Silencer (2 page)

The Watusi gazed across at them blankly. He was no bigger than an average feedlot cow, but his horns extended four feet from either side of his head, thick and unwieldy, more burden than menace.

“Fucking horns, man.” DirtyX's face shined with sweat. “Those are some big-ass horns. Got to weigh four hundred pounds, horns like that.”

“You have a wall big enough for those puppies?” said Jonah.

The rapper took off his white sunglasses, and he and the Watusi checked each other out. A staredown that seemed to wake Immambo from his stupor.

“You ever used a shotgun?” Claire said. “You need a lesson?”

DirtyX grinned back at Janiqua.

“Fired a sawed-off once or twice. Believe I can manage.”

“That's one strange-ass animal,” Janiqua said. “It's staring at us funny.”

“Give me the gun.” DirtyX got out of the Jeep, never looking away from Immambo. “I'm shooting this bad boy.”

“No,” Claire said. “Forget it. This is wrong.”

“What's wrong?” Janiqua said.

“That's a gentle creature. It's sick and dying. This isn't hunting. I've changed my mind. I can't let you do this.”

“Gentle?” the rapper said. “I don't fucking think so. Watusi, man. I never heard of no gentle Watusi.”

“Those horns keep him cool,” Jonah said, off in his own time zone.

The rapper grinned uneasily.

“Hey, Niqua, you hear that? Horns keep him cool. Just like my horns.”

“I don't know about this, baby. Maybe we should go shoot something else.”

“How those horns keep him cool?” DirtyX asked. “Like a hat in the sun?”

“There's blood vessels inside them,” said Jonah. “Blood flows through the horns, gets cooled by the air, flows back into the body. Like a radiator.”

“Like a radiator.”

“Go ahead, baby,” Janiqua said. “Do what you gonna do. I'm sweating through my clothes, all this sun.”

The rapper couldn't take his eyes off Immambo. And the bull seemed to sense this was a showdown like none he'd experienced before.

“I think we got us a chickenshit,” Jonah said.

“Who you calling names?” The rapper didn't look away from the bull.

“I don't see anybody else around here pissing all over himself.”

DirtyX tramped around to Claire's side of the Jeep and held out his hand. She took a long breath, let it go, then handed him the Remington.

A couple of years back Immambo had been the first exotic Browning brought to the ranch. In the two years since, Claire had witnessed many large and remarkable creatures tracked down and shot. She'd learned to blunt her sentimental attachments to most of them. But there was something about Immambo that still stirred her. She supposed it was the dignified way he endured the weight of those oversized horns. Rambling around as if the load he carried was of no consequence.

Until today she'd managed to steer all the hunters away from the Watusi. Even when the bull was younger and healthy, it was hardly fair game. A ten-year-old child could outrun the thing. There were no Watusi females on the ranch for it to protect, so it had never shown aggression of any kind. Though what she saw in Immambo at that moment was clearly different. Its hackles rising, a forward shift in its stance.

“Shoot him in the brain or what?” the rapper said.

“Don't mess up his face,” Jonah said. “Taxidermist hates that shit.”

“Go get him,” Janiqua said. “Do it, baby.”

Claire got out of the Jeep. She looked back at the sandy road they'd followed out to this meadow and thought briefly of hiking back to the lodge, just leave these craven children to their blood sport, let them assume the moral consequence. But of course she couldn't. This was her own weight to manage.

She'd never heard Immambo's bellow before. It startled her. It startled all of them. Beginning as little more than a wheeze but deepening quickly into a throaty rumble, then rising in pitch to a bleating scream that sent the rapper stumbling sideways into the Jeep.

He swung the shotgun up and aimed from his waist, the barrel wavering as if he couldn't locate his target. The Watusi had caught the scent of peril and started forward in a shaky canter, its massive horns cutting from side to side.

Janiqua squealed and spilled from the Jeep into the dry grass at Claire's feet.

“What the fuck!” the rapper yelled.

“Not in his face,” Jonah said.

DirtyX dodged to his left as Immambo trotted toward him, the rapper waving the shotgun from side to side as if simply brandishing such a weapon had always worked for him in the past.

