Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) (2 page)

The audio records violent splashes as though the animal is trying to drag Leslie underwater or tow her as far from land as possible, with Leslie fighting, thrashing. There are garbled words and heaves of breath, while the frozen video continues to show only the still and shadowy image of the grassy bank where the nest is torn open, exposing the white cluster of eggs to a milky wash of moonlight.

More than a minute of quiet is followed by splashing, and a few seconds later, a howl. A human voice that is barely human.

It could be either of them. Cameron doesn’t remember yelling but supposes it’s possible. He doesn’t recognize the scream as his own. To Cameron those moments were a bewildering blur. Shortly after the attack began, he recalls being chest-high in the canal and smacking the water with both hands to lure the big croc away from Leslie. Not heroic, he says, just a blind reaction to the horror unfolding before him. Then he remembers backing away when he thought the croc turned on him.

All that jostling of the water rocks the airboat and somehow triggers the camera’s light to flutter on again.

More silence follows, then the sound of someone slogging through the canal, and a moment later Cameron is in the camera’s frame staggering toward the bank in hip-deep water.

He’s massive, tall and heavily muscled, with short blond hair. He’s cradling something in his arms. His face is stricken and white. He claims to remember none of this. Picking it up, carrying it to the boat.

The video shows him splashing near the bow, then lifting the object and setting it on the deck in front of the camera. This human arm was severed an inch above the elbow. Around the wrist is a rubber bracelet, a camouflage design.

Cameron is huffing as he pulls himself aboard and lifts the video camera from the deck. For a moment the lens captures hundreds of glittering lights that outline the towers and the two enormous containment buildings at Turkey Point only a few hundred yards away. With all those lights sparkling in the night, the nuclear power plant appears almost festive.

Then the video goes dark.

TWO

THORN HAD SET UP HIS
fly-tying vise next to the lagoon and was almost done with his latest version of a Crazy Charlie with silver bead-chain eyes, underbody of pearl flashabou, wings of tan calf tail, and a few wispy sprigs of possum fur that he added to the rump. The possum fur was an oddball addition to the standard fly, but last week Thorn had found the creature crushed on the highway near his house, and on a whim he plucked a clump from its pelt to give the possum another shot at a useful purpose. That creature whose major survival skill was pretending to be dead was about to spend a while longer pretending to be alive.

He was making the final snips when a car rolled into his gravel drive. He watched Sugarman park in his usual spot beneath the ancient gumbo-limbo and get out of his dented Honda.

Sugar was his oldest buddy, an accomplice in more messy escapades than either of them would admit. Tall and lean, a striking mix of his pale Norwegian mother and Rastafarian dad, with a finely modeled face and a caramel skin tone a half shade lighter than Thorn’s perpetual tan. Sugar and Thorn had been yinning and yanging since they met in grade school and were still doing the same crazy, out-of-kilter tango decades later.

Impulsive, hair-trigger Thorn and steady, no-nonsense Sugar. Thorn, the hard-core loner, and Sugar with a hundred friends and a sunny view of the darkest days. For years the two had undertaken risky balancing acts along precipices and canyon edges, lurching along the edges of one bottomless disaster after another, but somehow they’d always managed to steady each other and dance away just before the plunge. So far.

Thorn tied the final knot and set the bonefish fly aside and stood waiting on the gray, weathered planks of the dock.

Sugarman didn’t say hello, didn’t say anything as he stepped down onto the dock. He blinked and looked off as if trying to conceal the slow-motion hardening in his jaw and some unpleasant taste rising into his throat.

Sugar was dressed today in blue-and-white-striped seersucker shorts and a canary-yellow polo shirt and his best boat shoes, the jaunty look that usually meant he’d been trying to impress a prospective client.

“What happened?”

Sugar turned and glanced back down the gravel drive, shaking his head faintly, the way he did when he was fetching the right phrase. When he turned back, a grimace had stiffened his face.

Thorn backhanded the sweat from his eyes, looked out at the lagoon, where a cormorant had surfaced, a bulge in his skinny throat. He swam in ever-larger circles as he searched the water for more targets.

Sugar took a moment to scan the blue reaches of the ocean. Processing something while he moved his lips as if doing a tricky computation in his head.

Thorn felt the rumble of storm clouds gathering in his chest. His trusty weather vane beginning to twitch.

