the slippery bank beside the same cow pasture where he'd left his car. And he heard the irritated scream of the loggerhead shrike. For after all, it was his field. And this made twice that Thorn had trespassed there.

  ***

  Back at the Ritz, Thorn didn't shower. The Okehatchee had washed away most of the mud and anyway he was too damn tired to do anything but undress and fall into the huge immaculate bed, glance over at the clock, two twenty A.M., and settle his head against the pillow and disappear.

  No rest for the last two nights, and only the fitful alcohol unconsciousness of two nights before that. Thorn tumbled down into the heavy dark, his body a thick weight around him. More a coma than sleep. He was too tired to dream, too tired to change positions, too blessedly numb to come fully awake, even when hours later he thought he heard the door to the hotel room squeak. Felt the room lighten, then go dark again.

  Sensed it was happening, or dreamed it was, but didn't fight his way back up. Sluggish syrup in his veins, the dead weight of his muscles. Too tired and ponderous to resist when the bed moved, someone climbing in beside him. Down too deep in the narcotic haze. Not even caring when the hand touched him, the fingers, cool and bony, moved down his belly, down the slope of his groin, combed through the kink of pubic hair, found his penis and held it, stroked it alive.

  Awake but not awake, asleep but deeper than sleep, Thorn rode this dream, caught in its magnetic surge, gave himself to it, feeling her there beside him, taking him into her mouth and holding him there, then moving him, swallowing his length into her throat, not a dream, could be no dream so real, and he stayed there, miles beneath the surface of his body. Inside some dark coffin on the ocean floor of slumber.

  Wanting it to be Darcy, wanting her here, doing this, working him in and out of her throat, the tender head of his penis growing sore, had to be Darcy, and felt himself buoyed up through warm miles of ocean blackness, felt himself rising and rising to recapture his body, which floated on the surface of the bed where she was holding him in her mouth, then let go of him, swiveling onto his thighs and fitting him inside her compact body, a fit that was too tight, scraped, hurt him, made him groan with grief and pleasure. Moving up and down above him, a wriggle, a twist, rising and falling.

  And finally she began to buck above him, a bareback gallop across a rutted field, Thorn doing his part, his eyes opening now, seeing her, seeing her above him, her boyish chest, her hair askew, not Darcy, not Darcy but this other one, her name coming to him out of the thick drone of sleep.

  Sylvie.

  Who wanted to bring him into her body for reasons having nothing to do with love, wanting to alter the orbit of his atoms, insert herself inside him, reshape him, seal their deal — Sylvie, who twisted and wrenched her body from right to left and back again, a corkscrew, throwing a single arm above her head like a rodeo rider, wringing what she could from him, which was everything he had stored away, everything he had kept hidden from Darcy, all that he had husbanded, the reserves he'd held back out of modesty or fear, whatever his reasons were, he didn't know anymore, but it seemed crazy to have kept anything from Darcy, especially the wildness, the savage howl of pleasure and the mad animal grind of his hips, giving it instead to Sylvie, trying to throw her off him, and trying just as hard to keep her on.

  Until he hated himself for allowing this, and Darcy for not sensing that so much was still hidden in him, layers she had not discovered, and hated Sylvie for knowing it was there, knowing how to tap it, watching it gush. And hated her for climbing off him and hurrying out the door, pulling at her clothes, before he was finished.

  Coming on himself now, the sperm thick on his belly and she, not an apparition, not a dream, but Sylvie, rushing out the door, slamming it behind her, running from him, and Thorn paralyzed on his back, still letting go, hating himself and Sylvie and even Darcy, but mostly himself, groaning at his idiocy, his mindless hard-on.

  Thorn clutched the sheets until he was completely done.

  CHAPTER 26

  Thorn woke in a dazzle of daylight with six pistols pointed at his face. It took him a minute to count them all, and it took him a minute more to see that this was definitely no dream.

  Crowded around the bed were a couple of men in uniform and a couple more in street clothes. And behind them stood two more people. Another man, a woman. Revolvers and automatics, .38's and 9 m.m.'s. No one said anything for a moment while he woke, pushed himself up onto his elbows. Then a thirtyish guy in an oxford-blue shirt and dark pants, a John F. Kennedy haircut, holding a Glock close to Thorn's nose said, "This the one, Judy?"

  In her neatly pressed green uniform, looking very official, Judy Nelson stepped up to the foot of the bed, looked up and down his naked body.

  "That's him."

  "Okay," John Kennedy said. "Get your clothes on, Mr. Thorn. We need to do some dialoguing."

