Off the Chart Page 19

  “Except tell me the truth.”

  Alexandra searched his face, tilting away from him an inch or two as if to bring him into better focus. Whatever she was looking for, she didn’t find enough of it, for her weary eyes grew dim and distant and she looked away, drew an exhausted breath, then blew it out.

  She went to the sink, busied herself with her coffee mug, rinsing it clean, then doing the same with his. Putting them upside down on the drain board.

  With her back to him, she said, “You said you were recruited. That’s what Webster was trying to do, right? That time when you left out Anne Joy’s name as you were telling me about his visit. He was trying to recruit you. Did he try again?”

  “Goddamn it.” Thorn turned and walked out to the porch and let the screen door slam. Down on the lawn, Lawton was playing fetch with the puppy. The dog sprinted after the stick and brought it partway back, then hesitated a few feet away from the old man. Sitting in the grass with the stick in his mouth, watching Lawton warily. Everything different from the night before. That was how fast it could disappear. A line crossed, a word spoken or withheld. That quick, and the puppy shied away and no matter what happened later on, in some hidden realm of his being, he would be mistrustful forever after.

  For five minutes Alexandra was inside the house, and when she came out her black duffel was slung over her shoulder.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “I need to check on my house,” she said. “Mail’s piling up. Telephone messages. Vines and weeds are probably taking over. You can’t just walk away from an old place like that.”

  “Now who’s lying, Alex?”

  “You want to talk, you know my number.”

  “Maybe I’ve lived alone too much. I don’t know how it’s done. The compromise thing.”

  “Maybe you have.”

  He didn’t try to stop her. He watched as she went out into the yard and collected her father and scooped up the Lab. Lawton glanced up at him as they were walking to the car and shook his head.

  In a voice ripe with regret, Lawton called up to Thorn.

  “We’re heading off to Ohio. Gonna dig up that damn time capsule once and for all. See ya, kid. And don’t forget Seung Sahn’s celebrated words: ‘If you don’t enter the lion’s den, you will never capture the lion.’”

  Alex took him by the shoulder and steered him ahead toward the car. The puppy barked and wriggled in her grasp, but she quieted him with a touch beneath his throat. No backward look, no hesitation, as she got into her Honda, shut the door, and started the engine and backed out of her place and headed out the drive. No sign that she was leaving for good. No sign that she was ever coming back.

  Thorn lowered himself to the bench of the picnic table and watched the birds flow from their roosts miles away out beyond the mangroves that rimmed Blackwater Sound, heading across the island to the fishing grounds on the Atlantic side.

  The throb in his ribs had eased. Nothing but a deep bruise—the spot would be tender for a week, make sneezing an unpleasant prospect, but nothing seemed to be broken. Though he couldn’t say the same for his bond with Alexandra Collins. If there’d been a way to tell her the truth without having to explain the finer points of what he’d agreed to do, he would have done it. But as soon as Alex mentioned Anne Joy’s name, it was clear that trying to describe the difference between a sham seduction and a real one might prove more destructive than remaining silent. Now he wasn’t so sure. He could have tried at least. Looked for words that told her just enough. But Alex had been on such high alert about Anne Joy, so touchy, he’d simply backed away.

  Over the years Thorn had lost so many friends and lovers and blood relations, he feared some crucial part of him had grown hard and impervious to that sort of grief. But this time, with Alexandra’s departure, it came as some bitter relief to discover that even that part of him could still ache beyond all endurance.

  And then there was Sugarman. Another ache. Different, but just as deep, just as final. And as Thorn looked out at the choppy bay, at the herons and gulls and egrets floating along the air currents with an ease that mocked all human enterprise, he wanted to believe his friendship with Sugarman had weathered worse than this, but as hard as he tried, he could remember nothing in their four decades that came even close to Janey’s abduction and Thorn’s guilty connection to the matter.

  Webster had struck a nerve.

