Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3)

by James W. Hall

  "You can't threaten us."

  "Okay, then look at it this way," said Judy. "Maybe it's time for a woman's approach on this. You guys obviously haven't gotten anything out of him. Let's give the other gender a shot."

  "Woman's approach?" John Kennedy said. For a moment he seemed to consider a smart remark, but took another look at Judy and thought better of it.

  The Eagle Scouts stared at each other again. Then the one in khaki pants turned back to Judy, nodded curtly, and the two of them gave Thorn a glare with the full weight of the federal government behind it, and left.

  "Christ, were those androids?" Thorn said when the door closed. "Are we doing that now? Making robo-jerks?"

  Judy got up, moved to the chair next to Thorn.

  "Look, old buddy, let's get this real straight. I knew you for a year or two when we were teenagers. But yesterday that whole scene out at the farm didn't feel right to me. So after I dropped you off, I made some calls. Talked to Sheriff Rinks in Key West, and some people I know in Marine Patrol in Key Largo. I asked them about you, who the hell you'd turned out to be."

  "Those particular people, Judy — I wouldn't have listed them very high on my reference list."

  "What I found out is, you've got a reputation as some kind of screwed-up cross between Daniel Boone and Bozo the Clown. Got a penchant for stepping in shit, and a habit of not giving a damn about whose rug you wipe it off on. Don't seem to have much use for the technicalities of the law. Don't own a social security card or driver's license, never cast a vote. And known to occasionally play it very loose with the safety and welfare of your fellow citizens."

  "Oh, so that's it," Thorn said. "You barge into my hotel room, guns drawn, because I haven't ever voted, don't own a goddamn social security card."

  Judy swung around in her chair and nailed him with her blue eyes flickering, mouth tight. Then things gradually began to soften as a thought grew behind her eyes. She grumbled, looked away, then rose and went over to the window and watched the egrets and herons stalk their nervous prey.

  "You were trying to sell red tilapia to Harden Winchester. That's what you're doing, isn't it? Making a deal with Harden."

  "Hell, no," he said. "I told you. I found that thing in my goddamn beer. Why in hell would I have dropped it off at your office if I'd been doing something illegal? I gave it to you, Judy. I gave you that goddamn fish. Is that what you think criminals do, hand over evidence of their crime to the authorities?"

  "I don't know what kind of shit you're trying to pull, Thorn. But I'm gonna find out, one way or the other."

  "Let me guess," said Thorn. "This whole thing has to do with what happened at Seamark, doesn't it?"

  Very slowly Judy turned from the window.

  She paced to the door and opened it, checked the hallway, then closed it, came to the table and sat down across from him. She took a breath, let it out. Took another one.

  "So, I guess I said the magic word."

  Her voice a whisper, Judy said, "Talk to me."

  Thorn looked into those eyes for a moment. Seeing the girl in there, the stubborn one who'd knocked half the Coral Shores High School football team on their butts, and then was forced to sit up in the bleachers the rest of her life and watch the guys get the glory. That girl's eyes in this woman's face.

  "A week ago," Thorn said, "a very close friend of mine was murdered. Darcy Richards. You may remember her, Gaeton Richards's little sister."

  She made a faint nod. Still wary, but listening.

  "Just before she died she mentioned a fish, a red tilapia. So I started scratching around, following the trail. And what I found out was there's no such thing as a red tilapia. But I kept on going and along the way, the name Seamark came up. I tracked the place down, went there. These days it's a nudist colony."

  "I heard."

  "People there told me what happened. Twelve dead people, their bodies stacked up, all the fish killed, place burned down."

  "Did they tell you all the breeding stock was stolen?" Judy said. "A few hundred thousand cherry reds."

