Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3)

by James W. Hall

  "Harden, this is enough. You've done enough now. Let us get you to the hospital. You're hurt."

  "Those fish," Harden said, glancing at Thorn as he came up the steps, then back at Doris. "Do you realize, Doris, no one will ever need to go to sea again. I've rendered an entire way of life meaningless. No more fishermen. Because now we can create all the fish we want right here on land. Tasty and beautiful. I've made them for you. They are your homecoming present. Dedicated to Doris Winchester. My wife. This gift."

  Obviously the poisoned water had not entered Harden's wound. He seemed fine. The tiger still fully alive inside him. While in the pool the fish swarmed in clumps, in their final frenzy as the toxin took effect. Harden stopped halfway up the steps, and glanced uneasily at them, then looked up at Sylvie.

  "What's wrong with the fish?" he said. "What did you do?"

  Sylvie struggled to speak. She moved close to the edge of the pool, a tear appearing on her cheek.

  "I want it to stay how it was, Daddy. We had a good family. You, me. It's enough. We don't need her."

  But Harden didn't seem to hear, the man preoccupied with his fish, and Sylvie just as absorbed in him. And for Thorn this was as good as it was going to get.

  He sprang forward, knocked Sylvie aside, ripped the shotgun from her hands, but before he could turn, the big man chopped him behind the neck, and Thorn dropped the weapon. The light dimmed, and he felt himself going down, but Harden caught him by the arm, turned him around and stared into his face.

  Roughly he crossed Thorn's middle fingers over each other and pressed his thumb into that cluster of synapses and nerves, and Thorn felt the arm go numb, felt his lungs contract. Harden using Dr. Ralph Mellon's grip — Mellon, the pathologist in the bright clothes. The big man holding Thorn's hand in the office of the funeral home and deadening it this same way.

  Thorn was immobilized, his legs wilting, looking into Harden's eyes, only a dim flicker of consciousness. The twilight before everlasting dark. Harden's grip tightened, and Thorn stumbled sideways to the edge of the pool, the big man coming along.

  Blowing out all the air in his lungs, Thorn drifted deeper inside himself. Clamped his eyes shut. Could feel the pressure in his ears, a hot twist in his chest, felt like he was drowning out there in the summer air, the last grains of oxygen consumed by his muscles, his arm numb and throbbing at once.

  With his left hand he reached out, felt the clamp of Harden's grip, explored it, tried to peel away his hands, but it was hopeless, the man was far stronger than Thorn. And abruptly Harden tightened the grip. Thorn flinched, saw the fizz of lights, like bubbles in seltzer, exploding brain cells, the light show just before unconsciousness.

  Thorn wasn't sure, but it felt like he'd stopped breathing. Lost in the dark undoing of his own chemistry, the self-consumption of his blood. Left-handed, blind from the pain, he reached out again, the last feeble seconds passing, extended his hand, eyes closed, felt his way up Harden's arm, patted him on the chest.

  The man squeezed harder, jerked Thorn to the left, then right, shaking him like a shark tearing loose a chunk of flesh. Thorn patted Harden's chest again, gently. Breath gone, fading. Rocking on the edge of the poisoned bath.

  Then Thorn brushed it with the fingers of his left hand. Not recognizing it at first. His mind loosening its hold on the moment. Mind going wordless and scattered. And once again he touched it, the cold thing, the round thing.

  He considered it, tried to picture it as his mind grew gray. And yes, of course. He felt it, one of the pendulums, a steel ball, Thorn seeing it now with his eyes shut, closing his hand around it as the electrical current in Thorn's mind flickered and went off, flickered again and came back on. He gripped it, made a fist around it. Harden sensed what was happening and relaxed his hold on Thorn's arm, relaxing, letting go, but it was too late to back away, too late for forgiveness, appeals to reason. They were a long way beyond the reach of law, a long way beyond all restraints of civility.

  Thorn yanked it hard. Like a parachute rip cord, and felt Harden fall away from him, felt himself dropping backward through some kind of watery sky, upside down, drift through the blue dangerous haze, a chute spreading open above him, slowing him down. Falling until he slammed on his back against the keystone deck.

