The Big Finish (3 page)

“He’s sending you a message,” Sugar said.

“A few words would be a message. These are blank. This feels more like taunting, showing off, trying to prove he did the right thing by joining up with these people.”

“He wants you to know where he is, that he’s safe. He’s trying to reassure you, keep the lines of communication open.”

“Then he should include his goddamn address.”

“You know he can’t do that. He’s got to stay at arm’s length.”

“He wants me to know what he’s up to, but he doesn’t trust me.”

“The stuff he’s doing, he’s got to be cagey.”

“Why send them to your office? Not directly to me?”

“Somebody could be snooping on your mail.”

“Come on. Who would do that?”

“Whatever federal task force is hunting ecoterrorists.”

“Flynn’s no terrorist.”

Sugar didn’t reply. He was tired of arguing that particular semantic issue.

“Okay, sure, he’s misguided, getting involved with these people. But he’s well-meaning. This is civil disobedience, nothing worse.”

“So he’s not a terrorist. Fine. Use whatever word makes you happy. Point is, if he’s caught, the kid’s going to do some serious time. He’s known to the feds and so are you. Since you’re his father, I wouldn’t be surprised if your mail is being monitored.”

“They would do that?”

“That and more. If you had a phone, Internet access, they’d be all over that too.”

Thorn spent a while longer scrolling through the images of Marsh Fork, Kentucky. Groups of forlorn women locked arm in arm marching somewhere, cops in riot gear blocking their way. More country folks, men, women, and children having a sit-in at the Kentucky governor’s office. Save Marsh Fork Elementary.

He moved the computer mouse to the heading of the Google page and touched the arrow to “News.” He hesitated, glanced around the library. The place was so quiet, so polite, the world of books and reading and thoughtful people. No one protesting. No one risking their lives for a higher principle.

The young librarian with purple hair and five nose rings was watching Thorn from behind the circulation desk, sending him “I’m available” smiles. Her name was Julia, and on several previous occasions she’d helped Thorn with the computer when the damn machine confounded him. A couple of times she’d asked about the postcards, but Thorn told her nothing. Julia had a pretty face and dark, striking eyes. Years ago he’d dated her aunt, a highway patrol officer who lived down in Lower Matecumbe.

When Julia winked at him and cocked her head coyly to the side, Thorn gave the young lady a cool disinterested smile. Julia read the look correctly, sighed, made a wistful nod and got back to work. Game over.

Good. Thorn wasn’t about to trifle with the daughters of women his own age. In Key Largo such men were not uncommon, but Thorn was determined not to become one. He’d gotten dangerously close a few times over the years, but lately some fuse had blown in his libido and his attraction to younger women had faded.

Still, Thorn continued to consider himself as relatively young, hovering somewhere between late twenties and early thirties, still in his twitchy prime. Though what he saw in the mirror was brutally at odds with that sensation. He was getting close to being twice the age he felt himself to be.

He clicked the mouse and went to “News.” Though he’d heard nothing about it at the time, Marsh Fork, Kentucky, had been the subject of dozens of newspaper headlines and sensational TV stories in the last few weeks. That earthen dam had given way. A couple of billion gallons of waste slurry had sluiced down the hillside and swept away the one-story brick school in a toxic tsunami. Another school would now be built in a safer location. Exactly what the parents and the assorted protestors had been campaigning for all along.

The catastrophe had occurred around two in the morning on a weekend. That night the single security guard must’ve been alerted to what was coming and had called in sick.

No one was killed. No one injured. Dynamite had been set at four locations along the downhill portion of the dam. No group had taken credit for the sabotage, but the Earth Liberation Front was targeted in the investigation because they’d been the most outspoken critics of the dam and organized the local protests and the sit-in at the governor’s office. And after the dam burst and the destruction of the school, no ELF members could be found anywhere in Marsh Fork.

It fit their pattern. An attack on the despoilers of the environment that was carefully calibrated to cause strategic harm to property without loss of life. Then they vanished.