  "Oh, good," Thorn said. "Dialoguing is my middle name."

  As he was pushing himself out of the bed, he noticed something in the ashtray on the table beside his bed. He leaned in that direction and saw a small silver key. Apparently a gift his visitor had left behind. The key to an airport locker.

  ***

  "We're asking the questions here, Mr. Thorn."

  "Am I under arrest?"

  "Not yet."

  "Then what the hell do you call this?"

  "What we call this is a federal investigation," said the kid with the Kennedy hair. "Ever hear of one of those?"

  Judy groaned and the FBI guys glanced at her in unison.

  She gripped her nose by the bridge, pulled it loose, then pressed it back into place while a distinct pop filled the room. Her personal Bronx cheer. She slanted her eyes away from them, letting Thorn see she wasn't particularly on his side, but she wasn't fond of these guys either.

  The rest of the posse was outside in the hall joking around. At the Holiday Inn again, third floor, the back room of the Fish and Wildlife office. Thorn sitting at the head of a long walnut conference table. To his right the single window looked out on a marsh. Egrets out there peeking through the sawgrass, holding their statue poses, poised to spear breakfast.

  The federal guys were on their feet, prowling the room, their eyes continually darting to Thorn as though they were trying to catch him cheating on an exam. The two of them wore identical blue dress shirts and cotton slacks with pleated fronts. One pair was navy blue and the other khaki. The blond one was Bill and the brunette was Joe. Or Bob and Tom. Thorn wasn't sure. Interchangeable names, haircuts, clothes, faces. Eagle Scouts promoted directly into the FBI clone bank. Both of them with black leather waist pouches where their handguns were stowed for the moment. Something unseemly about that, having to unzip before firing.

  There was a chalkboard on one wall, a plain institutional clock above it. It was ten past ten. A half hour so far in this room. On the other walls a variety of posters were taped up. Sierra Club and a couple of black-and-white Ansel Adamses. Snow-capped Sierras and a single saguaro cactus, peregrine falcons in flight, prairie dogs peeking out of their holes. These were a bunch of professional nature lovers, and let no one forget it. If you did, they just might pull out their Glocks and remind you.

  "Go on, Thorn, tell us where you got that fish." Judy was seated three chairs down from Thorn, looking off out the window. "If we like the answer, you can be on your way."

  "All right," he said. "You win."

  The guys took a position across from Thorn. Eyes sparking.

  "Go on," one of them said. "Let's hear it."

  "I found the thing floating in my beer."

  The FBI guys looked dully at each other.

  "I was sitting at the Ritz bar with a draft beer. I think it was Michelob, but it might've been something else. I'm not that great at differentiating. But it was domestic, I'm pretty sure of that. And cold. Ve
ry cold. Frosted mug and everything."

  "What do you think, mister? This is amateur night at the comedy club? Think if you can make us laugh, we'll let you go?"

  "Hey, it's the truth. 'The truth shall set me free.' "

  "In your beer, Thorn?" Judy said. "Come on."

  "You come on, Judy. What's the fucking problem here? I'm so dangerous you gotta call up this platoon of geeks to bring me in and ask some questions? You tell me what the deal is, I'll tell you everything I know. How's that? Fair trade?"

  "You know what kind of fish that is, Thorn?"

  "Miss Nelson, it's not necessary to explain anything to this gentleman. He has to talk to us, we don't have to talk to him."

  "It looks like a tilapia," Thorn said.

  "Tilapia nilotica," she said.

  "Only it's red."

  "You noticed."

  "Miss Nelson, we'll have to ask you to desist immediately. We're allowing you to sit in on the interrogation, but you're strictly in observer mode here. We can't allow you to discuss the situation with the subject."

  "Observer mode," Thorn said. "Just your thing, Judy."

  "Look," Judy said to the nearest clone. "You guys've been helpful. Great. We appreciate your support on this. I'll be sure to write a memo to my buddy Shanks in D.C. Get you all commendation plaques. But, listen, it's my jurisdiction here. At the moment all we got is a wildlife violation. It's my evidence, my bust. Everything about it is mine."

  "Now you look, Miss Nelson," one of the guys said. But Judy stood up and the guy swallowed back what he was about to say.

  She said, "I don't want to arm wrestle you people, but if I have to, I'll stamp on the floor three times and my guys'll be in here and we'll match judo skills. So, maybe what you should do is, you should go out, have a cup of java, take ten, fifteen minutes. I'm betting Thorn and I will've made some progress by then."