Under Cover of Daylight (20 page)

Thorn said, “It’s a little early to call Grayson, or I’d suggest you do that. He’s the one ordered this. Originally I told him I couldn’t get down here till next week, but after I thought about it, I thought every minute counted, so I came.”

“If you’re not on my list, you don’t get in.”

“This is a very sensitive issue,” Thorn said. “The department of health has given us strict orders not to reveal the nature of this scare. But I can tell you this much, I wouldn’t be here on a Saturday if these bugs were just endangering the building.”

The other one came out of the guardhouse, frisked Thorn with his eyes, stared at those ears grinding away up there.

“Little ants,” Thorn said. “Almost invisible. They walk single file. Maybe you’ve seen some?” He watched them to see how he was doing. He had their undivided. “Up at Disease Control in Atlanta, they’re making some linkups between these little guys and a couple of cancers; if I said their names, you’d recognize them.” That lit up something in both their faces. “They eat infected food, crawl over your coffee cup, and there you go. Exchange of bodily solids.”

“Little ants?” the second one asked.

“Size of coffee grounds,” Thorn said. “Harmless-looking. And they won’t bite you, sting you, nothing like that. It’s swallowing them that’s the trouble.”

“We got something like that in there.” He motioned to their cubicle. Standing there looking lost.

“I’ll start here then,” Thorn said. “Hey, you guys haven’t had trouble with swollen glands, have you?”

They raised the gate, and Thorn parked in the first spot he came to. He opened the trunk and took out the spray can and a long, thin chrome rod he found lying there. Just the thing for probing for coffee ground ants.

It took him ten minutes, but Thorn found no trace of them in the security station.

“I swear I saw some little ants like that last week on Jackson’s coffee cup,” one of the guards said.

As he was leaving, Thorn said, “Could’ve been just pissants; there’s a lot of those around, too.”

He carried the sprayer back to the car and put it away. He glanced back at the guards. They were standing in the drive outside their office, one of them sneaking a feel of his throat.

Thorn walked through a breezeway to the pool and patio. Found an elevator and took it as far as it went. Fourth floor. He walked along the balcony, looking out at the Atlantic. It was as gray and choppy as the sky.

He walked from one end of the building to the other before he spotted what he was after. A stairway up to the next level. The heavy door was held ajar by a cushion of wind. Thorn climbed up through the wind to the fifth floor.

The view from up there was about fifty thousand dollars better. He could see water at the other end of the island. The ships steaming around the edges of the reef, the La Concha Hotel in the distance. And the other new high rises walling the city. In the heart of the town were the quiet tree-lined neighborhoods, tin roofs, second-story verandas, lacy white trim, those old Conch houses in the shade of the condos.

Just beyond where the balcony ended was the penthouse’s wide picture window, mirrored against the sun. It had a panoramic view of the sea and the property below. The double doors to the penthouse were dark oak. There was a brass knocker in the shape of a ten-gallon Stetson.

Grayson answered the second round of knocking. He wasn’t amused by Thorn’s shirt, his chrome prod.

He was shirtless, a gold chain against his slick chest, wearing faded jeans with ironed creases, a bandanna at his throat, and nothing else. Yippee ki-yay.

He seemed younger than he had that night at Key Largo Elementary doing his speech for the rowdies. Somewhere just past thirty. Probably not old enough to work up a good case of sentimentality about anything.

“Bugman,” Thorn said.

“What?”

“Bugman,” Thorn said. “Bash-a-bug.”

“You’re in the wrong place, bugman.”

“Actually I didn’t come to exterminate anything,” Thorn said. “I wanted to talk. We have a friend in common.”

Grayson glanced up at the darkening sky, back at Thorn.

“Get it over with,” he said.

“His name’s Amos Clay.”

Thorn watched him process that. Grayson slanted his head and ran a make on Thorn. He seemed to come up blank.

“Amos Clay,” he said. “So go on.”

“Not out here,” Thorn said, “I’m not gonna mug you. We’re on the same side. It’s just that I stumbled into some information I thought you might find useful.”

Grayson hesitated another moment, then stepped back and motioned Thorn inside.

Thorn stepped up into the room and waited as Grayson bolted the door. Thorn stared at the place. A rough white stucco coated the walls, and an adobe fireplace was molded into one corner. There was a bleached longhorn skull on exhibit on the mantel. Dark stiff leather furniture, the leather worked with intricate designs. A cactus collection in clay pots.

