Under Cover of Daylight (26 page)

“You don’t seem surprised,” Sugarman said. “If I came home and found this house shot up like that, I’d register it somehow.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Well, that upsets me, then. ’Cause I’ve been hearing things around town. Things about you, Thorn. Going around telling people you’re pulling the plug on Allamanda. I thought what I’d heard was just so much bullshit. But I guess not, huh?”

“Don’t lecture me, Sugar.”

“OK,” he said. “I’ll just tell you something. This is going to stop. Right here. Right now. No more. I’ll put you in jail, buddy. Material witness. Spitting in the ocean, whatever it takes. I’m not going to have you drawing fire like this.”

“You came over last night to tell me something,” Thorn said. Holding it in. Looking straight into Sugarman’s rigid face. “What is it?”

“I mean it, buddy. I’ll put you in jail.”

Thorn asked him again what he’d found out.

“It’s a bunch of medical mumbo jumbo is what it is. But it translates into something fairly interesting.” Sugarman settled across from Thorn on another tall stool. “Apparently it was like I thought. Kate got in a couple of licks. She got one of them in the eye with one of those graphite rods she had. The blue ones?”

“Yeah, I know the ones.”

“Well, she got it in pretty good.” Sugarman picked up a small spiral notebook from the counter in front of him and read from his notes, “The cornea was pierced and the anterior chamber was entered. A blood vessel was broken in the iris. It’s called hyphema, blood in the interior. The rod glanced the lid and removed samples of tissue and hair.”

“So what does that tell you?”

“We now know the guy drives a brand-new white BMW.”

“Oh, come on, Sugar.”

“No, no. Not from this iris stuff. From some tracking I did afterwards. These guys are not real bright. They walk into Dr. Brimmer’s office the next day like they were normal people. I called around to all the local eye doctors and found Brimmer. He’d treated a wound like the one we were looking for.”

“Good work, man.”

“Once again, it’s just falling in my lap,” he said. “It’s just that these guys don’t seem to give a shit. Anyway. Here’s what the receptionist and the doctor gave us together. White new BMW, one short white male about five-five and one thirty-five, with two good eyes, dark, kinky hair, and a Spanish accent which the nurse said sounded phony. One six-three ugly son of a bitch with longish brown hair, goes over two hundred and has one hurting eye. They paid cash and left a phony address. At least they were doing something to make it harder.”

“I don’t believe this,” Thorn said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Thorn,” he said. “I’m telling you. You’re that close to jail right now. Don’t push me. If you know something ...”

“I think I saw these two. A big guy in an eye patch and a little guy with him. Both of them in Hawaiian shirts at Vacation Island. The other night. But shit. I don’t remember anything about them. I’d been drinking.” Thorn tried for a sincere look.

“You know,” Sugarman said, pouring himself more Tropicana, offering it to Thorn. “That’s interesting. There’s a couple of lady tourists made a complaint about two guys who fit this same description, placed them at Vacation Island, when was it?”

“Last Wednesday night. Yeah, that’s them. They were with two nurses. I remember that.”

“These are either real fuck-ups or they’re awful lonely,” Sugarman said. “They left their dates out on Pickles Reef. Nurses were out there all night. They were in very bad shape.”

“What does that mean, lonely?”

“Yesterday afternoon, the one with the eye patch washes up on Big Pine Key. Got a bullet in him that entered the neck from the rear; the guy was definitely done in up close. First, this little guy doesn’t do something as simple as driving his partner up to Miami to have the eye checked out. That would’ve made it a hell of lot harder to track down right there. And then it looks like he and his buddy might have had a little marital dispute, and I mean there are places to dump a body where it doesn’t get found all that fast, and he didn’t pick one of those. I mean, the guy’s smart enough to try the marijuana thing on the boat. Make it look like something it isn’t. So he’s not a total fuck-up. So I call that lonely. Looking for love. Crying out.”

“Maybe he thinks he’s invincible,” said Thorn.

“Or invisible,” Sugarman said. “Well, we got a guy at the jail right now I know would be happy to love this guy. Make a hell of a cell mate.”

“Jesus.”

“Not so loud with that,” Sugarman said. “Jeannie.” He nodded toward the back of the house.

“Is that it then?”

