Blackwater Sound
James Hall
Compelling action and suspense in the Florida Keys and Bahamas – in the atmospheric new thriller from a writer acclaimed by Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly and Robert Crais.The Braswells had everything: money, looks and power. But when their eldest son, the family’s shining light, was killed in a freak fishing accident, he took with him a dark secret. Ten years later, in the steamy shallows off the Florida coast, an airliner crashes, killing all aboard. Helping pull corpses from the water, Thorn finds himself drawn into a bizarre conspiracy: someone has developed a high-tech weapon capable of destroying electrical systems in a powerful flash. How are the secretive Braswells and their family-owned company involved? And what does it have to do with the family’s obsessive hunt for the great marlin that killed their golden boy?Featuring two of his most popular characters, police photographer Alexandra Rafferty and reluctant investigator Thorn, BLACKWATER SOUND is James Hall’s finest thriller yet. Loaded with action and suspense, spiced with humour and featuring some of his most unforgettable villains, it bristles with all the heat and tension of a tropical Florida summer.
JAMES HALL
BLACKWATER SOUND
Dedication (#ulink_7ec104ff-0846-5a27-87e8-9576b71a6fba)
For Peter Meinke, great poet and teacher and always good for a laugh
Epigraph (#ulink_2f44f86d-fe1f-5f73-a0ac-10947278a232)
Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
—King John, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Contents
Cover (#u6a230180-2c8e-5e54-bce8-64bdde050a05)
Title Page (#u3f46d522-effd-563f-8b0b-1e1fa2dd28f6)
Dedication (#ulink_ee6f0b1e-ec60-59d5-b1e1-b18dd972b591)
Epigraph (#uf89fa3c2-ede2-5601-b8c6-b196a4dda805)
Prologue (#ulink_f4442f81-55e2-530e-b870-e70a2a0aab10)
Ten Years Later
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Acknowledgments (#ulink_b972fd05-ce0e-5001-a2d6-778c58af0864)
Praise (#ulink_b9962256-5433-5cff-9b1a-dc4d00c0cdda)
About the Author (#ulink_dd9d0b44-2ab6-555d-af16-acdf33725bbd)
Also by the Author (#ulink_079860b2-a4d2-514a-943a-9b48a7c09f60)
Copyright (#ulink_51d6b4be-d3d9-5d4f-8bcc-64f9965ed290)
About the Publisher (#ulink_3612d522-0c73-5278-a482-2c428da5bfd2)
Prologue (#ulink_63e77e5c-183c-5902-9631-627618ec37a4)
The marlin was the color of the ocean at twenty fathoms, an iridescent blue, with eerie light smoldering within its silky flesh as if its electrons had become unstable by the cold friction of the sea. A ghostly phosphorescence, a gleaming flash, its large eyes unblinking as it slipped into a seam in the current, then rose toward the luminous surface where a school of tuna was pecking at the tiny larvae and crustaceans snagged on a weed line.
The marlin attacked from the rear of the school. An ambush. It accelerated from thirty knots to double that in only a few yards. A fusion of grace, efficiency, and blinding power. For a creature with the bulk of a bull, the marlin was as sleek as any missile and blazed through the water at a speed not even the most powerful torpedo could attain. When it crashed into the school, it stunned each fish with a blow from its three-foot bill, then swallowed it headfirst.
Morgan Braswell saw its dorsal fin and the curved arc of its tail. She saw its shadow just below the surface. Maybe it was simply the angle of the sun, but the fish looked twice the size of an ordinary marlin. Before she could utter a word, the marlin hit the trolled lure and the outrigger popped.
‘Fish on!’ Johnny yelled.
In the fighting chair Morgan lifted the rod and settled it into the leather holder that was belted around her waist. At the same moment the rod tip jerked and the hundred-pound monofilament began to scream off her reel. Nothing she could do for now except hold on and watch. They were twenty-two miles south of Key West, a marlin highway that ran along a drop-off in the ocean floor, an east-to-west ridge that plummeted from nine hundred feet to two thousand in less than a mile. Wood’s Wall was its name, the beginning of the Straits of Florida.
Andy and Johnny stood beside her. Her two brothers. Andy was the older, curly blond hair and rangy like their dad. At seventeen, a major-league science whiz, chemistry, electronics. He spent long hours in the MicroDyne lab, tinkering with new materials, new fibers, new everything. He was movie-star handsome, funny. A gifted athlete, president of his high school class, perfect scores on his college boards, courted by Stanford, MIT. A golden boy. Everyone in awe of him, most of all Johnny. Johnny was the quiet kid who tracked his big brother’s every move, stood in his shadow, said little.
