Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4)

by James W. Hall

  By one-thirty the stuff that wasn't broken was back in its place, the other shit was out in the Dumpster. Ray went back to see the orangutan, and right away the little hair ball started peeping, all excited. Ray unlocked his cage, and before he could stop him, the ape pulled himself up into Ray's arms, and glued its wet mouth to his face. He gripped Ray's head so hard, hugging him, Ray couldn't move. The ape sucked away, his tongue probing inside Ray's nostrils. Hell, if the thing decided to chew the nose right off his face, there wasn't much Ray could do about it, fucking ape was so strong.

  Ray reached up and tickled the orangutan on its cheeks, under its arms, along the inside of its thighs, and finally the thing rolled its lips back, squealing, and broke its hold. Ray could feel his nose swelling from all that suction, but at least the ape had been careful not to draw blood.

  Ray let the orangutan wander around while he made a phone call to a guy who lived on a ranch outside of West Palm. The guy said yeah, his boss was still interested in an orangutan, but he'd need to see the ape before any money changed positions.

  "You want my address down here, where I'm located?"

  The guy said no, Ray should come up to West Palm.

  "And if your boss doesn't like my ape for some reason, I made a hundred mile trip for nothing."

  "Hell, you'll get to meet Brad Randolph, Lot of people would drive more than a hundred miles for that."

  "I'm not a movie fan," Ray said.

  "Maybe you've seen him on the new Wheaties box."

  "No," Ray said. "I'm not a breakfast person either. So, see, it'd still be a wasted fucking trip."

  "Well, Mr. Randolph sure as hell isn't coming down to Miami to look over some ape. Maybe we should just forget this whole deal."

  "I'll be there by four. I need directions."

  "Give me your fax number, I'll zap 'em down."

  "And remember, this is a cash transaction. Forty-five thou."

  The guy paused a moment, then came back, his voice down an octave.

  "Last time we talked you said forty."

  "Since our last discussion the supply of orangutans has seriously dwindled. Add to that the fact that demand increased, so at this moment, the market value is forty-five."

  The man was quiet on the line.

  Ray loved negotiating with these civilians. Hell, even lifelong animal people didn't know from day to day what the damn beasts were worth. You couldn't flip open your Blue Book and run your finger down the page, find your year and model. That was one of the things he liked about this business. Every living creature on earth had a price tag on it. Somebody somewhere wanted it. Once you had your supply lines established — all those Indonesian hunters with their blowguns, their nets, the African spear hurlers, Georgia crackers driving down to snatch snakes out of the Everglades, El Paso boys gunning their four-wheelers across the desert, scanning for Gila monsters — then all Ray had to do was keep his inventory lists circulating in the mail, and every day another buyer called the 800 number and the haggling started.

  Ray watched the ape take hold of the handle of a file cabinet. Carrying the aerial phone, Ray got up, went over, and dragged the orangutan away, took him over to the bathroom, flushed the toilet, got him interested in the water swirling down the drain. The ape stuck his hand in the water and chittered.

  "Okay, Brad will go forty-five," the guy said. "But don't come in here and tell us the supply dropped suddenly while you were driving up I-95. You got that?"

  "Understood."

  "You bring all the papers with you too."

  "Papers?"

  "Shots, and all that shit."

  "Hey, whatta you think, this is some kind of documented legal alien? Like he's got a fucking green card? Man, think again. This creature, just a week ago he was hanging in the branches, shitting from two hundred feet up."

  "No papers?"

  "That's right. But he's healthy. Smart, strong, a real funny little critter. Burt should love him."

  "Brad," the guy said.

  "Yeah, yeah, Brad. Man on the Wheaties box."

  "One other thing," the guy said. "Wear something decent when you come. Mr. Randolph is getting married this evening. He doesn't want a lot of slobs walking around the premises. Is that clear?"

  "What? Like a tux?"

  "It's an Old West wedding theme. Related to the movie he's making at the moment. Blue jeans, a plaid shirt would do fine. Boots, if you have them. String tie, like that."

  "Come as a cattle rustler, you mean. Bring my branding iron."

