Blackwater Sound (18 page)

“I'm looking for Jelly,” Thorn said.

A flash of dark light passed through the man's gaze.

“No jelly around here, all we got is jam.”

The old woman chuckled quietly and stared down at her cane. It must've been an old refrain.

“He doesn't live here anymore?”

“Not here, not anywhere,” the young man said.

“He died?”

The young man pushed open the door and stepped outside. In the neighbor's yard the game of tag ceased abruptly, and the kids turned to feast their gazes on the young man's brawny body. They probably saw him every day of their lives, but he had the kind of body you could never quite absorb, brutish and graceful. A physique that probably filled them with never-ending awe. That one of their own could build himself to such stature and proportion must have seemed nearly miraculous. To Thorn such bodies always struck him as a little sad and pointless, like stuffing a six-hundred-horsepower engine under the hood of a family car.

The boy got a little closer to Thorn than he needed to.

“I'm sorry,” Thorn said. “I didn't know he'd died.”

“He didn't,” the young man said. “He's just waiting. We're all waiting.”

“What you want with Jelly?” the woman asked.

“He used to take me and my mother and dad fishing. He was the best.”

“He used to take a lot of rich white men fishing,” the old woman said. “That don't make you special.”

Thorn looked back and forth between the two of them.

“Is he here?”

The woman chuckled, gave him a scoffing look.

“Now there's a good question. Is he here, Farley? Is your daddy here?”

The young man did an about-face and marched back inside the house.

“Go on, take a look,” the old woman said. “But he ain't going to do you no good. Jelly ain't caught no fishes lately.”

Thorn went into the house. In the living room the big-screen TV was tuned to the weather channel. The tattered couch had once been a green-and-red plaid, the chairs covered in moth-eaten purple satin. Two white kittens were battling around the metal legs of a kitchen stool and the rest of the litter had taken up residence in a straw basket on the kitchen floor.

Thorn walked down the narrow hallway and stopped at the door of the first bedroom. Jelly Boissont was slumped in an ancient wheelchair that was positioned beside an open window that gave him a view of the neighbor's backyard, that is, if he could pull his chin off his chest and see. His hair was uncombed and looked like it had gone uncut for months, a wispy tangle of white. Clumps of wiry white hair curled from his chin and cheeks. He seemed to be dozing. A shiny ribbon of spittle coiled from his lips and hung like a silver thread from his chin.

Pressed against one wall was a tiny single bed. Against the other stood a wooden chair and a chest of drawers. The room smelled of urine and the sour reek of mildew and decaying flesh. An unemptied bedpan sat atop the dresser. The only sign of life in the room was the photographs that crammed the gray walls.

Thorn made a quick tour of the gallery. Hundreds of blue marlins hung from hundreds of weigh stations throughout the Caribbean. Jelly stood tall and straight and smiling beside an endless assortment of well-fed anglers. Sunburned and more often than not gripping beer bottles, these big white men grinned for the camera, full of bluster and macho high spirits, that afterglow that came from hauling those blue monsters to the surface. The photos seemed to cover Jelly's entire career, five or six decades. The clothes were different, the hats, the sunglasses, but neither Jelly nor his clients seemed to age.

Not until the handful of photos that hung beside Jelly's wheelchair. In those, the anglers were still the same big-bellied men in baseball
caps, their sunglasses hanging on cords around their necks. One of the group always holding out the dorsal fin of the dead fish for display while the others kneeled or held their drinks up in a celebratory salute. The men were all middle-aged with a similar aura of vigor and bully-boy assurance, but Jelly was now shriveled and hunched in the shoulders. His smile no longer rooted deep. He looked out at the camera wistfully, a slight confusion in his eyes as if he could not remember the point of this ceremony.

On the opposite wall Thorn discovered a picture of Dr. Bill and Kate Truman and a skinny twenty-year-old kid who bore a hazy resemblance to himself. Someone had painted in white letters the weight of the marlin across its midsection: 896 pounds. A record at that time for those waters. A five-hour battle that Kate had won without complaint or jubilation. She'd beaten the fish and brought it to the boat, and as was the custom of the time, they'd killed that magnificent creature and hauled it back for weighing and display, its meat distributed later to the waiting dock kids.

