The Big Finish Page 8

  But the boy’s mouth was packed with something. Thorn pried his jaws open and scooped his fingers inside the kid’s mouth and flung away a gob of goo. He dug inside the mouth again, found another handful of the pinkish paste. He scraped it out as best he could and scoured his cheeks for more.

  When he had the airway as clear as he could manage, he pressed his lips to the boy’s again, tasting a sour reek, and the acrid tang of ash, but staying with it, counting in the steady fashion he’d been taught, finding the rhythm, pressing the boy’s chest, breathing into him again and again for long, hopeless minutes until someone pulled him off the boy, a man in a blue jumpsuit, a man who hauled Thorn away from the dead child and the ruined hamburger joint, dragged him into the darkness of the parking lot.

  An hour later, maybe more, when Deputy Sheriff David Randolph was finished questioning him, Madeline Cruz walked Thorn back to the motel.

  “I close my eyes for a minute and you go all heroic.”

  “Not heroic,” Thorn said. “The kid died.”

  “All the same.”

  As she unlocked the door, Thorn looked back at the smoldering remnants, crime scene tape fluttering in the wake of the departing ambulance.

  “It’s not the same,” Thorn said. “Not even close.”

  * * *

  Saturday at three in the morning, Sugarman arrived in Key Largo and drove to Tina’s house on Oceana Drive. Her neighbors on both sides were up late, having competing parties in their backyard chickee huts, reggae cranked up on one side, Sinatra crooning on the other. Pickups and motorcycles at the reggae party, bulky American cars from the seventies filled the yard of the Sinatra house. Sugarman had met both sets of neighbors, got along well enough, though Tina had been at war with the reggae guys, who rented that house and didn’t use their recycle bin and tossed empty beer cans into her yard.

  Sugarman pulled in behind Tina’s ancient gold Eldorado, its white Landau top peeling, a blanket of rust consuming the rear panel.

  He knocked on the door, rang her bell. Waited.

  “I Shot the Sheriff” coming from the east, and from the west, “It Was a Very Good Year.”

  He walked around to the back, went inside her small screened porch. The beat of the music was rattling her collection of beer steins on the glass shelves beside the makeshift bar Sugarman had cobbled together out of old shipping crates. One of the steins had shattered on the Mexican tiles.

  Sugarman shaded his eyes and pressed his face to the sliding glass door. No lights, no sign of her return. He went around to the air-conditioning unit that sat on a concrete slab and kneeled, felt under its edge, and found the house key she hid there.

  He let himself in the back door, shut it, and called out her name. Called it out again as he walked toward her bedroom. In his ten-year stint as a deputy, he’d walked into many empty houses and had acquired a feel for the unique staleness in the air that he felt at that moment. No one home, no one there in a while. But he went through the drill, going room to room.

  When he was done, he went back to the living room and used her landline to call her cell and got voicemail again, Tina’s cheery message. She was off on a romantic getaway. Whoopee.

  Yeah, whoopee. With a duffel full of cash and a couple of high-powered shotguns. Not to mention an unsuspecting boyfriend.

  Sugar left another message, told her he was back in Key Largo. Give him a call when she got this, whatever time she got in, it didn’t matter, he wanted to hear from her, he was worried, and told her that whatever she’d been up to with the guns and the cash, it was okay, nothing bad had happened, but he needed to talk to her, needed to know what Thorn was getting into. He babbled for another minute then set the phone down without a good-bye.

  TEN

  IT WAS SATURDAY MORNING, BREAKFAST time in Pine Haven. Webb Dobbins and his sister, Laurie, were at the table reserved for them seven days a week. Webb on the phone, listening to Madeline Cruz’s brusque voice, this hardass female speaking without a bit of civility like Webb was her hired hand. When she was done, she didn’t wait for Webb to respond, just ended the call with an arrogant click.

  He stared at his phone, then looked at Laurie across the table and said, “First glance, I thought she was hot, now she’s starting to piss me off.”

  “She’s taking her sweet time.”

  “Had to find a way to get this guy motivated.”