Claire circled the Jeep, and cut in front of the rapper, putting herself in the path of the Watusi, waving her arms back and forth for it to halt. But the bull had disappeared into its dream of combat, eyes as vacant and sightless as chips of coal. Claire yelled its name, a futile and silly act, losing a second and another as she waited for Immambo to respond. The bull trotted onward as though the rails it was mounted on ran directly through the Jeep and shot west across the farthest prairies.

“Get back!” she yelled to the others.

Claire kept her focus on the closer horn, waited till it was a foot away, then cut to her right, ducking below the slash, feeling a hot rush of air as the Watusi passed.

Immambo rammed the Jeep just above the front right wheel. He twisted his head and dug the point of his horn into the rubber tire and gouged away a fist-sized chunk. He rooted under the chassis as though whatever demon he'd conjured might be hiding in the shadows there.

The rapper dropped the Remington and backed toward the sandy trail, his girlfriend huddled at his shoulder.

Immambo jimmied his head beneath the carriage of the Jeep and seemed intent on flipping the vehicle onto its back. Some imaginary rhino armored for battle must have been flickering in its head, a squat adversary sheathed in metal. The Watusi found the leverage it was after and the right side of the Jeep rocked a foot from the ground.

“Get out of there, Jonah! Get out!”

“Hey, fuck this, okay.”

Jonah bent forward, dug beneath his seat, and came out with a compact automatic weapon with a banana clip. He climbed atop his seat, lurching once, then grabbed hold of the windshield with one hand and aimed at Immambo with the other.

Before Claire could order him to stop, Jonah fired twenty rounds, then twenty more into the back and shoulders of the furious bull. Another dozen were required before Immambo gave up the battle it must have been anticipating for years, sinking silently to its belly in the yellow grass.

 

 

“
COQUINA RANCH
,”
RUSTY SAID
. “
YOU
ever heard of it?”

“Up near Lake Okeechobee? That place?”

Rusty said, “Yeah, that one. The Hammond family, seventh-generation Floridians, here before Ponce de León.”

It was a sheer afternoon in early November. A few minutes earlier Rusty Stabler had returned from a business trip and located Thorn in his customary spot, on the dock by the lagoon, tying bonefish flies. Selling those handcrafted lures to Keys fishing guides and a few longtime customers brought in a meager income, though it was the only income Thorn had ever required.

After they kissed, Rusty began to pace along the dock, a twinkle in her smile.

Thorn watched her for a minute, then went back to work on his bristle worm.

“So what about Coquina Ranch?”

She halted, her back to the water and the early-morning sun.

“Okay, but not until I have your undivided attention.”

Thorn knotted the thread, snipped the end, and turned away from the fly-tying vice. Rusty was wearing one of her new business outfits:
olive twill pants, a white linen blouse, and a burgundy jacket. Around her neck was a gold chain with a plump antique pearl her mother bequeathed to her.

In the last year, as her corporate duties consumed more of her time, Rusty had been forced to supplement her wardrobe of shorts, sandals, and T-shirts. Since most of her adult life had been spent on fishing boats, she'd never even owned a steam iron or coat hanger, much less a business suit. Which was one of the many things she and Thorn had in common.

With so little fashion sense, Rusty chafed and squirmed in those first store-bought outfits, and for weeks all the skirts and blouses seemed to fit her angular frame as awkwardly as starched cardboard. Little by little she discovered a style that suited her—clothes with a sporty grace, just proper enough to allow her to slip in and out of the boardrooms and the wood-paneled chambers of various elected officials that were now on her appointed rounds.

It was only one part of Rusty's makeover in the last twelve months. Using two decades of business smarts she'd acquired from running her own charter fishing operation, Rusty Stabler was now very skillfully managing Bates International, the third-largest privately held corporation in the United States.

Last winter, Abigail Bates, the matriarch of the Bates family, a grandmother Thorn didn't know he had, left her large and complicated estate to him, including the corporation and all its subsidiaries, which were valued in the billions of dollars, a sum so staggering it never seemed quite real. At Thorn's urging, Rusty agreed to oversee the board of directors, select new members, and take a shot at converting BI from a profit-driven monster that trashed large swaths of Florida into a good citizen and a constructive force. In other words, turn Genghis Khan into Henry David Thoreau.

