The Big Finish Page 12

  Yesterday when he’d first heard Tina’s phone ring, the volume was set on high, but this last time, the sound was heavily muffled. Still, he was trying to be systematic, hoping to find the phone lodged between the seats, or under the armrests or in the door pockets, which would suggest that X had been a party to stopping Tina on the highway after she fled the gas station in Vero Beach. That she’d ridden for a while in the backseat until she’d been deposited at some law enforcement facility. It was the reasonable, legitimate explanation. The other, darker alternative, however, was becoming inescapable.

  He repeated the search of the backseat, again found nothing.

  He shut the door and went to the trunk and unlocked it. He moved the luggage aside, but didn’t see her phone. He ran his hand around the outer edge of the spare tire. Nothing.

  Piece by piece he removed the luggage and set it on the gravel behind the car. Cruz’s backpack, a battered fake leather suitcase he assumed belonged to X-88, and a pink hard-sided roll-on that must’ve been Pixie’s. He hauled out the heavy duffel with the automatic weapons and the bricks of cash.

  He removed some old ropes and a roll of duct tape and assorted bungee cords and a leather packet of tools. When the trunk was empty, he patted the carpet from one side to the other and found nothing. He did it again, working methodically, and again felt no bulges or anything out of place.

  He was about to give up and dig through the luggage, when he looked back into the trunk and spotted a small lump at the far edge of the mat.

  Taking hold of the corner of the carpet, Thorn peeled it back, and there, tucked in a crevice at the right edge of the trunk, was Tina Gathercole’s cell phone. He drew a long breath and let it go.

  He flipped open the phone, located the control button, and navigated to the recent calls menu. Several numbers on the incoming list were from Sugarman. Since late last night, Sugar had called Tina seven times. From his home, from his office. The most recent calls, the two that rang an hour ago, were from Sugar’s cell. The call that Tina had answered in the car yesterday just before they pulled off at that Vero Beach gas station was from a blocked number.

  Tina’s outgoing list was odd. Late yesterday afternoon the last calls were a series of garbled numbers. Most were too short to qualify as phone numbers at all. A dozen or more were only five or six digits. And there was a long list of only three digits. 288, 443, 922. As if she’d been dialing in the dark or randomly butt-calling.

  He stared at the phone, the list of muddled numbers. Only one thing explained it. Tina had been in the trunk of X’s car, a captive, probably with her hands bound, and somehow she’d managed to work her phone free and had tried calling for help. The three-digit calls were attempts at 911, the others he could only guess.

  The list of recent outgoing calls was long. At least sixty or seventy. Frantic, she must’ve tried again and again in the cramped airless space. A valiant, agonized attempt to save herself. It was likely when she realized the car was reaching the end of its journey, she stashed the phone in a small fissure in the trunk’s floor. Leaving it behind like a note dashed off and slipped into a bottle and cast into the turbulent sea. An attempt to chronicle her predicament, to send one last cry for justice.

  Thorn had never liked the woman. She was shallow and self-indulgent. She’d exploited Sugarman’s generous spirit for reasons that still weren’t clear. But there was more to her than Thorn had seen. A core of toughness he’d missed. The woman had been dogged and resolute at the end. And yes, the bottle with her message had washed ashore and had come rolling up to Thorn.

  In the upper corner of the cell phone screen the signal strength icon was showing only a single bar, and when Thorn punched in Sugar’s cell number, the call wouldn’t go through. He closed the phone and looked around at the empty fields, the bare trees, the desolate expanse of a farm community clearly struggling. Prosperity had bypassed this region, their crops were no longer in demand or their land grown fallow. Great Hope, North Carolina, was dead quiet except for a steady wind that rattled the tin Dr Pepper sign and sent a paper coffee cup skittering across the gravel lot.

  He considered searching the luggage, see what more he could learn about his traveling companions, then decided it wasn’t a priority at the moment. He needed to move, put more distance between himself and Cruz. Thorn had slowed them down. They’d have to find fresh clothes for X-88, clean him up, and they’d have to commandeer a car, but he had no doubt Cruz would soon be back in motion.