  “How many is she bringing?”

  “Four counting her,” he said.

  “Thought there’d be more.”

  “Don’t need an army to root this rascal out of his hidey-hole. Just the right worm wiggling on the hook.”

  “The father, the kid’s father.”

  “Guy’s name is Thorn. He should get the boy’s attention.”

  “My money says the kid’s dead.”

  “Naw,” Webb said. “He’s out there. The little shit.”

  “You don’t know one way or the other. Just because you couldn’t find him in the woods, that doesn’t mean diddly, Webb. It’s coming up on two weeks. Either the kid’s body is rotting out there or he got the hell gone.”

  “He wouldn’t leave one of his own on the battlefield.”

  “You sure of that, are you?”

  “These assholes are true believers, that’s how they think.”

  “How’d you get to be an expert on these people?”

  Webb looked off at the diner’s empty booths. Just Millie cleaning up.

  “Bottom line,” he said, “till we find his corpse, we assume he’s alive. A threat to all of us.”

  “When do they arrive?”

  “Just now leaving St. Augustine, driving fast, six hours, around there.”

  Webb looked out the window of the Happy Biscuit Café, Main Street, Pine Haven, North Carolina. The street was bowed slightly, so from Webb’s position he could see all the way down two blocks in each direction, the complete length of Pine Haven. The Country Hearth Bed and Breakfast anchored the north end and the Winston County Bar and Grill the south, and in between were two pool halls, a pawn and gun shop, five empty storefronts, and Tommy’s Barbecue occupying the space where the Pine Haven Hotel had been when Webb and Laurie were growing up. You wanted Twinkies, tampons, or motor oil, or any of life’s other essentials, it was forty-five minutes to the Walmart in Goldsboro, narrow country roads all the way.

  Webb waved for Millie, who was cleaning the table one booth over. He scribbled in the air and she came with the check.

  “Get this, will you,” Webb said to his sister. “Forgot my wallet.”

  Born a year apart, Webb and Laurie used to be mistaken for twins when they were kids. Both were ginger redheads, tall and wide shouldered, both with a little extra jaw and brown eyes that could turn cold and harsh as arctic tundra. Over the years as their bodies filled out, the resemblance ended. Laurie turned out thin as a cedar fence post and twice as hard. Webb kept packing on meat since graduating high school, thickening in the gut and going loose in the jowls, but he hadn’t noticed any of the ladies hereabouts minding much.

  “Another rasher of bacon, Webb?”

  “No, I’m done. Though that pig belly was mighty tasty.”

  Laurie set her purse in her lap, dug around, and came out with a ten and looked up at Millie.

  “You ever have any trouble sleeping, honey?” Laurie said.

  “Sometimes.”

  “I got something that’ll fix you right up on those long nights.”

  Millie glanced over her shoulder at the kitchen and shook her head.

  “Don’t need a thing,” Millie said. “Thanks anyway.”

  “If it’s money stopping you, we know you’re good for it,” Laurie said. “No hurry either. It’s not like you’re running off somewhere.”

  Millie stared at Laurie’s purse.

  “No,” she said. “Thanks anyway.”

  “Whatever you like,” Laurie said. “Nobody’s forcing anybody.”

  “Did I ever tell you, Millie, you make me hap
py in the pants?”

  Millie produced a halfhearted smile.

  “Just every single day since junior high.”

  “It’s still true. All those years ago, and probably be true tomorrow.”

  “You’re an amusing man, Webb.”

  “I’m guessing if you’d heard anything about the young gentleman we discussed, you would’ve spoken up.”

  “Haven’t heard a thing, no.”

  “But you’re keeping an eye out, from your excellent vantage point.”

  “You know I am, Webb.”

  “And Billy Joe and his helper back there?”

  “Everybody’s watching out.”

  “Because this is important.”

  “I know it is.”

  “Not just to me and Laurie, personally, but you understand it affects every citizen in Pine Haven. Our community well-being.”

  She drew a rag from her smock and wiped some crumbs off their table.

