Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3)

by James W. Hall

  "Did you ask him to rescue you too? That's what you do, isn't it? Find the Roy Murthas, the Laverys, twitch your spooky little butt at them, try to get them lathered up about what an evil man your father is."

  "You seemed to enjoy Sylvie's butt pretty well last night. The way you heaved around. Never saw a guy get so worked up."

  Thorn glanced back at Sugarman and shrugged his admission. Sugar shook his head sadly at the sacrilege.

  "Darcy just stumbled into it, didn't she, Sylvie? She saw something that looked wrong, rushed in to help. And you thought, hey, why not? Maybe I should give a woman a chance to play the game. Might be a nice change of pace."

  Sylvie's eyes were growing distant, coming unfocused.

  "Nobody can help Sylvie."

  "Maybe you don't want any help. Maybe that's not what you're asking for at all."

  "Sylvie's in distress," she said. "She needs someone to step in the ring of fire and save her."

  "Or maybe what she wants," Thorn said, "is to see people flame out trying. Maybe that's what gets you off. Lure guys to the blaze, watch them sizzle. Must be very gratifying having all of them so worked up they're willing to die for you. Must be an incredible turn-on."

  Sylvie's eyes focused. She cocked her head to the side, a frigid smile coming to her lips.

  "You're a deep thinker, aren't you? Just deep as can be."

  "Not deep enough."

  "I don't like you, Thorn. I don't see how Darcy ever put up with some navel-gazer like you. She deserved better. Somebody who could take her out to places, show her the world. Not some goddamn hermit. Some guy, you think it's a big deal to walk down to the end of your driveway and watch the traffic go by."

  Sugarman inched to his right, but Sylvie noticed and flashed the shotgun his way and he halted.

  "And that dragon guarding the cave," Thorn said, glancing out at the fish ponds, seeing just beyond the range of the lights the shape of a man slouching toward the house. "That's all bullshit. You don't want to escape from Harden. 'Cause you and the dragon have a sweet little arrangement, don't you? Sylvie supplies him with all the fresh red meat he can handle, and he demonstrates how much he cares, what he's willing to do on her behalf. A cat bringing home its catch for its master's praise. That's how it works, right? One hell of a happy family."

  Her eyes twitched back and forth between Sugarman and Thorn.

  "You don't know my daddy," she said. "He's not like you, Thorn. A man like him, he gets bored without challenges. He needs action. It's how he stays youthful."

  "So that's your job, huh? You throw him nice slow pitches, and he belts them out of the goddamn park."

  Thorn moved a half step closer to her, two yards away now. Sylvie tightened her grip on the shotgun, holding him there.

  He said, "And it wasn't any rental boat either, was it?"

  "What're you talking about?"

  "That was you in the Grady White. Those were your flippers, your weight belt. Way too small to fit your father. That was you out on the reef."

  "I told you what happened. My daddy killed her. Like he does all of them."

  "You couldn't control Darcy. She didn't fall under the spell. Wasn't as gullible as the men. That got you worried. Maybe this one would actually succeed, bring your daddy to justice. You started sweating, thinking the whole goddamn fairy tale you'd dreamed up was going to come tinkling down. So you killed her, didn't you, Sylvie?"

  When she didn't reply, Thorn said, "Supposed to meet her at Snake Creek Marina so you could talk some more, but you didn't show. Instead, you followed us out there, looking for some kind of opportunity. Maybe you took along a gun. Ready to kill both of us if it came to that. But you saw your chance, swam over to her underwater, used a hand grip on her you'd learned from your father. I can just picture it. You and Harden sitting around the table after supper, father teaching his little girl some of his old military tricks, in case one day she might need to paralyze one of her playmates."

  Sylvie shifted the shotgun, worked her finger toward the trigger.

  "I should've never got involved with Darcy."

  "Yeah. And why's that?"

  "You can't trust women," Sylvie said. "You stand at the window watching for them, hour after hour, month after month, but they never come back. They pretend to care about you. But they don't. They don't care. Not really. They abandon you."

  "So you had to kill her, didn't you?"

  "Okay," she said, "I did it. I did it before she could hurt me. Women stab you in the back. Pretend they love you, then they do whatever they feel like. They go off. Sylvie had to defend herself before she was hurt again."

