Silencer (3 page)

“Who needs the government? We could keep it that way ourselves.”

“As hard as it is to imagine, Thorn, someday you won't be here. And depending on how you write your will, if you ever get around to that, the land could still be up for grabs in the future. Now it won't be. Ever.”

“We could give it to the state for free. No reason to make the taxpayers cough up five hundred million and whatever.”

“Five hundred and thirty-four million dollars.”

“Why?”

“The taxpayers have already anted up. The money's set aside in the Florida Forever fund, just sitting there waiting for the right offer. If you hadn't claimed the pot, someone else would. Normally it's some real-estate sharpie, he unloads a chunk of property that's not commercially viable, no utilities, too costly to develop, bad zoning, so he pawns it off on the state, then turns around and uses those millions to buy other land and develop golf courses and condo communities or strip malls.”

“The old shell game,” he said. “Con men picking the citizens' pocket.”

“Exactly.”

“But we're not going to do that.”

“Well, this is where it gets tricky.”

“Give it to me. I'm a big boy.”

“The day after I signed the initial agreements, Earl Hammond showed up at Division of State Lands and offered them Coquina Ranch. Almost two hundred thousand acres. If he'd come in one day earlier, he could have had the deal we got.”

“But we depleted the fund.”

“Right.”

“Only we don't really want all that money.”

“No, we don't,” Rusty said.

“So you tore up the deal, stepped aside, and let him take the five hundred million. Which means we're still stuck with the Bates land.”

“No, I didn't do that,” she said. “The attorneys for the state are drafting the arrangement. I don't understand all the ins and outs. But essentially everyone gets what they want. In about three weeks we're all going to sit down in a room, pass some papers around a table. The state of Florida hands you a check for five hundred and thirty-four million dollars, you endorse it over to Earl Hammond, which leaves us with zero, and when everything is signed, the state of Florida takes a shitload of land out of circulation. You wanted to use Bates International to do some good, well, this is something very good.”

Thorn took a swallow of the breeze coming off the water. Feeling a quick tingle of righteousness.

“Coquina Ranch,” Thorn said. “That's the safari operation, right? A thousand bucks to shoot a penned-up wildebeest. That Earl Hammond?”

“Yeah, that's the one.”

“And we're going to take this guy's land, put him out of business?”

“That's one way to look at it.”

“Better and better.”

“Minor point, but old man Hammond is holding back a few hundred acres to leave to his two grandsons. Even subtracting that, bottom line, your land plus the Hammond land, that's four hundred fifty square miles of Florida real estate. Which is larger than all five boroughs of New York City.”

“Out of circulation forever,” he said.

“Exactly.”

Thorn looked out the mouth of the lagoon where the Atlantic was slick as ice. Today its color was more Irish green than blue. Maybe there was some chromatic aberration at work, particles in the upper
atmosphere diffracting the sunlight in some oddball way. Though he could be wrong. It might be sorcery, not science. That deep green might be an upwelling at the ocean floor, a rare release of emerald water from the secret vats of Neptune and his boys. Yeah. He liked that idea better.

“You're a very smart woman, Rusty Stabler. Anyone ever tell you that?”

“I never tire of hearing it.”

“Can we keep my name out of this?”

She looked off at the treetops for a moment, then came back.

“Well, Margaret and a couple of her legal team in State Lands will know, but yeah, I stipulated that you wanted to remain anonymous.”

“If it can't be, I won't sign anything. We keep this thing between you and me and Sugarman. That's it. No big hoo-hah, pictures in the paper, any of that.”

“Understood.”

He leaned out and kissed her on the lips. When the kiss was done, her eyes stayed closed for a fraction of a second, then drifted open.

“I had a feeling you'd like it.”

“It's better than anything I imagined. You're an amazing woman.”

“I am,” she said. “I'm damn amazing.”

“I'll tell you what else I want to do,” he said.

Rusty touched the pearl at her throat with an inward look as if briefly communing with her departed mother.

“Thanksgiving is in a couple of weeks, right?”

“Two and a half.”

“The deal will be done by then?”

“If nothing snags it. That should be about right.”

“Then I want to have a party.”

Her eyes came back to him, first puzzled, then amused.

“A party?”

“A celebration. You, me, and Sugar, we'll know what it's about. To everybody else it's just a bash.”

