Tropical Freeze (20 page)

Thorn leaned back on the chaise.

She said, “I did this for you, Thorn, I didn’t ask any questions. But the way it is now, if you want me to do anything more, you’re going to have to tell me the reason.”

“Yeah, I understand that,” he said. “I need to consider it, talk to somebody else before we go farther.”

“All right,” she said, giving him a long, amused appraisal, shaking her head at the end of it. “I don’t know what you got me doing here, Thorn. It seems a long way off from what I’d expect from a boy like you.”

“I find it surprising myself.”

She said, “You ever think, just go up to the front door, knock, ask the receptionist for what you want?”

“I don’t think this’s something they advertise. I doubt the receptionist would even know about it. I thought it’d be better to knock on the back door.”

She said, “OK, well, so anyway, I got the computer finally, and it gives me choices. I can check the quarterly dividend report. I can see a calendar of upcoming events of interest to clients. Air shows, arms exhibits. I looked at that for a minute. Interesting business. You know this very minute we could be in Paris checking out the latest in spectrum analysis equipment, the stuff they use, they can analyze a hair, tell you how much Budweiser you drank in the last six months.”

“From one hair,” Thorn said.

“These are serious fascists we got here,” she said. “Next week it’s the Berlin Personal Artillery Fair. Lectures on weapon effectiveness in the Falklands War, Angola, and Afghanistan.”

“There’s so much to know,” Thorn said.

She said, “I browsed for a minute or two; then I selected the Services Menu. And there it was, one of the categories under service, Immigration Assistance.”

“Yeah, Priscilla, great. That’s it, that’s what we want.”

“I thought so. I got excited, I was about to call you, but I said no, I’ll wait, get a layer deeper in and then show off for you, make it look easy. So when I select Immigration, the screen goes blank and a row of question marks starts flashing on and off. I sit there. I mean, you told me almost nothing, Thorn. I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for, so I typed in ‘Illegal.’ ”

“You didn’t.”

“It seemed like a good idea.”

Thorn sighed. His pulse was thumping in his puffy hands.

She said, “Nothing happens for almost a full minute. I thought maybe the computer went down. Then suddenly it’s back on, and there’s a single line on the screen, says, ‘Provide User’s Area Code and Phone Number for Access.’ ”

“No, Priscilla, you didn’t do that.”

“No, no. Of course, I was suspicious. But I think well, OK, it might be a common business practice or something, put you on their mailing list, like that. But still, I’m nervous, so I type in the first number that pops into my mind, the number of the library in Key Largo.”

“Well, that’s OK, I guess.”

“And the computer starts clicking and whirring for a few minutes. And when it comes back on, the message addresses me as Key Largo Library and says that I need on-line human assistance for this department of company business.”

Thorn sat up on the chaise, stomach tightening.

She said, “I hung up quick. I didn’t like the feel of that.”

“Neither do I.”

“And then this Fatal Error message came on, and I didn’t like the feel of that even more. Like somebody had been tracing the call and I cut them off.”

Thorn leaned forward, stroked the chest of a black torn that had taken a position at his feet. Priscilla raised the Luger again, but a calico measuring a jump to the couch thought better of it. It looked over at Priscilla and took a prim seat on the floor.

Thorn said, “I believe we’re going to have to attack this from a different direction.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Before it attacks us.”

Sugarman wasn’t at home. Thorn drove around his neighborhood and finally located him at the neighborhood park. A boat ramp, basin, small beach and picnic table, and dock space for ten boats. All of it on Largo Sound, a busy bay that boaters used to cut from the backcountry to the ocean.

Sugarman was sitting at the cement picnic table under a chikee hut out on the point. There was a yellow school bus parked in the lot. Red curtains fluttered out its open window. Two skinny black dogs ran out the dock as Thorn approached. He waded through them as they nosed his hands for food.

Twenty yards from Sugarman’s table, three women and a man were standing in front of the neighborhood barbecue grill. The women wore halters and cutoff jeans. The man had on a pair of tattered jeans that hung from his skinny hips. A snarled beard, long dirty hair. All of them barefoot.

Sugarman rose when he saw Thorn and waited for him.

As Thorn passed the hippies, the man separated himself from the women and made a short bow toward Thorn, his hands making some kind of salute as if he were measuring off a foot of air.