Kate had her arm around Jelly's waist. Over several fishing seasons the two of them had become fast friends, an alliance built on their respect for each other's blend of tenderness and gristle. Dr. Bill stood apart, looking out to sea. And standing just behind the fish was a scrawny black kid wearing only a pair of baggy shorts. He was stroking the flesh of that giant fish as one might touch the secret skin of a lover, looking out at the camera with the same sulky eyes he'd focused on Thorn a minute earlier.

“He's not going to be guiding you to no fish anymore,” Farley said.

Thorn took a last look at Kate and Dr. Bill, then turned to the behemoth in the doorway. He'd put on a loose-fitting flowered shirt and yellow surfer shorts. But plenty of bulges were still exposed, his bull neck and his swollen forearms and calves.

“I'm not looking for fish,” Thorn said. “I'm looking for an old man who lost his way.”

“Well, they's a lot of those,” Farley said. “You come to the right place.”

“His name is Lawton Collins. He's about your father's age, a retired Miami cop who still thinks he's carrying his badge. He's come down here looking for the people who killed one of his friends. Their name is Braswell.”

Farley blinked.

“You know them?”

“What the hell do you want, mister?”

Thorn mulled it for a second. To trust or not to trust, that was always the gamble. He glanced again at the scrawny boy touching the giant blue, then looked back at Farley.

“I need to find some way to get inside the Braswells' world.”

“You're white, you're already in their world.”

“I want to get closer. Real close.”

“Yeah? And who is this man, Lawton? He your daddy or something?”

“Not exactly,” Thorn said. “But he's about as close to one as I have.”

“And you thought Jelly was going to help you buddy up to these people?”

“Jelly was catching blues before you or I were born. There isn't anyone who fishes down here who doesn't know him. And there isn't anyone who doesn't respect him. I thought he might know a way to open some doors.”

“All that's over with,” he said. “All that's long ago finished and done.”

“What about you?”

The boy smoothed his right hand across the engorged muscle in his left forearm. There was a faraway look in his eyes as if he were caressing someone else's body, some stranger who was inhabiting his same skin.

“What about me?”

“Are you a part of that world? The marlin world?”

Farley gave him a sour face.

“You mean, do I take the white man's money to lead him to the biggest, baddest fish in the sea? Do I show him the secret places it took my daddy his whole life to find? A hundred dollars in my pocket so some asshole banker that can't tie his shoes without help can take a glossy photo back home to Chicago, Illinois, or maybe even take that fish itself and hang it on his basement wall so he can look at it all the day long and pretend he's some big Ernest Hemingway with balls like oranges. You think I do that? You think I want to be like Jelly some day and sit in a wheelchair and all the people used to love him, used to buy him rum drinks, slap him on the back, introduce him to all their pretty blond wives, those people don't even know his name anymore, they don't pay his hospital bills, they don't come calling, say, Hi, Jelly, how's it going, old man, how's your wife and boy? Is there anything I can do for you, old Jellyroll, my buddy, any way I can pay you back for giving me the best goddamn hours of my life, the ones I'll remember when I'm lying on my bed, sucking down my last breaths. Is that what you think, white boy? I want to be a part of that world?”

Thorn turned and took a last look at the photo of Kate and Dr. Bill and the scrawny boy. He reached over and wiped the thread of spit off Jelly's cheek and dried his hands on his shorts. Jelly lifted his chin an inch from his chest, pried open his left eye, and peered up at Thorn. His lips twitched but he achieved only a faint gurgle. Thorn was turning away when Jelly lifted a crabbed hand off the arm of his wheelchair and reached out in Thorn's direction. Thorn took hold of the crippled hand, the bones as weightless as spun glass. He held the old man's hand for several moments until that one eye drifted closed again and Jelly's chin dropped back to his chest. Thorn replaced his hand on the wheelchair's arm and headed for the door.

