Off the Chart (7 page)

Facedown, she wormed to the edge of the yellow container and peered toward the spot where she'd last heard Daniel's voice.

Two men in camouflage pants and black T-shirts were standing over Daniel's body. They gripped silenced weapons. The taller of the two men said something to the other and the man unloaded his weapon at Daniel's body. She thought she saw Daniel twist aside in time to avoid the gunfire; then both men scrambled out of view.

A wail broke from Anne's throat, but before she could rise to fire, she was staring at a pair of black boots not more than a yard from her nose.

“Fuckin' move and you're dead.” His growl was all New York, the nasal bray of a street punk. “Shove it out slow, that fucking gun. You hear me, cunt? Twitch and you're dead.”

A year before, she would have obeyed instantly, raising her hands in relief that this long and terrifying dream was done. But that was before Daniel. Before he led her to the edge of the precipice, took her hand in his, and looked past the surface of her eyes into regions of her self she had barely sensed were there and the two of them leaped over the brink, dropping and dropping in one long ecstatic rush, only to land in the black heart of this moment.

Anne Bonny Joy nudged the Mac-10 forward along the deck, inch by inch until it was fully exposed; then without a flicker of hesitation she slid her hand down the stock and squeezed off a half-dozen rounds at the toes of the black boots and watched them jerk and dance for a half-second; then she spun to the right, came to her feet and sprinted to the rail, and dived into the bottomless dark.

 

In the choppy sea she stripped a life jacket from one of the Nicaraguans. She ducked away from the spotlights, stroking slowly and
steadily beyond the perimeter of their search zone. Through the night, she paddled and drifted in a swoon of dehydration, rage, and despair. She was carried by the current mile after mile northward until an hour after sunrise she was spotted by a Panamanian fishing boat and plucked from the sea.

They put her ashore on a beach at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and she used some of the American dollars she was carrying to work her way south by bus down the Mosquito Coast. Campesinos on the bus turned to stare at her. As Anne slumped in her seat, an old woman nudged her shoulder, checking for life. At Punta Castillo Anne chartered a skiff to the Barra de Colorado. In a deadened haze, she left the boat behind and trekked through fifteen miles of rain forest and made it to the lodge late in the afternoon four full days after the disaster on the
Rainmaker.

Taking cover in a gully on the outskirts of the camp, she spent an hour listening to the shrieks of parrots and howler monkeys. She sniffed the air but detected neither foreign aromas nor the charred ruin of the camp. Until dusk she waited; then finally she rose and entered the camp.

In the gathering darkness she inched along the shadowy edges of the buildings, a pocketknife her only weapon. The sour stench of the staff latrine, a can of garbage overturned and raided by jungle creatures. The cigarette reek of the bunkhouse where the Sandinistas slept, and at every step there were the vaporous echoes of voices.

She slipped into the main cabin that she and Daniel had shared the last weeks. Their bed was neatly made. She stared at his comb lying on the dresser and her brush, which lay beside it. She wiped her eyes clear and stepped over to the bathroom mirror and took it down from its hook. She calmed the jitter in her fingers and dialed the numbers and swung open the steel door. For a moment in the gloom she thought all was well, then she reached out and ran her hands across the bare shelves and a low groan rose from her chest. Someone had beaten her back to the camp and looted the reserves.

 

The journey back to Florida took two weeks. Riding Greyhounds through the long nights, exiting at dawn, eyes down, speaking to no
one. Staying in cheap motels along the coast, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. Blinds shut tight against the daylight, drinking herself to oblivion while she spent the impossibly long days staring at the pitted walls and the blank screens of televisions. Paranoid, grieving, so twitchy she couldn't sleep. Not even in those desperate weeks after her parents' deaths had she felt so hopeless.

Somewhere east of Pensacola she woke from a drowse, jerked upright in her bus seat, and startled the teenage kid in a cowboy hat beside her.

“You okay, ma'am?” The kid had taken his Stetson off and set it in his lap. “Bad dream?”

Anne looked at the boy for a moment, then turned her eyes to her window, at the palm trees and scrub brush flashing past.

“I wish it were,” she said. “I wish to hell it were.”