In one corner of the room there was a tumbleweed the size of a stove. And on the picture window that Thorn had seen from the balcony there was a transparent Old West scene superimposed on Sandpiper Bay Club and the distant Atlantic. A band of Apaches were attacking some circled wagons. The settlers were hiding behind spoke wheels, firing rifles at the savages on their rearing horses. Outside, through the window, a cyclone of laughing gulls whirled. Someone on the beach was tossing bread up to them.

“Homesick for Texas?” Thorn said.

“I’m from Philadelphia.”

Thorn sat in one of the stiff-backed leather chairs. Grayson standing, thumbs hooked in his belt loops.

“You mentioned a person’s name,” Grayson said.

Thorn said, “I wanted you to know. I thought you were the person who should hear this. I’ve heard you talk at meetings.”

“Who are you?”

Thorn shifted in the Mexican chair. He crossed his legs.

“I’m somebody,” he said, “who works inside people’s houses and hears things I shouldn’t.”

“You’ve mentioned a name,” Grayson said. “I’m interested in this name.”

“I want to see Port Allamanda go ahead as much as anybody,” Thorn said. “Know why?”

Grayson frowned.

Thorn, winging it still, said, “You get a whole lot of Yankees driving Lincolns, living out in the mangroves, first thing they’re going to want is to pay somebody to come smush their palmetto bugs. They had roaches in Minnesota, but they didn’t have these mother ships. These things, you try to kill them, they fly in your face. You try to squash one with your foot, it’s like stepping on a piece of chocolate caramel. You get it stuck on your shoe, the floor. A real gooey mess, I’m telling you.”

“Hey, I got all day. Saturdays I invite bugmen in and listen to their life stories.” Grayson’s face was taking on some color. He leaned toward Thorn, still keeping a distance. “Take your time, don’t leave out anything. Know what I’m saying?”

“This person’s name I mentioned, Mr. Clay,” Thorn said. “Until lately I understand he’d been planning to sign over his bug ranch to a woman name of Kate Truman. Is that another name you know?”

“I do,” said Grayson.

“Well, now she’s dead, which I guess you heard about. I just heard myself yesterday, standing in the kitchen at Amos Clay’s broken-down old house. And that’s where I was when I heard this other thing I thought you should know about.”

Grayson peered at him as if there were fog in the room.

“There’s another person stepping in now. A guy, let’s call him a relative of the deceased. How I hear it is this guy wants to run the bug plantation, raise mosquitoes. A real Bambi lover, this guy, worse than Kate Truman. Let the deer and the antelope play kind of guy.”

“Oh, boy,” Grayson said. He squinted at Thorn. “Who
are
you?”

“I’m a bugman. I hear things. I don’t like to gossip, but some things I hear, they make me mad.”

“Well, you shouldn’t keep things bottled up if they make you mad,” said Grayson, “Get ulcers that way. Know what I mean?”

“I do,” Thorn said. “Some things, it’s hard to go on living holding them inside. Not being able to talk to people about them.”

Grayson said, “These days it’s getting hard to find a good listener. It’s how the pope stays rich.”

“But people have needs,” Thorn said. “Some people, they’ll just talk and talk for free, and you can’t shut them up.”

Grayson pulled at a flake of skin on his lip, studying Thorn for a few beats of the heart; then he marched into the other room and brought back some fresh-looking bills. He held them by his side.

Thorn relaxed now, feeling he could sell this smart guy poison ivy for toilet paper, said, “I’m standing there in the kitchen, spraying Amos Clay’s roaches, and I hear this guy in the other room say he’s going to take up where Kate Truman left off, go ahead and buy this property. Guy by the name of Thorn. I hear the whole thing’s going down near the end of the month, late in the afternoon the thirty-first.”

“Look,” Grayson said as he handed Thorn the money, “you wouldn’t be shitting me, would you? Playing some kind of stupid game. You’re not some wood rat lover, are you?”

Thorn said, “You kidding? I get paid to kill things like that. The more Yankees there are, the more I like it.”

Grayson stared out his cowboy window, at a freighter rounding the reef line. “You know, I get little paranoid. After a while you think nobody’s on your side. I get made out as some kind of evil shit every day of the week. I’m this guy who’s coming in here plundering your land, killing your animals.”

“You don’t look evil,” Thorn said. Then he smiled and said, “But looking at vermin every day like I do, you maybe can’t trust my judgment.”

