CHAPTER 29
They buried Crotch Meriwether in an oak hammock a mile west of the Shack. Soft loamy earth, miles of unobstructed view west across the saw grass prairie. They took turns with the shovel, the other holding the Remington, scanning the horizon.
A few minutes past sunrise, when they were done, they stood over the grave, Allison drenched with sweat, Thorn breathing unevenly. After a silent three or four minutes, whatever prayers would be said for Meriwether had been spoken.
Back in the Shack Allison showered, bandaged her ankle, and dressed in fresh wheat-colored jeans, a blue-and-white crew neck shirt. Thorn took his turn in the shower and put on his torn blue work shirt, his khaki shorts. His ribcage was covered with yellowish red bruises, but he said he believed nothing was broken. His breath was coming more freely all the time.
It was nine-thirty when they stopped at a Cuban strip shopping center just inside the Miami city limits. She called Harry at work. His voice was vacant.
"Where were you last two nights?"
"At the Shack."
"Is that how it's going to be now, you're just going to come and go?"
"Look, Harry, I need your help."
"Oh, do you? What is it this time, going after the governor? A senator perhaps?"
She watched Thorn in the front seat of the Cherokee. He was downing another Tylenol with a Budweiser he'd bought in the Cuban market. Breakfast of convalescents.
"Your friend at the State Department," she said. "The redheaded one you used to play golf with. What's his name?"
"Danny Burton," he said warily.
"That's him. I'm sure he could handle this."
"Handle what?"
She said, "I want to know what Americans entered Borneo during October this year. In fact, what I really want is the complete passport and immigration list for the entire month, every nationality. Every port of entry, airports, ships, roads."
"Good Christ!"
"It wouldn't be conclusive," she said. "But I want to see their names. Be absolutely sure they were there. And to see if maybe there's another name I recognize, the one they're working for."
"Whose names are we talking about here?"
"I'll tell you about it later, Harry."
"You're still after Joshua Bond, aren't you? Still obsessed with that man."
"I want to see that list."
"And you think I can do something like that? Snap my fingers, get passport data from a foreign country?"
"Can't you?"
"Why do you have to keep playing cop like this?"
"Will you do it, Harry, or should I call Danny Burton myself?"
"Goddamn it, Allison, immigration records like that, even for a small country like Borneo, you're talking about mountains of paperwork at the very least. Hell, their computers probably can't break out a single month in the first place. I'm sure their data systems are just as backward as everything else in that damn country. And this is not even to mention the fact that the Malaysians would never allow some private citizen to paw through that kind of information."
"I'm sure there're lots of reasons," she said quietly, "why this would be difficult for you to accomplish. Lots of very good reasons you can't help."
He hesitated a moment and when he came back his voice was deeper, more grave.
"You think I can just pick up the phone?" he said. "Call somebody over there, Kuala Lumpur, and they'll drop what they're doing and send me lists of names?"
"Harry, I spent twenty years watching you operate. I know what you can accomplish when you want to. And I know you've got a ton of markers you could call in. So don't pretend with me. If you want to do this, you can find a way."
"All right, all right," he said coldly. "I'll try. But I won't promise anything."
"And Harry," she said. "I won't be home for a few days."
"So what else is new?"
"I'll call you later on, see what you've found out."
"Swell," he said. "I think you know my numbers."
"Thank you, Harry. Thank you for trying."
"Oh, by the way," he said. "Funny you should have called, really."
"What?"
"I just got off the phone with Sean."
"Yes?"
"She's gone. She left."
"Gone?"
The line was silent. Allison watched a construction crew walk past, young men in ponytails and earrings, each of them eyeing her up and down.
"Harry? Where is Sean?"
"I believe it's instructive, Allison, that she called me, not you, at a moment like this. I think that tells us something very important."
"Harry."
He was silent. Traffic sang in her other ear. Cuban Muzak, marimbas and trumpets, a manic beat.
Harry said, "She went back over there. To Borneo. She's with Patrick."
