Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  I stared at the map, the glittering coin, the thousands of square miles it covered. Not as much land as St. Joe Paper Company controlled, or Barron Collier in his prime. Both owned close to a million acres of the state. If Mona was correct, Bates International’s property looked to be less than half that. Still, it was a vast chunk.

  Over the years I’d driven through the region many times. Had friends who’d grown up there, most of whom fled as soon as they could. It was tough terrain. Orange groves, cattle ranges, some light farming. Raw and brown and harsh, full of sandspurs and armadillos and vultures. A few gorgeous rivers twisted through the countryside, a little shade here and there, some pastureland.

  Mulberry, Pierce, Brewster, Ft. Green, Ona, Wauchula, Bowling Green, Pine Level, Fort Lonesome. The hard-luck towns were usually composed of little more than an aging gas station, a Food Mart, and three or four churches. Mobile homes scattered through the piney woods. Some prefab houses and the occasional rotting remnants of pioneer homesteads with a chimney rising from rubble. Here and there was one of those fifties ranch styles holding sway on a promontory, where the boss man lived. The rough narrow roads that crisscrossed that area shot like bullets straight through the countryside, flat and mostly empty. It was mining country, phosphate. Big ugly pits gouged deep into the Florida prairies.

  Not exactly primo real estate, and not the Florida land-scape that most stirred my heart, but it had a rugged dignity. And some of the folks I’d met up there had much in common with the dwindling supply of old salts who settled the Keys. Both had cracker toughness and a hard-shell self-reliance. People who’d give you their last crust of bread or could turn mean as a rattler if the occasion required. Hard-eyed men and women without patience for frills or blather.

  “So your grandmother was a cattle baron.”

  “She was your grandmother, too.”

  “If so,” I said, “that’s only a technicality.”

  “She’s a blood relation. Nothing technical about it.”

  Mona handed me my quarter and I dropped it into my pocket. She refolded the map and put it back in the drawer. I flipped off the lights and stared out into the darkness. The Mothership was riding more smoothly through the rollers than I would have imagined. Not rough seas by any means, but rougher than any we’d tested her against.

  “Okay, so why are you here?” I said. “What snake oil you selling?”

  “Took you a while to get around to that.”

  “I assume you didn’t come for the fishing.”

  I was quiet, steering the big boat, rocking easily through the weather. Waiting for her to accept my challenge.

  Mona took a grip of one of the throttle levers, holding it as though she were trying to sense the power of the engine it controlled.

  “Until Grandmother died, no one knew you existed. Not until we opened the lockbox at the Summerland Planters Bank. You had a whole box to yourself. Life and times of Daniel Oliver Thorn. Newspaper clippings, your sordid escapades, some of the shit you’ve stepped in. That’s how we tracked you down. We ran a computer search. A few hits is all we got, but one linked with this houseboat deal. A fishing guide named Thorn, your photo on Rusty’s website. There was a family likeness, Dad called Rusty, asked some questions, and bingo, you were the guy. We decided this would be a good way to get to know you. See where you stood on things.”

  As I spoke the words, I regretted them. “What things?”

  “What do you know about phosphate mining?”

  In the ghostly glow of the instrument lights I stared at her profile.

  You couldn’t live in Florida all your life without knowing about phosphate. That it was bigger than citrus, bigger than sugar, nearly as big as Disney. I knew that great, monstrous machines called draglines tore open pits in the Florida earth, scraping away what was referred to as “the overburden” to get down to the strata of gray rock. When they exhausted one cavernous pit, they abandoned the land, leaving it mutilated and useless, and moved on to repeat the process nearby.

  I knew that foul and corrosive chemicals were used to turn phosphate into fertilizer and that huge barges loaded with the processed mineral headed off to China every day from the port of Tampa. And other barges headed out into the Gulf to dump millions of gallons of acidic sludge from phosphate production. I knew that phosphate bosses wielded such clout that every politician in the history of Florida had protected the industry from meaningful oversight. That some of the poorest people in the state mined the stuff and made some of the richest people in the world even wealthier.

