Dead Last (41 page)

“Me and Flynn and Mother.”

“I see.”

“You don’t see shit.”

“They were warm-up, your own batting practice. Those men in the photos in the hallway. That’s your trophy wall.”

“Every kid needs a hobby, don’t you think, Dad? I was never good with traditional sports.”

“So you invented your own.”

“Next season,” he said. “That’s the big reveal. Turns out the evil twin got her start whacking her mother’s boyfriends. I think it’ll be a hit. A few wrinkles to work out, got to get the tone right, but I have the feeling it’s going to be a winner.”

He tugged off his hood and Sawyer stood there smiling. A handsome boy, a young man with eyes so clear, jaw so rock solid, hair so thick and golden, he could have been a TV star himself. Though following someone else’s script was probably beyond his abilities.

Thorn had been wrong about Sawyer Moss. It wasn’t a tranquil smile he’d seen, it was the smug and pitiless grin of one who mastered every challenge so easily they had only disdain for the struggles of others.

“Buddha, the woman you beat to death, she had you right. A control freak.”

“And that’s bad, because?”

“You hid the suit in Matheson’s truck. You knew he was a suspect, somebody would find it sooner or later.”

“And true to form, Jeffy confessed,” Sawyer said. “Thinking he was taking a bullet for Flynn. Or just trying to get Flynn’s attention. Who knows about that shithead.”

He came a half-step closer, shifted the ice pick to an underhand grip.

“You’re sure you’re not insane? A psychopath? It would be so disappointing if it turned out to be just that. Doing all this elaborate scheming and killing without any purpose. I’d like it better if it was about something shallow and silly like making the show a success.”

“It will be a success. It’s going to be huge.”

“And then what?”

“Then I get back to work. Brass ring in hand, door wide open.”

“And how long will that last before you lick your lips and start again? Once you’ve had a taste, it never goes away.”

“Like you would know anything about it.”

“I know more than I’d like to.”

Sawyer’s smile had turned sour.

“I don’t need your psychobabble, Dad.”

“What do you need, Sawyer? Anything at all? Or are you totally self-sufficient?”

“Goddamn right I am.”

“Sitting alone in a room, making things up. Hour after hour, getting every word in place, the dialogue, the action, the story. Doesn’t leave you much left over for the real stuff, does it? Kind of drift away into your perfect world.”

“I know what’s real, what’s TV bullshit. If that’s what you’re implying.”

His son stood watching him, waiting for him to die.

“What a loser you are,” Sawyer said. “What a putz.”

“Poor kid, your only role model was the handsome stranger. An imaginary hero. Thin air. Words around a breakfast table.”

“Fuck you, Dad.”

“It’s not going to be so easy this time, kid. I’m not dying. You want me dead, you’re going to have to come over here and stick me a few more times.”

Behind Sawyer there was a light tap on the door and April leaned her head into the room. In shorty pajamas and flip-flops, her hair loose. The door shielding Sawyer from her view.

“You weren’t in the parlor,” she said. “I got worried.”

“Leave,” Thorn said. “Go now.”

Sawyer stepped around the door and took her by the wrist and hauled her to the opposite side of the bed. April, staring at the ice pick, released a moan of anguish. Thorn took the moment to edge forward a step and another until Sawyer swung back his way.

“What is this?” April said. “What’re you doing, Sawyer?”

“This is fucked,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here. You’re not part of this.”

“Not part of it? I’m your mother, Sawyer. Anything you’ve done, I’m part of it. Now put that down. Put it on the table and we can talk.”

“Bullshit.” Sawyer took a swipe at the air in Thorn’s direction.

“We can fix this, Sawyer. Whatever you’ve done, we can manage it. There are ways.”

Thorn’s eyesight was smeared and spinning. He’d lost touch with his right arm and his legs felt unsteady; the light had begun to flutter like heat waves off a summer highway. But he was hatching something.

