Going Dark(15)
He tried to push Flynn away, concentrate on his surroundings as he flew north along the eastern shore of Key Largo, a half mile off, five feet of green water. No boaters out, too early in the day for the summer tourists, no dive boats heading to the reefs to view the sad remains of the elkhorn coral, the dying, whitening twists of living rock. A mile to his east a lone shrimper was returning with his catch.
He skimmed by the state-owned lands preserved for the moment against bulldozers and chain saws, at least until some weasel-eyed politician found the temptation too irresistible, found a loophole, found enough willing officials to overturn the protections and flout the will of the people and send in the machines.
It would happen, it always happened, it was happening before Thorn was born and would be happening into the future until all of it was wiped away. The wild tangles of native scrub and gumbo-limbos and sapodillas and mangroves along the coastline, all of it densely populated with every manner of varmint, possums and egrets and endangered rodents and butterflies.
Then he came to Ocean Reef Club, the ritzy outpost for bankers, brokers, and assorted money changers who descended for a week or two in winter to luxuriate in their oceanfront mansions.
After Ocean Reef, the terrain turned wild again, and Thorn spotted his turn and cut sharply into Pumpkin Creek, then took a straight shot north, still at full throttle, faster than he needed to go, faster than was safe in such a tight channel, flying around the blind bends in the creek, gritting his teeth, unable to slow down, his wake splashing white foam high into the lower branches of the mangroves, Thorn keeping the engine wide open to match his pulse, his own racing mind. The closer he got to the south end of Prince Key, the stronger the magnetic pull.
Banking hard into Angelfish Creek, the broad river that separated the tip of North Key Largo from the rest of the ragged keys that trickled north for miles into Biscayne Bay, he swung the skiff into a sharp, sliding left at Linderman Creek and cut out into open bay, circling Prince Key to see if anything had changed since his last pass, and, no, it was still shrouded by an impenetrable mass of foliage and mangroves whose roots ran down to the waterline, an island whose dock had long ago washed away and had not been replaced, only a few rotting pilings left, and not even a spit of sand or any beachhead, nowhere to make a landing, which left only the one entrance Thorn remembered from long ago. If it still existed.
He completed the circuit, then ducked back in Angelfish Creek, pushing down the waterway into a labyrinth of smaller arteries, each one tapering narrower and narrower. He flashed past a warning sign, NO MOTORIZED WATERCRAFT, the sign the Park Service had been posting throughout the back bays of the Everglades these last few years, putting off-limits many of Thorn’s familiar haunts, all his best fishing areas, and Thorn grudgingly obeyed the signs, honored the state’s attempts at preservation, but not this time, forging on, the branches scratching at the hull of Thorn’s boat, slapping his arms, clawing his face, and then came more signs, hand-drawn private warnings, NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, scrawled in red, another saying, TURN BACK, NO ENTRY, nailed to a stake, and ARMED RESPONSE—NO WARNING SHOT, but he didn’t slow, pushing on until he entered some nameless tributary, a waterway he thought he recognized from years before when he was young and determined to poke into every corner of the watery world within the range of his gas tank, back in the days when Thorn needed to stretch his tether farther and farther from his island home, in search of some secret place, some knowledge hidden beyond the horizon, back in those years when he still believed such secret places existed.
As he slid around a sharp turn and entered a widening basin, he saw the hidden beach he remembered. An arc of white sand that glowed in the early-morning shadows like the sliver of a new moon against a dusky sky.
Thorn throttled back and rode the wash forward into the small basin enclosed by red mangroves. For a moment he was that boy again, the curious kid determined to chart every creek and canal and secret bay within his reach, the boy with big plans to someday push outward, to explore beyond the horizon, the unimaginably enormous world of bays and creeks and sounds.
To travel the earth year after year until he’d mapped every continent, hiked every mountain listed in his boyhood atlas, slayed every fire-breathing dragon along the way, pushed aside the beaded curtains of each hideaway bar from Madagascar to Borneo, and seduced the exotic ladies with his tall tales. A kid who’d grown older and traveled inward instead, abandoning those aspirations, dream by dream by dream and year by year as he was drawn into different, darker quests, defending friends, avenging wrongs, entangling himself in exploits as reckless as any of the swashbuckling silliness on the far side of the globe he’d once imagined.