Silencer (16 page)

Sugarman looked over at Rusty. She was staring out her window, her shoulders quivering. He reached over and cupped the back of her neck. In a moment she grew still, lowered her head, then raised her arm and covered his hand with hers.

“We'll find him,” Sugarman said. “I promise you, Rusty. We'll find him.”

She removed her hand and he withdrew his.

“I did my due diligence on this transaction,” she said, sounding
like she was trying to convince herself. “I spent a lot of time thinking it through, researching the land, the people involved. But I should've known something was fishy.”

“This isn't your damn fault, Rusty.”

“What if these two goons came down and took him off and killed him and hid his body? We might never know.”

Sugarman slowed for a line of traffic that was stacking up behind a Winnebago.

“I don't accept the premise.”

“Why?”

“What would killing Thorn accomplish? He's already agreed to the deal. It's in the pipeline, right?”

“It is and it isn't.”

“How's that?”

“The documents are done, but there's still the closing. It's scheduled for this Tuesday afternoon in Tallahassee. The three parties sit at the table—Division of State Lands, Thorn, and Earl Hammond. Thorn signs over the Sarasota land to the state, accepts their check, and he endorses it to Earl Hammond. Then Hammond signs over Coquina Ranch to the state. Florida gets three times more land than they would have otherwise. Hammond walks away with half a billion dollars; Thorn's divested himself of a good chunk of Bates International and done one hell of a good deed in the process.”

“Okay, if somebody's trying to kill this deal, why bother with both Thorn and Earl Hammond? Remove either one of them and there's no deal.”

She brushed dust off the dashboard. Turned the sun visor down, then turned it back up again.

“There were red flags. But I ignored them.”

“What?”

“Earl Hammond was in a big hurry to give the land away. A real sense of urgency. Margaret Milbanks, she's the head of Division of State Lands, she said Earl got very agitated when he found out the
Florida Forever fund was depleted. He wanted the land to be sealed up in a preservation program as soon as possible. Money wasn't an issue. He seemed ready to donate it for free as long as it was preserved.”

“There's lots of groups who'd be happy to take a couple hundred thousand acres off his hands.”

“That's the point,” Rusty said. “If Thorn's not at the table Tuesday, and the particular deal I structured fell through, Earl Hammond could still give the land to the state or find a private conservation group and make a donation. Taking that land off the table, that was his goal. So if the idea was to kill the deal, then removing Thorn was irrelevant.”

“Maybe somebody doesn't have the complete picture. They're carpet bombing when they could've just done a surgical strike.”

Rusty was silent. She stared ahead at the road.

“So what do we know about the rest of the Hammonds?”

“Not a lot,” she said. “Earl had one son, Earl the third. He and his wife died way back, some kind of accident, avalanche, skiing or something. Earl and his wife raised the two grandsons, Browning and Frisco. Frisco's a cop in Miami.”

“What kind of cop?”

“Horse cop. Whatever they call it.”

“Mounted unit.”

“That's it. And the second son, the younger one, Browning, he runs the ranch, day to day. Wife's name is Claire, college sweethearts. In their late twenties. It was Browning who started the safari operation. Fancies himself a businessman.”

“Okay, so let's put it on Browning. Just brainstorm that.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, number one, you got an obvious motive. Grandson's afraid he's cut out of the will, so he offs the old man, takes care of Thorn for good measure.”

“Makes no sense, Sugar. If Browning's greedy, all he has to do is sit around a few weeks, let the deal play out, and a fortune falls in his lap.”

Sugarman worked on that for a minute, watching a couple of
northbound crazies race past at over a hundred. No rules out there on that lonely stretch of road.

“Okay, all right. So is five hundred million what the land is worth on the open market? I mean, if the ranch suddenly belongs to Browning, could he sell if for more than that? Maybe that's his motivation. Screw the deal Earl was working on, make his own deal with higher numbers.”

“Five hundred is top dollar. And trust me, there's not a big market for two hundred thousand acres of ranchland west of the lake.”

