Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4)

by James W. Hall

  The orangutan snuggled against her, burying its face in her hair like it might be whispering something into her right ear, telling her secrets. The ape reached out and took hold of a strand of her red hair, almost the same shade as the ape's. He coiled it around his pointing finger, then put that finger in his mouth. Sucked on a strand of the psychotherapist's hair.

  Tricia saw what he was doing, then cut her eyes to Ray's.

  He smiled at her, at this intimate moment they were sharing, this baby ape that for all the world might be the kind of offspring the two of them would produce. Beautiful red hair, intelligent hungering eyes, like Tricia had. But still an ape, primitive like Ray, a barbarian who never knew which fork went where, which bread plate was his. Ray and Tricia looked into each other's eyes while the ape peeped between them.

  Ray was about to say something to her, find the words that would take them to the next stage of romantic entanglement, when the ape pulled his finger out of his mouth and there, glittering in the sunlight, was a good-size diamond ring. Tricia gasped.

  "Jesus Christ. He steal that from you?"

  "No," she said. "It's not mine."

  The orangutan was pointing his finger at Tricia's nose, the diamond ring on his slimy fingertip.

  Ray whispered to Tricia to hold very still, then he edged his hand up, keeping it out of the ape's peripheral vision, closer and closer until he was just inches away. Ray picked his moment, then shot his hand out, grabbed for the ring, but the orangutan was too damn quick. He popped the diamond back in his mouth and gulped it down.

  ***

  With forty-five thousand dollars in fresh one-hundred-dollar bills arranged neatly in one of Brad Randolph's own personalized cream-colored envelopes, the envelope tucked in his glove compartment, Ray pulled off I-95 at the Sheridan Street exit in Dania so Tricia Capoletti could urinate for the fifth time that afternoon. Though it was possible Ray might've missed one or two back at the wedding.

  He located a combination gas station and 7-Eleven in a neighborhood that seemed halfway safe, and pulled into the lot.

  "I'll just be a minute."

  "No hurry."

  He got out with her and followed her into the market. Ray watched her walk back to the bathrooms, suddenly feeling incredibly horny. Watching Tricia closing the bathroom door, he began to picture the rest of it, the woman unzipping her jeans, pulling them down to her knees, sitting, the tinkle of water.

  All afternoon he'd been feeling a growing closeness to her. Getting a vivid glimpse of her biological rhythms, a feel for the cycles of her internal organs. By Ray's standards Tricia had to piss with alarming frequency. Her bladder couldn't be any bigger than a pinto bean.

  But still, it didn't bother him. He even found himself liking it. Having to pull over so she could pee, visit new places, and he liked that Tricia wasn't shy about admitting she couldn't hold it, a secret thing like that, moving them into new conversational territory, new stages of intimacy. And most of all he liked the idea of Tricia confessing something to him for a change.

  In fact, Ray damn well liked the whole day. Thinking of it as their first date. And a very symbolic one, too, a wedding. Even liking the wedding ceremony, though it was pretty schmaltzy. He liked the way Tricia's eyes got shiny when the orangutan walked away from her and climbed up into Brad Randolph's big ex-football player's arms. Hugging Brad, then hugging his big blond bride, a double for Betty Penski, as far as Ray could tell. Same rubberized body.

  The whole time the orangutan was in Brad's arms or his bride's, it was staring back at Tricia with this pitiful look like the ape was headed off to the orphanage instead of a movie star's ranch.

  Tricia's eyes watered, but then she caught herself and all at once she set her mouth and turned off the tap, something she must have learned at psychology school. And later during the wedding ceremony, Tricia got a little trickle going from watching the way the ape walked around among the guests while the happy couple was taking their vows, and all those Hollywood types were cooing, smiling, cuddling the thing while the cowboy minister rattled on.

  Tricia Capoletti watched the ape, how it climbed into new people's arms and got interested in their hair. And to make it worse, the hairball kept looking over at her and Ray, giving them one long, sorrowful stare after another like it really wanted to be over with them, but was just being sociable, doing what was expected of it.

