Blackwater Sound Read online

  “Blam, blam,” Johnny said and threw another knife, which ricocheted off the wall and clattered onto the dresser.

  “But the guy didn’t grab for the pistol like I thought. He didn’t struggle or anything. He could’ve done it. He could’ve defended himself. He was a strong-looking guy. I expected him to. I pointed it at his face. And he looked right into the barrel and didn’t say anything for a few seconds.”

  “He was shitting his pants.”

  “He was calm,” she said. “He was calm as hell.”

  “If it had been me, I would’ve stuck you with a blade. I would’ve whipped out the AR 5 and, splat, sliced your hand off.”

  “I didn’t shoot and at that point, I didn’t even know if I was going to shoot. The noise from the first two was so loud. I was thinking no, the whole thing was over. I was going to hand him the gun, turn myself in, it’s all over.”

  Johnny was staring at her, head tilted like a dog hearing a high whistle.

  “He looked at me and he said, ‘I had a bad feeling about this whole deal. It’s why I wore my good underwear today.’ ”

  “His good underwear? He said that?”

  She sat back in the chair, had another sip of the Cabernet.

  “Joking with me. Gallows humor. Trying to win me over, I guess. I shot him in the chest. Three times. Then twice in the forehead. I came around and opened the door and I dragged them down this alley and I left them there side by side. I don’t know if anybody saw me.”

  “Mercedes must be torn to shit. Blood all over it. That was supposed to be my car some day.”

  “Now we’re going marlin fishing,” she said. “Now we’re going down to Abaco and get some sun and try to catch the fish that killed my brother. Like nothing ever happened. Just on to the next thing.”

  “ ‘You’ve got an honest woman’s conscience in a murderer’s body.’ ” Johnny smiled at her. “That’s from Fear in the Night, De Forrest Kelley said it.”

  He flicked another knife at the wall.

  “You want to hear about Arnold? How I cut off his finger? I said I wanted some live bait. I was pretty funny. I didn’t plan it out either. But it all went okay. Except having to swim back to shore. That sucked. But the rest of it was okay.”

  She looked over at him. “But you didn’t get the HERF. And you didn’t get down to Key Largo, to do your other job.”

  “No, but the rest of it went okay.”

  “The rest of it? You were supposed to get the HERF, Johnny.”

  “Yeah, well. I asked him about it. But things got crazy.” Johnny took a grip on another knife. “But there’s one thing I’m not sure about. I mean, Arnold is dead, and I was there when it happened, but I didn’t actually rub him out. You know, I didn’t actually do the deed. So does that count? What do you think, Morgan? I need a ruling. Am I a made guy now?”

  She looked at him for a moment and closed her eyes.

  “We’re fucked,” she said. “We need that HERF or it’s all over.”

  “I thought that was your boyfriend’s job,” Johnny said. “Mr. What’s-his-fuck.”

  “Yeah, my boyfriend,” Morgan said. “Our last, best hope.”

  Eleven

  They sat out on the porch till well after midnight. Lawton Collins’s gash was now sterilized with Mercurochrome and bandaged with gauze and adhesive. The old man steadfastly refused to go to the hospital, even threatened to jump back aboard his boat and head out to sea if the two of them tried to dragoon him off to some emergency room. No, sir, the people trying to murder him would sure as hell make quick work of it if he showed up at some goddamn emergency room.

  The blade had gone deep into the fleshy saddlebag at his waist but the wound looked relatively benign. While Lawton was in the John, Thorn and Sugar had a quick whispered exchange.

  “Let’s wait till tomorrow,” Thorn said. “See how he is.”

  “We need to call the police right now, Thorn. The guy’s dotty.”

  “He’s also scared silly,” Thorn said. “We can’t just turn him over to the cops. That’s cruel. The old guy would freak.”

  “It’s the right thing, Thorn.”

  The toilet flushed and Lawton came whistling through the living room.

  “No,” Thorn said. “In the morning he’ll be calm. We’ll deal with it then. Police, hospital, next of kin, whatever seems right. But not now, the state he’s in.”

  Lawton stepped out through the screen door.

