Blackwater Sound

‘Not really.’

On the kid’s thumb was a bandage with blood seeping through the gauze.

Thorn took a slow pull on the beer. The kid held the knife at his side.

‘So how long were you out there?’ the kid said. ‘Before the crash.’

‘Why?’

‘Me and my sister were fishing over behind that island. We didn’t see you. You just kind of popped up out of nowhere.’

‘I didn’t see you either. Not till after the crash.’

The kid smirked as if he’d tricked some vital detail out of Thorn.

‘The three of you didn’t seem to be getting your hands real dirty.’

‘Two of us,’ the kid said. ‘Me and my sister.’

‘I saw three,’ Thorn said. ‘You and her and a guy in a cowboy hat.’

‘Yeah, well, I guess you’re mistaken, crabcake.’ The kid looked back toward the TV lights. ‘And we pulled in a few survivors. Maybe not as many as you, but who’s counting?’

‘That’s not how it looked from my seat.’

‘What’re you, the head Eagle Scout? Handing out the merit badges.’

‘Your cooler looked pretty full. Must’ve caught a ton of fish.’

‘We caught our share.’

‘But you still got the creases in your shirt.’

‘So?’

‘So you weren’t out there fishing. You weren’t out there doing anything. You haven’t broken a sweat.’

The boy’s smile went sour. He peered into Thorn’s eyes and his knife rose in what looked like a reflexive gesture. As if his first instinct was to slash the throat of anyone who called his bluff.

Then he halted and took a quick look around at all the potential witnesses and he lowered the blade. He stepped back and raked Thorn with a look.

‘If you weren’t fishing,’ Thorn said, ‘maybe you were bird-watching.’

A breeze drifted in off the bay, heavy with the sickening fumes. The kid snapped his knife shut and slid it into his pocket. He glanced toward the TV lights, then turned back to Thorn. His fingers toyed with the lump in his pocket.

‘You know what you need, asshole?’

‘A better haircut?’ Thorn said.

‘You need a little negative reinforcement, that’s what. Like maybe somebody should drop a tombstone on your head.’

The kid flashed Thorn an ugly sneer, then swung around and sauntered away into the bedlam.

Thorn drifted back to the docks and watched the Coast Guard and marine patrol bringing in the bodies on stretchers. Most of the living were already on their way to hospitals, and now it was time for the dead. The men worked quietly, with the grim efficiency of those who trained for just such disasters. For the next half hour Thorn nursed his beer and stayed in the shadows, watching the boats unload the charred and mangled remains. Getting glimpses of bodies so twisted and broken they might have been trampled by a stampede of buffalo.

When he could stomach it no more, he located the Heart Pounder, brought the skiff over, and lashed it to the cleats. He started the engine and headed out into the dark, staying away from the searchlights and rescue boats. He headed across the black bay, and when he was a half mile beyond the crash site, he opened up the engine, rising onto the smooth sea. Around him the moonlight coated the bay like a crisp film of ice.

With his running lights shut off, Thorn steered his phantom ship south, plowing across that murky void. A cold shiver whispered beneath his shirt. He took a last look behind him, north across the Everglades where the black sky pulsed with lightning. Then he turned his back on the mainland, gripped the wheel, and put his face in the wind, standing stiff and empty, blinded by starlight.

3 (#ulink_73448f9c-3425-558f-9d94-24edc2f0c2a2)

Thorn made it home by two that morning. Totally wiped out, but too wired to sleep, he sat out on the porch of his stilt-house and watched Blackwater Sound twinkle and listened to the distant rumbles of thunder. At dawn he went inside and took a shower. He got dressed and stood out on the porch for a while watching the water brighten. The mourning doves that roosted in the tamarind tree were coming and going in twos and threes, resettling briefly, then exploding from their perches in a panicked flailing of wings. A small boat muttered by and he watched the ripples work toward his coral and limestone dock.

He went back into the house, stared at his face in the bathroom mirror for a while, then stripped off his shorts and T-shirt and took another shower, scrubbing harder this time. His back muscles were sore. His fingers and arms ached. He toweled off, chose a fresh pair of shorts and another T-shirt, and put them on. Still, his skin felt strange. Too tight, too clammy.