Grayson smiled uncertainly and said, “I hear nothing from these people but how I’m single-handedly wrecking the Keys. They’re down here, soaking up all this sunshine all their life, smelling the breeze, making their rum drinks, and when somebody comes in and sees what they got and says, ‘Hey, this is nice, I like this, I know some other people who’d like it, too,’ they get their little armies together and get out there and say they love this wood rat or that butterfly and now nobody else can live here because this butterfly is all of a sudden more important than people. They’re in the room nailing the door shut.

“If it weren’t for men like me, this state would still be paying its way with roadside freak shows. Sure I made a buck on this and that. But you tell me something. When was the last time one of those people got out a machete and took a stroll through that land they’re in such a hurry to protect? When was the last time they went out there in that swamp and played with a butterfly? They don’t give a shit about any butterflies or mice. They’re just as selfish as the next guy. This Kate Truman. She was the worst. In those meetings ranting about Port Allamanda and how bad it’s going to be and she’s cashing her checks every month on Vacation Island. Tell me that’s not hypocritical.”

“July thirty-first,” said Thorn. “Fiveish.”

“Hey, bugman.” Grayson stepped back as Thorn stood. “You know what I’m saying, don’t you? There’s some intelligent people down here anyway, with an idea of what progress is.”

“I’m just an exterminator,” Thorn said. “If it’s bigger than a spider, I don’t understand it.”

“Thorn, huh?”

“Nice-looking guy, about my height. Most people up there know him. You might want to talk to him or something.”

“He have another name?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Tell me something.” Grayson moved to the door and drew back the dead bolt. “How do you keep your dignity wearing a stupid shirt like that?”

Grayson smiling away. Thorn smiled back.

“It isn’t easy,” he said.

Thorn prowled around Sandpiper Bay Club for a while longer, walking along the white dredged-up beach, trying to picture where the old Sands Piano Bar had been in relation to all that cement. He walked out the finger pier and looked back up at the hulk. Listening to the halyards clink.

The thunderhead had slid off to the northwest, headed for Naples and Fort Myers. Thorn watched a white-haired gentleman in red pants putt on the Astroturf green. He had his grip all wrong, holding on to it as if it were a mop. Dr. Bill had taken Thorn along caddying for him one summer way back, and he’d picked up a few things. This old man glanced over at Thorn, and Thorn could see the guy wasn’t in a coachable mood.

Thorn walked past the pool, where the skin cancer crowd had begun to assemble. Over in the marina a large red Scarab was docking. Thorn leaned against the pier railing and watched the two guys in the racer tie up and come ashore. One was a big guy with a flesh-colored eye patch, the little one with dark, curly hair, puffing his chest out as he walked. Both very familiar.

They found a place at the outdoor bar, and Thorn watched as they drank down a couple of fast beers. That brought it back to him. The night of his drunk. The two guys with the nurses.

He hiked over there, keeping a distance from the bar, feeling a strange tightening of the throat. He walked along the dock, shooting looks at the two of them. The Scarab had drawn a crowd of kids. Thorn came up behind them and surveyed the boat. Very sleek. Muscular thing. Kind of boat Thorn had no use for because there was no use to it except to shear the tops off waves at fifty, fly across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas, in the air at least half the time.

And he didn’t like the smartass name they’d given her,
Perfect Execution.
He assumed it referred to someone’s handling of money, stocks, bonds, some wonderful pirouette of capitalism that had scored enough cash to coast through a lifetime.

Thorn felt the wad of bills in his pants pocket. He thought maybe in the next lifetime being a bugman wouldn’t be a bad way. Hell of a profit margin.

As Thorn was walking back around the pool, watching the two from the boat, he saw Grayson on his way out the front gate. Dressed in tennis togs now, striding across one of the parking lots, head down. His attention focused on the pavement, as if he were scouting for the shimmer of loose change.

R
ICKI HAD BORROWED
three grand from her boss, showing him the clipping about Kate’s death and giving him a story about having to pay for the burial, getting a little choky sound in her voice. Telling him she was going to be a rich lady soon and he’d get his money back then with interest. Then she’d told Lillian, her sometime lover, that if Lilly could come up with four grand, Ricki would turn it into ten in six months. So, bang like that, Lillian emptied her money market account, been building it for eight years waitressing and doing some topless dancing. True love.