  “You boys got any rope around here?”

  “Rope? What do you want with rope?”

  Lawton sat down at the picnic table.

  “I’ll show you a couple of tricks. Knot me up tight as you can, I’ll be free two seconds later. I’ve been studying the legendary Houdini’s methods of escape. There wasn’t a lock that man couldn’t pick, a set of manacles that would hold him. Either of you have any handcuffs?”

  “No handcuffs,” Thorn said. “How about you, Sugar?”

  Sugarman said no, his handcuff days were long gone.

  “Sugar used to be a cop.”

  “Yeah? Do you still have full arrest powers?”

  “Not really,” said Sugar.

  “Not even cardiac arrest?”

  Thorn smiled uneasily. A little worried he was starting to enjoy Lawton’s careening logic. Like maybe he was on his way to joining the old guy in the paradise of lost thoughts.

  “Okay, then, this’ll have to do.”

  Lawton reached into the pocket of his shorts and drew out a length of heavy twine. He made a quick loop around one wrist, knotted it, then took a couple of turns around the other wrist and stuck his hands out in front of Thorn.

  “Best knot you got. And tie it tight. Don’t go easy on me.”

  Thorn looked at Sugarman. Sugar shrugged. Go ahead, humor the guy.

  Thorn reached out and tied a half hitch around the old man’s right wrist.

  “Tighter,” Lawton said.

  Thorn tugged the knot snug. Nothing to cut off Lawton’s circulation, but a serious test.

  “One trick, then I got to leave.” Lawton drew back his hands and slid them under the table. He peered at Thorn with a mischievous glitter in his eyes.

  “Leave for where?”

  “I told you,” Lawton said. “Marsh Harbor on Great Abaco. Go talk to this Braswell fellow. He’s down there chasing a blue marlin fish. It’s got a little silver transmitter attached to it. Like a cigar with an antenna on one end. When the marlin surfaces, this thing sends messages to the satellites and those people follow the fish. Arnold told me all about it. That’s why I’m going down there to the Bahamas to talk to him. He’s our only lead.”

  Lawton brought his hands out from beneath the table. He held up the rope by one end.

  “Far out,” Sugarman said. He smiled at Thorn. “The guy’s good.”

  Lawton dropped the rope on the table and took a nip of his tea.

  Thorn turned his face again to the dark water. Something had splashed near shore like a handful of gravel peppering the still surface, probably a school of pinfish, chased by something dark and fast, a barracuda, a jack. He listened to the feathery scrape of the tamarind branches against his roof, to the mutter of traffic making its ceaseless rounds up and down the Overseas Highway. He smelled the ocean breeze coming from the east and the deeper, richer fragrance rising off the bay, the reek of barnacles exposed by the low tide, the sewery scent given off by that mat of seaweed that was trapped in his neighbor’s lagoon, rotting all day and night. He looked across at the old man who was now regaling Sugarman with another story, some yarn from his cop days, about a bank robber he’d put away by the name of Frank Sinatra.

  Thorn half listened to the story, but his mind was drifting. It’d been a long while since he’d thought about Dr. Bill Truman and his wife, Kate. The good-hearted couple who’d raised him as their own flesh and blood. While Lawton talked, Thorn summoned what he could of Dr. Bill. A square-jawed man with pale blue eyes, a Clark Gable-mustache that came an
d went according to whims that Thorn never fully understood. Dr. Bill was not quite average height, gaunt and hard-muscled, with a Puritan’s discipline and a heart surgeon’s rules of order. A place for everything and everything in its place. Keep your tools oiled, your rod and reel thoroughly rinsed with fresh water, your hooks and knife blades filed sharp. Hands always busy, brain working overtime, Dr. Bill never rested, never simply sat and gazed off at the distance.

  Though he was stern to a fault and no great talker and certainly not a hell-raiser of any kind, Dr. Bill had more loyal friends than anyone Thorn had ever known. Up and down the Keys, up and down the social register. When they held his funeral on the high school football field, more people attended than were in the stands when Thorn’s team played for the district championship.

