Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) (38 page)

To the north the city of Miami was totally dark. People would have a taste of the primitive life. A day or two, maybe a week. They’d have to adapt, learn to cope, get by on less. Learn a few lessons. It would last for a while.

Flynn pushed on, flat out, no one speaking. A half hour later, back in Key Largo, back at Thorn’s house, Cassandra was waiting on the dock. Flynn eased the skiff up to the pilings, handling it smoothly, an expert now.

Cassandra helped Leslie out of the boat. She was conscious, still shivering, unable to talk.

“She needs a hospital,” Thorn said.

“She’ll be taken care of.”

“A hospital, goddamn it.”

A man appeared behind Cassandra. Bearded, long dreadlocks, a bearish guy holding a shotgun at port arms. “She’ll be taken care of,” he said. “We’ve got doctors friendly to the cause. Trust us, she’ll do fine. You guys did a good thing up there.”

“Did we?” Thorn said.

After they’d stretched Leslie out in the back of a Ford van, Flynn came over. Thorn was leaning against one of the girders of the cistern. The cistern Cameron Prince had taken such an interest in. Going to build one like it himself someday.

“I’m leaving,” Flynn said.

“What?”

“I’m going with them.”

“Where?”

“Wherever they’re going.”

Thorn opened his mouth but Flynn reached out and touched a hand to Thorn’s lips. “It’s what I want to do. What I have to do.”

Flynn took his hand from Thorn’s lips and opened his arms, and Thorn stepped forward into the embrace. For a long moment his son wept on his shoulder. His son who’d taken such terrible risks for his cause.

Flynn released him and stepped back. Thorn told him good-bye. Said he loved him. Keeping it simple.

Flynn nodded. “And I love you, too, Dad.”

He watched Flynn walk away with the bearded man. Cassandra, who had been standing by the van, walked across the gravel to Thorn. As she approached, she reached to her mouth and pried loose the prosthetic appliance that had disfigured her face and slipped it into the pocket of her jacket with the aplomb of an actress effortlessly shedding one role for another.

Without the misshapen mouth, she was a striking woman. Her cheekbones were sharp, skin glossy and clear, and her large eyes were dark and electric. Wide shoulders, head held high, an easy poise in her step, something vaguely aristocratic about her bearing.

“I want to thank you for your help tonight. You acted with courage and honor in a very challenging circumstance. Don’t worry about your son. Flynn’s a tough young man. We’ll watch out for him. Bring him along.”

Before Thorn could reply, she turned and walked back to the van. He stood watching as she climbed into it and the van turned around on the gravel drive and disappeared down the entrance lane. He listened to the engine until the van moved so far away he lost it in the night noises, the dry whisper of palm fronds, the slap and jostle of the restless ocean against the seawall.

FORTY-FOUR

A WEEK AFTER THE ATTACK
on Turkey Point, the case was officially closed, but Sheffield was still reviewing the events of that night. In his room at the Silver Sands, while he waited for Thorn to arrive, for the dozenth time he watched one of the security videos from the night of the assault, playing it back on his TV, the view from an overhead, wide-angle camera that captured the whole control room.

He’d turned the sound down to mute the screams and gunfire, so all he could hear were the beach sounds beyond his door, the surf crashing against the white sands, a comforting noise while he watched Cameron Prince, a monstrous masterpiece of muscle, walk bowlegged from the weight of the gator under each arm and the python slung around his shoulders.

Must’ve been five hundred pounds of squirming reptiles, but Prince walked with a steady gait, followed by Leslie Levine, cradling a single gator of four feet, its snout duct-taped. The control room lit by a few emergency lights.

Frank watched as Cameron and Leslie cut the duct tape, set the creatures loose, and scared the shit out of engineers and hard-hatted workers who were scrambling to get the plant back online before the uranium heated up to such a white-hot molten state that a great hole would be burned right through the earth’s core. As one hyperventilating news anchor would put it the next day.

As Leslie and Cameron were fleeing the control room, a half dozen of Claude’s security men entered and blocked their exit. A quick, sloppy gunfight erupted. Leslie wounded, Prince hit several times but seeming unfazed.

Dozens of workers in the big room poured out the exits, screaming and pushing each other aside, a couple of them wounded in the cross fire.

In the dim light, those half-assed rent-a-cops somehow failed to see Leslie and Prince slip out a side door, and they didn’t recognize the other members of their team when they entered. Firing at their own. Rent-a-cop versus rent-a-cop. A couple injured. A chaotic scene of shadow men shooting at shadow men while the gators and the python roamed up and down the aisles.

Frank ran the video back to the beginning once again, though there was nothing new to see. No clues, nothing that hadn’t already been explained and documented and substantiated by multiple eyewitnesses. It was all in the reports on his desk at work, typed up handsomely by Marta.

It had all played out on the local TV and the national news, another Miami-weirdness story, feeding into the clownish narrative that had been established decades back. Miami, that city of eccentrics and wackos, the nation’s capital of silliness and gaudy crooks and grotesque crimes. Ha-ha. Only in fucking Miami.

But for Frank, watching the video again, the thirty seconds of those two souls staggering under the weight of their reptilian burdens, there was nothing funny, nothing ironic or goofy. These two were carrying out an honorable, principled mission. The newswriters had fallen into the easy clichés and had made the group seem bizarre and cartoonish, and ultimately, in the interests of entertainment, they’d undermined the statement the ELF guys had risked their lives to make. Leslie’s miscalculation.

Any publicity was not necessarily good publicity.