  "The wedding starts at sunset. Mr. Randolph will only be able to see you for a few minutes. So be here promptly at four, or the whole thing's off. Is that clear?"

  "Lucid as beer piss."

  "And does the ape have anything to wear?"

  "What?"

  "You know — a cowboy getup, a little Stetson or whatever."

  "Shit, no. It's got fur, is all. The thing's covered in it."

  "It'd be cute, you know, if the thing was dressed up like the rest of the guests. See what I'm saying?"

  "Then I guess you better go do some shopping, fella. Our animals don't come with wardrobes. They're naked. Every single one of them."

  A few minutes later Ray got the fax with the directions and looked it over. He had an hour or two to kill before he went up there. Maybe he'd telephone Tricia, see if she was free, maybe she'd like to go for a drive, watch a movie star get married.

  CHAPTER 24

  Allison found herself lying on a hard pallet lodged in a shadowy corner of Meriwether's living room. The same stifling air that she remembered, a potent brew of solvents and sour animal fluids. She lifted her head and saw Crotch Meriwether across the room bent over a long workbench. In the open kitchen area a young Seminole girl stood at the chopping block. She was under twenty, possibly as young as fifteen. The girl was mincing onions with a heavy knife, glancing across at Allison every few seconds.

  A gloomy twilight filled the room. It was lit only by the high windows that sent a half dozen planks of dull daylight across the wood floor. No electricity this far out, just one huge round candelabra suspended from the ceiling, a wagon wheel studded with unlit candles.

  Thorn was nowhere in sight.

  She lay her head back down and reached a hand up to her throbbing face and gingerly probed her nose. The cartilage felt mushy and crackled under her touch like pulpy gristle. Her nostrils were caked with blood. With a groan she sat up, put her feet on the floor.

  "Your boyfriend's still alive," Meriwether said, hunched over the bench. "Didn't want to finish him off till I'd checked you over for wires and tape recorders."

  Allison glanced down and saw her pants unzipped, the top button open.

  "Where is he?"

  She tugged her zipper up, slipped the button in its slot.

  Crotch swung around and faced her. He wore gray dungarees, heavy black shoes, a tattered white T-shirt. His hair was drawn back into a long ponytail. Unnaturally youthful, it was black with a lacquered shine like the hair of an Iroquois warrior. His mouth was full of misshapen teeth, cheeks hollow, his humid eyes sunken even deeper into his skull than when last she'd seen him. His skin had turned to rancid wax. The diseased pallor of a man who'd spent a lifetime sucking greedily on unfiltered cigarettes.

  His eyes, however, belonged to a different person. A clear, deep blue, they were lit with an intensity that seemed grotesquely unnatural in one so shriveled. As if the dregs of Crotch Meriwether's vast virility and drive had taken refuge there.

  "Dermestid beetles," he said. "Ever see them work before?"

  He held up a glass terrarium the size of a toaster. Inside it was a white oblong that she couldn't make out. Crotch came a step closer, held the glass case out into a dusty slant of daylight.

  Perched in the middle of a bed of straw was the skull of a medium-size gator or crocodile. She wasn't certain which it was, because the white bone was deformed by a layer of black shiny insects, wriggling furiously.

  "Flesh e
aters," he said. "Damn bugs come from Africa and they'll gnaw a skull clean in just over a week. What you do, you drill a hole through the brain pan, another one back of the mandible, so these boys can get in there and chew off that hard-to-reach meat. Shake them up from time to time, get them moving again. Saves a lot of effort, though you gotta stay downwind of the cleaning box for the first few days. That is, unless you happen to like the smell of putrefying flesh."

  Crotch lowered his head to the brim of the terrarium and took a deep drag of the air. He bobbed back up and smiled like a man who'd just savored a fine cigar.

  "I should clear a hundred and fifty dollars for this one," he said. "Soon as I clean that skull up with a little bleach, scrape out those last few crannies even the dermestids can't get to. Should be enough money to get me and the girl through the end of the year.

  "But, you know something, Mrs. Allison Farleigh? I always been real curious about whether or not these beetles would eat meat that's still alive. Or are they just vultures, they'll only feast on the dead?

