Silencer (33 page)

Thorn heard a car's engine coming down the same road he'd traveled a few minutes earlier. Almost as quickly as he heard it, the motor ceased. His backup was arriving.

The man with the smartass voice began to count. He made it to three before Thorn stepped away from the barn.

“Okay,” Thorn called out. “I'm here. Mr. Ta-Ta has arrived.”

“Well, now, look at this, Wild Dog. We done accumulated ourselves enough folks for a good old-fashioned square dance.”

“Step out here,” another man said. “Show yourself.”

“They're armed,” Sugarman called.

Thorn saw Sugar's head jerk to the side. One of the two had clipped him.

Thorn stepped forward, the Mac-10 aimed at the group. He kept
coming until he was twenty feet away, then he halted. He could just barely make out their faces.

“Well, looky there. That wouldn't be the Faust boys' Mac-10 automatic weapon, would it? What'd you do with my little buddies?”

The big man said, “Who the fuck are you?”

“My name is Thorn.”

The big man looked at the black man. “And you would be Browning Hammond and Antwan Shelton.”

“Well, I'll be double-dog damned. What you doing still walking around alive?”

“You sent children to do the work of men.”

“Hey, brother, that's some kind of shirt you're wearing. What happened to you? Come in second place in a shootout?”

“You're the fucker that's trying to take my land,” Hammond said. “You and this woman were conspiring to steal what's rightfully mine. What's been in my family for generations.”

“No,” Thorn said. “We were trying to preserve it.”

“Preserve it?” Antwan chuckled “There ain't a fucking thing anywhere around this godforsaken place worth preserving.”

“There's oil,” Thorn said.

“Oil,” Rusty said. “Aw, Jesus Christ. That's it.”

Thorn stepped closer, saying, “Must be a whole lot of oil if you're willing to kill your own flesh and blood.”

“Shut up,” Hammond said. “Everybody shut up.”

He took a grip of Rusty's hair and hauled her forward. His pistol jammed into her cheek.

“Now put down that weapon, Mr. Thorn. Drop it at your feet. We'll go inside and we'll hash this out. There's got to be some way to make everybody happy and go our separate ways.”

“Don't do it, Thorn,” Rusty said. “Don't do it.”

“No, don't do it,” a woman said.

She came from Thorn's right and walked to the edge of the group. Tall and thin with long hair.

“Well, do-si-do,” Antwan said. “Swing your partner left and right.”

“I know this looks bad, Claire.”

“Let her go, Browning. Let the woman go.”

“It'll be over and done in just a second. Then it'll be okay again.”

“Let her go, Browning.”

“Look, I got to get to a doctor,” he said. “This is bad, Claire. It's my eye. I've been blinded.”

“Hold on, cowboy,” Antwan said. “We about got this settled. Don't go all soft and cuddly on me now.”

“I'm hurt, Claire,” Browning said. “I need help.”

“Yes, you do. You've needed it for a long time.”

“Enough of this shit,” Antwan said. “Put the Mac down, Thorn.”

“Yeah,” Browning said. “Put it down before someone gets hurt.”

“Let's try that counting thing again,” Antwan said. “Ready, set, here we go. One, two, three . . .”

The horse was bigger than any Thorn had ever seen. It broke from the barn door at full gallop. On its bare back was a man in a gray T-shirt and jeans, leaning low and hauling ass right at Browning Hammond and Rusty.

All four of them stood immobilized as the horse charged like a shadowy apparition from some Arthurian tale. Browning Hammond released his grip on Rusty, raised his pistol to fire, but he'd responded too slowly, for the horse was on him and knocked him to the side, and the rider reached out with one arm and scooped Rusty around the waist and carried her off to the far end of the corral and put her safely down. It took a moment for everyone to recover, to register the immensity of what they'd just witnessed.

Sugarman was the first to regain his senses. He swiveled to the right and delivered a stomp to the side of Antwan's knee, felling the man into a groaning heap before he disarmed him with quick and professional ease.

Browning Hammond looked around at the gathering, watched his wife marching toward him. He groaned once and raised his pistol,
turning it to his temple, but Claire Hammond moved swiftly to his side and peeled the weapon from his grasp.

“Oh, no, Browning. You don't get off that easy.”

With a shaking hand the large man covered his ruined eye and sank to his knees in the white glowing dust of the corral.

 

 

THERE WERE FIVE OF THEM
around the campfire on that chilly March evening. The pine logs were erected in an elaborate square that reminded Thorn of a miniature version of the kind of fortress Davy Crockett and his boys might have whipped together on the edge of the wilderness. Sparks swirled up into the dark evening as if a band of Iroquois warriors had attacked the fort with flaming arrows and were circling on their horses, whooping with crazed delight as the pale faces fired their flintlocks.

Okay, so Thorn's imagination was a bit overstimulated by the Chianti and the stories Frisco had been telling, listing off some of the notable people who'd gathered in this very spot. A few of those folks even Thorn had heard of, most he hadn't, though Sugarman seemed to know them all, saying “wow” and “really?” and “man, oh man” over and again.

At a lull in the conversation, Sugar drew his small Canon camera from his shirt pocket, but Frisco waved him off.

