Off the Chart (27 page)

“I'm sorry,” she repeated.

“Just do me one favor, Anne.”

“Of course.”

“Don't be here when I get back.”

“I think it's the flu, Daddy. I'm hot and I hurt all over. Inside my bones.”

“Aw, sweetie. I'm so sorry.”

It was almost dark outside his windows, a radio blasting from his neighbor's house, Mrs. Selwyn, a deaf widow, listening to her big-band station.

“I was so worried something happened to you, Janey.”

Her face seemed on the verge of collapse. He could see her eyes glisten.

“Janey, listen. I know the flu is terrible. But you're going to be strong, okay? We need to keep working at this. You need to help me find where you are. We've made good progress, but there's other things we have to do.”

“I just want to lie down, Daddy. My bones hurt. I threw up all my sandwich. I really, really hurt.”

“You need to drink a Coke, Janey. Fluids, you need fluids.”

“I am.”

She held the bottle up to the camera.

“It's still light there, isn't it? I can see you, but you're dimmer than before.”

“The sun's going down. It's going to be dark soon.”

“So we know you're a good deal west of here. That's good. Now we need to figure out just how far.”

“I feel terrible.” Then she groaned.

“Can you do this one thing for me, sweetie?”

She looked woozy, her face pinched and drained, the light fading around her.

“The animals are very loud. I think there's a monkey out there, or something. It's screaming.”

“Look out your window, Janey. Look east, okay?”

There was a knock on his front door. Sugarman leaned back in his chair, but he couldn't make out a face in the small eye-level window.

“Hold on, Janey. There's someone at the door.”

He trotted into the living room, pressed his eye to the window, and flipped on the porch light. He unlocked the door and opened it.

“Hi,” Alexandra said. Lawton was standing beside her. “We came to see how you're doing.”

He nudged past them and ran out to the edge of his yard. He stepped out into the middle of his quiet street and looked east down toward Largo Sound. The moon was halfway over the horizon. Full and golden. He waited there until the last edge of it came into view. He tilted his watch toward the streetlight and read the time.

Then he sprinted back to the house, waving Alex and Lawton inside.

“I'm in the back bedroom,” he said, and trotted to the laptop.

“Alex and Lawton are here, Janey. Look.”

Alexandra came into the room, leaned close to the screen.

“My God,” she said. “Where is she? What's going on?”

“In a minute.”

Lawton said, “I know that little girl. Look, she's a television star.”

“Janey,” Sugar said. “Listen, go to your east window, okay? Turn your computer around so I can see you.”

“Daddy, I got goose bumps on my arms. I'm cold. I'm starting to shiver.”

“You've got a fever, darling. It comes with the flu. Be strong, you need to be strong. After we do this you can lie down and rest. But we have to do this now. Right now. We can't wait.”

She swiveled the laptop around and walked to the window, hugging herself tightly.

She walked out of view.

Her voice was distant, barely audible, saying, “All right.”

“Do you see the moon coming up, any part of it?”

“I think so,” she called out. “A little bit.”

They were losing the illumination, Janey being absorbed into the darkness. He heard a faint screech, one of the animals from her jungle.

“Tell me the exact second when it comes over the horizon, okay? The second you can see every bit of it rise out of the water.”

“All right,” she said. Her voice growing weaker.

He could see the dimming of the light in her tiny room. A minute passed, and then another.

“It's almost there,” she said.

“The whole thing,” Sugarman called. “The whole big ball.”

“Right now, Daddy. It's above the horizon.”

Sugarman looked at his watch and wrote down the number on the pad by his laptop. Did a quick computation. Subtracting his moonrise time from hers, then some multiplication. Got the total.

“Okay, good. Good work, Janey.”

She had moved back into the camera's range.

“I can still see you Daddy. Can you see me?”

“Just barely, Janey. You're pretty dark.”

“There aren't any lights here. The only light is from the screen. Your face is lighting up my room, but only just a little.”

“Yeah.”

He looked up at Alexandra. Her eyes were fixed on Janey's shadowy image. Alex didn't seem to be breathing.

“What's your battery signal say?”

“I don't know, Daddy. It's lower than before. It's running down.”

“What about that sign? Is it still hidden?”

“Yeah. Behind a palm frond.”

Sugarman pawed through the books on his desk until he found the
atlas. He paged quickly to the largest map he could find of the Caribbean Sea and checked the longitude.