  I also knew that Florida’s supply was nearly depleted. The earth was a ruthless bookkeeper and the arithmetic was brutally clear. Millions of years to forge the mineral, a few decades to plunder it, and eons to heal the damage.

  “Forget it,” I said. “This has nothing to do with me.”

  “Oh, but it does.”

  “Listen to me. I’m taking you people fishing. That’s all I’m doing. I’m not interested in a family reunion. Some touchy-feely bullshit. Is that clear?”

  Mona slid across the wheelhouse, stepped out the star-board door, and stood on the narrow deck. Wind twisted through her hair as she faced into the darkness. After a minute, she leaned back into the stillness of the cabin.

  “Like it or not, Thorn, you’re a member of this family. Better start getting used to the idea.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  For the next hour I steered the vessel through slapping seas. Rusty came up to ask if I was okay. I said I was just fine. She admitted she was a little wobbly and needed to hit the sack, but whenever I was ready for her to relieve me, just come shake her and she’d take the helm.

  “And, Thorn, goddammit, don’t let this spin out of control.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  She looked at my profile for a while, then said, “You must’ve had one hell of a past life.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Cause the karma kickback you’re getting this time around is brutal.”

  I was silent. Nothing to argue with there.

  “I don’t know how Sugar puts up with your shit.”

  “He’s a saint.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  She stood beside me for several minutes, watching the darkness roll by.

  “In fact, I’m toying with the idea of turning this baby around. Refund their money and call it a day. It’s got disaster written all over it.”

  “Your boat, your call.”

  She stood there a minute more, a little shaky, hands on the console.

  “You put a picture of me on your website?”

  She patted me on the back. “Guilty as charged.”

  “Why?”

  “What’s the problem, I blow your cover? Hey, everybody’s face is on the freaking Web. It’s no big deal. I thought you looked rugged. It was a business decision. Like it or not, some people are suspicious of women fishing guides. They’re so used to the manly-man thing. You fit the bill.”

  “Manly-man? You’re shitting me.”

  Her hand moved off my back and she gripped my chin, bringing my face around. Without hesitation, she kissed me, her lips going soft, mouth relaxing. I could taste the sharp musk of marijuana on her breath. Out on the walkway she must’ve snuck a few quick hits to quiet her nerves.

  I released the wheel and turned to her. She drew tighter against me and in an instant the years since our last kiss dissolved. Her fingers snaked into my hair, taking hold, and she levered us closer. Then she hooked her right leg around my left and wedged her crotch against mine, crushing hard.

  I was staggered for a moment, then just as I began to relax, to sink away into the kiss, she broke the hold with a gasp and stumbled back. Her eyes were red and watering. She rubbed the taste of me off her lips with the back of her hand and looked out at the night and shook her head.

  “I made a mistake,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It never happened.”

  “Not about this, no
.” She wouldn’t look at me. “About leaving you back then. Walking out. All that Dark Prince bullshit.”

  “We’re going fishing, Rusty. That’s what we’re doing out here. You’re running a business. I’m going to throw some bait into a virgin lake. Anything else, anything personal, we can deal with when we get back. Okay?”

  “God,” she said. “What next?”

  And she tottered off to her cabin.

  It shared a wall with mine and was just behind the wheel-house. We each had our own head, and enough room in the cabin to stretch both arms out without touching the walls. Comfortable single bunks with solid mattresses.

  When she was gone, I turned down the console lights and checked the horizon again for boat traffic. Still clear out there.

  Five minutes later, maybe ten, when my pulse finally settled, I angled the photo of my mother and her younger brother into the glow of the chart lights.

  My mother was no more than eighteen at the time. She wore a simple flowered sundress that was just tight enough to reveal the ample swell of her figure. From the tilt of her head and the angle of her stance, I read that she was pulling away from the touch of her brother, John. Then I noticed the hand on her shoulder had one finger hooked under the strap of her dress. Hard to tell if the gesture was merely teasing or outright invasive. Either way it made my stomach squirm.