Thorn scanned a few of the articles, searching as he always did for Flynn’s name or any mention of Cassandra, the red-haired woman who led the band Flynn had gotten mixed up with last summer. Thorn met her and one of her badass lieutenants when the ELF gang commandeered his isolated house in Key Largo to use as a staging area and escape route after their attack on Turkey Point nuclear plant.

He’d done what he could to thwart that attack and pry Flynn loose from the band of environmental crazies, and he partly succeeded, but after the mission ended that violent night, Flynn walked over to Thorn, embraced him, said he loved him but he’d had a change of heart about this ELF cell. He’d decided to go all in, dedicate himself to their goals, become a full-fledged member. Then he climbed into a green panel van with his new comrades and drove away into the summer night.

Since that moment there’d been seven picture postcards. With a little research on each location Thorn found the same pattern repeating each time. An environmental outrage committed against a community, followed by some kind of violent attack in response, each one an attempt to solve the issue or at least bring it to the public’s attention. While they didn’t all work as neatly as the Marsh Fork venture, Thorn continued to be sympathetic to their cause. Though he had to admit, it was hard to tell if Flynn’s group was accomplishing anything of long-term value.

In any case, Flynn was now an outlaw, and though his name was not mentioned in any of the news stories Thorn found on the library computer, Thorn’s friend Frank Sheffield, the agent in charge of the FBI Miami field office, had assured him that Flynn Moss was indeed on the extended Most Wanted list. Not hanging on the post office walls yet. But damn close.

Ordinarily Thorn wouldn’t go near a computer. He lived in a clapboard-sided house built by his adoptive father. Surviving just fine in primitive simplicity with electricity generated by an ancient windmill and water heated by pipes exposed to the ceaseless sunshine of the Keys. His basic needs were few, his food and beer bought with the meager funds he made tying custom bonefish flies. His clientele was a faithful group of old-time Conchs and a set of young fishing guides who found in his handiwork a certain practical magic. His flies caught fish—more fish than their own handcrafted lures. Maybe not a lot more, but enough to tip the balance in their favor and bring those guides to Thorn’s door.

Following the travels of Flynn Moss had become for Thorn a ritual of self-inflicted emotional pain, a masochistic habit he couldn’t break. His heart pitched and twisted when he sat down before the public computers and began to read the details of Flynn’s latest exploits. He wanted his son to return home safely, give Thorn a chance to make amends for all he had and had not done. But with each new stunt, the likelihood of that diminished. Off and on for the last two weeks he’d been tormented by the Marsh Fork postcard before he finally summoned the will to come to the library and confront his son’s latest escapades.

Until a year earlier, Thorn hadn’t known he had a son. Flynn was the product of a weekend fling decades earlier and only through a series of flukes had Flynn’s mother revealed the truth and allowed father and son to meet.

An actor by profession, Flynn was a handsome, high-spirited young man. Initially, after discovering Thorn was his dad, Flynn’s reaction was icy and distant. But months later, unknown to Thorn, he began to move in another direction. Inspired by a single visit to Thorn’s primitive home in Key Largo, impulsively Flynn Moss bought a boat of his own and began to explore the waters of South Florida, some dormant outdoorsman gene awakening in his bloodstream. He began attending Sierra Club meetings, got involved in local environmental causes, and quickly grew more radical than the other members. In a matter of months, Flynn was recruited by ELF. And so it happened that within only a year of his visit to Thorn’s spartan home, Flynn had quit his TV acting job, engaged in an assault on a nuclear power plant, then disappeared into the eco-underground, a fugitive on the run.

It weighed on Thorn, shadowed him through his daily chores, his hours of solitude beside the bright waters of Key Largo. For months he’d been plagued with guilt and a helpless simmering anger. Blaming himself for Flynn’s dark turn and trying to imagine a way to undo the harm he’d done to his son.

Thorn sat for a while staring at the brittle light coming through the high windows and watching the clouds drift by. Those windows, those walls, that library had been built three decades earlier, part of a package deal the developer of the shopping center was forced to accept to mitigate the loss of the many acres of hardwood hammock that were bulldozed. After all that time only a few old-timers around Key Largo remembered those trees where Thorn and Sugarman and some of their buddies had tramped around as kids and built a secret fort where they held council meetings, making up adolescent fantasies about girls their age, tales of derring-do and mystery that always concluded in saving the skin of the girl in question and, of course, winning her undying love.

