“All right,” he said. “Nameless it shall remain.”
Alex rolled onto her side, resting her head in the shallow of his shoulder.
“Will it hold you for the week I’m gone?”
“A week? Hell, I may never need sex again.”
“Oh, God, it wasn’t that good.”
“Close,” he said. “Damn close.”
“The female gender would be losing an important natural resource.”
“I’m not interested in the female gender. I only have eyes for you.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s true.”
“For the moment maybe. Don’t fool yourself, Thorn. Lifetime habits don’t go away so easily.”
Thorn was trying to recall a line of poetry he’d known once, something from John Donne about romantic constancy. But it wouldn’t come up from the foggy back roads of memory.
“I hear Dad. We should get up.”
“Your hearing’s better than mine.”
“He’s in the kitchen, pouring milk into his cereal, talking to Buck.”
She untangled from his arms and sat up.
“I’m glad you’re doing this search-and-rescue stuff,” he said. “This’ll be good. A new direction. More upbeat. Not the same old thing year after year.”
“It’s fun, yeah, but there’s stuff I’ll miss.”
“Crime scenes?”
“Believe it or not. The homicide guys, the other techs. Change isn’t easy. You know how that is. You’re pretty fond of your routines.”
“Lately I’ve been feeling open to new possibilities. As a matter of fact, I’ve been feeling very open.”
“Meaning what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Something more than a night now and then. You and me and a gardenia bush outside.”
“Don’t be stupid, Thorn. That’s the sex talking. Your brain is addled. You couldn’t give up the Keys. You’ve spent too many years up in that tree house, staring at sunsets, to ever walk away.”
“I didn’t say ‘walk away.’ But some arrangement we can be together more. I’ve been thinking about it. It could work, if we want it to.”
They were quiet for a while, the cardinal asserting its territorial claim. On the window screen a lizard climbed halfway up and puffed out the red disk in its throat and did five or six jerky push-ups as if stimulated by the erotic after-glow radiating from the room.
“You don’t have to go through with this, you know. Dad can sleep over at Harbor House. He’s done it before.”
“You’re dodging the issue.”
“Yeah, I am,” she said. “But in a couple of hours I’m hopping on a plane and leaving for a week. A subject like this, we need time to discuss, don’t you think?”
Thorn shrugged a yes.
“So, I’m serious. Dad can sleep over at Harbor House. You don’t really need to do this.”
“You want to back out. You don’t trust me.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “My track record has been spotty. But any scrapes your dad and I got into, we lived to tell the tale.”
“Barely.” She snuggled deeper against him.
The aura of their sexual moment was dissolving, but still Thorn sensed that the charged particles that passed between them had changed the nature of their bond. He wasn’t exactly sure how. For the better, he believed. But then again, every new high-water mark was a challenge to the future. The glow of the past always a rival to what followed.
He pushed away the misgiving and listened to a mockingbird who’d replaced the cardinal just beyond the window. Usurping its branch and its song—a cheaper version, repeating its melody four times, pausing, then going on from cardinal to blue jay to catbird, unspooling its repertoire, feeble simulations of the originals.
“Something’s not right across the street. Alan should be in class by now. But his car is still parked where it was last night.”
In blue-and-white-striped pajamas, Lawton Collins was leaning forward across the breakfast table, peering out the side window and over a pink hibiscus hedge toward the green house across the street. Buck’s tail thumped at their appearance. The dog took a quick look at Alex, and when she gave no command, Buck resumed his watch with Lawton out the window.
A year ago when the yellow Lab first wandered out of the woods near Thorn’s house, Lawton claimed naming rights. For the first few months, the dog was called Lawton. But Alexandra finally talked her father out of the name. Too much confusion with two Lawtons around the house. After a week of protest, Lawton relented and decided the dog would now be known as Buck. It was the name of Lawton’s partner for twenty years on the Miami Police Department, Buck Gomez, recently deceased. A tribute to the man who’d covered Lawton’s back for two decades. So Buck it was.
