Off the Chart (26 page)

“I assume this mistrust springs from negative experiences with law enforcement in the past.”

“Nicely put,” Thorn said.

Agent Fox reached out and laid a hand on the back of Thorn's bare arm. It was a weird gesture—neither friendly nor overtly intimidating. But not an innocent touch, either. His hand lay heavy against Thorn's flesh, warm and somehow exploratory, as if he were a human polygraph and could read Thorn's errant pulse.

“Would you mind, Miss Joy?”

“What?”

She'd been staring out at the dock, paying no attention.

“Could you give us a moment of privacy?”

Fox smiled over his shoulder at her, and Anne looked at Thorn.

“It's okay,” Thorn said. “If he tries anything funny, I'll shriek.”

Anne went outside and the other men gave her room at the rail. Everyone watching silently as the last of the bodies was cut down from the limb.

“I'm going to take you at your word, Mr. Thorn.” The agent's hand still lay on his forearm.

Thorn could have moved his arm aside, but this felt like some kind of alpha dog contest, a tactile staring match, and though it struck Thorn as a silly game, he couldn't seem to back down, either.

“I'm going to assume that James Lee Webster did, in fact, enlist you into some aspect of his operation. You mentioned maritime piracy, so I presume that Webster also informed you to some degree of the nature of his enterprise.”

“He put on a slide show,” Thorn said. “The Wide, Wide World of Pirates.”

“And for some reason you agreed to cooperate with him.”

“He was more persuasive than you are. He shared a little.”

Fox nodded.

“A few minutes ago you asked me a question. You wondered who the other man was hanging beside Webster and Rasmussen.”

With Fox cozied up so close beside him, touching his flesh in that intimate way, Thorn had the feeling that this was something of a religious ceremony for the agent. A baptism into some secret order.

“To lose Secretary Webster is distressing enough,” Fox said, “but losing that other gentleman, Mr. Thorn, I don't mind telling you, it's a colossal setback. For us personally and for the welfare of our country.”

“Let me guess,” Thorn said. “This was the guy who'd penetrated one of the pirate gangs.”

Agent Fox blinked, then notched up an eyebrow.

“Obviously Secretary Webster had a high level of confidence in you.”

“I think he was just desperate.”

“It's a breach of FBI policy to involve civilians in bureau investigations.”

“I'm not crazy about the idea myself,” Thorn said.

“But in this case,” Fox said, peering into Thorn's eyes, “we're at a critical juncture and we need all the assets we can find.”

“I already know more about this bullshit than I want to,” Thorn said. “Why don't you keep it to yourself, Fox?”

The agent appraised him for a long moment, then shook his head.

“And you're certainly not my idea of a helpful assistant, either. But at the moment you're all I have.”

Fox glanced toward the window, then turned back to Thorn.

“Things have ratcheted up in the last week, a real spike of activity. And now we're blind. We've lost our eyes and ears. Sammy Ching was the third man in the tree. As you suggest, Ching had penetrated a very active, very well-disciplined gang of maritime thieves based in Singapore. While he had not yet gained access to the highest levels of the organization, he was moving that way quickly. Now this, finding him so far from his base of operations, executed and hung up for display. These are the kind of people we're dealing with, Mr. Thorn. This is why extraordinary measures are called for.”

Agent Fox gave Thorn's arm a solid thump and rose from his squat.

Baptism complete. Now he was one of them, deputized, Citizen Thorn. And it was his turn to come clean. A cute technique, all so earnest and heartfelt, how could Thorn not reciprocate?

In fact, Daniel Salbone's name was itching on Thorn's tongue. It would damn well be comforting to have a contingent of federal agents hiding in the bushes when the jealous Mr. Salbone appeared to reclaim his lover.

But Thorn couldn't shake the feeling that getting any more entangled with these people would mean more delay in Janey's release.

“So I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Thorn, how devastating it is for us to lose Sammy Ching. And how totally incomprehensible.”

“I can see that, yes.”

“Do you have any idea why his killer might have chosen this location to hang these men?”

“Not a clue.”