  All in all, Thorn had enjoyed a damn lucky childhood. Schooled by a man who was thoroughly versed in fish and boats and weather and stars and every crucial thing about the outdoor life. A man who traveled the world every year to cast his lures into exotic waters, who took along his moody daughter and his shy adopted son and his wife, Kate, who was every bit his equal with rod and tackle. Those summer trips had given Thorn his best education, his only claim on a worldly view, having spent a month here and there around the world, on boats and in rough-and-tumble fishing camps. Sleeping in a nylon bag beside Dr. Bill and Kate, watching them stoke fires and broil fish from the waters of Mexico and South America and Alaska and the Caribbean, listening to them talk, watching the powerful shape and heft of their love.

  Sugarman was laughing now at the punch line of the Frank Sinatra escapade.

  “That was his real name?”

  “Sure was. Not the singer. Just some punk who liked to give out his phone number to the pretty clerks he was robbing. Like he thought they’d call him later, go out on a date, spend some of the bank’s money. Sure made my job easier, having the guy’s phone number.”

  Sugarman laughed again and turned to Thorn.

  “Well, buddy, sorry to say, but I got an early day tomorrow. You going to be okay, or you want me to stay around, help you handle this?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Thorn said. “Thanks for dropping over.”

  Sugar rose and picked up his glass pitcher, empty now.

  “I should be going, too,” Lawton said. “Got a long trip ahead.”

  “You’re not going anywhere, Lawton. You need your rest. You lost some blood today. In the morning we’ll talk it over, see where we go from here.”

  “Hey, this is my job. I just came to warn you, is all, and see if you knew anything relevant to the case. I’m not asking for any help.”

  “But you wouldn’t mind if I came along, right? Just to observe a seasoned investigator at work?”

  Lawton squinted at him for a long moment. “Okay,” he said finally. “But one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Things start to heat up, get a little dangerous, you gotta take cover, let the professional handle it.”

  “It’s a deal,” Thorn said.

  Sugarman stood there a moment more, smiling at Thorn, shaking his head and smiling.

  After Thorn checked the old man’s dressing and found the bleeding had stopped and the bandage was holding fine, he got him settled in bed. He left Lawton drowsing beneath the sheets and went back out into the yard and climbed into the hammock and for a while he stared up at the cold pinpricks of light in the endless sky.

  For half an hour he battled a mosquito nagging in his ear until finally he crushed the little bastard against his cheek. Then a heavy sleep drew him down into a warm stream of images, and he was assaulted by more dreams than he’d had in years. In one he stood beside Kate and Dr. Bill, knee-deep in a frigid mountain stream, laying a dry fly near a boulder, feeling the first shy tug on the line, then the smack of a hungry salmon. A host of other dreams came and went, flickering images of those two tough, generous people who’d raised him as their own son.

  For much of the night he fished again in streams he’d long forgotten, witnessed the marvelous doings of the dead, all the while feeling the smoldering ache of their absence. Then Casey, and Monica Sampson and Darcy Richards and Sarah Ryan appeared, the four women who’d given his life what warmth he’d known in these last dozen years. They stood shoulder to shoulder and spoke to him in a chorus, but he couldn’t decipher a thing they said. Then each one took her turn, trying to explain to Thorn about the careless shape his life had taken. The vast wisdom of women, there for the harvesting. But he simply smiled idiotically at their stream of speech, nodding and nodding, hearing only garble.

  Then he was swimming in a clear blue sea beside an old man with a snorkel and mask, a spindly codger with spear in hand, who was stabbing at a school of sharks that was closing in on the man and Thorn, their rows of white dagger teeth slashing and snapping, taking big ripping gulps of water, while with supernatural grace the old man fended them off, thrusts and parries of his spear, shielding Thorn with his body. And there were more dreams, underwater and in dazzling sunlight, and one particularly vivid scene in which Thorn rode across Blackwater Sound in the rumbling cockpit of a big cabin cruiser.

  All through that dark and breezy night, held aloft by the woven strands of rope, Thorn floated above the earth, dreamed of people and places so excruciatingly dear to him that he’d found no other way to deal with their absence than to force them to the subterranean depths where they cruised endlessly just beneath the hard crust of his ordinary life. And now suddenly they were back. All of them, a lava flow of images, these people he had once loved, one by one parading past in all their aching reality.