Morgan was the second child, a year younger than Andy, with electric blue eyes, a sinuous figure, glossy black hair that she wore as short as Andy’s. She was well aware of the effect she had on boys, but didn’t give a damn about trading on her looks, scoring points in the Palm Beach social scene. She’d rather hang with Andy. The two of them endlessly tinkering in A.J.’s workshop or at the company lab. Metallurgy, ceramics, carbides. Morgan had the intense focus and scrupulously logical mind. Andy was the creative one, spontaneous and intuitive, a genius. She was the yin to his yang. The controlled left brain to his exuberant right. A neatly nestled fit.
Up on the flybridge, Darlene Braswell stood beside her husband, watching her daughter closely. A tall, black-haired woman with shadowy Italian eyes. A violinist with the Miami Symphony till she’d met and married A.J. Braswell. Now a vigilant mom. Too vigilant. She and Morgan hadn’t spoken for days. A bitter standoff. Last week, coming into Morgan’s room, staring at her for a full minute in prickly silence. Morgan knew what it was about, but didn’t think her mother had the nerve. She held Morgan’s eyes and finally spoke, voice neutral, asking if anything was going on she should know about. Going on? Morgan playing dumb. You know what I mean, Morgan. Is something happening between you and Andy? Morgan said nothing, glaring into her mother’s dark eyes. Okay, her mother said, if you won’t discuss this, then I’ll talk to Andy. One way or the other, I’m going to find out. You go ahead, Mom, talk to Andy, but if you do, I’ll never speak to you again. Never. Now get out of my room. Morgan pointed at her door, kept pointing till her mother turned and walked to the door and stood there a moment waiting for Morgan to open up. But she didn’t. She wasn’t about to. Her mother wouldn’t understand. Never. Not in a million years.
From up on the flybridge her father yelled at her to pay attention.
‘A little more before you hit him. Ease off on your drag, this is a big girl.’
She picked her moment, then yanked back on the rod, sunk the hook, and in the next instant the fish showed itself. Forty yards behind them, its long bill broke through, then its silver head, holding there for several seconds, its wild eye staring back at Morgan as if taking her measure. The fish shook its head furiously and flopped on its side and was gone. Sounding, diving down and down and down, the reel shrieking, the rod jumping in her hands as if she’d hooked a stallion at full gallop.
On the bridge, A.J. was silenced by the sight.
Johnny stood at the transom transfixed, staring out at the blue water where the fish had disappeared. His blond hair hung limply down his back. A pudgy baby, a pudgy kid, and now a pudgy teenager. Smiling at the wrong times, always fidgeting, gnawing his fingernails to the quick.
Her dad stood with his butt to the console, reaching behind him to run the controls, doing it by feel, backing the thirty-one-foot Bertram toward the spot where the fish had disappeared. The Braswells worked as a unit. It required first-rate teamwork to catch these fish. No one could do it alone, not the big ones. Someone to handle the boat, keep it positioned; an angler strapped into the fighting chair; a wire man to grab the leader when the fish was finally brought close to the boat. Then a gaffer who nailed the fish in its bony jaw and helped haul it through the transom door. The five of them circulating the jobs.
‘You okay, Morgan? You want some water?’ Andy asked.
She was pumping the rod, then cranking on the downstroke. For every yard of line she won back the fish was taking out two. The reel was more than half-empty and Morgan had begun to sweat, her fingers throbbing already, back muscles aching. In only twenty minutes the fish was making her pant.
‘Water, yes,’ Morgan said.
He held the water bottle to her lips, tipped it up. With a towel he mopped her forehead. He gave her shoulders a rub, stayed with it for a while, a good massage, working his fingers in deep.
The line went out in screaming bursts and with grim focus she reeled it back in, inch by grueling inch. The fish stayed deep, two hundred yards of line, perhaps. A.J. cheering her on, giving her small instructions, though Morgan knew the drill as well as he did. She could hear it in his voice, a trace of envy. It should be him in the chair. It was his passion more than hers. He went to the tournaments. Mexico, Bahamas, Virgin Islands. He hung out with marlin men. Went fishing on the bigger boats of his rich friends. Boats with fulltime crews. Two million, three million dollars purchase price, a few hundred thousand a year to maintain and staff them. He lusted for one of those boats, a sixty-footer with four thousand horsepower rumbling belowdecks. At the rate MicroDyne was growing, it wouldn’t be long before he could afford one.
Her dad should be the one in the chair hauling his fish to the surface. But that wasn’t how it worked. The Braswells rotated the angling on a set routine. Morgan first thing in the morning, Andy next. After lunch A.J. took the chair. Then her mother had her shot, and finally in the last hours of the day, it was Johnny’s turn. Johnny, who would rather work the wire, the close-in stuff. He didn’t want the spotlight for hours at a time, didn’t have the patience for that kind of labor. He liked the big, dramatic moments. Slipping on the heavy glove and taking a couple of quick wraps and then arm-wrestling that fish to the edge of the boat, gaffing it.
An hour passed. Andy gave her water, her father rooted her on. As Morgan pumped the reel, her mother watched silently. Morgan was dizzy. Despite the fluids, she felt dehydrated. They’d not seen any sign of the fish again. It was down about nine hundred feet and was heading east out to deeper water. Her dad was quiet now, handling the boat. Wanting to be in the chair so much, but not a whiner, trying to be encouraging to his daughter.
