Silencer (11 page)

Later, an odor woke him. A perfume from somewhere long ago, a woman he once loved, or else some forgotten place or time revived by a wisp of scent. He blinked. The woman in her black cowl and inky lips was no longer attending him.

The slit in the ceiling pointed its death ray farther along the craggy wall. The smell was gorgeous, fruity and rich. He couldn't place it.

Couldn't find its name in the crushed memory banks. But he knew he loved it. This wonderful, lip-smacking aroma.

Thorn lay on his back, unmoving, working on the riddle of smell. Ruling out perfumes, for this odor was not complex. No war of sweets and sours and salty tangs. This was elemental and basic and true. This was rich and good and beautiful. These were fumes that raised in him the long swoon of hope.

Then he lulled away into oblivion.

When he woke again, there were tongs digging into his ice-block skull. Someone was lifting his head, but no one was there.

He turned his head to the side and saw what first appeared to be a thick icicle. He blinked and cleared his eyes. No, it was a spike of stone. There were several of them rising like pygmy spears from the floor. Stalagmites? He remembered the word. Calcium carbonate, made
from some steady drip from the roof of the pit. The one nearest his head rose more than a foot from the floor, as crooked as a witch's finger.

Then he caught the smell again, oh, God, the wafting scent from the honeyed center of the earth. The caramel nougat, the pungent bliss of the natural world. It was carrying him higher than his body, offering him a chance at salvation.

And then, yes, of course, the answer came to him in a hazy rush. It was water. Of course, the wellspring of goodness. It was green and blue and clear and it filled the air around him with clarity and precision, the scent of water.

Thorn rocked his head off the ground. Took a deep breath, drew in the aroma, drew it into his own broken, ruined body, suffused his bloodstream with it, the blessed scent of water, then he relaxed and slipped back into the melt of dream.

 

“This isn't Thorn. He wouldn't do this.”

“It's his goddamn handwriting,” Rusty said. “You know it is.”

They were in the living room, Sugarman picking up beer bottles and plastic cups and plates of half-eaten shrimp and cocktail sauce and tossing the recyclables in one can, trash in another—just to have something to do while they made sense of this. It was seven in the morning. Rusty had found the note in the kitchen two hours earlier when the last of the guests were leaving.

When she brought the note to him, Sugarman was policing the area around the dock and the lagoon. He read it several times before it sunk in. Though truly, he couldn't say it had sunken fully yet.

They'd searched the house. All Thorn's clothes were still in the drawers. His shaving stuff and his few toiletries were in the medicine chest. His fishing rods and gear were all accounted for as were the keys to his VW and his stash of ones and fives and a single twenty that he kept rolled up in a rubber band, tucked into the top right drawer
next to his cotton briefs. They roamed the two acres, that part of it that was not covered by impenetrable mangroves or stands of gumbo limbo and mahogany. They walked out to the highway, went a half mile in each direction, checking the tall grass for any signs of him. It seemed silly, an overreaction, but Rusty was panicky, so Sugarman went along, trying to settle her nerves.

“ ‘I just need some time to think.' ” Sugarman emptied the dregs of two more beer bottles into the kitchen sink, then came back into the open living room. “Think about what?”

Rusty was slumped on the couch. Her face was drawn and pale, her white sundress wrinkled and stained with grease, mustard and cocktail sauce from hours of carrying platters of food, dishing out burgers and fish tacos and broiled shrimp and corncobs to the dozens of people who'd showed up.

“It's what you say when you're dumping someone, Sugar. You know that.”

“You guys been having some kind of problem? Arguing or something?”

She looked up at Sugarman, squeezed out a grimace, and shook her head.

“We were doing fine. No problems. At least that's what I thought.”

“Okay, so you notice him being moody or off in his head lately?”

“Just the opposite. Less grumpy than usual. He was happy about the Florida Forever thing. He talked about it all the time. He wanted to come up with more stuff like that. Give money away, become an eco warrior. I haven't seen him so motivated. I mean, really energized. I haven't seen him that way before, ever.”

“Yeah, he's been a little giddy about it all.”

