Under Cover of Daylight (28 page)

He took two handfuls of sheet and mattress cover. Crucified. Her breasts shimmying, sweat trails running between them.

He dragged her down, still inside her. And from the side they cooperated, found a rhythm and stayed with it, nudged it gradually faster. She rolled back on top, and another roll brought him there. Thorn couldn’t tell who was the bandleader here, who wanted to be on top, who on bottom.

She broke the connection, rolled onto her stomach, and tipped her bottom up at him. Edging forward on his knees, he entered her and held to her hipbones as she wriggled and gasped and shook him. He leaned across her back, finding her breasts again. She reached back around and gripped his buttocks and pulled him tighter against her.

And as he felt the burn rise inside him, she clamped her vagina tight, a fist, locking the sperm in its corridor. Thorn shook his head, and a high groan, then a howl, broke from his throat. She seized tighter, shaking her head again, the last remnants of her chignon come loose.

“Let go!”

“I am, I am, I am.”

Thorn yelled at her now, bruising her with his grip on her waist. “Let go, goddamm it!”

“I am!”

She shivered, shook her bottom, and dropped flat onto her stomach, bringing him down hard onto her back, and Thorn released, the sap flooding now. A lancing pain firing through him.

They woke several times, and each time it was still raining. Thorn mounting her, or Sarah mounting him. Top, rear, side, on the floor, bent across his desk, where he’d solved geometry problems, but nothing like this. The rain coming listlessly all the time. They lay holding each other for the times in between, alternating fetal curls.

No more conversation. She spoke only in the growls of hunger. And he tried to answer her. As the darkness dwindled and Thorn looked groggily at the drizzling dawn, he knew he was free of something. He felt it as a lightness in his chest. A cavity in there where there had been thickness and weight. A clearing, a lessening of swelling.

Sarah was awake beside him.

“It’s still raining.”

“I can see that,” she said. She sat up, puffed up the pillow at her back.

He debated it a moment and said, “Who was the guy the other night?”

“Who are they all?”

He rolled up on an elbow to see her.

“Me, too?” he asked. “I’m your daddy, too?”

She looked for a moment at the rain smearing the window, then turned to him.

“You more than anyone.”

He nodded, waited a moment, and asked quietly, “Who was he?”

“Nobody special.”

“Does he know that?”

“Yes.”

“Just your sleeping pill?”

“We’re each other’s sleeping pill.”

“Well,” Thorn said. “You weren’t asleep when I came by.”

“It’s not working anymore,” she said.

When Thorn was asleep again, his breathing deep and raspy, Sarah inched to the edge of the bed. She set her feet on the wood floor and stood. As she crossed the room, she looked back at Thorn’s motionless sleep.

She’d left the Colt Python in her straw bag beside the living room couch. She padded out there, the thick rush of rain covering the creaking wood floors. The revolver was wrapped in a black camisole. Sarah unwrapped it and opened the cylinder quietly to make sure it was loaded. She carefully clicked the cylinder closed.

Thorn was on his stomach, his face mushed into the pillow. Sarah came back into the bedroom, crossed to the bed, and stood beside him. His left arm was draped over the edge of the bed, his fingertips touching the floor.

She stood beside him, looking down at him silently. She cradled the revolver against her chest. Her face was lax; her breath came slowly.

“Who’s going to save the wood rats,” Thorn said, his voice muffled in the pillow, “if I’m dead and you’re in jail?” He had one eye barely open as he turned his head to peer back at her. “Anyway, it’s not your style to shoot in the back.”

“I can wait till you turn over,” Sarah said.

Thorn was measuring a roll to his left, hit her in the knees, grab the wrist the way you grabbed a rattler behind the head.

“Was I that bad in bed?” Thorn said, lifting his head for a better look at her. Poised for the grab.

“You’re not going to try to stop me, are you? Not taking this seriously.”

“I tried all last night, best I knew how. If that doesn’t work, what can I do?”

“You could do me before I do you.”

“No,” Thorn said. “I have a thing about killing people I love.”

Sarah’s eyes were fogging, her forehead beginning to clench. “You don’t love me,” she said. “You love somebody we cooked up between us.”

“Close enough,” Thorn said.

Sarah said, “No. You’re right.” She sat down beside him on the edge of the bed. Thorn feeling his muscles unknot. “Wood rats come first. Our debt to Kate.”