  With his eyes clamped, Thorn released the steel ball, let it roll away. And he lay there for a long time in the unhurried drowse of shock. Hearing only the nag of night bugs, the electric fizz of a hundred floodlights. Drawn down into silence by the irresistible undertow of his exhaustion. Lying still in the luxurious quiet. And then he felt himself let go as well of the rage, and finally surrender even Darcy Richards, the sweet terrible ache of her absence.

  Thorn lay on the hard patio, with the dreamy night air bathing his face and filling his lungs.

  CHAPTER 35

  Long moments later Thorn was wrenched awake by a woman's wail. And began a slow breathless journey back to the surface. Fighting his way to the light. It took every fiber of his concentration to draw his eyes open, to lift his head, to push himself upright.

  He sat for a moment and tried to slow the dizzy spin in his head. Blinking his eyes, rubbing them, the scene came into gradual focus. On the lip of the pool Sylvie was holding tight to Doris Albright's right hand. She had rearranged her mother's fingers into the same lethal grip Harden had used on him, the same grasp Sylvie had just a few days ago used on Darcy. And now Sylvie was tipping Doris backward toward the water. The girl sobbing silently as she leaned her weight into Doris.

  "You lied," she said. "You never came back. You gave up."

  Doris slapped her free hand helplessly against Sylvie's grip. Her eyes shut hard, wincing with the pain. Thorn hauled himself to his feet and stumbled toward them. Woozy, bewildered, a drunk staggering to the bar for one last shot.

  With her eyes fixed on the pool, Sylvie cried out again, and threw all her weight against Doris, shoved her backward toward the water. But Thorn was there, and seized the neck of Doris's blouse, spun her around. Doris screamed, and Thorn felt the cotton rip in his hand, saw her twist away from him.

  He thrust out his other hand, the crippled one, and snagged her arm as she was tumbling away. He gripped her hard, and threw himself backward, holding on to Doris Albright, yanking her against her own momentum, hauling her down roughly on top of him.

  Doris landed on his chest, and lay there weeping quietly. Then he heard a splash. Heard Sylvie's voice, a babble of pain. He eased Doris to the side, lay her down on her back and stood up. In the pool Sylvie was thrashing through the mass of dying fish, splashing toward where her father floated facedown at the foot of the blue slide.

  When finally she reached him, she grabbed the neck of his shirt, swung his body around. She looked dreadfully weary, her movements growing more sluggish every second. The movie she was in seemed to be turning to slower and slower motion.

  Sylvie wrapped her arms around her father's chest, a clumsy embrace, and arduously turned him, then took one ponderous stroke toward the steps. But she faltered, and her head dipped below the water and she flailed her arms. When her head resurfaced, she sputtered, blew water from her mouth. As she lifted her eyes to Thorn, standing on the opposite rim, she seemed already to be disappearing into herself.

  Her gaze was desolate and faraway, as if she had lost her balance and was beginning to fall backward from a ledge. Her eyes holding on to his as Sylvie began her long slow plunge into that endless ravine.

  A moment later, Sylvie Winchester's body floated faceup next to Harden's. Both of them were motionless, surrounded by the carcasses of his red tilapia. Thorn watched them for several minutes, the water tinted crimson. He waited till he was sure they would not be moving ever again, then he turned around, checked on Doris, and staggered for the house.

  "You can't do it. I won't let you, Thorn. I absolutely won't."

  Thorn was backing Winchester's Oldsmobile, angling the boat trailer toward the edge of the Okehatchee. Judy Nelson waded through the
water beside his open window.

  "I'm telling you, Thorn, I can't permit this."

  "And what do you suggest, Judy? Just let nature take its course, let the goddamn tilapia turn the Gulf into something like that bay in Brazil? Is that what you want? Let that million fish lay their five thousand eggs apiece? You want that, Judy?"

  There was blood streaming from her ear, a gash along her temple. Her hair matted with muck. She was having trouble standing, had to prop one arm against the roof of the Olds.

  Thorn set the brake and got out of the car. Behind them, Sugarman, in knee-deep water, began to run the electric winch, letting the Grady White ease back into the water. With both his hands badly broken, he was pressing the switch with his elbow.