“Thorn's going to have a party? Hermit crab leaving his shell?”

“Yeah, the new and improved Thorn. Dance on the table. Toast the smart woman I'm lucky enough to live with. A big, loud, drunken, shit-faced party. Invite everyone we know. Everyone they know.”

At that moment, Sugarman came walking around the west end of the house, wearing a jaunty Panama hat, faded jeans, a red polo shirt. Looking at Thorn, then at Rusty, sensing something, getting a quizzical look.

“What happened?” he said. “Who got pregnant?”

“No one around here,” Rusty said. “Thank God.”

“Rusty just made five hundred million dollars. We're rolling in loot.”

“Five hundred million?” Sugarman said. “That's almost half a billion.”

“More or less,” Rusty said.

“What do you want money for, Thorn? A new pair of flip-flops, a safety pin to hold up your loincloth?” Sugarman smiled innocently.

His buddy had been giving him the same raft of shit forever. As a couple of ten-year-old misfits, they'd struck an immediate bond that hadn't faltered over the turbulent decades.

“Go on, Rusty, tell him the story. I'd like to hear it again anyway.”

Sugarman eased into one of the rattan rockers and Rusty ran through it one more time. Giving him the abbreviated version. Sugar rocked, looking off at the indigo sky above the mangroves. Nodding as Rusty spoke, not interrupting like Thorn had, but simply absorbing it, a slow smile taking shape on his lips as the scope of the deal came clear.

To strangers, Sugarman could come off as dull, a plodder, lacking in ambition. But Thorn knew the flip side of that surface appearance. He'd never met anyone as resolute, persistent, and loyal as Sugar. This man whose self-indulgent parents had betrayed him the moment he was born had set his course early in life and had kept an unswerving focus ever since. He was determined to be the opposite of his own parents. Steadfast and dependable to a fault.

Sugarman was only a week old when he was deserted by his Nordic
blond mom and his badass Rastafarian dad. He'd been raised by a granny in the Key Largo slums and grew up polite, soft-spoken, but with uranium at the marrow. With his sharp-angled good looks and cinnamon skin, Sugarman had long been a target for bullies of both races. “Pretty boy,” the jerks would call him, “dandy man.” Sugarman was slow to anger, but if the taunts ever got physical, he wasn't shy about shutting them down. Long-limbed and nimble, he could flatten a shithead's nose quicker than most men could make a fist.

After high school he spent a few years living his childhood dream, though he eventually discovered that working for the Monroe County sheriff's department was far less gratifying than he'd imagined. When he grew weary of writing speeding citations and stepping into the middle of snot-slinging bar fights and domestic chaos, he went private. “Security consultant” was what he was calling himself lately.

As Rusty reached the end of her story, Sugarman shook his head and whistled in admiration.

“And that's not even the most incredible part,” Rusty said. “Get this: Thorn wants to have a party to celebrate. On Thanksgiving.”

“Thorn? A party? Mr. Anti-Social?”

“I said the same thing.”

“Hey,” Thorn said, “a guy can change. Give me a chance.”

Sugarman looked at Rusty and shook his head.

“Boy, oh, boy,” he said. “This I gotta see.”

 

 

ON THANKSGIVING NIGHT, CLAIRE HAMMOND
was in the tack room skinning a wildebeest when Earl wandered in and sat down on a bench nearby. Just the two of them—the first time they'd been alone together in weeks.

Earl Hammond sighed, took the unlit pipe from the corner of his mouth, and tucked it in his back pocket. She waited in silence while he rolled up the shirt sleeves of his blue work shirt, then cut a look her way and gave her a bashful smile.

“How you doing tonight, Miss Claire?”

She said she was fine, just fine.

He chewed on that for a minute, nodding to himself, building up to something, but not quite there. A moth circling the Coleman lantern stumbled in Earl's direction, and he raised a hand and waved it on its way. For half a second his eyes darted to her, then cut back to the darkness beyond the barn door.

She wiped her bloody hands on a towel and came over to him.

“So,” Earl said. “You have time for a story?”

“Another one about the good old days?”

“What? Do my stories bore you?”

“Come on, Earl. I'm kidding. I love your stories.”