  Most of all Ray liked the feel of Tricia riding beside him in his old black Volvo, liked the way she'd said, "Could you stop, Ray? I need to use the bathroom." Nothing unusual in the words themselves, but God, it made things seize up inside him. Put a tremble in his hands. Saying it so natural, like the two of them had been married for years.

  Ray White stood around in front of the 7-Eleven counter and watched the teenage fat girl ring up gas customers, and guys come in off the street to buy single beers, taking them away in small brown sacks. Ray looked at the magazine rack for a minute, a sports magazine, a soap opera digest. Then he picked up a copy of today's Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.

  Read the lead headline: MOTORCYCLE MASSACRE. Then slid his eyes down the page and began reading a different story, something about an airline strike, then in a few seconds he came back to the motorcycle story, eyes running over the words, but none of it really sinking in, 'cause he was thinking of Tricia back in the bathroom. The way she must be looking into the mirror about now, primping, fixing up her makeup, though she didn't wear all that much, at least not compared to the likes of Betty Penski of International House of Pancakes. Ray's eyes slipped down the words, then looked at the photo on the page. A black-and-white picture of a little wooden house with motorcycles out front.

  A house Ray recognized. Jesus H. Mother of God.

  Then he started to read for real. Taking the words in, digesting them, feeling a flutter begin in his chest, a dizzy spin coming into his head.

  Motorcycle massacre. Nine men, three women. Methodically murdered, their mutilated bodies left to decay in their Hialeah clubhouse. Just found late yesterday afternoon, a full twenty-four hours after the slaughter happened. The house in Hialeah, the one where the old woman got killed by the twerpy kid. Neighbors reported seeing a black Corvette parked outside, hearing gunfire, but not reporting it. Wasn't the first time shots were fired in that house. Let them kill each other, one neighbor said.

  Ray got to the end of the article just as Tricia walked up. He looked at her blankly, not even recognizing her for a second.

  "Ray?"

  "You read about this?" He held up the newspaper.

  "The motorcycle club?"

  "Yeah."

  "I saw it on Channel Four this morning. A dozen people shot."

  Ray set the paper back in the rack, pushed open the heavy glass door for Tricia. Walked with her over to the car.

  "And those poisonous snakes," she said. "Crawling all over the bodies. The victims with their noses cut off. I mean, God Almighty, why would anyone do that, do you think, kill someone, then cut off their nose? I just can't fathom it, can't imagine the landscape of somebody's mind who'd commit an act like that."

  "Paper says it wasn't their whole nose," Ray said. "Just the tips."

  Tricia studied him as he held the door open for her.

  "I guess why he did it," Ray said, "it must've been for revenge. Like maybe what could've happened, a year ago those same motorcycle guys cut his nose, so then he might feel compelled to get them back. A nose for a nose."

  She looked at him for a puzzled moment, then her eyes changed and she said his name, a question mark at the end.

  "Yeah?"

  "Tell me the truth. Did you really shoot that boy?"

  He looked at her, the way her head was tilted slightly. He saw a long hair snagged on the front of her cashmere sweater. Maybe one of hers, maybe the hairball's. Her eyes were waiting for him, wanting to hear the right answer, something big hanging in the balance.

  "Did you, Ray? Did you shoot that boy in traffic?"

  Ray reach
ed out, pinched hold of that hair on the shoulder of her sweater and drew it off. He cranked open his window and dropped the hair outside, then turned back to look at her again.

  "Yes, I did," he said. "I shot him."

  She kept on looking at him, things changing in her eyes, her mouth, somewhere he couldn't put his finger on. And he couldn't tell if the change was for the better or the worse.

  Then she nodded her head once, twice. Her mouth grim.

  "My mother," Ray said, hearing himself speak, but at the same time drifting apart from his body, going off, hovering ten feet up in the air, watching Raimondo White discuss his mother with Tricia Capoletti. "When Mom was dying, one afternoon she made everyone leave her hospital room except for me. She had me get down on my knees, and she held my hand very tight, and she whispered in this croaky voice, telling me she knew she was just on the verge of dying, then asking me to look after Orlon, keep him out of trouble. It was up to me to be her substitute when she was gone. I said I would, sure, what else could I say?

