Magic City (5 page)

Lying beside Alexandra all night, Thorn dreamed of naked flesh, sleek torsos, fingers tracing across his skin, several persons attending to him, an orgy held in his honor, a dream that seemed to last for hours with bodies coiling like oily snakes around his own, his erection holding firm so long it began to ache. Such a vivid dream, it might have lasted only seconds but seemed to stretch back into the long hours of the night.

He was still lost in the erotic swoon when he felt Alexandra's long limbs raking across him, her arms and legs, thin yet strong from years of karate training and wind sprints across the soft dunes of Key Biscayne. Gymnast's calves and the long, smooth arm muscles of a distance swimmer.

Groggy, submerged in the ocean depths of slumber, Thorn registered her climbing atop, settling skin to skin, pressing flush against his contours. He opened his eyes, saw her smiling down. Then came a faint shifting and realigning until he was fully within her. Alexandra's glossy black hair fell forward and curtained his face. There was a wry twist in her smile, as if she'd seen into his dreaming mind and was pushing aside the others and claiming what was rightfully hers.

An April dawn in Alexandra's bedroom with gray light swimming beyond her lace curtains. Outside the open window a gardenia hedge flowered, its perfume thickening the air.

No kissing. Speechless. As though this were an encounter between unknowns. A woman and a man in an anonymous bed. Some wordless song passing back and forth between their lips. The rasp of her skin against his. Her face nuzzled against his neck, the smell of her sweat, acrid and citrus. With his fingertips he sketched the knobs of her spine. Inside her, heated but not moving. Holding it there, that fit, that merge of tissue and moistness.

On the bureau across the room, an oscillating fan hummed and sent its periodic breeze. Her breath stirred the hair on his neck.

Her right hand cupped his neck from behind. He turned his face and touched the tip of his tongue to her wrist, licked at the dark wisps of hair. Tasted more of her salt. But some message her loins transmitted kept him contained, not even permitting a mild thrust. The two of them holding that tight grip. Their hips immobilized by some signal rising from their core.

She worked her other hand into the small of his back, touching a knob in his lumbar region. Just there. Pressing it with her fingertips. Top of spine, base of spine, making some electrical connection. Alexandra, the conduit.

And Thorn had a male vision. A dead bolt gliding into its slot. Swiss precision. Twin pieces coming together in finely engineered connection. A fit so flawlessly calibrated, no oil was required for its slide. An effortless mesh. A lock with two halves joined. Him and her, with a rising pressure now in her hands, one on the base of his neck, the other just above his rump, gripping, cradling, the heels of her hands digging in. He could feel her nipples prod his own. The smallest writhing worked through their hips. His or hers. He was lost now. Not there. Fused. Loins dissolved.

Then after an interminable moment, she flinched. Her haunches quivered; a rumble rose between them. Some forewarning below the crust of the earth. An ancient growl of awakening geologic plates.

And a final surprise: with no warning, there was a mutual gasp. A massive letting go of air and fluids, spasms of sphincters, gripping so hard that there surely would be blue and yellow finger bruises later, and then constriction. Painful, burning. And with a groan, Alex heaved herself up and rolled away onto the white sheets.

Breathless and panting, both of them. Something like laughter rolling up, a cough of breath, an astonished cheer.

The cardinal that had nested in a poinciana tree just beyond the gardenia bush sang for them. Riddling the silence, overfilling it with a lush melody, its one simple song. A bird in the delicate light, a stirring breeze. His heart was slowing, gravity returning to reclaim him.

When words were possible, Thorn said, “What the hell was that?”

She took several seconds before answering.

“I don't know.”

“Where'd you learn it?”

“Here,” she said. “We learned it together, in case you didn't notice.”

“Something Oriental? Chakras, all that?”

“Is a name required?”

Thorn's right hand was resting on her thigh. Damp flesh still warm, still beating with blood.

“All right,” he said. “Nameless it shall remain.”

Alex rolled onto her side, resting her head in the shallow of his shoulder.

“Will it hold you for the week I'm gone?”

“A week? Hell, I may never need sex again.”

