Silencer (23 page)

Sugarman watched a hawk slice through the windy trees, swooping down for a closer look at something in the tall grass.

“You didn't tell Mullaney about the Florida Forever deal.”

“Some of it.”

“How much?”

“Broad outline. I just said Thorn was involved in a real estate transaction with Earl.”

“That's all you told him?”

“It was a quick conversation.”

She looked out her window, swept a palm across her forehead as if easing the pressure of a headache.

“So is that how it works, being a private detective? Withhold evidence. Misdirect the cops so you can handle things on your own?”

“Only when I see no other choice.”

Sugarman allowed himself one quick look, just to see if any trace of the kiss remained. She felt his glance and turned to him as if to allow this indulgence. He took several seconds to appraise the angles of her face, her mouth, which he had never considered sultry until now, her dark eyes, the faultless skin of her slanting cheeks, but he saw no remnants of the kiss anywhere. None at all.

Which he supposed was just as well.

 

 

JONAH CALMED HIMSELF
.

He had been hunting for Thorn when he encountered a wild hog. He must have killed the hog because he was covered in blood. He calmed himself some more. Powering down like Moses used to do. Moses.

Jonah no longer knew who Jonah was. Someone else, he knew that much. Some other thing. Moses was dead, and the Faust brothers' history was not what he'd believed. Sons of a monster. Kin to Dahmer, Bundy, Charlie Manson.

Jonah was alone in the world. The old Jonah was torn up and torn up some more, and all the tiny scrambled pieces were thrown like confetti into a howling gale. He'd been brother to Moses. Now what was he? Nothing he knew. Nothing.

He found himself back at the hunting lodge. There was hog blood on his hands and his arms and all over his clothes. Hog blood.

The red phone in his jeans pocket trilled.

He took it out, looked at the screen.

“RU There?”

“Ys.” Jonah got blood on the buttons thumbing back.

“WRUN.” Where are you now?

“Good f-ng?” It was. It was a good fucking question. Thanks for asking.

Then another one blinked on his screen: “LMIRL.” Let's meet in real life.

Jonah wasn't sure what that was anymore. He hit back with “WUB.”

“Clewstn bnk” came up.

What the fuck was he doing in a bank in Clewiston?

“RUNTS,” Jonah typed. Are you nuts? Then, “O&O.”

Over and totally out.

He slid the sticky-blooded phone into his pocket. It trilled again, but he didn't bother with it.

He walked to the shed out behind the cabin, went inside, and had to stand there for several moments before he remembered why he'd come. Oh, yes, the extension ladder. He carried the ladder across the pasture and into the trees and beyond the trees to the second meadow where the pit was. Where Moses was.

He stepped out onto the wooden platform over the pit and eased the ladder through the hatch he'd cut. The hatch he never should have cut. But the hatch he did cut, goddamn himself, goddamn his stupid self.

He walked the ladder forward till it was angled correctly. He turned backward and went down the ladder into the pit where Moses was. Where Moses lay on his back, a spear of stone poking through his belly.

Moses who parted the waters. Moses who led his people to freedom. Moses who protected Jonah as best he could from a monster.

Jonah stepped off the ladder. The sun was lowering and there were shadows in the pit. Jonah was going dark himself. He didn't know who he was or what he was or why he was. He knew he had to attend to his brother just as his brother would have attended him if it was Jonah lying on his back with a spike impaled through his flesh.

He kneeled beside his brother and looked at him. He made himself look at his handsome face, his closed eyes, and he made himself look at the tip of the stone at his belly. Jonah made himself reach out and he made himself, goddammit, he made himself touch his brother's cold flesh.

He kept his hand there until the nausea passed. Touching his dead brother. Then Jonah came from behind, gripped his brother's armpits and lifted him, pulling him away from the spear. Lifting him into his arms. His brother who had gone dark. Dark to the core like Jonah was going dark to his.

He carried his brother to the ladder, hoisted him up. His heavy-muscled and handsome brother who had meant no harm to anyone but all the same had suffered cruelty at an age long before a boy should know what cruelty was. He hoisted him onto his back. This brother Moses. And he climbed with him, rung by rung, rung by fucking rung. He climbed back to the level of the earth and heaved him onto the wooden platform.

