Silencer (24 page)

Donaldson opened and closed kitchen cabinets. Same plates as Frisco remembered, same assortment of glasses and mugs and beer steins.

“I'm still hung-up on that map you mentioned, Ms. Hammond.”

“Yeah, there was a map. There was most definitely a map.”

“Governor denied it. Your husband, Mr. Shelton, no one saw it.”

“It was there.”

“So they're lying? Is your husband lying?”

“I saw a map.”

“Why would your husband and Shelton and the governor deny it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Can you tell me anything more about it? Describe it in more detail?”

“I've told you everything. Red markings on a survey map.”

“How many red marks?”

“What difference could that make?”

“An estimate.”

“A dozen maybe, I don't know.”

“You know anything about this, Sergeant? You got an idea about this map?”

He did. He had a very clear idea, but he wasn't about to share with Donaldson. Frisco walked over to the leather couch and sat. A thousand years ago it was exactly in that spot, the lights off, on a moonless night, when he'd first fondled Ana's breast. Ten thousand years. An eon. Thousands of species had gone extinct since then.

“You're not particularly forthcoming, Sergeant. Not much of a talker.”

“You're not the first to notice.”

“Well, you haven't exactly won my heart, either.”

“Don't you have to go write up your report?”

“I'll give you this one, Sergeant. You don't deserve it, but here it is. Call it a peace offering.”

Frisco kept his mouth closed, watching Claire stare out at the horses.

Donaldson said, “I asked the Palm Beach County ME for a hurry-up on the forensics, and he was kind enough to put Saperstein first in line. So this is preliminary, but his initial workup suggests your angle-of-entry theory might have merit. The first two entrance wounds were ovoid in shape which as you may know suggests those shots were taken from a distance of anywhere from five to ten feet, and the remaining rounds were fired at a distance a good deal closer.

“The last two left powder tattooing, star-shaped lacerations, which says Saperstein was lying on his back, the shooter leaned over, fired directly into his prone body, touched the pistol to his clothes and the gases released from the fired round went into the subcutaneous tissue and exploded the skin outward in that star pattern.”

“And the angle of entry?” Frisco was looking at Claire. Her jaw was working, her eyes ducked down in a distracted study of the floor as if she might be revisiting that moment when she'd found Saperstein's body in the bushes outside the lodge.

“The only persuasive evidence on angle of entry is from the wounds Saperstein took while he was still standing. Shots one and two.”

“And?”

“The ME believes the shooter was likely to be taller than Pinto.”

“How much taller?”

“Can't be precise with something like that. Best guess, maybe a half foot. And by the way, when I got this, I called your cell, left all this on your voicemail. I guess you don't use your phone.”

“I try to avoid it.”

“Look, I already apologized, Sergeant. I don't know what else I can do. I was angry this morning. One of my colleagues had been murdered in the line of duty. You should be able to understand that.”

“So you're going to tell your superiors about the two shooters?”

“It'll be in my report. Don't see it'll cut much ice. The governor being so goddamn eager to have it over and done.”

“But despite that, you'll put it in your report.”

“What the hell is it with you, Hammond? What's your issue?”

Frisco turned his head slowly and steered Donaldson's gaze toward Claire. For a moment Donaldson was puzzled, then she grimaced, finally grasping his irritation. She'd been crossing the line again and again, behaving like a rookie. Not that it was in any rule book, but it was unspoken protocol. It didn't matter that Anne Donaldson and Frisco didn't care for each other. They were still cops. And cops talking to cops with civilians present didn't criticize their superiors, and they sure as hell didn't discuss the facts of a case in front of any civilian, especially one so deeply embroiled in that case.

“Anything else, Donaldson?”

“Well, there is one more thing.”

He waited.

“How would I locate the hunting lodge? I want to talk to the Faust brothers.”

“Why?” Frisco said. “If you've been shut down.”

“Just a detour on my way out the exit. An itch I need to scratch.”

“I'll draw you a map,” Claire said. “From here it's maybe twenty minutes, bad roads. Lots of cattle gates to open and close. You'll need a key for the last one.”

