Magic City (29 page)

When he finished, the sun was breaking free of the Atlantic, and the Miami sky was rosy and streaked with stripes of darker pink and a few bright golden tendrils that coiled off the edges of the first clouds of the day.

As the morning shift flooded into the office building, Thorn joined them and managed to scoot past security and make his way to the sports desk.

He found the office he was looking for and entered. The secretary behind the desk was sipping coffee and listening to a talk show on the radio. She turned it down and asked Thorn if she could help him.

“Is Mr. Pope in?”

“Mr. Pope is on assignment. A golf tournament. Something I can do?”

“Could you see he gets this?”

Thorn handed her the envelope. Battered and bloodstained, it was stuffed with his own writing and Bingham's uncropped photo and the one he'd displayed in his exhibit. Also there was the top-secret Southwoods document and the Xeroxed pages that included Mr. Pope's own articles about Cassius from the winter of 1964.

“It's not exactly a sports story,” Thorn said. “But there's sports in it. A famous boxing match that happened not ten minutes from where we're standing. And there's murder and treason and some other things I don't fully understand. It might call for a little more digging. And for sure it's going to require some guts to take on the people the story will expose.”

The woman stared at him, and her hand drifted toward her phone as if she meant to summon security.

“I've always admired Mr. Pope's writing. The way he gets straight to the truth. No wasted words, no bullshit. He strikes me as an honest man. This might not be a story he wants to write himself, but if he doesn't, I know he'll pass it on to the right person.”

The woman's hand drew back from the phone.

“Is there a number where you can be reached?”

“Not really,” Thorn said. “I'm more of a pay-phone kind of a guy.”

She smiled uncertainly and he smiled back and left the office. He walked outside to his car, started the old wreck, and headed off. At this time of the morning it would take an hour and a half to work his way through the traffic back home to Key Largo.

He planned to spend the rest of the day sitting on his dock, staring at the sky. Maybe later on in the afternoon, if the spirit moved him, he'd tie a bonefish fly or two, then take the skiff out and test them on the flats. See if the old magic was still there.