He got only as far as the living room before Farley slapped a hand on his shoulder and wrenched him halfway round.

“Come here, white boy, take a look.”

Farley led him back down the hallway, past Jelly's room to a small cubicle at the rear of the house. In the center of the room was a weight bench. A bar with at least five hundred pounds was mounted in the cradle. On the far wall past the bench there was a shelf full of gold trophies and a scattering of photos.

Thorn walked across the room for a better look.

They weren't bodybuilding awards or photos of Farley clenching his biceps on some dais. They were marlin trophies. Firsts and seconds in some of the biggest tournaments in the Caribbean. Photos of Farley standing beside the same men his father had once worked for.

“You took over,” Thorn said.

“Nobody takes over for Jelly. That old man knows more about that fish than any human being ever walked this planet.”

“But you're good.”

“I'm not Jelly.”

“You're still good.”

The scrawny boy on the dock stared at Thorn.

“After Jelly, there's me. He's the man. I'm just a distant second.”

“And people know it. Marlin people know it.”

“The ones that matter do.”

“What do you know about the Braswells?”

“They're sons of bitches. Like all the rest of them. Only a little worse.”

“Anything else?”

“They don't fish by the same rules.”

“I hear they're after a particular fish, one that killed Braswell's boy.”

“Like Ahab,” Farley said. “With about the same luck.”

“I want to get close to them. Buddy up.”

Farley shook his head.

“They're a family. No outsiders allowed. They got rent-a-cops to keep people like you away, twenty-four hours, seven days a week.”

“What if we could help them get to the fish they're after?”

Farley snorted with disdain and sat down on the end of the weight
bench. For all his bulk he could look small sometimes, small and lonely.

“What I hear is, they got some electronic thing attached to the fish they're chasing. That's how the boy got killed, putting that electronic thing on. When that blue marlin surfaces, they can see it on a screen. They don't need a guide.”

Thorn looked at the weight bench, at Farley, at the trophies and the photos of sunburned men in T-shirts and baseball hats.

“What if someone was going after the same fish they're after? Trying to beat them to the fish they want so bad.”

Farley turned his head slowly and gave Thorn a suspicious scowl.

“And why the hell would someone do that?”

“Oh, I don't know. To get their attention. To piss them off.”

Farley lay back along the bench and fit his hands to the steel bar and drew a deep breath and lifted the five hundred pounds an inch or two out of the cradle. Thorn thought he felt the floor shift beneath his feet.

Farley held the weight there for the count of ten, his massive arms just beginning to tremble when he decided to ease it back down.

Pinpoints of sweat had broken out on Farley's forehead but he wasn't breathing hard. He lay flat on the bench for several seconds, considering the cracked and peeling ceiling overhead. Then he turned his eyes to Thorn.

“Exactly who the hell are you, mister?”

“Just some little boy,” Thorn said, “your daddy used to take fishing.”

Saturday night an hour after sunset, two nattily dressed Bahamian police officers met Alexandra's chartered Cessna, saluted her with exaggerated respect, accompanied her through passport control, then hurried her to their open-air Jeep. They roared away into the night and in a few minutes were hurtling along a twisting road with only the moon for light. Alex got a series of quick, stomach-flipping views down into shadowy ravines, while her hair was snarled by blasts of wind from passing cars that careened by, only inches away.

The air was no cooler or drier, but somehow more refreshing than Miami's. Only two hundred miles away, but another century, another planetary system. Here, the sea scents flooded in from every direction and the long shadowy distances expanded everywhere into the boundless Atlantic. And though the sky was littered with stars and the moon was nearly full, the darkness on that remote road was more profound than any Alex could recall.

She could barely decipher the British burr of her driver, who had found no end of reasons to swivel around and shoot glances between her knees. He spoke in rapid bursts as he maneuvered them one-handed around the hairpins. He was a tall, narrow fellow with clever eyes and bright white teeth that he showed at every opportunity. His partner was small and glum, his compact body tightly filling his uniform, a blue suit adorned with gold buttons and epaulets. The glum one was named Darrell, while his chatty partner, their driver, introduced himself as Granger. Both had shaved heads that gleamed with starlight.