  Before he could return to the road, he needed directions. He’d taken only a quick look at Sugar’s paper map yesterday, and didn’t remember the road names or highway numbers that led to Pine Haven.

  He put Tina’s phone in his pocket, repacked the luggage in the trunk, slammed the lid and locked it, walked over to the general store, and pushed open the screen door.

  Two men and a middle-aged woman were huddled around a chess board that was set up on a wooden barrel, the men dressed in overalls and denim shirts and matching sweat-stained John Deere caps, the woman wearing black jeans and a ratty white sweater that fit too tight across her ample breasts. The younger of the men, a skinny dude, looked up as the screen door slapped behind Thorn.

  The other two stayed focused on their game.

  “Don’t have no gas,” the scrawny man said. “Ain’t been none for going on twenty years.”

  “I’m looking for the road to Pine Haven.”

  The woman, who’d been about to move a pawn, set it down and looked up at Thorn.

  “Pine Haven, is it? That what you say, Pine Haven?”

  Thorn didn’t reply.

  The woman rose from her chair and came around the chess board and over to Thorn, inching in close. Her brown eyes were lit with moonshine and there was moonshine on her breath.

  “Now what’s a healthy specimen like you be wanting to go to a god-awful town like Pine Haven? A day in that hellhole, you’ll be stumbling around like a one-legged mule.”

  The skinny man chuckled. He was a toothy fellow with hollow cheeks and long-distance eyes.

  “Never mind,” Thorn said. “I’ll find my way.”

  “You a hog man, are you?” the woman said.

  Thorn stopped and turned back to her.

  “That’s about all there is in Pine Haven,” the skinny man said. “Hogs and more hogs.”

  The big man, older by twenty years than the other two, was still seated at the chess board. He looked up and said, “Hogs and hog stink. Yes, sir, that about covers it for Pine Haven.”

  “What if I am?” Thorn said. “What if I am a hog man?”

  “You don’t look like any hog man I ever seen,” the skinny man said. “Does he, Reb? Does he look like a hog man to you?”

  “Could be one of them corporate people, Pastureland.”

  “Is that right?” the woman said. “You a Pastureland man?”

  “Pastureland,” Thorn said. “What do they do?”

  “What do they do?” The woman grinned at him. “What don’t they do?”

  “They run the show,” the skinny man said. “They run everything there is to run in these parts. If it has to do with hogs. And other things too.”

  “What about Webb Dobbins? They run him too?”

  All three of them turned to Thorn.

  “You know Webb?” the woman said.

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Just so happens, back in the day, Webb was my old flame.”

  Thorn didn’t reply.

  “You going to see him?”

  “He’s on my list.”

  “Well, you tell him howdy, you hear? Tell him Mary-June says hi.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Webb’s the number one hog farmer in all of North Carolina, that’s what they say. Number one, top of the list.” She smiled to herself and looked off at the empty shelves of the store. “In these parts, he’s our rock star.”

  “That Webb, he’s a healthy specimen,” the skinny man said. “Ain’t he, Reb
? Mighty healthy specimen, Webb Junior.”

  The woman craned her neck out and oozed in closer to Thorn.

  “Back in the glory days,” she said with a dreamy tone, “Webb, he’d come in this store, I was just a wee teenage thing working at the counter, and he’d reach out with those big hands of his and he’d honk my boobs.

  “Do it every damn time, honk, honk. A grab-ass boy, that Webb. Now he’s all grown and owns that whole town, owns it inside and out, upside and down. If I’d played my cards smart, I’d be lying there beside that warthog today in the lap of luxury.”

  “You didn’t have no cards to play,” the skinny man said.

  “Hell, I didn’t. He couldn’t stay off me.”

  The skinny man said, “These days Webb Dobbins can honk any boobs he wants. He don’t need your tired-out old flour sacks.”

  “You a friend of Webb’s? You do business with him?” the woman said.

  “I might be.”

  “There ain’t nobody in Pine Haven worth seeing but Webb Dobbins.”

  “’Less you count his sister,” the skinny man said. “Oh, lordy, I’d like to have me some of that tasty stew, yes I would, like to bury my face in some of that and just gargle the night away.”