Because the media had turned ELF’s deeds into a trivial exercise, a fraternity prank gone terribly wrong. The reconstruction of the cooling tower was under way. The lights were back on. The chargers were recharging, the downtown skyscrapers were twinkling their art deco patterns again, the pulse was pulsing.

Hearing the grumble of Thorn’s VW outside in the parking lot, Frank shut off the TV and sat for a moment staring at the blank screen.

*   *   *

Thorn stayed seated in the VW, admiring Frank’s view, the blazing white sands through the row of palms. An old motel that Frank was fixing up, staying true to its origins. A side of Sheffield most people never saw. The builder, the preservationist, the beach bum.

The natural kinship between the two of them was strained at the moment because Thorn refused to discuss Flynn’s actions the night of the raid or anything that happened afterward. Thorn had described it all to April Moss, Flynn’s mother, and if she wanted to relay the information to the authorities, that was her call. So far she’d remained as mute as Thorn on the subject.

Despite that lack of cooperation, Frank had covered for Thorn, testifying that he was an unwilling participant, basically a hostage. A father trying to protect his son. Claiming Thorn had wandered into the middle of this stunt and was an innocent bystander to the events. Thorn was grateful for Sheffield’s half-truths, but not grateful enough to tell Sheffield about Flynn’s decision to join the ELF warriors.

Frank came out of the door of his motel room and headed over to the VW.

Thorn took another look at the postcard in his hand. A panoramic scene of the West Virginia mountains. With careful penmanship she had written,
F doing fine. L didn’t make it. Thought you should know. Sorry, C
.

Cassandra staying in touch. Leslie was gone, Flynn was some version of okay. Thorn hadn’t told Sheffield about the card. Surely the FBI had ways of collecting evidence from it. It might reveal clues that would lead to Flynn.

Sheffield was at his open window, bent down, looking in. “Everything okay?”

Thorn reached over and flipped open the glove box and slid the postcard inside and shut it. “So where exactly is this Motel Blu?”

“Edge of Little Haiti,” Frank said.

Thorn got out, walked with Sheffield over to his old Chevy.

They drove in strained silence through the midday traffic, up Dixie Highway to I-95, then picked up speed.

“Sugarman doing okay?”

“Few more weeks of therapy, he’ll be fine. Barely a limp.”

“And you, your leg?”

“A ding,” Thorn said. “It’s healing.”

“What he did, Sugar, disabling Wally Chee like that in the condition he was in, flat on his back, that’s pretty goddamn amazing. I’d like to hear the whole story sometime. The blow-by-blow.”

“There’s no story. He hit Wally in the head with a crowbar.”

“How’s he come by a crowbar, lying in a bed?”

“I’m not much of a housekeeper. Things get misplaced.”

“You’re a terse son of a bitch. You know that, Thorn?”

“I do.”

Frank parked in the lot of Motel Blu and they sat for a minute looking at the venetian blinds of the small apartment attached to the back of the place. “Little River runs behind there. Kind of polluted, but you can picture how it used to be. A pretty place once upon a time.”

Thorn nodded.

“Neighborhood’s getting safer,” Frank said. “Motel’s got twenty-four-hour security. The girl should be fine here. You don’t need to worry.”

“I only want to see her. See her and go. I’m not going to try to adopt her.”

“She’s your granddaughter. It’s your right to see her. Anyway, Geraldine says she wants to meet you, wants to thank you for what you did.”

“What did I do?”

“A long time ago you saved Leslie’s life, that’s how she remembers it.”

They sat for a while longer in the parking lot.

Thorn saw one of the slats of the blinds move. “Julie. That’s a good name.”

“It is,” said Sheffield. “And she’s a cute kid. Got a patch of Leslie’s hair. And those amazing eyes.”

“Okay, then. I’m ready. Let’s go meet her.”

Also by James W. Hall

Dead Last
(2011)

Silencer
(2010)

Hell’s Bay
(2008)

Magic City
(2007)

Forests of the Night
(2004)

Off the Chart
(2003)

Blackwater Sound
(2002)

Rough Draft
(2000)

Body Language
(1998)

Red Sky at Night
(1997)

Buzz Cut
(1996)

Gone Wild
(1995)

Mean High Tide
(1994)

Hard Aground
(1993)

Bones of Coral
(1992)

Tropical Freeze
(1989)

Under Cover of Daylight
(1987)

Hot Damn!
(2002)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JAMES W. HALL
is an Edgar and Shamus Award–winning author whose books have been translated into a dozen languages. He has written four books of poetry, a collection of short fiction, and a collection of essays. This is his eighteenth novel. He and his wife, Evelyn, divide their time between South Florida and North Carolina.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

GOING DARK.
Copyright © 2013 by James W. Hall. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Cover design by Ervin Serrano

Cover photographs: island © Javarman/
Shutterstock.com
; palm trees © Alexandra Lande/
Shutterstock.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Hall, James W.

       Going Dark / James W. Hall. — First Edition.

           pages cm — ([Thorn P.I.; Book 10])

       ISBN 978-1-250-00500-7 (hardcover)

       ISBN 978-1-250-03833-3 (e-book)

  1.  Fathers and sons—Fiction.   2.  Nuclear power plants—Florida—Fiction.   3.  Radicals—Fiction.   4.  Environmental disasters—Fiction.   5.  Florida Keys (Fla.)—Fiction.   6.  Political fiction.   I.  Title.

       PS3558.A369G65 2013

       813
'
.54—dc23

2013024718

e-ISBN 9781250038333

First Edition: December 2013