When he was sixteen, Thorn had broken his right arm in a fall on the dock. For weeks, burdened by a cast, he’d distracted himself by working on his left-handed delivery. By the time he shucked the cast, he could toss a baseball thirty feet and hit the trunk of a tree with some regularity. Not great, not ambidextrous by any means, but he believed those hours of practice were still lurking in the muscle tissues somewhere, down there with all the other fluid moves—the graceful, effortless jumps and dives and sprints and the lazy, innocent grapplings of naked flesh in dusky bedrooms on a hundred tropical nights, and one memorable spring morning with the woman who stood across the room just now, talking to her son, their son, trying to reason him back from the nightmare he’d dreamed up and dragged everyone into.

Thorn scooped up the baseball with his left hand and rocked back and flung it at the boy, his boy. It dinged him in the temple, a glancing blow, but enough to rattle loose the ice pick from his hand.

Coming around the foot of the bed, Thorn scooped up one of Matheson’s eggs and flung that too, and flung the second. One of them hit the wall, the other struck the boy’s face and smeared him with yolk. April screamed for them to stop, as Thorn kept coming, a race against his boy, a race to the ice pick that lay on the wooden floor halfway between them.

The boy going for the ice pick and Thorn going for the boy, his egg-smeared son. Thorn looped his one good arm around the young man’s throat and pulled him upright. But not in time.

Sawyer had the ice pick in his hand with Thorn behind him tightening the grip on his throat. His left forearm pressed so hard against the boy’s airway, he could hear the cartilage pop.

Sawyer stabbed the pick into the meat of Thorn’s forearm. Someone screamed. Maybe Thorn. He used whatever leverage he had left to crank his arm tighter against his son’s neck. To stop him but not kill him. Strangle him till he passed out. Just enough. Just exactly enough.

Sawyer straightened his arm and held the ice pick out, taking aim at Thorn’s arm. Screaming for him to stop, April came rushing to block the blow, but arrived a half second late and her hand only bumped his, enough to alter its trajectory by a fraction, just enough to plant the ice pick up to the hilt in Sawyer’s throat.

THIRTY-FIVE

ON THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY, THORN
was out in his yard carrying boulders back to the seawall when he heard Paul McCartney playing the opening bars of “Hey Jude” somewhere inside the house. He’d forgotten he’d brought Buddha’s phone back to Key Largo with him, and it took a few minutes to locate it under a pile of laundry.

“Can I come down?” April said.

“Of course.”

“I need to ask you some questions about … I need to know what Sawyer said to you before I came into the room.”

“I can tell you now if you want.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not ready yet. And I need to hear it face to face.”

On the following Sunday afternoon April’s Mini Cooper rolled down the crushed seashell drive and stopped at the edge of the lawn. She and Garvey got out and walked arm in arm to the seawall, where Thorn was again setting the boulders back in place against the next high tide.

“I’m sorry we’re late,” she said. “I got lost.”

“So this is the handsome stranger’s hideaway,” Garvey said, gazing around the grounds, then settling on the house. “Not the manly lair I was picturing. Hell, there’re Nantucket cottages that aren’t this quaint.”

Thorn rinsed the dirt off his hands in the cool waters of the lagoon and climbed up the bank to give them both a light hug.

April touched a finger to his bandaged arm.

“You’re healing?”

“They tell me I’ll live.”

She stepped away and took another look at the surroundings. Facing the ocean when she said, “I invited Flynn to come, but he’s not ready yet. He’s still sorting things out.”

“That door is always open.”

She’d dressed in ankle-length khakis and a subdued tropical print shirt. Her face was thinner, not gaunt, but if she wasn’t careful, it would be soon.

“What happened to your stilt house, the one on Blackwater Sound?”

“It burned down a few years ago.”

“That’s too bad. It was a wonderful place.”

“It was,” he said. “Made some good memories there.”

“And you made some babies too,” Garvey said.

He took Garvey’s arm and guided them over to the Adirondack chairs he’d set up in the shade of a gumbo-limbo.

“I grew up here,” he said. “Same as you, still living in the family homestead.”

“Ocean view,” April said. “Good breeze, what more could you want?”

She looked over at the remaining boulders. Thorn had whittled the pile down to a half dozen. The seawall was turning out to be a lot harder to reconstruct than it was to tear apart.

“
Miami Ops,
I suppose you didn’t hear what happened?”

He shook his head.

“Even with all the publicity, it still bombed last Thursday. Got cancelled the next morning. Flynn doesn’t mind. His agent found him some commercials to do until something better comes along.”

