Off the Chart (23 page)

With Vic glaring from the front porch and Marty beside him with his arms crossed over his heavy chest, Anne and Thorn crossed the yard and headed out to the front gate. Thorn half-expected Vic to shoot him in the back or at least for one of them to come running and drag Anne Bonny back. But he was wrong.

The Hell's Conchs seemed to have taken the afternoon off, so Anne and Thorn pushed through the gate and walked briskly to his car and got in. Thorn started it and blew out a breath that he'd been holding for a while.

“Thank you,” he said as he pulled the Beetle onto the overseas highway. “That was damn close.”

“You're welcome,” she said. “Did he hurt you?”

“Maybe a nick,” Thorn said. “And I might have a little trouble peeing for a while. All the sphincters down there are locked shut.”

“Can we go to your place?”

He looked over.

“Don't worry, Thorn, I won't jump you. I'll sleep in the hammock tonight if you don't kick me out before then. I'm thinking of taking the cash and heading off. But I don't know. I guess I just need to take a deep breath, figure out what I'm doing.”

Her electric eyes were fully charged.

“Yeah,” he said. “A deep breath sounds good.”

She looked out the windshield at nothing.

“Listen, Thorn. I need to get this in the open.”

“Okay.”

There was a spatter of his blood on the lap of her khaki shorts. She scratched at it with a nail.

“Do you know anything about my recent history?”

“What do you mean?”

She watched the shops of Islamorada crawl by. The island had recently seceded from Monroe County and was turning into a more upscale version of its former self. Same shops, better facades. Same motels, higher prices.

“After you and I split up,” she said, “I was alone for a long time. I guess I was a little vulnerable, off-balance. Then this man came along.”

Thorn was silent. They were following a gold-and-green motor home from Canada that was towing a color-coordinated SUV. He watched the big vehicle carefully.

“And by the way,” she said, “I'm sorry about how I acted that last night. Walking out like that, no explanation.”

“I assumed it had to do with that story you told about your family. We weren't ready for that.”

He could feel her looking at him, but Thorn was concentrating on the motor home, driving carefully, keeping a safe cushion between him and the Canadian, not sure how good his reflexes were at the moment, the twin wounds in his gut throbbing again, a dull ache growing in his testicles.

“It was the story, yeah,” she said. “But what do you mean, not ready?”

“Too much honesty, too soon.”

“Oh.” Anne went back to her window.

Thorn glanced over and saw a single glistening track on her cheek. He reached out for the hand balled against her tanned thigh and she relaxed the fist and let him hold it for a moment.

“That story I told you,” she said, with her eyes still on the bars and T-shirt shops, tackle stores. “I lied.”

Thorn tugged his hand away to shift gears, then drove on in silence.

“Most of it was the truth,” she said, facing forward. “Ninety percent. Just the ending was a lie. I was trying it out on you, I guess. I wanted to see if I could tell the whole story to someone, tell it how it truly happened. You seemed honest and straight. And I'd heard things about you, how you had plenty of your own secrets, and because of that I didn't think my pitiful story would bother you too much.

“But when I got to the end, I just couldn't do it. So, I lied. That's the reason I left that night, why I wouldn't talk to you again. I was ashamed, Thorn. I poisoned everything, between us, and inside of me. Poisoned it with a fucking lie. Made it worse than it already was.”

The motor home pulled off into a gas station and Thorn pushed the ancient VW up to the speed limit and just beyond. He didn't feel the need to speak. She was doing pretty well without him.

“You want to hear the true ending, Thorn? How it really was that night?”

“Okay.”

“I know it's too late,” she said, “to fix things.”

“Fix what things?”

“I mean telling it straight this late in the game won't do anything. Not really. I don't believe that. Despite what I said to Vic, I think there's some things that won't mend once they're broken. The things that hold people together.”

“I hope you're wrong about that.”

