Under Cover of Daylight (33 page)

And the old couple, boy, he’d made their month, renewed their enthusiasm for living. The old guy had decided it was Dunkirk or Anzio or something. He’d found a deer rifle and was standing in his broken-out upstairs window, gesturing at Thorn with it, yelling at him. Was he crazy, hitting golf balls through civilized people’s windows! Guess so, Thorn had said to himself, and cranked another one, this one hooking off to knock out somebody’s security spotlight.

Sarah had shouted to him, too. Just his name, like she was calling down a long corridor at night, checking to see if it was him or some stranger. He didn’t answer. It
was
some stranger. And now she was staying a safe way back, on the steps to the dock. Thorn felt the skin on his back lifting, wrinkling, bumps running under his armpits and down his ribs. Out there in all that sunlight, probably close to two o’clock. High tide or thereabouts. Having chills on the fairway.

He wiggled his hips a little, the way he’d seen somebody do once. Maybe that was a baseball player. All these land games, he’d not paid enough attention. Set his feet again. Addressed the ball. Head down. He’d heard about the trick of tying a tight string from pecker to head. Try to bob your head up then. People could get serious about games, risking injury of that sort.

He had six or seven balls left when Irv came outside. Thorn was just getting set, adjusting his grip, straightening that left elbow. Sighting on Irv’s busted-out window.

And goddamn if Irv wasn’t prodding Sugarman in front of him. Sugarman, raising his hands, but only up to about his chest, peering at Thorn now as if he were trying to see through fog. And behind him was Irv, wearing camouflage goop on his face, and blood dried in a wavering trail down his neck. Though he couldn’t see it, Thorn knew the silencer was back of Sugarman, that these were now the seconds that counted, that all the other minutes and hours and months had been narrowing into these moments. Glad for that. For any kind of finish.

He tamped the ground around the tee with the black flat-sided driver. Gave another hip wiggle, brought everything in line, and let it rip. A slice, curved ten feet right of Irv and Sugarman and sailed out into the avenue, bounced along toward the pro shop. But Irv reacted as if a warhead had skimmed him, dropping to a squat, pulling Sugarman down by the collar, and shielding himself with Sugarman’s bulk.

“Hey!” he screamed at Thorn. “Hey, cunt, what in the fuck are you doing? You blind or what? There’s people out here, right in front of you!” He rose and dragged Sugarman up with him.

Sugarman sending some play calls with his eyes, but Thorn couldn’t read them. Sugar darted his eyes over toward a sand trap that dropped off ten feet to his right. Thorn tried to say back to him, What? I can’t tell what you’re saying. Finally just giving a full shrug, face shrugging, too.

Irv screwed his face into a broad, unhappy grin and said, “I don’t believe this. I don’t believe what I’m seeing here.” He brought the automatic out from behind Sugarman, stepped back a step, waggled the pistol at Thorn.

“You, man,” said Irv, glaring at Thorn. “I know your ass, don’t I?” Irv snorted and smiled. “Jesus fucking Christ, look who it is, Sugarbear. This is the guy I was doing for what’s her name, Ricki. Is this something else or what? The guy with the dead mother.”

Thorn pulled another of those hot balls from the small pile, feeling comfortable now using the driver like a rake. He stooped, set the ball on the tee, straightened, assumed the position again, and tried to let his weight shift down into this hips this time. Give him twenty years, and he’d learn how to do this thing. Twenty years was about how long it took him on anything with any complexity to it.

“Look it,” Irv said, inching closer now, nudging Sugarman with him. “How come you aren’t dead, man? I heard you got exploded.”

Sugarman said, “You got another guy. A friend of ours.”

“Well, I’ll be fucked, man.” Smiling now, a wide, toothy smile, but his eyes seeming to Thorn to be dead, flat and empty. Thorn adjusted the grip again, decided to try hooking fingers the way he’d done back with Dr. Bill standing behind him, conforming his body to Thorn’s, showing him how it was done. One of the few times the man had ever embraced him.

“Would you look at this shit, man? My hits are coming to me. I don’t even have to look them up anymore. They hear I’m after their ass, and they go, ‘Whoops, I’m dead. Might as well get over there.’ ”

The old man in the upstairs window was holding his rifle now at present arms. Thorn took a look around for Sarah but didn’t find her. He came back to Irv, this wiry guy, trying so hard to be smartass, wanting Thorn to say something, anything, so he could top him. Worst thing you could do to a guy like this was give him nothing to feed on, passive-aggressive him. Irv was snaking his head out and back, like a disco duck, keeping a fast beat, watching Thorn. Maybe a little admiration had worked into his face for Thorn’s loony performance, the clothes. Something this class clown could relate to.