He had to stop. He'd lost his breath. Above him the light was going gray and clouds were tearing across the sky.

He carried Moses on his back across the meadow, through the pine trees, and across the pasture where sometimes bison came to graze and sometimes axis deer and eland and fallow deer and waterbuck and four-horned ram. But none were there now. They knew not to come. They knew to keep their distance. They were hiding in the woods, hiding till this terrible thing passed. This thing that was Jonah Faust.

Twice more he had to stop because he had no breath. Once he stumbled and fell with Moses on top of him. But he rose again and staggered under his brother's weight across the open field back to the hunting cabin, where the paintings were and the drawings and the scribbled notes and the poems and letters, and all the stuff the ghouls and fiends produced in their cells to pass the long hours. Back to the cabin, where he would undress his brother and bathe him and prepare him for what came next. His long dark journey.

And then he'd wait for Thorn. The man had nowhere to go. It might take awhile, but when Thorn got thirsty enough or hungry enough, he'd show up. All Jonah had to do was wait.

 

Big Girl was cantering easily with an elegant uphill gait. Frisco flowed with her, his head high, surfing through a flood of familiar aromas on this familiar terrain, the pollen-saturated air, grass and pine, and far ahead at the horizon was the stark abutment of hard-edged plain against perfect sky, the afternoon light fraying through strips of ragged clouds.

Muscles he hadn't worked on the Miami streets in years were creaky, but with every stride the tightness eased a fraction. It was solace of the best kind. Comfort he hadn't known he'd lost. That wind, that light, that land he once treasured. Strange sensations on such a day. But there it was. Feeling freer than he had in years.

“Quicker this way,” Claire called out, riding past him on the left, taking a different angle to the northwest. Her bay's gait as smooth as a marble across glass.

That Claire knew the better course surprised him and made him glad. He'd always half enjoyed this woman, half distrusted her because she'd squandered herself on his brother. Some defect of character on her part, some blind spot. His brother was an imposter, or worse. Frisco hadn't decided exactly how much worse, though he was getting closer every hour of this punishing day.

Ahead he made out the slate-gray roof of the Pintos' home rising above the horizon. The ring of pines that sheltered it. A barn, some junked cars, a speeding windmill.

In Frisco's youth, the Pintos' house had been more his home than Coquina lodge. It's where Frisco learned to ride and shoot and came to understand how a large and noisy family stayed close and happy against backbreaking odds. Learned how chili was spiced, how long it should be simmered, and how to shoe a horse and properly saddle
one, how to tell jokes in two languages. And it's where one of the cousins, Javier, showed him how to drink great quantities of beer and not fall down, and Gustavo's eldest daughter, dark-haired Ana, taught him how to kiss and touch a breast with reverence and delight, and one of the Pinto aunts, fat as a barrel, schooled his clumsy feet in the dance steps of that year, and showed him how to slide his hips in a way that still made the ladies smile. All the things his grandparents were too grief-stricken and exhausted by their own losses to bother with.

Trying to catch up to Claire's dust, Frisco leaned forward, put his weight against the stirrups, and urged Big Girl into a gallop. She responded, stretching out, covering twice the ground in half the time he expected, like the horse had caught the bracing scent of the open range, and through her hooves and the lanky drive of her legs she was beginning to understand the possibilities of speed.

Going fast, but still not flat-out. He felt some portion of her holding back, a tightness in that powerful stride as if her limbs were still bound by memories from her early days, all that deprivation, the lonely weeks restricted to her stall, a sad neglect that left her suspicious of those open miles ahead.

From a few hundred yards off, Frisco saw there were no cars in the dusty lot behind the Pintos' house. No clothes hanging from the line, none of the gaudy flags the family displayed on a pole off their front porch, celebrating each change of season, every American holiday and each fiesta from their Mexican homeland. As he pulled alongside Claire and eased Big Girl down to a trot, Frisco saw the small patch of lawn that for decades the Pinto clan scrupulously maintained—gone scraggy with weeds.