“Something's wrong, Sugar. Maybe it wasn't the land swap he was giddy about. Maybe it's another woman.”

“All right, calm down,” he said. “So he could've wandered off. All these people, the crowd, the noise, it probably made him cranky. He had one beer too many and stalked off and curled up somewhere and
fell asleep. He'll stumble in any time now, apologizing all over himself.”

“The note, Sugar. Why'd he write that if he just wandered off?”

“Look, I saw the way you two were dancing. He wasn't about to dump you.”

“I've been on the road so much lately. I've turned into a goddamn business geek. Always up in Sarasota, Tallahassee, doing Bates International bullshit. He met somebody else. Go on, Sugar, you can tell me. He met someone. An old flame. Someone new, that girl Michaela who kept looking at him last night. I saw her.”

In the morning light flooding through the French doors, Rusty's flesh was sharply illuminated, and for a moment Sugarman was startled by how pale she'd become. All the hours she'd been spending lately in conference rooms had faded the golden tan she'd had for as long as Sugar could remember. Like so many fishing guides in the Keys, Rusty Stabler had spent years in the relentless sun, up on the poling platform spotting fish for her clients. No matter what she did to protect herself, the rays managed to leave their stain. But in only a few months all that was washed away. A change that perhaps suggested others not so visible.

Sugarman dismissed the thought. Not possible. He knew Thorn. He knew Rusty. They were on solid ground.

“There's no one else,” Sugarman said. “Trust me. I'd know if there was. And if I knew, I'd tell you.”

She stood up.

“The ring.”

“What ring?”

“I noticed it was missing, subconsciously or something, when we were checking his things before.”

Sugarman followed Rusty back into the master bedroom. She walked over to the oak chest of drawers that stood between two windows with a view of the mangroves and the blue glimmer of the Atlantic beyond.

“See.” She held up the glass ashtray where his car keys were. “This is where he kept it. Kate Truman's wedding ring, a big diamond. It's been sitting here since I moved in. Out in the open. Always in the same place.”

Sugarman looked into her eyes, looked back at the ashtray. He'd seen the ring lying there many times. He watched her eyes fumble around the room.

“Maybe someone from the party stole it,” Sugar said. “There were people I didn't know. It could be that.”

“Nice try,” she said.

Rusty sat down on the edge of the quilt, a burgundy and yellow creation Kate Truman had designed and stitched together when Sugar and Thorn were ten years old and becoming friends. Sugarman remembered watching Kate's nimble fingers suture those geometric shapes together. He remembered that simple trouble-free period so clearly because it was the first time he'd been welcomed into a home where both father and mother presided together over an orderly routine, that happy, caring couple who had adopted Thorn at birth greeted Sugar as an instant family member.

“Okay,” Sugarman said. “We need to be logical about this.”

“Logical, yeah, okay, let's be logical.” Rusty set the ashtray back on the chest of drawers. “You start, Sugar. Go ahead, be logical.”

“We make a list of everybody at the party. You take half; I take the other half. We track everybody down, see if anybody saw Thorn leave. That's logical.”

“Jesus,” Rusty said. “What the hell is it with this guy? Things are going good. He's happy. I'm happy. But it never stops with him, does it? One crisis after another. I thought it was going to be different. I thought I was immune.”

“Don't get ahead of yourself. There's got to be a very simple, very obvious explanation. Let's take a deep breath, sit down, and make a list of names.”

They walked back to the kitchen and Rusty perched on a stool behind
the counter. There was still trash and leftover food sitting out. Floating on the sunny breeze was the smell of stale beer and marijuana.

Sugarman got a pad of paper off the counter and found a pen.

“A simple, obvious explanation,” Rusty said. “You're sure of that? Your gut is telling you that, Sugar?”

He'd never lied to Rusty Stabler before.

Meeting her eyes, working hard to keep his face neutral, he said, “Thorn is fine. My gut says he's fine. Now, let's stay focused and get going on this.”

He slid the pad of paper across the counter and set the pen beside it.

“You can't bullshit worth a damn,” Rusty said.

Sugarman sighed. She was right. He'd never had a knack for deceit. One of his many deficiencies.

