Silencer (19 page)

Thorn froze for half a moment, then squirmed deeper into the burrow, fumbled the ring, lost it, swatted with his left hand as it trickled away, bouncing onto the ledge, where it rolled a few inches, bumped into a nub of stone, and spun over the rim into the pit.

 

 

JONAH POPPED THE LID. IN
no mood for talk, he aimed the Glock into the pit and fired twice at Thorn. Then twice more for good measure.

The blue-and-yellow shirt danced away from the wall and settled on the floor of the pit. Jonah stooped forward and peered into the darkness.

The shirt was empty. Just lying there.

Hadn't he seen Thorn a minute ago? Wasn't that him wearing the shirt? Getting a minor spook on, Jonah extended the pistol into the hole, making a circle around the rocky walls, then going back the other way. He felt his skin prickle. Double-spooked. Some kind of voodoo bullshit going on.

Jonah got down on his knees, squinting harder into the darkness.

“You fucker. Show yourself.”

He heard something down there, soft and low like overheated breathing. Or maybe it was the moan of wind. The Navajo flute music of the dead. Departed souls whispering their secrets into the currents of air.

Jonah fired at the shirt again, spewing rock fragments everywhere, digging a pit inside the pit.

“Goddammit. Goddamn your ass.”

When he got back to the hunting cabin and babbled it all to Moses, about shooting at the empty shirt, Moses slapped him. Not hard, not angry. Only to wake him from his daze. Slapped him a second time and said, “Give me the gun.”

And Moses, his handsome brother, the brother who'd risked his own life to save Jonah from their depraved old man, jogged out the front door while Jonah sunk onto the edge of his bed and stared between his knees at the cabin floor.

 

Thorn knew he had only a minute or two before they returned. If he stayed put, they'd find him. If he jumped down they'd find him quicker. There had to be a third choice. A way to counterattack. But only if he could find a better angle.

Squirming to his right, he explored the shelf behind him with the toe of his shoe. Nothing there, just more sheer wall. As he was drawing his leg back he felt a slight dip in the ledge. He craned around to see. It was a depression about the size of a bathroom sink. He studied it for a moment, saw how it might work.

He had to inch backward, scrunch himself into a tight tuck, then pivot his legs in the opposite direction. Cuts etched his chest and arms, and blood was tacky on his knees and shins. There was a dull ache in his gut, as though he'd torn muscles in his stomach from cramming himself into such a knot.

After he got a breath, he extended his legs one at a time into the bowl and eased down, toes over the edge, hunched into a squat like a swimmer on the blocks frozen in his starting crouch. He was poised to leap, but no longer sure his legs would respond when the moment came.

Good news and bad. The bad was very bad. He was now fully
exposed to anyone who brought his face down to the level of the wooden decking. The good wasn't all that good, because from this new squatting position, Thorn had the longest of long shots to uncoil and lunge upward and grab hold of a sleeve, an arm, or maybe the pistol.

One try would be all he got. If he missed he was going to plunge back to the floor of the cavern. And then it was over. Fish in a barrel.

He waited. He waited some more. He felt a tickle of sweat or blood coiling down his thighs. What was numb before was quickly going dead.

At last he saw the shadow moving across the deck overhead. He tried to limber himself, tried to send out messages to the lightless continents of his extremities. He wasn't sure what parts of him were still awake and what parts had retired. He'd find out shortly.

It was Moses on the deck. He could tell by the louder screeches of the planks as the bigger man eased forward toward the opening.

At the hatch the same gun he'd seen before reappeared. The hand holding it was thick and dusted with black hair. The pistol moved smoothly as though the man was shining a careful beam of light in concentric circles around the cavern. A man of precision. A man in firm control of his emotions and his tools.

Thorn saw the glint of the sardine can on the ledge a foot away. He snaked his hand to it, lifted it without sound. He flicked it across the cavern, and it clanged against the far wall and bounced down the pitted stone, landing directly below the hatch.

The hand dropped lower. Moses was in a crouch, stretching out his arm as he bent forward to peer into the cavern. The pistol came first, then his hairy wrist, then his blue shirt cuff, and an inch or two more of the sleeve. When his sharp profile came down into the twilight, Thorn leaped out, both hands grabbing for the forearm.

