Under Cover of Daylight (27 page)

Past the guard gate the cycle went straight ahead at the four-way stop, still pumping out blue smoke. The guy was wearing a chunky pack, army regulation. And black, shiny long pants and a black, shiny shirt, a red helmet. Thorn couldn’t tell much about his face. But he was short, five-four or -five, and he’d come out of the town house, 110 Barracuda Lane, apartment A. Had to be him.

When the bike slowed to about forty, Thorn thought maybe he’d been spotted, and he passed, watching in the rearview mirror as the guy pulled off onto the shoulder, just down from the entrance road into Amos Clay’s. Thorn drove on, thinking, Oh, boy, oh, boy. You get enough chum in the water, things start happening.

He drove on up 905 for another couple of miles, then stopped and turned around. About two hundred yards before Amos Clay’s drive he pulled off onto the shoulder. He got out and cut into the woods, heading north to the spot where he’d seen Irving McMann enter the jungle.

It took him almost half an hour to cover the half mile. Stepping carefully, and halting. Listening. Moving ahead another few yards, prying through the tangle of brush, his eyes scanning for any movement, the flash of that shiny black outfit.

Thorn was about fifty feet from Irv’s camp when he saw him. Pressing his back against an oak, he watched through a mesh of vines and Florida holly, Irving David McMann clean his Uzi. He had it broken down and spread out on a clear plastic tarp, and he was running a brush in and out the barrel. Amos Clay’s place was two hundred yards to the east, just a glimpse of it visible through the dense bush.

On his toes, Thorn retreated, taking his bearings. North of a giant gumbo-limbo. Maybe a stone’s throw from the highway.

The mosquitoes had discovered Thorn. They were sending their straws into his neck, his shoulders, his arms. Sipping. Stoning themselves on adrenaline.

S
ARAH WAS WAITING
at Thorn’s place, sitting in her Trans Am in the shade of a sea grape tree when he returned. He parked the Caddy beneath the stilt house and went over to her car and got in.

She didn’t look rested. Her madras blouse was wrinkled. She didn’t smell fresh.

“My place is a mess,” he said. “Let’s do this at Kate’s.”

She drove. Her window open, her hair tangling in the wind.

“So where’s the cash? Where do you keep it?”

She didn’t look at him.

“OK,” he said. “Then let me try this, tell you a story. Stop me if you don’t like it.” He rested his hand on her shoulder. Patted her once. Relax.

He said, “Once there is a little girl, eleven, twelve years old, having a so-so childhood. And one night she wakes up out of a deep sleep because she thinks she hears something, or maybe it’s just some slight barometric change that wakes her. She follows her instincts out to her front porch, and she sees a teenage boy holding her father up against his car. And the boy rears back and hits her father. And she sees them drive away together. The next day she wakes up and she thinks maybe it’s all a dream. Right away after that her mother comes in her room and tells her that her father has been killed in a car accident. He’d been drinking, out for some weird midnight drive.

“Maybe then the mother goes on and tells the little girl about that other accident her father’d been involved in a long time ago, happened in the same spot where he died. Maybe he’d even had others.

“But the little girl can’t forget her dream. She grieves over her father’s death and keeps her dream to herself. Sometime later, maybe she’s a teenager by now, she finds out the details of that other accident, eighteen years earlier, there in Lake Surprise. The father had killed a young couple. Their baby had survived. This baby would’ve grown up. He would’ve been a teenager about the time the little girl’s dream comes to her. And she—she maybe suddenly knows it all. She knows how this boy felt having his father and mother killed. She knows all of a sudden what loss, hatred, and obsession he might have known.”

Sarah kept her eyes ahead. The road was empty, but she was hard at work driving.

“How is this so far?”

She looked at him, a grudging softening of her face. “You’re on a roll.”

“Well,” Thorn said, “so now our little girl is feeling what the boy felt. Maybe even identifying a little with his anger. This burn that won’t stop. She forces herself to eat, to sleep, to hold a pencil and pay attention. She manages to get through high school, and by now, maybe she’s thinking, No, it couldn’t be. This is crazy, why am I screwing up my life like this? It was just a dream anyway. Maybe a quirky touch of precognition, a little ESP dream or something. However it happened, she gets through college, and she goes on to law school. Maybe somewhere in here it starts haunting her again, and she decides—”

“No,” she said. “You’re straying now.”

