Off the Chart (4 page)

She watched the waitress returning to the table carrying the check in a padded leather folder. The woman was in her sixties. She wore no rings, and the creases in her face hadn't come from smiling. She padded toward them carefully, as if walking a tightwire of exhaustion.

At the nearby table the toddler flung his plastic drinking cup in the air, and it rolled across the patio. Daniel pushed back his chair and went over and retrieved the cup and took it back to the young family. The father set the newspaper aside and nodded his thanks. Daniel said a few words to the couple, and they laughed, then he returned to the table.

“I'll take that when you're ready,” the waitress said.

“We're ready now.” Daniel counted out the bills, leaving her a tip that would have been sufficient for a dinner of twelve. The waitress stared at the cash and Daniel said, “Thank you for taking such good care of us.”

The woman gave Anne another look, then left.

“I barely know you,” Anne said.

“You know more about me than anyone has ever known. This isn't easy for me, either, Anne. But it's right. I know that much. It's real.”

“And I'm supposed to step aboard that ship and just go riding off? Leave everything behind.”

Anne watched the waitress refilling saltshakers.

“If you don't feel the same way I'm feeling, Anne, you should stay here. I'll respect your decision either way.”

The man from Daniel's crew came onto the patio and walked over to the table. He had a narrow face and an olive complexion and was wearing a white shirt and khakis and his sunglasses hung from a leather strap around his neck. He carried what looked like a small radio. He nodded at Anne.

“Weather's deteriorating in the straits,” he said. “We got maybe till tonight before things kick up out there. It'll be rough after that.”

“Thanks, Sal. I'll be there in a second.”

Sal nodded again at Anne and left.

“This has been wonderful,” Daniel said. He took her hand again. “Like nothing I've ever known.”

“Stop it,” she said. “Don't give me some goddamn good-bye.”

She turned her eyes from his and watched the waves shatter against the beach. A musky, sexual scent rode the briny mist that drifted to the patio. Seaweed, crabs, barnacles exposed to the sun—as if the surface of the ocean had been peeled back to divulge all the sensory richness below.

The truth was, Anne had felt an axis shift inside her. It happened days ago. Maybe it had even begun to tilt that first moment she'd seen Daniel at the Lorelei. She'd been denying it. Pretending he was simply another man she'd admitted to her bed. But that was a lie. He'd changed her, awakened appetites and aspirations she'd stifled until now. A dangerous man. A pirate.

“All right, goddamn it.” Anne Bonny heard the words rise from her throat unbidden. A voice more certain than her own. “But let's get one thing absolutely straight, Mr. Buccaneer.”

“Yes?” Daniel said.

She reached out for his hand and gripped it hard.

“I won't be some goddamn scullery maid for a bunch of scurvy dogs.”

Daniel's mouth relaxed into a smile. And the sun was never brighter.

 

“Marbled godwit,” Janey said.

“Where?” Sugarman lifted his binoculars.

“Eleven o'clock, two hundred yards.”

Sugar swung to the left and caught only a flash of the bird. The godwit made a wide arc to the west to avoid some tourist strapped into a parasail.

“Yeah, yeah. Good eyes, Janey. Good eyes. Or was that a curlew?”

“It's a godwit, Daddy. The bill's too straight for a curlew.”

Janey trained her binoculars on a platoon of pelicans skimming a foot above the leaden surface of Blackwater Sound. It was the first weekend in March, another blast of cold air pushing through, chopping up the water, tossing the palms, a spritz of chilly rain now and then from the blue-black clouds sailing past. Thorn was upstairs with Alexandra making lunch while Lawton snoozed in the hammock that was strung up between two coconut palms.

At the picnic table on the upstairs porch, Jackie had her chin propped on her fists. She was fuming again. She'd wanted to go back to the Lorelei to hear that reggae band they'd listened to three weeks ago. Sugarman said no. Uncle Thorn had invited them to lunch and he'd gone to a lot of trouble. Just yesterday he'd traded a few dozen of his custom bonefish flies with one of his regular customers for ten pounds of stone crabs and a bucket of fresh shrimp.