‘You want me to take over, Morgan?’ Andy asked her.
She told him no, she wanted to see this to the end.
Her hands were numb. Her back muscles in spasm. She struggled to breathe. The fish was down there cruising east, towing them toward the horizon. She held on because that’s what you did in this family. She held on because to give up would change things. She would lose something she couldn’t name. Some part of her identity. Who she was, who she wanted to be. It was what her father would do, and what Andy would do. So she hung on. She pumped and cranked on the downstroke. She fought that goddamn fish.
Then it was two hours. A little after ten in the morning. She’d refilled the reel more than halfway. Bringing the fish up, winning the battle. She lifted the rod, then lowered it and pumped the reel. Lifted it, lowered it and pumped. The world was now a narrow slit through which she saw only a few square feet of water where the line disappeared. Her tongue was swollen. Her hands were knotted with pain, arm muscles quivering, but she cranked the reel.
It was almost noon when she felt the slack. A belly in the line. No pressure when she reeled. She realized what was happening and was about to call out to the others when the marlin rocketed the last few yards to the surface.
In a great geyser it exploded, silver and blue, its entire electric length, shimmering like polished chrome and the bluest blue, a scream erupting on the boat, from her mother, from the entire Braswell clan, a chilling collective roar, as the marlin launched itself high into the air and hung in all its colossal radiance, a terrible angel against the clouds and sun and sky, like some divine appearance, the embodiment of all fish, of all life in the sea, a giant long-billed, scythe-tailed deity, a monster, dreadful and magnificent. Broken loose from gravity, hanging there for longer than was possible.
Finally it dropped, splashing on its side, sending a cone of water as high as the flybridge.
Morgan reeled and reeled, cranking as fast as her muscles allowed.
It was the largest fish she’d ever seen. Larger than the blue marlin on the wall of her father’s study. His was eight hundred pounds, caught in the Virgin Islands when he was twenty-eight. The fish that had started his obsession. But this one was half again as large. A giant. Bigger than anything in the magazines, anything on the endless videos A.J.’s friends brought back from the Great Barrier Reef or Kona. This was the mothership.
Her father was silent. Everyone was silent. Johnny turned to look at his older brother, and whatever he saw on Andy’s face made Johnny’s mouth go slack. This was not just a big fish. This was the fish that lurked in their dreams.
‘Jesus,’ Andy said quietly. ‘Jesus.’
He came behind her and once again he massaged her shoulders while she cranked the last few yards of line and saw the wire leader emerge from the sea.
‘It’s given up,’ her dad said. ‘You beat it. It’s given up, Morgan.’
But she didn’t think so. Until just before the leap, the marlin’s power seemed undiminished. The fish was still green. Still strong and alive. Unfazed by the fight. But the leader was only a few feet away, the fish lying slack a few feet below the surface. So maybe she was wrong. Maybe it had caved in after just one spectacular jump.
Andy let go of her shoulders, turned, and flung open a drawer in the supply case and grabbed a stainless steel cylinder a little larger than a cigar. It was one of Andy’s inventions. A float on one end, a stubby aerial on the other. It was designed to be hooked beneath the marlin’s second dorsal fin with a small surgical steel anchor, and was programmed to come alive for one week each year. On the appointed date, the electronic sending unit would begin to transmit all the information its microprocessor had collected that year, a day-by-day report on GPS locations, depth, water temperature, speed, distance traveled. By activating it only during that one-week window, Morgan estimated the unit would last for eight to ten years. Sometime during the crucial week when the transmitter came live, they had to get lucky and the marlin had to break the surface, either to sun itself or to attack schools of baitfish. Just a few seconds was all. When the antennae broke through, data would stream up to a satellite and a few seconds later the blue ping would pulse on the Braswells’ receiving unit. The ping would mark the fish’s present location and would continue to ping until the fish was submerged again or the week was over and the unit shut off.
Much better than conventional tagging methods. If it worked, it could revolutionize everything. You could track a fish’s migration, begin to understand its life cycle, its mating habits. Steal a look into the secret life of that mysterious fish. But she and Andy weren’t thinking of its commercial value when they designed and assembled it from salvaged computer parts. The pod was a gift to their dad, their attempt to take part in his consuming obsession.
Andy used a tiny ice pick to activate the unit, then clamped it just behind the sharp point of a customized harpoon.
Morgan hauled the fish closer and could see its blue shadow rising through the water. Listless, on its side. Either defeated or playing possum. It was impossible to tell.
Andy leaned over the transom, cocked the harpoon back, picking his spot.
Her mother called down to Andy. In her tense voice, telling him to be careful. Very careful.
Andy leaned another inch or two, then stood back up.
‘It’s too far, Dad! I’m going to have to wire it, bring it up closer.’
