The Big Finish (9 page)

“Tina’s fine,” Cruz said. “Don’t worry about her.”

Sugar rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth as if to smooth away the hurt that was showing there.

“Where is she?” Sugar’s voice was tightly controlled, eyes hot.

“Tina was questioned by my associates, she’s agreed to cooperate with their investigation, now she’s headed back home to Key Largo.”

“Driven there by Homeland Security agents,” Sugar said.

“That’s right.”

“I tried calling her, but there’s no answer.”

“Try again, she’s probably home by now.”

Sugar dug his phone out of his front pocket. He went to the corner of the room, made the call, must’ve gotten her voicemail. He left a message that he would talk to her tomorrow, speaking in a soft voice, consoling, but with an edge of urgency.

When he was done, Sugar said, “How you getting to Carolina without a car? Hitchhike?”

“We’ll manage,” Cruz said.

Sugar faced Thorn, peering into his eyes, trying to determine if this was legit or being done under duress. One last chance.

“Come outside,” Thorn said.

“Wait a minute,” Cruz said. “What’re you doing?”

“I’m having a private conversation with my friend.”

She gave him a warning look. Thorn put his arm around Sugar’s shoulder and steered him to the door and led him out into the dark parking lot.

“All right, old buddy. What the hell is going on?”

“Do you trust that woman?” Thorn said.

“Does a bear shit in the Vatican?”

“Yeah, well, neither do I.”

“Okay, so let’s get our luggage and go.”

“I can’t do that. I need to stick with her. For Flynn’s sake.”

“And me?”

“And you need to go find Tina.”

“Tina wouldn’t mess with guns or any of this bullshit. I know her better than that.”

“So go track her down, make sure she’s okay. I’m staying with Cruz. I’ll call your cell tomorrow. It’s going to be all right.”

“Is it?”

Sugar searched Thorn’s eyes, saw his resolve, and responded with a grim smile. They’d danced these steps before. The push/pull of a prickly loner and his bighearted buddy. How many rebuffs had there been? How many more could their friendship endure?

“You might as well get started,” Thorn said.

Sugar blew out a breath and took a half step back.

“That’s what you want? You don’t want to sleep on it?”

“Good luck with your job interview.”

“Yeah,” Sugar said. “I’ll knock ’em dead.”

They went back into the motel room. Sugar got his bag, didn’t look at Cruz, didn’t bother with Thorn either. He carried his bag out to the car, pitched it in the backseat. Through the open drapes Thorn watched him back out of the slot and drive off into the darkness. Standing there Thorn felt as hollowed out and useless as a sloughed-off cicada skin clinging to a branch.

“Good work,” Cruz said.

“That was all bullshit, the Homeland Security stuff, Tina agreeing to cooperate. What’s really going on?”

“When we get to Pine Haven, it’ll all be clear.”

“And those shotguns?”

“There’s a high likelihood we’ll be needing them.”

Thorn moved past her and walked into her room. He went to the bed, where the duffel was laying beside her suitcase. He unzipped it and hauled out one of the AA-12 shotguns and turned to her, holding its serious weight in both hands.

“Okay,” he said. “Show me how to work the goddamn thing.”

NINE

THORN LAY ON THE MOTEL
bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling. He played back every second he could recall of his brief time around Flynn Moss. From the first moment he saw him on the set of a television show Flynn was starring in, to the night when Flynn embraced Thorn, told him good-bye, and drove off with his radical friends. Then he played it back again. This might be all he’d have of the kid, these aching memories, so he worked to retrieve each second, stash them in some long-term storage file. He worked through each recollection and worked again until his weariness began to mix and blur the images together and the exercise grew too agonizing to continue.

At one
A.M
. Thorn got up and took a shower and dressed in fresh clothes. He moved to the adjoining doors that stood open and listened to Cruz’s fluttery snuffle, then he slipped out his door and walked across the parking lot toward the fast food joint. Its outside signs were dark, and inside there was only a faint glow where a young man was mopping up.

