Hell's Bay (40 page)

“What I told you about your parents, Thorn. That whole bit was true. Just so you know. I've tried to be honest. Tried to do the right thing. I'm sorry about this. I really am. Sasha lost it, and things just got off track. That's not how it was supposed to go.”

I'd already started for her, was halfway across the cabin, when the blast staggered me, knocking me backward against the wall. I threw my arms up in front of my eyes, but it didn't help. I was blind and stunned and totally lost. The cabin was white-hot and whirling. Mona held the beam of the big bruiser right on my face, eighteen million candlepower, six feet away. I hadn't shut my lids in time, and knew I'd be sightless for hours.

I put my head down and dove across the space.

Felt the prick of the blade in the meat of my right shoulder, felt the cold spread down that arm, then another prick, this one deeper. Teeter's fine sushi knife, so sharp, so well-balanced it could slice to the bone without hurting.

I thrashed my good left arm, spun and twisted against Mona's grappling. She wasn't half as strong as Sasha, not a quarter. I fumbled my hand in the white blaze of darkness, found the knife, took hold of it by the blade, that fine fine blade slicing into my palm, and twisted it out of her hand and felt the blood flow. But still no hurt, no pain. Such superb knives. So razor-perfect as they parted the buttery flesh.

I grabbed her by the front of her shirt and threw her across the room into the clothes locker, that teak dresser I'd spent two whole days installing.

I was across the cabin in a second, seeing the dazzle of sparks and red embers everywhere, the room clogged with fireflies. I found her huddled against the locker, patted her down till I located her arms, then hauled her to her feet, took her by the shoulders and shook her hard, shook her hard some more as if to wake her from her long idiotic slumber.

 

Sugarman saw a body lying out on the dive platform. A naked female lying on her belly.

Carter Mosley brought the plane as close as he dared and cut the engines, leaving the wing lights glowing.

As they both stripped off their headsets, Sugar looked at Mosley. He was staring at the body.

“Sasha?”

“Yes,” he said. “That's her.”

Sugarman leaned close to the small man. The rustic poet with his shrewd, predatory smile.

“Give me a reason to hurt you, Carter. The smallest reason. Please.”

Mosley looked down at his lap.

Over on the Mothership, Rusty Stabler dragged herself out of the stern door. One leg was wrapped in bandages. She held a long black flashlight in one hand.

“Rusty?”

“That you, Sugar?”

“Where's Thorn?”

“Up in the crew cabins. Somebody needs to get up there quick. Can't be me. I'm a little gimpy.”

There was a twenty-foot span of water between them. No way to get to the houseboat but to swim. Sugar opened the door, then stopped, turned back, and pulled the keys from the ignition and put them in his pocket.

As he was preparing to make the jump, Thorn appeared on the upper-deck walkway. He was bloody and looked bad, and he was dragging along Mona Milligan, holding her up-right by the nape of her T-shirt.

“Thorn?”

He raised a hand in greeting, shoved Mona on ahead with the other.

Mona climbed down the spiral stairs and Thorn followed. He said a word to Rusty, then climbed down to the dive platform. He took a loop of dock line from a locker, held on to one end with his bloody hand, and lofted about thirty feet of it out to Sugarman.

Sugar caught it. He held one end, Thorn held the other, then hand over hand they drew the two crafts together.

 

 

 

 

That spring Sugarman took a half-dozen trips up to Sarasota to visit Timmy Whalen. She was a good woman, he said. She'd seen the light just when it mattered most, done the right thing. He obviously felt something for her. He came back after each trip looking calmer, happier. The relationship would have gone somewhere, I was sure of that, except that Timmy was going to be serving at least ten years in prison for aiding and abetting the murderer of Abigail Bates. Ten years was a long time to wait for someone you'd only known for a few days.

Rusty got used to her new knee in less than a month. She was up and around, prancing around on the docks, showing off her scars to the other guides. She recuperated at my house. I got to know a lot about that tattoo on her lower back—its symbolism, the meaning of nearly every swirl, every color, every hidden creature and Chinese character. But Rusty promised me there was more than half of it that was still her secret. She'd tell me if I was good.

