Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) (28 page)

“Where does the escape skiff come from?” Flynn said.

“You’ll bring it.”

“Me? How?”

“You stay here until it’s time to take the boat to the escape point.”

“I’m not coming along? Why? You don’t trust me?”

“Nobody trusts you, ass-breath,” Wally said.

“It’s just the four of us going to the plant,” Leslie said. “Thorn, Cameron, and Pauly and me. You and Wally have other roles. This is your landing spot.”

She touched the ballpoint tip to a location along the coast, the closest point to the southernmost cooling canal.

“This is bullshit,” Flynn said. “I want to go to the plant.”

Leslie seemed not to hear. Her gaze wandered around Thorn’s kitchen and the living area beyond as though her eyes were refocusing on some distant time. Perhaps it had just hit her. The house where she’d first felt safe so many years back. This place of refuge. Something else now.

“Leslie,” Flynn said. “You can’t leave me out of this.”

The long-ago look in her eyes faded and she returned. Her expression had softened from the journey.

“Somebody always drives the getaway car. It’s as essential as any other piece of this.”

“You’re trying to protect me. Giving me this bullshit role.”

“I’m not going to argue. The decision’s made.”

He heaved a disgusted sigh and stalked to a chair across the room.

“Using my house,” said Thorn. “That was always the plan, wasn’t it? That day Cameron came, he was checking the place out. You were already familiar with it, but Cameron had to have a look, a scouting mission. Checking out its strategic value.”

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said.

“You were just going to show up here, the bunch of you, no warning, middle of the night, walk in, and you thought we’d have a big happy sleepover?”

Leslie traced a fingertip along the grout between the countertop tiles. She looked at him and gave a
so what?
shrug. “We’re here. And so far it seems to be working out.”

“And separating Flynn and me, that’s insurance, to keep me in line.”

She held his gaze. “Why should we keep you in line if you’re as committed as you say?”

“Hey, ass-wipe.” Wally’s hands were on the keyboard, head turned toward Thorn. “What mile marker are we at?”

“Why?”

“What’re you doing, Wally?” Leslie asked.

“I’m writing code, boss. Doing my job. So what mile marker is this?”

A remnant from the days of the Overseas Railroad, the small, green markers ran the length of the Keys, counting down each mile to Key West.

Thorn gave Leslie a questioning look and she shrugged. So tell him.

He gave Wally the number of the closest mile marker, and Wally turned back to the computer and resumed typing. “Okay. So where’s the pipeline run around here?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“The water line. Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority. Pumped from a well field near Florida City down here to the Keys.”

Leslie went over to the desk where Wally had set up his laptop and looked over his shoulder. “Why’re you playing around with that?”

“I finished all the jobs you gave me. Everything’s set. Ready to pull the trigger. So I’m goofing on something else.”

“Pipeline is about a hundred yards west of here,” Thorn said. “Runs along the side of the Overseas Highway.”

“Good,” Wally said. “So we can see it.”

“It’s buried.”

“I’m not talking about the pipeline, ass-face, I’m talking about the water runs through it.” Wally’s fingers flew across the keyboard for several moments, then he turned around and smiled at them, lifting a single finger over the keys. “And away we go.” He plunked his finger down. Stood up, walked through the open doors onto the porch. “Which way is it?”

Thorn pointed west.

Leslie came over and stood next to him, Flynn and Thorn drifting outside, everyone staring out at the hummock of slash pines and wild tamarinds and spice and mahogany.

“What’ve you done, Wally?”

“Hold on. It’ll take a minute. You got a 130-mile transmission line, water pressure at 250 pounds a square inch, pipe begins at thirty-six inches, narrows to twenty-four, then south of here goes to eighteen. Eight-hundred-horsepower electric motors suck it out of the ground and shoot it south. When there’s a power outage, they got two-thousand-horse diesels that kick in.

“Then two miles north of here you got a booster pump station, and another one down in Long Key, Marathon, Ramrod Key, they’re jacking up the pressure every thirty, forty miles. Got thousands of gallons a minute flowing inside that pipeline. A few million gallons every day sucked out of the ground.

“So it’s like this. Say the Key Largo booster station, just up the road, it keeps pumping its ass off, but south of here at the pump station in Long Key, they got a malfunction and have to shut down. Their power just switches off. Some kind of computer glitch. Software goes haywire. Their pumps quit.”

