Silencer (15 page)

“No, listen to me. Donaldson was right. I really fucked up.”

“No, you didn't.”

“I should've shot Gustavo the minute I walked in the door, saw him holding that gun. Earl would still be alive.”

Frisco watched Donaldson step outside onto the covered porch of the offices and light a cigarette.

“You're a goddamn hero, Claire. Get used to it. If you hadn't come in like that, guns blazing, everyone in that room might be dead right now. That's how you got to look at it. Because you didn't fuck up. A guy with twenty years on the street couldn't have done better.”

“Browning will never forgive me. He worshipped Earl.”

“Browning's a big boy,” Frisco said. “He'll get over it.”

“I don't know if I can forgive myself.”

“Cut it out. Now you're wallowing.”

She came to her feet, stared sharply into his eyes.

“What'd you say?”

He looked at her, faintly amused.

“There, that's better. That's more like it.”

He turned his attention back to Donaldson. The FDLE officer took a last drag, sucking the life out of her cigarette, and flicked the butt into the dusty corral.

“You know, Frisco, sometimes you can be one cold son of a bitch.”

“And the other times?”

“I haven't seen any of those,” Claire said.

A quick smile crossed his lips, then he motioned toward the interior of the barn.

“Need to show you something,” he said.

Still stinging, she followed him into the shadowy building that reeked of fresh hay and manure and the damp rot of ancient wood. They passed down the length of stalls past the five marshtackies, small, tough horses that were descendants of those left behind by Spanish explorers. The early Florida crackers had appropriated the breed to manage their large herds of free-ranging cattle on land all around these parts. In the last century, marshtackies had all but
disappeared. A shame, for those tough, tireless horses were so perfectly suited for working in the thick scrubland, pine forests, and rough and sloppy terrain.

The one time her father, the skin doctor, had visited Coquina Ranch, she'd brought him out to see these horses and explained their history. He simply nodded, beaming the same as he had all day, speechless and bewildered, like a man unable to match up the memories of his suburban Connecticut daughter with this woman in soiled jeans and shit-spattered riding boots. Claire's mother, Ellen, would have been less charitable about the ranch. Firing off catty remarks about the grungy world her daughter had descended into. Ellen, last Claire heard, was on her fifth husband, even younger and richer than the previous ones. Living on the beach in Hawaii, a yearly Christmas card with an illegible signature her only communication.

Frisco led her past the marshtackies to the last stall, where a roan Tennessee walker was backed up against the rear wall, head held high, peering at them warily. With its mouth closed, the big horse snorted twice.

Claire stopped and turned to Frisco.

“Her name is Big Girl. She hasn't adjusted to city life. I thought she could board here till I figured out what to do with her. If that's okay with you.”

She took a second, then nodded.

“By the way,” he said. “That story Earl told about Edison and Hemingway.”

“Yeah?”

“He give you both halves?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Where'd the story stop? When little Earl left the campfire, went back to the lodge and got in bed?”

“That's right.”

Frisco nodded like he'd assumed as much.

“What's the rest?”

Shifting his gaze away from her, Frisco said, “Have to tell you later.”

He drew a peppermint stick from his jeans, peeled the cellophane off, and held it out to the horse. Shyly it came over and took the candy from his hand.

“Tell me now.”

Frisco looked past her, fixing his eyes on the entrance.

“Later,” he said.

She turned and saw Browning coming into the barn with Antwan at his side.

“All right, then,” said Claire. “Later.”

 

 

THERE WERE SEVENTEEN PARTYGOERS ON
Sugarman's list of names, but he knew the phone numbers for only two. He used his cell for both of those, and neither had seen Thorn leave the party. Missy Mayfield, one of Thorn's old girlfriends, volunteered to round up a search party, but Sugarman assured her it wasn't necessary.

Rusty called the only three on her list whose numbers she could locate and got the same result. Last anyone had seen of Thorn was when he gave his speech about what a great lady Rusty was. Rusty worked for a while with BellSouth information, trying to finagle more numbers, but it turned out Thorn's guests were fairly typical Keys folks who either had no phones at all or kept their numbers unlisted.