“Ah, OK.” Thorn closed his eyes, pressed his hand to his forehead, consulting his muse. “I got it. She never skips a beat. Always haunted. Never lets it go.”

“That’s better,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, yeah. And then there’s law school. That was to bring the guy to justice. Find out about legal rights. All that stuff. ’Cause basically our young woman is civilized. Go into her living room. Speak to her mother. The little girl had a good life, moral training. Maybe her emotional training was a little cold, a little halfhearted, but basically she has scruples. She wants to nail this asshole, but nail him legal if it’s at all possible.

“So, now, she’s out of law school, and she knows the law isn’t going to help her any on this. She takes a job, a perfect job for somebody feeling guilty about this murder fantasy she’s been having, and she starts driving down to Key Largo on the weekends, sniffing around. Scene-of-the-crime stuff. Maybe she’d already done some of that in high school. She knows the guy’s last name from the newspaper article. Key Largo’s a small town, so she finds out fairly quickly. But there’s one hitch. She’s not absolutely sure. There’s a shadow of a doubt.

“And she might imagine it, showing up on this guy’s front porch and saying, ‘Hi, I’m the daughter of the man who killed your parents. Want to talk?’ That wouldn’t work. So she decides to go undercover. She starts using her mother’s maiden name. She reads about Kate in the newspaper, all her environmental battles, and our lawyer decides it’s a good time to develop an interest in wood rats.”

Sarah turned off the highway into Kate’s driveway. Thorn was quiet till she’d parked beside the house. The sky was darkening in the east. Another storm, more Sahara dust.

She turned off the motor and drew a coil of hair free from the corner of her mouth. When she turned her eyes to him, he said, “She and Kate spend some time together, and she starts to like it. She’s not that hot about wood rats, but Kate, Kate she likes.

“Then girl meets boy. Over here. Boy comes over one night, I think it was a weekend in September, to cook his specialty, Dolphin California, for Kate, and this lovely woman is here. Whose idea was that?”

She said quietly, “It was destiny.”

Thorn chuckled and said, “So then, there we are, practically up to the present. Woman tracks down man she thinks murdered her father. Takes him to bed. Tries out special new truth serum. But lo and behold, instead of confessing that he killed her daddy, he’s smitten. He invites her along to his little ceremony, as she called it. He’s ready to confess to her all his dirty little secrets, and what’s she do? She’s swimming out there, splashing around.”

“She never splashed,” Sarah said. “You think that wasn’t hard for her? You think she could step into that water knowing what had happened there without feeling ...” She gripped the shift lever. “She didn’t splash.”

“OK, so she didn’t splash. She swam without splashing. But the mood was all wrong. Maybe, and this is just coming to me now, maybe she was starting to worry. Maybe she didn’t want to hear him admit it after all, and so she pretended she was all light and upbeat and smartass so that this guy wouldn’t spill his guts.”

“Maybe she was,” Sarah said. “Maybe that’s exactly how she felt.”

Thorn took Sarah’s hand from the shifter and held it lightly in both of his.

“Now why would she not want to hear the truth? Now why would she have spent so many years searching for this fellow, and then, when she senses the asshole is finally going to expose himself, she backs off, makes jokes, takes her clothes off, and swims? Why would this woman do this?”

Sarah said, “Maybe she’s confused. Maybe she’s desperate and worried and confused.”

“Well,” Thorn said, “then I know how she feels.”

They went into the house, and while Sarah used the bathroom, Thorn located a bottle of wine in Kate’s pantry. Nothing great, a New York grocery wine. He poured some into fragile cognac glasses and took them into the living room.

Sarah appeared out of the darkness of the back of the house. She came into the living room and sank into the couch opposite Thorn. She picked up the glass of wine, held it aloft.

She said, “To well-told stories.”

Thorn said, “To swimming without splashing.”

They drank, and Thorn smelled the faint sweetening of air from the approaching storm. The light drained away, and neither of them rose to turn on a light. Thorn leaned forward and refilled her glass and his own.

As the first breezes of the storm stirred through the room, Thorn stood and came across to her. Her lips parted slightly, and she made room for him beside her. He sat. She lowered her eyes and leaned her head against his chest. He held her. She nuzzled in, holding him now. His breath in her hair, breathing in the herbal scent of her shampoo, her own odor, a richer, darker, heavier thing. He lingered there, kissing the part in her hair. She gripped his ribs tightly.