‘Morgan,’ A.J. called. ‘Keep the line tight. Keep it close so Andy can work.’
Andy grabbed his glove from the back pocket of his shorts and pulled it on. Another of his creations. An ordinary blue denim work glove with a thick cowhide pad stitched across the palm and sides. Even a medium-sized fish could badly bruise a hand, or sometimes crush bones.
Johnny seized the biggest gaff from the holder.
‘We’re not gaffing it, Johnny,’ A.J. called. ‘We’re just attaching the pod.’
‘But this is a world record, Dad. This is the all-time big mother.’
All of them laughed, and from that moment Big Mother was her name.
‘Tag and release, Johnny, that’s what we’re doing.’
Stubbornly, Johnny held on to the gaff, planting himself at the starboard side of the transom while Andy stood to port, the harpoon in his right hand. He was touching the metal leader wire with his left, stroking it lightly as if wanting to establish some connection with the giant.
Morgan had handled the wire on small sails and yellowfin tuna. It was dangerous, but thrilling. The saying went, ‘One wrap, you lose the fish, three wraps you lose a finger.’ Two wraps was right. You took two wraps of the leader wire around the gloved hand, no more, no less.
Andy took three.
Morgan wasn’t sure if she’d seen right. Her mind so foggy. Her tongue so swollen, she could barely speak. Maybe he took one more wrap for extra measure, because the fish was huge, maybe he made a mistake, or she was simply wrong about what she thought she’d seen.
A.J. backed the boat slowly.
‘Okay, Andy. Pick your spot, jab it in hard and true.’
Johnny edged closer to his brother, gaff at the ready.
Slowly the bill appeared as Andy hauled it up.
‘Jeez, it’s way over a thousand pounds. Maybe fifteen hundred.’
Andy had the fish at the transom. Its bill was longer than any she’d ever seen in photographs, on walls, anywhere.
Johnny leaned over the edge to touch the fish.
‘No, Johnny. Let Andy do his work.’
The fish must have seen their shadows because it shied away. Andy braced his knees against the transom, leaned back, using all his weight to drag the fish back into place. Morgan could see the muscles straining in his back, in his arms and shoulders. A wiry boy, narrow-waisted, wide shoulders and rawhide-tough. But the fish was strong, very strong.
Andy cocked his arm, held it for a second, then plunged the point of the harpoon into the second dorsal.
‘It’s set, Dad! I felt it lock on.’
He shouldn’t have done it. Shouldn’t have turned his back on the fish to beam up at their father. With a fish that big, it was reckless. But he was so proud, so hungry for a morsel of their dad’s approval. In that half second his back was turned, the fish swung back and made a slow pirouette, disappearing into the transparent blue.
Andy was jerked backwards, his hip banging against the transom. Johnny reached out for him but it was too late. Andy lurched overboard, his hand trapped in the wire. Morgan heard his scream, heard it stifled as he was dragged under, saw him moving quickly through two feet of water, three, four, five, saw him turning back toward the light, trying to swim one-handed toward the surface, a useless stroke against the horrific power of that fish. She saw his face, his blond hair pulsing like a jellyfish around his head, she saw his white flesh turning blue, blue as the water, blue as the fish.
‘Reel, Morgan! Reel, goddamn it!’ A.J. was screaming.
A second later he was beside her. He tore the rod from her hands, cranked the fish back up, cranked. But the line continued to unspool, the sharp ratchet of the reel clicking faster than she’d ever heard it.
A.J. heaved back on the rod, tightening the drag as he did, pulling with all his weight, all his life and breath and muscle.
Morgan couldn’t scream, couldn’t breathe. A dull paralysis had taken hold of her. Shock and terror and utter exhaustion.
She rose from the fighting chair, watched the water, saw a flash of white. Andy’s face, his shorts, something. Down in all that blue, his body dragged deeper and deeper into the airless depths. A bear hug crushed her chest, a pressure greater than bones and flesh could possibly withstand.
Her father was groaning as he reeled against the power of that fish, winning back a few feet, a few more. Johnny dropped to his knees, holding to the transom as if he were seasick, peering out at the water. From the flybridge Darlene screamed. Her boy, her precious son. Her wail ripped apart the air.
And then the crack of a rifle shot as the heavy monofilament snapped.
Her father crashed against the side of the chair and crumpled to the deck.
Without a thought, Morgan kicked off her boat shoes, climbed onto the transom and dived into the water and clawed her way down into the blue. She swam deeper and deeper until the light was flickering in her head and the crushing pressure against her chest was unbearable, then swam deeper still, squinting into the blurry distance, into the blackwater depths where the sounding fish had disappeared, but she could make out nothing in the darkness of the cold currents.
Then out of those murky depths a trail of bubbles rose toward her, a ghostly silver cloud climbing fast, spreading out, surrounding her, tickling across her bare arms, her belly.
Andy Braswell’s last breath. Her brother. Her love.
