Blackwater Sound (4 page)

“This is José,” she said. “He's looking after me.”

“I'm sorry,” Thorn said.

She reached out and smoothed a hand across his cheek, then cocked it back and gave him a sharp slap.

“You're a goddamn magnet, Thorn. You attract this shit. You're the baddest luck I've ever known.”

He watched her limp away, then he turned and went back to the docks. His daze had hardened into a cold shock that felt like it was rooted so deep in his tissues it might be with him forever. The sky was a black whirling mass overhead, and the earth rocked and wobbled beneath his feet. The roar of the choppers and sirens and the crowd was setting up a deep hum in his skull. Someone handed him a beer and he drained it and dropped the can on the sandy soil. A man in a fishing hat handed him another, and he meandered through the hallucinatory throng of reporters and medics and wild-eyed relatives of the passengers. A woman with a blond helmet of hair and perfect teeth, followed by a cameraman, jabbed a microphone in his face, and he shoved it away and kept on walking.

Gulping the beer, he followed the brightest lights to the pavilion near the boat ramps. Beside the pavilion were four concrete fish-cleaning tables the media were using as the local-color backdrop for their live shots.

He nudged into the crowd and jostled to the front. The woman from the Maverick was being interviewed. Her black hair gleamed in the lights and her blue eyes were achingly pale. She wore a long-sleeved white fishing shirt and khaki shorts. Her legs were sleek and deeply tanned and she stood with the gawky elegance Thorn associated with high-fashion models, back straight, hips and shoulders canted in slightly different directions as if to catch the most flattering light. There was a single spatter of blood on her right sleeve, but otherwise she seemed as cool and unruffled as if she'd just stepped from her dressing room.

“Bonefishing,” she was saying. “Johnny and I were out on the flats when it came down. Maybe a mile or two away.”

“And what did you hear, Miss Braswell? Were the engines running? We've heard reports that they were shut down.”

Her eyes roamed the crowd, then returned to the reporter.

“Yes, I believe the engines were silent. It was all very eerie.”

The reporter thanked her and turned back to the camera. He was excited, working a major story, a career boost. He sounded almost elated as he told the TV viewers that so far sixty survivors had been pulled from those remote waters. And that none other than Morgan Braswell, prominent local businesswoman, had been an eyewitness to these tragic events. According to Ms. Braswell, the plane's engines were shut down at the time of the crash.

As the reporter continued to speak, the woman peered beyond the lights. Her eyes catching on Thorn's and holding. After a moment, she reached out and put a hand on the reporter's sleeve, silencing him mid-sentence.

“There's the man you want to interview.” She lifted a slender hand and pointed him out. “Right there. He saved dozens of lives. Far more than we managed to. He's the hero of the hour.”

The cameraman swung around and spotlights glared in Thorn's eyes.

The reporter took a step his way, lifting his mike.

“Sir?” he said. “Could we have a minute?”

Behind him the dark-haired woman motioned to someone in the crowd. And when she brought her pale blue eyes back to Thorn, a faint smile formed on her lips as if Thorn's uneasiness amused her.

“Sir? Sir?”

Thorn turned from the reporter and ducked into the shifting crowd.

As he emerged from the rear of the pack, a chunky man with stringy, shoulder-length blond hair blocked his way and pressed a cold can of Budweiser into his hand. Chubby cheeks, small gray eyes. He was in his mid-twenties and had on a fresh blue workshirt and white baggies and boat sandals. His flesh was stained the deep chestnut of someone who labored in the tropical sun.

“Beer's been at the bottom of the cooler all afternoon. Nice and icy.”

Thorn squinted out at the parking lot where the fire rescue vans were screaming away into the night. He fumbled with the tab on the beer can, got it at the wrong angle, and broke it off. He looked at the kid. A toothy grin flickered on the boy's lips as if he were trying to decide whether to laugh or take a bite from Thorn's neck.

“That was you on the Maverick.”

“Yeah? What if it was?”

