Off the Chart

‘Hey, it’s a small town,’ he said. ‘Limited supply of single women.’

Alexandra tasted her Heineken. She watched Sugarman’s girls fling bits of bread into the water. The Lorelei was packed, tourists lining up to be seated.

‘Was it serious?’

‘A month maybe. Not serious, no.’

‘A month by my definition is fairly noteworthy.’ Alex peered into his eyes, cocking her head slightly, as if searching for a flicker of deceit.

‘We didn’t click,’ he said. ‘Anne’s a little intense, bottled-up.’

‘Not laidback and gregarious like you.’

She shook her head and looked out at the hazy blue of the bay, a flats boat skimming past, the white rip of foam behind it.

‘Oh, come on. You can’t be jealous. You know how I feel about you.’

‘It’s just amazing,’ she said. ‘Everywhere we go there’s another one.’

‘I’ve lived here all my life,’ Thorn said.

‘Yeah, and it’s a small town. But still.’

‘Look, I’m no ladies’ man,’ Thorn said.

‘What would you call it then?’

Thorn knew better than to field that one. He poured the rest of his Red Stripe into the stein and watched the foam rise exactly to the brim, not a single trickle running down the side – another of his highly refined, utterly useless motor skills. When he looked up, Alexandra was smiling at him, but her eyes still had a stern edge.

‘You heard of Vic Joy?’ he asked her.

‘Name sounds familiar.’

‘Owns half the upper Keys,’ Thorn said. ‘Not a big favorite with law enforcement. Runs that casino boat behind the Holiday Inn, owns a dozen marinas and waterfront joints from Islamorada to Key Largo. Doesn’t pay a lot of attention to what’s legal, what’s not. Has a whole law firm working for him full-time to keep him out of jail. In the past fifteen, twenty years, there’ve been a half-dozen murders with Vic Joy’s name floating around in the background. Then witnesses change their story, refuse to cooperate, or flat out disappear. That kind of guy. Anne never tells anyone she’s Vic’s sister, but people know.’

‘Brother’s a big-shot hoodlum, but she’s still a waitress.’

‘There’s some tension between them. Plus Vic spies on her. Checks out her boyfriends, lets them know they’re swimming in serious waters. First week we went out, he stopped by the house, asked me a lot of questions. Took a good look around. Started giving me a list of dos and don’ts.’

‘I bet you were very polite.’

‘Things started to go wrong when I grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him back to his car and threw him inside.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I lost it,’ he said. ‘This crook lecturing me about good manners.’

‘You were willing to risk the gangster’s wrath to keep playing around with his sister.’

‘Come on, Alex. Let it go.’

‘You have a long and sordid past, Thorn. I’m continually surprised.’

‘Point is,’ he said, ‘Anne and I didn’t mesh. And you and I do.’

‘Is that what you call it? We’re meshing?’

‘I think that’s an accurate description. Yeah, I’ll stand by that.’

He tried to smile his way past this mess, but Alex wasn’t buying just yet.

Lawton ambled back to the table and sat down. Alex gave Thorn’s shoulder a quiet stroke. Okay, interrogation over, all forgiven. Sort of.

Lawton had a sip of his Coke and the three of them gazed over at Sugarman and his daughters. He was Thorn’s oldest and closest friend. Sugarman had stood by Thorn through some blinding shit-storms, even risked his life on more than one occasion when everyone else deserted. Ten years ago Sugar had been a sheriff’s deputy; now he was struggling along as a private investigator.

This weekend was Sugarman’s monthly visit with his twins. Lunch, a boat ride, a cookout later at Thorn’s house, then Sugar and the girls would make the long trek back to Fort Lauderdale where his ex-wife, Jeannie, lived. The girls were eight. In May they’d turn nine.

Uncle Thorn, they called him.

More than likely those two girls were as close as he was ever going to come to having children of his own. Biologically he was probably okay, but he was too damn rigid for kids, too private, too rooted in habit. Still, he loved Sugar’s girls, loved their raucous games, their delight in tiny discoveries – holding a magnifying glass up to a hibiscus bloom while their daddy recited the names of its parts, their functions, showing off his flawless recall of high school biology. Thorn didn’t mind the girls’ pouts, their tantrums that came and went like summer thunderstorms, so quickly replaced by sunshine, it seemed never to have rained at all.

