Blackwater Sound (10 page)

A dark buzz began to burn in the back of her head. Alexandra stepped forward, following the divers into the water, rolling videotape, the bay water warm against her flesh, rising to her knees, then her crotch, Dan Romano calling to her from dry land, telling her
there was no need for that, no need to get wet, telling her to stay on the beach, let the divers bring the body in, but she followed them out, focusing on their backs, inching deeper across the smooth, silty bottom, until the water was at her navel, and Alex followed the divers, until they reached out for the body, and she stepped around him so she could witness it all, so she could tape this victim, seeing through her lens the man with white hair, long and wispy, that floated around his head like the delicate roots of some rare flower, and the diver said something to Alexandra, asked her a question, but she didn't register his words, taping as she was, focused with all her being on the lens, on what she was seeing through the glass eyepiece, and then Dan Romano called from shore again, yelling for her to get the hell back in there, what did she think she was doing out in the middle of the goddamn ocean, that equipment was expensive for Godsakes, but Alex didn't flinch, kept her finger tight against the switch, taping this floating man, this man with white hair whom the diver was turning in his arms, turning and lifting, cradling up from the water, holding him like a sleeping child, the man's right cheek resting against the diver's chest, and Alexandra moved the camera to the man's face, the man's familiar face, that face that was not her father's, not Lawton Collins.

“You okay?” the diver asked her.

Alexandra lowered the camera and stared at the dead man's features.

“No,” she said. “Not okay.”

“What is it? You know this guy?”

“I know him, yes.”

The diver trudged through the water back to shore with Arnold Peretti's head bumping against his chest and the old man's sightless eyes gazing up at the flawless span of blue.

Thorn was outside in the dark tying flies. A dim, moonless night. He'd never done this in the pitch-black before, working blind with tweezers, glue, silver beads from a key chain, mounting those shiny eyeballs on one of the triangular epoxy bases he'd created last winter. Dark Avenger. That's what he'd call this one. Maybe wrap it in black Mylar thread, use the dark boar bristles for its body, those short, brittle hairs one of his clients plucked from a wild hog he'd gunned down on some fenced-in hunting ranch.

Dark Avenger. Yeah, it had the right quixotic tone for the half dozen bonefish guides who were his biggest customers. A bunch of romantics. Priests of the flats with hair-trigger muscles and supernatural vision. On misty days or in the full blast of sun, those guys could detect the gray shadow of a bonefish ghosting the shallows from fifty yards away, or the imperceptible riffle on the surface of the water
that marked the bone's wary passing. They prayed to that silver god, worshiped at the altar of tail and dorsal fin. They devoted their lives to stalking a fish so elusive that weeks could pass without sighting even one of its kind.

Thorn squeezed out a micro-dot of glue and tweezered the silver eye into place. In the dark like this, he was probably bungling the job, creating some kind of misshapen monster, something that would spook the bonefish back into hiding for months. But he didn't care. At the moment he needed to keep his hands busy, needed to keep his focus short. Doing this purely by touch on that gloomy night, nothing to break his concentration but the occasional boat passing on Blackwater Sound, and the light breeze moaning in the wispy Australian pine.

Deep in his inner ear there was a sharp pinging, probably from the bottle of cheap Chardonnay he'd guzzled at sunset, the last shrill cries of dying brain cells. He was feeling sorry for himself, and for the dozens of people who'd died in the airplane crash, and for the Florida Bay and for every other damn thing that crossed his mind.

Thirty yards to the east, Sugarman's car crunched down his gravel drive. Thorn recognized the chuff and sputter of the old Ford V-8. Sugar killed his lights and got out and came up the stairs. Thorn didn't look up. He glued the other eye into place. Maybe what this fly needed was three eyes, or four, maybe a dozen. Dark Avenger, all-seeing, all-knowing. A sinker that would drop down through the clear water into the silt and mud and turtle grass and stare straight into the gray eyes of those ravenous bonefish.

Sugar climbed the steps and took a seat across from Thorn. On the table between them he set a glass pitcher that rattled with ice.

“Green tea,” Sugar said. “Thought you might need a pick-me-up.”

“I'm fine,” he said. “Never better.”

“Oh, yeah, Thorn. You've got such a happy glow.”

Sugar lifted the pitcher and filled Thorn's empty wineglass. Ice sparkled in the faint moonlight. Thorn caught a whiff of the tea. He
stared at the glass, then set down the glue, lifted the drink, saluted Sugar's health and took a sip.

“Casey not here?”

“She left.”

“Left?”

“Came by this afternoon. Packed her stuff and split.”

“For good?”

“Looks that way.”

“You try to stop her?”

“I asked her not to go.”

“That's all?”