Turning over onto his back, Thorn released a long breath. Sarah brushed a strand of his blond hair off his forehead with her free hand. Her eyes in long focus, staring out the bedroom window, her hand absently combed through his hair.

S
ARAH WAS SPRAWLED
on a towel, on the front deck of Thorn’s bonefish skiff, across the live-bait wells and the icebox. She was covered up against the sun, in one of his long-sleeved work shirts, Kate’s fishing hat, white jeans, and tennis shoes. Thorn glanced at her off and on, wondering what it signified, her having to hide from the sun like that.

She’d called in to work that morning, told someone she had to take some emergency annual leave. Back in two weeks. Have Stanley take over her cases. Got some static, gave some back, and hung up.

Thorn cast a weighted fly out to the reef patch, using one of his ultralight spinning rods, the reel no bigger than the fist of a baby. The fly had just enough weight to carry about twenty feet, maybe twenty-five with the wind at his back. Five feet of water, a mile off Kate’s place. Sunday morning, the sun just easing up out of the Atlantic.

“How’d you figure it out?” she asked.

“I have powers,” he said. “I can hear what’s happening inside you.

“Can you hear this?” She gave him a look.

“It’s not that simple. I have to be enjoying an intimate connection with the subject for it to work.”

“When we’re like that, I don’t
have
any thoughts.”

Thorn told her about finding the newspaper photograph.

When he’d finished, she was quiet, watching as Thorn climbed up on the observation stand mounted above his outboard. He cast out the port side, glancing back at her.

“You think Kate knew who I was?”

“It’s possible,” he said. “But I doubt it.” He squinted at the shadows a few yards inside his lure, maybe bones, maybe jack, maybe just a school of mullet. “If she’d suspected, she would’ve mentioned it to me.”

“Not unless she suspected what you’d done,” Sarah said.

“Maybe she knew everything,” Thorn said, “but didn’t tell anybody anything ’cause she saw how you felt about me, knew you and I would work it out.”

“If she knew how I felt about you, she was better than clairvoyant. ’Cause
I
don’t know.”

Retrieving his bait now, nudging it in front of those shadows, he said, “She’d been suspicious, she would’ve confronted you, something. She didn’t like liars.”

“I never lied to her. Or you.”

“Hell of a difference between nothing-but-the-truth and the whole truth.”

The leading shadow surged forward and hit his lure. The reel whirred. Whistling, Thorn held his tip down, pointing toward where the jack was running, out to sea, darker water.

“What is it?”

“Just a jack,” Thorn said as he reeled back some line. It took him about five minutes, but he brought the jack next to the boat. A jack crevalle, went about four pounds.

“You just release it?” Sarah was standing, watching the dazed fish drifting unhooked beside the boat. Its grogginess passed, and it flicked out of sight.

“Yeah, torture and release.”

“Noble sport,” she said. “I can see why you gave it up.”

“I’m rekindling my enthusiasm. It sure tunes up the reflexes.”

“Cranking in a fish, that tunes your reflexes? I can’t see it. Maybe if you’re going to eat them.”

“Why don’t you try a nap, take a load off your puritanism,” Thorn said.

He cast as far as he could, not a shadow in sight, and began a slow retrieve, jigging it every now and then. He said, “I think our relationship is better off when our feet are waving around in the air. We get in trouble when we try to compare the lengths of our morals.”

Sarah stood up and came around to the swivel seat. She sat and revolved it so she was looking at Thorn.

“Do you feel remorse, Thorn? Any remorse?”

He looked at her, back out to the water.

“I do,” he said. “And I don’t.”

“You can’t have it both ways.”

“You know. I got two-pound test line on this. I have to special order the stuff. You use this thread to tie buttons onto shirts. It breaks if you think about it too hard. That’s where the sport is.”

Sarah said, “Giving them a chance. Making it hard on yourself.”

“You can’t lift a soggy slice of bread out of the water with this line. I’d say it gives them a damn good chance.”

“You’d give them more of a chance if you didn’t use anything, just wait out here and see if they’ll jump in the boat.”

“They give me something, I give them something back.” He finished reeling in the line and cast it immediately. He’d spotted something. A ghost, hovering, moving ahead, hovering again. He twitched the line.

“What could you give them?”

