Under Cover of Daylight (17 page)

Thorn dragged the rusty door open and stepped inside.

“Hey, Thorn,” Jerome called above the chug of the air conditioner. He waved Thorn into a chair and put aside the pistol magazine he was reading. “They find the sorry bastard yet?”

“Not yet,” Thorn said, still standing by the door.

It was hotter in there than outside, and Thorn told him so.

Jerome said, “The gotblamed thing feels like it’s stuck on reverse cycle.”

“Be cooler without it,” Thorn said, straining to speak above the rattle and huff of the machine.

“It just takes it a while to catch up on days like this. I’m used to it.”

Thorn asked him where Jerome junior was.

“Out in the bird,” he said. “Poor fucker.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, they’re needle-dripping him. They cut him open, took out a goiter the size of a house. Kid’s a goner.”

“Oh, shit.”

“He’s gone deaf, too. Got to get up next to him and holler like the devil.”

“Jesus, Jerome. They just find this out?”

“Two, three weeks back. Started off bleeding from the shorts. Never a good sign, bleeding from the shorts.” He picked up his magazine again, found his place, and said, “Used to be, living down here, eating fresh fish, good clean air, people lived to be older than rocks. But gone are the days, Thorn. All the shit coming down lately, it’s as bad as living in Miama.”

Thorn opened the door, let the sun and air into the room. He said, “People say it was, but I sure don’t remember it ever being a paradise.”

“There was a time,” Jerome said, “it was a shitload closer than it is now.”

Thorn went outside and walked across the asphalt airstrip to the army surplus DC-3 the county used for mosquito spraying. Jerome had been flying it since high school, and there’d been a time when he and Thorn had taken a few aerial-busting rides together.

He climbed up the ladder and leaned through the cockpit window. Jerome was working under the instrument panel, a tangle of wires hanging down across his chest.

Thorn stretched in farther and yelled out Jerome’s name.

Jerome lurched up, whacked his head against the back side of the panel, and squeezed out from under it.

“Good Jesus, Thorn!” Jerome twisted around and sat in the pilot’s seat.

“Sorry, man.”

“My goddamn daddy tell you to do that?”

Thorn said he had.

“Fucker’s going deaf himself, and damn him if he don’t think it’s me can’t hear. Whispers like he’s in church half the time. He’s driving me fucking crazy.”

Jerome junior readjusted his black wig, checking it in the glass of a gauge.

“And this goddamn thing. Feels like I got my head stuck in a bucket of tar.”

“Your daddy lying about the cancer, too, I hope?”

“No,” Jerome said. “He’s right on that one.” Jerome shot a thumb back at the steel tank showing behind him. “Thousand gallons of Malathion. Try flying inside a cloud of that shit for ten years.” He reached into his shirt, dug out his cigarettes. He offered Thorn one, and Thorn shook his head. “Worse thing about having cancer is you got to drive up to Miama. I’d rather have them just cut out my intestines than drive on those highways up there. Between the New Yorkers and the assholes with old-timers’ disease, man, the way they drive, should send ’em all back where they come from. Shut the goddamn state border and lock it tight.”

Thorn watched him light the cigarette, flick the match out his window.

“I heard about Captain Kate,” he said. “Soon as I heard, I told Jerome senior she must’ve come across somebody’s sweet little coke deal. That what it was?”

“Don’t know yet,” Thorn said. He took a sip of air from outside the cabin. “She wasn’t making a lot of friends trying to stop Allamanda the way she was either.”

“I was with her all the way on that, man. But don’t bring it up around himself in there. That old man wants to sell the airstrip to a condo company. What the hell would I do around this place if I couldn’t fly that plane? Wait tables? Make beds at the Holiday Inn? No, but him in there, he’d sell this place to Castro if he could. The dumb shit bought it when it wasn’t worth nothing, and now he thinks he’s a real estate genius.”

Jerome pressed at his wig. Ribbons of sweat coming from its edges.

“You know, about Captain Kate, I got to say, man, much as I don’t like to, but she was hauling in
a lot
of fish lately. Lot more than looked healthy.”

“What in the hell does that mean?”

Jerome sucked on the cigarette and eyed Thorn.

“I don’t know, buddy. I just saw her about every time I made a pass along her quadrant, her cockpit with four, five ice chests. Boat riding kind of low in the water. I thought
four
ice chests? Now that’s a lot of fish.
One
ice chest is a lot of fish for me. So, naturally, I just thought ...”