  If Thorn had simply heard him out that day when he’d first appeared, none of this might have unfolded as it had. Something he revealed could have been the key to moving in on Salbone and thus prevented Janey’s abduction. Or maybe not. Maybe that was all a ploy of Webster’s, a recruiter’s trick—hook him with guilt. It was impossible to know how complicit Thorn actually was. But Sugarman wasn’t parsing those possibilities. All he needed to hear was that this woman who was on Thorn’s list of recent sexual partners was also in league with the people who’d taken his daughter. Blame stained them all.

  And as Thorn watched the first guide boat of the day heading out to the remote fishing grounds, he began to recall the long-ago story Anne Bonny Joy had told him about the rickety pirate schooner draped with gaudy Christmas lights. Anne and Vic’s early saturation training in pirate lore, their childhood abruptly ended by gunfire. At seventeen Vic Joy already an unrepentant murderer. And his sister, a willing accomplice. It was all of a piece. An inevitable series of spreading ripples that now washed ashore at Thorn’s feet.

  A moment later, he rose from the picnic table and went into the bedroom and pawed through his closet until he found a fresh blue shirt and a pair of clean shorts and laid them out on the bed, then he turned on the shower as hot as it would go and stripped off his rumpled clothes and threw them in the hamper. He stepped into the steaming spray and aimed the nozzle into his face and let it blast away what grime and exhaustion it could.

  With a sliver of scented soap Alex left behind, he scrubbed his skin till it smoldered, then shut off the water, stepped out, and toweled off in front of the mirror. With a new blade in his ancient Schick he shaved carefully, and afterward he smoothed his hand across his cheeks and neck, tracking down the stray bristles he missed. Then, in the back corner of his medicine cabinet, he located an unopened bottle of cologne in a sleek black bottle. A gift from some lady whose name he could no longer recall. He sprinkled some into his hands, rubbed it into his palms, and slapped his cheeks until he radiated an odor something like a flaming gardenia bush extinguished with a vat of limeade.

  He stalked back to the shower, climbed inside, and scrubbed away the stink as best he could. After he was done, he took Alexandra’s remaining shard of scented soap and set it on the edge of the sink where her toothbrush had stood only an hour earlier. From the soap rose just a hint of her aroma. It wasn’t much, but for now it would have to do.

  Seventeen

  “Daddy, Daddy.”

  Sugarman finished loading the Glock nine and laid it on the bed next to the Remington shotgun. He’d been hearing the voice off and on for twenty minutes, a faint, ghostly call that seemed to rise from the black fog swirling in his chest. When he’d first heard it, he’d raced through the house in a stumbling frenzy, searched every closet and beneath all the furniture, even torn open the refrigerator door. But it had been an illusion. Her voice disembodied, floating up from the vaporous black pit of hope and despair that roiled inside him.

  Now he was locked in a blind, methodical rage. Ignoring this phantom voice that mimicked Janey so well, determined not to be distracted again from his task. The charlatan was trying damn hard, insinuating and shrewd, but it wasn’t throwing him again. By God, he was not going to surrender to some softheaded fantasizing in which he swooped down heroically from the clouds and grabbed his little girl and sailed back up into the heavens with her joyful laugh and her cool breath bubbling against his throat. He was keeping himself hard. Staying tough and aloof. There was work to do. A plan to execute, no time to dawdle.

  A while back he’d heard tal
k that Vic Joy had built a brick house on his estate. Though Sugarman didn’t have Vic’s address, he was nearly certain he’d recognize the place from offshore. It had to be the only property anywhere in the Keys with a brick structure. If he didn’t see it on the first pass, he’d pull into one of Vic’s marinas and ask a gas pump jockey.

  When Sugarman completed his preparations, he’d ready his Boston Whaler, make sure the fishing poles were visible in the rod holders, and then cruise down to Islamorada, twenty miles south. First thing he’d do was a slow pass to evaluate security and possible cover—trees, shrubs, any vegetation along the shoreline. Then at twilight he’d work his way back up the coast, anchor the boat, and wade ashore, carrying the arsenal he was assembling on the blue quilt.

