Authors: James W. Hall
“I told you,” Dobbins said. “I told you he’d go along. I haven’t seen a soul yet it doesn’t work on, you get the dose right. Split a tablet in half, most of them, they just fall asleep, have some juicy dreams. But two tabs like he’s on, your wish is his command for the next ten hours, bark like a dog, he’ll bark. Take a shit in his hand and eat it, whatever you say he’ll do.”
“Can it, Dobbins.” Cruz flicked a hand at him as if chasing away a fly.
“What the fuck are those nose plugs?” Dobbins said, motioning at X.
“X is very sensitive,” Thorn said. “He can smell the starlight. He can smell the vacuum of space. The emptiness between atoms.”
Cruz gave Thorn a skeptical look.
“Is that how people talk on this drug?” she asked, her eyes on Thorn.
“No two are alike,” Dobbins said. “Trust me, he’s cruising at altitude.”
X-88 pulled the plastic bag of ammo from the hole and held it up.
“All right,” Cruz said. “Good.”
“What’s that for anyway,” Dobbins said. “Who you going to shoot?”
“Whoever the fuck I need to,” Cruz said.
“Now what?” X said. “Go look for the redhead?”
“She won’t be far away,” Cruz said. “These people always have a contingency plan. If they’re separated, they rendezvous at a certain prearranged location. We’re operating just as we were before she fled. When we find Flynn Moss, we find Cassandra. Count on it.”
“And remind me, Cruz, how’s that going to happen?”
“Thorn’s how. Keep showing him around long enough, one of them will make a play. They’re stupid that way. They don’t leave their wounded on the battlefield. Loyal to the point of self-destruction. Deluded.”
Next second they were back in the car, Thorn in the backseat wedged between Dobbins and X. Cruz driving, Pixie and Laurie up front, Laurie with an arm on the seat, touching a hand to Pixie’s bare arm, whispering in her ear. It was Eddie’s Taurus, the one Thorn had rented. Meticulously clean.
“Am I saying this out loud. Can you hear me?”
“Shut up,” X said.
“Okay, good,” said Thorn.
Back safely in his head, he worked on his breath. Hard as hell. But the stubborn-fuck voice was telling him to do it, it’s the only thing that’s working.
That’s keeping you from stepping off the cliff. Remember how the sky split apart like an eggshell, remember how the asphalt street expanded, remember how you couldn’t figure out how to get inside a car? Remember all that? So breathe, the stubborn fuck said. So breathe and breathe and rebuild the wall, and don’t let the drug win, don’t let these people win. Remember why you’re here. Remember your son.
“Is Flynn dead?”
“I told you to keep the fuck quiet.” X-88 punched him hard in the arm.
“Don’t hit him,” Dobbins said. “He’s your well-trained dog. You wouldn’t kick your dog, now would you?”
“I hit who I want to hit and you don’t have a say in it, pig man.”
“Webb’s right,” said Laurie from the front seat. “Bad idea to punch him. I’ve seen it happen, strike somebody when they’re tripping on this thing, it’ll snap them out of it. Adrenaline kicks in or something. I don’t know the chemistry, but I’ve seen it work that way. Better to be gentle, better to coax. Violence is counterproductive.”
Thorn looked down at his hands. They hadn’t cuffed him. They were counting on the drug to keep him under control. The two big men, one fat, the other who only looked fat. The guns were put away, he didn’t know where. A whispery voice was telling him not to try anything stupid inside the car. Weak and whispery, it said, “Wait till they’ve stopped, let you out, let you wander, then make a break.”
But Thorn didn’t feel like waiting because when they let him out and let him prowl the streets, that’s when they’d be most on guard, and he’d be on a short leash. It struck him that this was a better tactic, surprise them when they were least expecting. When the odds seemed impossibly stacked against him.
Thorn pictured it in his head, breathing slow and easy as he did it. He mapped it out, move one, move two, move three. Keep it simple. Quick and dirty. A plan even someone as stoned as he was could replay. One two three.
They were maybe half a mile from Belmont Heights, passing mobile homes. They’d be stopping in a minute or two and the window of possibility would shut.
Thorn leaned forward an inch, then two inches. Not enough to draw attention, but looking for a better angle, repositioning his feet, planting them securely.