“A key?”

“The hunting cabin is inside the game preserve. It's fenced in. I'll put it in the map, where to find the key.”

“That would be very kind,” Donaldson said, and gave Frisco a chastened nod.

 

 

IT WAS NOT LIKE ANY
barbed wire Thorn had ever seen. Bits of sheet metal twisted between two strands of wire, each one shaped into the letter H, with four dagger tips. The barbs were spaced an inch apart. Strung a few inches above and below those two-stranded wires was a single strand studded with six pointed tin stars that twirled like tiny propellers, clittering in the growing wind as if the fence itself were alive, eager to do its work.

It was barbed wire from another era, an antique. When he flicked his fingernail against a strand, tiny plumes of rust sailed into the steady wind. He found a section he could grip without slashing himself and tested its tension. It felt as taut and unforgiving as the day it had been strung.

The fence was at least twelve feet high and ran as far as Thorn could see in one direction, and in the other it disappeared into a stand of pines. Thorn felt sure that when he hiked into those woods, the fence would still be there. But he set off that way just in case.

Such a barrier was far beyond anything needed to keep wildebeests and antelope from straying. It was a monument to some other intention entirely. There was no way any man could climb that barrier. Even if
Thorn had boots and gloves and heavy clothing, that fence would have shredded him to ribbons before he reached halfway. Bolt cutters might have made a dent, but anything less would be insufficient.

He was trapped. Thorn and the wild creatures and a man covered in blood.

Thorn moved along the fence line to the woods. A hundred yards off he halted. In the west the sun had dropped below a dark mass of cumulus and was shining from a slit of open sky along the horizon. Maybe an hour of daylight left.

Thorn watched as the stand of scrub pine and cabbage palm and palmetto brightened. He'd never believed in signs or secret codes sent down by the heavenly stewards. What was unfolding before him was just the everyday magic in the pine flatwoods. The hard flat light threw every limb and leaf and frond into high relief, and every bird and cobweb and sapling in the sharpest contrast imaginable, as if a haze had lifted, the blue smokiness that dulled the world all day long had been whisked away, allowing every green and every brown and all the russets and saffrons to achieve their perfect state.

The vision was so crisp and pure, so perfectly illuminated that for a moment as he watched, it displaced Thorn's thirst and exhaustion and all his aches. He settled on his butt in the tall grass and took a breather as the color, minute by minute, reached its full blossom, then slowly began to back off, dwindling at a slightly faster rate, the light draining away, the bright pigments dulling to sepia, then finally to something close to black and white.

As he was rising to go, a heavy gust stirred the branches and fluttered the leaves and bowed the tall grasses in its path. And it was because of that, the odd confluence of wind and light that he noticed deep within the pine hammock, at the center of all that rocking and swaying, an object that held perfectly still.

Some dark and hulking thing. He squinted and tried to make out its exact contours, but he was too far off to be sure. It was no animal. Way too big for that.

It was on the route he was taking anyway in this wandering exploration, so he set off for the thicket of pines and palms, keeping his eyes on that unmoving thing. He felt like one of those colorblind men recruited in the Second World War to fly along as spotters on aircraft bombing missions. Because of their defect in sight, they weren't fooled by the camouflage used to hide anti-aircraft guns. Their deficiency saved the lives of countless aviators and troops on the ground.

At any other hour of the day, in any other state of mind, Thorn might have passed by that stand of trees without a second glance. Only because he'd been exhausted and stopped to rest, then was drawn by the light and wind, had he managed to penetrate the facade of limbs and leaves and twisting vines.

In the fading light he worked his way to the center of the wooded grove, pushed through the snarl of branches, creepers, and spiderwebs.

And there it stood like some obelisk abandoned by long-departed explorers.

It must've weighed three tons or more, coated with red scales of rust and crumbling blisters of corrosion. Two giant wheels shaped like those on the wagon trains of early pioneers straddled a large cylinder that he knew housed a piston the size of a fifty-gallon drum. The machine sat astraddle two rails as thick as anvils. He'd seen this same engine once before on one of those field trips with that old high school geology teacher.