The kid's grin grew blurry. The whole goddamn night had turned blurry. Though not yet blurry enough.

“And what's your name?”

The kid thought about it for a moment.

“ ‘Don't your nose get sore, sticking it all the time in other people's business?' ” The young man grinned. “That's George Raft, from
Nocturne
, 1946. With Virginia Huston and Myrna Dell.”

Thorn peered at the kid for a moment, then shrugged and brought his attention back to the beer can. He tried prying at the broken tab with his thumbnail, but got nowhere.

The kid reached in the pocket of his shorts and came out with a knife and flicked out the blade. He took the can from Thorn's hand, dug the blade into the tab, and popped it open. The knife had holes in the grip and a blade that looked heavy enough to gut a moose.

“You admiring my shiv?”

“Not really.”

On the kid's thumb was a bandage with blood seeping through the gauze.

Thorn took a slow pull on the beer. The kid held the knife at his side.

“So how long were you out there?” the kid said. “Before the crash.”

“Why?”

“Me and my sister were fishing over behind that island. We didn't see you. You just kind of popped up out of nowhere.”

“I didn't see you either. Not till after the crash.”

The kid smirked as if he'd tricked some vital detail out of Thorn.

“The three of you didn't seem to be getting your hands real dirty.”

“Two of us,” the kid said. “Me and my sister.”

“I saw three,” Thorn said. “You and her and a guy in a cowboy hat.”

“Yeah, well, I guess you're mistaken, crabcake.” The kid looked back toward the TV lights. “And we pulled in a few survivors. Maybe not as many as you, but who's counting?”

“That's not how it looked from my seat.”

“What're you, the head Eagle Scout? Handing out the merit badges.”

“Your cooler looked pretty full. Must've caught a ton of fish.”

“We caught our share.”

“But you still got the creases in your shirt.”

“So?”

“So you weren't out there fishing. You weren't out there doing anything. You haven't broken a sweat.”

The boy's smile went sour. He peered into Thorn's eyes and his knife rose in what looked like a reflexive gesture. As if his first instinct was to slash the throat of anyone who called his bluff.

Then he halted and took a quick look around at all the potential witnesses and he lowered the blade. He stepped back and raked Thorn with a look.

“If you weren't fishing,” Thorn said, “maybe you were bird-watching.”

A breeze drifted in off the bay, heavy with the sickening fumes. The kid snapped his knife shut and slid it into his pocket. He glanced toward the TV lights, then turned back to Thorn. His fingers toyed with the lump in his pocket.

“You know what you need, asshole?”

“A better haircut?” Thorn said.

“You need a little negative reinforcement, that's what. Like maybe somebody should drop a tombstone on your head.”

The kid flashed Thorn an ugly sneer, then swung around and sauntered away into the bedlam.

Thorn drifted back to the docks and watched the Coast Guard and marine patrol bringing in the bodies on stretchers. Most of the living were already on their way to hospitals, and now it was time for the dead. The men worked quietly, with the grim efficiency of those who trained for just such disasters. For the next half hour Thorn nursed his beer and stayed in the shadows, watching the boats unload the charred and mangled remains. Getting glimpses of bodies so twisted and broken they might have been trampled by a stampede of buffalo.

When he could stomach it no more, he located the
Heart Pounder
, brought the skiff over, and lashed it to the cleats. He started the engine and headed out into the dark, staying away from the searchlights and rescue boats. He headed across the black bay, and when he was a half mile beyond the crash site, he opened up the engine, rising onto the smooth sea. Around him the moonlight coated the bay like a crisp film of ice.

With his running lights shut off, Thorn steered his phantom ship south, plowing across that murky void. A cold shiver whispered beneath his shirt. He took a last look behind him, north across the Everglades where the black sky pulsed with lightning. Then he turned his back on the mainland, gripped the wheel, and put his face in the wind, standing stiff and empty, blinded by starlight.

