Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) (3 page)

A hundred yards offshore, a single skiff was working the edge of the neighborhood flats, searching for late-afternoon schools of bonefish. Ollie Davis was up on the platform, poling the vessel north while his client perched on the bow and cast his fly onto the flats.

Thorn watched Ollie steer the skiff along the edge of the flat and saw the client’s herky-jerky casting stroke and clumsy retrieve. The guy wobbled on the casting platform as if he might pitch overboard at the slightest rock of the boat.

Ham-fisted bunglers like him were one reason Thorn retired from his own guiding career. After all those hours in a small boat with razor-pronged hooks zinging past his face, he’d been tagged more times than he could recall.

The day finally came when he hit his limit. He had turned his back to a client to relieve himself over the stern, and on a careless backcast the angler hooked Thorn in the crotch. The Miami smart-ass holding the rod thought Thorn’s plight was damn amusing. Even tried to take a snapshot of him with his shorts at his knees, grimly extracting the hook.

Thorn dropped the pliers, tore the camera from his client’s hand, and sailed it. When the asshole got huffy, Thorn shouldered him over the side as well and wouldn’t let him back aboard until Thorn had removed the hook from his privates.

That was to be Thorn’s last day showing strangers how to fish the flats. He never regretted the decision. Now when he went fishing, he mostly went alone, which was usually more than enough company.

Thorn took another moment to absorb the view, watching the blades of his Aermotor turn in a lazy breeze. That windmill was next on his to-do list. Time to lubricate its gearbox, grease the pump pole swivel, and tighten the connections and track down fraying and cracking in the wiring. His house lights had been flickering more than usual lately.

By the time he climbed down from the cistern, his visitor had completed his tour and was on his way back to his car. Thorn caught up, tapped the guy on the shoulder.

At ground level, he made the intruder for at least six-six. A half foot taller than Thorn, and heavier by over fifty pounds of ripped, densely veined muscles. The stranger turned slowly and, after appraising Thorn for a moment, drew in a long breath and smiled with contentment as if the air at his height had a finer bouquet than anything groundlings like Thorn could imagine.

“Can I help you?”

The man studied Thorn for several moments. “I didn’t realize anyone was home. Sorry, I’ll just be going.”

“What do you want?”

“All right, then. How tall is your water tower, about sixty feet?”

The man was in his late twenties, with wide-set eyes and thin lips, and the kind of well-crafted bone structure some women probably found beguiling. His camouflage shirt seemed spray-painted to his thick chest and narrow waist. Muscles so ridged and jagged he might’ve been chiseled from a slab of volcanic rock. The kind of freak-show he-man you’d expect to find juggling cannonballs in some traveling carnival.

Thorn had run into more than his share of bruisers and goons and had vowed to steer clear of them in the future, never again engage, to slam the door, do a one-eighty, whatever it took to preserve the tranquil cycles of his ordinary life. In the past year he’d kept that vow and gradually a familiar shell of seclusion had regrown around him. The silence, the natural phases of the weather, and the ebb and flow of the seasons were once again the shaping rhythms of his days.

After last year’s bloodshed and turmoil, he’d finally managed to reclaim his old pattern—spending his days tying flies, doing sweaty labor around the property, cooling off with an afternoon swim, fishing for his dinner. At sunset taking aimless cruises with Sugarman through the sounds and coves of the backcountry, watching dolphins surf their wake, listening to Sugar gripe good-naturedly about the tedium of his work as a PI. Or on rare occasions Thorn would give a lady friend his complete attention while she discussed her troublesome kids or her ex-husbands and her fruitless search for genuine love.

But also in those months of isolation his reflexes had slowed. Otherwise he would’ve acted on his first impression and turned his back on this intruder’s gloating smile and gone resolutely back to his chores.

“I asked you about the tower,” the big man said.

“That’s why you’re here, to look at my cistern?”

“I’ve been studying them because one day I’d like to build one myself. How tall is yours?”

“Seventy feet,” said Thorn. “Six inches.”

“Three-thousand-gallon tank?”

“Around there.”

“So that gives you a smidge over thirty pounds per square inch of pressure in the house. Minimal, not much more than a trickle.”

“I never measured it, but a trickle sounds right.”