“Oh, God, it wasn't that good.”

“Close,” he said. “Damn close.”

“The female gender would be losing an important natural resource.”

“I'm not interested in the female gender. I only have eyes for you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It's true.”

“For the moment maybe. Don't fool yourself, Thorn. Lifetime habits don't go away so easily.”

Thorn was trying to recall a line of poetry he'd known once, something from John Donne about romantic constancy. But it wouldn't come up from the foggy back roads of memory.

“I hear Dad. We should get up.”

“Your hearing's better than mine.”

“He's in the kitchen, pouring milk into his cereal, talking to Buck.”

She untangled from his arms and sat up.

“I'm glad you're doing this search-and-rescue stuff,” he said. “This'll be good. A new direction. More upbeat. Not the same old thing year after year.”

“It's fun, yeah, but there's stuff I'll miss.”

“Crime scenes?”

“Believe it or not. The homicide guys, the other techs. Change isn't easy. You know how that is. You're pretty fond of your routines.”

“Lately I've been feeling open to new possibilities. As a matter of fact, I've been feeling very open.”

“Meaning what?”

“Oh, I don't know. Something more than a night now and then. You and me and a gardenia bush outside.”

“Don't be stupid, Thorn. That's the sex talking. Your brain is addled. You couldn't give up the Keys. You've spent too many years up in that tree house, staring at sunsets, to ever walk away.”

“I didn't say ‘walk away.' But some arrangement we can be together more. I've been thinking about it. It could work, if we want it to.”

They were quiet for a while, the cardinal asserting its territorial claim. On the window screen a lizard climbed halfway up and puffed out the red disk in its throat and did five or six jerky push-ups as if stimulated by the erotic after-glow radiating from the room.

“You don't have to go through with this, you know. Dad can sleep over at Harbor House. He's done it before.”

“You're dodging the issue.”

“Yeah, I am,” she said. “But in a couple of hours I'm hopping on a plane and leaving for a week. A subject like this, we need time to discuss, don't you think?”

Thorn shrugged a yes.

“So, I'm serious. Dad can sleep over at Harbor House. You don't really need to do this.”

“You want to back out. You don't trust me.”

“I didn't say that.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “My track record has been spotty. But any scrapes your dad and I got into, we lived to tell the tale.”

“Barely.” She snuggled deeper against him.

The aura of their sexual moment was dissolving, but still Thorn sensed that the charged particles that passed between them had changed the nature of their bond. He wasn't exactly sure how. For the better, he believed. But then again, every new high-water mark was a challenge to the future. The glow of the past always a rival to what followed.

He pushed away the misgiving and listened to a mockingbird who'd replaced the cardinal just beyond the window. Usurping its branch and its song—a cheaper version, repeating its melody four times, pausing, then going on from cardinal to blue jay to catbird, unspooling its repertoire, feeble simulations of the originals.

 

“Something's not right across the street. Alan should be in class by now. But his car is still parked where it was last night.”

In blue-and-white-striped pajamas, Lawton Collins was leaning forward across the breakfast table, peering out the side window and over a pink hibiscus hedge toward the green house across the street. Buck's tail thumped at their appearance. The dog took a quick look at Alex, and when she gave no command, Buck resumed his watch with Lawton out the window.

A year ago when the yellow Lab first wandered out of the woods near Thorn's house, Lawton claimed naming rights. For the first few months, the dog was called Lawton. But Alexandra finally talked her father out of the name. Too much confusion with two Lawtons around the house. After a week of protest, Lawton relented and decided the dog would now be known as Buck. It was the name of Lawton's partner for twenty years on the Miami Police Department, Buck Gomez, recently deceased. A tribute to the man who'd covered Lawton's back for two decades. So Buck it was.

Alexandra sliced up a cantaloupe and handed Thorn a plate with five slivers, a soy sausage patty from the toaster, and a piece of whole wheat toast.

“Finish your breakfast, Dad. We're on a tight schedule this morning.”

“Nobody listens to me,” Lawton said. “I'm just some old fool. A moldy boot in the back of the closet. A wad of greasy hair clogging the drain.”