“This is good, Janey. You did great. I've got your longitude now, or something close to it. You're at eighty-four degrees west. That's somewhere along the coast of northern Central America. Do you understand me, Janey?”

“I sure as hell don't,” Lawton said. “What're you talking about?”

Alexandra shushed him.

“I don't feel good, Daddy. I'm hot now. Really hot.”

“Is there still ice in your cooler?”

“No.”

“Is there a sheet or a towel?”

“There's a sheet, yeah, on the bed.”

“Soak a corner of it in the water in the cooler and press it on your forehead, Janey, and hold it there. That's what your mother and I used to do when you had a fever.”

“Does Mommy know where I am?”

“I haven't talked to her yet. I will. As soon as I have something definite. I'll call her.”

“And tell Jackie hello, too. Okay? I love them. I miss them.”

“I'll tell them, I will.” Sugar closed his eyes briefly and opened them again. “But we need to turn your computer off now. I need to think some more, figure out what to do next. But you can log back on anytime. I'll be here. Right here waiting.”

“Okay, Daddy.” Her voice was growing feeble and he could no longer see the outline of her face in the darkness.

“Wait a minute, Janey.”

“What?”

“That bird you saw. It was a kingfisher? Can you describe it?”

“Yeah, I think so. But it was little and green. Like that car we had when you and Mommy were still married. A weird green.”

“The Chevy,” he said. “Metallic green?”

“Yeah,” she said, “with a brown breast, and its throat was lighter brown.”

“Tufted like the kingfishers in Florida?”

“No, it had a smooth head, I think. But it had a kingfisher beak,
long and narrow. But I don't know. It might've been something else. Not a kingfisher at all.”

“I'll look it up, sweetie. I'll tell you next time we talk.”

“Okay.”

“So we should go now, I guess.” Sugarman glanced up at Alexandra. She'd closed her eyes and bowed her head and was shaking it slightly.

“Okay, I'm turning it off now, Daddy. I'll call you when I feel better. Bye.”

“I love you, sweetie,” he said. “I love you.”

But she didn't answer. The screen dark, the connection broken.

“My God, Sugar. My God in heaven.” Alexandra leaned down and hugged him around the shoulders, pressed her cheek to his. “I'm so sorry.”

He patted her other cheek and she straightened.

“I been holding it in, staying hard,” Sugarman said, feeling the tears starting to build. “I got to stay focused, goddamn it. I can't let it take over.”

He wiped his eyes harder than he needed to.

“You're right, you're right,” Alex said. She touched him on the shoulder.

Sugarman said, “She's alive, that's what's important, Janey's hanging in there, and we're making progress. Shrinking the search area.”

“What was all that about the moon?”

“Yeah,” Lawton said. “You confused the diddly-shit out of me.”

“Boy Scouts,” he said. “No big secret. One revolution of the Earth is three hundred and sixty degrees, right? The moon goes around the Earth in twenty-four hours. So you do a little long division and it works out the moon moves fifteen degrees every hour, or three degrees every twelve minutes. That's longitude, the east-west measurement.”

“I'm still lost,” Lawton said.

Alex said, “If her moonrise is twelve minutes later than ours, she's three degrees west.”

“Right, and that's exactly what it was, twelve minutes, twenty-five seconds, roughly three degrees.” Sugar moved the atlas to the edge
of the desk. “In the Keys, we're at eighty-one west longitude, so you add three; that puts it here, on a line along the coast of Honduras, Nicaragua, and a narrow slice into Costa Rica. She's a long way south of here, but not that far west. It's all rough-and-ready figuring. I mean, I could be off by some fraction. The line could be a little farther west, but it couldn't be much farther, because she can smell the ocean, and it can't be too much farther east, because that's the Caribbean Sea. So it's got to be along this patch.”

He ran his finger along a two-or three-hundred-mile curve of Central America. Honduras, Nicaragua, the northern tip of Costa Rica. Still a huge area, but so much smaller than before.

“She's on a satellite phone?”

“Yeah, it belonged to Markham. Built into the computer.”

“So maybe it can be traced,” Alex said.

“I looked into that. Didn't look promising.”

“You want me to give it a shot? Use my police clout?”

“Sure, if you think it's worth a try.”

“Okay, I'll go outside, use my cell.”

Lawton leaned down close to Sugarman's face.

“A painting of a rice cake doesn't satisfy hunger,” he said.