  “We’re looking out, Webb, best we can. We see anybody strange, hear anything suspicious, your cell phone jingles. We all understand what’s what.”

  “Because it’s my belief,” Webb said, “there’s some people in this town, they aren’t true blue, they don’t understand what the fuck is what. I even heard there’s a treasonous asshole or two might be giving aid and comfort.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “All the customers coming through the Happy Biscuit, sitting at these booths, you haven’t heard anybody talking treason?”

  She shook her head.

  Laurie said, “How’s your little one, Millie?”

  She stiffened slowly like a woman wading into cold ocean waters.

  “She’s fine, just fine.”

  “Getting ready for Christmas, I bet. All excited about Santa.”

  “She is, yes.”

  “Something on little Emma’s wish list me and Webb could help out with?”

  “That’s nice of you, Laurie. But no, I got it covered.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Laurie said. “Pass this on to that vegetable boy.” She reached into her purse.

  “Rodrigo?” Millie said.

  “If that’s his name. The dark-haired skinny one. He expressed an interest. Tell him if he’s happy how it goes, he knows where to find me. First one is free.”

  Millie palmed the packet and tucked it in her uniform pocket.

  Webb said, “So, Millie, you see anybody I should know about, give me a holler, you hear. The Doobies are always available. You know that.”

  Millie nodded again and cleared their plates.

  Although Dobbins was their given name, everyone in Pine Haven knew them as the Doobie Brothers. Two jokes rolled into one.

  The “brothers” part started in junior high when Laurie decided just being gay wasn’t sufficient. She wanted to be flagrantly, outrageously super-butch, a style she first observed one summer at Topsail Beach where the bull dykes from Camp Lejeune paraded the sands in muscle shirts, hairy legs, and bad attitudes, and those ladies made a deep impression on the budding lesbian. For years afterward her mannish style was one of many ways she tormented her parents and martyred herself.

  Although thank the sweet lord, that phase finally petered out and nowadays Laurie was all girly-girl again, smooth and feminine and lipsticked. Nevertheless that handle, “brothers,” stuck for good.

  “Doobie” was easy. As kids Laurie and Webb consumed way more than their share of weed. But the label stuck for good shortly after their senior year. As a graduation gift Webb’s dad presented little Webb with a ten-acre parcel on the west end of the nine-hundred-acre Dobbins hog farm.

  Webb Junior promptly plowed up a primo acre of his pineland and planted a hybrid ganja that was a cross between Afghan and Hindu Kush, known as Hog’s Breath, a name Webb considered so appropriate, it conferred virtual legality on his enterprise. The dense buds of Hog’s Breath were a beautiful dark green with bright orange hairs. The taste was cheddary and produced a tingly mind and body high. Damn good shit.

  During that bountiful period, while Laurie handled distribution, catering mostly to military personnel at Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg, Webb Junior tended the plants, harvesting, cleaning, and bagging, and in his spare time he experimented with the horticultural aspects, playing around with sativa and indica hybrids to come up with better yields, greater bag appeal, and some seriously higher THC counts.

  The Doobies were way ahead of their time. Now, a dozen years later, a new wave of cannabis barons were living large in high-rise office buildings in San Francisco and Denver. They underwrote state-of-the-art hydroponic farming operations and distribution networks that supplied hundreds of dispensaries with so many varieties of weed they had to keep adding pages to their Web sites to extoll all the medicinal and recreational virtues.

  But being ahead of your time in the drug game wasn’t a healthy business strategy. Two years out of high school, the Doobie Brothers were keeping their profile low, their profits high, when one spring afternoon Webb’s daddy, suffering from early stage dementia or some damn shit, came riding out to Webb Junior’s operation unannounced with two DEA agents following in their Crown Vic. The senile fucker had turned in his son for reasons Webb Senior was forever at a loss to explain. Pure malice is what Webb always believed.

  Webb was awarded an eighteen-month postgraduate scholarship at Wayne Correctional Center over in Goldsboro, a medium-security operation where he was treated to Narcotics Anonymous meetings three nights a week and a shitload of inspirational bullshit. And he met some mighty fine gentlemen in the facility, a few folks who were now his loyal customers.

