Under Cover of Daylight (25 page)

By the time he reached her place, her lights were out. He stood in the rough and looked at her darkened windows and then across the sloping fairway toward Dallas James’s house. Just another house now. A house in need of a good dusting.

He worked through the bushes to the edges of the lighted estate. He climbed the wall where it joined the garage and let himself down onto the thick grass.

Her Trans Am was in the drive. And a dark Mercedes parked close behind it. Two other cars were parked in the garage. He climbed the stairway, the rain thickening.

The door to her apartment had glass jalousies, slanted open. Thorn stood on her porch, his ear close to the door. Hearing nothing but the rain now, creating its warm hush in the pines nearby. Trickles splattering from the roof to the driveway.

He pried back the aluminum frame holding one of the glass slats in her door. Bent it back just far enough to slip the glass free. He repeated that with the slat above it. He set them quietly on the porch beside him and felt along the edge of the screened inset until he found a slight tear. He widened that till he could slide his hand inside the door.

There was a dead bolt, but she’d left the key in it, so Thorn squatted down and curled his hand around and opened the bolt. He turned the doorknob carefully until it was open. He drew his hand back and stood there, breathing hard. Rain flowing across his face. Still no lightning or thunder. Just the steady hum of the shower.

He drew the door open and stepped inside. His feet were squishing in the boat shoes, so Thorn stepped out of them, leaving them on the doormat. The security lights of the main house were lighting up her apartment.

There wasn’t a piece of furniture in the living room. Just a polished oak floor, bamboo screens. Bare walls. He stood dripping on the floor, wondering if perhaps he had come to the wrong place. No sign of her anywhere in that room, no sign of a tenant at all.

There were two closed doors and a small kitchen. Thorn tried the kitchen first, carefully drawing open the refrigerator door. The quiet suck of its seal, the light inside. Mangoes, skim milk, a bowl of grapes. He closed it carefully.

The first door he tried was the bathroom. White cold tile floor. Her vials, her toothbrush, her shampoo. A copy of the
New Yorker
beside the john. He used her towel to dry his face, patting his damp shirt as well. He caught a trace of her scent there.

He went back to the living room and stood, looking at the bare floor, the naked walls. His pulse was up again. A twinge of vertigo. Once when he was still in high school, he had picked up a hitchhiker and the guy had been reading a paperback book, tearing off the page he’d just read and tossing it out the window. Page after page, out the window. When Thorn asked him about it, the guy said he liked to travel light. When you’re on the road, the guy had said, even too much money can slow you down.

Her apartment looked that way, as if she’d ripped all the pages out. This wasn’t Thorn’s spareness, his jailhouse purity. This room was stripped back to the spine. Sarah, on her way somewhere and in a hurry, all baggage a nuisance.

The door to her bedroom was cracked open an inch. Thorn stood before it, listening to the rain swelling outside. His throat was dry.

He nudged it open and stepped into her bedroom. There was a man lying on the bed, sleeping on his stomach, one arm dangling over the edge. He snored softly, the light from the main house shining off his balding head.

Sarah was sitting up, watching Thorn.

He came across the room and stood at the foot of her bed.

She had pulled the covers across her chest, and Thorn could see the dark sheets rise and fall with her breath. Her eyes, more her mother’s than her father’s. He saw that now. The glaze of hurt.

“I know who you are,” he said quietly.

She nodded, closing her eyes briefly and reopening them.

“I see that,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Thorn said. “It doesn’t change anything for me.”

The man beside her stirred, pulled his arm back aboard, and dug deeper into his sleep.

She said, “I have no choice about this. I hope you know that.”

“I don’t know that any of us has much choice,” Thorn said.

He stood there for a moment more, trying to pour himself into her eyes, give her a reason to rise and come to him. But she stayed there, watching him, the rain pattering outside.

He turned, walked back to the living room, slipped into his wet shoes, and left.

I
RV WATCHED
A
MOS
C
LAY
leaning over the fender of his old red pickup. It was Tuesday morning, about ten o’clock, July 15. Irv had decided to get the rhythms of this place where he was going to pull his major score. A couple of weeks early, and Irv was already getting high, a regulation zonk, just thinking about that cash.