Twins, but very different. Jackie was devoted to television and was usually clamped inside the headset of her portable CD player, and she had her eye on a BMW convertible for her sixteenth birthday. Janey was fascinated by birds, bugs, frogs, and snakes. An amazing memory for the names of things. Tell her one time, it was there. Janey was constantly testing her dad’s knowledge of natural history. Forcing Sugarman to expand his library, stock up on multiple field guides, which the two of them pored over for hours at a time. Janey was a quiet kid, eyes always following Thorn like she might be working up a crush. She enjoyed watching him tie his bonefish flies. The slow, intricate wrapping and twisting, the bright Mylar threads and gaudy puffs of fur and feathers. A month ago she’d taken a shot at tying one herself and when she was done she snipped the final threads and held up her mangled creation and said, ‘Let’s go catch a lunker.’

Alexandra and Lawton were fond of the girls, too. When they came over some weekends, Thorn could see Alex soften – squatting down to help them tie a shoe or soothe a scuffed knee. An easy, natural gift for girls that age. Lawton grumbled about their noise, their rambunctiousness, but when they left he grew solemn and introspective, and it was clear the old man felt their absence more strongly than he could admit.

Thorn might be too damn old for kids, but he wasn’t too old for these.

Lawton had another deep sip of his Coke and set his glass down on the table and patted his mouth with the paper napkin.

‘You two should go over and look at those tarpon. They’re gigantic.’

‘We looked at them already, Dad, when we came in.’

‘You did?’

‘Yeah. Just a minute ago, before we sat down. You were with us.’

Lawton raised his hands and raked his fingers through his mane of white hair, then laid his hands flat on the table and pressed down as if he meant to levitate it.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That explains why I don’t remember. Something happens a minute ago, why should I waste my mental faculties on that? Most likely it’s not going to turn out to be worth remembering anyway. All the important stuff happened a long time ago.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Alex said, giving Thorn a brief look. ‘I believe some of the important stuff may still be unfolding.’

She had a sip of her beer and patted her father’s hand.

‘Hey, did either of you see the tarpon?’ Lawton said. ‘Over by the pilings. They’re huge. You should go look.’

Closing in on seventy-five, Lawton suffered from an evaporating memory and a growing confusion about things great and small. So far, no doctor had given his condition a name. Apparently he was headed down the steep and irreversible slope of dementia. There had been times lately when the old man’s focus narrowed so severely, he seemed to be peering at the world through a pinprick hole. Staring mutely for a solid hour at a blade of grass, water dripping from a faucet, the hairs on the back of his knuckle.

For the last few months he’d been preoccupied with returning to his boyhood home in Ohio. Packing his bag at any hour of the day and night, heading out toward the highway to catch a bus. Twice Thorn and Alex had woken in the night to find Lawton missing from his living room cot, and both times they’d finally located him sitting in the bus shelter a mile from Thorn’s house, his valise on his lap, dead set on a journey back to Columbus.

When Alex asked him why in the world he’d want to abandon the paradise of the Florida Keys for Columbus, Ohio, Lawton puzzled on it for a moment, then told her that he wanted to go home so he could dig up a time capsule he and his younger brother Charlie buried sixty-five years before. A time capsule? Alexandra wanted to know what was so important about a time capsule. ‘My past,’ he said. ‘It’s buried in the dirt behind a white frame house at 215 Oak Street.’ But what was in the capsule that required Lawton to depart on a journey in the middle of the night to retrieve it? ‘What’s in it?’ he said. ‘How the hell am I supposed to remember what I buried sixty-five years ago? That’s why I’ve got to go dig the damn thing up.’ He looked hard into her eyes and said, ‘So maybe I can find out who the hell I used to be.’

Now each night before she put him to bed, Alexandra lectured Lawton sternly. If he wandered off from the house one more time, she would have to start padlocking the door. Lawton always listened with a deadly earnest look. Although the midnight jaunts had ceased, neither Thorn nor Alexandra was sleeping easy.

During the day Thorn looked after the old guy while Alexandra labored as a crime scene photographer for the same Miami police department Lawton had once served as a homicide detective. For the last few months she’d been making the sixty-mile journey from Key Largo to the treacherous streets of Miami, then back each evening. A commute she claimed to find restful.

They’d met a few months back when Lawton showed up on Thorn’s doorstep. The old detective was on a self-appointed mission to track a killer and Thorn had been just a quick stop on his erratic journey. Hours after Lawton disappeared, Alexandra showed up at Thorn’s searching for him. And though things had started badly between them, the clash of his flint against her steel had sparked a smoldering connection that since then had been growing ever hotter.