He flicked his cigarette out the pilot’s window, smoke coming out his nose and mouth, raising his eyebrows at Thorn.

“I came to ask a favor of you,” Thorn said.

“You don’t have to say nothing to me, Thorny. I wouldn’t say a word to nobody. Hell, I smoke some of that shit myself now and then.”

“I came to ask a favor, Jerome,” Thorn said, keeping his voice empty.

“OK, OK. I thought you should know, is all.”

Thorn said, “I want to borrow the VW, Junior. I’ll trade you Kate’s VW for a couple of days.”

Jerome gave him a look.

“The bash-mobile?”

“Yeah,” Thorn said.

Jerome climbed out of the cockpit and led Thorn behind the Quonset hut where the car was parked. It was a bright pink Volkswagen with round black mouse ears coming off the roof, a long corkscrew tail welded to the trunk. And black whiskers fixed to the hood. Someone had tried to paint two buckteeth in black and white below the whiskers.

“I want to take it down to Key West.”

Jerome said, “The motor’ll get you there and back. But the damn ears are on the blink.”

Jerome showed Thorn the small electric motor mounted on the ceiling inside. He thumped the metal box, and the ears began to wiggle furiously. He hit it again, and they stopped.

Thorn said that would be all right.

“People borrow this from time to time,” Jerome said. “I never ask what they want it for.”

“Good.”

“But if it helps any,” he said. “A good thing to tell somebody comes to the door is that you’re out to spray for cement-eating scorpions. That scares the shit out of them six ways from Sunday.
Scorpionida concreticus
is what I say.”

Thorn nodded. He gave Jerome the keys to Kate’s VW.

“Oh, the hat,” Jerome said. He dug around underneath the passenger seat and came up with a green baseball hat. A black cloth replica of a scorpion, its tail curled to strike, was sewn on top of the cap, its front pinchers hanging over the bill.

He handed the cap to Thorn.

“The Bash-a-Bug shirt’s there on the backseat. In case you want to give the whole thing a little class. And the sprayer is in the trunk.”

Thorn thanked him.

He drove the VW back out to the highway. Cut across the median to Sammy’s Liquors. Before he got out, he had to smack the motor for the ears. He could hear them up there, waving frantically. It took another smack to kill them.

As he walked into the liquor store, the last of his hangover flared up. His stomach grumbling, wondering what the hell was up, coming into a place like this.

Sammy came down from his mirrored cubicle as soon as Thorn entered. Another guy Thorn had known at Coral Shores High. Back then Sammy used to amuse his gang with a pick-pocket routine. Bump you from the rear, fish out your wallet, and then, while his buddies stood guard around him, he’d read out your love notes in his thespian voice or open your Trojans or anything personal you had in there while you tried to climb over his buddies to shut him up. Funny guy.

Sammy stood in front of Thorn, drooping his head a little.

“Sorry to hear, man,” he said. “They found the fuckers yet?”

“Not yet,” Thorn said. He pretended to be interested in a pyramid of vodka bottles. The four o’clock construction crews were arriving. A couple of them lining up at the cash register with their six-packs.

“I heard it was Cubans. A drug deal, that she walked into the middle of something.” Sammy got a confidential tone, put his hand on Thorn’s back, and maneuvered him into the corner with the cognac.

“Might’ve been that,” said Thorn. “Listen, Sammy ...”

Sammy called out hello to a couple of new customers. He straightened his guayabera and gave Thorn what appeared to be his complete attention.

“I heard some talk,” Thorn said, “that you were planning on putting a new store up at Port Allamanda.”

Sammy narrowed his eyes, caught himself, and tried to soften the look into a grin. “I’ve given it some consideration.”

“I wanted you to know,” Thorn said. “I’m taking over for Kate. Port Allamanda’s dead on the drawing board.”

Sammy laughed. He picked up a feather duster that was lying on a case of wine and began to dust the tops of bottles. He said, “Thorn, you’re one hard-to-figure son of a bitch.”

“It’s dead,” Thorn said. “I got a deal working, and when it’s finished, Port Allamanda’s gone. History.”

“Wood rats, Thorn? You worried about wood rats?”