Thorn and Alexandra exchanged a look. More and more lately her father had been breaking into these bleak rhapsodies. Haiku of woe.

“You're not a fool,” Alex said.

“Some bad shit is going down at Alan's house.”

“No, it's not, Dad. Everything's fine.”

“I'm imagining things, that's what you're saying.”

“I think there might be a little imagination involved, yes.”

“Buck woke me up last night,” he said. “He heard it and alerted me.”

“Heard what?”

“Ask Buck. I'm halfway to deaf myself.”

Buck turned away from the window and went over to his green mat and curled up, keeping an eye on Alexandra. Since he'd first appeared a year ago, the dog had made remarkable progress. Going from a starving, feral creature to a supersensitive member of Alexandra's household. An avid student, so thirsty for knowledge it was scary.

Sit, stay, come here, shake hands. That was Thorn's meager list of dog commands. Buck had graduated far beyond his abilities. For the past several months Alex had pushed him to new levels. These days Buck responded to dozens of one- and two-word commands, as well as hand signals. He could run the agility course head-to-head with the smaller, nimbler breeds, track a scent in the air or on the ground through woods or suburban environments, and locate well-hidden targets.

“That guy,” Lawton said, “Alan Bingham, he could've been my son-in-law, but no, you get all swoony over this loser.” He jerked his chin at Thorn.

“Dad,” Alex said. “You love Thorn.”

“This bum? Are you kidding? He doesn't even have a job. Unless you call tying fishing lures work. What do you make, kid, a buck-fifty apiece for those things? How you gonna get ahead, support my daughter in the style she's accustomed? A buck-fifty, Christ, you can't buy a gallon of piss for a buck-fifty. How you going to pay the mortgage, now tell me that?”

“Good question.” Thorn was trying to smile his way past the moment, but Lawton was rolling full speed.

“Now, you take Alan. There's a guy with unlimited possibilities. University prof, big-time photographer, about to take his art show to New York, D.C., going on tour all around. My daughter's a photographer, too, in case you didn't know, for the Miami police. Full benefits, a retirement plan, the works. You got anything like that, kid? You got any benefits?”

“Not a one. But I have a few drawbacks.”

“Now the guy's smart-assing me. In my own home.”

“This is my home, Dad.” Alex used her quiet but don't-push-it tone. “Now, stop this.”

“Alan and Alexandra, that had a nice ring, but, no, my knucklehead daughter goes gaga over some derelict from the Keys, when right across the street she's got Prince Charming.”

“Ignore him, Thorn.”

“I'm trying.”

She got up and took her plate to the sink.

“Alan and Alex were picking a date, writing their vows, all of a sudden this poltroon comes along. Thorn. What the hell kind of name is that, anyway? Your parents never bother to give you a whole name? What's the deal?”

“My parents died before they got around to it.”

It was true enough, but it sounded needlessly harsh at that moment. Alex gave him a questioning look, and Thorn raised an open hand in apology.

“Okay, Dad. The Harbor House van is coming in fifteen minutes. Have you shaved yet? Are you planning on wearing your pajamas today?”

“What's the difference? All those feebleminded buffalo parked in their wheelchairs, slumped over, drooling. I can run around that place naked, nobody notices.”

Thorn listened to the hum of traffic. Seven-thirty in the morning and already the noise was wafting in from Red Road and surrounding highways. Overnight the buzz of the city seemed to have taken root in his bones, creating a grating resonance. The sirens, car alarms, barking dogs, motorcycles roaring on nearby streets, the screech of brakes. A ceaseless turbulence on the airwaves, the ragged hustling pulse of Miami.

From decades of living along the coastline of the Florida Keys, with the heave and swell of ocean breezes flushing away every unnatural noise and buffered by thick stands of mahogany, gumbo limbo, and Florida holly, Thorn had developed the hypersensitive antennae of the recluse. Touchy, thin-skinned. On perpetual alert for that off-key crunch of gravel or growl of motor that warned of approaching human contact.

Miami and the Keys were only fifty miles apart, but they occupied opposite ends of the galaxy. City of clamor and an island as still as the moon.