Alexandra sliced up a cantaloupe and handed Thorn a plate with five slivers, a soy sausage patty from the toaster, and a piece of whole wheat toast.
“Finish your breakfast, Dad. We’re on a tight schedule this morning.”
“Nobody listens to me,” Lawton said. “I’m just some old fool. A moldy boot in the back of the closet. A wad of greasy hair clogging the drain.”
Thorn and Alexandra exchanged a look. More and more lately her father had been breaking into these bleak rhapsodies. Haiku of woe.
“You’re not a fool,” Alex said.
“Some bad shit is going down at Alan’s house.”
“No, it’s not, Dad. Everything’s fine.”
“I’m imagining things, that’s what you’re saying.”
“I think there might be a little imagination involved, yes.”
“Buck woke me up last night,” he said. “He heard it and alerted me.”
“Heard what?”
“Ask Buck. I’m halfway to deaf myself.”
Buck turned away from the window and went over to his green mat and curled up, keeping an eye on Alexandra. Since he’d first appeared a year ago, the dog had made remarkable progress. Going from a starving, feral creature to a supersensitive member of Alexandra’s household. An avid student, so thirsty for knowledge it was scary.
Sit, stay, come here, shake hands. That was Thorn’s meager list of dog commands. Buck had graduated far beyond his abilities. For the past several months Alex had pushed him to new levels. These days Buck responded to dozens of one- and two-word commands, as well as hand signals. He could run the agility course head-to-head with the smaller, nimbler breeds, track a scent in the air or on the ground through woods or suburban environments, and locate well-hidden targets.
“That guy,” Lawton said, “Alan Bingham, he could’ve been my son-in-law, but no, you get all swoony over this loser.” He jerked his chin at Thorn.
“Dad,” Alex said. “You love Thorn.”
“This bum? Are you kidding? He doesn’t even have a job. Unless you call tying fishing lures work. What do you make, kid, a buck-fifty apiece for those things? How you gonna get ahead, support my daughter in the style she’s accustomed? A buck-fifty, Christ, you can’t buy a gallon of piss for a buck-fifty. How you going to pay the mortgage, now tell me that?”
“Good question.” Thorn was trying to smile his way past the moment, but Lawton was rolling full speed.
“Now, you take Alan. There’s a guy with unlimited possibilities. University prof, big-time photographer, about to take his art show to New York, D.C., going on tour all around. My daughter’s a photographer, too, in case you didn’t know, for the Miami police. Full benefits, a retirement plan, the works. You got anything like that, kid? You got any benefits?”
“Not a one. But I have a few drawbacks.”
“Now the guy’s smart-assing me. In my own home.”
“This is my home, Dad.” Alex used her quiet but don’t-push-it tone. “Now, stop this.”
“Alan and Alexandra, that had a nice ring, but, no, my knucklehead daughter goes gaga over some derelict from the Keys, when right across the street she’s got Prince Charming.”
“Ignore him, Thorn.”
“I’m trying.”
She got up and took her plate to the sink.
“Alan and Alex were picking a date, writing their vows, all of a sudden this poltroon comes along. Thorn. What the hell kind of name is that, anyway? Your parents never bother to give you a whole name? What’s the deal?”
“My parents died before they got around to it.”
It was true enough, but it sounded needlessly harsh at that moment. Alex gave him a questioning look, and Thorn raised an open hand in apology.
“Okay, Dad. The Harbor House van is coming in fifteen minutes. Have you shaved yet? Are you planning on wearing your pajamas today?”
“What’s the difference? All those feebleminded buffalo parked in their wheelchairs, slumped over, drooling. I can run around that place naked, nobody notices.”
Thorn listened to the hum of traffic. Seven-thirty in the morning and already the noise was wafting in from Red Road and surrounding highways. Overnight the buzz of the city seemed to have taken root in his bones, creating a grating resonance. The sirens, car alarms, barking dogs, motorcycles roaring on nearby streets, the screech of brakes. A ceaseless turbulence on the airwaves, the ragged hustling pulse of Miami.