TEN YEARS LATER (#ulink_d793f52c-8888-5cdb-a154-131b77c870a9)
1 (#ulink_4da64265-4888-5b5a-b8d8-1eddc04425ec)
Thorn had brought along the .357 magnum not because he was worried about being attacked by pirates, but because he wanted to give the pistol a long-overdue burial at sea. Maybe have a little ceremony, just he and Casey, say a few words, something short and funny, then sling the goddamn thing out into the water. Stand around afterwards and watch the ripples die out, have a sip of wine, put his arm around Casey and hold on.
She didn’t know yet about the gun being aboard. He’d told her about some of the violent incidents in his past, but if he got too specific, she always winced and turned away. Casey had inherited her light and airy view of human nature from her hippie parents. Growing up in Islamorada in an apartment above the gift shop where they sold rolling papers and hookahs and conch shells and custom-made sandals. Now in her late thirties, after years of waiting tables, Casey had started a roadside business in Tavernier, selling life-sized manatees and alligators that she made from plaster casts, then painted in garish sunset colors. The manatees and alligators stood up on their hind legs and gripped US Postal Service mailboxes in their flippers and claws. She was doing well with the mailbox stands. You saw them on nearly every street in Key Largo and Tavernier. People dressed up their manatees with goggles and snorkels or straw hats, cocked fishing poles and scoop nets up against the gators. Put witches’ hats on them at Halloween and white beards for Christmas. Lately, Casey had moved on to a few non-Keys animals. One of her new creations, a full-sized, neon pink buffalo, now stood like some crazed sentinel between Thorn’s house and the water’s edge, where it stared out at the sunsets.
The .357 was inside his tackle box that lay on the deck near where Casey was sunning. When he finally landed the sea trout on his line, he was going to let her know what he had in mind. He’d been holding on to the damn thing too long, and now that they were several hours out into the deserted Florida Bay, it seemed like the right time to dump it.
For the last two years a long string of wonderfully unremarkable days had come and gone. Each night the breeze stirred the curtains and the cardinals trilled their evening song, each morning at first light the mourning doves lowed from the upper branches of the tamarind tree, and almost every hour of the day palm fronds tickled against the tin roof like the whispers of angels. Not even the weather seemed to vary, with steady tropical trade winds pouring up from the south, a constant cinnamon-scented flow.
But even amid that unceasing peace, Thorn often jerked awake in the middle of the night, sheened with sweat, thinking about the pistol wrapped in oily cloths, tucked in a bottom drawer of his desk across the room. He thought about its history, the dark karma that clung to it. More than once he’d taken it out of the desk and walked out to the end of his dock to pitch it into Blackwater Sound, where it would sink into the silt and begin its long chemical unraveling. But something in him had resisted. Some wary voice had murmured in his ear. You are not finished with it. A bad day is coming.
But now, by God, he was determined to heave the thing away. Far enough from shore where no one would ever stumble on it. Far enough away from home that Thorn would forever be beyond its magnetic field. Today he would officially and irrevocably lay down his arms and the voice would go still, the fist in his stomach would unclench, and the days would once more stretch out lazily ahead of him, and he’d take one easy breath after the next, savoring the juicy Florida Keys air for the rest of his stay on earth.
‘You going to catch that fish, Thorn, or bore it to death?’
Casey squeezed more suntan lotion into her hand and slathered it across her bare breasts. She was stretched out on the forward deck, while Thorn stood on the platform perch above the outboard. In the four days they’d been out on the water, Casey had been nude most of the time and her bikini lines had vanished. She had a narrow face, bright green eyes, an easy smile. After all those hours in the sun, her shoulder-length hair was a few degrees blonder than when they left, and even the patch between her legs had lightened. Now when he lowered his face to it, he could smell the golden afterglow of the sun along with the faintly tart citrus scent that rose from Casey when her flesh was heated.
‘It doesn’t feel bored to me,’ Thorn said. ‘It feels kind of excited.’
Thorn cranked the reel, two careful turns. It was wrapped with three hundred yards of four-pound-test monofilament. Line so wispy, if you thought about it too long it would snap. He figured the sea trout probably went about ten pounds and it’d already stripped off two hundred and fifty yards. For the last ten minutes he’d cut the drag back to zero, letting the trout take all the line it wanted in ten-, fifteen-yard surges, then when the line went slack, the lunker taking a rest, Thorn would win back a yard or two. Letting the water wear the fish down. Water and time and the weight of that three hundred yards of fragile monofilament.
‘If you used ten-pound test, you’d have that fish filleted by now.’
‘If it’s too easy to catch,’ Thorn said, ‘it doesn’t taste any good.’
Casey finished oiling her breasts. Head to toe, she was now as glossy as fresh varnish and her nipples had tightened into dark buds. Thorn could feel a tingle working its way down from his navel. Things shifting inside his cutoffs.