“All right,” Agent Fox said, letting go of a breath, ready to close the deal. “Why don't you tell me something I don't know?”

“There's a little girl missing.”

“We're aware of that, but at the moment that's beyond our bailiwick.”

“Beyond your what?”

“My mission is very focused and precise, Mr. Thorn. We are attempting to disrupt the final coalescing of several large criminal enterprises.”

“The confederacy of pirates,” Thorn said.

He felt Agent Fox staring at him, but Thorn's gaze was fixed on that final body being handed down to the men on the ground. Jimmy Lee Webster, his days of strutting finished.

Thorn looked down at his bloody shorts. Feeling the lingering burn of Vic's blade in his crotch and the twin aches of the stab wounds in his gut.

He looked up and met the agent's stare.

“Look, Fox. Webster claimed his people, which I assume would also be
your
people, had Janey Sugarman under their safe control. Was he lying?”

Fox meandered through the room, taking a moment to compose his answer.

“We're aware of the disappearance of Dr. Markham's yacht, as well as the loss of life of his passengers. However, we can't know for certain that a kidnapping has actually occurred. At the moment the operating theory is that the child you're referring to was lost at sea and her body has not yet been recovered.”

“There was a goddamn ransom note. You have the mug shot of the guy who knifed it to my door.”

“Marshall is no more than an opportunist, Mr. Thorn. Trying to extort money from a grief-stricken family. Such scam artists surface frequently in high-profile cases. Preying on the vulnerable.”

“So that's the cover story, is it? That's keeping the press away.”

Fox cleared his throat and straightened his shoulders. Going to dig in, make a last push with this idiot civilian.

“Because of certain partitioning that exists between investigative agencies, one faction of agents is not always fully apprised of the missions and strategies of other factions, even within a single task force. And to complicate matters further, Secretary Webster was fond
of operating in a somewhat autonomous manner. The end result is that our team was not always up to speed on the direction Webster's inquiries were taking. Now that he's gone, it's crucial for us to know everything we can about the progress of his investigation. So I'm asking you one more time, Mr. Thorn, to enlighten me about what exactly Secretary Webster recruited you to do.”

Thorn took one more look at the grim work unfolding in his yard, then he stood up and walked across the room and stood close to Fox.

“Was Webster lying to me? Do you have any fucking idea where the girl is? Is she under your control?”

Fox considered the question for a moment, his gaze drifting toward the far wall.

“I'm sure Secretary Webster had very good reasons for presenting the situation in the manner he did.”

“Meaning he had a good reason to lie.”

“Secretary Webster's methods were not always ones we sanctioned.”

“You fucking people.”

“It's important that you keep in mind, Thorn, that there's a great deal more at stake here than the welfare of one little girl. Although we take her disappearance seriously, as I noted, we're also under serious time pressure on other fronts. In his final transmission a few days ago Ching was clear that a large gathering was about to take place. A sit-down of the top men of several of these organizations. We don't know where or when, but there are indications that this meeting is imminent.”

“A pirate bash.”

“The implications are enormous, Mr. Thorn, the scale of this merger of criminal elements is beyond anything we've—”

Thorn cut him off, waving his hands a few inches in front of the agent's face as if to wake him from his bullshit trance.

“Yeah, yeah, I heard that speech already. The future of Western civilization hangs in the balance.”

“You can sneer, but it's true. The stakes are huge.”

“Maybe
your
Western civilization is hanging in the balance,” Thorn said. “But not mine. It just so happens that my bailiwick includes only one thing at the moment, and that's getting Janey Sugarman home
safe. So unless you're going to arrest me or lock me up in a gibbet cage, you can just get the hell out of here. I'm not cooperating with you people. Go on, do your job and stop those gangs of pirates from coalescing. That's not my concern.”

Fox was silent, looking through his black-framed glasses into Thorn's eyes with something close to disinterest. Already plotting his next move and the one after that.

