No one home. No car, no lights.
He considered scribbling a note, but couldn’t think of what to say. That their son was mixed up with Cameron Prince. That Prince had stopped by Thorn’s house earlier today on some mysterious mission. That Prince had worked alongside an old friend of Thorn’s, Leslie Levine, and had been present at her violent death.
The sequence unsettled Thorn, but without anything more definite than that, he decided that leaving a note for April would only scare the shit out of her for no good reason.
So he got back in the VW, joined the ruthless traffic, and worked his way across the city, back to the turnpike, and headed south to the Keys. As he drove, a loop of images rolled in his head, all of them featuring Flynn Moss. The young man’s striking face, the stubborn clench of his jaw, those eyes that were both defiant and anxious as if he were always bracing himself for some fast-approaching calamity that only he could see. Thorn could even hear the kid’s rich, plummy actor’s voice.
Such a demanding career Flynn had chosen. Assuming the identities and mouthing the words of imagined people, giving flesh to fictions. Standing for hours before fussy directors who critiqued his slightest gestures. Required to perform his work in full view of the probing cameras, the brutal glower of lights, a man fully exposed but completely hidden. There, but not there.
Last year this talented young man, this son, had come as a staggering revelation to Thorn. He’d never imagined or wished for children, never felt unfulfilled or less complete than friends like Sugar, who had fathered two girls. But the discovery of a grown son had blindsided Thorn and left him reeling.
Flynn’s mother, April Moss, was now a writer for The Miami Herald. But a couple of decades back when she was barely out of high school, she and Thorn had spent a few rambunctious hours in his Key Largo bedroom, then she bid him good-bye and he hadn’t seen her again till last year, a quarter of a century later, when he discovered she’d borne twin boys from that single encounter. Sawyer and Flynn.
Days after Thorn met them for the first time, Sawyer attacked Thorn and April, tried to kill them both, and died in the ensuing struggle. Placing the blame for his brother’s death squarely on Thorn, Flynn had rejected any future contact.
To have discovered the twins and to have lost both with such finality within days of that revelation had whipsawed Thorn so badly he’d sunk deeper into isolation than was already his habit. It had been months since he’d belly-laughed or felt a tingle of arousal for any of the women who wandered across his path. He’d been experiencing the longest period of celibacy in his adult life. A condition he’d begun to feel might last indefinitely.
And there was another thing. He knew it didn’t sound like much, but in the last year, Thorn had begun to talk to himself. A new, disquieting habit. Mumbling beneath his breath, he found himself describing the rosy afternoon light or the foul reek of low tide, or whispering his complaints about the airless heat. Sitting alone at the breakfast table retelling his dreams aloud.
Sometimes he found himself quietly spelling out the step-by-step process he was using to tie a bonefish fly or the course he was navigating to some secret fishing hole. Soliloquies spoken in a murmur, his fantasies, his stray recollections. As though compelled to share his concerns and expertise, the trivia of his daily rituals, with some missing party, a ghostly presence hovering at his shoulder.
Of course he knew what he was doing and how pathetic it was. All these months he’d been pretending to share his days with Flynn, bonding with an absent son.
In the brief time he’d been around Flynn, they’d managed only a few strained conversations. He knew little of Flynn’s history, almost nothing of his childhood or the source of his passion for acting. A year had passed without his seeing the kid. Yet simply encountering his image on Cameron Prince’s gym wall roused Thorn like nothing else in these last twelve months.
A few miles beyond the sprawl of Miami, he pulled off at a gas station in Homestead, filled his tank and bought a Budweiser and a bag of peanuts, and half an hour later, by the time he crossed the Jewfish Creek Bridge and entered Key Largo, he’d finished the beer and the nuts, and he’d decided what he had to do next.
FIVE
SIX IN THE MORNING, THURSDAY, the ninth of August, Claude Sellers was in a long-term parking lot near Miami International. Keeping his head down while he applied magnetic AT&T logos to both sides of the white Ford van—an image of a white globe wrapped in blue swirls.
Fuck if he knew what that image was supposed to be. The earth with Saturn rings? Did that make sense? Hell, no. But you could bet someone was getting seriously rich designing the goofy-ass crap. Rich fucks, everywhere you looked, and hardly any were doing anything useful.