  He stood up. Walked over to the window and looked out at the marsh. The toll gate for Alligator Alley was visible through the cypress. Cars lined up to make the dual lane straight shot across the state. That road had been damming up the sweet, clear water of the Everglades for decades. The Glades no longer flowed as it was meant to do, filtering for a hundred miles through the rough sawgrass and scrub pine. No longer cleaning itself. And now the polluted runoff from the farms and sugarcane plantations was collecting out there, tainting the virgin water. Mercury, sulfur, lead. Some of the gar and bass and bluegills were growing third eyeballs, extra fins. Gators dying of stomach cancer, herons and gallinules with cataracts. Just another trade-off. Sacrificing Eden so the Chryslers and Nissans could race each other two abreast across the doomed remains of the state.

  Thorn left the window, glanced at the Ansel Adams prairie dog climbing out of his hole in the desert of New Mexico, West Texas, or Arizona. Hell, the same thing was probably happening out there. Nothing so unique about Florida. Most likely there were prairie dogs with tumors too. No place was staying the way it used to be. Never as pure, as abundant. Corrosives leaching into every aquifer. And railing against it was doing no good at all. There were people who'd screamed from soapboxes for years, a hell of a lot more eloquent than Thorn, and nothing had changed. Even the good people, the smart people had gotten tired of hearing it. They'd tuned out. Turned cynical. One more lost cause. Pave it over and be done with it.

  All a person could do anymore was cope. Keep touching the forehead, feeling for the lump beginning to rise. That third eyeball.

  He looked across at Judy.

  "Is there some way to tell if that fish I brought in is from the batch that was stolen from Seamark?"

  "The lab's doing an electrophoresis on it right now."

  "Sorry, but I'm basically a one-and two-syllable guy. I need help with anything longer."

  "They run electrical current through a sample of fish tissue on a gel plate, study the patterns of the migrating charged particles."

  "Now, that certainly helps."

  "Like fingerprinting," she said. "DNA testing. Not a hundred percent accurate, but it'll tell us something."

  "You can't be sure just looking at the fish? The markings?"

  "Not with a fingerling like you brought in. If it was an adult fish, yeah, then probably we could tell."

  "How?"

  "The Seamark fish had black circles on their tail fins. Almost like a conventional red fish, a false eye shape. Very distinctive. No other tilapia has that marking. Apparently it just evolved in the crossbreeding process. Became a fixed feature."

  "So fish with those marks, they'd have to be Seamark fish?"

  "I'm not saying it would stand up in court or anything like that," she said. "But, yeah, fish with that false eye marking would definitely be from the Seamark gene line."

  "So let's go out to Winchester's farm and look around."

  "You saying you got that fish from Harden Winchester?"

  "I'm saying we should go out there and look."

  Judy stared down at the table.

  "Now listen to me, Thorn. I've been over every godforsaken inch of Harden's farm a hundred times. Taken samples, poked anywhere and everywhere I wanted to go. It's impossible he's got any stock out there I don't know about. Impossible."

  "Maybe you let your feelings intrude. You like the guy. You like him pretty much. Maybe he steered you more than you thought, only let you see what he wanted you to see."

  Her eyes floated up, settled on his. She tapped a finger against the edge of the table. Kept tapping.

  "Tell me something, Judy."

  She held his eyes but said nothing, kept on tapping.

  "Tilapia, they're freshwater fish, right? Lake fish, that's what Ludkin told me. They wouldn't survive in the ocean, would they?"

  She stopped tapping.

  "Why do you ask?"

  "I
was just wondering about something."

  "Well, you're wrong. The fact is, these fish go both ways. They're saline tolerant. They could live anywhere there's water."

  "Is that right?"

  "Miracle fish," she said. "Wonder fish."

  "So what if they got loose? A whole bunch of them. A few million all at once, say into the Okehatchee. What would happen."

  "They're not going to get loose. That's part of my job, to see that doesn't happen."

  "But if they did. If they got free, swam down to the Gulf."

  "If enough of them got loose at once, then we'd have us a serious problem."

  "How serious?"

  "They're a thousand times more productive, Thorn, don't forget. Four hatching cycles a year. In no time at all those fish would be a nuisance. And it wouldn't take much longer after that before you'd start seeing other species completely crowded out."

  "Other species destroyed?"