I tried to be good. I really did.

In June, Rusty and Sugarman and I made the trip up to Sarasota to meet the folks at Bates. I'd done a crash course in corporate law with a fishing buddy of mine who used to be a financial planner for some big investment firm in Atlanta. Then he retired and came to the Keys and did financial planning for retired marijuana smugglers. He'd set them up in restaurants and motels and bars and showed them how to run responsible businesses. His name was Jimmy Fineman and he had a business degree from the Wharton School and lived on a thirty-foot sailboat anchored behind Snook's Bayside.

Jimmy was a financial Zen master. Just a few simple questions.

“Is it a public corporation or a family business?”

“Family,” I told him.

“Good. A lot more flexible. Not so many rules.”

“How do I extricate myself?” I asked him.

“Define extricate.”

“Get out of this. Get my old life back.”

“You want to sell the company or change it?”

“I don't know.”

“Selling's easy, changing is hard.”

“Maybe sell it, then.”

“Then you lose all control. Whatever bad things they were doing, they'll still be doing.”

“So change it, then. How does that work?”

“Like turning a battleship. Slow and easy. I'll talk you through it.”

It took four more meetings, but he did. He talked me through it.

It was late June, and Sugarman, Rusty, and I were going to Sarasota to pick a new board of directors.

I was the only billionaire in Sugarman's car. I sat in the backseat. I was wearing my boat shoes, my quickdry shorts, and my lucky shirt, now repaired. I looked like I always looked. Maybe that was how all billionaires looked, but I doubted it.

While Sugarman drove, I paged through the typed sheets. A list of questions the three of us had drawn up.

Five questions on each page.

We'd considered asking each of the applicants for the board to write a mission statement, but Rusty said that was likely to generate so much bullshit we'd have to spend a month wading through them all. And we'd still not have a clue who these people were, which ones would do a good job with correcting the course of Bates International. So we'd hit on the question idea. Ask them five simple questions.

Take the answer sheets back to the hotel that night, go over them, and make our decisions. We were looking for five people. We had twenty-two applicants, and most of them were Bates employees already. Some junior, mostly senior, some clerical people who'd heard the new owner was a maverick or a whacko and they might have a shot at a job they'd never in ten million years have a shot at otherwise.

I preferred the term
maverick
.

We stayed in a hotel on Siesta Key. Great powdery sand. Sugary. We had fish sandwiches and a glass of wine and got to bed early. All three of us were nervous. We'd never turned a battleship before.

Nine o'clock next morning we arrived at the corporate offices of Bates International, downtown Sarasota. The town had doubled in size since I'd been there last. Gotten fancy and crowded with traffic, lost all its sleepy charm. Like the rest of Florida. Hardly any sleepy charm to be found anymore. A security guard met us at the front desk and wanted to see ID's. I had none.

“No driver's license?”

“He's Thorn,” Rusty said. “He owns this place.”

The security guard's hand drifted toward his holster.

A woman in a white business suit arrived and saved us from certain death.

She escorted us up to a boardroom on the seventh floor.

Twenty-two people crowded in the room, some at the table, some standing. Rusty and Sugarman took seats. The woman in the white suit introduced everyone. They had important-sounding titles. They were CPA's, lawyers, investment advisers, head of the family office.

Sugarman asked what that was, the family office.

The woman in the white suit, Margie Banks, said, “The family office is responsible for all the Bates residences, in Cape Cod, Aspen, New York, and so forth. The cars and planes. Chefs, travel plans. You know, the personal stuff.”

“Yeah,” Sugarman said. “Personal stuff.”

The walls were a tasteful yellow. There were a half-dozen portraits of the Bates family hanging on three of them. I made a circuit of the room while the others waited at the table and watched me. My grandparents and my great-grandparents had been cowboys. Lean men and women with squinty eyes and sharp cheekbones. They huddled around campfires, their horses tied up nearby. I bet they didn't have driver's licenses either.