Thorn nodded back.

Sugarman was wearing a pair of black jeans, a yellow T-shirt with a French angelfish on its front. He smiled at Thorn, but it was an effort. His eyes holding back.

Sugarman gestured at the hippies.

“Flower power,” he said. “Mellow yellow.”

“That or Charlie Manson,” said Thorn.

Thorn sat. Sugarman gazed out at the dull shine of Largo Sound, at some sailboats moored out there, their windmill propellers twirling in the northwester.

Thorn watched the hippies grilling their meat, the three women laying out plates and plastic forks on the table over there. The man kept glancing over at Thorn and Sugarman.

“New neighbors?” Thorn said.

“Vagrants. They pulled in late last night, just parked here and camped overnight. I was elected by the neighborhood association to kick them out. Me, the cop. I came down here, and I didn’t have the heart for it. The head geek said to me that the Lord God Almighty owned this land, it wasn’t my place to say who could or couldn’t use it.”

“He’s got a point,” Thorn said.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Well, they say the geeks shall inherit the earth.”

“Yeah,” Sugarman said, “they’re getting a damn good start.”

The hippies seemed to be chanting now, shoulder to shoulder in a circle, eyes closed.

“I came over here,” Thorn said, “see if you got anything on Cousins.”

“Figured,” Sugarman said, shifting his eyes away from the hippies, giving Thorn a tired frown. “Well, it’s just like I was telling you, Thorn, Benny Cousins is running for God. He’s a very saintly fellow.”

“That’s bullshit,” he said, and massaged one sore hand with the other.

“I’m trying to be patient with you, man,” Sugarman said. “You’re building your house, tying your flies, concentrating on your belly button, so you’re not up on what’s going on around the island, Thorn. But Benny’s on everybody’s top ten nice guy list. He donates money to the cocaine crisis clinic, the battered wife shelter. Stuff like that. He sponsored two or three fund raisers lately for Blessed House, the halfway house for problem kids. Man, the guy’s Key Largo’s own Mother Teresa. He may have a little Bubba in him, maybe a tendency to want to good-old-boy the good old boys, but otherwise the guy’s strumming a harp as near as I can see.”

“Come on, man. Have you met met him? Been around him?”

“Once,” Sugarman said. “Oh, yeah, I know. Is he somebody I’d want to have over at the house? Not really. He’s obnoxious. But the good he’s done, you know, there’s not anybody else down here really working like that, everybody’s out on their boats. They came down here to forget about all that. It doesn’t fit with their picture of paradise. So, this guy comes along, I don’t care if he’s got bubonic halitosis, he’s a good guy.”

“He’s a barracuda,” Thorn said. “This Mother Teresa bullshit, it’s just PR.”

“The only knock on the guy I heard,” Sugarman said, “is he has people in and out of that Islamorada house, foreign types. They show up in Islamorada, Matecumbe, sometimes they’ll pick up things, walk out, forget to pay for them. He had to come by the station a couple of times in the last couple of months. Get this guy or that guy out of the tank. Shoplifting, resisting arrest with violence.”

“Yeah?” Thorn said.

“Turns out these guys were all diplomats of one kind or another. They stole things ’cause they had different cultural orientation or something like that. They all had immunity. A man from the State Department even called on one of them, to let him off the hook. But Benny goes by the store where they lifted something, he makes a donation. Everything’s copacetic.”

“You verify that? That State Department call?”

“I guess somebody did.”

“And you still call that Mother Teresa?”

“I call that
clout
, is what I call it,” Sugarman said. “The man’s plugged in. But just because he hangs out with lepers and highwaymen … I mean Jesus did that, Thorn. It didn’t taint him.

“OK, so what is it has you so stirred up about Benny? I mean, if it’s just that thing with fixing your code violations, well, yeah, that’s cheating, but it’s also par for the course down here. When in Rome kind of stuff.”

Thorn sighed. He watched two of the hippie women peel out of their clothes and step under the outdoor shower. They began to glide large dark bars of soap across each other. At one with their nakedness.

“The moon must be in the seventh house,” Thorn said. “Time for another bath.”

“Boy, you’re in a bad mood,” Sugarman said. “These are gentle, harmless people.”