And he got it, latched on as the pistol fired then fired again.

His hands slipped an inch on the man's thick arm, relocked on the wrist, but Moses was unyielding.

Thorn bounced his weight up and down against the man's strength
and leverage, and felt him rock forward, briefly off balance. Thorn rattled the pistol, rattled it again, and it shook loose from the man's grip and fell, clipping Thorn's bare knee as it went.

Thorn bounced again, but Moses was ready for it this time. He clamped his other hand on Thorn's right wrist, and began to rise, hauling Thorn up to the daylight with the effortless power of a two-ton wench.

There was nothing rational in Thorn's reaction. If he'd had time to work out the odds, he might have decided to ride on up to the land and go one on one with Moses on that pineland prairie. But his instincts said otherwise, and he kicked his feet up, and planted the soles of his feet against the bottom of the deck, let Moses drag his arms a little higher so the big man was slightly off balance, then he thrust his legs straight and dragged the big man headfirst down into the cavern.

In the pitching tumble, their bodies collided midair, Thorn taking a futile swing at the man's face, then came another crash against the floor. This time Thorn landed hard on his right side, cushioned by the other man's bulk.

He rolled away, his lungs struggling. He was dazed, wobbling, remembering the pistol that fell somewhere close. Eyes bleared over. He pushed himself upright, rubbed his vision clear, raised his fists to block a punch or throw one.

Moses lay on his back at Thorn's feet. A few inches above his navel, a spike of stone jutted from his belly. Blood was darkening his blue shirt.

He was awake and looking at Thorn. He lifted his head and saw what had happened to him, then set his head back down. His mouth relaxed into a lazy smile.

“Fucked,” he said.

Thorn retrieved the pistol. He ejected the clip, thumbed out the remaining rounds. Only two. He fitted them back in the magazine and slid it back into the Glock.

From far away he heard Jonah calling out. He was yelling for Moses, yelling his brother's name again. Coming closer.

Thorn stepped over to the side of the pit and stood beneath the ledge where the diamond ring had fallen. He scanned the floor of the cavern but saw no sign of it. He scuffed his feet in the dust, listening to Jonah's voice calling out, closer and closer.

Moses grunted and coughed. His head rocked back and he held perfectly still as though exposing his neck for a barber's blade.

Thorn continued his search for the ring. Jonah called out again.

Thorn stooped over, peering at the floor, crisscrossing the area below the ledge methodically until he spotted a gleam at the base of one of the stubby stalagmites. He picked up Kate's ring, blew off the dust, dropped it in his pocket. The diamond and the rudist. Two survivors of another age.

Above him, Jonah thumped across the wood decking, and Thorn raised the pistol and aimed at the hatch. Jonah stopped short of the opening.

Moses hacked against the pain. He rolled his head from side to side like a lover in ecstasy, then his body began to buck as if he were attempting to pull himself free of the spike. A second later when his body stilled, Thorn was certain that Moses had moved beyond the possibilities of speech.

But he was wrong.

As Thorn held his aim on the opening above, Moses bellowed, “Gun! He's got a gun!”

Thorn held his aim. He could make out Jonah's shadow through the chinks in the plank. Tempted to fire, but knowing it was a risky play with only two shots left.

“You okay, Mo?” His voice was bewildered and forlorn. “Moses, you hear me, man? You okay? You in trouble down there?”

But Moses couldn't answer. For Thorn was crouched over him, grinding a knee into his throat, bearing down with all his weight, depriving Moses of his last breaths, cutting short his final seconds. All the while keeping the pistol fixed on the opening above.

Jonah wailed his brother's name. Wailed it again, a panicked howl.

Moses' arms jiggled once and dropped to his sides.

Then the shadow on the decking moved away and the wail retreated.

Thorn lifted his knee and felt for a pulse on Jonah's big brother. None there. For a moment he took his own pulse, the moral one, and got the same result. Not a pang of regret, not even a goddamn twitch.

He retrieved his flowered shirt, put it on, still damp and riddled with holes. He tucked the Glock into a front pocket of his shorts, and climbed the wall a second time. Driven by the certain knowledge that Jonah was coming back fully armed, Thorn made it up the steep rock without a slip or hesitation, as quick and sticky-fingered as a cartoon hero scaling an office tower.

