“A hospital, goddamn it.”
A man appeared behind Cassandra. Bearded, long dreadlocks, a bearish guy holding a shotgun at port arms. “She’ll be taken care of,” he said. “We’ve got doctors friendly to the cause. Trust us, she’ll do fine. You guys did a good thing up there.”
“Did we?” Thorn said.
After they’d stretched Leslie out in the back of a Ford van, Flynn came over. Thorn was leaning against one of the girders of the cistern. The cistern Cameron Prince had taken such an interest in. Going to build one like it himself someday.
“I’m leaving,” Flynn said.
“What?”
“I’m going with them.”
“Where?”
“Wherever they’re going.”
Thorn opened his mouth but Flynn reached out and touched a hand to Thorn’s lips. “It’s what I want to do. What I have to do.”
Flynn took his hand from Thorn’s lips and opened his arms, and Thorn stepped forward into the embrace. For a long moment his son wept on his shoulder. His son who’d taken such terrible risks for his cause.
Flynn released him and stepped back. Thorn told him good-bye. Said he loved him. Keeping it simple.
Flynn nodded. “And I love you, too, Dad.”
He watched Flynn walk away with the bearded man. Cassandra, who had been standing by the van, walked across the gravel to Thorn. As she approached, she reached to her mouth and pried loose the prosthetic appliance that had disfigured her face and slipped it into the pocket of her jacket with the aplomb of an actress effortlessly shedding one role for another.
Without the misshapen mouth, she was a striking woman. Her cheekbones were sharp, skin glossy and clear, and her large eyes were dark and electric. Wide shoulders, head held high, an easy poise in her step, something vaguely aristocratic about her bearing.
“I want to thank you for your help tonight. You acted with courage and honor in a very challenging circumstance. Don’t worry about your son. Flynn’s a tough young man. We’ll watch out for him. Bring him along.”
Before Thorn could reply, she turned and walked back to the van. He stood watching as she climbed into it and the van turned around on the gravel drive and disappeared down the entrance lane. He listened to the engine until the van moved so far away he lost it in the night noises, the dry whisper of palm fronds, the slap and jostle of the restless ocean against the seawall.
FORTY-FOUR
A WEEK AFTER THE ATTACK on Turkey Point, the case was officially closed, but Sheffield was still reviewing the events of that night. In his room at the Silver Sands, while he waited for Thorn to arrive, for the dozenth time he watched one of the security videos from the night of the assault, playing it back on his TV, the view from an overhead, wide-angle camera that captured the whole control room.
He’d turned the sound down to mute the screams and gunfire, so all he could hear were the beach sounds beyond his door, the surf crashing against the white sands, a comforting noise while he watched Cameron Prince, a monstrous masterpiece of muscle, walk bowlegged from the weight of the gator under each arm and the python slung around his shoulders.
Must’ve been five hundred pounds of squirming reptiles, but Prince walked with a steady gait, followed by Leslie Levine, cradling a single gator of four feet, its snout duct-taped. The control room lit by a few emergency lights.
Frank watched as Cameron and Leslie cut the duct tape, set the creatures loose, and scared the shit out of engineers and hard-hatted workers who were scrambling to get the plant back online before the uranium heated up to such a white-hot molten state that a great hole would be burned right through the earth’s core. As one hyperventilating news anchor would put it the next day.
As Leslie and Cameron were fleeing the control room, a half dozen of Claude’s security men entered and blocked their exit. A quick, sloppy gunfight erupted. Leslie wounded, Prince hit several times but seeming unfazed.
Dozens of workers in the big room poured out the exits, screaming and pushing each other aside, a couple of them wounded in the cross fire.
In the dim light, those half-assed rent-a-cops somehow failed to see Leslie and Prince slip out a side door, and they didn’t recognize the other members of their team when they entered. Firing at their own. Rent-a-cop versus rent-a-cop. A couple injured. A chaotic scene of shadow men shooting at shadow men while the gators and the python roamed up and down the aisles.
Frank ran the video back to the beginning once again, though there was nothing new to see. No clues, nothing that hadn’t already been explained and documented and substantiated by multiple eyewitnesses. It was all in the reports on his desk at work, typed up handsomely by Marta.