“Knowledge,” Thorn said. “I’m improving the gene pool, making them more wary.”

The bonefish smacked the lure. Thorn lurched, caught himself, watched the line sizzle off the reel. He had wound four hundred yards of that narrow-gauge thread on his reel, four hundred yards of monofilament dragging through the salt water, resisting the powerhouse fish. But that was all that would tire it, because Thorn had taken the drag off. If the line didn’t slow him, it’d be free in a few more yards, roaming for a week or two with a rusting hook in its lip.

There was only a turn or two of line left on the reel when the run stopped. Thorn won back a few yards of it, delicately cranking. Alert. Holding his breath, that fragile line taut. Even the slightest twitch of the bonefish while he was reeling in would snap it. Thorn tried to send his mind out to the creature, anticipate its reviving energy, its next spurt.

He cranked, paused. Cranked a few more turns, paused longer. Even a puff of wind, rocking the boat against the tension of the line, would rupture the connection.

Sarah said, “I wonder if it knows what’s happening, that it’s being sacrificed for the higher good? Satisfying the spiritual needs of the ruling species, all that.”

“It knows.”

He ate up a few more yards, his reel now a quarter refilled. The finest, sheerest awareness awakening. Threading a miniature needle, sighting a hummingbird through a long-distance scope, tuning in the faintest shortwave signal. Every inhalation straining the tensile strength of his line.

“If I had a pair of scissors,” said Sarah. “If I had a razor blade.”

The next run came with the reel half full. But even if Thorn had had a thousand yards of line, that fish would have spun it off. The reel singing, Thorn smiling inside himself.

“Good for her,” said Sarah.

“Good for all of us,” said Thorn.

Thorn fished until noon, aiming at shadows. He anchored the skiff at different angles around the perimeter of the scattered patch reefs. His casting skill returning. With Kate in the last few years, he had only fished for meat, drop a line beside the boat down a hundred feet and haul up a mutton snapper. His sure hand, the carefully calibrated toss had deserted him, but now, after four hours of it, the muscles were remembering.

At noon they ate the cold chicken and pickles and potato salad that Sarah had picked up at the Largo Shopper.

Thorn put his empty beer can in the bait box. He said, “Couldn’t you change things, have Amos meet us in some lawyer’s office for the closing?”

“You kidding? Amos in a lawyer’s office?”

“Yeah,” Thorn said. “I guess you’re right. Well, anyway. You better bring along the Colt.”

“I was planning to,” she said.

Thorn cast his fly at a sparkle twenty yards away. Hit it. Retrieved. Cast at a blade of passing turtle grass. Direct hit. A few more days and he’d be able to lay a number two hook on a barracuda flashing by at thirty miles an hour.

Sugarman had been sitting in the pro shop behind a rack of golf pants for three days, staring at the row of town houses across the street. He was very polite, moving aside when one of the rich geezers was passing down the aisle, looking for a new plaid Sansabelt. But he knew he was getting on the pro’s nerves.

Sugarman sure didn’t like it any more than the pro did. But it was what was going to crack this thing. An address of a guy who was a friend of a guy whose teeth had washed ashore. The eye patch guy who had come in with the tide had once had a root canal done on a rear molar. He had three other teeth rot away and had needed the Brooklyn Bridge to keep things together in there.

Sugarman had trotted the X rays from Key West to Key Largo to every dentist in the county. He’d sat in so many waiting rooms now he’d memorized the July
Reader’s Digest
. Finally a dentist in Islamorada had said it looked like the guy had suffered from internal resorption. Teeth were rotting away from within for no apparent reason. Sugarman almost told the guy, oh, yes, there’s a reason all right. The guy was a damn killer.

So anyway, this dentist recommends a doctor in Fort Lauderdale who specializes in internal resorption. Sugarman calls, the guy’s on vacation, he tracks him down long-distance in North Carolina, gets the name of another dentist who is also a specialist in this area, an office in Boca Raton. So Sugarman takes a day and drives up to Boca, and this guy takes one look at the X rays and says, “Stillman. Dr. Roger Stillman in Palm Beach.” So it’s back in the van, and all this is on his own time, back in the van, up to this fancy Palm Beach dentist, and there’s Sugarman sitting in the waiting room with chauffeurs holding poodles and rich old guys in white suits and bow ties.