Under Cover of Daylight (9 page)

There was a footlocker on one side of his bed where he kept his underwear and socks. And on the other side another footlocker, which was his nightstand and where he kept, wrapped in an oily rag, the blue Colt Python. Four-inch barrel, .357 magnum. The pistol he’d once dreamed of using on Dallas James.

E
VERY LOAD FIRED FROM IT
, every careful squeeze and bruised palm had been for Dallas James. He’d bought it late one night in the parking lot behind the Elks Club his junior year in high school. Hidden it from Kate and Dr. Bill, and had spent a year practicing with it in the woods. Hell of a wallop, made him flinch just to raise it toward the target. But wing somebody with that and he’d stay down, traumatize him out of action.

Thorn hadn’t ever been proud of the Colt. Had never flaunted it in front of his buddies. It had always made him queasy to hold it, loaded, leather holster off. As if he were looking over the edge of a tall building. Legs drained. Heart wallowing. Afternoon after afternoon of his boyhood, he had forced himself to overcome that feeling in the woods south of his house.

He was only an average marksman, even with all those hours of shooting. He could never group more than four within a baseball-size circle, always wavered at least one round a few inches away. Passable, but nothing more.

Funny thing was, he’d left the Colt behind the day he hitched up to Miami to settle up finally with Dallas James. He hadn’t even been tempted when the time came. All those afternoons in the woods fantasizing, that had just been to learn how hatred felt, to practice it, to learn to hold it up clear of the rest of the emotions. The .357 had been just a tool for doing that.

For the last few weeks he’d been meaning to make a present of the Colt to Sugarman or maybe take a boat ride out beyond the reef and feed it to the sea. But whenever he got ready to do it, he found he had no stomach for opening the trunk, touching it again after twenty years. He always discovered something important that needed doing.

When he finished the last Crazy Charlie, he went out onto his porch, leaned against the railing, and for a while he watched a heron standing in the shallows next to his dock. Its neck coiled, beak aimed at some shiny shadow. Finally, after minutes in that pose, it struck, nabbed a silver pinfish, and walked over to the mangroves in its stiff-legged gait.

Thorn walked down his stairs, humming, smiling as the words came back to him, phrase by phrase. “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Such a silly song, about such a silly feeling. He walked, humming the words, out the dock to the concrete picnic table on the point. He sat out there and looked east across the island to the sunrise sprouting through a wall of ragged clouds. Was this a rosy-fingered dawn? He’d never got that. Rosy-fingered? Never seen the fingers, but he’d kept looking. As Thorn watched, the clouds grew pink, their fringes darkened. He should ask Sarah about it. All that college. She’d know.

He stretched some creakiness out of his neck, stood, and touched his toes. Something to kick-start his heart. He’d been feeling it lately. The first nicks. Bruises taking too long to disappear, a burn in the knee joints in the morning. The squeaky wheels of the winged chariot gaining on him.

Sugarman’s patrol car came crunching down his drive. Thorn waved him out to the dock. A part of the ritual of Saturdays. Sugarman, off from the barroom brawl shift, came over to wind down, shoot the shit, let the sun come up before going home. He was back in his off-duty things, cutoffs and a blue work shirt.

Sugarman went about six-three, leaner now than ten years ago. The only features he’d gotten from his black father were the black, coiled hair and the dark eyes. His skin was lighter than Thorn’s tan. He had a straight, almost delicate nose and his mother’s sharp cheekbones. Long lashes. If Thorn had just seen this guy on the street, he would’ve guessed Sugarman put on a Lena Horne revue in some late-night Key West bar.

“I brought the book back.” He dropped the novel on the table and sat down with a sigh.

Thorn asked him how he’d liked it.

“Truth is, Thorn, I couldn’t get into it. Got as far as him hitching down U.S. One on drugs.”

“That’s the first page.”

“Yeah, well, I skipped around some, too. I’m sure it’s a good book. I appreciate your loaning it to me and all. I don’t know, I just didn’t have any feel for the way it was going. The way it’s written. It’s like the sentences don’t sound like anything I recognize.”

“It’s got Key West in it, fishing the flats, gunplay, all the stuff you like.”

Sugarman shook his head sadly. “Jeannie read it. She flipped it open and started reading it out loud and what the hell. She came right to a place where two of them were going at it doggy style, and she asked me what kind of books you were trying to give me.”

“Whoops.”