“Oh, come on, Thorn. Even a guy like you could find a use for two million bucks.”

“Not really, Marty.”

Marty Messina shook his head and groaned. He was a big man with a blocky head and coarse black hair that he wore in a military flattop. An inch of hair across the front was greased into a small curl like a perfect wave rolling off the black ocean of his skull. He was several inches above six feet. In the years since Thorn had seen him last, Marty had chunked up, and now dangerous muscles flared in his shoulders and arms. His neck was so thick, he probably had to custom-order his flowered shirts. He wore white high-top tennis shoes with a complicated lacing system, and skintight blue jeans and a black rayon shirt printed with yellow hibiscus blooms. The shirt was opened to the sternum, showing off a pad of black hair that rose to his throat. Five, six years ago when he'd been sent away to prison, Marty had been fond of heavy gold jewelry, but they must've had a
fashion class up there, because now he wore only a single diamond stud pinned to the top of his right ear.

Marty shook his head and made a show of sighing and marching over to the wood stairway of Thorn's stilt house and planting his butt on the fourth step with such resolve, it appeared he meant to stay as long as it took for Thorn to cave in.

Resetting his grip on the pine slat, Thorn pressed it against the sawhorse, then drew the handsaw back and forth through the last inch of softwood. When the excess piece dropped in the grass, he smoothed away a couple of brittle ends on the slat and stepped over to the shade of a tamarind tree and set it on the bench that was three-quarters complete. He brushed the sawdust from his hands and wrists and looked out at Lawton Collins, who was napping in a hammock strung between two coconut palms a few yards from the rocky shore of Blackwater Sound.

It was about four o'clock on that May afternoon, and Blackwater Sound shivered with sharp blue light. A brown pelican coasted a few feet above the still water, carried along by a warm draft from the west. An Everglades breeze full of mold spores and mosquitoes and the first ozone whiffs of a spring thunderstorm. It had been a brutally dry year. During the winter only a couple of cold fronts had plowed all the way down the state, and those brought no rain. And so far, the summer monsoon season still hadn't kicked in.

His grass was charred and crispy underfoot, but the bougainvillea seemed ecstatic about the drought, and their great clouds of purple and pink and white cascaded over trees and lesser shrubs all around the perimeter of his five acres. The wild lantana and the penta were doing fine as well. For generations those indigenous plants had thrived in the inch of sandy soil dusting the limestone rubble that passed for land in the Florida Keys. Regularly flooded by the salty sea or scraped back to nubs by hurricanes, those native plants seemed to bloom with even greater flourish after each new trial.

The year of relentless heat had been nearly ruinous for Thorn's fly-tying business. Out on the flats the bonefish and reds were lethargic in the overheated water. A warmer-than-average winter in the Northeast and a series of airline crashes had cut the tourist flow by half, so the fishing guides who worked the flats hadn't snapped up
Thorn's custom flies in the numbers they had in the years before. And though Thorn had almost exhausted his savings and was starting to make uneasy calculations whenever he looked into the pantry, he wasn't about to confess any of that to Marty Messina.

Back when Marty Messina had been a bush-league dope peddler around the upper Keys, word was Marty was connected to a Miami crime family. Whether it was true or not Thorn didn't know, but the guy certainly had acted the part. As a sideline, he'd laundered some of his profits through Tarpon's, a waterfront restaurant he operated in nearby Rock Harbor. Probably through dumb luck, Marty signed on a young chef who'd discovered some creative uses for cinnamon and bananas and exotic Caribbean fruits in his fish dishes. Nobody had ever cooked that way in Key Largo before, and the restaurant became a trendy hit with locals. Even Thorn had gone there once or twice for special occasions.

Marty kept the prices low, routinely buying rounds of drinks for the whole bar to celebrate his great good fortune. But then a trawler Marty was piloting was boarded by the DEA just off Islamorada. Nearly a ton of Mexican grass was aboard at the time. Within a few weeks Marty was sent away to perfect his croquet skills in a minimum-security prison somewhere in north Florida, a place that housed corrupt politicos, white-collar embezzlers, and other well-lawyered crooks. In his absence, the restaurant changed hands, the chef moved on, and finally the place became just another tourist joint, pumping out fish sandwiches and limp fries.