He walked beyond the hamburger place out to the two-lane and headed back toward the ramps onto I-95. He would hitch rides, head north, catch a bus if he had to, get to Pine Haven any way he could. Take as long as he needed. Do this alone. He didn’t trust Cruz. There were too many slippery places in her story. Her voice quivered and her eyes wandered. She swallowed too often as she was speaking of her daughter, Carmen. She was lying. He wasn’t sure how much of what she’d said was a lie, but some of it, maybe all.

He’d do this on his own. When he arrived in Pine Haven, he’d parade up and down Main Street announcing his arrival, whatever it took to lure Flynn out of hiding, then whisk him away to safety in the Keys.

It was a crazy idea. No idea at all. But he continued to walk.

He walked beneath the underpass, a mile from the motel, then another, moving beyond the buzz and flicker of gas stations and all-night convenience stores into the darkness. Past a state park, Twelve Mile Swamp Conservation Area, and caught a cool breeze scented with ferns and pines and cypress.

Forget the interstate. He’d hitchhike the back roads. Or hell, he’d walk every step of the way to Carolina if he had to. He had nothing better to do, nothing of consequence. He could send Sugarman postcards from the road.

He was exhausted and felt old. He felt beyond old. A paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, or however the hell it went. He remembered the other phrase, the quotable one from that high school poem, the “mackerel-crowded seas,” an image for the overflowing, ridiculous energy of youth, the irresistible drive and vigor, the flailing excitement, the way young people threw themselves forward, churning up the waters, high on the potency of their dreams and convictions and passionate about their ideals, a level of intensity that had also driven Thorn twenty years ago, thirty, a steadfast belief that justice must be served even if violence was necessary, and a conviction that it was also his sacred duty to assemble a moral code and live by it strictly, at least until some savage impulse tempted him to break loose from everything he’d worked so hard to build.

And that, he saw, had been his son’s pattern as well, cycling between self-discipline and impulse. Flynn was a wild spirit, robust, a reckless live wire spewing sparks who’d learned to hold all that crazy energy in check, trained himself to master the tricky craft of acting, then just as his career was gaining shape and substance, he chucked all that and threw himself into the shadowy world of insurgency with equal fervor.

Along the shoulder of a road whose name he didn’t know, he walked through a darkness as complete as any he could recall. Walked for another half hour until he saw ahead in the distance the golden radiance of some outpost, a town or a trailer park, or commercial gathering place. He halted in the quiet dark, listening to his pulse tick away the seconds, looking at the glow of the far-off lights.

He stared down at the earth beneath his feet, inhaled the night air of north Florida, a different scent than the sea-blown breezes he was used to. Here, well inland, the air was raw and edgy, seasoned by landlocked forests and stagnant marshes and the harsh industry of woodland creatures.

All the years, all his passions, all the loves that had come and gone had led to this empty stretch of asphalt. At that moment he could think of nothing he’d done with the heft or significance to match all that he had not done or done poorly. In all his reckless abandon, his high-minded quests, what justice had he brought to the world compared to the hurt and devastation he’d left in his wake? His own heedless behavior had corrupted his only son, sent Flynn off on a self-destructive path, a do-gooding quest that led inevitably to violence and injury and possibly death. Thorn’s fault. All of it.

Behind him he heard a car and he turned and watched the headlights approach. When the car lights shined on him, he lifted his arm, thumb out. High beams in his eyes.

The car slowed and pulled abreast, a radio playing loud. Two teenage boys leaning over to inspect him.

“Where you headed?” the passenger said. A thick-necked kid with spiky hair, his voice slurred by drink.

“Nowhere,” Thorn said.

“Nowhere?”

“That’s right.”

“Hell, buddy, you don’t need a ride. You’re already there.”

The driver laughed and gunned the engine.

“Get in,” the driver said. “We’ll take you far as we’re going.”

Thorn looked ahead at the empty road and back the way he’d come.

“No, thanks,” he said. “I’ve changed my mind.”

The boy in the passenger seat stared at Thorn for moment, decided he’d been insulted, and reached back into the car and slung a half-empty beer can. It bounced off Thorn’s chest. The wheels threw up a hail of pebbles and the car squealed up the highway. Thorn watched until its taillights disappeared.

By the time he made it to the motel parking lot, he was worn out, heavy-footed, finally ready for sleep. But heading across the parking lot he caught an odd shimmer inside the burger joint. When he steered that way for a better look, he saw the flicker and lash of flames spiraling from the kitchen.