“But thanks for trying,” she said. “Thank you, Sugar.”

 

 

THORN WAS ON HANDS AND
knees, stooped over a cleft in the rocky floor. He'd found the source of the water smell. After scooping and shoveling handfuls of marl and finely powdered shale aside, he wedged his arm up to the shoulder into the opening. The hole was perfectly round and its sides were oddly slick. He could feel the air was cooler down below and knew water was only inches away. Rain runoff trapped in a pocket of limestone. Or perhaps a small pool of the surficial aquifer.

He jammed his shoulder against the floor and stretched his hand out and skimmed one fingertip across the cool surface.

To gain the extra inch or two to scoop up water, he was going to have to carve a much deeper depression into the soft floor.

He was drawing his arm out of the fissure to begin the excavation when a blast of sunlight filled his prison cell.

He scooted away from the hole and settled his back against the wall. The kettle drum inside his skull started up again, a Sousa marching band pounding out an old patriotic standard.

He squinted up at the grinning face of Jonah. Shaved head, face of a jackal.

“Room service,” Jonah said. “Care to place your order?”

Shredded clouds floated against the powder blue like drifts of foam on a summer sea.

“For starters,” Thorn said, “how about a plate of conch fritters?”

“What?”

Thorn drew a long breath, trying to quiet the booming.

“A hush puppy with gristle inside,” he said. “Greasy little ball, like something that fell off your family tree.”

Jonah blinked.

“Don't insult my family, fuck-breath.”

Thorn held a hand up to shade his eyes.

“You hear me, Thorn?”

“I hear you. Your entire family is off-limits.”

Jonah digested that for several seconds as if he was trying to decide if Thorn was mocking him.

“Okay, then. So how's it going? You and the whale doing some business? Bonding a little, are you?”

Ground level where Jonah squatted was roughly twenty feet above, maybe a bit more. Stalling, Thorn glanced around, using the sunlight to make a quick survey of the cavern's vertical walls. Earlier, he'd run his hands across the perimeter, searching for the source of water. The floor was coated with several inches of sand and pea-sized pebbles, the walls were rough limestone and sedimentary layers he couldn't identify. Some kind of rock or ancient shells compressed into deposits thin as wafers, while others were thicker slabs the width of mattress pads. Clumps of weeds and grass grew in a few nooks, a small fern was rooted in one shady corner and had sent runners along the wall. Signs that this deep pit had been above the water table for a while.

Now with a clear look he decided it might be a sinkhole. A collapse in the karst and limestone shelf beneath the surface of the ground. The substrata beneath the Florida soil was honeycombed with fissures and cavities, a sieve that allowed rainwater to filter through and recharge the aquifer. Steady rains could erode a crevice until it widened and
eventually failed. When it did, the land above it caved in and these pits appeared. Sinkholes in Florida had been known to eat cars and houses. Sometimes they swallowed entire lakes or subdivisions or portions of the interstate. Rare in the southern part of the state, but there he was, way down inside the earth. So they weren't quite rare enough.

Over the opening of this particular sinkhole someone had fashioned a wooden cover made of heavy planks, and cut into it was a hinged lid, making it a perfect holding pen for idiots like Thorn.

“I asked you a question, dude. You still operating on your full mental faculties, or has the whale taken you off into a fugue state?”

“We're getting along,” Thorn said. “I've always had a soft spot for cetaceans.”

“You know about whales, do you?”

“I know they're mammals. A lot smarter than some humans.”

Jonah stared down at Thorn for a few moments as he processed that.

“You getting thirsty? Need a drinkie? Maybe an icy bottle of Evian?”

“I wouldn't turn it down.”

“We can trade. You give me what I want to know, I might take pity on your sorry ass and provide some liquid refreshment.”

Propped against the pebbled wall, Thorn tilted his head, trying to get a better view of Jonah, to read this guy, decode his clothes. Anything that might be useful.

Jonah held up a shiny object. The sun was directly behind him, and Thorn couldn't make it out. He changed his angle again, tipped his hand to better shield his eyes, but it was no use. The sun blinded him.