A lost hardwood forest, a gained library. In the grand scheme, a fairly even trade, but as much as Thorn loved books and libraries, he missed those lignum vitae and mahoganies, and the secret dens of raccoons and possums and the nests of osprey and ibis and egrets, making their home and raising their young in the very spot where Thorn was now sitting.

As Thorn was shutting down the computer, Sugarman settled into the adjacent chair, reached into his shirt pocket, and slid a postcard across the table.

“Came today.”

Thorn looked at the glossy image of a river twisting through the lush woods of some foothill wilderness.

The caption read:
The Neuse River, Pine Haven, North Carolina.

Thorn turned to the computer keyboard.

“Don’t bother,” Sugar said. “I looked it up already.”

“So tell me.”

“The Neuse runs southeast of Raleigh, all the way to the coast.”

“What’s the issue this time?”

“That’s the thing.”

Sugarman took a cautious look around the library as if checking for eavesdroppers.

Sugar was Thorn’s age, but was enduring the years far more gracefully. He seemed to be growing more handsome, more dignified, more calm. His caramel skin was still silky smooth, his dark eyes full of the quiet fire of youth. A man whose Jamaican father and Scandinavian mother had bestowed on him a lucky genetic legacy. An elegantly structured face, coffee dark eyes, and a thick mat of densely coiled hair that Sugarman had always worn short.

“What’s wrong, Sugar?”

“What’s wrong is this time there is no issue.”

Thorn looked again at the card.

“I checked online news sites, blogs, Twitter, everything I could find. No protest, no mention of any outside agitators or an environmental issue.”

Thorn sat back in his chair, glancing around at the quiet carpeted space. The clean December light was filtering through the tall windows. No one listening, no one looking in their direction.

“So whatever they’re planning hasn’t happened yet.”

“A reasonable inference,” Sugar said.

“Which makes this different. A different kind of message.”

“Appears that way,” said Sugarman.

“An invitation?”

Sugar’s face was blank.

“Tell me what’re you thinking.”

He just shook his head, waiting for Thorn.

“Seems pretty obvious,” Thorn said. “He’s ready to come home.”

Sugar closed his eyes. He massaged his forehead as if trying to drive away an ugly thought.

At the age of two, after his parents abandoned him, Sugar was adopted by an African American church lady who’d raised him in Key Largo’s one black district. Under her influence, Sugar acquired a finely tuned moral sensibility. He resolutely followed the codes of decency and honor. Controlled and methodical and steady. In that way he was Thorn’s opposite and because they’d been close friends since childhood, fighting side by side in more battles than Thorn cared to recall, Sugar had saved his ass dozens of times, snatching him back from the brink of one disaster after another. The good cop to his bad. The wise counsel to Thorn’s impulse.

Sugar’s gaze drifted to the windows across the room, his eyes faraway as though he was revisiting a time long past when their shared world was uncomplicated and their struggles manageable. Back when it was possible to be full of hope and confidence, before the losses and heartaches and ambiguities began to complicate every decision—a time when the future was as sharp and bright as the winter sky beyond the library windows.

Thorn had been at this precise point so many times before, feeling the first click of gears meshing, the revving heart, the flutter in his blood. Another long stretch of tranquility interrupted. He no longer deluded himself about his ability to resist. This was who he had become. A hermit on call.

“Let’s say you’re right,” Sugar said. “Then what?”

“I’ll go get him.”

“And how would you do that?”

“Fly up to Atlanta or Charlotte, rent a car.”

“Yeah? And how the hell do you accomplish that, fly commercial without ID? You going to go get a driver’s license this afternoon? A Social Security number, a credit card. After all these years you’re going to register your sorry ass with the U.S. government. Check in with Uncle Sam, say, hi, I’ve been living in the shadows for the last half-century, but I decided I want to take a plane ride, so I’m signing in.”

“Then I’ll drive.”

“Goddamn it, Thorn.” He stood up. “The shape it’s in, your car wouldn’t make it to Miami.”