While Alex dabbed her napkin at a spill of Coke on her father’s lap, Thorn’s gaze drifted over to Anne Joy, who was waiting on a nearby table. He’d nearly forgotten about the woman. So much intensity at the time, but the months had fleeted by and Anne had turned to smoke and drifted almost completely from his memory.

‘Thorn?’ Alex tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to her, but she’d already tracked down the source of his attention, and her smile was tart.

‘Yeah?’

‘Dad and I are going to take another look at the pet tarpon. You want to come, or stay here and ogle?’

‘Those fish are huge,’ Lawton said. ‘Wish to hell I’d brought my pole.’

Thorn got up and took Alexandra’s hand in his. She answered his squeeze with the slightest pressure, and they walked over to the rail to join Sugarman and his girls.

Like everyone else sitting outside at the Lorelei that sunny Sunday afternoon, Anne Bonny Joy noticed the sleek black Donzi sliding up to the restaurant dock – just another flashy Miami asshole down to the Keys for brunch – and she wouldn’t have given him a second look except for the name printed in gold script on the stern of the big rumbling speedboat, the Black Swan, which happened to be the name of her mother’s all-time-favorite pirate flick.

The boat’s captain and two top-heavy blondes barely out of their teens took one of Anne’s tables, and while the girls sat reading their menus, the guy tilted his head back and closed his eyes to bask in the sun. Anne Bonny came over, placed their water glasses in front of them, and stood next to the table until the man rocked his head forward and revealed his dark blue eyes. Longer and thicker lashes than her own.

‘Take your order?’ she said.

Standing there in the Lorelei uniform, green shorts and a tight white T-shirt. The girls in bikini tops and snug shorts, the guy bare-chested, with a caramel tan. His dark hair was long and swept back like a teen idol from forty years earlier. A man too handsome for his own good, and for anyone else’s.

‘How it’s usually done,’ he said, giving her a lazy grin, ‘you’re supposed to say, “Hi, I’m Mandy; I’ll be your server.”’

The girls were both platinum blondes. They might’ve been twins. Anne looked at them as they giggled at the man’s wit; then she looked back at the man.

‘Take your order.’

‘What’s good here?’ one of the girls said. ‘Let’s have what’s good.’

‘Cheeseburger,’ the other girl said. ‘You have cheeseburgers, don’t you?’

‘It’s a fish joint, Angie,’ her double said. ‘You should order fish.’

‘I hate fish. It smells funny.’

‘Your name?’ The man was in his mid-thirties, about Anne’s age, and had a coarse black beard he hadn’t bothered with that morning, bristles glinting in the harsh sunlight.

‘It’s there on her shirt, the little tag,’ one of the girls said. ‘Anne Bonny.’

The man turned his head to the blonde.

‘I see the tag,’ he said. ‘I’d like to hear her say her name out loud.’

The blonde’s lips wrinkled into a practiced pout.

‘My name is Anne Bonny Joy. Can I take your order?’

‘That’s a weird name,’ the other girl said.

‘It’s an illustrious name,’ said the man. ‘Legendary.’

‘Never heard of it,’ the pouting girl said. ‘I think it’s stupid.’

‘Three hundred years ago,’ the man said, ‘Anne Bonny was the most famous woman in the world. Bigger than a movie star.’

‘There weren’t any movies three hundred years ago,’ the blonde said. ‘Were there?’

He was watching Anne’s face. His voice was dark and liquid and his blue eyes were fastened to hers, stealing past her usually impenetrable shield. She held her ground, her pencil poised above her pad. It was all she could manage. Seagulls squealed overhead. On the other side of the patio the reggae band started their version of ‘I Shot the Sheriff.’ The bell in the kitchen rang, another order up. Garlic and shrimp and coconut suntan oil floating on the breeze.

‘Anne Bonny was the greatest pirate of the Caribbean, ruthless and daring, the equal of any man.’

‘Big deal,’ the sulky one said.

‘My mother named me,’ Anne said. ‘It’s just a name.’

‘Whatever you say.’

The man touched a fingertip to the lip of his water glass, smiling down.

‘And your boat?’ Anne said. Irritated now, wanting to push back.

‘My boat?’

‘The Black Swan.’

‘Oh.’ He glanced out toward the docks, then let his eyes drift back to her. ‘It’s the name of an old movie with Tyrone Power.’