“He’s a talented kid. He’ll make it.”

He got them settled, took their orders, and brought back a tray of iced tea and some fresh shrimp with his own cocktail sauce.

“And he cooks too,” Garvey said. “Be still my heart.”

April gave Thorn a smile that was only halfway there.

“I got a call from Sheffield,” Thorn said. “About them nailing Gus for Dee Dee’s death. Says they’ve got him cold. That forensic magic they do.”

“Killed his own child,” Garvey said. “What kind of monster does that?”

April closed her eyes for a couple of seconds.

“I need to tinkle,” Garvey said. “You got any clean toilets in this joint?”

“Second door on your left. It’s spotless.”

“Do you need help, Mother?”

“Do I need help? Hell, yes, but the help I need seems to be already taken.”

She winked at Thorn and headed off.

When she’d disappeared inside the house, April said, “I came all this way, and now I don’t want to hear what you have to say.”

“We can do it later. Or skip it entirely and just move on.”

“I killed my son, Thorn. How am I supposed to move on from that?”

She stared out at the empty blue distance, her mouth tight, cheeks ruddy with emotion. If Thorn could have spoken his mind, he’d have told her that the nudge of April’s hand against Sawyer’s, that slight redirection of the ice pick that cost the boy his life, was exactly the kind of ending that Sawyer would have devised. Spreading the blame around in a clever, cynical way. Giving his mother and Thorn a lasting stain of guilt.

“You were very brave,” he said. “You saved my life.”

“Did I? I don’t think so.”

“When you came in the room, I had maybe another minute left before I passed out. Then it would’ve been over.”

She sighed, and held herself very still.

“Okay. Go on, what did he say? He blamed me, didn’t he?”

“No,” Thorn said. “The killings were about the show. All about publicity, about turning the show into a hit.”

“You’re lying, Thorn. I can tell you’re lying.”

He held her eyes, reached out and lay his hand on hers. It was the easiest lie he’d ever told.

“Look, April, you didn’t cause it to happen, and nothing you can do will change anything about it. If there’s a reason why shitty things happen, I haven’t discovered it. But I do know one thing. Going over and over how something came to pass, what you might have done differently, going left instead of right, right instead of left, it’s pointless. You can get lost in that maze and stay lost.”

“You can do that? Just move on, let go of the past.”

“I try. I work on it every day.”

She looked out to sea, and after a moment she began to weep quietly and without embarrassment.

Thorn kept his hand on hers until she’d weathered the moment.

Sniffing, she gave his hand a squeeze, then bent forward and pulled a Kleenex from her purse and blew her nose.

“Some day,” he said, “I’d like to get to know Flynn better.”

“And Flynn would like to know you. He just hasn’t realized it yet.”

A snowy egret touched down on the wooden dock and bent forward to stare into the dark mirror of the lagoon.

“Listen,” he said. “Before Garvey gets back…”

“Yes?”

“I wonder if you could do me a small favor.”

She smiled. There was weariness in it and the ache of sadness, but there was courage too, and a sturdy resolve that balanced out the pain.

She kept on smiling.

“Name it,” she said. “It’s yours.”

THE MIAMI HERALD

Monday, August 16

Buddha Hilton, in the Line of Duty

By April Moss

Buddha Hilton, elected sheriff of Starkville, Oklahoma, at the age of 19, died in the line of duty while playing a crucial role in ending the violent rampage of the man who came to be known as the Zentai Killer.

From an early age Ms. Hilton pledged herself to a life in law enforcement. Her dream was to repay in some measure the citizens of her small Oklahoma town for their generosity and love. It was those citizens who had once liberated Ms. Hilton from nightmarish captivity and it was they who helped give her a fresh start in life.

Held prisoner in a darkened room where she was tormented by her father throughout her early childhood, Buddha was rescued from her ghastly conditions by an alert social worker who spotted Buddha wandering about in distress in the front yard of her father’s rented home.

“There wasn’t a person in town who even knew that little girl existed till that day,” said Millie Janks, the social services professional who came to Buddha’s aid thirteen years ago. “People had suspicions about her daddy, but no one could have imagined the horrors that were going on inside those four walls.”