At the airport Granger informed her that it was a short drive, no more than twenty kilometers to the beach where the yacht had run aground. But after half an hour of being flung about without a seat belt in the rear of that speeding vehicle driven by a man more interested in looking up her skirt than in keeping them on the narrow band of asphalt, Alex was ready to revolt. She'd decided she'd rather hitchhike, walk, anything but this.

But as she leaned forward to make her demands, Granger slammed the shifter into a lower gear and cut the wheel sharply, and the Jeep launched three feet into the air over a sandy hump at the shoulder, then slammed through a stand of sea oats and whippy saplings and slewed down a steep embankment for thirty feet, spraying marl as they rode the face of a formidable dune and came finally to a stop on the hard-packed sand of a tiny beach.

And there, glowing in the golden light, tipping slightly to one side with its prow buried deep in the sand, was Arnold Peretti's two-million-dollar fishing boat. Apparently the tide had retreated since the boat rammed into the shore because now only a few feet of her stern was still brushed by the listless waves.

For a moment Alexandra studied the boat's enormous bulk, then she turned and drew her police flashlight from her duffel and climbed down from the Jeep.

“Do you require our assistance in any manner, Lieutenant?”

Though he'd made the same error at the airport, Alex had not corrected him. If being a lieutenant gained her any advantage, then by God, she was going to preserve the misunderstanding as long as possible.

“It's a crime scene,” she said. “The less people tramping around, the better.”

Granger smiled and looked around until he spotted a wide, flat rock that looked inviting and told Alex that she was very welcome to take all the time she required, that he and Darrell would just rest for a while from their day's labors and perhaps indulge in a smoke.

Alex watched them walk away, then turned and began to circle the boat. The soft sand was tricky and walking was an effort. The hull was badly dented in several places near the bow, scuffed and banged along the keel. But it still looked seaworthy. After a minute or two of trudging, she found a place on the starboard side that looked promising. She got a foothold on a small chrome plate and chinned herself up onto the boat.

On the gunwale she sat for a moment to catch her breath. Wafting up from Granger's and Darrell's position near some scrubby vegetation was the unmistakable pungent spice of marijuana. She saw the glow of their spliff and heard their faint chuckling and the elegant cadence of their patois. These two fortunate souls, stranded so far from the messy back alleys of urban life, stretching out in this isolated cove lit by the moon, their air freshened by unceasing ocean breezes, these cops who laughed with the easiness of children.

Alexandra pushed herself to her feet. She wore a knee-length denim skirt and a long-sleeved white jersey. Unsure of local fashion, she'd dressed as blandly as possible, trying to strike a balance between casual and professional. Her leather sandals had rubber soles that squeaked faintly when she crossed the deck.

As she looked around, deciding where to begin, she tried to clear her mind. Stay positive, even though she was certain Lawton was long gone by now, off on the next phase of his inexplicable odyssey. But
she couldn't let her expectations cloud her sight. She had to see what was here, not what she hoped or expected.

Usually she didn't have to summon such discipline. After ten years on the job, exercising a rigorous detachment in every kind of circumstance, grim and chaotic, risky or routine, Alexandra liked to believe she'd absorbed into her very marrow the lessons of her work. In those ten years she had purified her senses. Learned to see without the interference of ego or bias, to strip away her own point of view and become sublimely neutral. A tough, scientific mind recording in precise detail the bedrooms and alleys and backyards where rage and frenzy had torn apart lives and left behind wild montages of blood and gray matter, body parts and mangled corpses.

But tonight there was a shiver in her blood. Just as there had been a faint tremolo in her voice when she'd spoken to Granger a few moments ago. For this was not just another crime scene. As far as anyone could tell this boat was the last place her father had been seen. Dispassion was out of the question.

