Buzz Cut (40 page)

"Well, you got a long fucking way to surge," Sugarman said, "before you get up here with us human beings."

Sugar slammed the door and locked the three deadbolts, peered into the cell briefly then stepped away. He was angrier than Thorn had ever seen him. His pulse throbbed in the dark blue veins and tributaries that mapped his temple. His eyes were bloodshot and seemed to be skating aimlessly.

McDaniels located a chair in a storeroom down the corridor and dragged it back. He sat down, holding his leather blackjack in his lap. In his wild hula girl shirt, yellow socks, and black sandals he looked like a bouncer at a nightclub for utter nincompoops. He smiled up at Sugarman and told him not to worry, they should go do what they had to do.

"Don't open that goddamn door till we're back and ready to take the fucker ashore. Not for anybody. Not Sampson, not Gavini, nobody goes in there."

"Don't worry. The monarch of the assholes himself could come marching up in his shit-brown robe, I wouldn't let him in." He threw Thorn a giddy smile.

"And watch out for the blue haze too," Thorn said.

Sugar drew the knife from his belt and extended it to the old soldier. McDaniels took it, pressed his thumb to the blade.

"You think it's wise, getting our fingerprints all over a murder weapon?"

"I think we're a long way past that." Sugar patted McDaniels on the shoulder and left the man chewing attentively on his straw.

Thorn and Sugar went back to the chapel. After a quick debate on who should do the honors, Thorn hauled himself up into Butler's nest, had a peek at the tight quarters. An odd clash of high tech and primitive that reminded Thorn of the cockpit of one of the early space modules.

An array of very sophisticated looking electronic gadgets and circuitry was wired into the bundle of cables overhead, while all around the small work area were exposed plumbing pipes and the aluminum ductwork of the air-conditioning system. Butler had fashioned a plywood floor and covered it with a thin rubber mat and pillow. Beside the pillow was a fancy telephone. The operating space itself was so cramped it was hard to imagine a man Butler Jack's size squirming into it. But he had. Mr. Blue Haze.

When he dropped back down to the floor, Murphy was standing beside Sugarman. He gave a little bounce of excitement.

"I'm next," he said, flashing his eager smile.

"What's going on upstairs?" Thorn asked him.

"Nothing much. TV show is still going on. Bev Mitchell and her three whores."

"Ho's," Sugarman said.

"That's what I said, whores."

"Going on like nothing ever happened," Thorn said. "Wow."

"It's television," said Sugarman. "No attention span."

Thorn boosted Murphy to the ceiling and he chinned himself the rest of the way into the crawlspace. A minute later he poked his head out.

"Holy moley," he said. "I gotta hand it to him. The guy had it all figured out. He's got a circuit board spliced into the main rudder control line, looks like it's the brains of an autopilot control panel. If he's got it programmed right, it could steer the ship right to a piece of ocean the size of a postage stamp a thousand miles from here. Once it was switched on, there was nothing anybody could do to shut it off, override it or anything except track it down, cut it out. He's got a VCR, a twelve-channel telephone, enough food and water for a week."

"His little Ritz-Carlton," Thorn said.

"VCR? Why the hell would he want a VCR" Sugarman helped Murphy lower himself back to the chapel floor. The effort left Sugar breathless and he had to sit on the front-row pew.

"Maybe he wanted to watch some old Disney films," Murphy said. "I read that somewhere. There's a high correlation between serial killers and early exposure to Disney cartoons."

Thorn stared at the kid. "Get outta here."

"No, I read it somewhere. Ted Bundy, Dahmer, all those guys had four things in common when they were kids. Bedwetting, torturing animals, setting fires, and Disney movies. That's the profile."

"He read it somewhere," Sugarman said. "It's got to be true."

"Maybe you ought to offer Murph a job. Guy's got an impressive command of criminal justice trivia."

Sugarman was peering down at a stain on the tan carpet just in front of the pulpit. A spray of blood that was shaped like a small stingray. Another bloody spritz marked the front of the oak pulpit as if someone had snapped a wet paintbrush from an inch away.