Lying low for one reason or another was standard behavior in the Keys, where a large portion of the population had come to reinvent themselves, assume new identities, or flee from one mainland nuisance or another. Messy divorces, the justice system, debts, the IRS were high on the list, though Sugar had met a few desperados determined to break away from darker forces, mafia snitches, gangbangers, and former drug mules looking to go straight. Key Largo and Tavernier and Islamorada had such a large population of those shadowy
types who placed a high premium on anonymity that asking questions about someone's past was ill-advised conversational etiquette. It could even get you hurt.

The Friday after Thanksgiving was a busy workday in that island resort. Most on the party list were employed in the tourist trade. Only a few might have the day off—a plumber, two carpenters, an electrician, and the Coral Shores High School librarian.

Rusty and Sugar divided the rest. Sugarman took all the folks living below Mile Marker 95, from Popp's Motel south. Rusty took Key Largo, where the highest concentration of the party guests lived or worked.

She showered and changed. Came out of the bedroom in black jeans and a long-sleeve blue T-shirt and running shoes, hair still damp. Looking more like her old island girl self than Sugar had seen in a while. He followed her outside into the brittle sunshine. A steady easterly off the Atlantic had pushed the swelling tide high into the lagoon and it was sloshing over the seawall and onto the dock. Feathery white horsetails filled the sky. Winds changing aloft, a sign that things were about to shift below.

“It's going to be fine,” Sugar said as Rusty got into her Accord.

She put the key in the ignition and looked up at him through the open window.

“I'm not superstitious, Sugar. I don't have premonitions. But this is different.”

“We'll find him, Rusty. We'll find him and there'll be a good explanation and we'll all have a big laugh.”

“No,” she said. “This is serious. This is some very bad shit.”

She started the car and backed out.

Sugarman watched her go, feeling a dark fist clenching inside his chest, a gloomy certainty that what she said was true.

 

No luck with Penny and Jed Thompson, who were home watching a ball game in the tiki hut behind their house. Neither Lisa Lee, who
tended bar at Morada Bay, or Jimmy Hankinson, who ran the windsurf concession at the Marriott, were any help. The last they remembered was Thorn's speech and someone shoving him into the lagoon. A strike-out with Joel Carmel, who operated the bookstore in the Surfside shopping plaza, and another with Randy Schutes, who sold tropical gewgaws and parrot shirts at Island Silver and Spice. Zero with Sharon Jenkins, the hostess at Snapper's restaurant. Two of Sugarman's old cop buddies, Shaky Means and Junior Nickerson, were out fishing together. Junior's wife hailed him on her VHS, and over crackling static Junior said, no, they hadn't seen Thorn after the speech or the lagoon episode.

Sugarman was down to his last two names when Rusty rang his cell.

“Meet me at Squirrelly Shirley's,” she said. “Be quick.”

“What?”

She clicked off and Sugar wheeled the Toyota around and hauled ass back up the overseas highway, twice skidding along the shoulder to pass slow-moving traffic, driving like a goddamn Miami idiot, getting some honks and a couple of flipped birds.

It was just after four in the afternoon when he swerved into the lot at Squirrelly Shirley's Boutique and hustled into the air-conditioned shop.

Shirley and Rusty were behind the cash register. A newspaper was spread out on the counter. The morning
Miami Herald,
front-page section.

Shirley was a cute blonde in her late thirties wearing a low-cut dress that revealed about fifty percent of her famous breasts. The boutique was one of the few clothing stores in the Keys that local men frequented, shopping for their wives or girlfriends, or at least pretending to. Shirley must have known those deeply scooped dresses brought them in because that was her daily uniform. For years that décolletage had paid the mortgage on a nice waterfront house.

“I saw two guys,” Shirley said to Sugar before he could speak.
“They came in late, maybe an hour before the party ended. A big one and a little one. The little one was grubby like a derelict. They didn't look like they belonged together because the big one was dressed nice, muscled up, handsome face, but his eyes weren't nice. Mean eyes. Dead or something, I don't know. I've been trying to find the right word.”

“What about these two?”