He turned around and gave them an impish grin. “Hey, something happens like that, where’s all that water go? Well, they got a half-assed safety system, shut-off valves every few miles to prevent backflow. And they got a com network, it sends a message up to the Key Largo pump station, warns it to shut down.

“But say some hacker, he overrides that com network, the Largo station keeps pumping water, pumping and pumping. Then that hacker tells the Key Largo station their fucking water pressure is dropping and they need their pumps to work harder. What do you get? Anybody want to guess?”

“You idiot,” Thorn said.

“Okay, no guesses. So the answer is, all that water pressure is building up in that twenty-four-inch pipe. Building, building. Then, hey, suddenly for no reason, the relief valve at this very mile marker opens wide, and badda bing. I’m tearing that relief valve a new asshole.”

“Wally. Undo it right now. Put it right.” Leslie was staring helplessly at the computer screen, the rolling lines of code.

“Too late.”

“We don’t need this,” she said. “This’ll bring heat. And for no reason.”

“Hey, is that it?” Wally pointed off at the tree line. “Yeah, I think we got ourselves a gusher.”

About a half mile away, a silver-blue geyser of water was shooting straight up, maybe a hundred feet into the blue afternoon sky. A fountain of pure aquifer water appearing in the middle of the native forest that separated Thorn’s property from the Overseas Highway.

“See,” Wally said. “That’s the kind of shit I do, ass-breath. That’s what I bring to the table.” Speaking to Flynn, then glancing at Thorn. “So lay the fuck off me, or I’ll blow your shit up, too. Don’t think I can’t.”

“Shut it down, Wally.”

“No can do. Has to be fixed by hand. Wrenches and shit.”

A car rolled into the drive. Nobody Thorn knew. A ten-year-old SUV with dark windows. It was covered in dust and the grill was badly dented as if the car had collided head-on with a telephone pole. An out-of-state license tag was mounted on the crushed bumper.

Cameron left the porch and trotted over to the car, stood by the driver’s door, and waited till it opened. Since Thorn had seen her last, her red hair had been cut pixie short. It blazed scarlet in the afternoon sunlight as she marched across the lawn, following Prince toward the house.

Same uniform as the day they’d spent together in Leslie’s boat, counting the croc population. Fatigue jacket, scruffy jeans, hiking boots. She cast her gaze around the premises, surveying the layout with an almost mathematical precision. Pretty eyes, but a misshapen mouth with awkwardly protruding teeth. Still, something about her was fierce. The fiery resolve of a field commander on the eve of battle.

“You stay here,” Leslie told the group. “This doesn’t concern you.”

She went down the steps and crossed the lawn, and the two women shared a stiff embrace, touched cheek to cheek. More ritual than personal.

Leslie spoke to Prince and he edged away, giving them privacy.

When their conversation was finished, Leslie waited while the red-haired woman walked back to her SUV, opened the rear hatch, and hailed Prince. She handed Leslie a liquor box, and from the cargo hold Cameron dragged out a large sheet of fiberboard covered by a white sheet. With both hands he raised it above his head and carried it to the house.

The red-haired woman handed Leslie a set of keys, turned, and headed back down the drive on foot. In the distance, the geyser continued to spew. Sirens were screaming out on the highway.

Prince angled the fiberboard through the French doors and laid it on the dining-room table. The long, rectangular oak table where Thorn had eaten his first meals, learned what table manners he knew, and later on, when the house became his, shared countless dinners with friends and lovers.

Leslie set the liquor box on a counter and walked over to the fiberboard.

“What’s in the box?” Wally said.

“Uniforms. FBI.” Leslie took hold of the end of the white sheet and drew it away.

In all the years Thorn had passed the place offshore, he’d never paid much attention to the Turkey Point nuclear plant, so he hadn’t realized how vast it was, how numerous were its domes and smokestacks, cooling towers and guardhouses and office buildings, roadways and transmission lines. An industrial city. Twenty cooling canals shot straight south for about ten miles, the crocodile breeding grounds that Leslie once patrolled.

This scale model was meticulously crafted with plastic windows in the office buildings and runty trees lining the entrance drive and half-inch hard-hatted workers scattered around the site. Each structure had a printed label attached. Cars, trucks, earthmoving equipment, even an airboat docked beside a small, rectangular building that was labeled
BIOLOGY LAB
.