At nine he was waiting outside the Key Largo Library when June Marcus, the tall, dark-haired librarian, unlocked the front door. She looked at him for a second or two as if she didn’t recognize him, then said an uncertain hello and stepped back out of his way.

‘You were at the crash,’ she said. ‘The airplane that went down.’

‘How’d you know that?’

‘Saw you on the news this morning,’ she said. ‘You were pulling somebody out of the water. An old man.’

He nodded.

‘It must’ve been awful out there. I can’t even imagine. All that carnage.’

In the reference section, June showed him how to run a computer search. It took only a minute or two. Morgan Braswell was on the cover of several magazines from a few years back. The library had hard copies of several of them. Business monthlies. Long articles. A couple of newspaper stories. Big turnaround at her father’s company. She flashed a variety of smiles, arms crossed beneath her breasts, looking satisfied, in control, a woman full of bold confidence. From Tragedy to Triumph. That was the theme. After the heartbreaking loss of her older brother in a boating accident, the family business floundered, disintegrated, but with courage and a maturity beyond her years, Morgan managed to pick up the pieces and rebuild her father’s company into a major player in the technology sector.

June Marcus photocopied the articles and didn’t ask why he wanted them. She patted him on the shoulder as he walked out of the library.

He took them back to his house and sat out at the picnic table. It was a hot morning, the breeze off the Atlantic shaving away a few degrees. Northeast above Miami, dark blue clouds hovered in the sky. The cold front was going nowhere. He read the articles, looked at Morgan Braswell’s pictures. Read them again.

At noon he nagged his Volkswagen Beetle to life and drove out to US 1 and headed up the eighteen-mile strip to Miami. Thirty minutes later, at Cutler Ridge, the rain started and didn’t let up till he was in Palm Beach. It was after three o’clock when he found the Braswells’ neighborhood. They lived in a two-story Mediterranean villa three blocks from the ocean. Oak trees lined their street. Fancy lamps on brass poles were planted along the sidewalk. He drove past the house and parked half a block away. He sat for a while staring down the street toward the Atlantic. There was a pleasant lift to the breeze rushing in off the sea, cool and sweet, seasoned by money.

No traffic. No pedestrians on the sidewalk. Most of the wealthy snowbirds had already fled north to avoid the first upticks of the thermometer. A snowy egret stood on the snipped lawn next to his car and regarded him haughtily. Thorn wasn’t sure why he’d driven all this way, wasted the day, fought I-95 traffic. The photocopies lay in the passenger seat. He picked them up, glanced through them, and dropped them back. These people weren’t any of his business. He had things to do. Bonefish flies to tie, lunkers to catch. He didn’t need this. He’d saved a bunch of people’s lives. He should be feeling good this morning. He should be rejoicing. Not feeling so numb, so crazy.

He started the car and made a U-turn and drove back past the Braswells’ house. Pink and purple bougainvillea climbed a trellis in the side yard. The cross-hatched wood had pulled loose from its posts and was sagging toward the house next door. The Braswells’ grass was scraggy with yellow patches and weeds. Flakes of white paint curled off the window frames. In an upstairs window a broken pane was covered with what looked like a square of sandwich wrap. The mail slot in the front door was rimmed with rust. Somebody hadn’t been paying much attention to maintenance.

He drove west beyond I-95 into the golf communities. Heron Glen, Willow Walk, The Banyans. Miles of red tile roofs and guardhouses and endlessly repeating franchise strips. He kept going till he was beyond the turnpike, beyond the last stucco wall, the last rigid row of royal palms. The land was scrubby and wet and of no use to anyone except alligators and woodstorks. Only an occasional straggling 7-Eleven and a couple of industrial parks marked the desolate landscape.

Seven miles beyond the turnpike, Thorn pulled into a complex of low, windowless buildings. At the guardhouse a young woman with a yellow buzz cut stepped out with a clipboard in her hand. She wore a sidearm in a glossy leather holster and a tailored gray uniform that showed off her bulky shoulders and cinched waist. There were spikes in the road, tilted forward to rip the tread off tires. A yellow steel crossing arm striped with red closed off the entrance.

She bent to his open window and didn’t smile. Didn’t say a word. She looked at him, looked at the passenger seat, peered into the back.

‘Am I in the right place?’

‘I doubt it,’ she said.