Fifty thousand feet, sixty below zero outside, seven hundred miles an hour, a steady thunder in the Concorde, not too different from riding in an unmuffled, full-race Ferrari, Patrick said. It goes very, very fast, but it's extremely stiff, much bumpier than the slower models, 767's, L-1011's, proving once again that you have to pay in one way or another for every good thing you get.
Only six seats, big leather ones, widely spaced, a creamy color. Then a partition, a sliding door. Behind the door there was a bedroom with soft lighting, smoky gray drapes over the cabin walls cushioning some of the noise. Lights coming from somewhere, Sean wasn't sure.
In the air for hours now, somewhere over the Atlantic, she lay on her back on the bed, a silk sheet covering her. Sean naked, looking up at the vague lights, the shadows, feeling the speed of the airplane, the reckless velocity of the last few days, the sheer wildness of what she'd done, packed one small bag, flown off with this boy from another time, another world, Patrick who lay naked beside her; fifty thousand feet, sixty below zero just beyond those curtains, just beyond the thin aluminum skin of his uncle's Concorde.
Flying against the grain of time, into the rising sun, but with the wind at their backs. Always a trade-off. Lose time, but reap a tailwind. Making love while going against time, losing it one way, gaining it back another. Growing older at seven hundred miles an hour. Later and later and later, every mile they traveled east, every thrust of hip.
Sean was six motel rooms and then some past virginity; two blankets on the beach, and a backseat of an '85 Ford Fairlane, a dorm room, and a beachfront condo. And even from the very first time, with Sammy Parks, parked near the third green of the Gables Country Club, Sean had never once missed her orgasm. She could make it happen quickly, or she could hold it off. Either way, it was predictably intense.
So she'd never understood what the big deal was, how some women could go their whole lives without having one. Like Winslow, who'd had that problem, confiding in Sean that she was in therapy for it, just couldn't let go with a man, repressed, bashful, convinced she was defective, emotionally incomplete.
But not Sean. Ten guys, and even the few who'd been consistently premature, she could come with them all. It was easy for her, like playing a team sport, or slow dancing. Anticipating her partner's move, being there when the ball was passed, harmonizing. Like everything physical Sean had tried, she was good at it almost immediately, got better very quickly, and mastered it within a year or two.
One of them, Tom Lawson, liked to watch porno movies to get in a raunchy mood. Sean had never seen such stuff before and was repelled and fascinated. They'd sit naked on his couch for hours fondling each other, the films running, and Sean watched the California healthies play their Kama Sutra games. But she discovered the films had nothing to teach her. There were no new positions, no anatomical surprises. Somehow in her own instinctive, meandering way she'd already covered the same ground as these fantasy people. A doctorate in sex without any formal training.
But Patrick was different from any man she'd known. Handsome, caring, mysterious, a very light touch. And Sean was beginning to doubt her arrogance. With subtle strokes and nudges, small but cruc
ial shifts in position, he'd been pushing her to places she'd never been. Moving her up a scale of pleasure she had not imagined.
And now, in the shadowy cabin where a vanilla-scented candle fluttered on the bedside table, and Dire Straits seeped quietly from hidden speakers, Patrick sat up, poured two more glasses of cognac, handed one to Sean.
They each took a sip, Sean feeling the golden flush spread through her. After another silent sip or two, Patrick set his glass aside and took hers from her hand, put it on the table. He leaned across her and kissed her shoulder, her throat and breasts as he lowered himself to her again. His body sleek, pale skin as delicate as ash.
With his lips and fingertips he roamed her flesh. She could feel herself begin to lather as she curled to him, moved lower, inhaled the freshly cut hay smell of his cock, so familiar now, taking it in her hands, fondling, and curving down to take it in her mouth. She felt his lips easing down her belly, tongue in her navel, lower through her abundant hair, his lips parting those other lips, tongue dipping into her hungrily as if she were a ripe mango.