  "And ever since she died I've been trying to do it, nudge Orlon in the right direction whenever the chance arose. But now I see the shitty job I've done. Hell, I can't even keep myself out of trouble. And here I got one important job in life, one thing my mother begged me to do above all else, and look how I mangled it up. Look what I did."

  "Mangled what up, Ray? I don't follow you,"

  "Bullying Orlon, making him go in there on his own, into that house. I mean, I might just as well have done that thing myself, butchered all those people. I wound him up so damn tight, set him off in that direction, slicing and shooting."

  "What're you saying? What exactly are you telling me?"

  Ray started the car, not speaking anything more to her. Not even looking over to see how she was taking his silence, just wanting to get back home, go up to his room, lock the door, think this through.

  "Talk to me, Ray," she said.

  But he couldn't. There were some things too awful to confess to anybody, even to your eighty-dollar shrink, even to the woman you loved.

  ***

  Brad Randolph's bride, Windy Li, decided the orangutan should be named Ringo. In a brief and drunken ceremony, she bestowed the name on the orangutan, then immediately turned her attention back to her guests.

  Ringo spent his first evening at Brad Randolph's ranch looking out the second-story window. From that perspective, the ape could see into the uppermost branches of the oaks and pines in Brad's front yard. For the last four years the ape had lived almost exclusively in the canopy of the Borneo rain forest, so he was naturally fascinated by the movie star's treetops.

  Music played through the early evening, guitars and banjos, drums and fiddles. Lanterns had been hung from limbs around the yard, and dozens of people milled around in their flickering glow. Others hung around the hors d'oeuvres that were set out on the back of a fake chuck wagon. Occasionally Ringo watched the people, but mostly he stared at the tree limbs.

  Brad Randolph's assistant had chosen that particular room for Ringo because it contained a single bed but was otherwise empty. With such short notice of the ape's arrival, that room had seemed like the best place to house the new guest. The one room where he could do the least damage.

  However, for the last few months the room had belonged to Butch, Brad's five-year-old male Rottweiler. Brad owned Butch since his single days, and the dog had once enjoyed the privilege of sleeping alongside Brad in his king-size bed, but since Windy Li arrived he'd been banished to that unfurnished room.

  Earlier in the afternoon the dog had retreated to the room to escape the noise and chaos of the party and had curled up inside the empty closet. When Brad's assistant led the ape into the room and shut the door, he failed to notice that Butch was already there.

  The orangutan's arrival woke the dog and Butch lay on his stomach, his chin against his paws, peering out through the half-open closet door. The dog was absolutely still, focused on every move of the orangutan as it paced in front of the second-story window, peering out. The Rottweiler's nose was working, his ears pointed up to catch each squeak and peep the red-haired ape made.

  As the sun set, Ringo grew weary of the view out the window and walked over to the bed. He tugged on the edge of the flowered bedspread and pulled it loose. He wadded it up and dropped the bedspread onto the floor, then lay down in the small pile and found a comfortable position on his side.

  The dog waited a half hour before finally standing up. He came slowly out of the closet. In a crouch he approached Ringo, halting every foot or so, until his snout was just a few inches from the orange ape's feet.

  Unlike monkeys, the great apes have no tails. Without a tail for balance, orangutans must rely completely on the strength of their hands and feet to swing through the treetops. Actually the orangutan's feet could more properly be described as third and fourth hands, for they had the same prehensile abilities as the ape's hands and equal strength.

  When Butch leaned forward, bringing his nose to within an inch of the strange animal's fragrant soles, the orangutan used its feet in a movement so quick and powerful the dog did not even have time to make a sound.

  The orangutan grabbed Butch by the neck, and though Butch outweighed Ringo by forty pounds, the ape held the dog in place as it shifted its grip to the dog's trunk. Then, while grasping the dog with all four hands, Ringo lifted Butch off the ground and held him in the air.

  The dog squirmed in the ape's grip but couldn't break free. Lying on his back, Ringo rocked the Rottweiler back and forth above him, examining this unusual animal. While domestic dogs were abundant in the villages of Borneo, no wild dogs roamed the jungle. The closest animal to this Rottweiler the orangutan might have seen was a common barking deer.

