Silencer (30 page)

The device in his lap played its jingly tune again.

Jonah read the text and said, “Okay, so I was wrong.”

He typed something back and after a second the phone jingled again.

“What the hell're you doing?”

“Antwan wants to get rid of some people at the lodge. I asked him who it was, and all he said was a couple showed up, sticking their noses in his business. A guy he's calling ‘brown sugar' and the guy's squeeze, a twiggy.”

“Brown sugar?”

Thorn grabbed the shoulder of Jonah's shirt and hauled him to his feet and pushed him toward the front door.

“Hey, back the fuck off, man. What's going on with you?”

“We're going to the lodge.”

“I'm not going to any lodge. I'm staying here. I'm staying with Moses. I'm going to have a funeral.”

“Get going.”

Thorn shoved him toward the door.

“I said no. I'm not deserting my brother. Fuck the lodge.”

Jonah dodged to the left behind the couch and was halfway to the kitchen before Thorn could raise the Glock. But again he couldn't shoot. Not moral hesitation, but necessity. The asshole knew the way out of this landlocked maze.

Thorn started across the living room, calling out to Jonah.

He was passing by the Gacy poster when Jonah popped into the doorway holding the Mac-10. His shit-eating grin was back.

But only for a second. That grin died quickly on his lips. Thorn dropped him with the first shot to his chest, watched him fall, then stepped close to put the second through his tortured brain. Granting Jonah his final wish.

With the toe of his shoe, Thorn nudged his shoulder. Jonah was gone.

Thorn kicked away the Mac-10, and it skidded across the hardwood floor.

There was no clip in the slot.

 

 

FRISCO HAD NEVER TOLD THE
story, never been tempted to tell it. Since the night Earl Hammond revealed it to him, Frisco kept it locked up with most of the other memories of his childhood on Coquina Ranch, inside a dark vault in his chest. Though he'd hauled it around without complaint all these years, he knew the knowledge had made him colder, less trusting of men who held the reins of power.

In silence and in no particular hurry, he drove west out of the orderly network of streets and roads and avenues that spanned Miami, all the roadways broad and lit, straight as rulers, and numbered north and south and east and west. Most of the city was mapped that way. If you knew an address, you could drive directly to it. Good for cops and taxi drivers, good for tourists. But soulless and dull. In a way that's what Earl Hammond's story was about, those roads, all the other cars packed tight around him.

“You ever hear of the Trilateral Commission?”

They were stopped at a light, 8th Street and 107th Avenue. Claire turned down the jazz station she'd been listening to.

“Some kind of Ayn Rand phony cabal? The twelve men who run the world?”

“Well, that particular cabal exists, the Trilateral Commission. David Rockefeller started it in the seventies. Supposed to foster international cooperation. They have official meetings, put out papers, that kind of thing.”

“Is this about Coquina Ranch?”

“It's about the second half of that story Earl was telling you.”

She was cupping Frisco's cell phone in her hands. He could see its slow green pulse like some otherworldly creature calmed by her touch.

“Trilateral Commission is just one of many. There's Bohemian Grove, a summer camp for the rich and famous out in California. The Carlyle Group, Davos, Bilderberg, the Jerusalem Assembly. Skull and Crossbones. A couple dozen of them. Lots of overlap, same guys, different campfires. Ex-presidents, sheikhs, people you've never heard of. The global elite. The Four Hundred who matter.”

“Sitting around, complaining about their prostates,” Claire said.

He smiled.

“Prostates are not unimportant.”

“So you're saying Coquina Ranch is one of those?”

“It was never supposed to be.”

Claire was silent while Frisco gathered himself for a moment.

“That night little Earl went back to bed, but it was too much for him. For godsakes, Ernest Hemingway, his hero, was sitting out there a half mile away. The President of the United States is there. Earl fidgeted for an hour, couldn't get to sleep, so he rolled out of bed and stole back down there. He knew every twig and branch out in those woods, so it wasn't hard to sneak around. In the daytime when the campfires weren't in session, he played in those woods, pretended he was part of the gatherings. One of the gang.