“No photographs, sorry.”

Sugarman lowered the camera.

“Really? That's a rule?”

“Yeah, always has been,” Frisco said. “No photos, no recordings, no videos.”

“So where's the proof any of those people were actually here?”

“There is none.”

“Hemingway, Edison, Ford. It could all be fiction.”

“It could be,” Frisco said. “Any other rules we should know?” Thorn said.

“No mention of prostates,” Claire said. “Other than that, anything goes.”

“Not very challenging,” Rusty said. “I've never had any desire to discuss prostates.”

“I think we're breaking that rule already,” Sugar said.

Frisco was silent. He sat on a stump, staring at the campfire, sipping a beer from the bottle. The night was cool. One of the final fronts of the season had plowed through yesterday and left them swimming in air so pure and perfect everyone was a little dizzy. Soon the seven months of summer would begin, hurricane season with all that waiting and watching.

“Thomas Edison. Right here?” Rusty patted the rock she was sitting on.

“Right there,” Frisco said.

“Did you know that Edison found the smell of cooking food revolting?” Rusty said. “He couldn't go anywhere near a kitchen. He liked to eat just fine, but smelling it while it was being prepared, that turned his stomach.”

“Where'd you hear that?” Claire said.

“I read a biography last week.”

“She was getting ready for tonight,” Thorn said.

“An overachiever,” Frisco said.

“Nothing wrong with overachieving,” said Claire.

“What blows me away is Hemingway,” Sugarman said.

“Exactly where you're sitting,” Frisco said. “He made a fool of himself that night.”

“Insulted Hoover,” Claire said. “Insulted Henry Ford.”

“Full of himself and drunk as usual,” Frisco said. “Apparently he saved all his good stuff for the books. Nothing left over for real life.”

Claire said, “Ringo Starr and the Maharishi. Those were guests of Frisco's dad. Earl Three.”

“Be still my heart,” Thorn said. “Not the Maharishi.”

“Right there.” Frisco pointed. “Yammered all night about his prostate.”

“Have a little respect, Thorn,” Sugarman said. “This is hallowed ground.”

“How hallowed could it be if we made the cut?” Thorn stretched out his legs into the dancing light.

“Can't take this guy anywhere,” Sugar said. “I apologize. Thorn doesn't know the meaning of the word
reverence
.”

“That's not true. I revere lots of things. Just not that many dead people.”

“So that's it? You just sit around and talk? That's all there is to it?” Rusty kicked a sputtering cinder back toward the bonfire.

“That's it,” Frisco said. “Sit, talk, drink a little. Pretty simple.”

“Are we allowed to talk about what happened?” Sugarman said. “Antwan, the governor, and all that.”

“Do you want to?” Rusty said, giving Sugar a hard look. “Really?”

There was silence for a moment as everyone drifted off into their own recollections of the aftermath. Twenty to life for Browning and Antwan seemed light to Thorn. And simple impeachment for the governor seemed lighter still. In some law-enforcement quarters there'd been lingering questions about the deaths of the Faust brothers, suspicions that some unnamed third party had been involved. Though lately that fervor seemed to be dying out as a string of new atrocities in South Florida moved to the head of the line.

One of the logs crumbled, and gold embers whirled away into the air and winked out against the starry sky. Thorn listened to the frogs
out in the brush, their mad peeping, and to a distant owl and some crickets and the flap and squeak of a heron rising into the darkness.

For a moment he had a vision of other campfires blazing away in other outposts far from the busy hives of cities. Campfires sprinkled around the globe where men and women were engaged in similar ceremonies, honoring the wilderness as their elders had. Trying in this way to stay attuned to the dwindling frontier, where the old lessons were still the lessons that mattered most, where it was possible for a moment, in the scattered halo of the flames, to recall the legends and testaments of one's youth and believe in them again with full faith and pleasure.

“Why don't you tell us the one about that rattlesnake, Thorn,” Claire said. “Your brush with the wild hog.”

“It's true,” he said. “It really happened.”

“Any photographs?”

Everyone chuckled.

“Okay, so tell us. Convince us,” Frisco said. “Make us believe.”

“All right.” Thorn had a gulp of the Chianti, then set his glass on the log beside him and brushed off one leg of his jeans. “I was running from Jonah. Ran three miles across some pasture land and came into a stand of pines and cabbage palms.”

“Three miles? You ran three miles without stopping? An old fart like you?”

“Yeah, right after I climbed the walls of that sinkhole.”

“And then you sat on a rattlesnake.”

All of them laughed. They didn't believe him. Thought he was exaggerating. Thought he was embellishing his small part in the larger tale. No matter how hard he tried, there was something about the way Thorn told a story that always made people believe he was joking. Like the night he was praising Rusty at the party, same thing, everyone hooting at his earnestness.

He touched his pocket, the lump of the diamond ring. He'd been
carrying it around for the last few weeks, looking for the perfect time to spring it on her. He glanced around at these people, this place. But something told him no, maybe not tonight. Not just yet. Get Rusty alone, go down on one knee, give her something goofy and romantic to remember. Something she might tell later at a campfire when she wanted to get a good laugh.