  "That's right. If a tilapia drives a fish out of its natural habitat, out into some unprotected space, it's not going to last long. And if tilapia are as good at living in an open saltwater environment as they are at living in the canals, I'd guess in a few years or so they'd dominate the environment. You'd have a hard time finding any other fish in the entire Gulf of Mexico beside tilapia."

  "That bad?"

  "Oh, worse than that even. Very bad."

  Judy pressed the palm of her right hand to her forehead and seemed to smooth away the first stabs of a headache. She looked up at him, eyes working over his face as if she were trying to read some feature of his character. Finally, she stood up, told him to sit tight, and she left the room.

  In a few minutes, when she returned, she carried a couple of eight-by-ten photographs. She lay them on the table in front of him. The first one was an aerial view of the shoreline of some tropical environment. In rich color it showed a lush green thicket of palms and bamboo and ferns that grew right to the shoreline of the bay. The water was six different shades of green, that many blues as well.

  "Brazil," she said. "Six hundred miles south of Rio. Rain forest grows right to the seashore."

  "So?"

  "Seven months ago a dam broke five miles up the Sangre de Cristo River. A Brazilian fish farm was operating a mile downstream from the dam. They raised tilapia. The whole fish farm got washed out into the bay. A few hundred thousand fish. Look at the next photo."

  The second photograph showed the same bay. The palms were still there, but the ground cover was gone. It looked like Agent Orange had been sprayed on the jungle, or a hurricane had churned above the coastline for days and had mowed down ninety percent of the former plant life. What was left was closer to a desert than a jungle. The water was now a chalky white. Several large strands of sickly green wove through it.

  "Tilapia did this?"

  "Tilapia, yes."

  "How?"

  "You want the scientific explanation, you'd have to ask somebody else," she said. "But in my words what they did is, they rode the river down to the ocean. In just seven months they choked the water all along the shoreline. Overproduced to such an extent, they changed the whole balance of the system. Nitrogen levels grew dangerously high from all their waste. And all that nitrogen produced an algae bloom of giant proportions. Algae loves nitrogen, but that's about all that does.

  "Sponges die, and sea grasses, and shrimp. The gulls leave, one by one the rest of the shorebirds desert the place. And those birds helped control insect pests. The bugs flourished. Termites, weevils, you name it. Chewed up all that vegetation along the coast, then marched off somewhere else.

  "You know how the story goes, Thorn, right? The hip bone's connected to the thigh bone. I clap my hands in Florida, a sparrow falls out of its nest in Hong Kong. You know the story. Every little thing you do has effects you'll never see. Effects no one understands. We start playing around with Mother Nature, shipping a fish from its natural habitat to some other place, bad things can happen."

  He stared at the two pictures. Shuffled them and stared.

  "What'd they do about this?"

  "Well, it was a little late by the time they got around to it. But the Brazilians poisoned the bay. Cordoned it off best they could, then killed every living thing in six thousand square miles so the tilapia wouldn't spread. That's what they did."

  "Jesus." He looked up at Judy again. "So your people would do that? Or could they even do anything at all?"

  Judy said, "Did you happen to read in the papers about the shrimp farm up in South Carolina? The Parker Project."

  Thorn said no, he'd missed that.

  "Okay, well, Fish and Wildlife had this giant research station up there, all these boys in white coats working with some kind of designer shrimp. Super jumbos. Raising these goddamn interbred genetic monsters in ponds and cages and big concrete tanks, similar in some respects to what Harden and others are trying to do with tilapia. But then along came Hurricane Hugo, taking aim on Charleston, and the Interior Department people up there flipped out, scared shitless. A few hours before the storm hit, they swooped in and destroyed all those shrimp. Burned a couple of the facilities to the ground."

  "Burned them down?"

  "Yeah, because if the storm surge reached that far inland, some of those hybrids could be dragged back out to sea. And none of the scientists could say for sure just what the hell would happen if those shrimp got loose in the general ocean population. And let me tell you, those environmental regulation boys don't like surprises. They're a paranoid bunch. They've seen pictures like those you're looking at. So they burned the place down. Destroyed a decade of scientific research, I'm told."