  He woke with a jerk in full sunlight and peered up into the brightness at a man in a glossy black helmet and goggles and a black flak jacket who was aiming a pistol at his forehead.

  On the other side of the hammock another man dressed in the same costume pressed a shotgun tight against his shoulder. Thorn closed his eyes and willed the hallucination away, but when he opened them again the men were still there, the pistol barrel hovering only inches from Thorn’s nose.

  “Ah, yes,” Thorn said. “Room service.”

  “Take it easy, buddy. No sudden moves.”

  “I’ll have two over easy with a side of bacon,” said Thorn. “Crispier the better. Big mug of coffee.”

  “Sit up, do it slow, and keep your hands in view.” It was the man with the Glock automatic. Thorn could see his coarse black beard showing around his chin strap, his Adam’s apple jumping to a fast tune. From high in the gumbo-limbo a cardinal chirped, and a mile away out on the sound a fast boat cruised past. The world proceeding with surreal normalcy.

  “Where is he?” a woman asked from the rear of the group. “What have you done with him?”

  Thorn sat up as slowly as his muscles would allow. The men in flak jackets tightened their stances, a half dozen gun sights trained on his vital organs. Thorn showed them his hands. He tried a smile but no one was impressed.

  “Where is who?”

  Then Thorn heard Sugarman’s car rolling down the drive. Two of the SWAT guys peeled off from the rear of the group and jogged over to deal with the interloper.

  “Scratch the coffee,” Thorn said. “Don’t think I’m going to require any caffeine today. Nothing like a few guns in your face to get the blood buzzing.”

  It was hard to read their expressions behind the goggles, but he was fairly sure he hadn’t won them over yet. A hard crowd.

  “Feet on the ground, then lower yourself, face in the grass.”

  “Maybe I should see some ID first,” Thorn said. “Or did they cancel the Constitution while I was asleep?”

  “We’re looking for Lawton Collins,” the woman said. “We received information that he was here.” She appeared to be the only one not armed.

  “What’d he do, rob Fort Knox?”

  “Where is he?” The woman wasn’t wearing flak gear. Her black hair hung free. She wore a loose-fitting gray shirt tucked into blue jeans. She was ta
ll and rangy, with the sinewy arms Thorn associated with long-distance runners and hardcore vegetarians. Her eyes were an intense blue, indigo perhaps. All at once he saw the resemblance around the slant of her cheekbones and in her wide, thin-lipped mouth.

  “You’re Lawton’s daughter. Alexandra.”

  She flinched, but made a quick recovery.

  “Where is he? What have you done with him?”

  “About midnight I put him to bed up there.” He pointed toward the house.

  She stung him with a final look, then swung around and led two of the goggle-eyed warlocks up the flight of stairs to the porch. But Thorn already knew they’d be back in a few seconds, this time with tougher, nastier questions. He was staring out at his dock. The Heart Pounder rested calmly beside his skiff, but the big white yacht had vanished.

  Twelve

  The last of the SWAT guys climbed into the white van and the van pulled out of Thorn’s drive. Alexandra Collins and a white-haired police lieutenant named Romano and another man who looked like a professional golfer were inside Thorn’s house. They were talking quietly. They’d been in there for ten minutes now. The most company he’d had in years.

  Sugarman was staring up at the tree limbs. Thorn sat across from him at the picnic table. Sugar had been quiet, poker-faced, since they’d finished interrogating him and let him come back outside. Humiliated, pissed off, Thorn couldn’t tell.

  “Sugar, why the hell didn’t you let me know what was going on?”

  Sugarman kept his eyes on the tree limbs.

  “If you had a goddamn telephone, Thorn.”

  “You’re five minutes away, you could’ve driven over.”

  “Look, they were showing the old guy’s photo on the morning news, I called in, told them what I knew, then I took a quick shower, gulped a bowl of Wheaties, got in the car, drove over, and bang, they were already here. I sure as hell didn’t think they’d show up so fast. Or in such force.”