“I love it,” Irv said. “Don’t you love it, cop? Guys I’m hired to kill are lining up outside my place, saving me the trouble.” When Sugarman gave him no response, Irv poked him hard in the back. “OK, show’s over. We’re out of here now. Back inside, where we can have a good old-fashioned encounter session. Get out of these damaging rays. Guy in my business has to watch his skin.”

Thorn heard it now. Not much louder than a lawn mower a block away. He really exaggerated the hip wiggle this time. Let the wiggle run all the way up his body so his shoulders were doing it, too. Give this guy something to watch. He let his neck go loose and wiggled his head, too. One of those kid’s toys, held upright by a string running through its parts. You press the button in the bottom, loosen all the strings, and the thing collapses. That was definitely Thorn, a button push away from falling in a heap.

The noise building now, a drone. Thorn drew his club back a foot and brought it back to the ball, did that again. One to get ready, two to get set.

“Forget that, asshole, no more games,” Irv said. “Put the club down. Fucking now!”

The DC-3 broke into view over the tall mangroves on Thompson Island, the huge thunder now, the rumble rising as if up through the hard earth. And Thorn went about his golf business. Nothing happening, taking a quick peek at Sugarman, who was leaning toward the sand trap. Thorn focusing everything on that ball, picturing its trajectory, a cartoon hole through Irv’s forehead.

Irv screamed something, waved the pistol around, fired up at Jerome as he skimmed not fifteen feet above the fairway, dumping what must have been half his normal load for the whole twenty-mile island, all right there.

Though he could not see anymore, his eyes burning, Thorn found the rhythm again, cocked the driver back, and sailed one into the depths of that smog. Then he dropped to his knees, fanning for air, and hearing now the small poofs from Irv’s pistol, and seeing a divot appear in the fairway a few inches from his right hand. He rolled quickly to the left. No visibility at all. Not a foot. He continued to roll, and then the real gunfire sounded.

One, two, three. Regular intervals. Very, very loud in that billowing blue-gray smoke. Four, five. And the rumble was returning for another pass. Jerome going above and beyond. The crescendo louder and louder. The concrete fairway quaked. It sounded as if Jerome had gouged holes in the mufflers before he’d left. Thorn felt the heavy whoosh of air before the plane came, the surge and suck of wind as it passed. And more diesel fuel, Malathion. Man, they wouldn’t have mosquito troubles on this golf course for at least a month.

There was no sound for a while as Thorn lay on his belly, breathing into the short grass, getting sand on his lips, swallowing some. But in a few moments he made out a harsh click, the fall of a hammer on empty cylinders. A breeze was lifting the poisonous cloud, shredding it. Thorn crawled toward the noise, dragging himself on knees and elbows, hauling along the Ben Hogan.

He heard someone coughing off to his right, but he continued to pull himself forward toward the clicking noise. Getting a little buzz from all that poison, head swimming. He knew better than to attempt a normal thought and watch it dissolve or turn crazy. He kept his mind on that click and wriggled across the grass.

Then there was a shoe, the sole of a shoe in his face. It was a small foot, waffle-sole running shoe. Its mate was next to it, spread a couple of feet away.

A breeze lifted more of the gas, and Thorn was looking into the crotch of a pair of black shiny pajamas. Guy was just lying there, taking it easy, waiting for the mist to clear. Rolling suddenly onto his side, Thorn got his other hand on the club’s rubber grip and took as much of a swing as his awkward position would allow, bringing Ben Hogan thudding down on that shiny crotch.

“Too late,” he heard Sugarman say.

Thorn up on his knees now, cocked for another swing.

The last of the fumes carried away on the easterly. There was Sugarman, prying the Colt out of Sarah’s hand. Both of them standing above Irv, Sarah staring down at the body, a spasm in her trigger finger. Click. Sugarman pulling the fingers open, click. Click.

It was almost sunset when Sally Spencer had finally taken the bodies away and Danny Sterling, Monroe County homicide detective, had finished giving Thorn and Sarah and Sugarman a lecture on their irresponsibility and their luck and the incredible amount of shit still stuck to their shoes. The three of them stood on the dock beside Thorn’s skiff.