  Sylvie shifted her feet, brought the shotgun level with Thorn's chest. A few feet to her right Sugarman inched her way, spreading her targets as far apart as possible. Sugar's right eye was bloated, only a slit of white eyeball showing. Sylvie cut a warning glance his way, then looked back at Thorn.

  He'd shifted to the balls of his feet, had his weight cocked forward, and was estimating his chances for a dive at her feet. Out of the edge of his vision he saw Sugar trying to send him some kind of message with a flutter of his right hand, a countdown to attack or something, but Thorn couldn't read it.

  Sylvie swallowed deep and started to speak, but a scream interrupted her. A woman's agonized voice. Then another shriek came from the house. The woman screamed again and Sugarman heaved out a curse and charged down the slope of the terrace.

  Before Thorn could move, Sylvie had spun around and fired in his direction. But the recoil jerked her shot high, and Sugar continued to jog clumsily through the knee-deep water. Thorn lunged for her, but Sylvie stumbled away from him in time, swinging the barrel around till it was a foot from his face.

  CHAPTER 34

  "Back off," she said. "Back the fuck off."

  Thorn did as he was told.

  She seemed stunned by the blast of her shotgun. But after a moment her eyes gradually cleared, and she tilted her head, began to look curiously at Thorn, as if she'd just bumbled onto this stage and didn't remember which role was hers, had even forgotten the name of the play. Was waiting for Thorn to cue her.

  But he said nothing, and as she stared at him, a winsome smile materialized on her lips and lingered there like lazy smoke. It was coming to her now. An old act she'd played so well, so many nights before.

  "Oh, now, come on, Hemingway. Be honest," she said, her voice taking on a silky edge. "All that screaming and moaning last night, all that humping. Come on, Thorn, say it. Don't you love Sylvie, maybe just a little bit?"

  He slid his eyes away from the black barrels of the shotgun, lifted them to the hazy sky above the floodlights. The night had cleared, the moon riding higher up the steep rails of its orbit, rotating from the earth, pulling away at thousands of miles an hour, that cold, barren rock loosening its hold on tides and lovers and the desperately insane.

  Bringing his eyes back to her, he said, "Why don't you put that shotgun down, you little shit, and I'll show you just how much I love you."

  Sylvie glared at him for a moment, then her eyes seemed to lose interest and swam inward like the eyes of a sleeper drawn back into the powerful currents of her dream. After another moment, Thorn was fairly sure she didn't even see him anymore. Just a murky shape, the outlines of a man. No longer one of Sylvie's soldiers, no longer of use, become now simply a faint annoyance. It must've been how she'd looked at Darcy at the end. The way she learned to deal with betrayals of every kind.

  You were either completely devoted to Sylvie or you didn't exist. You either worshiped at the altar of her lunatic smile, pledged yourself to her every wish, tried to soothe each of her complaints, had utter faith in her, absolute loyalty, or Sylvie shunted you off into some dead part of herself, deposited you there in the cemetery of her heart, where you became, as Thorn had just become, a ghost.

  Thorn turned from her and listened to the racket coming from inside the old wood farmhouse, grunts and scuffling, furniture overturning, a woman's voi
ce pleading for them to stop. A large pane of glass broke.

  "Get it out of your mind, Thorn. You're staying with me. Sylvie has some stoop labor for you." Her voice was remote, eyes frosted over, staring into the air above his head. "The fish are the money, and the money is what brought her back, so we're going to destroy the fish."

  Sylvie kept the shotgun aimed at Thorn as she squatted down at the edge of the pool, plunged her arm elbow-deep in the water. She struggled mightily with something for a moment, eyes fixed on Thorn, then tugged up the edge of a sheet of plastic. It seemed to be a tarp tinted a deep blue, fastened by snaps to the walls of the pool a foot or two below the waterline.

  "Now you finish it, Thorn. Pull it loose. This is man's work."

  Thorn hesitated a moment more, the house ominously quiet now. Then he kneeled at the edge and patted the sides of the pool till he found the snaps and began to pull them free. As he circled the pool unfastening the tarp, Sylvie dragged the plastic sheet to her, and dumped the crinkly excess into a pile on the keystone patio. It was shiny blue, some kind of opaque camouflage, giving the pool its shallow look.