  "I'm telling you. You can't just go out there, Thorn, and kill wildlife indiscriminately. Fish, birds, reptiles. You can't do it. That estuary is chock-full of every kind of fish and animal. Some of them are even endangered species. There's manatees in there, birds roosting on the shoreline. I can't let you, Thorn. I can't."

  She patted her hand against her empty holster.

  "I don't like it any more than you do, Judy. But I don't see what the choice is. We wait till the morning, let the scientists and the politicians take it over, nothing'll ever happen. You know that. They'll decide to study the problem, write papers or some bullshit. A month from now, Judy, think about it, those fish'll work down to the Gulf, get out in that warm, shallow water, nutrient rich — it'll be a disaster, Jude, a total fucking disaster. We either do something tonight, right now, or it doesn't get done. You know that. You know it's true."

  Judy reached up and touched her hair near the jagged tear in her flesh. She staggered. Then caught herself against the hood of the car and looked out at the silver water flowing west toward the Gulf. Fish flipped at the surface. All across the yard the shallow water was speckled with their presence. It was as though the surface of the earth were being peppered with an invisible rain.

  An osprey high in the pines screeched three times, then four, its displeasure unmistakable. The off-key tone was grating at some ancient, biological level, warning every blood-filled creature below that it was not pleased. That it was on the verge of swooping down with its beak and razor-sharp talons extended.

  "The boat's in!" Sugarman called. "You going to do this or what?"

  Thorn came close to Judy. Her mouth opened, but she didn't speak.

  "I hate it, Judy. I fucking hate this. But we have to do something. You know we do. And I haven't heard a better idea."

  She closed her eyes and looked away from him, her mouth shut tight against all she wanted to say.

  Thorn turned from her and went to the boat.

  "You're going to have to do this alone, Thorn. I'm no good."

  Sugar held up his bloody, mangled hands.

  "Take Judy inside the house. Lay her down. Get Doris to look after her. Maybe there's a radio in her truck. You could try calling for help."

  "You know how to work those things?"

  "Not really," Thorn said. He hauled himself over the gunwale and stepped into the boat. "But how difficult could it be?"

  "Good luck, buddy."

  Thorn tilted the engine down, started it, and eased the Grady White backward out into the deeper water.

  He swung the wheel around and headed downstream at an idle. In the rear locker he found a hand-held spotlight and plugged it in and shone it down into the water. The black and white tilapia were swarming near the surface. He washed the beam across the width of the river and saw them swimming everywhere.

  He eased the throttle forward, RPM's up to two thousand. Just short of a plane. Kept the spotlight on the water and moved downstream, watching until the fish began to thin, and then finally, a mile or so west of Winchester's farm, the river was clear of them entirely.

  He went another half mile for good measure, then swung the boat about in the narrow channel, headed back upstream. He cut the throttle, turned on the anchor light, and squatted down beside the several crates of hand grenades.

  There was probably another way. A sensible man would have stayed calm, considered creative options. A net strung across the river perhaps, something to contain the fish, keep them from moving downstream. Some ingenious solution that didn't involve killing every living creature for miles up and down the river.

  A wiser man perhaps would have found a way to cull the tilapia from the other fish, separate them from the snakes and alligators, the frogs, the turtles, and river otters and raccoons, manatees and spoonbills, night herons, the snowy egrets, ospreys. Spare the innocent, execute the guilty.

  But Thorn was not that man. No matter that he considered these river creatures his biological equal, their lives as rich and sacred as any two-legged mammal's on the shore, there was no other way to proceed. No time to sort the good creatures from the bad. The estuary was infected, a plague was loose. God help him, but the blameless would have to die.

  The first pin came out easy. Thorn gripped the spring-loaded trigger, picked a spot out in the middle of the stream. He set his feet and hurled the grenade. It splashed and sank a few feet short of the spot he'd chosen.

  Thorn waited. Seconds passed.

  But nothing happened. A few moments more. A dud perhaps. Had sat in Winchester's humid pantry for so many years that the detonator was dampened somehow.

  Then suddenly the water formed a huge silver bubble that lifted the surface of the river and rumbled through the deck of the Grady White, and a second later erupted in a massive geyser that broke the air into a thousand slivers of glass, put a bellow in Thorn's blood, river-spray coming down for minutes afterward like a short summer shower, the water rocking in the channel as if a tanker had passed by at fifty knots and left a tidal wave behind.