Then he went for it. Rocked forward, bounced his forehead on the front seat, arms folded in front of his chest and heaved backward, exploding, straightening his legs, pushing hard and throwing open his arms, hammering his elbows into their faces. Simultaneous strikes at X and Dobbins. Dobbins howled, X grunted. He didn’t stop to inspect the damage but repeated the move, rocking forward, driving backward with both elbows at once.
Cruz slammed the brakes.
He reached forward and with the flat of his palms, Thorn pounded Cruz on both ears like he was banging cymbals, then a second time for good measure. X clawed for his arm, trying to pull him back into the seat, but his grip had weakened, and Thorn jerked away, gave himself enough room to deliver another elbow crack to X’s face, then swiveled the other way and slammed his right elbow into Dobbins’s nose.
He leaned across Dobbins, found the door handle, got it open, pushed Dobbins headlong onto the dirt road. X was clutching at the collar of Thorn’s shirt, but his fingers fumbled and lost their hold. Pixie was yelling, Laurie spilling out her door, then kneeling beside her brother in the roadway.
Thorn came around to the driver’s door, threw it open, hauled Cruz into the road. Her hard brown eyes were woozy from the ear claps. He grabbed her by the shirt front, dragged her close.
“You’re the deluded one. You, Cruz, not them.”
She was too hazy-eyed to reply.
Thorn drew back his right arm and hooked her with his forearm in the side of the head, sent her stumbling backward into the tall weeds beside the road. Snarling, X came out the rear door. Thorn pivoted and side-kicked the open door into his face. Then took hold of the handle and drove the door onto his lower legs, which still dangled outside.
He reached in, snatched the ignition keys, took them to the trunk and opened it, slung the green army duffel over his shoulder, the shotguns, the ammo, whatever cash was left. He had no plan to use them, but wanted only to deprive Cruz of the chance.
He hustled down the road toward Belmont Heights. The whispery voice in his head was nagging. Where the hell did that come from?
You’re drugged, you’re a creaky old guy, you’re finished. Maybe this is a hallucination, maybe you’re only dreaming this, imagining it, wishing it were true. Don’t trip over your own drunken feet, you fool.
Thorn stopped and looked back at the car. Cruz on her knees, fingering her damaged ears, yelling at him to stop, X-88 groaning inside the car.
He wasn’t dreaming. He was a stubborn fuck, gifted with a wild and reckless streak. That second goddamn voice was the drug whispering, cajoling, undermining, trying to demoralize.
Up ahead another thirty yards he saw Ladarius Washington standing in his front yard. As Thorn broke into a trot, Ladarius started moving his way, a worried smile growing on his face. Then he waved his arm like a third base coach bringing his batter home:
Hurry up, hurry up, move your ass.
TWENTY-SIX
“I KNOWN IT FIRST TIME
I saw you,” Ladarius said. “You’re some kind of crazy-ass fucker.”
He was leading Thorn at a jog down the dusty maze of pathways winding between the houses. Thorn catching sight of rust-stained tin roofs, windows covered with bright prints like the summer clothes of children cut up and hung to sweeten the indoor light, an old wooden boat upside down on sawhorses. A black hound, ears flapping, scooted around a corner and fell in alongside Thorn, head up, shaking himself as he ran, happy to join the procession. Clouds of insects swarmed near an outhouse where the stench of sewage was even greater than the cloud of pig shit riding the afternoon breeze.
Children stopped at their games, and men and women shushed their conversations and the humor went out of their faces as they watched Ladarius, then Thorn loping along behind, burdened by the duffel, but keeping up with the lanky man in overalls and heavy work boots.
Thorn had been doing a lot of running lately, more than since the days he used to go for dawn jogs along the bike path that ran beside the Overseas Highway in Key Largo, chased by roosters at Hibiscus Park and honked at by his fishing guide buddies on their way to the docks. When he got back to Key Largo, by god, he’d get back to running, whip himself in shape. It wasn’t too late. Never too late.
Thorn hailed Ladarius to stop. He halted on the edge of the communal gathering spot, where several men were standing around the barbecue grill warming themselves in the smoky heat of charcoal, several slabs of meat broiling. There was church music coming from someplace nearby, a piano leading a choir of women’s voices in “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down,
darkness be over me, my rest a stone;
yet in my dreams I’d be nearer, my God, to thee
“Got to keep moving,” Ladarius said. “They’ll be here shortly.”
“I need to see Eddie, he around?”