“I was on the porch and they asked where they could find Thorn, and I told them he was in the kitchen.”

“You see them again?”

Rusty flattened wrinkles out of the newspaper.

“No,” Rusty said. “Shirley didn't see them come back out. But they could've gone out the front door. No one would've noticed that.”

“Two guys,” Sugarman said. “One big, one little.”

“I never saw them before,” Shirley said. “I knew everyone at the party except those two. This was around two or three in the morning, pretty late. I was a little high. But I remember them clearly. You and Rusty were dancing by the lagoon.”

“You'd recognize these two again if you saw them?”

“Pretty sure.”

“There's something else,” Rusty said.

She swiveled the paper around so he could see the headline:
THREE DEAD IN SHOOTOUT, GOVERNOR SANCHEZ NARROWLY ESCAPES
.

“What's this about?” Shirley asked.

Sugarman took the paper over to the front of the store where the light was better and skimmed the article. Thorn's name wasn't mentioned. An FDLE agent who'd been protecting the governor had been the victim of multiple gunshots; also killed were Earl Hammond Jr. and a worker named Gustavo Pinto. Short article, sketchy details. Must've been slammed together as the paper was going to press.

“Happened last night,” Rusty said. “About midnight. Coquina Ranch.”

“And a couple of hours later two guys show up asking for Thorn.”

“What's going on?” Shirley said. “Is Thorn in trouble again?”

“We need more details, Shirley. How these guys were dressed. Anything you can remember, no matter how small it might seem.”

“Okay.”

Sugarman took notes on a sheet of Shirley's flowery stationery.

It seemed that Squirrely Shirley had photographic recall on matters relating to wardrobe—a job-related skill, she said with a smile of pride.

The two men were wildly mismatched. The scrawny guy dressed like he'd just crawled out of a Dumpster. Gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders. Grungy black jeans, white high-tops. A green bungee cord for a belt.

The other guy, the good-looking one, wore chinos, loafers, a blue button-down. The loafers had tassels and were cordovan.

“Very preppy,” Shirley said. “Not my type. But cute.”

The big guy had medium-length brown hair, stylishly cut. The other had a shaved head. The handsome one worked out with weights, deep chest, wide shoulders, with the pigeon-toed gait of a body builder. The other was more feline, and Shirley said he'd taken a long look at her as he was going in the door, leaning forward, trying to sneak a peek down her top. Smirked when she caught him.

“You see their car?” Rusty said.

“One of those teeny compacts,” Shirley said. “I'm not into cars.”

“Color?”

“Oh, it was weird. Same as Norm Higgins's Jeep. That military look.”

“Military?” Sugar said.

Shirley came out from behind the counter and walked over to a spinner rack near the side window. She pulled off a pair of pants and held them up.

“Like this. Military.”

“Camouflage,” Rusty said. “A camouflage paint job?”

“Right,” Shirley said. “That's what I meant. Why does somebody paint their car camouflage?”

“I don't think it's because they're trying to blend in,” Sugar said.

A few minutes later, as they were passing over the crest of the Jewfish Creek Bridge in Sugar's Corolla, Rusty looked out at the mangroves islands, the watery view.

“This is my fault.”

“Stop it, Rusty.”

“Thorn wanted to be John Beresford Tipton,” she said.

“Who?”

“A character in some fifties TV show. Back in September I was watching an episode on cable, Thorn came in, sat down, and sat through the whole thing. I don't think he'd ever seen an entire TV show before.”

“Must've been pretty good.”

“It's called
The Millionaire.
John Beresford Tipton is a retired industrialist. You never see his face, he's always sitting in a high-backed chair. Every week he gives away a cashier's check for a million dollars to some complete stranger. It's his hobby, what keeps him amused. He stayed anonymous, his personal secretary delivered the check to someone Tipton picked out, and the show was about how the money changed that person's life. Sometimes for the good, but a lot of times it turned into a disaster. I can't remember which episode Thorn saw. Probably a good result. He never said it, but I think that show planted the seed. You know, how he acted that day on the boat, wanting to do something big. Stand behind the curtains, pull the levers, and make the world a better place.”