Sugar tapped his keyboard. Waited. Tapped some more.
Thorn watched through the window as Molly Bright, the owner of the Hairport, ripped a long strip of adhesive tape off the inner thigh of the high school principal, Dorothy Sherman, a woman of advanced age and surprising hairiness. The speakers were turned off, so Thorn couldn’t hear the exact curse Dorothy screamed, but it was sufficiently colorful to produce hoots from several of the other haircutters and their clients.
“Brazilian wax,” Sugar said. “One of my favorites. Yet another reason to be grateful you’re a man.”
He tapped a few more keys and watched the screen. The computer made a beep and Sugarman squinted and leaned forward. “Jesus. Your instincts are sharp. This was no Realtor.”
“What?”
Sugar swiveled the monitor around so Thorn could see the name blinking in a small square at the bottom of the screen.
Cameron Prince.
* * *
Thorn made it up to Miami in a little more than an hour and took Old Cutler Road through the Gables, then Ingraham Highway into the Grove, moving easily through light traffic, going against the evening flood of cars returning to the suburbs, until finally he rolled up to the address Sugarman had supplied for Cameron Prince.
A block off Tigertail Avenue, five blocks from the bay, the white wood cottage had clapboard siding and a shingle roof. Weeds and roots had pushed aside chunks of the cement walkway, and more weeds were flourishing in the gutters. The few screens remaining on the front porch were torn, and the entire house seemed to slouch several ramshackle degrees to the south as if it were slipping back into the soil from which it had risen almost a century before.
Thorn rolled past the house and parked two doors down and sat for a while considering how to proceed. Months before, he’d mourned the loss of Leslie Levine, even forced himself to go to her memorial service at the Lorelei Bar, her favorite hangout, down in Islamorada. He had a few beers too many, stood up when the tributes were given, made a few clumsy remarks about the shitty childhood Leslie had overcome, and sat back on his barstool and was silent the rest of the night. Afterward he let her loss go as he’d done with so many others in the last few years.
But for these last few weeks it nagged him. The circumstances of her death, the suddenness, the location, out in the cooling canals of the nuclear plant where she was working to restore the endangered croc population.
Most of all it bothered him that she would be killed by a crocodile at all. That last day he’d seen her, he’d witnessed her sure-handed way with those creatures, seen her roping and dragging the crocs to the boat, tagging them, weighing and sexing them, releasing them back into the wild. All done with an effortless, natural ease. That a croc had killed her and dragged away her body didn’t add up.
Then for her partner in the croc-breeding program to appear at Thorn’s house, nosing around, feigning interest in his water tower, then refusing to identify himself, well, damn it, that was too much to ignore.
While Thorn was still mulling over his next step, the front door of the house where Thorn was parked blew open and a white-haired man in a grubby undershirt and purple sweatpants appeared. He glared at Thorn for a moment, then stalked down his walkway, carrying what looked like a shillelagh.
The man marched up to the front of Thorn’s VW Beetle and raised the gnarled club over his head and whacked the hood of the car. Then raised it and whacked again.
Thorn got out and walked to the front of the VW to survey the damage.
“I warned you assholes not to park in front of my house.”
“I’m a new asshole,” Thorn said. “I didn’t get the warning.”
The man peered at Thorn, cocking his head to the side, running his eyes over Thorn’s body, as if evaluating his physique. “You’re not one of them muscle boys? Them goddamn bodybuilders.”
Thorn held out his arms so the man could see he was not a muscle boy.
“Well, okay.” The man lowered his club. “My mistake.”
“You’re referring to Cameron Prince, that house?” Thorn waved at Prince’s dump.
The man huffed his disgust. “Those idiots coming and going all hours, day and night, clanking them barbells and dumbbells and whatnot. Runs an illegal gym out back. Charges these turd brains good money. A dozen times I reported him to the city and the county, code enforcement, police, you name it, but does anybody give a rat’s ass? Hell, no. I’m an old man, a war vet, I got asthma, I got insomnia, bad kidneys, I got herniated disks, pains on top of pains. You name it, I got it. And then him and his muscle boys. Bunch of hair balls, back there banging away. And the cars coming and going, parking right here, blocking my sidewalk, squealing their tires. It ain’t right.”