Thorn made it home by two that morning. Totally wiped out, but too wired to sleep, he sat out on the porch of his stilt-house and watched Blackwater Sound twinkle and listened to the distant rumbles of thunder. At dawn he went inside and took a shower. He got dressed and stood out on the porch for a while watching the water brighten. The mourning doves that roosted in the tamarind tree were coming and going in twos and threes, resettling briefly, then exploding from their perches in a panicked flailing of wings. A small boat muttered by and he watched the ripples work toward his coral and limestone dock.

He went back into the house, stared at his face in the bathroom mirror for a while, then stripped off his shorts and T-shirt and took another shower, scrubbing harder this time. His back muscles were sore. His fingers and arms ached. He toweled off, chose a fresh pair
of shorts and another T-shirt, and put them on. Still, his skin felt strange. Too tight, too clammy.

At nine he was waiting outside the Key Largo Library when June Marcus, the tall, dark-haired librarian, unlocked the front door. She looked at him for a second or two as if she didn't recognize him, then said an uncertain hello and stepped back out of his way.

“You were at the crash,” she said. “The airplane that went down.”

“How'd you know that?”

“Saw you on the news this morning,” she said. “You were pulling somebody out of the water. An old man.”

He nodded.

“It must've been awful out there. I can't even imagine. All that carnage.”

In the reference section, June showed him how to run a computer search. It took only a minute or two. Morgan Braswell was on the cover of several magazines from a few years back. The library had hard copies of several of them. Business monthlies. Long articles. A couple of newspaper stories. Big turnaround at her father's company. She flashed a variety of smiles, arms crossed beneath her breasts, looking satisfied, in control, a woman full of bold confidence. From Tragedy to Triumph. That was the theme. After the heartbreaking loss of her older brother in a boating accident, the family business floundered, disintegrated, but with courage and a maturity beyond her years, Morgan managed to pick up the pieces and rebuild her father's company into a major player in the technology sector.

June Marcus photocopied the articles and didn't ask why he wanted them. She patted him on the shoulder as he walked out of the library.

He took them back to his house and sat out at the picnic table. It was a hot morning, the breeze off the Atlantic shaving away a few degrees. Northeast above Miami, dark blue clouds hovered in the sky. The cold front was going nowhere. He read the articles, looked at Morgan Braswell's pictures. Read them again.

At noon he nagged his Volkswagen Beetle to life and drove out to
US 1 and headed up the eighteen-mile strip to Miami. Thirty minutes later, at Cutler Ridge, the rain started and didn't let up till he was in Palm Beach. It was after three o'clock when he found the Braswells' neighborhood. They lived in a two-story Mediterranean villa three blocks from the ocean. Oak trees lined their street. Fancy lamps on brass poles were planted along the sidewalk. He drove past the house and parked half a block away. He sat for a while staring down the street toward the Atlantic. There was a pleasant lift to the breeze rushing in off the sea, cool and sweet, seasoned by money.

No traffic. No pedestrians on the sidewalk. Most of the wealthy snowbirds had already fled north to avoid the first upticks of the thermometer. A snowy egret stood on the snipped lawn next to his car and regarded him haughtily. Thorn wasn't sure why he'd driven all this way, wasted the day, fought I-95 traffic. The photocopies lay in the passenger seat. He picked them up, glanced through them, and dropped them back. These people weren't any of his business. He had things to do. Bonefish flies to tie, lunkers to catch. He didn't need this. He'd saved a bunch of people's lives. He should be feeling good this morning. He should be rejoicing. Not feeling so numb, so crazy.

He started the car and made a U-turn and drove back past the Braswells' house. Pink and purple bougainvillea climbed a trellis in the side yard. The cross-hatched wood had pulled loose from its posts and was sagging toward the house next door. The Braswells' grass was scraggy with yellow patches and weeds. Flakes of white paint curled off the window frames. In an upstairs window a broken pane was covered with what looked like a square of sandwich wrap. The mail slot in the front door was rimmed with rust. Somebody hadn't been paying much attention to maintenance.