Though he'd always known Rusty was exceptionally bright, Thorn was boggled to see how undaunted she was to be swimming in those deep waters. She'd learned the lingo fast and well. Nowadays she
spoke fluently about balance sheets and global platforms and short selling and supply chain management and metrics for functionalities. The gibberish of the marketplace.

She was a lean woman with ash-blond hair that she kept so short it barely required a comb. Her hazel eyes were wide set and tenacious. Her narrow face highlighted the slope of her cheekbones, and in relaxed moments her generous lips tended to soften into an artless smile. In the right light Rusty could pass for mid-twenties. She liked to tell the story from last summer when she'd set a six-pack next to the register at a 7-Eleven, and the twenty-something kid behind the counter carded her. She didn't have her license and the kid flat refused to sell her beer. Best damn beer Rusty never bought.

“I'm ready, Rusty. What about Coquina Ranch?”

She looked out at the riffle from a passing school of mullet, then took off her jacket and hung it carefully on the back of the Adirondack.

She smiled.

“Oh,” Thorn said. “So this is good. Something big.”

“Very big. I think it fits your guidelines perfectly. Turning shit into gold.”

“Our new mantra,” Thorn said.

“So here's the nutshell. We're going to sell the entire Bates tract east of Sarasota and use the money to buy Coquina Ranch.”

“How's that work?”

“It starts with the state of Florida, their land-preservation program.”

“Okay.”

“It's called Florida Forever. They buy land, take it off the table.”

“Rings a faint bell.”

“Here's the story. I was talking to some of our people in Tallahassee, Bates attorneys and lobbyists, sketching out the goals we had in mind, and someone suggested I go to the Division of State Lands, talk to the Florida Forever people. I was there a couple of hours, brainstorming with the director of the program, and little by little we shaped the outline
of a deal. Maybe at that point I should've called you and gotten your go-ahead, but I didn't.”

“You don't need my permission for anything, Rusty. Nothing. Ever.”

“Well, this is a big deal,” she said. “Probably bigger than anything you had in mind. You can say no. Nothing's set in stone yet.”

“Go ahead.”

“In exchange for the eighty-eight thousand acres along the Peace River, the phosphate mines, the state is going to pay you five hundred and thirty-four million dollars.”

“That should buy a few cases of Dos Equis.”

“Yes, it should.”

Last year after Thorn inherited the Bates holdings along with that parcel of land, he and Rusty and Sugarman had driven up to Summerland and spent a few days exploring the back roads of the region, then tramped on foot for miles along riverbanks and through scrubby pinelands to get a feel for the property that now belonged to him. It was huge. It was desolate. It was a long way from the coast, and it was dense with wildlife, including some rare crested caracaras and wild hogs. It was a different Florida than the one featured in fashion shoots and the slick TV shows. This was the rugged heartland of the state, a good hour from the sandy coastline and blue waters and neon-drizzled hotels, a landscape still as harsh and inhospitable as it had been when the first cutthroat Europeans on horseback pushed into its matted underbrush seeking the Fountain of Youth and bricks of gold.

“So I filled out a stack of paperwork,” Rusty said, “ran everything by the Bates lawyers, then went back and negotiated like hell with Division of State Lands. They're fast-tracking the environmental-risk audit. The state's required to see what contaminants on the land need to be cleaned up before they take possession. They know about the phosphate pits, the gyp stacks. That's factored in. But even if they find something they don't expect, we should be able to get waivers. I agreed in principle to pay whatever costs might be incurred in a clean-up. Margaret
Milbanks, the director of State Lands, she's ecstatic. This is a huge deal, a career maker. It's so big it depletes the fund.”

“Wait a minute. Why do we want to sell land to Florida?”

“So they'll preserve it. So nothing will ever be built on that land. So it'll be green forever. A flyway for migrating birds. So the rivers will never be polluted or pumped dry. So the trees will never be harvested.”