Pauly and Cameron stood on one side of the table, Flynn and Thorn and Leslie on the other. Even Wally broke away from his laptop to take a look.

Leslie lifted the lid off one of the structures. Inside were more handcrafted details. An enormous control room full of electronic hardware with sweeping desks and podiums and a wall of computer screens.

As one who created miniature replicas for a living, Thorn marveled at the detail. The model had required months of work by a highly skilled craftsman. Every door, beam, column, truss, pipe, valve, tube, tank, storage area, skylight, stairway, elevator shaft. Ladders and machinery and earthmovers.

“You’ll be studying this layout until it’s as familiar as your face in the mirror. You’ll learn where every visible defensive device is placed, and where all the hidden trip wires and motion detectors are planted, the entire sensing system. From this point on, there’ll be no more games. This is real.”

“Who’s the babe?” Wally said. “I’d take a dip in that spasm chasm.”

Leslie fixed him with a cold smile. “Her name is Cassandra. Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing her again. As soon as we’re done.”

Leslie’s tone had hardened. Even Wally heard it and shut the hell up.

THIRTY-THREE

MONDAY MORNING ON HIS WAY
to the office, knowing this would probably be the last free minute he had for a few days, Sheffield swung off I-95 at Seventy-ninth Street and headed east into Little Haiti. Operating on an hour’s ragged sleep, but still so wired from the night before, the disastrous raid on Prince Key, Frank tapped out a mindless beat on the steering wheel the whole way.

He parked in the lot of Motel Blu on Biscayne Boulevard, a block down from Seventy-ninth. The sign out front said
MIAMI STYLE AT AFFORDABLE RATES
. Behind Motel Blu he could see a cool, shady section of Little River. Frank got out, walked over to the small bridge along the boulevard, and looked down at the sluggish green flow.

About a mile east the river emptied into the northern end of Biscayne Bay. Despite the heavy traffic on the thoroughfare behind him, standing there you got a peaceful hint of how this part of town had been once, maybe fifty years back, locals picnicking along the riverbank, fishing, napping in the shadows of the cabbage palms. Snowbirds staying at motels like this one, back in its earlier incarnation before all the seedy bars and nudie theaters, hookers and Haitian markets, and fast-food joints moved in.

As a motel owner himself, one who was trying hard to revive his own slice of Miami history, Sheffield wasn’t impressed with the attempts at rebirth along this stretch of Biscayne. The gentrifiers had given the architecture a new name, MiMo, Miami Modern, and designated it historic. Space age with bold angles, lots of plate glass, and extreme, weird-angled roofs. The 1950s version of Tomorrowland. Or a bowling alley built for the Jetsons.

To Frank it told a different story. Mom and Pop got scared and sold out thirty years ago and fled when the hookers and the crack dealers and the johns moved in, and now a bunch of thirty-year-old trust-fund kids had scooped up the places supercheap, slapped on trendy colors, added tubes of neon, then rechristened their best rooms Bayview and Ocean Vista even though the bay and the ocean were miles away. But Frank was willing to bet real money that those kids hadn’t gotten around to throwing out all the bloodstained mattresses or patching the bullet holes.

It had been a while since he’d cruised this stretch of Biscayne. He was here now because of Leslie Levine. Over the weekend, while Frank and Magnuson were making a mess of things on Prince Key, Marta had sacrificed Sunday, going to the office, where she’d spent the morning online, then worked the phones and tracked through Levine’s records, which eventually pointed to this kitschy dive along a polluted stretch of Little River.

First, she discovered Leslie’s paychecks were automatically deposited in her bank account, and that account used a post office box up in Aventura for a home address. She used the same PO box for tax returns and other assorted mail. Cash payments for the mail drop. Dead end there.

Her driver’s license showed an address in Kendall, but according to the apartment manager, Leslie had moved out a year earlier. No forwarding address. When Marta asked the apartment manager if Leslie had any friends, anyone who might know her current whereabouts, the lady told Marta no friends ever stopped by. Not even men friends? Marta asked her. No men. And as Marta was about to end the conversation, the woman said, well, one woman used to visit pretty regular. You wouldn’t call her a friend. What would you call her? Marta said. Her mother, the manager said.