  "I been wondering about that for a long time now. Got so curious once or twice, I about put my hand in there with 'em, see what they'd do, but then I thought, no, I might still have some use for that hand one day. Now all of a sudden it looks like the good Lord has provided me with a couple of top-notch experimental subjects might just answer that question once and for all."

  "Goddamn you, old man, where's Thorn?"

  "Your friend," he said, "is resting outside. For now."

  "He needs medical attention. He'll bleed to death from that wound."

  "Brenda Cougar sutured him. My redskin Florence Nightingale."

  She lifted her head at the mention of her name, but kept on mincing.

  "Don't lie to me, Crotch. I want to see him."

  "Well, listen to that," he said. "Look who's calling who a liar."

  Woozily Allison tried to stand, but an invisible hand stuffed her back. Brenda Cougar put down her knife and came over. The girl was thick-waisted with a broad, indifferent face. She wore jeans and a bright yellow T-shirt that advertised a Chinese beer. She extended her hand, and helped Allison to her feet. With Crotch taking sidelong looks from his workbench, Brenda led her unsteadily across the room and outside.

  Twenty yards to the east of the house were four rectangular holes, seven, eight feet deep, like rough-hewn gravesites hacked out of the limestone. The first two were empty, the next held a large hog that seemed to be drowsing. Cozy and warm in his little block of sun. A scattering of half-eaten corn cobs and rotting vegetables lay near his tusked snout.

  In the last pit Thorn was slouched in the corner, several turns of silver plumbing tape twisted around his ankles and wrists. A turban of gauze on his head. At the crown of the bandage a bloody Rorschach had seeped through. His eyes were murky as he stared up at her.

  In a shaky voice he asked if she was okay.

  "I'm all right. Are you?"

  "Can't seem to focus," he said. "But I'll make it."

  "Everything's fine, Thorn. Just rest. I'll deal with Crotch. We'll be out of here soon. I promise."

  She glanced at Brenda Cougar for some kind of confirmation, but the girl dodged her eyes, bowed her head in silence.

  Allison turned back to Thorn, held his gaze for another moment, then she whirled around and marched back into the house, Brenda Cougar hurrying behind.

  She walked directly to Crotch's workbench, drew back her fist, and hammered the man between the shoulder blades.

  He grunted, fell forward, bent at the waist across his bench, and he stayed there, his head down, holding that pose for a long moment while he gathered himself. Then he pushed his body up, turned slowly to face her. Gave her a wretched smile.

  "So, did you meet my feral hog?"

  "You son of a bitch."

  "I just captured the little bastard last week. Been after him for the last two months. They're dangerous, you know, feral hogs. Used to be domesticated, living the nice easy farm life. But when one gets loose, wanders off, has to learn how to fend for itself, it turns mean. Nobody pitching it bushels of com anymore. Has to root, has to learn to kill. A thing that was civilized once, but it's gone wild, that's the worst thing you'll ever want to meet in the woods. It remembers how it used to be, the sweet peaceful times. And that just makes it all the angrier. Those hogs are insane. Worse killers than a wounded gator. One gets you down, on your back, it'll tear out your goddamn throat in two seconds." Allison stared at the beetles cleaning that skull and said quietly, "Thorn's probably got a concussion. He needs a doctor."

  "He'll live."

  "Come on, Crotch, be reasonable."

  "Reasonable! Now listen to me, woman." His voice filled with a hateful hiss. "You're the one who snatched a year right out of my life. Got me sealed up in a cage, solid concrete walls between me and the sky. A man who's lived out in the open every day of his life.

  "And you think you can come light-footing in here like we was old friends, just had a slight disagreement? Kiss and make up? No, ma'am. That's not how it works out in these woods. Only goddamn reason I didn't kill you on sight, Mrs. Allison Farleigh, is because I thought I'd like to study for a bit on the most enjoyable way to go about it."

  "I need you, Crotch. I came out here 'cause I need your help."

  For a second he was taken aback, then he sputtered out a bitter laugh, and that choked him, and sent him off into a hacking cough. He turned his back on her, gagging. Hands flat on his workbench till his body calmed.

  She spoke to his back.

