Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) (9 page)

As Nicole sped east on the surface roads, Sheffield watched the neighborhoods fly past. Then they hit the long, empty entrance corridor to the nuke plant, the first guardhouse coming up. Layer one of security. Cameras everywhere, a couple of guys in khakis, shiny holsters with automatics, milling around the heavy steel barrier.

“Rent-a-cops,” Frank said.

“They get special training, nuke stuff. The NRC supervises them.”

“Still rent-a-cops.”

“You’re going to love the head of security. Real sweetheart.”

“That’s who we’re meeting?”

“Yup.”

Sheffield glanced down at the front of his shirt. “You should’ve told me, McIvey. I look unprofessional.”

“Would you have listened if I had?”

She stopped at the gate, lowered her window, held out her badge to the stocky guy manning the post. He stooped down, checked out Nicole, then looked across her at Frank, at his hula-girls shirt.

“He’s with me,” Nicole said. “FBI.”

Frank flipped out his ID, leaned across to show it.

The guard grunted, spoke into his handheld, and a moment later got a scratchy answer. He stepped away from the car, reached into the guardhouse to raise the steel bar, then waved them through.

Ten minutes later, after two more guardhouses, they were inside the plant’s three-story office building. Escorted by another security guy, Nicole led the way down the gleaming hallway, Sheffield keeping his eyes forward in a businesslike manner.

Coming finally to the security office, Nicole stopped, let their escort go ahead through the door while she turned to Frank.

“His name is Claude Sellers,” she said quietly. “But everyone calls him shithead.”

TEN

BEFORE HE LEFT THE BEACH,
Thorn buried the pry bar in the sand near the base of a gumbo-limbo. He brushed the sand over the spot and brushed it some more. He didn’t want to go walking into the unknown with a chunk of badass steel in his hand, make the wrong impression.

He found a narrow break in the snarl of branches and headed up a sandy path that meandered through poisonwood trees and strangler figs and silver buttonwoods, the ground littered with chunks of limestone and jutting roots. High in the tamarind branches, a canopy of cobwebs and morning-glory vines was lit by the angled sunlight, and the dense smell of sulfurous fumes rose from the marine muds where dead plants and flecks of animal matter were decomposing.

Only five miles of calm waters separated this island from the mainland. Over there the land was jammed with the usual outlet malls, strip shopping centers, and franchise joints, and an endless maze of highways and turnpikes and avenues. Though Prince Key was so close by, this tangle of tamarind and capers and cabbage palm and this rocky pathway seemed marooned in another warp of geologic time. As harsh and brutish as the terrain was, to Thorn this was the only Florida that mattered, the landscape that kept his heart in tune, that hummed in his marrow. Lose these last few pockets of magic native land, and the game was over. Thorn might as well buy a golf cart and a chartreuse leisure suit, mix a pitcher of manhattans, and call it a day.

Branches snagged his shirtsleeves, scratched his skin, stabbed him below the belt. He ducked below a limb and glimpsed an open stretch to his left. Moving that way, he saw the glitter of metal and pushed through a last screen of acacia and stepped into a wide field, maybe three acres, grassy and treeless, open to the sun.

A solar panel the size of a picnic table was tilted up to catch the morning light. Beyond the panel was a twenty-foot wooden wall surrounded by a sandy pit, and a set of monkey bars. Nearby was a tall, wooden frame with a twenty-foot hawser hanging from the crossbeam, a heavy rope meant for climbing.

As he came closer to the primitive obstacle course, Thorn saw a dozen old automobile tires laid out in a hopscotch pattern, identical to the one for the footwork drills Thorn had run in his brief high school football career. There was a chinning bar, and a half dozen structures made of rough-hewn logs that seemed designed to torture various muscle groups.

He stood for a moment, taking it in, until he heard a groan coming from beyond the high climbing wall studded with handholds. He angled across the grassy meadow toward the noise. His clothes sopping, his shoes full of mush.

Behind the wall he found two men, shirtless, wearing only white gym shorts and flimsy tennis shoes. Each one stood atop a narrow balance beam that ran parallel to the other beam about two feet away. At the midpoint on each beam, the two were crouched, facing each other. They gripped wooden staffs slightly longer than baseball bats with boxing gloves lashed to both ends.