“The grandson doesn't have his facts straight. He gets wind of Earl disposing of the land, but doesn't know about the five hundred.”

“A stretch,” she said.

“All right. So what's with this urgency thing? Earl was in a hurry to get this done. Why's that? Was he sick?”

“Not that I know.”

“So why was he so juiced to protect the land? Protect it from what?”

“Good question.”

“I mean what do you protect land like that from? Like you say, it's the middle of nowhere. No highways anywhere close. Clewiston, Palmdale, for christsakes. Trailer parks and barbecue joints. Nobody's going to build a housing development out there, sugarcane fields on one side, Everglades on the other, at least an hour from the city. So what was Earl Hammond afraid of? What's making him move so fast?”

He slowed for an RV with Michigan plates, tooling along at thirty.

He dug out his cell, scrolled through his directory, and found the number.

“What're you doing?”

“Shaking the trees, see what falls out.”

“Sugar.”

“Old friend of mine works in Miami PD. Twenty years ago we did a couple of tours at the sheriff's office in Key Largo. He went up the ladder, I jumped off. But he'll remember me.”

“This guy might know Frisco?”

“Oh, he'll know him.”

“The Miami police department can't be that small.”

“Mullaney knows everybody on the force. He's the chief.”

Sugarman made the call, but Mullaney was in a conference. He left a message with the chief's aid, his cell number, told her it was urgent. She seemed too brisk to Sugar, less attentive than he would've liked, so before she dismissed him, he told her he was calling in regard to the incident with the governor. That gave her pause.

“You have information about the shooting?”

“I do,” he said. Somewhat true. True enough.

“Well, FDLE is handling that. Young woman named Anne Donaldson. I'll transfer you to someone who can give you her number.”

“Tell Larry I called, give him my cell,” Sugar said. “He'll want to talk to me.”

He clicked off, slipped the phone in his pocket, and looked over at Rusty. She was on her own cell, listening intently. A few moments later, she said a quiet “Thank you” and snapped her phone shut.

“Who's that?”

“Margaret Milbanks, State Lands.”

“And?”

“Other than two lawyers in her office that put the deal together, no one knew Thorn's role, his name, or any of the particulars. Except for one other.”

Sugarman waited.

“Margaret's boss,” Rusty said. “Governor Sanchez.”

“Well, well,” he said. “The circle tightens.”

“Sugar,” she said. “What's the plan? You and me. What are we doing?”

“Plan?”

“We're just going to cruise up to the front gate at Coquina Ranch? That what you think? Start asking questions while a triple homicide investigation is underway?”

Sugarman pulled out into the passing lane and floored it past the Winnebago.

“Sugar, you ran out of Squirrelly Shirley's, jumped in the car, headed up the highway. I thought you had a plan.”

He smiled at her. She was a pretty woman, one of those lucky ladies who flourished with age. If not for Thorn . . . if not for that lucky bastard . . .

“I do have a plan. It's worked before, it'll work this time.”

“And that would be?”

“We find out what that old man was afraid of, why he was in such a hurry to part with his land, that'll tell us where Thorn is.”

“Do that again.”

“In the heart of the heart of the trouble. That's where Thorn'll be. You watch.”

 

 

WITH A TIGHT GRIP ON
the collar, Thorn hauled his flowered shirt out of the cleft in the sinkhole floor. It was sopping with cool water. The oversized yellow hibiscus blooms had turned two shades darker, and the cotton was starting to shred from being dragged repeatedly across the jagged stones. It was the fourth time he'd dunked and retrieved his shirt, and he was starting to get the hang of it.

Careful not to exert too much pressure, he coiled the shirt into a rope, held it by the ends, lifted it, tipped his head back, opened his mouth and wrung the water out.

He swallowed the dribble, maybe a quarter of a cup, twisted the cloth harder, then harder still for the last drops. The water tasted metallic. Maybe fertilizer run-off or pesticide or some dissolved minerals that had leached into the groundwater. It didn't matter. Better to ingest a few carcinogens than die of thirst before sundown.

