Going Dark(6)

In the other direction, west, was the Florida Bay, and beyond that the vast and spreading indigo of the Gulf of Mexico. Where else in the world but the Florida Keys could you watch the sun erupt from one sea and hours later see it melt away into another?

A hundred yards offshore, a single skiff was working the edge of the neighborhood flats, searching for late-afternoon schools of bonefish. Ollie Davis was up on the platform, poling the vessel north while his client perched on the bow and cast his fly onto the flats.

Thorn watched Ollie steer the skiff along the edge of the flat and saw the client’s herky-jerky casting stroke and clumsy retrieve. The guy wobbled on the casting platform as if he might pitch overboard at the slightest rock of the boat.

Ham-fisted bunglers like him were one reason Thorn retired from his own guiding career. After all those hours in a small boat with razor-pronged hooks zinging past his face, he’d been tagged more times than he could recall.

The day finally came when he hit his limit. He had turned his back to a client to relieve himself over the stern, and on a careless backcast the angler hooked Thorn in the crotch. The Miami smart-ass holding the rod thought Thorn’s plight was damn amusing. Even tried to take a snapshot of him with his shorts at his knees, grimly extracting the hook.

Thorn dropped the pliers, tore the camera from his client’s hand, and sailed it. When the asshole got huffy, Thorn shouldered him over the side as well and wouldn’t let him back aboard until Thorn had removed the hook from his privates.

That was to be Thorn’s last day showing strangers how to fish the flats. He never regretted the decision. Now when he went fishing, he mostly went alone, which was usually more than enough company.

Thorn took another moment to absorb the view, watching the blades of his Aermotor turn in a lazy breeze. That windmill was next on his to-do list. Time to lubricate its gearbox, grease the pump pole swivel, and tighten the connections and track down fraying and cracking in the wiring. His house lights had been flickering more than usual lately.

By the time he climbed down from the cistern, his visitor had completed his tour and was on his way back to his car. Thorn caught up, tapped the guy on the shoulder.

At ground level, he made the intruder for at least six-six. A half foot taller than Thorn, and heavier by over fifty pounds of ripped, densely veined muscles. The stranger turned slowly and, after appraising Thorn for a moment, drew in a long breath and smiled with contentment as if the air at his height had a finer bouquet than anything groundlings like Thorn could imagine.

“Can I help you?”

The man studied Thorn for several moments. “I didn’t realize anyone was home. Sorry, I’ll just be going.”

“What do you want?”

“All right, then. How tall is your water tower, about sixty feet?”

The man was in his late twenties, with wide-set eyes and thin lips, and the kind of well-crafted bone structure some women probably found beguiling. His camouflage shirt seemed spray-painted to his thick chest and narrow waist. Muscles so ridged and jagged he might’ve been chiseled from a slab of volcanic rock. The kind of freak-show he-man you’d expect to find juggling cannonballs in some traveling carnival.

Thorn had run into more than his share of bruisers and goons and had vowed to steer clear of them in the future, never again engage, to slam the door, do a one-eighty, whatever it took to preserve the tranquil cycles of his ordinary life. In the past year he’d kept that vow and gradually a familiar shell of seclusion had regrown around him. The silence, the natural phases of the weather, and the ebb and flow of the seasons were once again the shaping rhythms of his days.

After last year’s bloodshed and turmoil, he’d finally managed to reclaim his old pattern—spending his days tying flies, doing sweaty labor around the property, cooling off with an afternoon swim, fishing for his dinner. At sunset taking aimless cruises with Sugarman through the sounds and coves of the backcountry, watching dolphins surf their wake, listening to Sugar gripe good-naturedly about the tedium of his work as a PI. Or on rare occasions Thorn would give a lady friend his complete attention while she discussed her troublesome kids or her ex-husbands and her fruitless search for genuine love.

But also in those months of isolation his reflexes had slowed. Otherwise he would’ve acted on his first impression and turned his back on this intruder’s gloating smile and gone resolutely back to his chores.

“I asked you about the tower,” the big man said.

“That’s why you’re here, to look at my cistern?”

“I’ve been studying them because one day I’d like to build one myself. How tall is yours?”