He drove west beyond I-95 into the golf communities. Heron Glen, Willow Walk, The Banyans. Miles of red tile roofs and guardhouses and endlessly repeating franchise strips. He kept going till he was beyond the turnpike, beyond the last stucco wall, the last rigid row of royal palms. The land was scrubby and wet and of no use to
anyone except alligators and woodstorks. Only an occasional straggling 7-Eleven and a couple of industrial parks marked the desolate landscape.

Seven miles beyond the turnpike, Thorn pulled into a complex of low, windowless buildings. At the guardhouse a young woman with a yellow buzz cut stepped out with a clipboard in her hand. She wore a sidearm in a glossy leather holster and a tailored gray uniform that showed off her bulky shoulders and cinched waist. There were spikes in the road, tilted forward to rip the tread off tires. A yellow steel crossing arm striped with red closed off the entrance.

She bent to his open window and didn't smile. Didn't say a word. She looked at him, looked at the passenger seat, peered into the back.

“Am I in the right place?”

“I doubt it,” she said.

“MicroDyne?” said Thorn. “Morgan Braswell.”

She shifted the clipboard to her left hand, freeing up her right to pump him full of lead.

“Is this MicroDyne?”

“You have business here, sir?”

“What do they manufacture?”

The blank look on her face got blanker.

“None of the news articles say. Government contractor, that's the phrase. What's that mean? Is that defense work? Military? Top-secret gizmos? What?”

She took a step back from the car. Her eyes were working. She was going over procedures in her head, making decisions about how to proceed. Memorizing his face, the car. On a better day Thorn might have trotted out the charm, tried to win her over, seduce a fact or two. But today he was shit out of charm. It was all he could do to press the accelerator, turn the wheel. Hold one thought for more than a few seconds.

Thorn put the VW in reverse and backed slowly out of the short drive.

The security guard stood in front of the steel barricade with her
legs spread, right hand close to her holster. Annie Oakley about to shoot the hearts out of silver dollars flung high into the air.

Thorn took the turnpike south.

He hit rush hour in Miami. Fifty miles of raging incivility.

 

“Did he give you his name?”

Morgan Braswell was looking at her computer screen, the freeze-frame of the surveillance tape from the front gate. The man from last night at the crash site, the big hero who'd pulled thirty, forty people from the water. Lanky, blue-eyed, tan, tousled sandy hair.

“No, ma'am. He didn't say his name.”

“But he mentioned me? By name.”

“That's correct.”

Morgan ran her tongue along her upper lip. She leaned back in the leather chair. Behind her desk was a large window that looked down into the testing lab. A quiet, sterile space where dozens of men and women in white lab coats spent their days peering into computers, monitoring the sintering furnaces that were located behind layers of tempered steel in a distant section of the plant.

“Did you get a license number?”

“Yes, ma'am. I'm running it through DMV. But there might be a problem. It looked like it was an expired tag.”

Johnny was standing at the window looking down into the lab. It was empty now. Everyone gone home for the day.

Johnny wore navy blue shorts and a white polo shirt with their boat name embroidered on the left breast. His long hair was clenched back in a ponytail.

“He probably wanted a date,” said Johnny. “A little cootchie-coo.”

“Joyce,” Morgan said.

“Yes, ma'am?”

“Print out the best frames of that video. His face from the front, profile. As many angles as you can get. Enhance them, sharpen the focus.”

Joyce nodded.

“The pictures and whatever you get from DMV on my desk in the morning.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“He was a smart-ass,” Johnny said. “He said he saw three of us on the boat. You, me, and a guy in a cowboy hat. I should've iced him right then. Filled him full of daylight.”

Morgan swiveled her chair around and looked at her brother.

“Joyce,” she said, keeping her eyes on Johnny until he finally turned and read her expression, then quickly looked away. “You can go now. But I want those items first thing.”

When Joyce shut the door, Morgan said, “Johnny?”

He was staring down at the test lab and wouldn't look at her.

“Johnny?”

He swallowed and stepped back.

“Come over here, Johnny.”