Sugarman nodded at the old man.

“Good point,” Sugar said.

“I may be old and slow and dumb about longitude, but I know a few things.”

“You do, Lawton. You're a fountain of wisdom. Indispensable.”

The old man gave a rumpled smile, not buying the flattery but happy enough to have it. Alexandra headed out to the porch to make her call.

Sugarman picked up the volume of
Birds of the Tropics
to see if he could locate that undersized kingfisher. The big book fell open in his lap to a page of vultures and large black raptors. Giant birds, dark and iridescent, with short, powerful beaks and humped backs. Killers, predators, scavengers.

Lawton leaned over his shoulder and said, “Jesus, those are some badass birds. Not a good omen. Not good at all.”

Nobody was manning the front gate at Vic Joy's estate, at least nobody Thorn could see. In the VW he crawled past and parked fifty yards down the road, then walked back to Vic's compound in the shadows. The gate was shut. Twenty feet high.

He scanned the area toward the highway, the only place where a surveillance crew would have a line of sight to the front gate. No one out there. No cars parked, no vans. No men skulking in the shadows. Nothing he could see. Even if they were there, he didn't care. He was beyond that. No longer in their service. No longer in anyone's.

Plan A was to sign the real estate papers. Plan B was to drive to Miami, go to Alexandra's house, explain everything, try to make amends, bring her into it. The police route.

Thorn hitched himself into the lower limbs of a mahogany and climbed ten feet into the tree, then reached out and scaled the last four feet of the wall. Perched on the top, he surveyed the compound. Floodlights illuminated the squat brick Harlan house, and a half-dozen other bright lamps shined out into the restless ocean. The main
house was dark and he could see the floatplane was gone.

He could've jumped down the other side and prowled the estate, but the place look so deserted, he doubted it was worth the effort. Guard dogs were a possibility or maybe an armed sentry or two lurking in the shadows. He was angry and fired up, but he wasn't feeling suicidal. Not yet anyway.

A few feet away along the top of the wall he saw a fist-sized chunk of concrete, a leftover from sloppy construction work. On his knees he crawled to it and hefted it and found a comfortable fit in his throwing hand.

The French doors on the back of Vic's office were less than fifty feet away, just at the edge of Thorn's pitching range. He ran his eyes around the inside perimeter of the wall and saw no easy access back up and over, so he reset his butt, used his other hand for leverage, and hurled the chunk of cement at the glass doors.

He was short by a yard, but the fragment bounced off the wood porch and took a lucky hop and smashed into the lower panes. The alarm was triggered instantly. It was as loud as an air-raid siren, and a full complement of floodlights snapped on. Thorn flattened himself against the narrow rim of the wall and waited, but no one showed themselves, no one fired. No armed militia, not even a uniformed servant.

All of which told him a little: Vic and his entourage had flown the coop. Beyond that, he couldn't say.

Plan B was calling.

After another moment, Thorn climbed down through the mahogany branches and went back to the VW and pulled out onto the narrow asphalt road that paralleled the Overseas Highway. As he slammed through the gears and hauled ass out to the main thoroughfare he heard a shrill siren in the distance, and as he was passing through the village of Islamorada he had to pull onto the shoulder to avoid two speeding patrol cars heading toward him and then on past with their blue lights whirling.

 

Anne waited on the end of Thorn's dock, below the pennant. It was drooping now, the night air still, an occasional mosquito whirring at
her ear. She stared out at the black water that rippled with faint moonlight, and the wild racket she'd been hearing inside her head finally calmed and the tension ache in her jaw muscles was starting to ease.

She'd never believed in destiny. Everyone had choices. Once she'd escaped from Harlan, she'd constructed her world brick by careful brick, built the solid fortress she'd inhabited for almost two decades, a secure, unvarying routine. She believed she'd successfully gone beyond the reach of her mother's madness, purified herself of that polluted air, the stench and desolation of that place. Until Daniel Salbone stormed her castle, revealed it for the flimsy construction it was, and carried her away. Damn her mother, damn her bones.

It all seemed so inevitable now. Named for a pirate, Anne became one. And those years of the waitressing work her mother had so disdained, the quiet evenings on her skiff, the string of meaningless men she'd taken to her bed, that was gone forever now. No possible return to those simple duties, those easy, uncomplicated days. That afternoon at Golden Beach she'd stepped across a permanent divide. Her Blackbeard, her Captain Kidd, her Errol Flynn had whisked her off to a place she'd never allowed herself to imagine. But it was all real to her now. The shipboard life, the rowdy men who fell in line at Daniel's brusque commands. The endless movement, the wind, the long nights of heat and sweat and the brackish taste of his flesh.