He’d built himself a campsite in the mangroves. A tarp on the damp ground, a pair of binoculars, some pistols, three grenades. He’d left the bug spray home, confident that his garlic intake would keep the bugs away.

He’d come this morning dressed as Ho Chi Minh, in black silk pajamas and a black scarf around his head. He’d dug up an eyepatch, too, to remind himself of Milburn. Sort of penance. The sucker was itching like crazy as he watched this old man, Amos Clay, dinking around in his truck. Irv could see now why Milburn had bitched about it. Looking out at the world with only half his brain.

He also wore Vietnamese rubber sandals and his Rolex. It was a great outfit, and Irv felt like he was cruising now, creative juices pumping; the madness or passion or whatever it was was warming him up, giving him an edge again.

He needed to get the lay of this location if he was going to give a first-rate show. He saw this as moving from off Broadway onto Forty-second Street, and you didn’t just show up on opening night, no rehearsals, and expect to get raves.

Irv didn’t mind waiting out here for two weeks to make this happen. Once he got the picture, wrote a script for this, he’d go home and get the rest of his supplies and return and just do a camping-out thing. Get tuned in to the place so well he wouldn’t even have to wear camouflage, he’d be a mangrove. Work up a good funk of sweat and mud. Eat fruit and shit under rocks.

Sometime this week he’d take off a day and locate this Thorn guy, stamp his passport, and there it was. Next stop his new life. Oh, Grayson had told him Thorn was for some reason off limits, at least until after the transaction had been halted. But hell if Irv was going to let Grayson make up his schedule. Swat Thorn, get the million, jet to the Coast. One, two, three.

It was right that the million-dollar score should cost more of him than usual. The guys bringing the money, the ones he was going to quash, probably were a step up from the meatballs he’d been doing in lately. These guys no doubt had professional training, batting coaches, all the advantages. Irv couldn’t just lark his way through this one.

Near as he could see, this old man, Amos, wasn’t much of a mechanic. He seemed to be changing the oil in his truck, but it was taking him about an hour to do it. Frail old fart couldn’t seem to budge the drain plug. Irv thought about walking out of the jungle and helping the guy twist that wrench, say hello, then walk off. Freak the guy.

But no. That was bush-league stuff. Irv had to be careful. He didn’t want to piss on himself in front of the big boys. So he stayed there, squatting low, assuming eternal patience, Zen empty mind. Following his breath into egoless silence.

Thorn lay with his hands behind his head, watching the light reconstruct the room. A couple of squirrels scrambled across his tin roof. In his woods a wild rooster was celebrating an early-morning conquest. The Frigidaire’s compressor heaved back on.

Through the French doors he could see a frigate bird suspended high over the bay. A man-o’-war, it would hover till it spotted some gull with a finger mullet in its mouth. Then it would drop, slash the bit of fish away, and ride the thermals back up into the blue atmosphere. Survival of the shittiest. Just the kind of thing that discouraged Thorn from counting too much on nature to guide the way.

Someone had trashed his house. When he’d gotten out of the Cadillac last night, he had smelled the gunpowder. It looked as if they’d used a shotgun. All the windows gone. Dr. Bill’s chairs shattered, his desk on its face. Buckshot holes in the front of the refrigerator. They had tried to set his bed on fire, but it had smoldered a little and gone out.

They’d torn his books in half, broken the lanterns, dropped his customized vise off the porch onto a protruding ledge of limestone. He hadn’t gone down yet to see the damage. Some of his clothes were in the toilet. His one-burner had been set on high, and they’d laid a squirrel pelt across it to catch fire. The house stank of singed fur and charred flesh.

Thorn lay there listening to the highway noise. There was nothing to think about. There was nothing to do anymore. You do all you can, fix your bait carefully on the hook, and you lay your finger on the taut line and wait. It’s not up to you anymore. You can do only a few things anyway. Choose the correct tide and pattern of wind. Be at the right place, not make noise or else make the right kind of noise, make a careful presentation. The rest was luck.

He heard a motorboat arriving at his dock, and he pulled himself up and went out there.

It was one of his regulars, a retired minister from Michigan. A man who had told Thorn once that bonefish were not nearly as elusive as what he was used to back home. What things are those? Thorn had asked. The minister had merely turned his eyes up to the sky.

Thorn shook his head as the minister coasted up to the dock.