“Right here.”
Eddie stepped forward from the group around the barbecue pit. Bald head gleaming in the afternoon sun, freshly pressed black trousers that shined with wear and a stiff white shirt and red sweater vest. His Sunday going-to-meeting best.
“Your keys.” Thorn dug them from his pocket and handed them over. “Car’s on the road. Better reclaim it now. Don’t think it’s been much abused, though there might be a bloodstain or two on the upholstery. A little pig shit on the mats. We got some on our shoes running through a field.”
Eddie looked quizzically at Ladarius.
“They must’ve slipped the man some dope. That’s how he’s acting.”
“True,” Thorn said. “But I’m fighting it ’cause I’m a stubborn fuck.”
“You keep on being stubborn,” said Eddie. “Fight it all the way home.”
“They’ll be coming,” Ladarius said. “We wasn’t here. Neither of us.”
“Course you wasn’t,” Eddie said. “I found these keys on the road. Get on now, get on to where you gotta go. None of us seen you passing by.”
The other men nodded.
The two of them broke into a trot, going deeper into the rear fringes of the neighborhood. The duffel banging hard against his back. Thorn wasn’t sure where Ladarius was leading him and he was breathing too hard to ask. They ran beyond the houses into an open field where a group of mutts were basking in the sun. The hound that was escorting them broke off and joined the pack as though he’d reached the limits of his territory, or perhaps beyond this point it was no longer safe for dogs.
The forest they entered was trackless, matted with vines, and dense with saplings and red maples, loblolly pines, sweet gum with their spiked seed balls littering the forest floor. Big white oak and sugar maples towered over the others.
“Where we going?”
Ladarius had slowed to a fast walk. A sweat stain showed through the back of his white shirt and burrs had collected on his dark blue trousers. His church clothes.
“Taking you where it happened.”
Thorn’s heart rolled and pitched.
“Where they were killed?”
“Just hold on, it’ll speak for itself.”
Thorn’s elbows ached. His right arm wouldn’t straighten fully, as if he’d cracked a bone when he slammed Webb Dobbins’s face. His knees were sore from all the running and his forearms throbbed from repeated impacts. Thoughts in disarray, head swirling.
High above them the light piercing the canopy of evergreens and firs was diffused into a delicate twilight with a green cast that cut the temperature by ten degrees, and Thorn found himself shivering. He saw birds flitting in the uppermost branches but heard no birdsong, as if they were all waiting warily to see what these intruders in their woods had in mind.
Ladarius halted and peered from side to side through the trees, getting his bearings. Thorn heard nothing stirring, only a few stray long-dead leaves letting go of their limbs and trickling to the forest floor.
“This way,” he said, and set off through an ankle-deep layer of leaves and twigs. Pushing through the dense netting of branches, ropey vines, and spiderwebs.
In fifty yards they came across a footpath, barely wide enough for a slender man. It shot straight ahead through the shadowy woods as if the deer, foxes, and Cherokees who’d carved the trail had settled on the same route to some watering hole or cave. Maybe it was the drug’s lingering hallucinatory effects, but as they progressed down the narrow track, Thorn found himself conjuring the wispy spirits of the departed who’d passed this way centuries ago, leaving behind the path as a memorial to their common needs and basic fears. Those remnants of the long past, as insubstantial and shapeless as fog, seemed to be ushering Ladarius and Thorn toward some hallowed site.
A few yards later on, Ladarius halted, then stepped off the path and came to a stop beside the trunk of a large oak.
“This here was the lookout,” he said. “Where your boy was crouched.”
Thorn stood beside him and looked down at the ground behind the tree. The spot was bare of leaves, dirt scuffed lightly, but otherwise unremarkable.
“How do you know this?”
“His job was to alert the others, his hippie friends, if anyone came sneaking up in the dark, he blows a whistle twice. A signal to run.”
Ladarius reached into his trousers pocket and handed Thorn a red-and-white plastic whistle.
“Been carrying this around, looking for the right time.”
“Where is he? Where’s my son?”
“We’re getting to that. Didn’t know could I trust you. Didn’t know which side of the street you was playing. Still not a hundred percent sure on that, but the others think you’re straight, so that’s why we’re here.”
“What others?”
“We’re getting to that too. You just hold all those horses you got pulling on you. We’ll take this step at a time. Be sure that drug finished its business.”