“This isn’t speeches, Sammy. This is right down in the dirt. A cash transaction. Hand quicker than the eye. This is going to be final, no appeals from anybody, no bulldozers, nothing.”

“You shouldn’t shit people, Thorn. You shouldn’t walk into people’s place of work and give them a raft of shit. I don’t care if your mother was killed or what, it doesn’t make it OK, walking around doing your loony shit.”

“It’ll be dead inside two weeks,” Thorn said. “I wanted you to know so you could start changing your retirement plans.” Thorn made a show of patting for his wallet. He walked back to the front door, stood aside as another construction crew came into the store.

Sammy stared at him, holding that feather duster at his side.

Thorn sat out in the lot in the bash-mobile a few minutes watching Sammy in there. Watching him go on with his hail-fellow world.

Maybe it wasn’t a billboard along U.S. 1, maybe not as effective as hiring a skywriter to put it up there on a cloudless noon. Still, in Key Largo, if you wanted coverage, you didn’t need to call a press conference.

Thorn made it to Key West by six-thirty. The sun in his eyes for the last fifty miles. He managed not to think the whole trip, did that by driving like a maniac, cutting in and out of the passing lanes. Flashing his lights, honking. Letting those ears go crazy.

He came over the bridge onto Key West, turned left, and went around by the beach, the motor for the ears grinding away. He found a place to park outside Ricki’s house. It was on Southard Street just a couple of blocks off the main drag. A Haitian art gallery across the street. A health food store and restaurant on the corner.

Thorn got out of the car. Bongo music was playing loud from somewhere nearby. He smelled fried plantains. The twilight was tinting the old wood houses on the block a vague pink.

As he was climbing the stairs to her house, the front door opened and she was there. Coming out in a T-shirt and white shorts, sandals laced up her ankles. Her step stuttered for a second when she saw him, but she caught herself and came on down the stairs with her usual bulldog look. She had Kate’s boxy face and Dr. Bill’s wide mouth and dark, weary eyes. She was so close to pretty that you had to take a second look to see she wasn’t. It was the eyes, something sickly there, a lack of luster, tarnished by bile.

“You come all this way to see me?” She moved up next to him, making him taste her rum breath. “Somehow I’m not moved to tears.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I wanted to tell you something.”

“I got a phone,” Ricki said. “Next time phone me. The less you’re around, the happier I get.”

“I wanted to see your face when you heard this.”

Ricki made a smartass frown. “Sugarman called me, bozo. Kate got herself dead.”

Thorn said, “Not that. Something better. Something that’s gonna eat you up.”

Ricki hmmphed and began walking, heading toward town. Thorn followed, caught up with her in a few steps. They passed by a bearded man in overalls, barefoot, slumping on the front steps of the Haitian art gallery. He drew himself up when they passed and shuffled after them.

“Leave me alone, Thorn,” Ricki said. “Go on back up there and leave me alone. You’re out of your element down here.”

Thorn said, “I know why you had her killed.”

She stopped and turned on him.

“Are you crazy! Have you finally totally freaked out?”

The bum was beside them now, grinning at Thorn, his eyes zooming in and out. He kept wetting his lips, rubbing his finger against his thumb.

Thorn looked at him. Shook his head.

Ricki set off again, and Thorn and the bum followed.

Thorn said, “And I also talked to the lawyer for Kate’s estate.”

She stopped and put her hands on her hips, pretending to fume, but Thorn could see a spark of excitement in her eyes.

Ricki stepped over to the bum. She said, “Dr. Leery, go find me a lizard. I want a lizard right away.”

“OK, OK,” he said, full of delight. Smiling at Thorn. “You want one, too? You want one, too?”

Thorn told him no, he was fine the way he was.

They were in front of a scuba shop, the street empty, the last light dwindling. To the west, downtown, Thorn could hear the faint bass beat of a jukebox. Dr. Leery was scrabbling about in someone’s lawn a few doors up.

“Say it, Thorn, if you have anything to say.”

“I know why you had her killed,” he said.

Ricki shook her head in disbelief, staring at Thorn.

“Tell me, then. You came all this way, so tell me.”

“It’s not for hate, and it’s not for the money,” he said. “That’s what you think at first. But it’s not that. It’s because you think you can’t keep living as long as this other person is alive. You’d rather die. You think you’re going to be happy for the first time in your life when this person is dead. The voices’ll stop, the insomnia. However it gnaws at you.”