“By the time he returned, the cast of characters had changed. Hemingway was gone. Hoover had left, too. Edison and Ford were still there, and another man had joined them. An old codger, frail as Edison, in his eighties.”

Frisco steered into a service station, pulled up to the full-service
pump, and let an elderly Cuban gentleman fill his tank with gasoline that cost fifteen cents a gallon extra for a little old-time service. He wanted to do the story justice, but it sounded bland as he related it to Claire. None of the color or the smells that he could picture in his mind. The dying campfire, the men huddled close. That story had been in the vault too long and lost its flavor.

“Earl found out later who the old guy was. Rockefeller.”

“John D.?”

“Yeah, he had a winter home in Ormond Beach and he'd gotten to be friends with Edison and Ford, met them at the ranch a few times. They shared a love for Florida. They'd go camping together, in their straw boaters and sport coats, a bunch of eccentric outdoorsmen. Rockefeller was a serious golfer at a time when playing a round of golf was like hiking the backcountry. He'd been retired from Standard Oil for twenty years, his wife had died. That was the time when he was giving his money away in huge chunks.”

Frisco paid the Cuban man for the gas and pulled back into the traffic. He glanced again at his cell phone flashing in her lap.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I just haven't had much practice telling this story.”

“You're doing fine.”

Frisco cracked his window, let in some cool night air.

“Well, what little Earl heard that night, he didn't understand. It took him years to put it together, to grasp what an outrage he'd witnessed.”

Claire was quiet, watching Frisco speak.

“It was just talk, nothing concrete, no papers drawn up or anything like that. None of that came clear till later. But Earl Junior was certain the seed was planted that night. The Depression was just taking hold, and here were these men, captains of industry, they got all the money in the world, and they couldn't stop looking for business opportunities. It was in their blood, it was who they were.

“The plan was simple. Start a company, call it something innocent. Rockefeller proposed the name that night, and that's the thing Earl remembered. National City Lines. A year or two later Firestone came into the deal, and Alfred Sloan with General Motors. Rockefeller used his West Coast branch, Standard Oil of California, as cover. A year or two after that campfire, National City Lines started buying up streetcar systems, all the electric mass transit. Trolleys, trains. They bought more than a hundred. Tulsa, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. Then they just stepped back and let them fall apart, raised fares, cut service, fired mechanics and conductors, didn't maintain the rail lines, let it all rust. Found every goddamn thing they could to undermine the business. A decade of neglect and sabotage until automobiles and gasoline-powered buses started looking pretty attractive to commuters and politicians. Just a simple plan to get everybody out of electric trains and into gasoline-burning cars, so all the men sitting around that fire could get a little richer.”

“Goddamn.”

“Yeah.”

“That's it?”

“When he got old enough and put it together, Earl Junior hated the idea that National City Lines was born at Coquina Ranch. Hated that his own father had collaborated in a way. It was corruption of the worst kind—moral, ethical—and it was unpatriotic. Everything Earl despised.”

“It's what competitive people do,” Claire said. “Same in sports. Find your opponent's weakness, exploit it. It's the way the world works. Push hard, take advantage. Go for the throat.”

“Part of the world works that way, I guess.”

“I'm not trying to justify it.”

“There's referees on the football field, and there's cops on the street, but tell me, Claire, who's watching the guys sitting around the goddamn campfire?”

She was silent, staring out the windshield at the faint lights of
ranch homes in the distance. Frisco had never realized how angry that story made him.

“I'm sorry I barked,” he said.

She waved her hand, blowing it off. “So where does the oil fit?”

“Geology was one of Edison's hobbies. The guy had a million hobbies. All that time he spent on the ranch, he and Ford were poking around, damming up streams, digging in the dirt like a couple of kids, excavating fossils. Eventually he sold Earl Senior on the idea of setting up a few exploratory wells. He thought the topography looked right. Earl said fine, be my guest. All a big joke.