Thorn circled the motor and circled it again. On what he took to be its rear, he saw a copper plate riveted to one corner, and he kneeled to inspect it. With his fingernail he scraped away a patina of hardened salt and dust, and there was a date and name: 1933,
HUMBLE OIL
.

He closed his eyes, made himself take several deep and careful breaths. In the past, that's all it usually took to recharge himself. But this time it didn't come close. His body and his spirit had sailed far beyond such easy remedies.

He slipped his hand into his pocket and took out the rudist and rolled it in his fingers, feeling its rounded edges. That once ragged
clump of mollusk shells had been smoothed by the centuries, buffed and polished by the restless layers of sand and bits of bone that mounted steadily around it.

On that long-ago excursion, his geology teacher had bused the class to Collier County, an hour west of Coquina Ranch, taking them to a remote spot on the fringes of Big Cypress Swamp, an area called the Felda Fields. It was there in the early forties the first commercial oil well in Florida was drilled. Two miles below the ground was what oil men called a pay zone. But because the reservoir was a measly thirty feet thick, it only managed to produce a few million gallons of crude. Enough to make things interesting, but not the gusher Humble Oil was searching for. At the time when Thorn's class visited, the oil had mostly played out and only a few stripper wells were still operating, the bulky rigs propelled by motors exactly like this one.

It made perfect geological sense. Down in the substrata, over the countless centuries, some portion of that same oil that was discovered in the Felda Fields had trickled eastward along the seams in the bedrock, moving steadily downstream toward a rudist-lined basin deep beneath Coquina Ranch, where it was trapped and held.

But why such a machine had been brought to this spot then abandoned, Thorn could only guess. The business of oil was always changing. Better extraction methods or higher prices could turn old fields new again. A deposit that was once considered unprofitable suddenly acquired great value. Maybe that's what happened at Coquina Ranch.

What was nearly certain was that there was oil beneath this ground, and oil was behind Earl Hammond's death, and it was oil that had brought Thorn unwillingly to this place.

He gave one backward glance at that great machine as he resumed his hike.

As far as he could see, he had no other choice, nowhere left to go except back to the hunting cabin.

 

 

A HALF HOUR NORTH OF
Clewiston, with twilight settling, Sugarman spotted the sign for Coquina Ranch. In the last few miles each ranching operation they passed seemed to be trying to outdo their neighbors with a more extravagant logo. But not the Hammonds. Theirs was barely a sign at all. Just maroon lettering on a modest whitewashed background. No insignia, no fancy crest. And none of the
KEEP OUT
warnings they'd been seeing plastered around every other turn-off.

Sugarman swung off the highway and into the one-lane dirt road lined by ancient slash pines. The trees were planted so close to the narrow roadway that if he'd wanted to turn around and run for his life, there was no place to accomplish it.

Rusty made a noise in her throat. Not sure of this.

“It's okay,” he said. “I know what I'm doing.”

“Do you?”

“Trust me. It's not my first time rescuing Thorn.”

“What makes you think he's here?”

“I don't know where he is. But this is what we've got.”

The road made a hard right and narrowed even more. A half mile
ahead, down the corridor of pines, a concrete guardhouse was stationed in the center of their path.

“We're in over our heads, Sugar.”

“No, we're not. We're exactly where we should be. Doing the right thing in the right way.”

In her lap she made a fist, and stared down at her knuckles like a prizefighter getting psyched for the main event.

“Relax,” Sugar said. “Guardhouses are my specialty.”

In spite of herself, Rusty smiled.

There was a football game playing on the small TV in the gatehouse. A hundred thousand rabid fans were roaring, and the man inside wasn't happy about missing the next play. He looked like a Mexican with an Aztec warrior or two coloring his genes. On his cheek and forehead were several red welts, inflamed scars that Sugarman had seen a few times before. Ancient cigarette burns.