For what seemed like the thousandth time in these last few days, one position melted into another, and he was inside her, and they were once again making slow and thorough love. And as he'd been from the first, Patrick was attentive, tender, and exploratory, using a quiet delicacy she'd never felt, as if he were handling an ancient, perilously fragile violin. The background music, the salty taste of him, his deep, slow thrusts flawlessly in time with hers.
As Dire Straits continued to recycle, slowly he drew her off the bed, standing naked at fifty thousand feet, outrunning the speed of sound, a rumble everywhere, clouds exploding around them. He led her to the next contortions, Sean bent over the small couch, then flat on her belly on the gold wall-to-wall rug while Patrick pressed into her from behind, and still later Patrick was atop her again on the bed, supporting himself on straight arms, delicate pushups, only his cock touching her.
And Sean inched to the edge of release again, her cries spiraling upward, calling out as the moment approached. But this time it was different from every time before, a quick jolt that twisted inside her. She stiffened and the back of her head knocked against the headboard. She clenched her eyes, arched back to ease the spasm. Felt something large and feverish moving upward inside her, swelling as it came, a huge warmth spreading through her belly, shuddering into her chest, a ping of lights, swirl of noise.
She made a noise in her throat, gasped, reached up to pull him down against her. It was scary how good they were together, scary to feel this way about anyone, and for all of it to have happened so quickly, as though the other men had only been warm-ups, pale preparations for the real thing. Very scary. Fifty thousand feet, seven hundred miles an hour. Going somewhere far away, getting there very fast.
And those were her final thoughts before it took her. Heavy drugs flooded Sean's bloodstream from glands that had never worked before. Something she hadn't known, hadn't suspected. As if she had never had a true orgasm before, as if before today she'd only been skimming along some shallow pond of feeling.
***
Allison wanted a few things from the Gables house, clothes, her address book, any new faxes. Thorn said no, it was too dangerous. They'd be watching the house. She wasn't so sure. The way they ran off like that last night. It had to be the White brothers, cowards really. Maybe seeing Meriwether killed like that had scared them off for good.
"Humor me then," said Thorn. "I'll go over there. You stay here."
They were at Snapper Creek Marina in the galley of his thirty-one-foot Chris-Craft berthed on the edge of the shadowy creek. Old Cutler Road ran fifty yards to the east. A hard wind was bending the Australian pines, scudding foam along the fringes of the canal. Another cold front was settling in, the sky gloomy and low, the sun dulled by cheerless layers of clouds the color of oyster shells.
"You need to rest anyway," he said. "Just lie down for a while, take a nap, let me get the stuff and I'll be back before noon. Then we can take the boat out on the bay, find a cove, anchor up, figure out what to do next."
"Sean flew back to Borneo with Patrick Sagawan."
Thorn opened the small refrigerator beside the breakfast nook. Found a beer, held it up for Allison. She shook her head and he put it back. He looked out at a cabin cruiser headed out of the canal, a man without a care steering from the upper deck, going out on the bay to blow his hair loose, spend a few hundred dollars' worth of gasoline doing it.
"Patrick Sagawan does business with Harry. Some mysterious construction project in Brunei. A very big venture."
"So?"
"Do you know where Brunei is?"
"It sounds far away."
"It's near Djakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Taipei. Where all those animal smugglers have been congregating lately."
***
Thorn circled the block twice, saw nothing suspicious, but just to be sure he parked the Cherokee two streets away just off Alhambra, then cut down an alley on foot, jumped over two backyard fences and then was in the Farleighs' backyard.
Frank Sinatra was crooning Christmas carols in the house next door. The smells of roasting turkey, onions and garlic simmering. Only the second week in November and "Silent Night" was filling the neighborhood. As if the cold weather had triggered some automatic response.
It was probably the combination of the Christmas carols, the dreary wind, the raw, sunless day, and all the accumulated wounds and bruises he'd suffered in the last week backing up inside him, all of it with nowhere to go anymore, riding up into his throat, because suddenly Thorn was breathless, and had to sit down on the Farleighs' back steps, his head swirling like a compass needle that's lost its true north.