  Young John had a jaunty look, a man with no respect for boundaries of the flesh, probably any other boundaries. A cocky superiority gleamed in his smile. My mother seemed to be suffering his brashness with a practiced patience.

  Perhaps I was simply transferring to this teenage kid from long ago my aversion to the grown-up Milligan. But as I studied the image further, it was hard to miss my mother’s stiffness, her tilt away from her kid brother’s clinch, that possessive finger. As if neither the photograph nor the embrace had been her idea. She was bullied into it and was doing her best to be a good sport.

  For the first time I noticed a bow made of fat ribbons fastened to the hood ornament of the Ford coupe behind them. So the car was probably a gift, a birthday or high school graduation present, and the reason for the photo was to memorialize Elizabeth Milligan’s first ride.

  I worked the math in my head and, as best as I could figure, shortly after that photo had been taken, that coupe was to become her getaway car. The vehicle she and my father, Quentin, would use to speed away down the dusty roads of central Florida, carting their worldly goods off to the Keys.

  For all I knew it was the same car they’d driven that night when they brought their baby son home from the hospital. A dark night, along a narrow stretch where the only escape from the speeding headlights of a drunk driver was for Quentin Thorn to jerk the wheel hard to the right and sail that Ford into Lake Surprise, where the young parents slammed against the dashboard. Knocked unconscious, they drowned in only five feet of water, and I, less than a day old, catapulted from my mother’s arms, bounced off the windshield, and wound up in the rear seat wedged atop her suitcase, just high enough above the rising water to survive.

  All I could make out of my grandparents in the back-ground of the photograph, sitting on the porch, were their stern profiles and straight-backed postures. They were dressed formally as though for church, he in a stiff white shirt and string tie, she in a high-necked white blouse. She appeared to be speaking and he was listening, his head tipped slightly in her direction. The words that passed between them looked to be weighty. Their dour moods radiated from every detail of dress and posture and facial expression. The photograph had captured a tense moment in a tense household where only one member, young John, seemed either oblivious or indifferent to the strain.

  I switched off the chart lights and took a few deep breaths. There was something wrong in this family, something grating and off-center. It had existed in that ancient photograph and it still existed. Maybe tomorrow in daylight when I re-examined the picture that tension would disappear. But I doubted it. More likely in full light there would be even more strain visible. If I had the stomach to study it further.

  I stared into the darkness. It was cool and the breeze was growing fresher as we moved farther from the glow of civilization into the dark core of the wilderness. Normally when I made this journey I felt a tingle of exhilaration as we approached the Everglades. It was a homecoming. A return to islands and bays, rookeries and flats and marshes and twisty mangrove channels that had always managed to realign my internal compass no matter how far I’d strayed off course. But not tonight.

  I toggled on the GPS to make sure of our position. Without it, at that moment, even in those familiar waters, I would have been lost.

  Sasha Olsen shinnied up the metal pipe all the way to the edge of the roof, snipped the phone line, slid down, walked back to the pickup, and got in.

  Griffin came out of the shadows, bent forward to the open window, his breath rattling in his throat. He backhanded his mouth, wiped away the slime.

  “Wear your seat belt,” he said.

  “Hate seat belts. Air bag should be enough.”

  “Mama, if you get a concussion or break a leg, the whole deal is over. Fasten your seat belt. Don’t get all insane on me.”

  “Screw sane,” she said. “What did sane ever do for me?”

  Out on the highway, headlights flew past. Then blackness again.

  “Shit,” he said. “Can’t both of us be insane. I got there first.”

  Sasha had to laugh. Her beautiful son making gallows jokes. She pulled the shoulder harness down, snapped it into place. To keep the faith, the bargain they’d struck. Two righ-teous avengers off on a road trip.