The wind had begun to keen in the Australian pines. The odor of electricity, the white curtains stirring. Thorn rested his chin on her head and watched the pages of Kate’s files flutter off her desk. Sarah burrowed deeper into their embrace.

She stood beside his boyhood bed, and Thorn unbuttoned her blouse. He slipped it off of her and let it fall and reached around her to unfasten her bra. The rain was coming now. The wind trembling at the windows, the gusts probably ripping away loose petals, carrying them off into the dark.

He shaped her breasts, molding his hands around one, then the other. Then brushing them lightly with his open hands, each nipple tickling a palm, tracing with the puckered tips of her nipples the edges of his outspread fingers.

“You don’t trust me, do you?” Sarah said, her eyes closed.

Thorn brushed his fingertips down to her upper ribs, the roots of her breasts.

“I trust you more,” Thorn said, “now that I know your real name.”

His hands were slipping down her ribs, his thumbs brushing the sides of her breasts, sliding in under them, the hot fold. Down her narrowing waist, thumbs against her hip points. At the brim of her shorts.

Sarah said, a hoarse whisper, “I’m afraid of what may happen.

They unsnapped each other’s pants in unison. And Thorn dragged her shorts and panties together down past the swell of her hips, her very full bush. Sarah unzipping him.

“You’re afraid you’re going to kill me,” Thorn said.

Sarah stepped to the side and, with her toe, tossed her shorts aside. She gripped the tails of Thorn’s cowboy shirt and in one sudden opening of her arms unsnapped all the pearl buttons. She pulled his jeans down, and Thorn stepped out of them.

“It’s crossed my mind,” she said.

She held his shirt by the yoke and slid it off him.

Thorn said, with sudden laryngitis, “I don’t recommend it.”

“I’ve fantasized about it,” Sarah said, “for such a long time.”

She pulled his Jockey shorts down, forcing his erection to ride down with them. It sprang back, and she gripped it.

“In your story,” she said, “you were wrong about something.” Her hand trickled up and down him there, and she said, “It was always more than truth serum.”

“Thank God for that.” Thorn, his eyes closing involuntarily, hardly able to speak, said, “If you kill me, we can’t do this anymore.”

Her eyes were cagey and lustrous when she leaned forward and kissed him hard. Teeth clicking. He sucked her tongue in deeper. Hurting it with the pressure. She drew it back slowly, and he skimmed it with his incisors.

They both let go at once. Stood apart, breathing. Both of them slick with sweat. Thorn reached out and touched his fingertip to her hardened left nipple, circled it. Let his nail rake across the wrinkled flesh.

“If you don’t kill me,” Thorn said in a whisper, “is it because you might love me?”

“The official statute of limitations has run out on you, Thorn,” she said. “But mine, it’s still running.”

They lay on their sides on the bed. Thorn reaching to her knees, stroking, and sliding his hand back up to her thigh, running a finger around the rim of her vagina, tangling in her long black secret hair. She cocked her left leg up to give him access, and Thorn continued a moist, slow circuit.

“Did you steal my pistol?”

She said yes.

“That’s perfect,” he said. “Perfect.”

“You asked me,” Sarah said, eyes drowsy, “where the cash was.”

“The cash?” Thorn’s finger slipped briefly into the dark quick. “Oh, the cash.”

Sarah patted the mattress behind her, her legs spreading more. “Kate put it inside here.”

“We’re making love on a million dollars.”

“Nine hundred thousand.” Sarah’s voice husky, her eyes tight, head digging back into the pillow as Thorn’s fingers found a gentle pressure. “One trip left to go.”

Thorn tried to hold on as the orgasm took her, gradually at first, then whipping through her, electrocuting her, his finger driving her. Watching her grimace.

When it was finished, Sarah lay still for a few minutes.

“This’s the most money I’ve ever made love on,” Thorn said.

“You’re catching on to it,” she said.

They lay and listened to the rain lashing the tin roof, a shutter tapping an SOS against the kitchen window. Her hand coating and recoating his erection with sweat.

She rolled up and swung a leg across him and eased herself down onto him. She raised herself and came down again, settling her stickiness against his, a small twitch, a subtle grind, and then she went back up.