She'd worked so goddamn hard to thwart her destiny but finally had only managed to stall it for a while.

Anne Bonny Joy followed the running lights of every vessel that passed across the sound. It was nearly midnight and the boat traffic had all but ceased. Once or twice she felt the air shudder overhead, a bat or nighthawk, doing its silent work.

She leaned her shoulder against the flagpole and strained to see across that empty prairie of moonlight. And when she saw the green and red bow lights heading directly toward shore, she knew it was him. Idling slow across the silver sheen, coming back to retrieve her as he had promised.

With her heart thumping madly, she unknotted the thin rope on the flagpole and ran down the pennant. She unclipped it from the line and held it in her hand and watched the shimmer of the boat's
wake spread across the sound. The craft was long and narrow, and even when it was still fifty yards away she made out its glossy black hull and the low burble of its V-8 engine.

The bow lights switched off as the boat eased into the shallows near the dock, making a sweeping right turn to come alongside where she stood. Then inching close in the careful, precise way that Daniel had with boats.

Anne stood watching, silent, tense. Not wanting to shout out his name. Determined to be as cool and strong and confident as Daniel, repress the giddy schoolgirl exhilaration she felt. If only to keep from embarrassing him in front of his crew with some sappy display.

She held out her hand to receive the dock line and make it fast. A good sailor, a competent partner. But no dock line came, and as the boat drifted close and bumped one of the forward pilings, she could make out three men in the small cockpit. One tall and two smaller, chunkier men.

And then with a heavy thump, one of them jumped onto the dock with the bowline in his hand. He bent down to secure it to the forward cleat.

“Daniel?” She reached out and grabbed hold of the gunwale and leaned her weight backward to tug the heavy craft closer to the piling, holding the boat in place.

The big engine shut down.

And the man who'd been fastening the line straightened up.

He snapped a lighter and cupped his hand around the flame as he lit his cigarette. In the wavering light she recognized him, but it took another moment to place the man. Someone from another frame of reference. Light-years across the universe. The man from the mug shot Sheriff Taft had shown her, the man at her brother's front gate.

When he had his cigarette lit, he extended his arm, bringing Anne Bonny into the halo of his flame. He limped closer to her.

“My, my, look who we got here,” he said. “If it isn't the bitch who shot me in the fucking foot.”

Anne Bonny felt a strangled gasp escape her.

“What?”

“You don't remember?” Marshall said. “The
Rainmaker,
blasting me in the fucking foot before you jumped overboard? Shit, there's sev
enteen steel pins in there now; that goddamn foot isn't ever going to be right again.”

Marshall Marshall stepped close, his heavy plaster cast thumping on the dock, the scrawny long-haired man drawing back his open hand to take a vengeful swipe at her.

“Leave her alone, brain death,” Vic Joy said. “That's my sister. She's precious cargo.”

Anne felt the sky spinning fast and dark above her.

“You killed him, you son of a bitch. That was you, Vic. You killed Daniel.”

“What a loser. Jesus, you'll thank me someday,” Vic said. “So hey, Annie. Where's your boyfriend, that fucker Thorn? He around here or what?”

Anne heard the scream a moment before realizing it was her own, a shriek full of fire and acid and despair torn loose from the twisted depths of her bowels.

 

Thorn had enough sense to park along the highway and sneak down his own drive. He had no intention of stumbling into the middle of a reunion of pirates. He was hoping they'd come and gone, Anne safely on her way back into the arms of Daniel Salbone. Thorn was headed to Miami to drop in on Alex and Lawton and had only stopped to be sure that Anne was no longer there. If somehow he succeeded in convincing Alex to return with him, he sure as hell didn't want Anne Bonny Joy camped out in his bedroom when he got back.

He was halfway down the drive, staying on the soft earth that was matted with pine needles, listening for any sign that the gathering might still be in session, when he heard her scream.

It didn't sound like Anne. It didn't sound human. Some jungle cry from high in the canopy. He fought back his instinct to rush toward the noise and halted near the slick trunk of a gumbo-limbo.