  Before he could hurl the second one, the fish and a ton of other water creatures were already bobbing to the top. Their carcasses began to blanket the surface of the river like the flotsam from the shipwreck of Noah's ark. He threw another. And another after that. Working himself slowly, methodically back toward Winchester's farm.

  He killed a million fish that night. A few million other things. And filled the dark with unforgivable thunder.

  CHAPTER 36

  Thorn knew a woman once who had gone on a shopping trip to New York City, and among other things she had brought home to Key Largo a necklace of shiny black beads. The woman put the necklace away in her drawer, where it sat for months before she remembered it.

  When she tried to open the drawer again, it wouldn't budge. Finally, using a screwdriver to pry it free, she found the drawer was clogged with the vines and roots of a strange plant. Her necklace had sprouted. It was made of seeds.

  What might have remained dormant forever in the temperate zone had gone haywire in the sub-tropics. If she had gone away for a year, the plant might have taken possession of her house.

  Then there were the catfish that had grown legs so that they might climb out of canals and explore the adjacent shopping centers. And the land crabs that flooded out of Biscayne Bay each spring and invaded the neighborhoods for miles up and down the coast. For days they clacked across patios, into bedrooms, caused pileups on the highway. And there were also the termites that ate cement, and the lovebugs that mated in great black clouds along the roadways and brought traffic to a halt. Male and female attached, hovering with all their million relatives nearby, they squashed into an ecstatic gummy paste on every windshield. And there were also the roaches big as fists, and the flying ants that appeared suddenly and choked the air in random houses, then just as suddenly and inexplicably disappeared.

  The list was far too long to recount in its entirety. South Florida was rich with short-lived phenomena. Naked twigs jammed into the earth became trees overnight, mold and mildew and pollen enriched the air till it was stifling and unbreathably dense. The climate was just too hospitable for its own good. The region was a giant petri dish in which everything, weak or strong, had an excellent chance to flourish.r />
  And it was into that world that Winchester had released a million tilapia. Thorn had done the only thing he could. He'd headed off a disaster, saved the state of Florida untold misery and distress.

  Why then could he not sleep? Why then did he hear the echo of those blasts every time he closed his eyes?

  ***

  It was early December, the temperature had evened off to the mid-seventies. Tourists had retaken the roads and restaurants. Thorn and Sugarman and Rochelle Hamilton were out on Thorn's Chris-Craft, the wide-beamed thirty footer. They were tied up to an anchor buoy on Carysfort Reef, riding the swells like an ocean liner in drydock. Eleven miles out, too far from land for most of the party boats. Had the reef practically to themselves that Monday afternoon. Only two other open fishermen on the other side of the lighthouse.

  For the last half hour Sugarman had been badgering Thorn to come in the water. But Thorn just kept shaking his head, sitting in a deck chair on the stern, nursing a bottle of Dos Equis, watching Rochelle standing at the fish sink, cleaning a grouper she'd speared a few minutes earlier. Every few minutes she threw more bones and skin and entrails back into the sea.

  "I don't know why," Thorn said. "I just don't feel like swimming. Okay? Can you just accept that, get off my back?"

  It was a partly cloudy afternoon, a small chop from a ten-mile-an-hour breeze out of the east. Humid for December.

  Sugarman was standing on the top rung of the dive ladder, his mask up on his forehead. Both hands were still in casts, and those were wrapped in plastic bags for the diving trip today. The surgery was all done. Inside Winchester's house that night, Harden had crushed both of Sugarman's hands. Broken small bones and large, left Sugar writhing on the living room rug.

  That's for touching the wrong woman, Harden told him, as he'd hauled Doris out the door.

  Most of Sugar's movement would come back eventually. So said the bone and nerve physicians at Baptist Hospital. Sugarman asked them if they could put a number on it. Eighty percent, ninety, maybe a hundred percent? A hundred percent mobility? one of them said. What the hell's that? I don't even have a hundred percent, and I'm a goddamn surgeon. The other one going, Let me put it this way, Mr. Sugarman, I think your career as a concert pianist may be about to go into a serious decline. Drs. Laurel and Hardy. Sugarman smiled politely and said, How about twist-off beer caps? Think I'll ever manage them again?