“Did I block the door, try to use force? No.”

“You tell her you love her?”

Thorn glanced across at his friend.

“I would've told her if it was true.”

Thorn lifted his eyes and watched the channel marker in Blackwater Sound blink like the secret pulse of the world. Slow and steady, unfazed by the disastrous affairs of humankind. He tried to time his heartbeat to it, but it was no use. He was hopelessly out of synch.

“She take the pink buffalo?”

Sugarman was peering out into the dark.

“No,” he said. “She wanted me to have a memento of our good times.”

“I don't know why, but I like those stupid things. I'm thinking of getting one for my lawn. Maybe a whole herd. To perk up the neighborhood.”

A thin scum of clouds dulled the moon and blotted out the stars. Night birds cut swaths through the haze of insects that floated in humming clouds out in the darkness.

Thorn had another sip and Sugarman topped up the glass.

“You feel bereft?” Sugarman said.

“Bereft?”

“You know, bereaved, dispossessed.”

“I feel sad,” Thorn said. “Not as bad as bereft.”

“Bereft is about as bad as it gets.”

“Casey said I liked her because she was shallow. I wanted someone simple and uncomplicated.”

“An insightful observation.”

“No, it's not. I liked her.”

“You liked her because she was easy. Because she didn't have a lot of baggage, or seething conflicts. There's nothing wrong with that. You deserve to coast a little, all the shit you've been through.”

“I was coasting? That's what Casey was about?”

“You want a bunch of lies, you should get a new friend.”

Thorn turned his head, squinted through the dark at Sugarman.

“You've been reading those self-help books again, haven't you?”

“Go on, make a joke. But it's true, Thorn. You need people to smack you in the head sometimes. Tell you the truth. How else you going to figure things out?”

There was a boat out on the sound. A big one, going full-bore along the dark channel toward the mouth of Dusenberry Creek, that narrow passage through the mangroves over to Tarpon Basin. The vessel was a fifty-footer, maybe sixty. A rarity that time of night. Usually the traffic died out after sunset, just a shrimper or two or some midnight yellowtailers heading out to the reef.

“What you need, Thorn, is a woman who likes to dance on tables. Somebody in full celebratory mode.
Foie de vivre
.”

“A wild woman.”

“Wild, yeah. Fun. Able to let go. Somebody that makes you laugh.”

“Thanks, Sugar. I'll keep my eyes open.”

“You'll find somebody,” Sugar said. “You always do. But this time, you should hold out a little longer, be picky. You deserve the real thing, Thorn.”

“I've had the real thing. I've had it a few times.”

“And it hurt so bad when they left, you chose Casey this time. Someone that wouldn't hurt.”

“Okay, okay. Enough.”

Without slowing down, the boat took a hard left out of the channel and headed toward shore. Thorn peered out through the dark. None of his neighbors had boats that big. No one he knew.

“Did you throw your pistol away like you were planning?”

“Yeah,” Thorn said. “Just before the plane came down.”

“You stay close to home today?”

Sugar topped up his glass again.

“You mean did I go poking around anymore in the Braswells' business? No. I'm finished with that. I don't give a shit who they are, what they're up to. I did my good deed for the month. I'm back in retirement.”

“Good,” Sugar said. “Very mature. Very level-headed.”

The yacht was less than half a mile from shore, its running lights on, all its deck lights, too, a big, sleek, white boat, Hatteras, Bertram, one of those. It was just after high tide, so there was four feet of water about twenty yards from shore. Then it got shallow very fast, except for the one channel that ran due west from his dock. That boat was on a heading that took it just south of Thorn's house.

“What's that dumbshit doing?” Sugar stared out at the dark water.

“Just some drunk.”

“Yeah,” Sugar said. “One of our own.”

“Well, here's to the brotherhood of drunks,” Thorn said and raised his glass. “Another of our clan, lost at sea.”

The yacht had slowed to an idle a few hundred yards south of Thorn's. He heard voices calling back and forth from the boat to someone on the land. Sounded like the boater was lost, asking one of Thorn's neighbors for directions.

“Okay, so yeah, I've been reading all these books,” Sugar said, “trying to figure out what I did wrong with Jeannie. Maybe there's some way I can patch things up, get the girls back. But every time I finish one, I think I've got the answer. I loved too much. I was overly enmeshed. Then I read another one, and I think, no, I was too distracted, too caught up in my own world and didn't see how depressed
Jeannie was. I'm reading a new book every week and every week I discover I got a different neurosis.”

“Maybe some people are just meant to live alone.”

Thorn was watching the yacht head out to deeper water, then make a sweeping turn to the north. By the time it got out to the channel it was doing at least thirty knots, throwing a giant bow wake.