Thorn’s skiff was pole-anchored in about two feet of water over some grassy beds where schools of silver sea trout had flickered past all morning. In the last few days they’d seen dozens of tarpon and permit and bones skimming the flats, lots of rays and more sharks than they could count. The sky had been clear all week and Thorn’s eyes were dazzled and aching from staring into the shallows. A good ache.
On that April morning, Monday or Tuesday, he wasn’t sure, the breeze had died off and the Florida Bay stretched out as flat and silver as a platter of mercury, running off toward the western horizon where it turned into a blur of blue chrome. The air and water were within a degree or two of his own body temperature. Dipping in and out of the bay, one element to the other, he hardly noticed.
A hundred yards east of their spot, the Heart Pounder, his thirty-foot Chris-Craft, was anchored in four feet of water on the edge of the flats. Their mothership. A couple of narrow bunks, a stove, a cooler full of fruit and cheese and a few bottles of a cut-rate Chardonnay. They’d towed the skiff behind the big boat to have some way to get into the skinny water, chase the fish.
The Heart Pounder was a teak and white oak beauty. Built before Thorn was born, it was low and slow, with the ancient grace of an era when getting from here to there as quickly as possible wasn’t the point. Thorn had spent all of March and half of April replanking the hull. Tearing out a dozen rotting boards and fitting the new ones into place. Harder job than he’d anticipated. Made harder by the fact that he had absolutely no idea what the hell he was doing when he started. He’d torn out too many planks, used the wrong screws, applied the wrong caulk to the seams between the new boards, then wound up having to pull off his planks and begin over. Finally he’d found a boatwright in Islamorada who gave him a few lessons in carvel-planking, and the use of bunged screws and stealers, those triangular-shaped strakes that allowed Thorn to slightly alter the hull profile. For several weeks with the old man standing over him puffing on his pipe, Thorn managed to learn just enough to get the Heart Pounder watertight again. Skills he hoped he never had to use again.
‘What’s another word for blue?’
‘Blue?’ Thorn looked over at her. ‘What’re you, depressed?’
‘No, that.’ Casey lifted her hand and pointed lazily up at the cloudless expanse. She was propped on one elbow now, her breasts doing nicely against the pull of gravity. ‘I’m thinking of doing a rhino in that color. I want the right word for its name. Blue rhino sounds dull.’
‘A rhino?’
‘I’m tired of manatees and alligators. I’m artistically restless.’
‘Azure,’ Thorn said. ‘Cerulean.’
‘Too hoity-toity.’
‘Sapphire.’
To the west across the flats was a small mangrove island. Gulls dove into the shallow water rimming it. A great blue heron stood in the flats just a few yards from the snarl of mangrove roots. On the charts the island was unnamed, but he and Casey had been calling it Mosquito Junction. A dark haze of bloodsuckers that’d probably never tasted human flesh before hovered over it like an evil bloom of radiation. Last night the little bastards had followed the wisp of light from their kerosene lantern across a mile of motionless air right into the Heart Pounder’s cabin to dine on their exposed flesh. He and Casey had to decide whether to douse the lantern and stop reading, or put up with the itchy nuisance. They read. Swatted and read.
‘Cobalt rhino,’ Thorn said. ‘Or navy.’
‘Okay, you can stop. I’m sticking with blue. It’s not great, but it’ll do.’
‘Turquoise.’
Casey gave him a quick, precise smile.
‘You know too many words, Thorn.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘All those books you read, you’re clogged with words.’
‘I’m just a simple guy with a simple vocabulary.’
‘Yeah, right. Sure you are, Thorn. You’re so simple.’
‘Indigo,’ he said.
Casey aimed her chin at the sky.
‘That,’ she said. ‘That color. Whatever it is.’
Casey stretched her arms, pointing both hands up at the unnameable heavens. Her breasts shimmered, taking the light and playing with it and sending it on its happy way.
‘So what’re we having for supper?’
‘I was thinking fish,’ he said. ‘In fact, that fish. If it ever gives up.’
‘Fish again?’
‘You like fish.’
‘Four days ago I liked fish. At the moment I’d kill for a hamburger.’
‘You’re a vegetarian.’
‘My point, exactly.’
Thorn fished for a while and Casey basked. She was excellent at it. Basking seemed to be one of her gifts. She had such a remarkably even disposition, nothing seemed to rouse her to anger or even mild distress.
For the last couple of months they’d been sharing his small stilthouse and his monotonous days. She went off to her roadside shack every morning to make her plaster animals while he tied bonefish flies. After work, he helped her unload her latest creation from the back of her ancient Chevy pickup and she set up her paints out near Blackwater Sound and spent the next few hours covering that dull gray plaster with the gaudiest colors she could swirl together.
While she painted, Thorn tied flies or crafted the wooden lures he carved for a few longtime clients who believed his handiwork had some kind of supernatural power to catch fish. God bless their superstitious butts. The lures Thorn made were torpedo-shaped pieces of gumbo-limbo or live oak ornamented with a few dabs of paint and glitter and glass bead eyeballs, nothing more or less. But if those fine folks wanted to give him cash money to carve them and sand them and fine-tune them with a little color, then fine. Go with Allah.