Jousting with the wood bats, striking and blocking and parrying thrusts, the men grunted and cursed. No protective headgear, no padding on their bodies. One of the men was clearly getting the better of the other. He was quicker and more aggressive and his strikes came in bursts of threes and fours, while the other man, slender and sandy-haired, seemed in pure defensive mode, blocking most of the thrusts, managing only an occasional counterpunch.

Stepping closer, he saw the young man’s face.

Flynn Moss.

No longer skinny, the kid had added a layer of muscle in the year since Thorn had last seen him.

The other guy was cut from coarser stuff. Two puncture wounds for eyes, a heavy nose, and a thug’s mouth with a belligerent jut of jaw. Rooted to the beam, whacking Thorn’s son, the guy was as pitiless and composed as a journeyman boxer taking out a lifetime of frustration, blow by blow, on his latest patsy.

Thorn kept his distance, circling the men, trying not to distract the eye of Flynn Moss, who seemed with every blow he took to be about to tumble backward off the beam and fall the seven or eight feet to the sand pit below.

For a minute or two he watched them club and batter and block, sweating heavily though neither seemed winded by their combat training.

Finally Thorn’s presence caught the attention of the other man, and he lowered his staff and gave this trespasser his full attention. When Flynn followed the other man’s gaze, Thorn raised his hand in a silent salute.

The man took that opening to ram the butt of his club into Flynn’s stomach, bending him double. Gagging, the kid somehow kept his balance and slashed his own stick in response, but the tough guy batted it away with a smile and stepped across from his beam to Flynn’s, a move that must have signified an end to their workout, since Flynn relaxed his grip and lowered his own club.

“Aw, shit,” Flynn said. “What the hell’re you doing here?”

But the man wasn’t done. With Flynn turned away, the guy lined up, cocked his bat, and nailed Flynn between his shoulder blades, sending him sprawling in a long, ungainly flop into the sand.

The man jumped off the beam, landing behind Flynn, and watched the young man struggle to sit up. Edging forward to Flynn’s backside, the man choked up on his club and drew it to his shoulder, aiming for the right side of Flynn’s head.

Thorn covered the ten yards at full tilt and reached the sandpit as the bludgeon was starting its downward flight. He grabbed it high and wrenched it to a halt and found the man’s grip was solidly fixed, so Thorn dug in his feet and pivoted, throwing out his hip to catch the guy on his backward stumble. Thorn’s hip jolted against the man’s thigh, a primitive judo move, a half step up from the schoolyard.

But it was enough.

Grunting, the man went down hard, slammed his shoulder in the sand, and tried to use the momentum of his fall to duck and roll back to his feet, but Thorn was waiting as he struggled to stand, the club in Thorn’s hands now.

He set himself, leaned into the blow, ramming the guy in the gut exactly as the man had rammed Flynn, then thrusting into the guy’s diaphragm. Knocking a long, wet cough out of him and sending him blundering backward into the sand.

He sat there trying to breathe. Staring up at Thorn while an ugly smile quivered on his lips, coming and going like a bad habit he was trying to break.

When he managed to speak, a teaspoon of sand was in his throat. “You just fucked up, sport. Nobody ambushes Wally.”

Wally jimmied himself upright, groaning as he straightened.

Thorn made him for late twenties. Robust with red cheeks and a fiery gaze, but sickly around the edges. His facial skin had the oily sheen of wax paper as though he’d survived a pot of scalding coffee poured into his crib. He was about Thorn’s height with wide shoulders and a barrel chest and thickened waistline and legs that were rooster thin.

“You know this guy?” he said to Flynn, edging closer to Thorn.

Thorn pitched the fighting club aside and squared off to Wally’s approach. Wally cleared the sand from his throat.

“His name is Thorn.”

“What the fuck is he doing here? You can’t just walk in here.”

Thorn was watching Wally inch forward.

“You ex-military?”

Thorn shook his head.

“SEAL, Ranger, Black Ops?”

“I’m nobody.”

“Somebody schooled you on those moves.”

“Nobody schooled me on anything.”

“Is he lying?” Wally asked Flynn

“I don’t think so. I don’t know that much about him.” Flynn was brushing the sand off his bare skin. “I just met him a couple of times. He knocked up my mother when she was a teenager.”

“Last time I checked, that makes him your old man.”