“That's how it started. Wildcat crews showed up one day, rigs got built, wells drilled. I don't know who footed the bill. Probably John D. They hit some oil, hit it again, all in that one area on the western border where the red circles are. But Earl Senior lost interest. He didn't see the point. Why wreck his sanctuary? The ranch was selling cattle to Cuba at the time, making good money. He thought of the oil as a retirement fund. He could tap it one day if he needed to, like hocking the family silver. He wasn't opposed to drilling.

“Earl Senior sat on that survey map till he was an old man, then he picked a time when he thought his son was ready, and passed it on to Earl Junior as part of his initiation into the Hammond patriarchy. When Earl Junior was running things, first chance he got, he built that fence around the oil land. Had the bore holes filled or covered. Wanted no part of it. Just that one night hearing Rockefeller talk about destroying the cheap, easy transportation system of the common man, that sealed it for him.”

“So that prisoner-of-war thing, that was a lie?”

“A cover story, yeah. I always thought that fence was more symbolic for the old man than anything. A way to close up that area like it never existed. I think it's why Earl agreed to let Browning go ahead with the safari deal, let wild animals roam on that land. Probably hoped Browning would get hooked on the hunting preserve, he'd fall in love with that land, one day it might keep him from drilling.”

“When you were twenty-one, Earl gave you a copy of the map, leaving it to the next generation to decide.”

“Like I said, a test of loyalty.”

“And that's when you left the ranch. Went into Miami and never came back.”

“That's right.”

“You never fell in love with that land?”

“I didn't say that.”

“Then why leave?”

“The job description didn't suit me.”

“You mean the campfires? Hosting all the hotshots?”

“Never been all that fond of hotshots.”

By then they'd moved beyond the urban sprawl and the fuck-you-I'm-packing-heat traffic of Miami. There were faster routes back to the ranch, but Frisco was in no hurry. He took the north turn off Tamiami Trail, passing by the Miccosukee casino that had risen in the last few years on the edge of the Everglades. Thousands of cars and tour buses filled its enormous lots. They traveled a mile beyond the casino's glow, entering the dark prairies again. There was an hour left to Coquina Ranch.

“Why did Earl only tell me the first half of the story?” Claire said.

“It's the way he wanted Coquina Ranch remembered, the romantic version. Powerful men hashing out things, arguing about the greater good, oddball get-togethers, Hemingway mingling with Hoover. It's how he ran those campfires all his life. Kept them personal, philosophical, like college bull sessions. Any business talk started up, anything with a dollar sign, Earl would squash it. He was ashamed of the second half of that story. That's the ranch's dark side. A bunch of greedy bastards conspiring.”

“He wanted me to be proud of the ranch. Even if it was only half the truth.”

“The fact that he told you any part of that story amazes me.”

“Yeah?”

“Earl was a decent man, but he was a Hammond, in most ways as hide-bound as the rest. Like keeping the men-only rules. Only reason he told you that story is because he must've seen something in you he hadn't seen in a woman before, not even Rachel Sue. Something he trusted.”

“Well, he was wrong,” she said. “I let him down when he needed me most.”

“Knock it off. Earl saw who you are, that's why he opened up. He was right. That's damn well who you are—someone he could trust to do the right thing.”

“And you? Do you finally believe that?”

He looked at the green light blinking in her lap. “I think my brother is a goddamn fool. That kid's made only one good choice in his entire life. And I don't believe he even recognizes it.”

She sighed, then reached out and turned the jazz station back up and listened to the music for a few miles until it began to fade, and turned into static as they moved farther into the countryside. She snapped it off and leaned her head against the seat.

Frisco kept the truck at the speed limit while the ten-wheelers boomed past. It was several miles before she spoke, her voice with its edge again.

“I need to fill in some blanks.”

“Okay.”

“Who shot Saperstein?”

“My guess is one of the Faust boys. The little guy with the grin. Last winter Browning came into Miami, we had lunch. He brought those two along. That little twit wouldn't take his eyes off me.”