I gave the speech I'd worked on in my head. I hadn't given a speech to that many people since high school. I was nervous and fumbled a couple of times, had to backtrack. Once Rusty had to prompt me. I did it without notes, five minutes. But it seemed like an hour.

Bates was a battleship. It had been heading in one direction, now we were going to make a slight course correction. But first, I understood we needed to pick a new board of directors. Five people to run the corporation. Five people.

Rusty handed out the sheets. Five questions for five people.

Everyone looked at the questions.

“Is this a joke?” one guy asked. He wore a very nice black suit with subtle pinstripes. He had a red tie and a blue shirt.

“You're excused,” I said.

“What? You can't do that.”

“Sugar, would you show him out?”

The man straightened his red tie and stalked out of the room. One down.

“Take five minutes,” I said. “Short answers, one word, two or three at the most. Anyone need pencils or a pen?”

Nobody did.

Five minutes later we had the stack of pages.

I thanked them all for coming and they left. Several of them took a parting look at me. The maverick, the whacko.

“This is very unorthodox,” Margie Banks said when everyone was gone.

“Did you fill out a questionnaire?” I asked her.

“Is my job on the line, too?”

“The five new board members will decide that. Maybe you'll want to be one of them.”

Margie sat down and read the questions and filled out her answers quickly.

I thanked her, and then I took another look at my grandparents and my great-grandparents. I could see some resemblance. They didn't look like they'd do well in front of a crowd of lawyers, either. Tough old coots.

We went back to the hotel on Siesta Key and we sat out at a picnic table and watched the twilight come as we read through the pages. A small band was playing on a stage nearby, tinkly calypso, a little reggae. Not bad.

Some people had left half the questions blank. Others had tried to scribble in as many words as they could manage in the space. Tiny scrawls. We rejected those.

A few had done a pretty good job. Succinct.

 

1. What was the last fish you caught?

2. What bait did you use?

3. Did you release it or eat it or do something else with it?

4. Name two rivers in Florida.

5. In a hundred years, how do you want to be remembered?

 

It only took us an hour to whittle the group down to six. Margie was one of them. She'd caught a bonefish in Venezuela on a fly and let it go. She got the Peace River and the Miami River. She wanted to be remembered as someone who'd left her campsite cleaner than she'd found it.

“Maybe she's bullshitting,” Rusty said. “Giving you what she thinks you want.”

“You know what?” Sugarman said. “Maybe you should put Rusty on the board, to keep a watch on these people.” Sugarman sipped his wine and smiled out at the Gulf.

“Done,” I said.

Rusty thought about it silently, looking off at the reddening sky.

“All right,” she said after a minute. “These six and me.”

“You'll do it, really?”

“I'll do it,” she said.

“It'll mean coming up here from time to time.”

“I can manage that. I could bring the boat up almost as fast as driving 1-75. And have a lot more fun doing it.”

“Done.”

We shook hands. All three of us.

“Am I still a billionaire?”

“I think you'll have to sign some papers tomorrow,” Sugar said. “Then you're free.”

“Well, I should pay for dinner, don't you think?”

“Damn right,” Rusty said.

Rusty walked down to the shoreline. She waved at Sugarman to join her. Somehow she talked him into dancing with her. When she'd danced him breathless, she waved me down to join her in another turn on the sand.

I went down to the shoreline and stepped into Rusty's rhythmic embrace. She had on a white skimpy top that showed off the freckles in her cleavage, and some kind of loose yellow pants that turned almost transparent in certain light. The pants rode so low on her hips, the tattoo at the base of her spine was fully exposed.

We danced for two more songs, barefoot, sloshing through the gold moon water. Her new knee didn't miss a beat, and I'm sure she felt more limber in my arms than I felt in hers.

“You look good together,” Sugarman said when we returned to the table.

“We're too much alike for it to last,” Rusty said. But she smiled at me, and I knew she was being ironic. Somewhat ironic.