Sugarman said, “You’re a hell of a shot, counselor, especially in all that bug spray. Though I think there’s going to be some questions about those last few rounds. One extra they usually give you. Four more, that’s pushing it.”

Sarah nodded, miles from the dock, from that stifling summer evening.

“And you, Thorn,” Sugarman said, “you ever going to tell me how you wound up at that condo?”

“Probably not,” he said. “No.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure you’ll dream up something entertaining for the sheriff.” Sugarman touched the shiny bill of his hat, nodding at Sarah. “I’d like to stay longer, have a nice chat, but I got to get over to the funeral home,” he said. “I got an autopsy I want to see.”

“W
HERE TO?”
Thorn asked her when they’d gotten back into the skiff.

“Where do you think?”

He tried for a moment to see behind her blue eyes. But she’d taken them out of action. Dazed or determined, it hardly mattered at this point.

Thorn took the skiff back down the coast, skimming past Kate’s, down past Garden Cove, into Crawfish Creek, and into Largo Sound. Past the mangrove canal where that morning they had eluded the marine patrol. Through Adams Cut and over to the bay and then back up the coastline, north through Blackwater Sound. Sarah sitting up front, facing into the wind, Thorn standing out from behind the windscreen, also taking it full in the face, steering with his left hand.

He called out to her, “This what you had in mind?” She nodded, without turning to look at him, that it was.

He slowed as they came through the narrow inlet into Lake Surprise.

“Out there,” Sarah said, and pointed to a spot a hundred yards from the highway. She snapped the cylinder back in place on the Colt. Held it in her lap.

Thorn made for her spot.

“Anchor?” he asked her when they’d reached the place.

She shook her head no.

Thorn looked down into the clear water, six, maybe seven feet. The turtle grass bending with the incoming tide. When he looked up again, she had moved forward and was sitting on the bait wells, facing him. The revolver in both hands still in her lap.

Thorn said, “Haven’t you already bagged your limit for today?”

Sarah stared at him, the arteries in her temples working hard. “I
do
love you,” she said.

“But you still want to kill me,” Thorn said, stealing a look at the pistol. “It’d be a typical modern marriage.”

“Being flip,” she said, “that’s not changing anything.”

“What’d you save my life for back there? So you could be the one to pull the trigger?”

“I’d like to pardon you,” she said. “If you’d let me.”

Thorn said, settling his eyes on hers, “We could pardon each other.” He took hold of the railing around the console, for leverage if he had to lunge for her. “You give me a rosary to say, I give you three Hail Marys, and we call the whole thing even.”

She kept looking at him from a long way off, unamused.

“That’s close,” she said, the revolver rising from her lap, hovering. “I want you to take your clothes off, Thorn.”

He squinted at her, puzzled, started to smile, felt it disappear.

She raised the Colt, let him stare at that a moment.

“Take everything off.”

“What? You want to do that out here, now?”

“Not that,” she said. “Something else.”

“Sarah,” he said, trying to shake her awake. “Sarah!”

“Do what I tell you.”

Her face seemed to be under fierce control, her mouth clamped, eyes straining. The veins in her right arm had begun to show.

Slowly he began to peel out of those stiff, bright clothes, glancing once out at the highway. When he turned to her again, she was shivering. Not used to killing guys the way he was, not taking it like a pro.

She said, “You come out here, Thorn, once a year, stare at it, run it all through your mind, feeling sorry for yourself. You brought me out here, I could’ve been anybody. Going to tell somebody, this stranger, so you’d have it off your heart finally. That’s nothing. That means nothing.
Looking
at it. Telling your secrets to strangers. Exposing your shame to somebody you didn’t even know. That’s nothing.”

“Whose fault was it I didn’t know you?” Thorn shook his head, trying to untangle this. “I thought I knew you, I thought I loved you. I’d never been tempted to confess to anybody before.”

From a rental shop on the south shore of Lake Surprise two jet skis blared to life. A gang of kids in bright clothes razzed the two riders who were mounting up.

Thorn looked back to her. “Listen, what’re the words you’re looking for? I apologize? I’m sorry? I wish it hadn’t happened? What is it you want?” He edged around the center console, gave her the clearest of shots. “When it happened, I was nineteen years old, for godsakes.”