A few minutes later, when he'd composed himself, he used her key to enter the house. Went upstairs to her bedroom. He selected her wardrobe for the next few days, packed the clothes in a grocery sack. Ms. Allison Farleigh's personal valet. He took a handful of faxes from the machine, her toothbrush, deodorant, and filled the sack to the brim with the assorted tubes and bottles arrayed on the lavatory shelf.
Before he left, he stood in the doorway and took a long look at her bedroom. Frank Sinatra had moved on to "The Twelve Days of Christmas," hamming it up on "five golden rings."
Allison's bedroom reminded him uncomfortably of his own. A double bed and across from it a desk covered with the functional paraphernalia of her trade. Muted beige paint on the walls. No frills, no filigree, no pile of pillows, no distracting geegaws or romantic watercolors. All business. A cloister for sleep and toll. The windows looking out into dull trees.
It was the room of someone who'd lost the knack of self-indulgence, a person so caught up in the methodical habits of work, so focused on the minutiae of the problem at hand that she seemed to have abandoned any last possibility of joy.
Thorn took the sidewalks back to the Cherokee. He glanced around several times, but saw no one following him. Only a mail truck making its rounds, one old lady sweeping her front walk. A yapping dog.
It was eleven-thirty when he got back to the Jeep. He opened the door, set the grocery bag on the passenger's seat, and was ducking his head inside when someone whispered behind him. Pivoting, Thorn saw only a quick flash. The blur of metal. Though he realized what it was a half second after the first blow. A rod, tire iron, something like that. Feeling a second jolt in his gut even before he registered the first one on his skull. Wondering about that as he tumbled against the car, how things could get so scrambled so quickly.
Then another hard shot above his right ear, spinning him to his right. He snagged his shirt on the Cherokee's rearview mirror, ripping it, hearing his own grunt as the scalding zipper opened up the back of his head along the seam of his machete stitches, a fizzing noise like the spew from a giant rocket about to lift off. His wound reopening.
Somehow he didn't fall. Somehow Thorn kept his eyes open, the light smudged, growing gray, but his brain still awake. Tottering, he watched the small man, the hair
less White brother, peering into his eyes. Through the gray mist, Thorn saw the black crowbar in his left hand. The man was examining Thorn, choosing a spot, as if Thorn were a tree, one good whack away from falling to the forest floor.
Leaning against the door of his car, Thorn let his head loll forward. His eyes slack, but still watching the little guy with the tire iron, and then seeing over his shoulder the next-door neighbor, a white-haired Cuban woman in a yellow apron out on her porch staring in their direction.
Thorn refocused on the small man before him, watched as he drew the iron bar back with both hands, assumed a slugger's stance. The guy was dressed in black T-shirt and jeans. Eyes smiling.
Thorn waited till the bar was coming around, aimed at his head, the little guy going to blast this one over the center field wall, like Mickey, Reggie, Canseco, spray Thorn's teeth across the lawn. The old Cuban lady watched placidly.
At the final possible instant, Thorn jerked out of his slump, dodged the blow, watched the little guy spin halfway around, lose his balance. Thorn stepped in quick, punted him in the butt, kicked a week's shit back up into the little bastard, sent him hurling headfirst across ten feet, into the rough bark of an old oak. Heard the thunk of that hairless skull against the tree.
Thorn met him as he was stumbling to his feet, eyes groggy. Thorn leaned back and cracked him with an overhand right against the bridge of his nose. The guy lurched back, but the tree held him up. Thorn gave him a quick left jab that glanced off his temple, a right uppercut to his solar plexus. Thorn eased off a little, didn't want to kill this guy. Not yet anyway.
Leaning back against the oak, the little man breathed hard, blood leaking from his nose.
"You finished, tough guy?" Orlon White said, his eyes muddy. "You got all that macho bullshit out of your system?"
Thorn stepped in, took a deep grip on the man's shirtfront, straightened him up, fist clenching cloth, his knuckles bumping the underside of the guy's chin. Thorn lifted him a few inches into the air.
Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4) Page 29