“It’s OK.” Sugarman picked up the book and fanned himself with it. “You know Jeannie, hell, she’s not against sex, but it’s got to have a born-again thing in it. She read and read this book, and she said, ‘Well, maybe it has some Bible references and maybe it doesn’t.’ ”

Thorn laughed.

“Well, look at you,” Sugarman said, reaching out and touching a finger to Thorn’s bruised cheekbone. “I heard about this. Those wood rat meetings can get rough.”

“Some nail whacker,” said Thorn. “Giving Kate a hard time.”

“You got to keep your left higher,” Sugarman said.

“Kate’s coaching me already.” Thorn looked down at the darkened knuckles on his right hand. “So,” he said, “what else is new on the Jeannie front? You getting that worked out?”

“I’ll tell you, Thorn. It’s just more horny ideas every day. This week it was all One Corinthians, Chapter Twelve.” Sugarman drummed his fingers on the stone table, looked off at the bay. “About how there’s parts of the body we think of as inferior, but God wants us to honor them, which she takes to mean my pecker. And I’m saying there’s nothing inferior about my pecker, and she says that’s exactly right, and she won’t be satisfied until she’s spent half the night down there, between my legs, doing everything she can think of to honor my pecker, talking to it, for chrissakes.”

Trying to set a serious look on his face, Thorn said, “What’s she say to it?”

“I don’t know,” Sugarman said. Worn out thinking about it. “She’s down there talking to it, I can’t hear her. She might have been praying with it.”

“Maybe you should just lean back, enjoy it for what it is. Stop making a deal out of it.”

“Yeah, I know.” Sugarman stood up, combed his fingers through his hair. “This new minister at the church, Robert Redford type, he’s got them in Bible study groups, all talking about sex and marriage and the kind of stuff you never thought you’d hear in a church.”

“California comes to Key Largo,” Thorn said. “It’ll be hot-tub baptisms before you know it.”

“I guess it’s OK,” Sugarman said. “It’s sure perked up our sex life.” He picked up the book again, looked at the jacket photo. Fanned himself with the book.

Thorn said, “You know, there are those would doubt you. Who’d think you are fantasizing all this about Jeannie being a born-again nympho to cover up an empty sex life?”

“You want to see my pecker? It’s in shreds. She’s like this for, what, five months almost? In heat and more heat.” Sugarman took his eyes out of focus, seemed to be revisiting the recent past.

“Or maybe you could just tell her straight out it’s too much for you. That you’d rather go bowling. Maybe that’s the thing, get her out bowling.” Thorn thought, Good God, bowling!

Sugarman gave Thorn a halfhearted smile. “I couldn’t do that. It’s a religious thing now. It’d be like I didn’t believe in God or something. What was it two weeks ago? Still Corinthians, Fifteen or something, that week it was about celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies and how there is glory in both of them. Glory, glory. I was in pain. That week, bad pain.”

“Well,” Thorn said. “I don’t know, man, I’m having a problem working up a lot of sympathy here. Maybe she just loves you. Ever think of that? Just loves you a whole lot.”

He considered it and said, “Yeah, well. It’s not that bad, I guess. She’s always there, cooks good, interested in my work, who’s been beating up their wife, who’s been brawling at the Caribbean Club. All the gossip. I never knew, man, how much gossip there was before I took this job.”

“Well, quit complaining so much,” Thorn said, feeling a grin take shape. “Glory?”

“She’d yell it out. I shouldn’t be telling you this stuff. But she’d yell out, ‘Glory, glory.’ Bucking around, ‘glory, glory.’ ”

“Stop, stop.”

“How about you? We never talk about you, man. What’re you hiding these days?”

“You mean, do I invite ladies over here to read the Bible?”

“How’d it work out with that weight lifter? Darcy?”

“Yeah, Darcy,” Thorn said, managing a smile. “Where you been? That was finished in June. I was too puny for her. She was always complaining about my pecs, my lats. Pinching me, checking for body fat, like that.”

“Better your pecs than your pecker,” Sugarman said. “Well, what about that other one? Sally?”

“Sarah,” said Thorn. “Things are good there. I like her.”

Sugarman craned his head forward, peered at Thorn, crooking an eyebrow. “Is this the fever? Is this what I been noticing in my old buddy? His head lifted a little higher.”

“What’re you, a love narc? Gonna bust me for excessive smiling?”