“Yeah,” Thorn said. “I am. I’m in a bad mood.”

“I heard you were smearing Darcy Richard’s lipstick. Is that it? Being in love, that get you in a bad mood?”

“You heard that? Where?”

“It was in the paper, Thorn. Shit, come on. Everybody knows everything.”

They both looked out at Largo Sound some more. Thorn listening to the faint tinkling of the halyards out there, like trays of iced tea. He thought of how far they’d gotten away from the good parts. From the hammock days, the sunset fishing. The pleasant burn of the first beer as night came on. Lying in the bed, listening to the silky rattle of the palm fronds, to the moths battling against the screened windows, turning up the flame in the lantern, opening the book, finding the place.

He looked down at the mosaic pattern in the tabletop, broken bits of colored ceramic afloat in cement. Over the years he’d seen things in that tabletop. Sometimes sober, sometimes not. Beasts, the faces of women, schools of fish. He looked for something now, took his eyes a little out of focus. And that random jumble clarified, took the shape of a .25 Browning Baby, aimed back at his own empty gut.

“You know, I’ve been thinking lately,” Sugarman said, staring at his hands flat on the table in front of him, “maybe I need to go see a therapist myself. Get some shrinking done.”

“Oh, Jesus, Sugar, not you, too.”

“I been feeling pretty blue,” he said. “I’d just like to know something, be sure about something for a change. I’m floundering, buddy. I mean, these days I wonder about everything, work, marriage. Why I’m doing anything at all. What the purpose of it is.”

“You got the virus, it’s going around,” Thorn said. “What I heard is, all you can do is wait. Have another beer, call back in a year. Do whatever you can in the meantime, and things change on their own. The calendar takes you to the next stage, things get clearer. It’s the best answer I’ve heard lately.”

“Just wait?”

“I know it doesn’t sound like much,” Thorn said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Sugarman said. “But thanks.”

Charlie Manson was eating his meat now. It smelled good. He was sending Thorn and Sugar a mean look. A little spasm in one eye, while his women washed, waited their turn.

One of Sugarman’s neighbors pulled into the lot; she got out of her car. A white-haired woman in a brown dress. She stared at the showering maidens, stared at Sugarman, waved her hand at him, then at them. Get up, do something. He waved back at her. Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. She got back into her car and sat there for a minute fuming, then drove home. Probably to call the real police.

“Tell me something, Sugar. I need to know something.”

“Shoot.”

“If I told you a thing that had to do with police work, a possible crime, because I needed your help, but it was important not to make it a full-blown police matter, what would you do?”

Sugarman shook his head at Thorn.

“What’re you into, Thorn?”

“Answer my question first.”

“What kind of crime we talking about here?”

“It’s a disappearance, maybe foul play.”

Sugarman pulled in a deep breath. Thorn could see a vein rising in his throat, the skin pulling tight to his skull.

He said, “I’m your friend, Thorn. You’re practically my goddamn brother, man. But you tell me something that has to do with a murder investigation, kidnapping, or the like, I’m a cop. Pure and simple.”

“You’re out here dressed like a real guy, even then, huh?”

“I’m off duty, yeah, but mv ethics aren’t. Priests are for confession. They’ll never tell. A cop, well, that’s different.”

“Yeah,” said Thorn. “It’s what I thought. But I guess I needed to hear you say it.”

“Now, look, I don’t like the sound of this shit, Thorn. I don’t want you going back into the vigilante business. We don’t need that, you know. We got a pretty good system of catching crooks, putting them away.”

Thorn thought for a few moments and said, “You remember three summers ago, time we played all those hoops at Harry Harris, getting ready for summer league?”

That headshake again. He said, “OK, all right, yeah, I remember. You, me, Dewey Wisdom taking on the young studs.”

Thorn said, “Well, it was serious basketball. But you know, it was mostly fair. You hit somebody taking a shot, you called the foul on yourself. Honor system.”

“Yeah, OK.”

“But soon as league play started, and we had refs calling the games, things fell apart. Everybody got away with what they could. If the ref missed it, it didn’t happen. Honesty went out the window.”

Sugarman considered it a moment, looking intently at Thorn.

“What? No police?” he said. “That what you’re saying? Just let John Q. settle his own grievances?”