“All right, Thorn. If you're unwilling to assist, fine, that's your right as a citizen. But let's be very clear about this. Whatever your relationship was with James Lee Webster, it's finished. You're no longer involved in any aspect of this case. And I'm giving you fair warning, Thorn. Stay clear. Don't stick your face into this again, and if you don't listen to me and you get in trouble, don't come to us begging for help. It won't be there. You're on your own.”

“Yeah,” he said. “The way I like it.”

Sheffield arrived at Sugarman's at quarter till six. Alone. Telling Sugar his high-tech assistant had the day off and was visiting in-laws in north Florida.

Frank was wearing khakis and a white shirt with epaulets, new boat shoes. A lot dressier than his normal look. Airplane clothes, off on a fishing safari. Sandy hair still cut scruffy. Looking as lean and suntanned as he had when he'd worked alongside Sugarman on a murder-for-hire case ten years back. Sugar acting as liaison between the county cops and the feds. They'd hit it off. Frank was a slightly straighter version of Thorn. Neater, more orderly, held a job. But with a heavy dose of devil-may-care. Quicker with a “fuck it” than any cop Sugar'd ever met.

“She's gotten sick to her stomach,” Sugarman said. “She called a while ago and said she was going to call back in a bit.”

“I can wait,” Frank said. “A while anyway.”

Sugarman sat down in the chair and stared at the blank computer screen.

“Computer visitation,” Frank said. “You're not allowed to see her in person?”

“Twice a month I see her and her sister. The computer thing's a bonus.”

“No postmarital fighting going on?”

“It's not that, Frank. Jeannie and I are fine.”

“Had to ask.”

Frank was pacing the room, touching things lightly, moving on.

“What's eating you, Sheffield?”

“I called around on this. Sounded so weird.”

“And?”

“I gather this is part of something larger,” Frank said. “I can't tell exactly what. But the word I got was that this whole deal was already in the pipeline.”

“What? Finding Janey? Somebody's working on it?”

Frank stopped circling the room and sat down on the edge of the daybed. Hunched over, elbows on his thighs, with a sour look like a ballplayer sent to the bench for screwing up an easy play.

“Couldn't get a straight answer, Sugar. Spent the hour drive down here on my cell talking to one guy after another. Inference I'm drawing is that there's some territorial thing going on, some squabble about who's running the show, top dog shit. You know how it is. Who gets to piss on which tree. It happens with these interagency task force things. A lot of big people running around looking for the biggest tree.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“You saw her? You talked to her? On the computer, satellite hookup?”

“Yeah, Frank. I wasn't hallucinating.”

“These heavyweights,” Sheffield said. “That could be a good thing, it could be bad. But how it looks, Sugar, they got people swarming all over this thing.”

“So what're you telling me? Whatever can be done
is
being done?”

Frank looked at Sugar, then shifted his eyes to the tree branches out the window. Took a long time with that like he was framing his reply.

“If Hannah wouldn't kill me for missing this goddamn trip she's
planned for six months, I'd stay and see what I could stir up. Even though I've been assured your case is already in good hands.”

“And is it? What's your gut tell you?”

He brought his gaze back to Sugar.

“I'd like to say yes. I been with this outfit going on twenty-eight years, but I don't know, Sugar. I can't honestly say what the fuck's going on, what kind of hands you're in. I just know there's a lot of people in town who don't usually get this far south. Some seriously hot and bothered types.”

Sugarman nodded.

Frank said, “Janey can call you, but you can't call her?”

“I'm logged on to the video chat room. All I can do is wait for her to show up, but she has to come in from her side.”

Frank dusted his hands across his white shirt.

Sugarman said, “These heavyweights? They know she's been kidnapped, they know I'm talking to her?”

“Can't say for sure.” Frank took a long look at the silent computer screen. “But I'll be making some phone calls, see if I can light a fire under anybody. I'll write this up on the flight out to Alaska. Soon as I'm on the ground, I'll fax it up and down the chain of command. Make sure Andy Meeker gives you a call, too. He's the kid, the high-tech guru. He'll get with you and if a call trace can be done, he'll do it.”

“Memos,” Sugarman said. “Always memos.”

“Good or bad, that's how we do it.”

Sugarman looked at the blank screen.

“Thanks, Frank.”