Last week after he’d finished replanking the hull, Thorn decided he needed a break from the routine. A shakedown cruise seemed just the thing, putter out into the backcountry, deep into the Florida Bay, and see if the dignified old lady still leaked.
It’d been a long while since Thorn had motored so far into those waters, and though he’d heard the backcountry was in bad shape, seeing it firsthand was something else entirely.
The Florida Bay was a flat, shallow basin that lay at the tip of the Florida peninsula. Bordered on the east by the upper Keys and running west to the other side of the state where its waters merged with the Gulf of Mexico. For centuries the bay had received the freshwater outflow from the Everglades and had converted it gradually to saltwater by the time it reached the Keys and the coral reefs. The eelgrass had once grown in thick beds, covering most of the bay, providing the nutrition-rich nurseries for shrimp and the other lower-pecking-order creatures. When Thorn was a boy, exploring the nooks of the Florida Bay in his wooden skiff, he’d assumed such abundance would last forever. That the water would always be crystal, that the undersea kingdom would ceaselessly flourish.
But since those days Miami and its suburbs had quadrupled in size and were trying to quadruple again and the people up there were stacked butt-to-jowls twenty stories into the air without room to turn or bend over to tie their shoes, and now that the sugar growers had intimidated or paid off all their foes and were once again happily scattering phosphorus and mercury and a long list of other unpronounceable toxins across their vast acreage, the end result, a hundred miles downstream, was that the pristine Florida Bay was now teetering on collapse.
A never-ending flood of solvents and cleaning fluids and petroleum products and every other form of exotic contamination had been oozing out the rectum of the state, a spew of caustic wastewater and runoff and overflow and toilet flush, leaching into the bay, poisoning the shrimp with its acid, overheating the water with its super-mambo genetically indestructible fertilizer spillage, causing great blooms of algae that stole the oxygen right from the water, leaving the fish to writhe and float to the surface. Decades of abuse. An endless tonnage of disregard. All of which would’ve killed the bay long ago if it weren’t for the steady string of hurricanes bringing in their million million gallons of diluting fresh water. Nature’s irony, using one disaster to neutralize another.
Because of several busy hurricane seasons in a row, the bay water was not as salty or as acidic. You could see the bottom again. Patches of eelgrass were growing. Clusters of shrimp snapped by. But there was no cause for celebration. The rebirth was only temporary. The ever-sprawling masses up the road would win eventually. They’d kill the Keys. One day soon, one of those weekend visitors would snap off the last finger of coral, snatch up the final living conch. And no matter what anyone tried to do, you could absolutely count on the fact that those toxins would continue to pump into the Everglades and filter into the bay until it was all as bleached out as the whitened bones of a desert coyote ten years lying in the sun.
This was death-throes time. Time to bring your ear close to the lips of the dying creature and hear its final rasping words. Thorn couldn’t help being gloomy about it. The only way not to be gloomy was not to know it was happening or not to give a rat’s ass. He’d tried the rat’s-ass approach, tried it and tried it.
So he and Casey had come out on a shakedown cruise and the new hull hadn’t leaked. Thorn was pleased with the hull, and a little amazed. But he was deeply disheartened by what he saw beneath the glittery surface. Last night, after two rum drinks and a long dose of starlight, he’d proposed that the two of them take another trip. Cross the Gulf Stream, go over to the islands, poke around. He’d heard about a place near Andros, the blue holes, the wall. Go diving in the deep stuff. Fish on flats where the bonefish had never seen human shadows. Maybe search out some fresh place to set up shop. A new home where the tourist Huns had not yet arrived.
Casey said nothing, and Thorn dropped the subject.
Now in the fading daylight, Thorn started in on Andros again. And those other little islands where wild goats and rats and iguanas were the only residents. He’d been down there as a kid with the folks who’d raised him, Doctor Bill Truman and his wife, Kate. They’d crossed the Gulf Stream on the Heart Pounder. It’d been his first experience with deep-sea fishing, sailfish, marlin, and yellowfin tuna. Thorn was only ten, but he remembered it clearly. Great fishing, wild landscape.
‘Leave the Keys?’ Casey said. ‘All this?’
She levered herself up to a sitting position. Naked and oiled and squinting at him through the harsh sun. He looked out at the water where his fish was taking a breather, hiding behind a rock, probably hoping this was all just a terrible dream.
‘I’m ready for something new,’ Thorn said. ‘I’ve got an itch.’
He cranked the reel, brought the fish a foot closer to the boat. Then another foot.
‘I think this is the end, Thorn.’
‘The end?’
‘Of you and me. Our romance.’
He gave her an uncertain smile.
‘Because I want to go to the islands?’
‘No,’ Casey said. ‘It’s been coming for a while. It arrived just now.’
‘What?’