Jackie said she hated stone crabs and she was pretty sure she hated shrimp, too. Before it escalated further, Alexandra said she'd run down to the Upper Crust for a double cheese and pepperoni twelve-incher. But nothing would appease Jackie. She had inherited a heavy dose of her mother's pissy tendencies. Me first and last and always. Sugarman tried to treat the twins evenhandedly, but at times like this it was rough. Jackie was just so damn frustrating, coasting along fine one minute, in a full-blown snit the next.

Beside Sugarman at the end of Thorn's dock, Janey sat with binoculars pressed to her eyes. For the last half hour she and Sugar had been scanning the overcast sky, the rocky shoreline, and the snarl of
woods that edged both sides of Thorn's property, spotting birds, racing to see who could ID them first.

As usual, Janey was way ahead. On the drive down the eighteen-mile stretch from the mainland into the Keys, she'd already collected five roseate spoonbills, a dozen white pelicans, uncountable egrets and herons, and five kingfishers on the telephone wires. Since they'd been at Thorn's she'd spotted another kingfisher, two warblers, a red-shouldered hawk, and an osprey. Suspended about a half-mile overhead, there was a single frigate bird holding its place in the currents with small tips of its wings. So far Janey had missed the frigate bird, but Sugarman was confident she'd notice it soon enough.

While she combed the darkening sky, Sugar set aside his binoculars and began to thumb through
The Sibley Guide to Birds.
He wanted to have the Latin name ready when she finally noticed the frigate bird. A juicy factoid would be nice, too. Lately, Janey had been sponging up the names of birds and bugs and reptiles so fast, Sugar had started to worry he was slipping in his parental duties. Each week before their visitation, he'd been doing homework—an hour or two poring over
Sibley
or one of the Audubon field guides he'd been collecting. From a lifetime in the Keys he already had a pretty good command of shorebirds and waders, and he was good on the diurnal raptors. The anhinga, boobies, cormorants, and the rest of the pelecaniformes he knew. He was weak on small sandpipers, but the tourist birds were what really threw him. The Keys were a north-south highway for a variety of the migratory species, some pretty exotic specimens flittering past all through the winter and spring. Purple martins, swallow-tailed kites, parrots, shrikes and vireos, wrens and finches and sparrows. It'd take him two more lifetimes to keep all those sparrows straight.

“Over there by those ferns,” Sugar said. “What's that bobbing its tail?”

She swung her binoculars around and found the bird.

“Oh, you know what that is, Daddy. It's a palm warbler. They're always in the dirt, hardly ever in tree branches.” She panned the binoculars slowly back and forth across the dense foliage. “Did I tell you about the tufted titmouse?”

“The one in Orlando?” Sugar said.

“At Disney World. It was sitting in a bush shaped like a brontosaurus. Its call is real loud.
Peter-peter-peter.
Tufted titmouses are rare down here in the Keys, huh?”

“Yeah, you hardly ever see them this far south,” Sugar said. “But I think the plural is
titmice.
”

“Look at that, Daddy. Up there.” Janey had her binoculars tilted up.

Sugarman was ready for her.

“
Fregata magnificens,
” he said. “The frigate has the longest wings relative to its weight of any bird there is. Steals food from other birds, a pirate.”

“Not the frigate bird,” Janey said. “That man in the kite.”

“Is that damn flasher back again?” Thorn had come out on the dock behind them with a plate of crackers and smoked fish spread. “Close your eyes, Janey. This guy is gross.”

“He's taking pictures of us,” Janey said. “Look.”

She raised her binoculars and handed them to Thorn.

It took him a few seconds to locate the big blue parasail against that dark sky and then tilt down to see the guy strapped into the sling below it. He wore a black tank top and white shorts and a red bandanna on his head. He was holding a camera, clicking away.

“Well, I'll be damned,” said Thorn. “That who I think it is?”

Sugarman tightened his focus.

“Maybe he thinks I'm still dating his sister.”

“I'd heard about this,” Sugarman said. “The guy's been working up and down the coast taking pictures. Three or four people told me about it, but I didn't believe it.”

“Who is it?” Janey said.

“A bad man,” said Thorn. “A crook.”

Sugarman said, “His name is Vic Joy, honey.”

The boat that was hauling the parasail made a slow turn away from shore, circling out to deeper waters.

“What makes him so bad?”

“Probably his past,” Thorn said. “Things that happened to him when he was a kid.”

“No,” Janey said. “What does he do that's so bad?”