“Shit, I'm sorry, Sugar. I'm really sorry. I'll do what I can.”

Sheffield waited another half hour, but Janey didn't log back on and finally Frank had to leave.

 

The afternoon sun was disappearing behind a thick bank of clouds out over the Florida Bay. The squirrels in Sugarman's backyard had retreated to their hiding places before the big nocturnal birds arrived for the night's hunting. Janey still hadn't dialed back in.

For the hour since Sheffield had left, Sugarman tried to occupy
himself with lists of questions to ask, the observations he wanted her to make. He'd had a hopeful half hour as he jotted down the step-by-step procedure he recalled from his Boy Scout days, a trick to narrow the search zone dramatically, then as the minutes passed and the video screen stayed dark, that hope turned to worry and now that worry was taking a fast plunge into gloom.

He occupied himself by paging through guides to birds and mammals. He found pages and pages of giant green iguanas but learned they were all abundant throughout the region, that band of rain forest and jungle that ran for over a thousand miles along the rim of the Gulf and the Caribbean Sea from Mexico to Venezuela.

He closed the
Rain Forest Mammal Guide.
He held it for a moment, then cocked his arm and flung it at the far wall. He walked over and picked the book up and slammed it into the wall again. He looked at it lying on the rug. Its cover dented, its spine chafed. He stared up at the ceiling and squeezed his eyes closed and roared until his lungs ached and his throat was raw.

When he'd gotten his breathing back under control, he picked up the guidebook and gathered together all the other volumes that exclusively featured wildlife in the islands, ruled out by the agouti, and stacked them carefully by the front door.

He sat down in his TV chair and flicked through the local channels. Evening news on all four. On Channel 10 he caught the tail end of a press conference Jeannie had given earlier in the afternoon. With the beach in the background and Jackie at her side, she told the Channel 10 reporter that she wasn't angry or upset that the search-and-rescue mission had been called off. It was her strong faith in reincarnation that was getting her through this difficult period. With the dark, restless surf crashing behind her, Jeannie blinked back tears and spoke into the camera, saying she was absolutely certain her daughter Janey was now living happily in a better place and time.

Beside her, Jackie chewed gum and stared out at the waves.

Sugarman switched off the set and went back to the desk and sat for several moments staring into the blank screen. When he finally roused himself, he began to flip through the books until he located one with several pages of kingfishers. But then he couldn't seem to concentrate on the images, much less the tiny print, the careful, sci
entific descriptions of habitat, behavior, the sounds of calls, the distinctive patterns of markings.

He set the book aside and stared into the dark computer screen, willing it to come alive.

At seven-thirty, as the light in the branches of his oak tree was failing, Sugarman once again looked over his sheet of scribbles but saw nothing there he hadn't seen before. Cormorant, blue heron, kingfisher, agouti, blue morpho butterfly, green iguana, smell of the sea.

 

“What now, Thorn?”

He'd been asking the same question himself and had no answer.

The investigators were gone. The bodies carted off. Photos taken, measurements made. Yellow crime scene tape staked out in a large square around the base of the gumbo-limbo tree.

At the end of his dock, Anne Bonny Joy and Thorn stood below the black pennant, watching a ribbon of fire simmer along the horizon.

“You ever seen the green flash?”

She gave him a sidelong look.

“What're you talking about?”

“Green flash, it's supposed to come just after sunset. You ever seen it?”

She shook her head. Thorn touched the flagpole, staring out at the silver sheen spreading across Blackwater Sound.

“People claim they see it, but I've lived here all my life and watched thousands of sunsets and never seen one green flash. So either they're lying or else I keep blinking at the wrong second.”

Anne was silent, waiting for him to get to the point.

“Then again, maybe they're not lying. Maybe I'm just one of those idiots that can't be hypnotized. Won't let myself surrender. Too skeptical, too locked up in my own head. Sometimes I wish I were the other kind, the one that can see the green flash. They see it because they really want to see it. I admire that, people who can suspend their disbelief, throw themselves headlong into something far-fetched and weird. Believe in the unbelievable.”