Earl Hammond was a big rumpled man whose silvery hair was still luxuriant. Though he was in his eighty-seventh year and there was some stiffening in his gait, he showed no loss of vigor, no wasting of muscle, no fading of the sharp light in his eyes. An unbowed six-foot-six, he could still ride a horse at full gallop, could fell a mature pine without setting aside the ax to catch his breath, and was still the best marksman on the ranch. Men were drawn to his cast-iron vigor, women to his reserved gentility.

Staring off at the shadows, Earl Hammond told the tale straight through, altering his deep voice here and there to mimic the various characters, and narrating the rest in that slow, resonant manner she'd heard him use a few times before, a tone he reserved for cherished memories, rare glimpses into his storied past.

 

Earl Hammond had been ten years old that winter in 1930 when Henry Ford and Thomas Edison arrived at Coquina Ranch early in the afternoon on a Friday. Clara Ford and Mina Edison stayed behind in Fort Myers, where the two families wintered in adjacent homes.

Young Earl had met Mr. Edison on previous visits but had never seen him so pale and feeble. Mr. Ford had to hoist Edison out of the passenger seat of the Model A Tudor Sedan, then assist him across the bridge and into the lodge.

After dinner the men were seated in the dining room enjoying their cigars when Ernest Hemingway lumbered in, his arm bandaged from a recent accident. He was red-faced and joking in Spanish with Juan Miguel Pinto, the ranch foreman. In the two hours it took Juan Miguel to chauffer Hemingway from his Miami hotel, the writer and the ranch hand had apparently forged a friendship.

It was to be a quick stop for Hemingway, enroute to Key West, making this detour to shake hands with two of America's great geniuses,
gab a little around the bonfire, and drink some first-class whiskey with the legendary Earl Hammond Sr.

Earl Junior could have cared less about the lightbulb man or the manufacturer of the Tin Lizzie. But he was enthralled with Hemingway and dogged him all evening. At the campfire he sat on a log behind the great man and memorized his every move.

President Hoover appeared well after dark, accompanied by a single federal agent. There was a one-bodyguard rule at Coquina Ranch, for otherwise Earl Hammond feared the place would be overrun with Pinkerton men and gun-toting thugs, and the camaraderie between the guests would be compromised. Hoover saluted the others, and they returned the greeting with affection—all but Hemingway. By then well drunk, he began to fume about the fatheaded Quaker and his prohibitionist policies, until Earl Senior stepped in and quieted the writer down.

The logs burned and young Earl watched the vines of sparks twist up into the dark sky as if they meant to take root in the heavens. The discussion ricocheted from topic to topic so quickly the ten-year-old could barely keep up. Earl's father congratulated Hemingway on his new novel, which he believed was the best war story he'd ever read. The praise sent Hemingway rambling on about his exploits on the Italian front in that long-ago conflict. Everyone listened politely to the familiar narrative until finally the writer paused to take a long swallow of whiskey.

President Hoover cleared his throat and remarked on Mr. Edison's many contributions to the war effort, perhaps less well publicized than Hemingway's but of critical importance in the ultimate victory. The president ticked off a few of Edison's wartime inventions: a ship telephone system, an underwater searchlight, anti-torpedo nets, and navigational equipment. The list seemed to come as a surprise to Hemingway. After that young Earl caught the author giving the half-deaf inventor respectful glances.

Prohibition took its turn as a topic, and Hoover had his say, mostly religious tripe. Ford, a teetotaler, chimed in with a homily about the devilish effects of liquor on his workers. Sulking in silence, Hemingway sipped his drink and stared into the fire, his cheeks flushed as if the flames of the log fire were singeing them.

Finally the matter that lurked in the background all evening broke forth. The stock-market crash of the previous October, the rising rate of bank failures, and the economic misfortunes that were spreading poverty and gloom across the land.

In a somber voice, President Hoover described a certain gala that Henry Ford had hosted the previous fall in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Edison's invention of the lightbulb. Hoover, along with the major political and financial leaders of the country, showed up in Dearborn, Michigan, for the event. It was Hoover's view that in the fifty years since the lightbulb first flickered on, Edison, Ford, Firestone, and Durant had transformed America from a third-rate power into the world's industrial giant. Then, tragically, only seven days after those festivities in Michigan, Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression was under way.