“Well, the big guy was half shark-eaten when he came in. We sent his teeth to Tallahassee. I’m told by county medical the guy had some first-class bridgework; pathologist said he’d never seen anything like it. Stuff like that can turn out to be as good ID as fingerprints. Can be hell to track down, but it’s a place to get going.”

Jeannie called from the back of the house, “Are you talking about me, Sugarman?”

“I want to see these guys that did my house,” Thorn said.

Sugarman said, “I’ll meet you down there in half an hour.”

“ ’Cause if you are,” she called out, “I want to hear what it is you’re saying about me.”

At the door, hearing Jeannie banging around back there. Thorn said, “I just want to look at them, see their faces.”

“Sugarman!” she called. “Close that door! Those mosquitoes are carrying me off.”

Sugarman tightened the towel around his waist and said, “You know, until she came back, I was thinking of leaving.”

“Leaving Key Largo?”

“Key Largo. Florida, all of it. Going up north. I was thinking about New Jersey.”

“New Jersey? Nobody goes to New Jersey.”

“I still might,” he said. “I’ve heard it’s nice there.”

“This is your home, Sugarman. You were born here. You can’t just chuck it like that. These are your roots.”

“What kind of place is this? It’s like living in a damn airport. Everybody’s got a suitcase, Thorn. Somebody you’ve never seen before is sitting in your spot at the diner. I hear they got basements in New Jersey. I’d like to see a basement for once.”

Thorn shook his head.

“Sugarman!” Jeannie called. “You shut that door or I’m calling the police.”

“I’ll see you down there,” Thorn said.

Thorn walked out to the Fleetwood, hearing another rumble louder than the three-wheeler or the chain saw. He looked over his shoulder up into the trees. It was Jerome making his midweek run, trimming the treetops, driving the senile war veterans under their couches. Spreading his cancerous relief.

He got into the Caddy, started up the V-eight. He watched the blue smoke filter down, probably mixed now with African dust. He took in a lungful of that gas. Holding it in like dope smoke, getting high on the poison, holding in the pinch of someone’s dried-up homeland.

He looked around the shady neighborhood. Everybody standing around with their rakes, their lawn mowers, their sponges and hoses, letting that haze break apart before they got back to it.

Thorn waited on the sidewalk outside the jail on Plantation Key. Sugarman arrived, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt. His eyes looked sore and heavy, but Thorn didn’t ask him about it. He’d heard Jeannie’s voice.

Sugarman led Thorn inside and back to the holding cells. The other cops glanced at Thorn and nodded at him. Not a member of their club, maybe, but no longer just one of those others.

“These guys,” Sugarman said as they waited for a door to be unlocked, “they picked up their morals on their lunch break. Getting stoned and listening to outlaw music.”

The two guys in the cell looked a lot like redbeard’s friends. Wore their hair in ponytails. One of them had a little dot of gold on his earlobe. Thorn stared at them. And they, sitting on the edge of their cots, smoking cigarettes, stared back at him.

“They didn’t kill her,” Thorn said. “She would’ve tossed these shits overboard.”

T
HORN WATCHED
S
UGARMAN
pull his van into traffic and start home. He waited until the van was well up the highway, and he got out of the Fleetwood and went back into the county building.

Janice Deels was at the counter for car and boat registrations. She was on the phone but covered the mouthpiece and whispered to Thorn she’d be right with him, rolling her eyes at the person on the line.

He stood next to the water fountain and watched her talk. He felt as if his blood were glowing. Sarah was Dallas James’s daughter. The eye patch guy and his partner had killed Kate. The two of them were connected with Grayson and Ricki. Sarah and Kate had been bringing in dope. Kate was dead. Eye patch was dead.

Sharing the same air, breathing in, breathing out. All that air, all those molecules endlessly passing between us, along streams of air, connecting us, converting us. In this hothouse, this closed system, breathing in the expelled breath of men long dead, breathing out molecules that will outlive us. Caught in a plot too complex for any one mind to hold. Quentin and Elizabeth breathing out, Dallas James breathing in, Dallas exhaling, Sarah inhaling. Thorn, standing beside the water fountain, trying to breathe.

I’m awful sad about Kate,” Janice said, taking his arm and turning him to the door. “I hope you’re doing OK.” Her arm in his, she led him outside to the shade of a banyan, her brown paper sack in her left hand.

“I’m getting better,” said Thorn.

“Well, good!”