“Like Vic,” Anne said. “Or my mother. You admire that?”

“Hell, with Vic, it could've been stock cars or coin collecting.”

“What?”

“The pirate bullshit, that's an accident of fate, just what happened to come along, so he latched onto it. Uses it to distract himself, or try to. Vic strikes me as a guy hungry for something he can't find. A guy who could gobble everything in sight from now till the end of time and not satisfy his hunger.”

“Because he's hollow,” Anne said. “A bottomless pit.”

“Greedy people are like that sometimes. Need to have ten things going on at once to keep themselves from feeling the vacuum in their chests.”

“I think that about nails him.”

“What about women?”

“Vic and women?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't know for sure,” she said. “From the gossip I've heard, apparently there've been a few who threw themselves at him over the years, but he pushes them away, like he's too busy or maybe too drained from fucking over his business competition.”

“Maybe he's not interested in women. I mean, the way he was holding my balls.”

She sighed.

“I think it's probably something else.” She tilted her chin up, closing her eyes, and said, “There
was
one woman when we first got to the Keys. We were kids, teenagers sharing an apartment down in Matecumbe. Vic took up with her, Francis Colmes, our landlady. Couple of weeks after we got there, he moved all his stuff upstairs and started sharing her bed. He was eighteen, she was in her fifties. It lasted a few months, then one day she threw us both out. Threatened to call the cops. Vic never talked about it, but I could hear them up there sometimes. Francis bossing him around. Giving him chores, scolding him for not doing things right, humiliating him. It was sickening. I couldn't stand to listen to it. His shriveled voice. Whining.”

“Mommy's little boy.”

Anne's mouth was tight for a moment as if she were fighting back the urge to scream.

She turned her eyes toward the last scarlet tatters of the sunset.

“After Francis Colmes, Vic didn't seem interested. At the restaurant I'd hear about these women now and then who tried to tempt him. Went to his place, threw themselves at him. But far as I know none of them ever succeeded. He's cold. Asexual, maybe. I don't know.”

“Maybe he's just waiting for you to be available. It could explain him scaring off all your boyfriends. Like they were competition.”

“I've thought about that,” she said.

They were silent for a moment. A squadron of ibis coasted high above the sound, heading toward that last seam of light in the west.

“About the green flash,” he said. “My point was that I respect you, Anne.”

“You what?”

“I respect you for letting go the way you did, running off with Salbone. It was crazy, reckless. But hell, without some of that, what's the point? Play safe? Lie low? What the hell kind of life is that? Better to crash and burn out in some wild place than live happily ever after in your foxhole.”

“You're working yourself up to something.”

“I'm going back to Vic's,” he said.

“Sign away your land?”

“If I thought I could beat it out of him, I'd try that.”

“Don't be an idiot, Thorn, you can't bargain with the devil. He'll scoop out your heart and walk away laughing.”

“There some other choice? If I saw one, I'd take it. I'm going to give him what he wants, see if he can deliver Janey.”

“And if he's bullshitting you and doesn't have the girl?”

“Then it's crash and burn time. Adventure hour. I'll have to get creative.”

“Well, I know one thing,” she said. “You shouldn't be here when Daniel shows up. Even though nothing's happened between you and me, he can be a very jealous man.”

“This is my house, Anne. I'll go when I'm damn well ready.”

She stepped away from him, gripping the flagpole.

“You're angry. Well, you should be. I dragged you into this.”

She looked out at the bay. He was angry all right. But Anne wasn't at the top of that list.

“You're not afraid?” he said. “Going back to that life. It doesn't scare the shit out of you?”

“A little bit, sure. I'd be crazy if it didn't.”

“And you still don't believe he killed Webster and the other two?”

“I don't know,” she said. “But if he did, it was unavoidable.”

“Yeah,” Thorn said. “Unavoidable.”

“Look, I'm sorry, Thorn. I'm sorry about the little girl. I'm really sorry. You've got every right to be pissed at me.”

“It's everybody's fault,” he said. “Yours, mine, Webster's, Vic's, everybody's. There's a lot to go around.”