  The man named Reb stood up and smoothed his palms across his huge belly, looked down at it, and ran his hands over it again as if surprised to find it there.

  “You take highway 13 right out front here, go north about ten miles, you come to the first crossroads, you throw a left, few miles later the next right. That’ll be Perkins Hollow Road. You stay on that for fifteen miles, you come directly into Pine Haven. Town’s four blocks long, not much to it.”

  When Reb was finished, he took a step to his left, raised his hand, and backhanded the skinny man across the face—a blow that sent him staggering against an ancient Coca-Cola cooler.

  “And don’t be talking that way about women, boy. It’s unseemly and unchristian. Makes me damn near ashamed to call you my son, hearing them words stream out of your filthy mouth.”

  “We were just having fun, Reb. No need to get pissy,” Mary-June said.

  Reb turned back to Thorn, fixing him with an uncanny look. He reached out the hand he’d used to strike his son, gripping Thorn’s shoulder, digging his fingers in with the passionate resolve of a faith healer hell-bent on curing Thorn’s deformity.

  “I knew Webb’s daddy, Big Webb. For a time, me and him ran around together. That Big Webb, he was always one mean-ass son of a bitch, kind of man should’ve never married, never had no family whatsoever. All that man was good at was meanness from the time he was little till he went off to the war with the gooks and when he come back he was twice as mean as when he left.

  “Far as I can see, anything his boy, Little Webb, does, or his poor sinful sister, I don’t condone it, not one bit, but I understand it. The apple don’t fall far, is what they say, and if the tree was rotten to begin with, then the apple’s gonna be rotten when it falls and it’ll only get more rotten as the years go by.

  “And you listen to me, mister. I wouldn’t mind if you were to repeat to young Webb any of what you just heard come out of my mouth, each and every word, if you do run across him there in Pine Haven. I don’t mind a bit. You tell him Reb Parker was talking about him and if he has a problem with any of that, he can drive over and sit down and we’ll have us a discussion about apples and meanness.”

  Thorn shrugged out of Reb’s hold and took a half step toward the door and the woman scooted over and pressed a soft shoulder against him.

  “Go ahead,” she said, pulling her shoulders back. “Honk them for old times’ sake. ’Cause of Webb and all. Just a quick honk and fare-thee-well.”

  “This man doesn’t want to squeeze your titties, Mary-June. Nobody does.”

  “Just once in memory of them good old days that have come and gone.”

  “A tempting offer,” Thorn said. “But I must decline.”

  He looked past Mary-June, thanked Reb for the directions, and headed for the door.

  FIFTEEN

  WHEN THE PHONE CALL CAME from Cruz, Webb Dobbins was in the greenhouse planting a trumpet tree cutting, and was up to his elbows in pig shit. The shit was nicely aged and blended in a ratio of one to five with vermiculite, the plastic tub also holding a few scoops of crushed peanut shells, a handful of dried-out straw, a gallon of topsoil, dozens of earthworms, and a healthy dose of peat-based biofilters inoculated with bacteria to metabolize ammonia and reduce offensive odors, an idea Webb had stolen from a Dutch researcher.

  “You there, Dobbins?”

  “Present and accounted for.”

  “I can barely hear you,” Cruz said.

  “I’m wearing a mask. But don’t worry, I can hear you fine.”

  Cruz was silent for several moments, probably unsure if Webb was playing games with her. He wasn’t. A full-face gas mask with goggle eyes.

  “Thorn got away from us. I believe he’s headed to Pine Haven.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “Not important. We’ll be there soon as we can. A few hours at most. But he’ll arrive first. So get ready.”

  “And do what exactly?”

  “Watch for him, put out the word.”

  “To who?”

  “To whoever you put the word out to. It’s your town, I believe.”

  “That’s it? Put out the word.”

  “Intercept him if you get the chance, sit on him till we get there. Do whatever you need to do to restrain the man.”

  “What’s the guy look like?”

  She said he was around six feet, well built, sandy hair worn scruffy and uncombed, blue eyes, face a little beat up.

  “He dangerous?”