Janice had been a cheerleader. He remembered how she’d cried after losing games. He remembered her giving speeches in the auditorium about pep.

They sat on the grass under the banyan, and Thorn accepted one of her pieces of fried chicken and held it while she ate.

“I’m glad you came to see me,” she said. “I think about you.”

Thorn nodded. Holding his chicken. Breathing in, and out again.

“You know,” she said. “I hear about you. I hear you’re dating a girl from Miami.”

“I need your help, Janice.”

She wiped her mouth with a napkin, leaned across and took hold of his arm, and smiled at him earnestly. “Whatever I can do, Thorn, you know that.”

“Irving David McMann,” she said in a hoarse whisper, and wrote it on a pad. She typed in another command, watched her screen for a moment and whispered, “He lives at Coral Reef. One-ten Barracuda Lane. Apartment A.” She wrote that down. “Is that all you want?”

“You can’t let anyone know I asked you for this.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the woman working at the desk behind her. “I like my job.”

“I appreciate it, Janice.”

“
Perfect Execution.
What is this guy, a friend of yours?”

“He owes me something,” Thorn said.

She stood up and leaned across the counter and pecked him on the cheek.

“Perk up, Thorny.” She squeezed his biceps. “Did you know the prayer group has been praying for you?”

“Don’t stop now.”

“I’m in the book,” she said.

Thorn slipped the note in his pocket and left.

Irv was getting the classic late start. He’d overslept because the electricity had gone off and on sometime during the night and his digital clock was just blinking to be reset. Then he’d had to track down a key to Milburn’s condo, where they’d stored the heavy ammo. He’d decided to go paramilitary on this. He’d hyped himself to a paranoid, full-tilt rage, picturing the kind of delivery boy who carried a million dollars.

Then the BMW wouldn’t start, so he had to call the Reef Exxon station to come tow it in. And then he had to pack the rest of the grenades, the Uzi, and the sawed-off shotgun into a pack, something he could strap onto the Kawasaki 650.

So, it was one-thirty, hot as shit, humidity 105. Irv always said it wasn’t the heat, it was the stupidity. If he had any goddamn sense, he’d be spending the summers in Mendocino. Like his old man, the chicken franchise king. Johnny Chickenseed, Irv called him. Never to his face. But when Irv had that million safe in municipal bonds, shit, he’d call the old man any damn thing he pleased. Usually Irv just did a month in the winter at Coral Reef Club, then back to Manhattan or the family house at the Cape. But this year things had been happening, and he’d just coasted on into the summer. Never again.

Irv was astraddle the motorcycle, about to crank it up, when he remembered the photograph of the guy Thorn. An extremely familiar guy, not much of a haircut, but a good jaw, good wide chest. The photograph was of this Thorn guy and Ricki standing outside Sloppy Joe’s Bar along with the old lady charter boat captain. Irv liked having a photo of her. Like an old lover, you look at it, and some of the memories come floating back up. Yeah. Like her throwing fucking chum in his face.

Irv thought maybe he should buy a Polaroid, snap a shot of all his victims from now on. Something to remember all this by, something for his weird little grandchildren. He’d sit in his rocker and tell them, This is before. And this with the blood is after.

Irv went back in the condo. He’d stuck the photograph on the front of his refrigerator with one of those little magnetic vegetables. A brussels sprout or was it a broccoli? Irv didn’t eat shit like that, so he wasn’t sure.

The plan was, he’d go back to the mangroves at old man Clay’s house. Stay there for a while, get nasty, starve himself a little, and when his blood was cooking, he’d cruise on down the road to where this Thorn lived. Isolated spot, it looked like on the map Ricki had drawn. Perfect place for a little explosion. Irv McMann’s Carnage à la Carte.

After two hours out in the golf club parking lot, baking in the Fleetwood, wondering if anyone was watching him, calling in to security, Thorn saw the short guy come out of his town house and watched him open the door of the small attached garage and try to kick-start a big red motorcycle. Finally it caught and filled up the garage with oily smoke. Thorn slumped down.

He waited till the guy had rumbled out to the main road; then he started the car and pulled out. Following a quarter mile back, Thorn wound through the Coral Reef streets, feeling conspicuous as hell in that rusted boat. But at the same time his heart was light and fast. He’d found the guy, found where he slept, where the asshole lay down and dreamed.