Problem was, the process took too long, wedging his shirt into the crevice, soaking up water, and wringing it into his mouth. He'd be working all night before he could rehydrate himself. He was still parched, still felt the drill bit of his headache boring into his frontal lobe, but he had to stop.

He stood up, hung the shirt from a jagged ledge about shoulder high, and took a long look around the pit. It was time to get busy, time to get the hell out of there.

It had to be near noon, which meant this would probably be the best light he'd have all day. A twilight haziness filled the space, with a few splashes of brightness projected onto the walls and floor from sunlight pouring through the chinks between the planks. Three of the stalagmites were illuminated. Spiny tubes with pointed tips, like stalks of coral on the reef.

Stepping around the half-dozen stalagmites, he circled the sinkhole again, patting down the walls, here and there poking his fingers into the crumbly sediment, exploring, finding some places as squashy as fresh plaster, pebbles breaking free, and other areas that were gritty on the surface, but tough an inch below. The bad news was that most of the walls were unyielding, an ancient limestone that had calcified over the centuries into impervious stone.

Impervious to Thorn's fingers anyway.

He retrieved the sardine can he'd pitched into a corner and found the lid nearby. The lid was curled slightly and fit neatly in his hand like a primitive trowel. Thorn selected what he believed was the western side of the sinkhole, a section not quite as sheer as the others. Maybe a few degrees beyond vertical. He and Sugarman had once watched a documentary about a group of blind climbers taking on Mount Everest. That was the extent of his knowledge of rock climbing. It didn't look easy. And it didn't fall nicely into any of Thorn's skill sets.

He was a fly-tier, a fisherman. He had excellent eyesight, fairly good hand-to-eye skills, and a degree of dexterity in his fingers, but he'd never spent time in mountains or around rock walls or cliffs. As close as he'd come to any of that was climbing trees as a kid.

He stood back and tried to calculate the geometry of the climb. How far apart the footholds should be spaced, where exactly to start. He didn't want to consider yet what he would do when he reached the wooden lid at the top of the sinkhole. He'd deal with that in due
course. From this distance he couldn't tell how solid the carpentry was, whether the workmen had used screws or nails to fasten it all together. Didn't matter. First he needed footholds.

Trying to climb the wall without some kind of precut traction didn't look possible. A little menacing, too, since the wall was studded with burrs of rock and jagged edges. Losing his hold and sliding back down that rock would be like grinding his flesh across a cheese grater.

The initial foothold was simple. He dug the sharp edge of the sardine lid into a chalky spot about three feet off the floor of the pit. After half a minute he hit a patch of granular sediment, thick sand or marl. The material spilled out of the wall and left a fissure about three inches deep.

He put the toe of his boat shoe in the cranny, a perfect fit, and hoisted himself up, balancing for a few seconds with all his weight on that one foot. He pressed his stomach and chest flush against the wall and searched for a likely spot for a handhold higher up. He scratched the lid against a few places but the rock was too hard. Two or three inches beyond a comfortable reach, he found another natural fissure. He had to keep himself stretched out completely while he used the lid to enlarge the opening.

When he was satisfied, he pushed away and hopped back to the floor. He looked up at the wall. It seemed higher than before. Not insurmountable, but a lot more challenging than he first imagined. For sure, he wasn't going to be able to keep carving footholds then hopping down to catch his breath. Once he got up on the wall and wriggled a foot or two higher, jumping back wouldn't be wise.

Last night when he was shoved into the pit, he'd landed in an incredibly lucky spot. Missed by inches being gored by one of those rocky spikes. Not something he wanted to gamble with again.

And the truth was, he doubted he could absorb one more fall.

His body was a collection of lumps and nicks and deep bruises and stiff and swollen joints, but the sum total of all that was nothing compared to what waited for him if he didn't make it up that wall.

For a few moments he searched for a place to sink his second foothold, somewhere around two feet higher than the first. He tried two places but got nowhere with the lid. And the aluminum was already beginning to grow dull, and loose threads of metal were fraying along its edges from the rough use.