Sugar looked at Thorn blankly, then patted him on the back. “We need to talk.”

“Ah, yes. My favorite four words.”

“I assume you haven’t heard about Leslie Levine?”

“News about Leslie?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been out of the loop lately.”

“Lately? You been out of the damn loop since the day you were born.” Sugarman smiled wearily. Accustomed to Thorn’s stubborn disinterest in the details of the modern world. “Day before yesterday, there was a crocodile attack up at Turkey Point, at the nuke plant. Happened late at night, back in those cooling canals where she’s trying to rebuild the croc population. Twelve-footer versus Leslie.”

“Leslie was injured by a croc?”

“She was killed, Thorn.”

“Leslie?”

Sugar reached out and laid a consoling hand on Thorn’s shoulder. Thorn turned his head, looked at Sugar’s hand, then looked out at the lagoon. A mist burned his eyes, blurring his vision.

Around twenty years earlier Leslie Levine lived in a trailer park a half mile down the road from Thorn, and one autumn afternoon the skinny, auburn-haired teenager showed up with a fishing rod and bucket of dead shrimp she’d bummed off a clerk at the Yellow Bait House. Awkward and shy, not more than fourteen at the time, she introduced herself and asked Thorn for permission to fish off his dock. Thorn said it was okay, and the kid spent a couple of hours trying and failing to snag gray snappers from the school that lived around the pilings.

Finally Thorn drifted over and offered her a few tips on her casting technique and showed her how to grip the rod when jigging her bait, and gradually the girl got the hang of it. Later, he made sandwiches, and when Leslie wolfed hers down in three bites, he made another. The next afternoon she returned. A week, another week, a month and another month.

For most of that school year Leslie Levine apprenticed herself to Thorn, eventually applying herself to the craft of fly-tying and learning to fish the flats in Thorn’s skiff. Raised by a single mom who traded sex for cocaine, Leslie was more of a lone wolf than even Thorn. But the bond between them grew until Leslie began to confide in Thorn a few details about her grim childhood.

After four or five months, she’d mastered every lesson Thorn had to teach, and her visits became sporadic. Then one day, without a formal good-bye, the visits ceased altogether, and Thorn later heard the young woman had attached herself to Mary Jo Prentiss, her high school biology teacher, a specialist in Florida reptiles and a strident environmentalist. A couple of years later, Thorn read in the local paper that Leslie had won a scholarship to the public university in Miami, where she planned to major in biology.

He’d heard nothing more about her until last year, when Leslie paid a surprise visit, appearing at Thorn’s dock at sunrise one morning in a sleek flats boat. She’d matured into a striking young lady, lithe and vibrant, her chestnut hair worn boyishly short. She said she was working temporarily for some Florida state agency that had hired her to do a crocodile census in the Upper Keys. Leslie invited Thorn along for a tour of local croc habitats.

Sitting in the bow of her boat was another woman, gaunt, with flame-red hair loose down her back. Her tall frame was hidden beneath a bulky jacket and loose jeans. Her hiking shoes were battered and her skin sunburned and roughened by weather as if she’d been hiking for months through some unforgiving terrain. Leslie never introduced the young woman, just made a quick
don’t ask
shrug.

The three of them spent the morning cruising the familiar back bays of the Upper Keys, Thorn marveling at Leslie’s ability to spot bashful crocs from long distances, sneak up, lasso them, haul them to the boat, tag and release those toothy creatures as effortlessly as if they were backyard lizards. At sunset, before she left, Leslie stood out at the end of Thorn’s dock and thanked him for sharing those hours with her as a teenage kid. The red-haired woman sat silently in the bow of the boat, staring forward as she had all day.

“You got me started on all this.” Leslie gestured at the open water, the mangrove islands, the reddening sky laced with threads of purple and green.

Thorn said he was glad to have played a part in Leslie’s education.

“It was more than that,” she said. “You gave me a reason to go on.”

Thorn smiled, opened his arms, and Leslie stepped into an embrace.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, when they parted.

“Does it ever piss you off, Thorn, what’s happening to it all? Losing these beautiful places.”

“Hell, yes,” he said. “But mostly it makes me sad.”