“Isolation isn't healthy, Thorn. You gotta be around people, socialize a little, or you'll turn into an ape man. You know, reverse the evolutionary process, slide back down the greased pole of civilization. Before you know it, you aren't bathing anymore, forgotten your table manners, stopped brushing your teeth, shaving your beard. Next thing happens, you've lost your motor skills. You're nothing, just some blob, sitting there, half-alive.”

“Doesn't sound so bad.”

The big boat's spotlight swept back and forth across the shoreline. Now the yacht was on a heading for the dock where the
Heart Pounder
was tied up. The spotlight stopped moving and held tight on the old Chris-Craft.

Slowly Thorn stood up, watching the yacht coming fast across the basin, along the channel that led to Thorn's deck.

“You expecting somebody?”

Sugarman rose beside him. The boat was plowing ahead, thirty yards from the dock, going way too fast to stop in time. The
Heart Pounder
and his skiff were already beginning to shift against the pilings like horses sensing some approaching calamity.

“Jesus, look at that asshole!”

Thorn hustled down the stairs and sprinted across the yard with Sugarman close behind. Thorn yelled into the darkness, waved his arms above his head.

The dark water curled away from the bow of the big yacht as it headed directly toward the dock with the throttles firewalled. Up in the flybridge the captain was hidden behind the glare of the spotlight.

The cylinder of light found Thorn, and froze for a second on his
outraged face, then blinked off. A second later the captain yanked the throttles back to idle, slammed the gears into reverse and ran the throttles back up to full. The big engines slowly spooled upward as the wake caught up with the transom and started to shove the boat forward as if it were surfing on the crest of a tidal wave. Finally the turbos started to whine with boost and the props grabbed, and in a wild overstraining of gears and pistons, the huge boat, somewhere near a hundred thousand pounds of ungodly momentum, shuddered and shook and was suddenly quiet, only the faint hollow bubble of diesel exhaust announcing its arrival.

Thorn rubbed at his blinded eyes. By the time he could see again, the rest of the boat's wake was rolling ashore, coming several feet up his sloping yard. Not even four solid hours of Hurricane Mitch had moved that much water that far inland. The boat itself had run aground, its big bow lodged in the sandy muck two scant yards to the north of his dock. By some miracle of physics he didn't comprehend, his dock was still intact and both his skiff and the
Heart Pounder
were bobbing peacefully, still lashed to their cleats.

“Now there's one hell of an impressive entrance,” Sugarman said.

“Oh, man,” Thorn said. “I knew it was a mistake.”

“What was a mistake?”

“Throwing away that damn .357.”

Thorn stepped beyond the harsh glare of the spotlight and watched as a man climbed down the port ladder and stepped carefully off onto the dock. Sugar and Thorn waited in the grass at the end of the dock, watching the man come toward them. He tottered with an uncertain limp or drunken wobble.

“You armed?”

Sugar said no, he wasn't.

The man stepped off the end of the dock into the damp grass. He halted a couple of yards away. He was white-haired, wearing Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. His hands were empty. And from what Thorn could make out, he had spindly legs and a pronounced potbelly.

“You better have a pretty damn good story,” Thorn said.

“Are you Dr. William Truman?”

“What?”

The old man stepped closer, peering into Thorn's face.

“You Dr. Truman?”

“No, I'm not,” Thorn said. “Dr. Bill Truman was the man who raised me. He died twenty years ago. My name is Thorn.”

“But this is his place?”

“It used to be. It's mine now.”

“Well, good, I'm in the right spot then. I've had one hell of a time finding you, Dr. Truman.”

“My name is Thorn. The man you're looking for died a long time ago.”

“Well, look here, buddy, like it or not, you're next on the list. I came down here to warn you to take cover.”

“Take cover?” Thorn said. “From what?”

“And I wanted to hear what you know about this ray gun thing.”

“Ray gun?” Sugar gave Thorn a quick eye-roll.

“Yeah, yeah. Some kind of secret ray gun. I had the damn thing right in my lap and I fiddled with it and it blew out the television at Neon Leon's. And that's why Arnold Peretti was killed. The blond kid cut his hand and then Arnold got knocked overboard. I went back for him but he was gone.”

“You've made a mistake, sir. I'm not Dr. Bill.”

“I wasn't sure where I was,” the old man said. “It got dark and I thought I was lost, then I found Jewfish Creek, Gilbert's Marina. It's been a long time since I was down here in the Keys. But when I saw the Jewfish Bridge I knew it was just a little way longer. Thank the good lord, I've still got a pretty good memory some of the time. That's how it goes. I recall some of it real well and the rest of it kind of evaporates when I go looking for it. That ever happen to you? If it hasn't yet, it will soon, I can promise you that.”