“Hey,” he said. “I should’ve known. You’re all lit up. Friend should notice something like that, not need to be told.”

Thorn said, “I have a lot of energy these days. I feel good.”

“You always had energy.”

“No, but this is different. This is real energy. That other, that was sublimation,” Thorn said. “Driven, but not driving.”

“You want to talk about this, you got to use words I know.”

“I feel good, is all I’m saying. She makes me feel good.”

“Well, now that’s good.” Sugarman leaned forward, stroking his chin like he wore a goatee there. Peering into Thorn’s face. “But the question is, bud, do you make her feel good?”

Thorn inhaled, held it, gave Sugarman a cagey smile. “I think I do. It seems I do.”

“A new man, Thorn. That’s how you strike me.” He clapped Thorn on the back.

“She’s been pressuring me a little,” Thorn said. “Tell her things about my past.”

“What past?” Sugarman said. “You got no past. You been on this rock all your life.”

“Yeah, well. About the accident. All that,” Thorn said. “And hey, I got a past, things I’m not proud of. Things I haven’t even told you, buddy.”

“Yeah?” Sugarman said, leaning forward on his elbows. “So? You going to tell me or what?”

Thorn watched his fingers drumming on the table. He said, “No, I guess not.”

“That good, huh,” Sugarman said, cocking an eyebrow.

“You hide anything from Jeannie?”

“If I had anything to hide, I sure as hell would. She’d stand up in church and confess to everybody what it was.”

“I mean, if it was something you weren’t sure how she’d take it. She might leave you, it was that bad. Or you were worried if you didn’t tell her, you’d have to leave her, ’cause there’d always be this big vacant area, this lie between you.”

“You’re doing it again, man. Talking that way.”

“I’ve found somebody, that’s all it is, and I don’t want to lose her.”

“And just in time.”

Thorn asked him, in time for what?

“Thorn, it’s serious danger out there. I’ve been very worried for you. It’s like you date these days you need a full-body condom.”

Thorn laughed. “A what!”

“Lubricated on the inside so you can slip into it. Nipple end, like an air tank. I mean, it’s just an idea I had. Might be a little awkward and all, but you could forget herpes, AIDS, all those new VDs. Stay in there till you find somebody’s clean, and then you crawl out. Not just your pecker. Hands, mouth, the whole body.”

“Great, Sugar.” Thorn looking off at Blackwater Sound, at the dazzle of sunlight there. A breeze whisking the edges off the hot morning.

“We get all these pamphlets at the department. AIDS, VD stuff. All these people exchanging bodily fluids. Things of that nature. It’s just an idea. A full-body condom. I think it might go.

Thorn said, “Yeah, and for down here, for the mosquitoes. Instead of bug spray. Man, I’d buy a dozen.” Thorn told himself, what the hell, he’d rather be talking about Sarah some more, but this was all right. “And let’s see. Yeah, you’d have to have different colors, too. A black one for fancy dinners. Pink for going down to Key West.”

Sugarman laughed, a tear squeezing out of one eye. Thorn was flushed, feeling a giddy swell in his chest. “Sort of like a wet suit, but without any openings.”

“Like galoshes, but all the way up,” Sugarman said.

Thorn said, “You put it on like a sock hat, roll it all the way down.”

Sugarman spurring him on: “Yeah, yeah.”

Thorn said, “They could double as handcuffs, roll a big guy up in a little one.”

The radio in the patrol car squawked, and Sugarman wiped his eyes, let go of a long sigh. “That’s me, sounds like.”

While he talked on the radio, Thorn watched the last pink bleed away from the eastern sky. A small flock of egrets drifted low over the hardwood hammock, floated down on the grassy lawn near the shore. Sugarman was having a long conversation with his squawk box.

Out on the edge of the flats Captain Ernie was poling across the low tide. Thorn stood up, waved out to him. He jogged back upstairs for Ernie’s flies. Feeling a smile taking a firm hold. He stood up there before going in for the flies, relishing it. Like the windows were all thrown open, airing the place out.

When he returned, Sugarman was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. His face had gone empty, eyes lightless.

“Something’s happened.”

“I can
see
that,” Thorn said. “At home?”

“No,” Sugarman said. He started over, voice official. “Kate have a charter yesterday, you know of?”

“I don’t know. I think so, yeah. She mentioned it.”

“Did she mention the name of the party?”

“Sugar.”

“Does she keep a logbook?”