  He’d strap the dive knife to his ankle. Take the two other handguns, the Beretta and the Smith, that were on the top shelf of his closet. Extra ammo in the pockets of his black jeans, an extra clip for the nine, pistols in each pocket of his black windbreaker. He’d already cut a coil of dock line into three-foot sections, just the right length to bind up any of Vic’s security people he came across. He had a lead-weighted fish-stunning bat out with his tackle box. He’d carry that in his right hand, the nine-millimeter in his left. He’d have to rig a sling for the shotgun so he could wear it on his back.

  Daddy, Daddy?

  The voice was tired and frayed and seemed to echo across the cavernous expanse inside his gut, a void that was widening and deepening with every breath he took. But he wasn’t going to make another ridiculous tour of the house. Yield to the frantic impulse. He wasn’t going to go spinning off into the stratosphere. That wouldn’t do Janey any good. And he wasn’t going to let Jimmy Lee Webster throw him off, either. So what if there was no help from law enforcement? And so what if this time, he wouldn’t even have Thorn at his side? He’d manage alone. This was his daughter, by God. No assistance required.

  Last night on the walk home from the Holiday Inn he’d raged and muttered at Thorn for that first mile, but he couldn’t keep the flames of fury going. Now, after weighing it a few hours more, the darkest emotion Sugar could summon was a deep sadness.

  Sugar took the box of .38 shells out of the underwear drawer and dumped them in a heavy, clinking pile on the quilt.

  Thorn was just being Thorn. He couldn’t help himself. The guy was simply a product of a violent and unlucky past and the ingrown, rebellious disposition that came from living such a reclusive life.

  Sugarman wasn’t actually mad at Thorn, just deeply, terminally disappointed. And on this occasion, he’d decided to take a serious break from the guy. Maybe even use the time to rethink the whole friendship. Though Sugarman was pretty sure whatever Thorn’s part had been in bringing on this catastrophe, it was innocent, an unintended consequence of his mulish nature, the bottom line was simple. Innocent or not, Thorn had somehow managed to put Janey in danger. So screw him. Screw him, screw him, screw him.

  When Sugarman finished tucking all the pistols into his Nike duffel, he lugged the bag to the front door and set it down and went into the kitchen to throw together lunch. There was a whole day of sunlight to kill before he could mount his assault on Vic Joy’s compound. He had to keep his mind busy, his focus sharp. He knew he could use a nap—an hour or two of shut-eye would probably do wonders, though he probably couldn’t sleep and was, when he thought about it, concerned that if he did lie down and relax his vigilance, Janey’s voice would seep into him again, her fright and confusion and horror resounding in his head until all his momentum and certainty were lost.

  He tugged the cooler from the shelf above the refrigerator and broke some ice cubes free from their trays and dumped them in. He crammed plastic bottles of water into the ice. As he was zipping the cooler shut, once again Janey’s voice registered in some murky region of his head. But this time her voice was different. Not the mournful tone the phantom had used before. Now her words came as a whisper, hoarse and far away, and then there was another sound. It took him a moment to identify it. Something like the pop and sputter of static.

  Sugarman lifted his head, tensed, listened a moment more to what was clearly the fizz and crackle of electronic interference, then he whirled from the counter and sprinted to the back bedroom.

  He halted at the antique desk, dropped into the chair. Tilted up the screen of the laptop, which he’d folded down two nights before after seeing the man dressed as a pirate holding his daughter in his arms. He ran his finger across the touch pad and the dark screen fluttered and buzzed, then came to life, and Janey was there. The picture fuzzy with the white sputter of a badly strained reception. But it was her. His daughter, her face taut, blond hair messy.

  “Janey, my God. Where are you?”

  “Where were you, Daddy? I’ve been calling you all morning.”

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Well, it’s okay. I’m here now. Are you all right?”

  He bent closer to the screen, touched a finger to the black plastic frame.

  “I think the battery is running down, Daddy. There’s no electricity. Nowhere to plug it in and recharge. I don’t know how long is left.”

  “Don’t worry about the battery, sweetheart. Where are you? I’ll come get you right now. Where?”

  “He brought me in an airplane. The man we saw in the kite thing flying over Thorn’s house that day. Remember that man?”

