Going Dark(14)

Tomorrow there’d be a news story in The Miami Herald, a kid tapping into the power line died while trying to save himself a few bucks. The bad economy was driving people to take terrible risks. So let this be a lesson to all those citizens contemplating current diversion.

Not that anyone read the paper anymore or took it seriously if they did.

Claude left the ladder behind, just a generic Ace Hardware brand, and was back in the van and on his way in thirty seconds.

Waiting at the first stoplight, he bent his head to the side and sniffed at the fumes clinging to his jumpsuit. Not the worst smell he’d ever inhaled.

But close.





SIX





JUST AFTER DAWN THURSDAY MORNING, Thorn started the Evinrude and let it idle while he put away the tubes of caulk and the pipe wrench he’d been using on the cistern repair yesterday.

Stowing them in the toolshed, he spotted an ancient pry bar hanging from a nail on the far wall. He took it down and weighed it in one hand, then tapped it hard against his open palm. It made a satisfying thunk.

He carried it to the dock and stepped down into the skiff and set the pry bar on the console. You never knew when you might need to force a locked door, a sticky window, or maybe whack someone across the face with a pound of rusty steel. A guy the size of Prince might require two whacks.

Back inside the house his Smith .357 was wrapped in an oily rag and stashed in a back closet. But Thorn decided against taking it. That pistol had saved his life more than once. But a handgun had a way of causing unintended consequences, upping the ante at crisis moments. He was weary of unintended consequences and even more weary of crisis moments. The pry bar would do.

Thorn was moving with controlled focus. Ignoring the shudder in his nerves. He tried to tell himself that Flynn was not in any danger. There was no conspiracy here, no sinister intrigue. Flynn had gotten mixed up with Prince for reasons having nothing to do with Leslie Levine or her suspicious death. Prince had been creeping around his property for some entirely innocent purpose. Maybe he was only checking out the cistern like he said.

But damn it, as hard as he tried to explain it away, he couldn’t ignore the weird overlap, coincidental connections that felt far from coincidental.

The Princes were old-guard Miamians. For decades the patriarch, Reginald Prince, had published the afternoon newspaper in Miami, battling righteously against political corruption and criminal enterprises of every stripe. When Reginald died, his son, Reggie, let the paper flounder. He hadn’t inherited the father’s warrior gene. In the fifties, Reggie married a Havana-born nightclub singer and turned Prince Key into a weekend retreat for his wife’s musician friends and for writers and artists and movie stars passing through town.

Growing up, Thorn heard stories about boozy orgies and high-stakes poker, congressmen and local leaders consorting with notorious actresses and mafiosi out on that island. Eventually Reggie and his wife abandoned the island for the mainland and faded from view. Then a few years back Reggie was arrested for bribing three Miami councilmen over a real estate deal. In only two generations the family had gone from crusading newsman to low-life scum.

As a teenager, Thorn was drawn to Prince Key by its shadowy history and romance. But the day he boated there and poked around the place, he found only the charred remnants of a few wooden structures, piles of litter, and dark clouds of voracious mosquitoes, and not a whiff of romance anywhere.

Now he stepped aboard, cast off the lines, and idled into the center of the lagoon, then headed out the narrow channel. As he reached open water, he hit the throttle hard, kicking the skiff onto plane.

He kept his eyes on the silky bay before him. He was hungover from a night of fever dreams, a rising dread about Flynn. He kept circling back to that hurried message Flynn had left on his answering machine. The more Thorn replayed it, the more worrisome it seemed.

Through the long night hours, Thorn passed in and out of sleep, debating whether to get involved or stay put, tormented by a flurry of scenes of past events when he’d answered some call and things had gone badly. Flynn’s face mingling with so many others, people Thorn had known, men and women, some long dead, those he’d tried to help and wound up failing, and some he’d managed to comfort or save. Snippets of fistfights and gunfire, flashes of knife blades, jerked him back to full consciousness.

Thorn’s skiff sliced across the oily, flat waters, and stingrays scooted out of his path, and schools of mullet parted before him. The mirrored water reflected his white hull, his own stiff body rippling at the wheel, his hair blowing, a silvery-blue replica of himself. He kept his eyes forward. Let the wind rip away all doubts. Almost all.