From decades of living along the coastline of the Florida Keys, with the heave and swell of ocean breezes flushing away every unnatural noise and buffered by thick stands of mahogany, gumbo limbo, and Florida holly, Thorn had developed the hypersensitive antennae of the recluse. Touchy, thin-skinned. On perpetual alert for that off-key crunch of gravel or growl of motor that warned of approaching human contact.
Miami and the Keys were only fifty miles apart, but they occupied opposite ends of the galaxy. City of clamor and an island as still as the moon.
“So what did Buck hear last night?” Thorn had a last sip of coffee.
“Thorn. Don’t encourage him.”
Lawton shook his head and turned from the window, looking at his daughter, then at Thorn.
“Gunfire,” Lawton said. “I was asleep, but that’s how he was acting. Like he heard a gun going off. Pawed the hell out of my arm.”
“I didn’t hear any gunshots, Dad.” Alex finished rinsing the dishes. “Did you hear anything like that, Thorn?”
Thorn shook his head.
“Of course you wouldn’t hear anything. Going at it like a couple of overheated goats. All you could hear was the thumpedy-thump of your damn headboard pounding the wall.”
Alex worked her jaw. When Lawton was in one of his moods, there was little to be done beyond summoning patience. The irritability and antagonism would pass, and in the next instant he could be sunny, even comical.
“Bingham’s a photographer, you know, like my daughter. Only Alex takes photos of corpses, but Alan, his subjects are still alive. Not that one’s better than the other. But I think it’s a good match. You got two photographers, between them they cover the whole gamut, alive to dead. Match made in heaven, you ask me.”
Thorn finished the last of his melon, gave Alex an innocent look.
“Picking a date, huh?”
“We went out a few times,” she said. “The rest is Dad’s invention.”
“Went out a few times, yeah, and they stayed inside a few times, too,” Lawton said. “If you catch my drift.”
Alex shook her head helplessly.
“Alex and Alan,” Lawton said. “A perfect fit, but does she listen to her own father? Oh, no, I’m just toe jam around here. Roach droppings.”
Lawton rose from the table, then stood still with his head cocked to the side, staring at the wall as if it were a bank of fog he was trying to penetrate.
For the past few years he’d been fading in and out of lucidity on some timetable that was impossible to anticipate. One minute his memory was laser-sharp, the next he was whimpering in frustration, confounded by knotting his tennis shoes. After two MRIs and an array of other tests, the doctors wouldn’t give a firm diagnosis. Only way to be sure, one doctor said, was an autopsy.
But it was clear to Thorn that Lawton was fast becoming a new concoction. One jigger of the tough, street-smart homicide cop he’d once been and one shot of some obstinate, bewildered gentleman oblivious to good manners and mortal danger and the simplest forms of logic. Dump that in the blender and liquefy.
“So, Thorn,” Alex said, “what’s on your agenda today?”
She had her back to him, loading the dishwasher with the breakfast plates.
“I’m going to start with a little flashing.”
“You’re not in Key Largo anymore; up here they arrest people for that.”
She half turned, smiling at him over her shoulder.
“So keep it in your shorts, mister.”
“Flashing is that stuff around the edge of the roofline. In case you haven’t noticed, we roofers have a different vocabulary.”
She went over and gave Thorn a kiss, a taste of melon on her lips.
“I have to fluff myself up. Then I’ve got to run.” She settled a serious look on him. “You’re sure about this, Thorn? You can handle things?”
“She means me,” Lawton said. “Mr. Toe Jam.”
“Trust me,” Thorn said. “Lawton and I are buddies.”
Lawton muttered something and marched away toward his bedroom, and Alex lay a hand on Thorn’s shoulder.
“I think he’s getting worse,” she said. “He’s cycling through the ups and downs faster than he used to.”
“He doesn’t seem too bad to me.”
“I’m going to cancel the trip. I can’t leave him like this.”
“Oh, come on,” Thorn said. “You can’t let Buck down. Or yourself.”