‘And Maureen O’Hara,’ said Anne.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said, giving her a more careful look. ‘Who could forget Maureen O’Hara?’

‘Hey,’ said the sulky blonde. ‘Are we having lunch or what?’

In the Lorelei kitchen, Vic Joy made an offer. Seven million dollars.

And Milton Stammer, who owned the joint, said sure, sure, he’d think about it and get back to Vic real soon. Blowing Vic off.

‘What’s to think about?’ Vic said. ‘It’s two million more than the goddamn place is worth.’

Milton Stammer was a short balding man with a formidable paunch. He kept smoothing his hands across his bloated belly like a pregnant woman trying to get used to how big she’d grown.

‘Okay, so I sell you the restaurant, what am I going to do then, Vic? Move to Boca, sit in a golf cart all day, cocktails at four, early bird at five, sit around, talk about how everybody did on the back nine? I’m a blue-collar guy; I’m too freaking old to pick up golf.’

Vic glanced out the serving window and watched Thorn and his group sitting in the sun, waiting for their lunch. In his free time for the last few months, Vic had made Thorn his project. Shadowing him, asking around about the guy, trying to get a feel for what would motivate the asshole.

Today Vic had tagged along two cars back and wound up at the Lorelei, where his own sister worked. His estranged sister. Two of them hadn’t spoken in years.

When Thorn and his gang pulled into the Lorelei, Vic parked a few spaces away facing the sprawling restaurant and bar. He sat there for a moment watching Thorn and his friends walk into the place. Vic must’ve driven by the Lorelei a million times, but he’d never given it any serious real estate scrutiny. It had a nice ramshackle feel. A laidback, outdoorsy vibe. A nice fit with the rest of his holdings. Five minutes after pulling into the parking lot, he was inside the noisy kitchen, waving seven million bucks in front of the owner’s face. That’s how Vic Joy worked, relying on his creative juices. Weaving and bobbing as events took shape. He’d built a damn nice empire that way.

‘Place like this,’ Vic said, staring up at the ceiling, ‘all this wood. Must be a bitch to insure.’

Milton closed his eyes and shook his head solemnly.

‘A grease fire,’ Vic said. ‘Or maybe a smoker flicking his butt in the bathroom waste can, or bad wiring, overloaded circuits. Shit, it could start a hundred different ways. All this old timber, about twenty minutes all you got is ash and rubble. Then you’d be sorry as hell you didn’t take the six million.’

‘What happened to seven?’

‘Did I say seven? Well, I meant six.’ Vic watched the hubbub of the kitchen. Steam rising from the dishwashing machine. A darker steam coming from the deep-fat fryers. The Lorelei was a busy place, and prickly hot. Kitchen staff hustling back and forth, sending uneasy looks their way. Everyone knew Vic Joy, how he worked. ‘Actually, Milton, now that I take a careful look around, I’m going to have to back down to five mil. All this wood. This place is a fucking fire trap. I don’t know how it’s lasted as long as it has.’

Milton’s stubby arms hung at his sides. The man’s eyes were grayish and bulgy. A large man’s large eyes. Pry them out of their sockets, they’d fill your palm. For a second Vic flashed on an image of a couple of gray eyeballs floating inside a glass jar, suspended in formaldehyde. Make a nice addition to his collection.

He smiled at the big man, but Milton wasn’t in the smiling frame of mind.

‘I’ll tell you what I’m doing, Vic. I’m taking all that fire shit as a threat. I don’t know if that’s how you meant it, but that’s how I’m taking it. Now I want you to get the hell out of here. If I ever see your sorry ass around my restaurant again, I’ll call the cops. You got that? Tell them you been threatening me.’

‘The cops?’ Vic shivered and wobbled his hands in the air. ‘Be still my heart. Not the cops.’

Milton gave Vic a bitter glare, then about-faced and tramped across the buzzing kitchen to his office and shoved the door closed behind him.

Vic stepped over to the fry cook, a tall thin man with a hook nose. Guy’d been eavesdropping, sneaking looks.

‘You know who I am, kid?’

‘Vic Joy,’ the hook nose said.

‘Bingo.’

With a wide spatula the cook slid a burger onto a plate, then settled a fish sandwich onto another. Lettuce, tomato, pickle on the side.