  “Yes, I know,” Sugarman said. “Vic Joy.”

  “It’s raining here, Daddy.”

  “Are you all right, Janey? Are you hurt? Did he do anything to you?”

  “I’m all right. They didn’t do anything to me.”

  She turned her head and looked to the right. All he could see of the background was dark planks. Some kind of cabin or hut or paneled room.

  “There’s a bathroom, but it’s dirty. And there’s no toilet paper. And the water smells funny. I drank some of it, but then I realized it stunk and I spit it out and didn’t drink any more.”

  “That’s good, Janey. Now where are you? Do you have any idea?”

  “There’s noises outside. Birds I’ve never heard, and shrieks and other noises, too. I’m really tired. But I’m afraid to close my eyes.”

  Sugarman rubbed his hands together, his thoughts scattered wildly, something flapping in his chest like a caged raptor.

  “How long were you in the airplane, Janey?”

  “What? I can’t hear you, Daddy.”

  The picture was breaking up, freezing, then moving ahead in choppy spurts. Her voice a half-second out of sync with her lips.

  Sugarman repeated his question and Janey said, “I don’t know. All night, I guess.”

  “All night!”

  “I fell asleep,” she said. “When I woke up we were landing. We landed on the water, Daddy. I thought we were crashing.”

  “On the water. Okay.”

  “There were two men. Mr. Joy, and the other one was big, with hairy arms. Both of them used the f word a lot.”

  “And what did you see when you landed, Janey? Was it light?”

  “The sun was just coming up. But I had my eyes closed. I was scared we were going to crash. I didn’t know the plane could land on water. It was bumpy, that’s all.”

  “Listen, Janey. We’re both going to have to be calm. We’re going to figure this out together. Okay?”

  “I’m tired,” she said. “I want to go to sleep, but I’m afraid.”

  “Is the man who took you there still close by, Janey?”

  “He left. They put gas in the airplane and left.”

  “You’re alone? There’s no one there?”

  “They nailed boards over my windows so I can’t get out. But I can see pretty good. It’s a jungle, I think. I can see palm trees and vines and mangroves, I think. They let me keep my binoculars.”

  “Do you have food, water?”

  “Subs,” she said. “Turkey and cheese with cucumbers and lettuce and mayonnaise.”

  “Freshwater?”

  “They
left a cooler. Some ice, but it’s mostly melted. Cokes and the sandwiches. Five sandwiches, all just alike. The foot-long ones.”

  “There’s no one else around? No one who could help you?”

  “After the airplane left, I yelled till my throat hurt. Nobody came.”

  Sugar rocked back in his chair and rubbed his hand across his mouth to smooth the crazy pain from his face.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, listen, Janey.”

  But he had no idea what to ask or say. His chest felt like it was about to crack open, the giant hawk clawing its way out.

  “I saw a kingfisher, Daddy. But it was different from any I’ve seen.”

  Sugarman looked at her face on the screen. Tired but smiling with the memory of the bird sighting.

  “Are you wearing your watch, Janey?”

  She’d moved away from the screen and he saw only her ghostly outline, what appeared to be her back.

  And then her face was there and the binoculars were in her hands.

  “There’s a sign, Daddy.”

  “A sign?”

  “On a post by the gravel road.”

  “Great, great. What does it say?”

  “I don’t know. It’s behind a palm frond. Maybe if the wind blows I’ll be able to see it. I think there’s a G, but I don’t know for sure.”

  “Okay, that’s all right, no problem.” Sugarman’s pulse was reeling. “Look, Janey, are you wearing your wristwatch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it working?”

  “I think so.”

  “My watch says eleven forty-five. What does yours say?”

  He could see her peering at her wrist.

  “There’s something screeching out there, Daddy. It’s running around right outside the window.”

  She got up and turned her back on the camera. She was gone for a long moment, then her face was close again. “Wow, I couldn’t see what was making the noise, but I saw a big blue butterfly right outside the window. It’s shiny like tinfoil.”

  “Iridescent,” he said.