Blackwater Sound

She nodded and said okay, yes, she would go along this one last time.

‘Good. Maybe you’ll be like your mother. She always brought us luck.’

‘Yeah,’ Morgan said. ‘A lot of luck.’

‘It wouldn’t be right if you weren’t there.’

‘But when the battery dies, it’s over. No more trips. No more chasing.’

His smile drifted away, eyes blurring.

‘And you’ll come back to work. Start minding the store again.’

He blinked and returned from somewhere far off.

‘I know this has been hard on you, Morgan. I’m very proud of you, the way you stepped in and took charge. I couldn’t have managed without your help.’

‘So you’ll come back and everything will be like it was.’

‘Someday, sure,’ he said. ‘This can’t go on forever.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It can’t.’

He took her hand and gave it a squeeze, then swung back to his work.

Morgan stood behind him for another moment and watched her father shift through the screens. Entering new data, studying the small mutations that this fresh information made on the global model.

She watched him type, watched him click the mouse. She reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder but he did not register her presence. He simply continued to type, to move from screen to screen, entering the latest information, then switching back to the global chart to see what effect his new data had on Big Mother’s position.

Morgan closed her eyes and tried to focus all her being on the palm of her hand. Tried to feel the energy that resonated from her father. But all she could sense were the tiny adjustments of muscle and sinew as he typed, as he clicked, as he peered at the cold, bright, deathless screen.

4 (#ulink_ba0b4864-8330-57b7-8d90-f7f25607717c)

The bar at Sundowners was quiet. Willie Nelson crooning softly from the overhead speakers, the bald, heavyset bartender whistling along. Only Thorn and a couple of schoolteachers on spring break from Chicago staring at each other across the bar. A short, blocky blonde and a tall redhead with a piercing laugh. They talked to him for a while. Told him what they did for a living, where they were from. Going home tomorrow, back to the grind. All those papers to grade. After ten minutes of flirting, they bought him a round, then came around the bar, took the stools on either side of him to watch him drink it. The redhead giggled. They were drunker than he was. Having a lot more fun.

They leaned behind his back and whispered to each other. The blonde whooped with laughter. Thorn poured the Bilge Burner down his throat and stared straight ahead at their reflections in the dark glass that looked out on the canal. The alcohol wasn’t working. The smell of scorched flesh still lingered and he could hear whimpers echoing from the shadows of the bar.

The blonde cupped her hand around Thorn’s ear and leaned close.

‘Can I interest you in an orgasm,’ she whispered. ‘Two-for-one special.’

The redhead scratched a message on his wrist with her fingernail.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’ the blonde said. ‘What’s that mean? Sorry.’

‘It means I’m not that kind of guy. At least not tonight.’

‘Every guy is that kind of guy,’ said the blonde.

‘He’s telling us he’s gay, Charlotte.’

‘He won’t be gay after we get through with him,’ Charlotte said.

‘You’re drunk,’ said her friend.

‘Well, of course I am. This is the Keys, isn’t it? That’s the law down here. Get drunk, stay drunk. Isn’t that the law, Mr Scruffy Keys Man?’

‘Thanks for the drink,’ Thorn said, and got up and moved around the semicircular bar.

For the next fifteen minutes the two schoolteachers glared at him and murmured to each other till finally Sugarman showed up.

‘Friends of yours?’ he said, nodding hello to the schoolteachers.

‘They think I’m gay.’

‘You don’t look gay,’ said Sugarman. ‘You look morose.’

Sugar was his oldest, closest friend. Jamaican father, Norwegian mother. From that odd mix, he’d inherited a quirky nature, a blend of hot-blooded and serene, sexy island rhythms and cool detachment, a jovial nature, a dissecting mind. He was strikingly handsome with short, dark, curly hair and a thin, straight nose and shrewd dark eyes. His mouth was supple and he had half a dozen different grins at his disposal. His skin was silky and its color was two shades lighter than Thorn’s tan. Wherever he went, Sugar got second looks. Once down in Key West, while walking along Duval, two breathless adolescents mistook him for some TV star and pestered Sugar for his autograph, making such a fuss that finally he signed their napkins to make them go away.

A few years back Sugarman resigned his job as a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy and opened a private investigation firm down in Tavernier. Since then he’d been scratching by on runaway kid cases and occasional security work. Enough to pay the mortgage and buy groceries, but no frills. Then last summer Jeannie, his wife since high school, decided she’d had enough of flirting with poverty. She filed for divorce. ‘Irreconcilable economic aspirations,’ is how Sugarman put it. Somehow, she won custody of Janey and Jackie, their twin girls. Jeannie carted the five-year-olds and the rest of her possessions up to Miami, where a few months later she moved in with some charlatan who was pocketing large sums by guiding weak-minded souls to their previous lives. Jeannie always had a soft spot for gurus.

‘You realize you’re a TV star, Thorn?’

‘I heard.’

‘They been running the same footage over and over. You’re in your skiff pulling some old guy out of the water. I’ve seen it half a dozen times already. An unidentified Good Samaritan. How’s it feel to be famous?’

‘Shitty,’ he said. ‘Very shitty.’

Sugarman ordered a Corona. The schoolteachers were arguing. The blonde wanted to move on to another bar. Her friend wanted to go to bed.

‘Thanks for coming, Sugar.’

‘Hey, you call, I come. That’s how it works.’

‘Something’s strange.’

‘Strange?’

‘About the crash.’

Sugarman took a longer look at him, and shook his head sadly.

‘Oh, no. Here we go.’

Sugar’s beer arrived and he removed the wedge of lime and took a sip.