Red Sky at Night, page 17
His eyes went blurry. He backed away a foot. Hardy was breathing fast already. He smiled at Thorn, then torqued himself forward and rammed his footplates into the spokes of Thorn’s chair, nearly threw him onto his side. The muscular man wheeled himself backward to make another ram, when Pepper took hold of his chair and put the brakes on.
He swiveled around and cursed her, but Pepper just smiled and held on against his exertion.
“That’s enough, boys,” Pepper said. “I don’t want to have to mop up any blood. End of my shift, time to go home, don’t be making any extra work for Pepper now, you hear what I’m saying?”
Hardy glared at Thorn, his arms rippling as he tried to haul himself forward.
“You need to work on that left hand,” Thorn said, “if you ever want to hurt anybody.”
He wheeled past Hardy, out through the TV room. He rolled onto the front porch, took a few seconds to find his breath, then aimed himself down the wooden ramp and let his chair coast out into the sweltering streets of Key West.
He spent the next hour rolling down Duval and back up Whitehead, reminding himself why he loved and hated this town. The sky was a perfect blend of perfect blues, the temperature in the low eighties, a breeze swept off the water and filtered through the maze of old wood houses and picked up the scents of fried fish and black beans, garlic and rotting meat. The shops were busy, the sidewalks brisk. The windows were full of bright frivolous things only people on vacation would consider buying.
After an hour working his way to the Southernmost Point and halfway back down Whitehead, the muscles in Thorn’s arms were cramping. And he still wasn’t used to the perspective, moving along at the height of a three-year-old, belt-buckle level. Several times he’d almost been trampled by groups of giddy tourists, all those legs and torsos churning toward him, parting at the last second, a scowl for the idiot in the chair.
He never imagined that sitting down could be so exhausting. Fighting his way through the steady onslaught, the bombardment of faces and clothes and stray bits of conversation, the bus fumes and blare of revving hot rods, the endless push and nudge of the crowds, the small potholes in the sidewalk that seemed like impossible canyons. Or maybe what was tiring Thorn so badly were all the pitying looks he was getting, the flustered glances, strangers dodging eye contact as though the terrible stroke of luck that put him in that wheelchair might be contagious.
On a couple of intersections along Whitehead the city planners had failed to provide cement ramps for people in his condition, and Thorn had to test the laws of physics, easing himself over the enormity of a three-inch drop from sidewalk to street level, then jacking himself over the same dangerous hump on the other side. If it hadn’t been for two passing Samaritans he would have tumbled onto his face both times.
With only the twenty-dollar bill in his pocket, he had no idea how he would sustain himself for any length of time in Key West, but by midafternoon all he could think of was drinking as much beer as the twenty would buy.
He cut back over to Duval and selected the first bar he could find whose floor was near sidewalk level, a dark and smoky joint near the corner of Fleming, and cranked himself over to a vacant table by the front window.
A young man wearing a leather vest over his hairless chest marched across to Thorn’s table and Thorn ordered a beer.
“I’m not your waiter, I’m the manager.”
There were pimples on his chest and his eyes were yellowed at the edges. He kept standing there staring at Thorn, mouth twitching as if his vocal cords were sending up sounds his lips refused to transmit.
“There a problem?”
“We’re not really set up for wheelchairs.”
“How’s that?”
“The bathroom’s downstairs, two steps, no ramp.”
“You asking me to leave?”
“I got nothing against cripples, you understand. It’s just, you know, sitting here, at the front like this … You know what I’m saying.”
“It’s a bummer, huh? Puts a shadow on the festive mood? Well, that’s too goddamn bad, ‘cause I’m staying.”
“Ah, fuck it,” the guy said and stalked back to his station to spread his charm to the next lucky customer.
Thorn’s waitress showed up in a while and he ordered a three-dollar Budweiser. After he’d downed it, he was about to leave to search out a cheaper spot when a young woman with straight brown hair down to the middle of her back walked into the bar wearing pink shorts and a white halter top and passed by his table, then swung back around, gave him a regulation happy face and asked if she could join him.