They dismounted near the barn and Frisco ran some water in a tub for the horses. No dogs came out to greet them. No cats curled round their legs. A swarm of gnats rode the wind past his head and sailed off to the south.

“They're gone. Everyone left.”

“When's the last time you were out here, Claire?”

“Weeks ago, I guess. Back near Halloween. They were having a party.”

They left the horses to drink and walked to the brick house. Long and low with smallish windows. A poured concrete patio on one side that Frisco remembered well. It's where they grilled meat and ears of corn and skewers of peppers and squash, and it's where they told long boisterous stories, strummed guitars and sang songs late into the evening, accepting Frisco as one of their own. The aluminum patio furniture was still there. One chair had tumbled onto its side. A crow stood possessively on the chaise. In a corner lay a naked blond-haired doll with neither eyes nor legs.

Claire followed him to the front door. No need to knock. The screen was torn, the varnished pine door stood open. Inside, the musty air was flavored with the onions and garlic and fried grease absorbed for decades into the carpets and wallpaper. Much of the furniture was the same: table lamps, mismatched chairs, a black leather sectional couch, an entertainment unit that covered an entire wall. The screen of the TV was coated with dust. None of the family photographs were on the walls, but otherwise it was just as Frisco remembered. Closing in on thirteen years since he'd been there last. He'd celebrated his twenty-first birthday with the Pintos, a night of margaritas and a roasted pig. And the next morning he'd left Coquina, drove down to Miami and never returned.

“Somebody's here,” Claire said. She stood by the front door looking out.

A car door slammed.

“Oh, great,” she said. “Donaldson.”

Anne Donaldson was speaking on her white cell phone as she came up the concrete walkway. She walked into the house, still listening to the voice in her ear, her eyes lowered. Without a word, she snapped the phone shut and snugged it back into its holster on her belt, and looked first at Claire, then directed her attention to Frisco.

“This pisses me off,” she said.

Frisco waited. Claire turned away and began to wander the room, apparently had her fill of Donaldson.

“We're cashing it in,” she said. “Game's been called. Why do you think that is?”

“Closing up shop?” Frisco said. “So soon?”

“Governor's orders.” She stole a look at Claire, whose back was turned, then faced Frisco. “Any idea why your friend Sanchez would shut this down?”

“He's no friend of mine,” Frisco said.

“You got any ideas?”

“How's a lowly street cop fathom the subtle workings of government?”

“You don't quit.”

“Quit what?”

“You know what.”

“Am I getting under your skin?”

Donaldson made a tour of the living room, not touching anything. Observing the dust on the TV screen, examining the pale squares on the wallpaper where the photos had hung.

“Okay, all right. So I came on a little strong this morning.” Donaldson unloosened her ponytail and shook out her light brown hair, ran her fingers through it. “I do that sometimes. A woman in a man's world and all that. I apologize. Okay?”

“Apology accepted,” Claire said, turning to the woman.

Donaldson looked to Frisco for his response.

He gave her none.

“Okay, you're probably out here for the same reason I am,” Donaldson said.

Frisco waited.

“Something's not right. Something's off. I can't say what it is exactly. The circumstances of the shooting—it's just not kosher. What am I missing, Sergeant?”

“You're the expert. I sat in on a couple of interviews. That's it.”

Her eyes roved the living room again; she took a step into the open kitchen.

“They haven't been here for a while. The Pintos.”

“Claire saw them at Halloween.”

“Was Gustavo around the ranch, doing his jobs? You see him lately?”

“Nearly every day,” Claire said. “Coming and going. We haven't spoken in a while.”

“Is that unusual? Not talking to him for an extended period?”

“Yes. Normally he'd stop by the barn and say hello. Socialize a little. Not lately.”

“Any idea where the Pintos went? They have family in the area?”

“The entire family lived here, three generations,” Claire said. “Big sister, Ana, got married, moved away a few years back, but Gustavo's mother, his wife, Angela, and their three grown sons have lived in this house their whole lives. I don't know where they went.”