A couple of weeks ago Marty Messina had materialized again in Key Largo. Thorn had heard from one of his fishing guide buddies that Messina had been planting his butt on a stool at the bar of his old restaurant, running the place down to anyone who'd listen. Reminding everyone what a cutting-edge hot spot it had once been.

“So you a Realtor now, Marty? Get your license in prison?”

“Fuck you, Thorn.”

“Seems reasonable,” Thorn said. “Real estate's the logical next career choice after apprenticing in crime.”

“Hey, Thorn, come on, man, I don't have all fucking day. Just say yes, and I'll go back and draw up the papers and get your money bundled up.”

Marty gave him a cheerless grin.

“My buyer will pay all cash,” he said. “Two and a half mil.”

“A minute ago you said two.”

“I'm negotiating.”

“Oh, is that how it's done?”

“Okay, three,” Marty said. “Three million dollars, Thorn.”

Marty stood up and lumbered back over to the sawhorse.

“You're negotiating in a vacuum. I'm not selling.”

“Yeah, that's what I told him. You were a first-class knucklehead.”

Thorn glanced up, but Marty was looking out at the glassy bay.

“Tell him to drop by. I'll refuse him to his face.”

“This guy doesn't drop by, Thorn. He pays people to drop by.”

Marty turned and looked Thorn in the eyes and a smile spread slowly across his face as if he'd surprised himself with his own ominous wit.

“What's his name, Marty? The guy who wants this place so bad.”

“Look, Thorn. If you fuck with me, you fuck with him. And believe me, buddy, you don't want to fuck with him.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, really.”

Marty's dark eyes held to Thorn's and he clamped his lips together as if to keep from blurting out the name. The buyer could've been any of a hundred of Marty's old associates, dope runners of an earlier era who'd stashed away enough to buy their way into legit businesses around the Keys. Thorn had nothing against their kind. He'd smoked his share of funny stuff back in his younger days before grass got all inbred and so full of hallucinogenic juice that one toke would give you the munchies for a month. He knew a ton of plumbers and electricians and roofers around the island who'd bought their first tools and panel trucks with the proceeds of one successful dope run. Most of them were upstanding citizens now. Churchgoers with a mortgage, kids in high school, a small fishing boat they took out weekend yellowtailing. But there were other guys he'd run into back in the good old dope days who'd gaffed and gutted one too many of their competitors, waded a little too deep into the dark sea of deadened senses. They were still around the island, but you didn't see them out and
about. They sent their lackeys, guys like Marty Messina, to do their bidding.

“Okay,” Thorn said. “So what exactly does he want to do with my land?”

“Improve it,” Marty said.

“Ah, yes.” Thorn lined up another slat of pine on the sawhorse and drew out the aluminum tape. “This land's long overdue for improving.”

“Don't get funny with me, Thorn. I'm running low on patience.”

“Hey, Marty. I have a tip. Tell your guy to swoop in and buy the tract where the Island House motel used to be. Back in March somebody knocked all the trees down, scraped the land bare, then left it sitting there. Guy must've run out of money. That'd be a nice spot to improve.”

“He wants
this
land,” Marty said.

“You hit town one week, you're out throwing around millions of dollars the next. How do I know you're even legit? You know what I'm saying?”

“This is for real, Thorn. A bona fide offer. Far as just getting into town, yeah, that's true. But some people around here remember me, respect my abilities. I got excellent credentials.”

“A stretch in jail being near the top of the list.”

“I been out for a while, jerkhole. I been into some other things; now I'm into this. Not that it's any of your fucking business.”

“You're standing here trying to buy my land. That sort of makes it my business, doesn't it?”

Thorn took the pencil from behind his ear and marked the slat, then set the blade of the saw against the mark, drew it back an inch to score the spot. But before he could begin to saw, Marty stepped close to the horse, blocking his stroke.

“Look, Thorn. You got a piece-of-shit car; it's rusting through. Same fucking car you had before I went off to the joint.”

Thorn looked up at Marty. He held the saw in place.

“You got this falling-down house, one good storm comes along, a puff of wind, trust me, Thorn, that shack's gonna wash right into the bay.”