“Only if you buy,” he said.
“I saw you sitting there. You looked so lonely.”
Thorn tried to return her smile, but he could see by her puzzled look that his smiling apparatus was malfunctioning. He let his mouth go slack.
“I would be honored and thrilled if you’d join me,” Thorn said.
The girl had blue eyes and large white teeth and was attractive in a standard sort of way, as if she’d dropped off the end of a pretty girl assembly line, one of ten thousand identical units produced during the month of June twenty-three years earlier. After she had a sip of what she told Thorn was her fifth margarita of the afternoon, she said her name was Bonnie and that she’d decided Thorn should be fully informed about each of the courses she had just completed in her first semester of law school at Emory. Five courses, only one in which she’d gotten less than an A.
Under normal circumstances Thorn would’ve strangled the young woman right then and stuffed her body under the table and marched out of there, but on that day, in his condition, he was immeasurably grateful for the dull static of her presence. The law student seemed to be unaware of his wheelchair hidden beneath the tabletop. She seemed to have no idea his legs were dead. She didn’t get sorrowful and sympathetic and adjust her speech accordingly. She was simply and resolutely full of youthful pep and mindless ardor for her scholarly life. She talked to Thorn as if he were whole, as if when they were finished talking they would walk off to resume their happy lives in the healthy normalcy of America. And he cherished her for that. Cherished her for her obliviousness, for the next two hours of vapid babble.
As she talked, Thorn watched the manager making his rounds, barking orders at the waitresses, hovering behind them as they served their drinks, stepping in to rearrange the glasses an inch this way or that, or to set down a forgotten coaster. As he circled the room the guy helped himself on the sly to drinks left on abandoned tables. Thorn watched him sneak down the dregs of two beers and a whiskey sour.
When Bonnie finally decided she must be on her way, it was late afternoon and most of the bar’s tourist trade had swarmed off to Mallory Square for the sunset silliness. Thorn finished the last of his beer without her.
He could feel the pressure in his external bladder; the plastic bag strapped around his waist was tight, probably about to overflow. He looked around and smiled at the man paying the check at the table next to him, then waited till that gang had cleared out before he unzipped himself beneath the table, whisked one of Bonnie’s margarita glasses out of sight, and refilled it with his own frothy elixir. He half-filled his beer glass too, a parting gift for his thirsty host, and with a pleasant nod to the bare-chested manager, Thorn rolled out onto the sidewalk and headed back toward the clinic.
He was an hour past tipsy and for the next block he coasted along, blissfully unaware of his paralysis. The muscles in his arm had recovered, and now he simply stroked his wheelchair forward with the effortless ease of a man long accustomed to such conveyance.
Just as he was about to cross Eaton, he saw the man coming toward him. Shambling along in dark pants, white shirt, shiny black shoes. Tall, with that potbelly shaped like the helmet of a Hun. Thorn backed away from the curb and stared at the man. He knew he was drunk, knew the heavy doses of steroids he’d been getting had heated his blood to a feverish boil, but he would have recognized that man through the thickest haze.
Just to be double certain, he set a red baseball cap on the man’s head, tipped it down low, then pressed the aviator sunglasses with the gold frames against his eyes. It was a perfect fit.
As if Thorn might need more proof, at that moment the man stepped out into Eaton and dug his thumbnail between his two front teeth and gouged loose a particle of food and flicked it into the street.
The man from the dolphin pools was crossing the intersection of Eaton and Duval, coming directly toward him, and following a half step behind, in a pair of neatly pressed blue Bermudas and a yellow tennis shirt, was old Doc Wilson’s good friend, Brad Madison.
CHAPTER 18
“You’re drunk.”
“Damn right,” Thorn said. “You would be too.”