She reset herself in that saggy bucket seat, turning to face him. Her sleeveless blouse was dark blue and printed with yellow
alamanda
blossoms. The top two buttons were undone and the gusts from her open window ballooned the shirt and one dark nipple was briefly exposed.

He directed his eyes back to the road.

“Do you remember that story, Thorn? Is it still clear in your head?”

“Oh, yeah, it's clear,” he said. “Very clear.”

“All the pirate crap was true, the schooner in the yard, the way my mother was crazy and drove the rest of us crazy. My daddy, smalltime drug runner. An ignorant country boy. Everything was accurate, except what happened out on the porch at the end.”

“The shootings.”

“That's right. The shootings.”

She wiped away the damp streak.

“It wasn't Vic who went out the door when the shooting started. It was me. Mother had already shot Sherman, the younger Woodson, and the older brother, Al, had put two bullets into her with his pistol and she was lying there bleeding, still alive, making awful noises. And Dad was there with his hands in the air, trying to bargain with the Woodson boy. His wife dying at his feet and he's telling this redneck that it's all going to work out okay, they'll bury young Sherman and then they'll bury my mother, and no one needed to know the difference. Get right back to business. Saying he was even willing to take a cut in pay to make things right. And then, I guess to seal the deal, he said he knew Al Woodson had his eye on me. Liked the way I was built. And then my daddy said Al had his blessing, anything he wanted to do, take me now, if it suited his fancy.”

“So you shot him. You shot your father.”

“He was a loser. And his stupid petty thievery is what killed my mother, and almost killed the whole lot of us. He was going to give me to that stupid boy like I was some truck stop whore.”

Thorn was silent. Anne looked down at the fists in her lap.

“I blew him through the front window, then shot Al Woodson before he could say a word.”

“And Vic?”

“Cowering inside the whole time. Hiding in our bedroom closet.”

“I see.”

“When I told you the story that night, I gave you the same version Vic and I worked out between us. Making him the hero. Turning him into the one that saved what was left of the family. We drove together all the way to Florida and that's what happened on the trip. I made
up that story and I gave it to him. At first he was dazed and blubbering half the time. So I led him through it step-by-step, planted it in his head. He didn't accept it at first. He kept looking over at me and shaking his head, refusing, refusing, but mile after mile I went over it again, very patient, very slow, every second of what happened in my imaginary version, until by the time we drove into Key Largo, that's what he believed. He was a hero.”

“You also convinced him he was a killer.”

“That wasn't my purpose. I wanted to protect him, make him strong. I needed him when we got down here. We were two kids, runaway teenagers. I needed to count on him. I needed him strong.”

“Well, he's crazy now.”

“Yeah. He's out of control.”

“A little crazy goes a long way.”

They passed through Key Largo, then drove beyond the black area of Hibiscus Park, past the Publix, and on toward Pennekamp Park. Not talking for those three miles. The road less strangled with traffic. Most of the winter people already home. Just some weekenders heading home to Miami and Lauderdale.

“That's three shots,” Thorn said.

“What?”

“Your mother fired once and you fired twice. You said it was a shotgun.”

She looked at him for a couple of moments, mouth tight.

“What, you think I'm still lying?”

“Clarification,” he said. “That's all.”

“Why would I lie? I'm telling you how it was.”

“I didn't say you were lying. I just asked a question.”

She sighed.

“Mossberg AOW, twelve-gauge. It's a three-shot shotgun.”

Thorn kept his eyes forward, but he was seeing that night from her eyes. A teenage girl, her mother dead at her feet, then killing her own father. Trying to imagine how that had forever reshaped the landscape of her heart. How she coped then, how she'd continued to cope over time. Getting a glimpse of the hard woman she'd turned herself into, but still vulnerable. Still parts of her easily wounded.

“You were going to tell me about your recent history. The man you met.”

She looked down the highway, then turned back to him. Her eyes seemed brighter. Relieved of some inner pressure. Finally shattered the flimsy history she'd invented as a child and had been carrying around ever since.

“It's all just a bunch of stories, isn't it?”

“What is?”