Marty made his eyes go droopy like he was bored with this, bored trying to reason with a knucklehead, but still trying real hard to be decent.

“Three million, you could buy any car you want. Buy ten cars. A house on the water anyplace in Florida. Put the rest in mutual funds, live off the interest. See what it feels like to be an adult for once in your life.”

Thorn looked over at Lawton stretching his arms, yawning, then rearranging himself in the hammock and easing back for the rest of his nap. Lately the old man had taken to dressing in Thorn's clothes. Today he was wearing a baggy white T-shirt and khaki fishing shorts with flap pockets in the front, the exact same outfit Thorn had on. The official uniform for Camp Thorn.

“I've already got a house on the water, Marty. I have the piece-of-shit car I want. So why don't you go on back to Mr. Hotshot's office and tell him to find another plantation to sack and plunder.”

Marty peered into Thorn's eyes for several seconds, then shook his head sadly as if about to deliver a fatal diagnosis.

“I told my guy how you were. But he said to come anyway, 'cause he believed I could talk you into selling. Man has that kind of confidence in me. Now I got to go back and tell him you blew me off. You're going to make me look bad, Thorn. I don't like looking bad.”

Thorn held the saw steady against the notch.

“Seems like you'd be used to it by now, Marty.”

Overhead a warm breeze crackled through the brittle fronds. Marty's eyes grew even droopier. He'd heard it all. Been there, pissed on that. He was too jaded to get riled by some amateur smart-ass. But all the same, Thorn could see the flush inching up his neck like the mercury on an August afternoon.

Marty held his stare, then shifted his gaze to the saw in Thorn's hand. His dark eyes going flat.

“You're a crazy motherfucker, aren't you, Thorn?”

“So I've been told.”

“I believe you'd use that, wouldn't you? That saw. Take a swipe at me, try to saw my fucking head off if you could.”

“You could stick around about two more minutes and find out.”

Thorn gave him an innocent smile.

“Assholes like you, Thorn, they're a dime a dozen in the joint. Thing is, they don't last long with that hard-ass attitude. Sooner or later they smart off one too many times and wind up getting their fucking tongue cut out and handed to them on a clean white plate.”

Thorn looked down at the wood slat and nudged the saw back and forth across it, the blade missing Marty's leg by half an inch. He spoke without looking up.

“You might want to go home, Marty, stand in front of the mirror, work some more on that sales technique. 'Cause it's not working worth a damn.”

Marty took a few steps toward his car, then stopped and swung around.

“He's coming after you, Thorn. This guy doesn't take no for an answer. He's going to have this land one way or the other. That's just fair warning.”

“Bring him on,” Thorn said. “Bring the fucker on.”

 

Just inside the front door of Tarpon's, Marty snagged the portable phone off the podium and headed into the bar to use it. Tying up their only line right at early bird time. The old lady hostess came over and tapped on his shoulder and held out her hand, but Marty turned his back to her until she went away. What he needed was a damn cell phone, but he hadn't put away enough cash yet.

He checked in with his boss, broke the bad news about Thorn, and his boss was pissed at the pigheaded asshole, but he wasn't surprised.

Marty's boss thought about it for a minute, humming to himself the whole time like he might be shaving or some damn thing; then he came back on and told Marty he could redeem himself by doing another job for him, one he could probably manage on the telephone. Marty got the details and hung up and about then the hostess came back, tapped on his shoulder again, but Marty ignored her and dialed the next number, hoping he'd catch the guy before he knocked off for the day, then had to wait another five minutes while the secretary who answered carried the phone outside to the guy on his forklift.

Marty didn't even have to bully the forklift guy. Just used his boss's
name and offered him a foreman's job at another marina, double what he was making, and the guy said hell, yes, he'd do fucking backflips for that kind of money. And after two more minutes on hold, listening to the background music at Morada Bay Marina, with the Tarpon's hostess coming and going, pecking him on the shoulder to get the phone back, the forklift guy came back and said he had it. Five pages, the complete May calendar, the float plans for every boat in the marina. Marty gave him his boss's fax number and the guy said he'd send it right over.