With her fingertips she brushed the stubble on his cheek, held his eyes for several seconds, an intimacy that gave him an uneasy buzz. Then her look dissolved, she turned, climbed into her skiff, started the outboard, and was off, her passenger’s hair blazing against the darkening sky.

Thorn stared out at his lagoon, at the cormorant still hunting minnows.

“How’d it happen?”

“Only witness was Leslie’s assistant, a guy named Cameron Prince. Spotlight failed. Leslie tripped, a croc went for her. Prince went for help, but it was hours before any arrived. They couldn’t locate the croc or Leslie. The animal dragged her off. Between the crocs, gators, and every other damn thing with teeth and claws out there, well, you know.”

“Leslie Levine, Jesus Christ.”

“I thought I should tell you.”

“I don’t believe it.” Thorn settled his butt against the seawall.

“I know. Everybody’s pretty shocked.”

“No. I don’t believe it could’ve gone down that way.”

“Nothing suspicious about it,” Sugar said. “It was dark out there, the mother croc was moving her babies, Leslie stumbled over the damn thing. Accidents happen. People get careless, even a pro like Leslie.”

Thorn shook his head. “Not her.”

Sugarman opened his mouth to say more, then shut it.

Thorn kept his eyes on the open water beyond the lagoon. His face was inert. Eyes focused inward. A fine mist sheened his forehead as if he had a low-grade fever. He didn’t believe it. Not her, not Leslie Levine.

THREE

AUGUST 8, TWO MONTHS LATER

FROM SEVENTY FEET UP, BALANCED
on the narrow railing at the top of his cistern, Thorn could only make out the man’s general features. Bulky guy, pale-yellow hair parted precisely. Black cargo shorts and a camouflage T-shirt.

Ten minutes before, the man had parked in the gravel drive, gotten out, and started snooping around Thorn’s property as if taking an inventory, about to make an offer on the land. It wouldn’t be the first time Thorn had to chase off an overzealous Realtor.

Thorn dabbed the white plumbing grease into the fitting, smoothed it into the groves, then with his wrench tightened the two-inch pipe to the valve. Gave it one final crunching turn and wiped the excess grease away with the rag from his back pocket. He reached high and levered open the main valve, heard the squeal of water pressurizing the pipes, and watched for any leaks around the fitting. When he saw none, he wiped a fingertip around the joint to be sure it was dry. Praise the Lord, it was.

Scratch another chore off the unceasing list around his aging Key Largo home. Another finger in another leak in the ever-growing dike. Lately Thorn seemed to be running out of fingers. Barely staying ahead of the rising tide of decay.

Between the harsh subtropical weather testing every surface, the briny breezes off the Atlantic aggravating each patch of rust, the wooden house shifting restlessly on its foundation, the heart-of-pine planks shrinking and expanding with each twitch in the barometric pressure, he was spending half his waking hours staying even with maintenance. Precious time subtracted from tying his custom bonefish flies, the work that paid the bills, bought his food and an occasional luxury such as a six-pack of Red Stripe beer.

Twenty-five yards below, the man was still making himself at home, pacing the dock beside the lagoon, checking out Thorn’s sixteen-foot flats boat, and bending down to peer through the windows of the
Heart Pounder,
Thorn’s ancient Chris-Craft docked just forward of the skiff.

Arrogant bastard, not even going close to the house, knocking at Thorn’s door or calling out hello to see if anyone was at home.

But Thorn stayed put. He wanted to see what the guy was up to, and, hell, he was in no hurry to come down from his perch. It had been years since he’d climbed the cistern tower, and he’d forgotten the dazzling views. On such a cloudless day, he could see several miles east toward the blue slit of the horizon and make out the hazy outline of the Carysfort Reef lighthouse. Just beyond it a cargo ship was steaming north along the Gulf Stream.

Closer in, the swirls of sapphire water and bottle green and turquoise interlocked like thousands of intricate jigsaw pieces, and just off Thorn’s shoreline the shallow sea turned an eggshell blue where patches of white-sand flats lurked three or four inches below the surface. Just now it was low tide and a languid breeze was spreading riffles across the coastal waters, while farther out the ocean had a gentle roll.

In the other direction, west, was the Florida Bay, and beyond that the vast and spreading indigo of the Gulf of Mexico. Where else in the world but the Florida Keys could you watch the sun erupt from one sea and hours later see it melt away into another?