“The past,” she said. “Just one lie overlaid on another. That's what we do; we fiddle with the facts, find a better way to tell it. Dress things up, add, subtract to suit our needs, make what we've done more tolerable. Any way you cut it, memories are just one story after another.”

“Stories maybe,” Thorn said. “But somewhere inside, everybody knows what's true about their past. Even Vic.”

“You think so? I'm not so sure.”

“It's in there somewhere. It may be down deep, buried under a lot of muck. He's a coward and a fool and he knows it.”

“If he does, it's under a whole lot of muck,” she said. “A ton of it.”

She drew a breath and let it go.

“I murdered two men,” she said. “And I gave that to Vic. I guess I never admitted that part of it. I was trying to make him strong, but without meaning to, I was also handing off the guilt. Turning him into the fucked-up individual he's become.”

“You did it to survive. You were a kid in a terrible situation.”

“Doesn't let me off the hook.”

“At least it helps explain how he is now. The thing with the knife. Vic's got a lot of proving to do. And you seem to be his number-one audience. Though I'm not sure exactly what I've done to piss him off so bad.”

“You're with me, for one thing.”

“The protective older brother. Comes and has a talk with all her boyfriends, lets us know we're swimming in dangerous waters.”

“That's part of it,” she said.

“And what else?”

“He wants what you've got.”

“My land, you mean. Or my nuts?”

“He wants what you have, Thorn. Something he doesn't have and you do. It enrages him that you're like you are. Not impressed, don't give a shit about his money, his possessions. He doesn't run across that very often and it infuriates him when he does. You're not even particularly afraid of him.”

“I wouldn't go that far.”

“You're in his sights now, Thorn. The crosshairs are on your forehead.”

“I realize that.”

“You don't seem too worried.”

“Oh, I'm worried,” he said. “But at the moment I'm a little more worried about what's happened to a nine-year-old girl.”

“I know Vic took her,” Anne said. “He admitted as much. But I have no idea what he did with her.”

“Square one,” Thorn said.

He drove in silence for a while. The declining sun put the palms along the highway in sharp relief. Birds on the telephone wires were dark silhouettes surveying the endless flow of traffic. The hot wind coming into the car brought that hazy, festering smell of a full-moon low tide, the sulfurous stink of exposed marl and rot of barnacles and shellfish and decomposing seaweed. A lush and sticky breeze that marked the last quick days of spring giving way to the heavy suffocation of summer.

“Well, as long as I'm confessing,” she said.

He looked over and met her eyes.

“You sure you want to hear this, Thorn? It's another tragic story.”

“Ready if you are.”

She began to describe that day in February at the Lorelei when Thorn and Alex and Lawton and Sugarman and his girls had come to lunch. Right after Anne had served them, she'd met a striking young man out on the sunny deck.

Thorn listened to her as he was slowing for the shrub-veiled entrance to his driveway.

“Aw, shit. Now what?”

A Monroe County Sheriff's car was blocking the mouth of the gravel drive, its blue lights spinning. A couple of deputies were loung
ing around, which meant, of course, that there were more inside, doing the real work.

Thorn swerved into the cut-through, gunned across the highway, and stamped the brake and the ancient VW bumped onto the shoulder and slewed through the gravel to within a foot of the left front fender of the cop car.

A few minutes later, when the deputies finally let them pass and they pulled up next to his stilt house and parked, he saw Sheriff Taft down by the dock with the others.

Taft ambled up the sloping yard to meet them. There were half a dozen cars scattered across Thorn's yard—a white van, an ambulance, two cop cars, and a navy blue Crown Victoria.

“I been trying to reach you, Thorn.”

“I must've left my beeper at home.”

Uniformed cops and two slender men in white shirts and dark slacks were milling around down at the water's edge. He supposed the white-shirts might be Mormon missionaries, but more than likely they were FBI. Thorn counted seven people in all before Taft stepped into his line of sight.

He looked at the bloody mess on the front of Thorn's shorts.