He shook his head, mouth clenched, eyes dodging hers. A four-year-old doing his willful routine. Her tone was delicate, coaxing.

“I just want to talk to you, Johnny, that's all.”

He tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling as if conferring with his personal savior.

“Johnny.”

He blinked, then stepped over to the side of her desk, bowing his head.

“Look at me, Johnny. Lift your head and look at me.”

He drew a breath and met her eyes.

“What did you do wrong just now?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“Yes, you do, Johnny. You know what you did.”

“I spoke out of turn.” His eyes were half-shut. Shoulders slumped.

“That's right. You spoke out of turn. You made a threatening remark in front of one of our security officers. You mentioned a man in a cowboy hat.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Is anyone supposed to know about Roy besides you and me?”

Johnny shook his head.

“Is even Dad supposed to know? Or Jeb Shine?”

“No. Roy's a secret. Just between us.”

“So why did you do that, Johnny?”

He took a breath and his hand went into his pocket.

“You need to think, Johnny. You have to organize your thoughts, deliberate before you say or do things.”

“I'm too reckless,” he said. “I have low impulse control.”

“Johnny, listen to me. You're a fine brother. I'm proud of you. You've been a great help to me lately. But we're at a crucial juncture. No rashness allowed. Self-discipline, restraint. We have to be very careful, Johnny. Very very careful with everything we say or do.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I let you down.”

He drew the knife out of his pocket and opened it. His mouth was crimped. He blinked his damp eyes.

“No, Johnny, wait. You don't need to do that.”

Morgan stood up, came quickly around her desk. But he'd already peeled the bandage off the thumb of his left hand. The cap of his thumb was scabbed over.

Morgan made a grab for his hand, but Johnny swung his back to her.

He hunched over and pressed the blade against the tip of his thumb. He gritted his teeth, then clamped his eyes and balled his hand into a fist. With a low growl, he shaved off the scab and a layer of bloody flesh beneath it. Blood washed down his hand.

Morgan groaned and looked away. She took a full breath, then snatched up a wad of tissues from her desk and took hold of his hand, pressing the tissues to the wound.

“It hurts,” he said.

“I know, I know.” Morgan put her arm around his shoulder. “I wish you wouldn't do these things, Johnny. It's not necessary. Really, it's not.”

“I need negative reinforcement,” he said. “That's the only way I'm ever going to learn.”

She kept her arm around his shoulder until he stopped trembling. When he grew still, she gripped his chin and turned his face to hers. She leaned close and kissed both his teary eyes, then smoothed a hand across his cheek and stepped back.

“Now you're better. Aren't you? The pain is all gone.”

He looked at her and nodded.

“Some of it.”

“I want you to stay here,” she said. “Pull yourself together. I'll be back in a minute and we'll go home. You can choose what you want for dinner. Burger King, pizza, anything you want, Johnny.”

 

As Morgan approached her father's office, Jeb Shine stepped from his doorway and peered at her over the frames of his reading glasses. He was a tall, hump-shouldered man. Bald, with a half-assed ponytail he plaited together from his stringy fringe hair. He was wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt printed with yellow hula girls and pink flamingoes. His khaki shorts were rumpled and he wore his usual pair of rubber sandals. Same age as her father, but dressed like a college kid on perpetual spring break.

“Got a minute, Morgan?”

“Not really.”

“It's important. Quite important.” He stepped aside, bowed at the waist, and motioned her into his office. But she held her place in the hallway.

“If it's about payroll,” she said, “we don't need to cover that again. Just find another creative solution, stretch us out a little longer. A week, ten days, that's all we need. Things'll be fine.”

“I'm fresh out of creative solutions, Morgan. There isn't a bank left in South Florida that hasn't turned us down. We've depleted our rainy-day fund. We're a dime away from being flat broke. Short of a
bag of money showing up on my desk by next Friday, all the payroll checks are going to bounce.”

“One week, Jeb. That's all I need. Seven days. You'll see. I have a deal working.”

“What kind of deal?”