“He takes advantage of people, sweetheart,” Sugar said. “He
doesn't play fair. He tries to get what he wants no matter who it hurts.”

Janey stared out at the bay for a moment, filing away this new fact. The water was glazed with silver like cooling lava. The shifting scent of the cold front rode the breeze, mingling its rough blend of fall leaves, wood smoke, and the sweet burn of fresh-cut pine with the sulfur and saffron of the resident tropical air mass.

Janey lifted her binoculars and swung them to the right. So much for bad men—now back to work.

“Yellow-crowned night heron, Daddy. Look, three o'clock.”

It was Monday morning after another raucous weekend with Sugar's kids. A day of bird-watching and hide-and-go-seek. Lawton was pretty funny, doing a stiff-legged Frankenstein walk, arms outstretched, eyes squinty, as he searched for the squealing girls, who hid behind bushes and in closets. At dinner Jackie nibbled at her pizza while the rest of them scarfed stone crabs and shrimp.

After Alexandra left for work and Lawton climbed into his hammock with a stack of fishing magazines, Thorn tied on his carpenter's apron, filled the pockets with nails, and dug into his latest project. He'd been working on it for the last month and had almost finished the framing, raiding the tall stack of milled hardwood planks that had been lying on the gravel beneath his stilt house for years. They were leftovers from the time when he'd had to rebuild the place entirely, and now he'd decided those old boards would work perfectly for enclosing the downstairs area—the open space between the eight telephone poles that held his house fifteen feet above the ground.

It was to be a room for Lawton, granting all of them a measure of
privacy they hadn't known since Alex and her dad moved in. For the last few months Lawton had been sleeping on a cot in Thorn's living room, a mere ten feet away from where he and Alexandra shared a bed. Thorn had told the two of them that he was building a workshop, wanting to keep the real intention secret until the room had actually taken decent shape.

At Thorn's current rate, he figured Lawton's room would take another month to finish. By then he was fairly certain he'd know if it was safe to tell Alexandra the true purpose of the space. The reason he'd shied away from confessing it already was that he didn't want to scare her off. It seemed so permanent, such a pivotal step. A room for Lawton. An unmistakable display of the growing bond he felt toward the old man and his beautiful daughter.

At noon he'd finally finished the framing. To celebrate he decided to take Lawton on the skiff, go out past Crocodile Dragover to McCormick Creek, check some snook holes he knew. Do some damage to the fish population.

So he showered, put on fresh shorts and a white T-shirt, and carried his spinning rods and tackle box down to the skiff. Out at the end of his dock, he heard the grinding roar, a noise he'd become all too familiar with lately. Two properties to the north a bulldozer was leveling the Island House. For fifty years the small motel with a half-dozen quaint bungalows had been at that location. He'd heard Doug and Debbie Johnson had sold out but assumed the new owner would keep it intact as all the previous owners had for half a century.

Thorn stood at the end of his dock and watched the big machine uproot an old gumbo-limbo, then flatten a stand of wispy Australian pines, mowing down those shallow-rooted trees that took decades to reach those heights. That rocky shore and the rickety motel had been in his peripheral vision for so many hours and so many years that now, with the coastline so suddenly altered, he was feeling a whirl of vertigo.

When the land clearing was done, Thorn's neighborhood was probably going to be getting another of those ten-thousand-square-foot get-away-for-the-weekend mansions. A million-dollar party house owned by a Miami heart surgeon or a pitcher for the Florida
Marlins—with a half-dozen Jet Skis and a flashy red speedboat at the dock. Progress.

Back on the shoreline Lawton was standing in water to his ankles with fishing line tangled around both arms. In the stiff breeze, his casting practice had been going badly.

In a couple of hours Alexandra would be home and they'd open a bottle of wine and hold hands while they watched the last trickle of the daylight drain from the sky. If she was in the mood, she'd tell him about one of her cases that day. Keeping it light but still managing to give him a glimpse of the brutalities that were commonplace in her daytime world. He'd recount his time with Lawton, things the old man had said or done. And she would listen without comment, her eyes on the distance. After these few months, their routine felt solid and reliable. Thorn, his lover, and his lover's father, an odd little family but a family nonetheless. For someone who'd spent most of his life working hard to stay isolated, it was startling to discover how much satisfaction he found in the constant presence of that old man and his strong-willed, beautiful daughter.