She looked over at the two cops trading their joint. Beyond them, moonlight quivered on the lapping waves. And in the heights of the sky, the million stars trembled like the glittering eyes of soldiers on the nervous eve of their first battle.

Alex drew a breath and clicked on the flashlight, held it near her right cheek, and fanned its light slowly across the cockpit deck. She stiffened and the air clenched in her lungs. For a second such a powerful wave of wooziness passed over her, she thought she might faint.

Before her, coating nearly every foot of the deck, were spatters of blood and fine red cobwebs and bloody footprints, large and small. Like some appalling work of extemporaneous art, with blood slung randomly here and there, loops and swirls, dots and smears, more blood coating the chrome rail and ladder up to the flybridge.

She swung the flashlight away from the deck and shined its beam out into the dark, where it was swallowed by the gloom. And held it there till she managed to bring her pulse back under control.

When she was ready, she turned back, steadied her light, and washed it again over that gory canvas. She kept her teeth clamped, breathed through her nose, managing a cold, bitter calm. There would be time in the daylight to photograph and study the patterns of the blood, to draw orderly conclusions.

The night was clear, no sign of a thunderstorm that might destroy this evidence. She could simply stay on board for the rest of the night, safeguard what was here. There was no hurry, nothing driving her to decode this mess right now.

She found a bloodless path to the door of the main cabin, turned the handle, and stepped into the living area. In the faint moonglow the leather upholstery was yellow and the barstools had legs of gleaming chrome. There was a flowery chemical taste in the cabin, some air-freshening device that Arnold must have used to combat the inevitable mustiness.

She stood for a moment in the center of the room and passed her light over the furniture, holding briefly on a shelf of mementos that Arnold had accumulated. Photos of a young, dashing Peretti standing alongside a variety of sleek and sporty women. On the bar she found a ceramic ashtray and a matchbook from Churchill Downs. And a wadded bar towel from the Doral Hotel, a couple of glass trophies from marlin tournaments, both of them fastened tightly to the shelves behind the bar. She scanned the room methodically, working as she'd been trained, breaking down the space into quadrants, exploring with her flashlight every surface, every crevice.

The décor was understated but classy. Cherry-wood cabinetry and mahogany trim, a light tan wall covering. Full-length tinted windows running down either side, an L-shaped coffee table with silk flower arrangement fixed neatly in its center. Pale yellow leather settees surrounded the table. She found some broken glass behind the bar, old-fashioned and martini glasses shattered on the parquet. No doubt flung from their shelves during Lawton's wild ride across Biscayne Bay.

She held the flashlight beam on the sparkling shards, then kneeled down and pinched up the edge of a small square bar napkin with an advertising logo. A blue dolphin rising from the waves to smile up at a bright golden stylized sun.
ABACO BEACH RESORT
was printed in blue below the surface of the sea.

She tucked the napkin in her skirt pocket and stood back up. She glanced around the room a moment or two more, but nothing struck her as the slightest bit out of the ordinary. Then she angled over to the window for a peek at her guardians. Their joint no longer glowed and both Granger and Darrell seemed to have dropped off to sleep on the flat rock. She was about to turn away when a blur of movement caught her attention. A shadow within the shadows moving along the sand halfway between the boat and the rock on which the two cops reclined.

She cupped a hand around her eyes and pressed her nose to the glass. But whatever had moved out there was motionless now. She shifted her gaze back to the sleeping cops. She could see the shine of Granger's forehead, and a couple of the gold buttons on his uniform. Sprawled beside him, Darrell was on his back, both arms flung over his head like a man trying to backstroke across solid stone.

She walked to the door and stepped outside, and held up the flashlight, pressed the button and trained it on the two men, first Granger, then Darrell. The beam was beginning to fade. Old batteries, rarely used.

Alexandra was about to call their names when she spotted the dark shimmer on Granger's neck. She focused the failing light on Granger, squinted through the dark, and made out a ragged gleam beneath his chin. Something that looked a great deal like the slow ooze of blood.