  "I want you to help me set somebody up." He came around, short of breath, a hand against his hollow chest.

  "Now, why in fuck's name would I want to do that?"

  "I think they killed my daughter."

  "You think I give a shit about your goddamn family? Fuck your family."

  "It's the White brothers I'm after," she said. "Raimondo and Orlando."

  He peered at her. She heard Brenda Cougar stop slicing.

  "Whatta you want with those shitfaces?"

  Allison felt the muscles in her back relax, relief begin to trickle into her veins. Joe Tiger, who ran the Miccosukee village near the Shack, told her the story a year or two before. She'd been gambling her life and Thorn's it was true.

  "Those are the assholes I told you about," Meriwether said to Brenda Cougar. "Rayon and

  Orlon. Orlon and Rayon."

  Brenda looked his way, then went back to her work, chopping a carrot into orange coins.

  Crotch picked up the terrarium again, peered down into it. Even from six feet away Allison could smell the foul air, the sweet stink of rotting meat.

  "Treated those boys like they were my own goddamn sons. Showed them every trick of the trade. How to leave an old piece of rug at the head of a canal, warm dark place where snakes will take up residence, come back a week later, lift the rug, there's your snake. Twenty, thirty pieces of rug, on average that gives you fifteen, twenty snakes. Simple things like that, but nothing those two knew when I got a hold of them."

  Meriwether gave the glass case a small shake and the beetles swarmed.

  "Caught them one day down near Hudson Beach, they were squirting gasoline into rotten trees to flush out rat snakes. Ten bucks apiece. If it wasn't for me telling them that the gas fumes burn up the snakes' lungs and kill 'em within a day or two, they'd've never figured out why the hell all their snakes were croaking on them. Sixteen years old, that's all those assholes were. Orphans, running around in these swamps, totally lost most of the time. I took them in, let them stay around the house any time they had a mind to. Years, that went on. Teaching them what they needed to know to survive out here. Like how all the snake hunters drive the exact same white Ford pickup trucks the sugarcane foremen drive, so they can blend in when they're driving around on Big Sugar's private land, which is prime snake territory in these parts.

  "I give them their goddamn college degree in the reptile business. Then one July night, two, three years back, those
two shitheads waited till I'd passed out from drinking, comatose on my bed, and they stole every hide, every goddamn skull I had. All my jerky, my smoked mullet. Made off with every damn thing they could carry, down to my granddaddy's old whittling knife.

  "Little shits vandalized what they didn't steal. Broke a glass vase of my mama's, a clay pot my granddaddy kept his cigars in. Those measly little fuckfaces. Learned all I had to teach them, then pissed on me like that. Those two would've cut off my pecker if they'd thought there was a market for it."

  He set the terrarium back on his workbench, and when he looked at her again, his eyes seemed dimmer, as if his speech had run down his dwindling battery, shaved an hour or two off his life.

  "I want you to call them on the phone. Make a proposal. I want to listen in. I want to hear them talk."

  Crotch jerked his eyes away from her and winced as if some sharp-fanged creature had just yawned and stretched in his chest. He sucked in a long, whistling breath.

  "Well, the problem is," he said, "I'm not rightly sure who I'd prefer to kill. Those fuckfaces, or you."

  Allison said, "I'll take you out to the gas station at Monroe Station. You can call from their phone."

  Meriwether looked across at Brenda Cougar as he weighed the proposition. Brenda was dicing a bell pepper now, and though she didn't return his look, it was clear she was somehow collaborating with Crotch on this verdict.

  Allison's pulse jiggled in her chest, a twinge of pain, as if all her veins had tightened down to pinholes, and an explosive pressure was building within the membranes of her heart. It had been pure folly to come to this place, ask for Meriwether's help. Surely there were a hundred ways to catch these killers that made better sense.

  She cast her eyes around the room, and the terrible irony struck her, that she should die in such a place as this. Her enemy's shrine. This foul and airless room, where thousands of animals had been slaughtered or made ready for a lifetime of imprisonment. Surely in her seven years of labor, Allison had not rescued a fraction of the animals that this man had destroyed in any month of his life.

  Crotch Meriwether turned around to face her.