  “He got away from the three of us,” Cruz said. “He’s Flynn Moss’s old man. You figure it out.”

  She clicked off and Webb brushed some crumbs of potting mix off the phone and slipped it into his pocket.

  He looked out at the greenhouse. Five hundred plastic pots lined up in neat rows, each thirty-pound tub of blended potting soil watered daily and left to season for half a year before it was put to use.

  That greenhouse was where Webb’s momma, Hazel, grew her hibiscus and her spider lilies, golden shrimp plants, oleanders, sunshine mimosa, lantana, orange jasmine, pentas, plumbago, and porterweed. All native blooms from her homeland in South Florida, the region where Webb’s father, the twisted bastard, bumped into Hazel.

  Hazel was the only child of two schoolteachers, a Depression-era couple, religious penny pinchers. When he met them, Webb’s daddy did some fast arithmetic and realized the size of the jackpot waiting for their only daughter when these two teachers kicked off, and he proceeded to court the hell out of Hazel, and more important, he set about winning the hearts of her parents, who by that time had begun to fear Hazel was doomed to spinsterhood, too gawky, cloddish, and unappealing to ever find a suitable husband.

  Big Webb, passing through Miami after his discharge from the army, took only a month to win the three of them over, and after the wedding he spirited her away from the jasmine breezes of the subtropics and the wild and gaudy hues of the flowers she cherished and brought her to the bleak landscape of the Dobbins hog farm in Pine Haven, North Carolina.

  Five years into their marriage Webb erected the greenhouse, calling it a Christmas gift, when in fact it was his last-ditch bribe to keep Hazel firmly trapped in the Dobbins harness after she’d suffered repeated bouts of wordless depression, despising her husband and the isolation and the drab surroundings and yearning constantly to return to the flamboyant natural world of her youth.

  All of this Webb’s mother confided to him on many long afternoons working side by side, grubbing in the rich dirt of the conservatory. The story of how Webb’s father had constructed the glass house himself, pane by pane, wooden beam by beam, on a plot of land within sight of the pig pens and the slaughter barns and smokehouse, so no matter what labor he was engaged in, he could keep an eye on h
is erratic and gloomy wife, make sure she didn’t hang herself from the rafters. At least not until her parents died and the inheritance was final.

  These days the greenhouse no longer contained his mother’s colorful medley of flowering beauties, for they’d been replaced by a monochromatic single plant. Its downward hanging trumpet-shaped blooms were the pale yellow of a sad winter day. Hailing from the Solanaceae or nightshade family, the trumpet flower was as beautiful and tropical and eerie as anything Webb’s mother had ever grown, but it was far more than a simple ornamental. This was a plant that could gratify the senses in any number of ways and greatly profit a man willing to risk the dangers of its blooms, its pollen, its seeds, its very scent, a man willing to exploit its potency.

  As he always did when working inside the greenhouse, Webb wore latex gloves and one of the army surplus gas masks he’d bought online. NATO filter and a hydration port. NBC was its nickname. Full protection against nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. Also good for smoke, paint spray, and grinding dust and the full range of airborne microorganisms. Probably a bit of overkill, but the outfit settled Webb’s nerves.

  Webb’s workers had to make do with paper surgical masks, and as a result a few of them, now and then, had tragically succumbed to an overdose of the trumpet flower’s pollen. Losing a well-trained man was always a setback, but it was the unlucky cost of doing the kind of business he was engaged in.

  The trumpet flower Webb was cultivating went by many names.

  Some South Americans knew it as the Borrachera tree, or the tree of the drunken ones. Fall asleep beneath its branches and wake up plastered. Tree Datura and burundanga were other aliases. A plant used by Mexican shamans to add color and vividness to hallucinations and utilized by criminals in Medellín to stupefy gullible foreigners, then direct them to empty their own bank accounts.

  Its blooms and seeds and even the invisible spores of its sugary scent contained the alkaloids scopolamine and atropine, powerful toxins that in low doses could cause dizziness, sweating, dry mouth. But at higher amounts the same chemicals could produce delirium, unconsciousness, and a wide range of hallucinatory experiences. Push the dose a bit higher, you were cold-cocked dead.