“Hard to take a shower in a trickle.”

“I manage.”

“Can’t run your dishwasher.”

“Don’t have one.”

“Barely enough to flush your toilets.”

Thorn took another dip into the shallow pools of the man’s eyes. “You don’t look like a building code inspector.”

“And what do I look like to you?”

Thorn couldn’t find a word that captured the full measure of his distaste. “Exactly what kind of bullshit are you selling?”

“Right now I’d like to know how you heat your water.”

Thorn sighed. He had to give the colossus credit for sheer gall. “I’ve worked out a deal with the sun.”

“Solar panels?”

“Exposed water pipes on the roof.”

The man nodded judiciously. “Primitive, but workable. And cloudy days in winter?”

“A week or two of shivering.”

“And the windmill, that’s your power source?”

“When there’s wind.”

“So you’re one of those.”

“I’m not one of anything,” Thorn said.

“Oh, sure you are. You’re a back-to-nature true believer. Self-sufficient. In touch with the ancient ways.”

“You’ve got it wrong.”

“I don’t think so. I look around and I see a guy living the pioneer life. Hard-ass maverick, don’t-tread-on-me philosophical view.”

“I don’t have a philosophical view.”

“Everybody does. Whether they admit it or not.”

“The man who raised me built that cistern. In his day it was the only way to get freshwater in the Keys. There was no pipeline coming down from Miami. That’s not philosophy, that’s survival.”

“But you’re still unconnected to the public water system. You made a choice to stay true to the old ways. You’re bucking the modern world.”

“You have a name?”

The man considered the question for a moment, taking another leisurely look at Thorn’s acreage. “I apologize for intruding on your privacy. I’ll be taking my leave. Have yourself a glorious day.”

Thorn’s memory wasn’t what it used to be, so he had to repeat aloud the string of numbers, then repeat them again as he walked back to the house to scribble down the asshole’s license plate.

FOUR

“YOU’RE NOT GOING TO TELL
me what this is for?” Sugarman sat behind his desk, looking at the numbers Thorn had scrawled on a scrap of paper.

Sugar’s PI office occupied the narrow space next to Key Largo’s premier beauty salon, the Hairport. Running the length of the wall his office shared with the salon was a shadowy one-way mirror, a legacy of the previous owner of the beauty parlor, who’d believed it necessary to spy on her employees.

Sugar often toyed with the idea of walling over the mirror and disconnecting the speakers to make his office appear more professional, but he could never bring himself to do it because the constant bustle next door distracted him on slow afternoons, not to mention how much he prized the tidbits of Key Largo gossip and the invaluable insights into the riddle of the female mind. Plus watching what happened next door could often be a serious turn-on. The young ladies knew full well about the mirror, and like most women, they found Sugarman a winsome fellow, so they sometimes put on shows for his benefit.

“I did tell you,” Thorn said. “Some pushy guy shows up at my house. He refuses to identify himself.”

“And now you’re going to track him down and do what?”

“Can you do it or not, Sugar?”

“I usually get paid for this service.”

“I’ll buy you a Red Stripe. Take you on a boat ride.”

“You’d do that anyway.”

“Nope, not anymore. Not until you give me this guy’s name.”

“It’s just some Realtor looking for cheap land. You’re overreacting.”

“This guy was no Realtor.”

“You’ve gotten bored, now you’re out trolling for trouble.”

“I’m not bored, and I’m sure as hell not looking for trouble. Are you going to help me or not?”

“All right. Just to placate you. Simply to dulcify your savage breast.”

Vocabulary building was one of Sugarman’s hobbies, and Thorn was regularly subjected to his latest acquisitions.

Sugar tapped his keyboard. Waited. Tapped some more.

Thorn watched through the window as Molly Bright, the owner of the Hairport, ripped a long strip of adhesive tape off the inner thigh of the high school principal, Dorothy Sherman, a woman of advanced age and surprising hairiness. The speakers were turned off, so Thorn couldn’t hear the exact curse Dorothy screamed, but it was sufficiently colorful to produce hoots from several of the other haircutters and their clients.

“Brazilian wax,” Sugar said. “One of my favorites. Yet another reason to be grateful you’re a man.”