"What about that telephone?" Sugarman said. He continued to study the shadow of blood, his voice at half power.

"What about it?"

"Why the hell would he want a phone? Who would he call?"

"Order a pizza?" Murphy offered, grinning.

Thorn said, "Maybe he was going to ring up the networks back in the U.S., the TV people, get some publicity going for his fucked up cause. Get his name on the airwaves."

"Maybe so," Sugar said, staring at the polished brass crucifix on the wall behind the pulpit. "Yeah, maybe so."

***

Thorn took his time wandering back to his cabin. Eavesdropping on snippets of nervous conversations, passengers getting very antsy to go ashore, not sure exactly what was going on. The printed schedule said they should've been on land an hour ago. But so far the ship was still at anchor.

He knew these people now, had met their kind before when they'd wandered mistakenly into the unpredictable Keys. They were infected with the theme park virus, its major symptoms being an impatience for anything not on the prepackaged itinerary. For them the cruise ship was locked onto rails, riding its reliable route, skimming above a five-inch simulated sea. They wanted safety and predictability. They wanted to be assured in advance exactly what kind of fun they could expect, what clothes they'd need, who to tip and how much. They came in herds to Miami International, followed a smiling hostess in the cruise ship uniform with her upraised sign. Their luggage was transferred automatically. They rode a bulletproof bus across the city, wound through the cattle guards and boarded the ship exactly on schedule. They were old and wanted a neatly organized program. They were young and wanted to get exactly their money's worth.

When they disembarked in Jamaica or Nassau or Cozumel, they moved in herds along preprogrammed routes. If any of them chanced to wander off, encounter some unseemly reality, a grubby unwashed child playing in the ordinary dust, some tavern filled with genuine roughnecks, they would no doubt scurry back to the group with wild tales of poverty and danger. That's another thing the theme park disease did. It trivialized everything evenly. The pleasure, the awe, the terror. Made the authentic into just one more carnival ride.

After their cruise they would flow upstate to one of the plastic theme parks where the great white shark would lunge predictably, the rocket ship would plummet right on schedule, the ferocious beasts would charge their car on the hour every hour, and the black-hearted pirates would carry away shrieking damsels, all of it on steel tracks, a conveyor belt dragging them forward smoothly and dependably and safely above the shallow sea. This was Florida. This was his home, what it had become. Where the false and the true had become so interchangeable that hardly anyone could tell the difference. And those who still could were so worn down they barely cared.

He stopped at an empty span of railing on the Sports Deck, his gaze drifting out beyond the crystal water of the harbor, looking at the distant Caribbean. Out there the sky was scoured clean, its blue had the hard glossy shine of wet enamel. Coasting a few hundred feet up was a lone gull. A warm aroma wafted on the breeze, the scent of smooth black river rocks heated by the sun.

Two men and a boy in a rough-hewn outboard fishing craft were heading straight for the
Eclipse,
then twenty yards shy, the skiff veered west and peeled open a frothy seam on the flat green water. The midmorning sun plated the boat and its passengers with silver glaze. Their tackle was ready, their bait rigged. Full of the same reliable hunger and hope of all fishermen heading out, a yearning he realized with a wicked jolt that he had not experienced himself for many many months.

Somewhere along the way of courting Rochelle and mass-producing his flies and performing the never-ending upkeep on his house and boat and equipment, he'd lost the habit of going out on the water. Only that one trip into the Everglades with Sugarman, one trip in many months. He couldn't even remember the time before that one. And that, of course, was the answer. The reason his flies had lost their allure.

He had always tied them for himself. Sold his extras. The compulsion behind each one was the simple desire to snag his own bonefish. To concoct a bait so appetizing it would guarantee the thudding strikes and wrenching excitement he had relied on for over thirty years. But he'd lost something, tying them exclusively for others. His fingers committing the same act, tweezers and scissors and vise, Mylar and feathers, hackle and ribbing. Everything exactly the same. Identical to the eye. But now they were duds. Failures on some level so subtle, so subatomic that only the fish could see it.

Over the last half year, his craving to go out on the water had dwindled to little more than a glimmer. He had fallen into the tedious and consuming rituals of the land animal, lost his hunger to hunt for those bright, wild creatures.