“I guess I would be,” Brad said. “Christ, I’m sorry, Thorn. What’s happened to you, it’s a terrible thing.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
They were sitting in the rooftop bar at the La Concha Hotel. Tallest building in downtown Key West, a three-sixty view of the island and surrounding waters. From up there you could keep tabs on the great wall of condos and hotels that had almost finished circling the island, the same wall of concrete that was moving mile by mile to ring the entire state, blocking the water from the riffraff. Soon, if they wanted to walk the beaches of their state, they’d damn well have to rent a two-hundred-dollar room for the privilege.
Thorn was nursing a tall frosted glass of seltzer water. Across the small round table, the man named Echeverria was munching the second of three cherries from his cherry Coke. Behind him the sunset was a major disappointment. Mostly grays, just a single horizontal band of red along the horizon, which was slowly dissolving into a purple splotch. A sunburned woman at the table next to them had given the sunset a C minus. She said she was going to ask for her money back. From whom? one of her table-mates asked. From God, she said. And there was a round of dizzy laughter.
“I just got off the cell phone with Doc Wilson,” Brad said. “He told me what happened to you. Must’ve gone down right after I saw you the other day.”
“That same night,” Thorn said. “A prowler.”
Echeverria had big hands, long thick fingers, nails chewed to the quick. His cheeks were spiderwebbed with tiny veins and his jowls had the loose and oily look of a man who had not been eating his vegetables. He seemed monumentally uninterested in Thorn, and his small eyes kept moving around the outdoor bar as if he were awaiting the arrival of a very hot date.
“When we saw you come out of the clinic in the wheelchair, I was stunned. So I called Wilson to find out what was going on.”
“You saw me come out of the clinic.”
“We have it under surveillance,” growled Echeverria, his eyes following the hypnotic gait of one of the waitresses.
“What is this?” Thorn said.
“Maybe we should wait till he’s sobered up.” Echeverria sucked the last of the cherries off the stem, dropped the stem on the floor.
“We’re in a bad situation here, Thorn.”
“He’s drunk, Brad. Guy can barely keep his chin off his chest.”
Thorn turned his head and stared into Echeverria’s eyes.
“I may be drunk,” he said. “But I know who you are, asshole.”
“What?”
“I know who you are and what you’ve been doing,” Thorn said. “I just don’t know why yet. But I will.”
“What the fuck’re you talking about, you wacko? I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“Thorn?” Brad reached across the table and gripped his arm. “Hey, what the hell is this?”
Thorn kept his hold on Echeverria’s eyes until the big man tried to swallow away the lump of worry growing in his throat, then Thorn broke off and turned to Brad.
“Sorry,” he said. “Must be these drugs. I’m getting twitchy, all the shit they’ve been pumping into me.”
He looked back at Echeverria and smiled.
“This guy’s out of it, Brad. Forget him.”
“Thorn, listen. We could use your help. We’re in a very difficult posture at the moment, and just by the sheerest piece of luck you’re in a position, you could be an enormous assistance. I have to get up to Washington tonight for a meeting I absolutely can’t miss. But Carlos is staying here at the Casa Marina Hotel. He’ll be acting as your contact until Tuesday when I can get back down.”
“My contact? You’re getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you?”
Thorn took a sip of his seltzer. He was dead sober. Give him a white line to tightrope. Order him to close his eyes, touch a finger to his nose. Hell, he could build a house of cards standing on one hand, count backward from ten thousand. Every time he took another look at Echeverria he got a few degrees more sober.
“Look, Thorn,” Brad said. “I’m not going to plead with you, but we need some eyes and ears inside that clinic. And we need them bad. You could do it. Doc Wilson told me about some of the things you’ve been into in the past. I think you’re just what we need.”
“I’m still listening.”
He smiled again at Echeverria. He liked smiling at the man. It was the most fun he’d had in months, smiling at the guy that had something to do with slaughtering the Key Largo dolphins. And it wasn’t too much of a stretch to guess he might also be smiling at a guy who also had a little something to do with putting him in that aluminum chair.
“It’s a long story,” Brad said.
“If you’re buying the seltzer,” Thorn said, “I’ve got the time.”