  When Thorn was almost done, Sylvie moved to a panel on one of the columns of the gazebo and snapped on the pool lights, and Thorn saw them then, the swimming pool thick with fish. Tilapia nilotica swarmed everywhere, stirred into mild action by this sudden unveiling. Thousands of them, all a bright crimson, and all with those distinctive marks on their tails, dark false eyes.

  "Now throw it into the pool."

  She waved at the bucket brimming with white granules.

  "Sodium fluoroacetate." Her voice seemed to come from a long way down inside her.

  Thorn picked up the bucket and Sylvie stepped back, out of range, three, four yards away.

  "Into the pool. Throw it in."

  He stared at the fish for a moment, swirls of scarlet. All of them with the color the marketplace apparently craved. It was only skin, just a surface illusion. Because these fish were identical to all the other tilapia, the blacks and whites tasted the same, had flesh just as flaky as these reds. But men had died for these fish. They were the pretty blue-eyed blondes. The fairy-tale princesses. Born lucky, the Aryans of the sea.

  Thorn hurled the chemical into the pool, and watched as the fish swarmed upward toward it, tricked, believing it was feeding time. They pecked at the dissolving powder, then backed quickly away, swam to the edges of the pool.

  "It takes a while," Sylvie said. "They're tough bastards."

  As they watched, the tilapia began to swim in faster and more erratic patterns as if some large predator had been dropped in their midst. Darting and diving, they bumped into the walls, splashed the surface.

  "Now it's your turn, Thorn. I'm finished with you. Get in the pool."

  He looked at her. The muscles in her face were slack, her mouth loose; all the blood was drained from her, her flesh a zombie-white. A bleak imitation of Sylvie aimed the shotgun at him. Aimed with her finger hard on the trigger.

  He took a step toward the pool, Sylvie backing away, the shotgun steady. He considered the gymnastics involved in trying to disarm her, a feint, a dodge and roll. Some cinematic Bruce Lee kip and kick that sent the shotgun flying. But Thorn had never had the limberness for that, or the disposition. He was a bull-ahead fighter, the man who wins, if he wins at all, by getting back up and wading in one more time. Stubbornness his only talent.

  "There's another way to do this, Sylvie. Nobody else has to die. But you have to put that shotgun down first." Trying to warm his voice, soothe the jumper back from the ledge. But Sylvie wasn't listening. Her eyes were cataracts of ice.

  "Get in the pool," she said. "You're not sniveling your way out of this."

  "If you testify against your father, Sylvie, they won't go so hard on you. That's how it works."

  "I'm not testifying against anyone. Harden and I are going back to how it was. That's all I'm doing. Keeping it how it was."

  Behind Sylvie, Harden was coming down off the porch. He had his arm slung around Doris Albright's waist and was hauling her along with him. They were headed toward the pool.

  "Sylvie. It's never going to be that way again. All that's finished. You've got to give me the gun. Right now, Sylvie. It can't wait any longer."

  Thorn edged forward into the line of fire, only a few seconds left before Harden was within earshot.

  "Stop it, Thorn. Stop right there."

  He drew a hard breath. It was too late. Harden plodded up the terrace to the pool, and Sylvie heard him then, and stepped back, keeping the shotgun aimed squarely at Thorn. She swung her head around and saw them approach, then cut her eyes back to Thorn and held him there.

  "Good work, Sylvie," Winchester said. "Good girl."

  Blood seeped steadily from Winchester's throat. A shiny metal wire seemed to be embedded there, the flesh of his neck was puckered and swollen around it. Dangling at each end of the wire were two bright silver balls slightly larger than marbles. They hung down to Harden's chest and swung like grotesque pendulums as he stepped forward with Doris onto the patio, then let her go.

  "I must be a sight," he said, his voice a wet croak. "This thing." He touched a finger to his bloody neck. "I'd pull it out except I think it's all that's keeping me together at the moment. Be fine till I get to the hospital, have it fixed. The jugular's intact. That's what he was going for. Bastard cut some neck muscles is all. The Venter superior, the sternohyoideus. But I've survived worse. Much worse."