Thorn trotted over, first on the scene.

The black kid who’d been mopping the floors was spread-eagled facedown on the floor near the front doors. He was a teenager, skinny. Dark fumes poured from the kitchen. Flames were twisting around the passageway between the galley and the serving counter, and the plastic menu signs with garish images of burgers and fries were melting, spattering molten beads of color onto the floor where more flames lashed up and over the counter, taking the napkin holders and the straw dispenser, reaching out for everything they could touch and consume.

Thorn shook the handle, locked and searing to the touch.

The kid was probably overcome by smoke. His body seemed shriveled inside the restaurant uniform. Thorn pivoted away, searched the area for a battering ram and saw a nearby trash bin made of galvanized wire mesh.

Thorn pushed it over, knocked off its domed top, and dumped out a day’s worth of food sacks and paper cups and diapers, rolled the bulky can down the sidewalk to the front window.

From the kitchen came a flash then a concussion that rattled the windows. The deep-fat fryers had exploded or some other accelerant had supplied the fire a new rush of fuel, and a ball of flame appeared at the passageway, a seething mass like some Greek serpent, an orange hydra’s head with coils and loops of flame sprouting in every direction. The kid was vanishing inside the smoky haze.

Heaving the trash bin onto his shoulder, maybe thirty or forty pounds of unwieldy weight, Thorn took two steps forward and crashed the base of the container against the widest, seemingly most vulnerable sheet of glass.

A spiderweb of fractures radiated from the dent, but the windowpane didn’t give way. He targeted the same spot and slammed the base against the glass. Slammed it again. The blossom of cracks spread wider and the glass flexed more at every blow.

As Thorn hammered, the glass beginning to sway and weaken. Behind the boy’s body, the fire had burrowed under the fixed tables and chairs and was consuming them. The boy’s mop was ablaze. A shallow layer of fire spread across the tile floor like smoldering surf washing up the shore toward his feet.

Thorn continued to bash the glass wall, breaking a finger-size opening, then a larger one, continuing while a mass of fire edged closer to the boy.

Thorn stepped away, moved several paces back, and took a running start, throwing the trash bin at the glass, then slammed his shoulder against the center of the web of cracks. That did it. The glass gave way, and a solid sheet of it dropped like guillotine blade and exploded on the sidewalk at Thorn’s feet.

Inside the restaurant the whooshing intake of air sent the fire rising higher, blew it into the ceiling, setting off small explosions and bursts of sparks. Thorn stepped over the ledge and grabbed the shoulder of the boy’s uniform and lifted him up and over the ragged teeth of glass still clinging to the window seams.

The boy’s shoes were melted to a black goo. One of them fell away, exposing the charred flesh of his foot as Thorn dragged his body beyond the swell of heat and smoke to a grassy plot beside a concrete picnic table and a flagpole. There was a siren somewhere, there were screams. They might have been there all along, people rushing toward them while Thorn lay the boy out on his back and cocked his head back at the proper angle and applied his lips to the boy’s lips and tried to breathe into him.

But the boy’s mouth was packed with something. Thorn pried his jaws open and scooped his fingers inside the kid’s mouth and flung away a gob of goo. He dug inside the mouth again, found another handful of the pinkish paste. He scraped it out as best he could and scoured his cheeks for more.

When he had the airway as clear as he could manage, he pressed his lips to the boy’s again, tasting a sour reek, and the acrid tang of ash, but staying with it, counting in the steady fashion he’d been taught, finding the rhythm, pressing the boy’s chest, breathing into him again and again for long, hopeless minutes until someone pulled him off the boy, a man in a blue jumpsuit, a man who hauled Thorn away from the dead child and the ruined hamburger joint, dragged him into the darkness of the parking lot.

An hour later, maybe more, when Deputy Sheriff David Randolph was finished questioning him, Madeline Cruz walked Thorn back to the motel.

“I close my eyes for a minute and you go all heroic.”

“Not heroic,” Thorn said. “The kid died.”

“All the same.”

As she unlocked the door, Thorn looked back at the smoldering remnants, crime scene tape fluttering in the wake of the departing ambulance.