Ten minutes later Thorn was fully informed of the situation and he was more sober than he’d been in years. A woman named Greta Masterson was missing. She was a DEA agent and had been investigating Dr. Bean Wilson, Jr., for possible diversion of narcotics. All this was an off-the-books DEA operation. Brad had wanted to protect Doc Wilson’s son from a major scandal, possibly losing his license. If the suspicions proved true, he’d been planning to sit down with Bean, lay out the evidence, maybe bring Bean senior in on it, shame the boy into going straight. It had sounded easy, humane. The right thing to do. But then Greta disappeared. And now it was at a whole different level of seriousness.
“What do you think, Thorn? Will you help us, be our eyes and ears? Talk to Bean, see if something he says might give us a direction.”
Thorn sat back in his chair and looked around the outdoor bar. The woman who’d wanted her money back from God had left too soon, missing an off-the-chart sunset.
Half the sky had ripened to a flawless crimson that was only produced when sufficient pollution was floating in the atmosphere, enough to absorb the blander wavelengths. Unmuted by blues and yellows, that brilliant cherry light had stolen up from the sea and seemed to be blistering the air.
Thorn had spent much of his life on the sunset side of Key Largo and had watched the sky light up over Blackwater Sound for so many years that by now he had as many words for red as Eskimos had for snow. But the best sunsets were more than color, they were topographic displays, three-dimensional maps of the heavenly terrain. And that night’s clouds were a wild collection—a dozen shapes and textures set against the backdrop of scarlet corrugations like some gigantic plowed field of blood that reached high overhead and faded off to the north and south into purplish clumps of ripe bougainvillea blossoms. Along the horizon a few scarlet barracudas were schooling among the twists and swirls of vaporous crimson coral fans. There were patches here and there with the texture of crushed velvet, and other swatches as slick and glossy as puddles of oil paint. It was the kind of sunset Monica and he would stare at wordlessly. Daunting and huge and impossible to absorb.
Echeverria glanced at the sky and looked away. Brad turned his eyes that way and took a breath and let it go as if it were the first time he’d remembered to breathe that day.
“Sure, I’ll help you,” Thorn said, turning his grin on Echeverria. “If it means I get to hang with my old pal here.”
He lay a hand on Echeverria’s and the big man jerked away from his touch.
While Thorn continued to beam at Echeverria, Brad thanked him. After a few minutes of strained silence, Brad paid the check, shook Thorn’s hand, told him that they’d be in touch, to just keep his eyes open, don’t go snooping, don’t bring up Greta’s name, anything like that. Thorn said sure, he could be tactful, no need to worry about him. A last grin for his pal, the dolphin killer. And the two men left him there with the fizzless remains of his seltzer.
When they were gone, Thorn looked back at the sky, still rippling with rosy light, and the harp string that was strung tight through the center of his chest plucked itself and a triple note, deep and resonant, thrummed through his gut. Monica.
He had spent the day not thinking about her. He had been doing a damn good job of it. It was something he’d trained at for a long long while. Blocking out difficult thoughts, holding emotions at bay. It was one of his great talents. Olympic-class repressor. A necessary ability for a man who cycled through women at the rate he’d been doing lately.
Although, of course, his were always serious relationships. Only a handful of one-night hoot-and-hollers. It was how he preserved his self-respect, how he’d made the saga work on his behalf, a tragic tale of Thorn’s failed attempts at love. Always something tripping him up. Some boomerang sailing in from offstage upsetting his best intentions. And that’s what had happened with Monica as well. A crack on the head, a crack on the spine, and he’d martyred himself to this new condition, told her good-bye, kissed her off.
But he didn’t believe it for a second. Get enough booze circling his veins and the veritas was impossible to ignore. The only boomerangs doing any damage in Thorn’s life were the ones he’d tossed himself. Maybe there was some fraction of random chaos in the events of any moment, but not enough to let anybody off the hook. The undoing of his affair with Monica was his own doing. There were no quarks or radio waves or pulsars beaming down from some control booth out in the dark heavens. Thorn had thrown the curved wood into the air and it had spun and tilted and looped back to knock him in the spine.