‘The end. The end of our affair.’
He cranked the fish closer. It seemed to have given up. Just a dull weight now.
Casey said, ‘We’re different. I thought it would work out, you being how you are and me being who I am. But it hasn’t.’
‘It’s working for me.’
‘You like me because I’m shallow, Thorn.’
‘You’re not shallow.’
‘Hey, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s who I am. How I was raised. I don’t have a complicated view of the world. I don’t have dark places. Brood over stuff, get all tangled up in my thoughts. You like me because I’m easy. A lick and a dash and you’re on your way.’
Thorn looked out at the bright water. His eyes hurt and his shoulders were tired from hauling in the damn fish on such light tackle. Casey was right. There was no reason to be sporting when all you were doing was catching your supper. Just put ten-pound test on the reel and haul them in as efficiently as possible and be done with it.
‘Are you listening to me, Thorn?’
‘Oh, yes. I’m listening.’
‘You’ve just been using me to relax. I knew that. My girlfriends told me from the beginning. All the women you’ve been with, what they were like. I’m not like any of them. But I thought I’d give it a try. And sure, it was fun most of the time. The sex was fine. But we’re not the same. We’re just not. It’s pretty simple when you get down to it. We have fun, but we don’t exalt each other.’
‘Exalt each other?’
‘Maybe it’s not the right word. I don’t know. But you know what I mean. We don’t push each other up the incline. We’re just hovering in the status quo.’
Thorn cranked the sea trout up to the side of the boat. He climbed down from the platform and used the scoop net to bring the fish aboard. It lay inert on the deck, all its fight gone. Thorn squatted down. He withdrew the barbless hook from its lip and eased the sea trout back over the side and washed it back and forth through the water till it was revived. When he let it go, the fish hesitated a moment, sinking several inches through the water, then with a couple of flutters of its tail it was gone.
Thorn looked out toward the small mangrove island, at the bright water stretching beyond it, the vast silvery plain that ran for miles up toward the mainland.
‘You sure, Casey? I like you a whole lot. I’m very happy with you.’
‘Happy isn’t good enough, Thorn. Sorry.’
‘It’s not?’
‘Happy is pretty low on the joy scale.’
She reached over and picked up her yellow blouse and slipped it on and buttoned it. She looked at him for a moment, then looked out at the water again.
‘Tell me the right words. I’ll say them.’
She smiled at him.
‘At a time like this, one chance is all you get. It’s over, Thorn. But don’t worry. You’ll find somebody else. That’s how you are. A week, two weeks, you’ll be on to the next thing. Making some other girl all swoony.’
As they motored south the western sky turned pale gold. Along the horizon it was shot full of purple streaks and eddies of red. To the north, out over the Everglades, the sky was bluish-black with thunderstorms – a late cold front stalled just north of Miami. Thorn guided the boat around the shallows and Casey sat in the fighting chair drinking wine and looking back at the froth of their wake.
They were maybe ten miles southwest of Flamingo, the primitive national park that covered the extreme southern tip of the state, about as far from civilization as it was possible to go and still be in Florida waters. Thorn pulled open the tackle box and drew out the .357. He held it in his right hand, steering with his left. Behind him Casey was still facing the wake, sipping her wine. Thorn gripped the pistol by the barrel, and without ceremony, he hurled it over their starboard bow. More heavy metal added to the seabed. An empty gesture. It proved nothing, ended nothing. If the bad shit started again, he could always go buy another gun. He’d tossed the thing away but felt not one bit better about anything. Still stuck in his own tight skin. Cramped by his own mulish ways.
Before him the water lay flat with a spreading scarlet sheen. The twilight air was mellow and seasoned with the tang of barnacles and muck clinging to mangrove roots. The red sun was a smudged thumbprint a few inches above the horizon. Maybe an hour of light left.
Thorn had his face in the wind, steering them around a small mangrove island rimmed with white sand, when he sensed something off to the northwest, and turned to see the silhouette of the jet, a black cutout against the crimson sky.
Casey felt it, too, and swiveled the fighting chair halfway round and stiffened. Thorn pulled back on the throttle. The plane was growing larger by the second.
‘Please tell me that’s a fighter jet going back to Homestead Air Base.’
Thorn shook his head.
‘Wrong color, wrong shape.’
It was skimming very close to the water, headed in their direction, maybe a mile or two away. A 747 or 767, he wasn’t sure. But big, very big, and closing fast. A great blue heron wading on a nearby sandbar squawked once and untangled into flight. To their south a large school of mullet splashed the surface and quickly disappeared.
‘Hear that?’ Thorn said.
‘I don’t hear anything.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Engines are dead.’
‘Shit!’ Casey dropped her wineglass on the deck, stood up.
The Heart Pounder was too old and slow to dodge anything hurtling that fast. Anyway there was nowhere to hide, and no way to be sure he wasn’t putting them even more squarely in the jet’s path.
Thorn shifted the engine into neutral and watched it come.
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