‘Let me see that ticket.’ Vic reached out and snapped the order slip from the clip. A few minutes earlier he’d watched Anne Bonny hang it there. When she’d appeared, Vic swung around and kept his back to her. Didn’t want to give his little sister a cardiac right there at work, bumping into her long-lost brother after all these years. Vic studied the order slip. In his sister’s scrawl, Thorn was written out next to the guy’s order.

‘Which one’s the grouper with Swiss?’

Vic nodded at the six plates lined up in the window.

The hook nose took a careful look at Vic.

‘Which one?’ Vic said again.

The fry cook reached out his spatula and tapped one of the sandwiches.

Thorn’s lunch. Fried fish with a layer of melted cheese. Guy was going to choke on cholesterol if he wasn’t careful. Which suited Vic fine, as long as the jerkhole waited till after Vic was completely done with him.

‘Guy’s a friend of mine,’ Vic said. ‘We do this, me and him. Little pranks back and forth.’

‘Whatever.’ The fry cook got busy with the dressing on a cheese-burger.

Vic peeled back the bun on the grouper sandwich and laid it on the plate. He reached into his pocket and drew out his penknife and flicked open the blade. Out on the sunny patio Anne Bonny was taking the order at another table. Two blondes and a dark-haired guy. Vic craned forward and squinted into the sunlight.

Dark-haired Romeo smiling up at Vic’s little sister. Batting his eyes and Anne batting back.

Vic laid the blade against the palm of his left hand. He looked over at the fry cook, but the guy was focused on his work.

Vic gritted his teeth and sliced the blade across his palm, an inch, another inch, just deep enough to get a trickle of blood rising from the seam, spilling into the web of creases.

He reached out to Thorn’s open sandwich and made a fist and watched the dark fluid dribble out. Six, seven drops spattering against the melted Swiss.

He milked out a few more drips, then closed up the sandwich and set it back under the warming lights just as the fry cook smacked the signal bell.

A few seconds later Anne headed back toward the window to pick up her order. There was a tiny smile on her lips. Probably nobody else would’ve noticed, but Vic was her brother and he’d spent years studying the looks that came and went on Anne Bonny’s face. He’d never seen that exact smile before. Not once.

Vic ducked away from the window. He rubbed his bloody hand on the leg of his jeans and tried to shape his lips into a replay of Anne’s smile, but it felt slippery and uncertain on his face.

When he looked back, Anne was at Thorn’s table dealing out the plates. Vic stayed in the shadows to the side of the window and watched until finally Thorn picked up his sandwich and held it for a moment near his mouth while he laughed at something one of the little girls said. Then he took a bite and munched on the fried grouper seasoned with Vic Joy’s blood.

Vic grinned, watched Thorn swallow, watched him take another bite. Swallow that one, too. The lumps of food snaking down Thorn’s throat and into his esophagus, heading toward his belly. Wouldn’t be long until Vic Joy was slipping inside the fucker’s bloodstream, mingling, festering. Taking root.

‘That’s some weird prank,’ the fry cook said.

Vic turned to the cook, then fixed his eyes on the hand holding the spatula.

‘Think you could still flip burgers with a metal hook on the end of your arm?’

The guy stared down at his right hand, then back at Vic. His Adam’s apple jiggled.

‘Hell, Mr Joy, I wouldn’t say anything. Not a goddamn word. Really.’

Vic winked at the kid and headed for the parking lot.

2

Three weeks after their meeting at the Lorelei, Daniel Salbone and Anne were having breakfast on the outside patio of the Cheeca Lodge.

Overnight a late-season cold front had muscled in and the sky was hanging low – as heavy and ominous as a slab of slate. A few yards away from their table the Atlantic thrashed and foamed against the resort’s white beach. While they sipped their coffee Daniel’s gaze kept drifting out toward the end of the long dock where a white sport-fishing yacht was moored. For the last half hour several men had been rolling dollies down the dock, then heaving the supplies aboard.

Anne’s mind was whirling, her body inflamed from the three-week frenzy of sex and extravagant food and full-throttle cruises on the Black Swan, both of them naked, racing the moonlight. Except for the boat rides, they’d not left their room at the Cheeca Lodge. DO NOT DISTURB on the doorknob. Room service trays piling up in the corner, their sheets growing funkier by the hour. They’d switched off the air conditioner because they wanted to marinate in their own juices, breathe the other’s true scent. They opened the windows to hear the ocean and the gulls, inhale the marshy breeze. Lying in the black night or at noon, feet tangled in the sheets, skin glistening, she trailed her fingertips across his long stretches of muscled flesh.