He tapped a few more keys and watched the screen. The computer made a beep and Sugarman squinted and leaned forward. “Jesus. Your instincts are sharp. This was no Realtor.”

“What?”

Sugar swiveled the monitor around so Thorn could see the name blinking in a small square at the bottom of the screen.

Cameron Prince
.

*   *   *

Thorn made it up to Miami in a little more than an hour and took Old Cutler Road through the Gables, then Ingraham Highway into the Grove, moving easily through light traffic, going against the evening flood of cars returning to the suburbs, until finally he rolled up to the address Sugarman had supplied for Cameron Prince.

A block off Tigertail Avenue, five blocks from the bay, the white wood cottage had clapboard siding and a shingle roof. Weeds and roots had pushed aside chunks of the cement walkway, and more weeds were flourishing in the gutters. The few screens remaining on the front porch were torn, and the entire house seemed to slouch several ramshackle degrees to the south as if it were slipping back into the soil from which it had risen almost a century before.

Thorn rolled past the house and parked two doors down and sat for a while considering how to proceed. Months before, he’d mourned the loss of Leslie Levine, even forced himself to go to her memorial service at the Lorelei Bar, her favorite hangout, down in Islamorada. He had a few beers too many, stood up when the tributes were given, made a few clumsy remarks about the shitty childhood Leslie had overcome, and sat back on his barstool and was silent the rest of the night. Afterward he let her loss go as he’d done with so many others in the last few years.

But for these last few weeks it nagged him. The circumstances of her death, the suddenness, the location, out in the cooling canals of the nuclear plant where she was working to restore the endangered croc population.

Most of all it bothered him that she would be killed by a crocodile at all. That last day he’d seen her, he’d witnessed her sure-handed way with those creatures, seen her roping and dragging the crocs to the boat, tagging them, weighing and sexing them, releasing them back into the wild. All done with an effortless, natural ease. That a croc had killed her and dragged away her body didn’t add up.

Then for her partner in the croc-breeding program to appear at Thorn’s house, nosing around, feigning interest in his water tower, then refusing to identify himself, well, damn it, that was too much to ignore.

While Thorn was still mulling over his next step, the front door of the house where Thorn was parked blew open and a white-haired man in a grubby undershirt and purple sweatpants appeared. He glared at Thorn for a moment, then stalked down his walkway, carrying what looked like a shillelagh.

The man marched up to the front of Thorn’s VW Beetle and raised the gnarled club over his head and whacked the hood of the car. Then raised it and whacked again.

Thorn got out and walked to the front of the VW to survey the damage.

“I warned you assholes not to park in front of my house.”

“I’m a new asshole,” Thorn said. “I didn’t get the warning.”

The man peered at Thorn, cocking his head to the side, running his eyes over Thorn’s body, as if evaluating his physique. “You’re not one of them muscle boys? Them goddamn bodybuilders.”

Thorn held out his arms so the man could see he was not a muscle boy.

“Well, okay.” The man lowered his club. “My mistake.”

“You’re referring to Cameron Prince, that house?” Thorn waved at Prince’s dump.

The man huffed his disgust. “Those idiots coming and going all hours, day and night, clanking them barbells and dumbbells and whatnot. Runs an illegal gym out back. Charges these turd brains good money. A dozen times I reported him to the city and the county, code enforcement, police, you name it, but does anybody give a rat’s ass? Hell, no. I’m an old man, a war vet, I got asthma, I got insomnia, bad kidneys, I got herniated disks, pains on top of pains. You name it, I got it. And then him and his muscle boys. Bunch of hair balls, back there banging away. And the cars coming and going, parking right here, blocking my sidewalk, squealing their tires. It ain’t right.”

He raised the club again and took aim at Thorn’s hood, then thought better of it and lowered it to his side. “You’re not one of them, huh?”

“I was coming to see Mr. Prince on a different matter. I’ll be happy to move my car.”

“He ain’t there.” The old man bent down and ran a finger over the fresh dents he’d put in Thorn’s hood, looking mildly pleased at his work. “Ain’t been there for a few weeks. But does that stop the muscle boys from using his illegal gym? No, sir, it don’t. They’re back there twenty-four/seven clanking away with them weights.”