He saw figures down near the dock. Two men, maybe three, scrambling around, then heading up the sloping yard and disappearing behind the cover of the trees. For the next few seconds he caught small darting movements, men sprinting from tree to tree. The moon was no help and his eyes were still dazzled by the half-hour drive into
the stream of headlights. But they seemed to be searching the grounds, running tricky, unpredictable patterns like men dodging machine-gun fire.

Thorn heard no voices and lost the three men, or two, or four. He held his position, waiting for something definite, some sense of what game was unfolding out on his darkened lawn.

He should've had the upper hand in this skirmish. Lived here virtually all his life, tracked across every inch of his five acres a thousand thousand times, but what he was seeing made no sense. A helter-skelter game of hide-and-seek. He heard someone crash into a limb and curse, and when he ducked his head out to see, another curse came from less than twenty feet to his left.

He flattened his back against the tree, waited till the huffing man moved a few feet out of range, then in a crouch he headed for the house. A year ago, he'd tossed his only handgun into the Florida Bay, an act of contrition and a vow to reverse the violent course his life had taken until that moment. No pistol now, but inside the house there were other weapons. A baseball bat from his high school days, a few knives. Reason told him to retreat back to the car and get the hell away. But reason had never driven his choices.

He stayed low and moved from tree to bush. Getting up the stairs without being seen would be a challenge, but if he made it that far, he imagined he could do that final dash in time to seize the bat that stood behind the front door and at least crush a few bones, go down swinging.

His eyes were working now. He saw through the darkness a third boat at his dock, black and shiny. He was thirty feet, maybe forty from the house, sizing up the last open stretch of yard, hearing the men prowling nearby, the snap of a stick, the crunch of gravel, a wheeze. He was picking his moment, lowering himself into a crouch to make that run to the steps, when he smelled the dizzy fumes of gasoline and heard the unmistakable slosh of fluid.

He came out from behind the oak tree, saw the shadowy outline of a heavyset man moving around the frame for Lawton's new room. He carried a ten-gallon can in his hand, and another man was on the stairs splashing gasoline onto that old hardwood Thorn had salvaged from the Miami landfill. As if they were the assessment team, here to
test his long-held belief that those oily hardwoods from the center of the ancient Brazilian rain forest were impervious to all things. Organic steel.

He charged the closest man, hit him in the back with a flying tackle, and the big guy belly-flopped, the air exploding from his lungs. Thorn was on his feet before the man had regrouped. He grunted and tried to rise as Thorn drew back his leg and kicked the man flush in the temple.

The kick sent the big man sprawling to his left and Thorn would have followed and delivered another blow, except he knew the noise of the struggle must have gotten the attention of the others. He grabbed the plastic gas can and slung it into the dark. Thorn's heart was bulging inside his chest, working triple-time to keep up with the needs of its human host.

Then he felt the spurt and surge of blood he knew from a dozen other moments in his past, a wild boost of energy, a blinding resolve to go forward, driven by some secret long-ago animal nodule in his brain screaming its message down the ages, that reptilian part of him, the morsel of primeval taffy buried deep beneath the layers of culture and manners and good sense and a thousand lessons in comportment and restraint exploding like a nucleus of napalm jelly, bits of liquid fire, the scattering shrapnel of his id.

He made it halfway up the stairs as the tall, rangy man was hustling down. Thorn lowered his shoulder and blew the guy backward against the railing. All bones and tendons and gristly muscle, the man bounced off the rail and tumbled sideways onto the hard angles of the steps. His plastic canister came loose from his grip and bounced down the stairway spraying gasoline.

Thorn got a flash of his whipping silver mane, Vic Joy's hair. Not that it mattered, not that he could fine-tune his rage at this point, adjust the bestial rush that was running the show. With a grip on Vic's T-shirt, he hauled him upright and levered his body straight, jamming the small of his back into the rail, then rocking him backward. Ten steps up, twelve, thirteen. It didn't matter. The fall was high enough to do more damage than Thorn could manage with his fists. Vic kneed him, but Thorn felt it coming and blocked it with his thigh, and with a groan he bulled Vic Joy up the extra few inches
and hitched him onto the rail, seesawing him for a moment while Vic tried to brace himself, fighting for balance, clawing for a hold on Thorn's shirt, scratching at his eyes. But Thorn had the superior angle and gave a last shove and Vic Joy tipped over in a backward swan dive onto the hard-packed earth below.