  “Don’t make it complicated,” Griffin said. “This is a good thing. You know that. You know in your heart. Sacrifice a few for the good of the many. No doubts, no second thoughts. Head of the snake.”

  “Step back, son. I’m ready to rip.”

  She sent the window up, fired the engine, sat in the glow of dashboard lights. Griffin stood there a moment, then stooped forward and planted a kiss on the window glass. Left a bloody lip print.

  She watched him move into the darkness, then Sasha gunned the V-8, edged the tach toward redline, filling the night with horsepower. She put her hand on the shifter.

  Revved the engine higher, then higher still, and racked it into gear. Zero to whatever, screaming for the barred front doors of the gun shop.

  Fuck a bunch of concussions.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sugarman never called anyone after 10 p.m. unless it was an emergency. He’d been on the receiving end of late-night phone calls and knew how jangling they were.

  But after the dinner at Pierre’s, he’d gone back to his office, wired by the evening’s events, especially that parting look Thorn shot him. “Do this for me,” it said. “Just this once.”

  Sugar had logged onto the Net and for the last hour he’d been reading about Abigail Bates. Starting on the day her body was discovered by a passing kayaker, he’d worked forward, article by article. The early news accounts were thin on detail. An investigation had been conducted by the local sheriff of DeSoto County, someone named Timmy Whalen. The only statement by Whalen that Sugar could locate in his Lexis search was vague at best: “At this time we have no reason to suspect foul play, but we’re leaving no stone unturned. Anyone with information concerning the death of Mrs. Bates should contact the office of the sheriff.”

  Sugarman would’ve left it there, waited a week till Thorn got back from his Everglades trip, except for a detail in a follow-up story two weeks after Abigail Bates’s drowning: “Local canoe outfitter, Charles M. Kipling, Jr., was released from custody after being held for five days as a material witness in the drowning death of Abigail Bates. Mr. Kipling’s attorney, Price Hargrove, said his client was cooperating fully with the investigation and had been cleared of any suspicion. Mr. Kipling was taken into custody after two women from nearby Sarasota came forward with claims they had witnessed a violent encounter between Mr. Kipling and Mrs. Bates
on the day of her death. Both women, who asked not to be identified, admitted they were surprised and disappointed in the sheriff’s decision, but refused further comment on Mr. Kipling’s release.”

  A violent encounter. A suspect let go. Nothing definitive, but it sent a prickle across Sugarman’s shoulders. Maybe Mona Milligan knew something after all. Small-town cover-ups happened every day.

  When he pushed further back, broadened his search to the months and years before her death, looking for anything on Abigail Bates or Bates International, that’s when his heart began to rev and his focus tightened.

  Bates International was a Fortune 500 company. Originally based in tiny Summerland, Florida, its corporate head-quarters was now in nearby Sarasota, with branch offices in Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, and Beijing, and its 139,000 employees scattered across sixty-three countries. Bates International had hundreds of smaller companies sprouting off the corporate trunk. Companies that manufactured fertilizers and a variety of chemicals: vitamin supplements, biofuels, processed grains, oil seeds, feed ingredients to farmers and live-stock producers, corn milling, a range of sweeteners like malitol, sorbitol. Oil and gas leases, mining, drilling. Marketing and trading electricity. Pig farms, dairy farms, cattle ranches, vast corn farms. Poultryand meat-processing plants. A food giant with its fingers in dozens of lucrative pies.

  Estimated earnings of 67 billion the previous year. A personal net worth that put Abigail Bates at number fourteen among the wealthiest Americans.

  She was also a member of the Business Round Table, an in-nocuous-sounding organization that required more Googling. Turned out the Round Table was composed of 120 CEO’s of America’s most powerful companies. The group met three times a year to discuss governmental policy and put forth recommendations. Position papers that lobbied Congress and the White House for certain business objectives. Though Sugar paid little attention to business affairs or national politics, even he recognized a dozen names on the Round Table list.