  As the ape shifted its grip for a better view of the dog, the Rottweiler suddenly twisted its neck, growled, and lurched to the side. It bared its teeth and snapped at the ape's right hand. But the orangutan was too swift. In an effortless motion, he heaved the dog headfirst two yards across the room and Butch crashed through the front window.

  Out in the yard, some of the wedding guests screamed.

  CHAPTER 26

  Brenda Cougar gave Allison two aspirin and made her swallow them down with a jelly glass of Scotch. Then she sat Allison down in a chair and tightened a strip of adhesive tape hard across the bridge of her nose, studiously molding the flesh back into some semblance of its former shape, an operation, it seemed, Brenda Cougar had performed a few times before. Allison's eyes clouded with tears, but she clenched the arms of the chair and was silent throughout the ordeal.

  The girl never spoke a word or changed her bland expression. Her dark eyes were empty, but somehow she managed to reveal herself to Allison, let her know without question who ran Mr. Crotch Meriwether's house, and who Allison and her friend were indebted to for walking out of there alive.

  When she was done, they went outside and Brenda Cougar lowered a stepladder into the pit, helped to haul Thorn out. She led the two of them to the jon boat and climbed in herself. Brenda poled them all the way back out to the highway, taking a far more direct route than the one Allison had used coming in. She and Allison muscled the boat onto the roof of the Cherokee and strapped it down. As Allison was thanking her, the girl turned away and walked off into the dense woods.

  Allison helped Thorn into the Jeep, shut the door, and he slumped against it. With his eyes closed, he rubbed at his face as if he had walked through a wall of cobwebs.

  "So," Thorn said, eyes closed against his pain. "Are they coming for tea?"

  "Yes," she said. "Tomorrow night."

  "Good," he said. "That'll give me time to grow a new head."

  A mile down Tamiami Trail, Thorn was paralyzed by sleep. As Allison watched the black highway unspool beneath them, she was filled with a wild garble of emotions. Dread, sadness, and fury. But through it all a bright, clear voice rang out from the empty sky of her memory. Raimondo White speaking on Crotch's cellular phone. Alliso
n, he'd said. Allison Farleigh.

  Driving through the fading dusk, she compared the lingering echo of those voices in Borneo with this voice, and there was absolutely no mistake. All-iii-son. Allison. The same derisive enunciation, turning her name into three syllables, the same shading of the last vowel. The identical hiss at the end, a long, sibilant sneer. Allie, Allie in come free.

  Yes, it was miles from courtroom proof. Arraignments, grand jury indictments, forget all that. But for Allison it was as definite as fingerprints, as conclusive as a perfect match of the loops and swirls of DNA.

  She held the Jeep at the speed limit and kept her eyes on the road, and over and over again she invoked that bullying taunt. All-iii-son. Come out, come out, wherever you are. All-iii-son! Winslow lying dead at their feet. Tormenting herself with the image, with the recollection of that haunting voice.

  At least now she knew. Not why Winslow had to die, none of the particulars. But she was certain it was them, the two brothers, the White boys. Shabby second-raters. Redneck herpers who until lately had been content with selling fifty-dollar ratsnakes, hundred-dollar kings. Somehow they'd found their way to Borneo, hunting orangutans at forty thousand apiece. Seedy, low-life animal dealers, clearly in the employ of someone a great deal more shrewd. Someone who was buying and selling fantastic numbers of animals. A man like Joshua Bond.

  Allison watched a mass of dark clouds pile up in her rearview mirror, the leading edge of another front, driven down the peninsula from the Northwest, a great roiling imbalance in the upper atmosphere as the clean arctic currents clashed with the heavy subtropical air. Wild thunderstorms were on their way, squalls that would shake loose the tons of water that had thickened the air for weeks.

  The storm chased them back down Tamiami Trail and caught them as they crossed the Dade County line. The deluge hammered against the Cherokee roof, wipers slapping fast but ineffectual. Headlights on, she drove east into the city through the nerve-racking curtain of rain. It was eight-fifteen by the time they arrived at Baptist Hospital's emergency room, and half past ten when they were released. Ten stitches and a handful of codeine-laced Tylenol for Thorn, another tape job for Allison's nose. And a warning: Go see an ear, nose, throat man first thing tomorrow or you'll snore like a drunken sailor the rest of your life.