  Thorn stood up, walked over to the window and looked out at the stream of cars lining up to roar across the Everglades.

  "Talk to me, Thorn."

  "I don't know if it's true. I'm not sure about the reliability of my source."

  Judy said, "What're we talking about, Thorn? Specifically."

  With his back to her, he watched a gang of vultures circling about a mile away, and said, "I think Harden's going to let his tilapia go. All of them. All at once."

  "Bullshit."

  "I believe he has a plan to do that. To let them loose into the Okehatchee."

  "And why the hell would he do something like that?"

  "I'm not sure. To get even with somebody. And because he's full of hate. I don't know. Maybe he just wants to leave his twisted mark. Piss on the world."

  She considered it a moment, then shook her head.

  "Now, look, Thorn. I don't know what you have against Harden Winchester, but this is ridiculous. A major crock of shit."

  "He's gonna do it."

  "First of all, his farm is landlocked."

  "What about the Okehatchee?"

  "His ponds are two hundred yards from the river," Judy said. She got up and came over to him, and they stood shoulder to shoulder looking out at the fringe of the Glades. "He'd have to dig several big goddamn trenches through solid limestone to get those fish to the river. It would require major earth-moving equipment. It'd take months to do that. And I'm out at his place twice a week. I'd see what he was doing. No way in hell he could manage that. Absolutely no way in hell."

  "He's found a way to do it. Trust me, Judy, he's found a way."

  CHAPTER 27

  As Sugarman woke, the dream lingered like a strange fragrance, rich and earthy, full of sunlight. In the dream he'd been chasing a tall lithe woman, wildflowers rising all around them, up to their waists, chasing her in slow motion, following the path she left as she parted the thick green stems. From a movie he'd seen. That image of two young lovers in a field of flowers. The name of it coming to him out of a mist, though usually he never remembered movies, their titles. Elvira Madigan, some foreign film he'd seen long ago, not positive why or where. Maybe one of Jeanne's brief hobbies, a culture attack, dragging him to French films, some art cinema up in Miami, sitting in the dark reading subtitles and trying to figure out what the hell was going
on.

  And even remembering Jeanne, his wife of nearly twenty years, while he stared at Doris Albright sleeping beside him beneath the pale blue sheets, Sugarman felt not even the faintest sting of guilt.

  He watched Doris and listened to the house waking up, the sound of coffee perking on the floor below, a toilet flushing, shower running. The Olde Island Inn, a bed and breakfast place she'd known about in a two-story wood frame house a block from Naples Pier. When they'd arrived last night at eight, the young woman at the desk had told them there was only one room left. Looking at them uncertainly. And without a flicker of hesitation Doris had said, "We'll take it."

  The sexiest moment of Sugarman's life. We'll take it. Out of the deepest blue it had come. Just her hand touching his in the car before that. And then there was Doris Albright standing in front of him, opening her purse, counting out the money. Even filling in the registration card while Sugarman stood like God's own idiot holding their suitcases in the living room of the wonderful old tin-roofed beach house.

  We'll take it.

  My god.

  And they'd said nothing going up the stairs to their room. Said nothing when he closed the door, remained silent when she turned around and came to him and he set the bags down and she stepped up to him, lay her head against his heart, circled her arms around his waist, and he held her and drew in her sweet orange blossom scent, found his lips pressing against the part in her hair, holding her that way, wordless, till finally, long minutes later, she stepped back, reached behind her, and began to unbutton her blouse.

  We'll take it.

  And they had taken it. Taken the brass bed and the sheets and the pillows. Twisted and grappled, fumbling in their haste, all of it as it should be on the first hot time. As it should be long after that. Wrestling, groaning, but still without a word about it, about what sins they were committing or obligations they were assuming. No thoughts in Sugarman's head, absolutely blank. For the first time in his life his mind as naked as his body. Wordless. Such a sweet relief. Such an instinctive fitting together of their strange and distant bodies.