  Webb took the fall for Laurie, and to show her gratitude, his sister managed in the year and a half he was locked up to piss away their entire stash of dope and cash so that when Webb returned to civilian life, he had become, like his father and grandfather before him, nothing more than a simple hog farmer. Until a year ago.

  * * *

  When he and Laurie were getting up to leave the Happy Biscuit, Webb got another ring on his cell. He listened while they were walking out the door and said, “Be right there.”

  “What is it?”

  “Burkhart needs me,” he said. “He caught another spy.”

  “Well, well,” she said. “Maybe we won’t need Cruz after all.”

  “I’ll find out shortly.”

  Webb headed west in his black F-150, passing first through the three-block section of stately Victorians where the great-grandchildren of Pine Haven’s gentry were still occupying the family homes, built when cotton and flue-cured tobacco made a few local men rich. Most of the folks in the big houses were church ladies or shut-ins or renters living four poor white families crammed together. Then came four blocks of tiny brick two-bedrooms mixed in with a scattering of double-wides, the homes of Pine Haven’s plumbers, handymen, and the folks who commuted to Fayetteville or Goldsboro or Cape Fear.

  Shortly after that Webb bumped across a gully where the old train tracks were ripped up decades ago, the asphalt ended, and the dirt road began and he passed into the shantytown where a few hundred coloreds lived in pine shacks, most of them with busted-down front porches and taped-up windows, no bushes or grass in their yards, their communal trash pit burning constantly near the road. Since before Webb was born the area was known as Belmont Heights, though the land was as low-lying and featureless as the rest of Winston County.

  As he drove Webb looked out at the brokeback houses, the ancient cars rusting in dirt driveways. At the ruined furniture in the weeds and ruptured refrigerators and stoves lying on their sides in the front yards. Disgraceful how they lived like junkyard dogs, but every time Laurie and her lady friends got it in their minds to do some community beautification and run some bulldozers through the miserable slum, all the preservationist fanatics got out their bullhorns and whipped up an army of crabbed-up arthritic ladies and put a stop to it. So nothing ever happened. The dead refrigerators continued to rust and the squalor would just
keep on being squalid for another generation.

  Up ahead he saw a man he’d been meaning to speak to sitting on an overturned washtub. Webb pulled over, honked twice, and Ladarius Washington lifted his head and flicked away his cigarette butt.

  One more honk and Ladarius stretched himself and sauntered over to the truck, leaned in the passenger window. Webb and Ladarius had once been classmates in elementary school and on through the county high school, and they’d played on teams together, riding the team bus, banging heads and blocking each other’s jump shots. They’d been friendly enough back then, but eventually the social order kicked in and now it was just a wave howdy when Webb passed by. Sometimes Ladarius nodded back.

  “Something open up at the farm?”

  “Not a thing, Ladarius. Not a damn thing. Got all my slots filled.”

  “With Mexicans.”

  “Your people work the slaughterhouse. There’s always jobs coming open there. What’s wrong, you too good for butchering hogs?”

  “Too bloody for me, too much screaming,” Ladarius said. “Rather work with the living.”

  “Well, there you go. You can’t complain about not having work if there’s work around and you don’t have the stomach for it.”

  Ladarius watched a flock of ravens pass overhead.

  When they’d disappeared, Ladarius motioned at the sky.

  “Air’s stinking again. Must be shit-spraying season.”

  “Got to put it somewhere.”

  “All the power and influence you got, Webb, you can’t get the wind to blow the other direction?”

  Webb smiled politely.

  “Just shipped out a few thousand hogs,” he said. “Another batch to the abattoir. I’m thinking I’ll spray their leftovers later on this afternoon. So, fair warning, old friend, better hold your nose for a while, you hear.”

  “What you want with me?”

  “Just say hello. Shoot the shit.”

  Ladarius was silent, waiting.

  “Oh, and I heard a rumor some white fella might be hiding out here in one of these shacks. Might be bullet wounds in him. You hear that same rumor?”