He wedged back into his familiar burrow, not wasting a second, he found the best angle for leverage, planted his hands, then heaved up against the loosened plank.

He blew a breath, blew out another, grunting like one of those stumpy weightlifters forcing the iron bar up and off his chest, straining with everything he had to raise the end of the board an inch, then another.

The plank flexed and he heard the squeal of rusty nails pulling loose farther down, and he blew out another breath and rammed his shoulder against the board, and it creaked once more and tore free.

Thorn shoved it aside, and stuck his head out into the daylight, twisted and wriggled and jammed his body through the gap and hauled himself up and out onto the land again.

Good lord it was a stunning day, with the sun high and fiercely bright, and the sky an exhilarating blue. A half mile to the west he saw a small cabin in the shelter of a dozen pines. A compact car was parked nearby. Thorn turned and headed in the opposite direction, toward the closest stand of trees, sprinting without pain, as light-footed and limber and free of gravity as a schoolboy set loose for the summer.

 

 

ANTWAN DISHED UP A THIRD
helping of roast beef from the serving dish that Deloria held out to him, saying, “Thank you kindly, ma'am, these are mighty fine vittles,” lathering up his words with hokey southern charm, all the while grinning at the cook, Deloria Gonzalez, whose eyes were red and swollen from sobbing in the kitchen over the loss of Gustavo and Earl Hammond.

Other than Antwan's plate, the table was bare. Fifteen minutes earlier all the serving dishes and plates had been removed, but that didn't slow Antwan. Browning kept looking off toward the living room, where two crime-scene technicians were still studying blood patterns on the carpet.

For the last few minutes, Browning had been using his great-grandfather's gold toothpick to probe his gums. For as long as Claire had been on Coquina Ranch, Earl Senior's gold toothpick sat untouched in a shot glass of cut crystal on a side table next to the family Bible. Browning must've been eyeing it for a while but had restrained himself as long as Earl Junior was alive.

For a moment she tried to attribute his behavior to simple heedlessness, the bewilderment of grief. Or to the second glass of bourbon
he was knocking back just now. But try as she might, those excuses wouldn't wash.

That Browning was using the toothpick at such a moment was as crude an act of disrespect as a Hammond could offer to family traditions. He might just as well have rifled through Earl's pockets before his body was stretchered away.

Frisco sat at ease, wrists on the table, fingers intertwined as though in prayer. He was monitoring the progress of a housefly as it tracked across the blue tablecloth toward a pile of sugar that Antwan spilled while spiking his iced tea.

Making this series of small observations was how Claire was keeping herself intact. Holding tight, maintaining a watchful disengagement. There had been almost no conversation at their luncheon. Antwan had asked Frisco how he'd been doing, and Frisco made some stock reply. Nothing substantial. Nothing about Earl, nothing about the grotesque tragedy of the night before or the investigation unfolding around them. Nothing about Claire, whether she was to be crowned a hero as Frisco claimed, or if she was seconds from being handcuffed and dragged away to jail by one of the armed men in the other room.

“A funeral,” Claire said. “We need to talk about a funeral. Two funerals.”

“There'll be no funeral for Gustavo, if that's what you mean. That son of a bitch is going to hell. No charlatan priest is doing some last-second absolution hocus-pocus on his everlasting soul.” Browning's voice was directed toward the kitchen, speaking for Deloria's benefit, so she might spread the master's curse among the help. A new boss in town.

Browning downed the last of his bourbon. He clinked the cubes inside the glass as if considering another, then smacked it down.

“Ya'll have a preacher in mind?” Antwan forked in another bite.

“The Hammonds,” said Frisco, “are not big churchgoers.”

“Didn't think so,” Antwan said. “As it happens, I know a couple of
Bible beaters in Miami. Big-time TV evangelistas. White or Afro, take your pick.”

Browning cleared his throat for effect.

“ ‘The mirth of the wicked is brief, the joy of the godless lasts but a moment.' Man, old Earl loved to trot that one out when he thought I was slacking. It's from Job. He was big on Job. Revelations, Numbers. All the hardass books.”