Thorn smiled at Lawton's struggle with the fly line and headed over to give him a hand—glad to have some reason to pull away from the bulldozer's dismal work. He was halfway down the dock when the car pulled off the Overseas Highway and began to inch down Thorn's gravel drive. A dark blue Crown Victoria.

The car parked in the shade near his house and the man who got out from behind the wheel was squat and square-faced, with a paunch stressing the buttons on his blue madras shirt. Despite his stumpy legs, the man advanced on Thorn with a cocky stride. His head was shaved and gleaming and his beard ran in a narrow, precise band along the outlines of his jaws and chin. He had on jeans and boat shoes, but both looked as if they'd been purchased an hour earlier and hadn't yet been broken in. This seemed to be a man for whom casual dress did not come easy.

“Thorn,” he said as he came across the yard.

Lawton was swiping at the wispy fishing line as if trying to pluck a spiderweb from his skin.

“You okay, Lawton?”

“Fine, fine,” the old man said. “I've caught a monster this time. Me.”

The stranger held out his hand, and after a moment's reluctance Thorn shook it.

“Do I know you?”

“You should,” the man said. “Mind if we stand in the shade?”

Thorn followed the man over to the shadows of the tamarind tree.

“Jimmy Lee Webster,” the man said.

“Listen,” Thorn said. “I don't mean to be impolite, but—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Webster said. “You're busy tying flies, or whatever it is you do with your free time.” He flashed Thorn a one-second smile, then said, “Which seems to be most of your day. And a lot of your night.”

The man produced that miserable smile again, like something he'd acquired from a second-rate drama coach.

“You might've seen me on TV,” Webster said.

“If I had one.”

“Or in the newspaper.”

Thorn shook his head.

“Jimmy Lee Webster.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“Really? Not even the faint tinkle of a little bell?”

“What're you, a TV star?”

“Secretary Webster.”

“Oh, okay. You're the guy that answers the phone, takes dictation.”

“Yeah, I was warned,” Webster said, “what a smart-ass you are.”

“Fair enough,” Thorn said. “But I still don't know you, Webster.”

“I was Secretary of the Navy, last administration.”

Lawton had dropped down in the grass and was peeling the knotted strands of line off his legs and sandals. He noticed Thorn looking at him and showed him his palms. Didn't need any help, doing just fine.

“I know,” Webster said. “Looking at me, it's hard to believe. Don't exactly have a military bearing. Not the tall, top-gun prototype. But fortunately, advancement in the armed services isn't based on appearance.”

“Well, congratulations,” Thorn said. “Your parents must be very proud.”

“Reason I was on TV is because I was controversial,” Webster said. “I butted heads with the big boys, but I held my own. Damn well got some things accomplished in those four years.”

A shift in the breeze sent Webster's aftershave Thorn's way. An abrasive blend of wood smoke and motor oil.

“Look,” Webster said. “You don't know me, but I know a little about you. You're a loner. You don't like strangers wandering up to your house. Hey, who does? I can appreciate that. And the fact that I was Secretary of the Navy doesn't cut any ice with you, okay, that's fine, too.”

Jimmy Lee Webster drew a white handkerchief from his jeans pocket and dabbed the sweat off his face, then did a quick swipe across his dome.

“I don't know how you folks put up with this heat.”

“There's not a lot to do about it.”

“Okay, here it is,” Webster said. He spread his legs apart and reset his feet as if he were about to snatch Thorn by the lapels and body-slam him. He produced his fake smile again and said, “My style is to go for the throat. That way we don't waste any more of your valuable fly-tying time. So here's what's going on. Your name came up in an investigation I'm running. And I decided I should come have a chat.”

“Whoa,” Thorn said. “Stop right there.”

“Look, I can explain the whole enchilada to you out here in the sun. Or we can go upstairs, have a beer, discuss it in detail in the air-conditioning.”

“Only air-conditioning I have is what you feel right now.”

Lawton had extricated himself from the fishing line, and it lay in a nasty tangle near the dock. He dusted off his hands as if he'd just knocked a bully flat, and marched over to join them in the shade of the tamarind.

“Okay, then,” Webster said. “I understand you had a hot and heavy fling with Anne Bonny Joy.”