At the sound of his name, the Lab thumped his tail against the floor. Alex looked out the window for a moment, then sighed and turned back to him.
“You’re sure?”
“I can handle this, Alex. It’s only seven days. We’ll be fine.”
Her hand slid up the side of Thorn’s neck and she cupped his face. She bent and gave him a fuller kiss. This one was good-bye for a week.
Then she turned and walked down the hallway to her bedroom. She must have known he was watching because she put a little extra sauce in her hips, though Alexandra Collins required nothing extra to hold his attention.
Thorn finished his breakfast while Lawton and his lovely daughter readied themselves. He took a look out the window at the house across the street but saw nothing over there the least bit suspicious.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the foyer a few minutes later, with the suitcase at her feet and Buck standing nearby, they shared another kiss—one so warm and eager, it might have been the prelude to another hour of love if the taxi driver hadn’t honked.
Alex pulled free, opened the door, and waved that she was coming. She had on gray linen slacks and a pink sweater set. Somehow managing to look both feminine and tough.
“Oh, I almost forgot.” She gave him a wary smile, snagged her purse from the front table, dug through it, and produced a silver cell phone, flipped it open, and showed it to Thorn. “You ever use one of these?”
“I’m more of a pay-phone kind of guy.”
She smiled and shook her head.
“You’re such a Luddite, Thorn. Come on, join the new century.”
“I was just warming up to the last one.”
She demonstrated how to turn the cell phone on, use the speed dial to reach her own cell, then showed him the charging cord and where to plug it in.
“Why do I need this?”
“Do me a favor, okay? One week, it won’t corrupt you. Leave it on in case I want to check in, hear your voice, see how Dad is doing. Just in case.”
The cabbie honked again, and they embraced once more. Buck stood close by and pressed his head against the side of Thorn’s knee.
Thorn carried her bag while Alex followed with Buck on the lead. The cabbie got out and popped the trunk. He was a young black man in a green guayabera. As B
uck approached, he backed away, and though his English was spotty, he let it be known he didn’t want a dog in his cab.
“It’s a police canine,” Alexandra said, flipping open her department shield and showing it to the guy. “I’d be willing to bet this dog’s cleaner than most passengers you carry. Not to mention smarter.”
The man seemed confused, so Thorn gave him a shorthand version in basic Creole. “Police work. You have to do it.”
The man scowled at both of them and got back into the driver’s seat.
“Creole?”
“Years of fishing in the islands,” Thorn said.
“Man of many talents.”
They kissed again and Alex drew away and got in the back with Buck.
“Leave the phone on, okay? Humor me.”
“The things I do for love.”
“When I get back I’ll find a way to reward you.”
“Kick ass on the test. You, too, Buck. Sniff out the sneaky bastards.”
The Lab wagged his tail and curled up beside Alex, resting his head in her lap.
After Thorn rinsed his dishes, he carried the extension ladder outside, clattered it out to its full length, and propped it against the roof edge. He set up his supplies, a roll of black felt paper, a box of roofing nails, and various tools. Toting the cordless drill and thermos, he climbed onto the roof to make his initial inspection.
The pitch of the roof was slight enough that he could work without handholds or ropes. For a while he prowled the aluminum surface, checking for any obvious faults, but found nothing in the panels themselves.
The water stains had recently appeared on the ceiling outside Lawton’s bathroom, but as with any roof leak, the problem could have been weeks or months in the making and originate nearly anywhere. Water was devious. It could penetrate the house thirty feet away and follow some gravity-assisted path that was impossible to predict. Given enough time, a steady trickle could rot away the roof timbers or march down the joists like a trail of ravenous termites, softening crucial beams along the way before it ever showed up as a dark patch of crumbling plaster inside the house. Like senility. Like a lot of things.
So Thorn started with the obvious. One by one he pried off the rusty strips of flashing around the three vent pipes. But he discovered no sign of rot. While they clearly needed replacing, the problem just as clearly lay elsewhere.
Magic City Page 5