“Gone out of business,” Thorn said.

“You can’t do that, son. I’ve just found the hottest patch of flats from here to the Bahamas. Best congregation I ever saw.”

Thorn smiled. “Got to,” he said. “Got to get back to fishing before I forget everything I know.”

“Well,” the minister said, “if it’s a higher calling, you’ve got to follow it.”

Thorn waited till nine, and when Sugarman didn’t show up, he decided to drive over to his place. He stopped off at the 7-Eleven down the road from his house and bought a cup of coffee and drank it in the parking lot, sitting in the Cadillac. He watched a pretty woman talking on the outdoor phone, two black men drinking beers in a lawn service pickup truck. Thorn wondered who they’d killed, who wanted to kill them.

Nothing he saw looked familiar this morning. Or no, it wasn’t that exactly. It was more that it all looked like a set, a flat thing set up to fool the eye. Like when he used to take the skiff out at dawn on a windless morning, the water so clear and flat that he skimmed over it and saw perfectly through it to the bottom, the water not there. Thorn seeing it both ways at once, having to force himself to settle for the way he knew it was. That’s how Sarah was this morning. There, not there, lover, hater. Thorn’s choice, flipping back and forth, comparing this new version of what the last year with her had been with the solid shape of his memories.

Sugarman lived behind a blanket store at mile marker 103, two blocks off the highway. A little block house with a bamboo screen fence. Shady lot, big oaks and banyans. A teenage boy was riding a three-wheel cycle in the vacant lot across from Sugarman’s. Seeking out ruts, plowing across debris. Someone nearby was using a chain saw.

No one came to the door right away. Thorn couldn’t tell if the buzzer was working with all that other noise. Finally, Sugarman swung the door open, a towel around his waist. His face prepared to dispatch a Mormon missionary.

“Sorry,” Thorn said. “I should’ve called.”

“Come in.” Sugarman stood back out of the way, looking grim. “I been expecting you.”

“Well,” Thorn said. “Here I am.”

“Man, you look like week-old shit.” Sugarman padded across to the kitchenette.

Thorn followed him, saying, “Hell of lot better than I feel.”

Sugarman waved him onto one of the wooden stools at the breakfast nook. “Jeannie’s come back.”

“Is that good?” Thorn said, and glanced back down the hallway of the little house. In a full-length mirror at the end of the hall he saw Jeannie’s reflection. He swallowed and cut his eyes back to Sugarman, who was pouring two glasses of orange juice. Jeannie was hanging back there, naked, upside down from gravity boots. Ankles hooked to a chinning bar in the bedroom doorway.

“Yeah, I’d say it is.” The scent of anger. He said, “I need to have a talk with you.”

“So talk, I’m here.”

“Good grief, Thorny, don’t get pissy on me, man.”

“Sorry,” he said. He thought for a second about telling him about Sarah, then said instead with more feeling, “Sorry.”

Sugarman put the orange juice in front of Thorn and swallowed down his own. It wasn’t right, but Thorn had to do it. He shot another look back there. The mirror was empty. Thank God.

“You been home yet?” Sugarman asked.

“My home?”

“Yeah, how many you got?”

“What? You know what happened over there?”

“I waited around for you till about midnight last night. I figured you had other plans, so I left. But we got the guys that did it at the jail.”

Thorn stood up. “I want to see them.”

“Sit down, sit down. What’re you going to do, strangle them through the bars?”

“I want to see them, Sugar.”

“OK, you’ll see them, you’ll see them. I’ll take you over there in a little while.”

Thorn sat back down. He heaved out a breath.

“It wasn’t any police work on my part,” Sugarman said. “I was coming by to see you, to tell you some other things we’ve developed, and kaboom, kaboom. These guys were dove hunting in your living room.”

“Thanks,” Thorn said.

“Five minutes later and the house would’ve been history. But as I say, man, it was only a piece of luck.”

“So, who are they?”

“A couple of bozos with Armistead Construction. I guess they build them all day, tear them down all night.”

Thorn shook his head. He raked both hands back through his hair. He glanced around at Sugarman’s living room. The walls, the tables, everywhere he looked there were framed photos of Jeannie’s family. Her mother. Her father. Sisters and one brother. White people. White people everywhere.