Lawton settled in between Jimmy Webster and Thorn. Leaning forward, giving Webster a good going-over.

“You're that navy guy,” Lawton said. “From TV. You sunk that ship.”

Webster smiled at Thorn. See, somebody recognized him.

“That particular fling you're referring to,” Thorn said, “was over a long time ago.”

“That's not how I heard it. I heard there was still considerable heat there. Some sparks.”

Thorn took a calming breath, glanced out at the water, then turned his eyes back to Webster.

“Look, Mr. Secretary—”

“Not anymore,” Webster said. “I'm out of the cabinet these days. Still got one foot in government, but I'm in other areas. A bit more low-profile.”

“Clandestine,” Lawton said. “Covert operations.”

Jimmy Lee looked at Lawton.

“This your father?” Webster said.

“Practically.”

“You came to the right place, Webster,” Lawton said, “because it just so happens I did a bit of undercover work myself at one time. Miami PD. Several high-profile sting operations. Stolen merchandise, cocaine. So I know how it's done. We took down some pretty rotten apples.”

Jimmy Lee nodded uncertainly at the old man.

“Forget about Thorn,” Lawton said. “He's the shy, retiring type. The guy you want to talk to is standing right here.”

Thorn rested a hand on Webster's shoulder and eased him firmly toward his car.

“I just want to pick your brain about Anne Joy.”

“You already picked it clean, partner. Time you hit the highway.”

 

“You didn't even ask him what he wanted?” Alex said. Lawton was stretched out in his cot, the full moon had risen above the trees, and Blackwater Sound was frosted with gold.

“I ushered him to his car and sent him on his way.”

“Jeez, Thorn. Jimmy Lee Webster.”

“Big shot, huh?”

“Was for a while.”

“He claimed he was controversial.”

“Oh, yeah,” Alex said. “He's the guy who gave the go-ahead for a
navy destroyer to fire on some commercial ship in Malaysia, somewhere over there.”

“Why?”

“Something about pirates. Problem was, he got the wrong boat. Bad intelligence. I forget the details. Bunch of civilians got killed, ship sank. That's how I remember it. Major international incident. A lot of saber rattling afterward. There was a Senate hearing on TV for a week or two. Haven't heard much about him lately.”

“Pirates?”

“I think what it was, navy intelligence thought an American oil tanker had been taken over by thugs and they were sailing off somewhere after murdering the crew. They had that part right. There was an oil tanker that got pirated; our folks just got the wrong ship. A U.S. destroyer tried to get this other tanker to stop; when they didn't respond, our guys opened fire. A dozen men killed, that's what I recall. Maybe more. Big oil spill.”

“Well, he's doing something else now. CIA maybe. Who knows?”

Alex leaned against his shoulder. They were standing at the rail looking out at the darkness.

“Your name came up?”

“That's what he said.”

Thorn considered for a half-second telling her about the Anne Joy connection but decided to pass. No need to stir that up again.

“It might've been interesting just to hear his pitch.”

“No way. I'm on vacation.”

“Oh, yeah? For how long?”

“Rest of my natural life.”

“Well, that's fine. But me, I'd want to know what the deal was.”

“Whatever it was, I've got my hands full already,” Thorn said, nudging her hip with his. “My cup is overflowing.”

“Hey, I know what it was,” Alexandra said. “Your name came up in an investigation of international Lotharios.”

“Funny,” he said. “Hilarious.”

He poked his elbow lightly in her ribs.

“They wanted to know what makes you so irresistible to women. Start distilling it. Put it in bottles, lob it at the enemy. A weapon of mass seduction.”

Thorn laughed. He lifted his glass and clinked it to hers and had another sip of wine. She gave his cheek a peck, then drew away and looked back at the dark view.

“Irresistible?” he said. “How irresistible?”

“Mesmerizing.” Alexandra finished the last swallow of her cabernet and set the glass on the table behind them. “An overpowering magnetism.”

In the thick mangroves that bordered his land, a bird keened. A warning screech or maybe a late-night mating call. He wasn't sure what kind of bird it was. Didn't sound like an osprey or the red-shouldered hawk, not the screech owl, either. Sugarman or Janey would know.

“Well, it's nice to know,” Thorn said, “I'm such hot shit.”

“Yes,” she said. “You are. You most certainly are.”