  Harden took a long breath and it chattered in his throat as though he were sucking up the last of a milkshake.

  He moved to the steps of the swimming pool, maneuvered himself awkwardly down the first two. The blood had stained his gray sweatshirt, leaving the shadow of what looked to Thorn like a tarpon diving in panic toward the ocean bottom.

  "Doris, come here, come close." He waved at her. "I want you to see what I've done. See what I've made for us."

  "Daddy, don't. Don't go in the water."

  "What'd he do with Sugar?" Thorn said to Doris.

  "Your friend," Harden said, "is staining my living room rug with his blood."

  Doris swallowed. "He's alive," she said. "He's still alive."

  "Daddy, don't go into the water. It's dangerous. You're bleeding, you're hurt."

  Harden glared her way.

  "Don't spoil this, girl. Don't try to sabotage this night for me. Do you hear your father?"

  He waded into the pool, went deeper till he was waist-high, and he leaned forward, lowered his arms into the water and scooped up a half dozen fish, held them squirming in his embrace. Bright red tilapia, lifting them up, then opening his arms, letting them splash back into the water.

  With a steady ooze of blood coming from his throat, he scooped up more, almost a dozen this time, cradled them to himself, giving Doris an elated smile, then one by one, let the fish go, let them slither free and escape back into the clear water.

  "You see, Doris," he said. "See what I've done. So many people tried, people with unlimited finances, scientists with their Ph.D.'s. But I succeeded. I did it because I had a reason, Doris, because I had a just cause. I brought alive a thing that never existed on the earth before."

  Doris seemed spellbound by the pool, the fish, by Harden Winchester splashing about, now grabbing up two large specimens, one in each hand, holding them heavenward like bricks of gold to the dark sky, beaming at Doris as the fish wriggled helplessly in his hands.

  "They're ours, Doris," he said. "The most beautiful, the most fruitful fish in the world. Aren't they wonderful?"

  Barely a whisper, she answered him.

  "Say it, say those words, Doris. They're wonderful fish."

  "They are," she said in her sad trance. "Wonderful fish."

  The night was humid and a sluggish breeze carried the faint scents of pine and moldering vegetation. High overhead the moon was speeding along its trajectory, moving out of range.

  "Do you realize, Doris, there are people who will p
ay great sums for these fish. Millions of dollars. Enough to wipe out all your debts, allow you to walk away from your dying husband, from that failed business, that pitiful life. That's how much these are worth. That's what I've done for you. For us. To free you of all your debts and entanglements, to wipe the slate clean for you, so you can return to us just as you left."

  "I want you to let these people go, Harden," Doris said. "They've done nothing. They were only trying to help me."

  Harden swept his hand through the water, stirring the fish into action. Some of them had already begun to die. In the corners of the pool they gathered, heads tipped up as if they were trying desperately to suck down some untainted air.

  "What are they to you, Doris? Who are these people?"

  "They're my friends. They were only trying to help."

  "Friends? What do you need with friends? You have a family. That's all you need. That's all anyone requires."

  "He didn't create those fish." Thorn stepped toward the edge of the pool.

  Harden's hand fluttered through the water. He peered into a corner of the pool where some of the dying fish had clustered.

  Thorn said, "He stole the fish from the government. Killed a dozen people in the process."

  Winchester shifted his eyes to Thorn.

  "Oh, he brags about it, claims he did it all himself. But he didn't do anything. He cheated. He murdered people who were in his way just like he's done all his life. Always got some noble justification. He used to kill because it was his patriotic duty, then he murdered to recover his family. But the man's just a goddamn killer. Just a simple lowlife son of a bitch who was raised by a murdering bastard and became a murdering bastard himself. And taught his daughter to be one too."

  Harden glared briefly at Thorn, then his eyes dodged away, looking again at Doris. His mouth softened into a con man's smile.

  Saying to her in a honeyed voice, "You know, sweetheart, pink is definitely your color. I always thought so. With your hair, your complexion. It's strawberries and cream. Sets everything off perfectly. I was telling Sylvie that just the other day. Pink is far and away your best color."