Now, standing at the railing of that boat that was not truly a boat, looking out at that primitive fishing skiff as it swung around a palm-lined point, with the yeasty, sun-baked scent of the sea in his lungs, the screams of the gulls overhead, the relentless magnetism of the blue distances, it was as though a layer of calluses and epidermis had been flayed back, and the bright tender nerve endings were suddenly exposed to the shock of the familiar. A fresh discovery of what he had always known.

To him a house had always been merely a place to clean fish and reels and plot the next voyage. From the earliest time in his life, his incompetence at social discourse and his craving for isolation had fueled his calling. He'd spent the majority of his waking hours for the last thirty years wandering across the markerless flats of the Keys, rod at the ready, tracking the fleeting shadows that he'd trained his eyes to see. He had never felt at home with the rules of land. Had never known more than a marginal happiness traveling its well-worn thoroughfares.

Now after only two days at sea, even in such a ship as the
Eclipse,
he felt again the tingle in his blood. Some stagnant cluster of molecules rousing. He watched as that skiff headed out to the wrecks and reefs and deep underwater trenches where the big bottom fish lurked, or farther out where the weedlines or circling, diving gulls would steer the fishermen to schools of migrating dolphins. Or perhaps those men were headed to the flats where the jittery permit and tarpon registered every tremor in the tide and were spooked by clouds tickling across the sun or a single human utterance a mile away.

As they disappeared around the point, their boat lifting up onto a sluggish plane, Thorn knew exactly what was alive in their nerves. The weight of every fish they'd ever lifted from the water. The thousand sharp colors, the wavering silhouettes, the blinding speed of barracuda and hammerheads and bone, the snapper's cautious nibble before the tug, the yellowtail's bump, the trout's nervous plucking. All of it was there, stored for all time, the jig of the line, the slow, deliberate reel, the long false casts and the release, the jarring strike and steel-melting power of marlin and tuna. All still there, even if it had been dozing in some desiccated twist of cortex for far too long.

Thorn held up his hand, wriggled his fingers against that polished sky. It might take a week or two of steady fishing, some hard sweaty hours of fruitless labor, but now he was fairly sure he knew how to restore the suppleness to his fingers, how to regain that simple, baffling sorcery that once came so easily.

***

Monica showered. She burned her skin with the hottest water she could stand, piped up straight from the boiler. Poaching herself. Then she backed it off, lathered with the ship's lavender soap. Scrubbed away a layer and another.

With her flesh bright and quivering, she put on one of the terry-cloth robes from the locker, drew the curtains against the brightest day she'd seen in years, and lay down. Her eyeballs burned as if they'd been packed in salt, throat so scalded it felt as though she'd been vomiting for days.

An hour ago when she'd walked off the stage, her father calling after her, she had not turned to face him, hadn't answered his cries. She'd marched away, the hard, tangible core of her anger vaporized, leaving an acrid residue that made her breath burn and her mouth taste like dirty copper. There was a sickly ache in her belly as if she'd been punched repeatedly.

Maybe she slept. Maybe she only imagined sleeping. Maybe she dreamed or maybe she only dreamed she dreamed. Confused and feverish, every breath a struggle, every heartbeat sending a pulse of grief through her gut.

With her eyes shut, she heard the cabin's lock come open, heard him come in, pad across the floor. Felt the mattress give as he sat across the bed from her. He looked at her a long time. He must have seen her eyes wide awake behind her lids. When he spoke, Thorn's voice was as quiet as the first shadows of the evening.

"You feeling any better?"

She opened her eyes, stared up at the ceiling.

"Of course," she said. "I purged, didn't I? I purged big time, in front of twenty million people. I bashed my daddy, I spilled it all out. I drew major quantities of blood. Wrecked his reputation. Did you see? He wasn't smiling anymore at the end of it. I took away his fucking smile."

"You disemboweled the bastard."

"Yeah, I cut his heart out and held it up, and let everyone watch it pump."

"And now you feel shitty."

"Ten times worse than shitty."