Both of them were studying Thorn as if he were an exotic creature who’d wandered out of the mist.

“If that saying holds true,” Wally said, “‘like father, like son,’ then we just doubled our pussy population.”

“Take a hike, Wally,” Thorn said. “I want to talk to the kid.”

Thorn held Wally’s gaze, his body poised, ready to go the full fifteen rounds if that’s how Wally wanted it.

The smile on Wally’s lips fast-twitched like a loose connection. He looked at Flynn and said, “I’m getting Prince. Doesn’t matter if he’s your old man or not, he can’t be here.”

Wally gave Thorn a weapons-grade glare that was meant to make his knees knock. It didn’t work.

Wally turned and walked to the chinning bar and retrieved a camouflage T-shirt that hung across it. Without a backward glance, he trudged off toward a tan barracks tent that was riffling in the sea breeze.

When Wally was out of earshot, Thorn stepped over to his son. “Are you okay?”

“Why the hell are you here?”

“Long story.”

“You need to get out of here right now. I’m serious. This is a major fuckup, Thorn. Prince is going to freak.”

“Why?”

“Just go, goddamn it. Leave the way you came. Do it now.”

Thorn glanced across the field, watched Wally pull back the flap and step inside the tent. “Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

“Jesus, I don’t believe this. You just walked right in.”

“And I’m not walking out till I find out what’s what.”

Flynn brushed a rough hand against Thorn’s arm as if to confirm his reality. Then cursed to himself and stepped away, his face flushed. He glanced around the open field and motioned for Thorn to follow.

He led Thorn to the shade of a mahogany that towered over the mangroves on the eastern shore of the key. There was a single rough-hewn bench long enough for three. Flynn settled on one end.

Thorn took the other and kicked off his soggy shoes and faced them toward the sun. “Look, I’m sorry you’re upset. I came to see Prince. I had no idea you were here.”

“You know Cameron?”

“Met him once.”

“What do you want with him?”

“Another long story.” Thorn was looking back across the field, past the obstacle course, beyond the solar panel, to the entrance flap of the barracks tent maybe a hundred yards away. A man stood there, holding the flap open. A big guy, thick-chested, tall with pale-yellow hair. Cameron Prince stared in their direction for several moments, then drew back inside. “Talk to me, Son.”

“Don’t fucking call me that.” Flynn stared off at the morning sky. Then he looked at Thorn, shook his head, and looked off again. “Okay, stick with that story. You came to see Prince and had no idea I was here.”

“It’s not a story.”

“Christ, Thorn. Are you dense? This is a dangerous situation. You’ve walked into something, it’s way over your head.”

“Over mine, but not over yours?”

“Jesus H. Christ. I can’t believe this.”

“What’s so dangerous?”

Flynn turned his head slowly and glanced over his shoulder, checking to his left, then right. Behind him there was only the blue blaze of the Atlantic visible through the snarl of mangrove branches and roots. No one was in the field, no one anywhere around. “You came in your boat, right?”

“I did.”

“Where is it?”

“In the cove.” Thorn nodded toward the hidden beach.

“Good. You need to get on it right now and leave. I’m serious. Right now before they can stop you.” Flynn’s eyes were searching the field.

“The boat’s disabled. The prop is fouled.”

Flynn closed his eyes for a second, then opened them, frowning. “You ran into the net? You didn’t see it?”

“I didn’t see it.”

“How bad?”

“Engine’s damaged. It won’t start.”

“Shit. A guy like you, you didn’t notice the net?”

“A guy like me?”

“Experienced boater.”

“I should have noticed, yeah.”

“Damn right you should have.”

“I saw some kayaks. I could paddle home, get some tools, come back, and fix the engine.”

“The kayaks are locked up. No one leaves without Prince’s say-so.”

“What? You’re a captive?”

“Oh, I’m here by choice.” But Flynn’s tone wasn’t as certain as the words. He stared at the sandy soil, shaking his head with an air of futility.

“Look, Flynn. I called your phone yesterday, heard the message on your machine. You said you’re doing something you’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Is this it? Being here? With these guys, Prince and Wally?”

Lifting his eyes and gazing at the distant tent, Flynn said, “I committed myself to a cause, Thorn. You have any idea what that is? A righteous cause.”

“I’ve heard of them.”