Bad Axe, page 1
Praise for James W. Hall
”James Hall’s prose runs clean and fast as Gulf Stream waters.”
Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
"The real pleasures in Jim Hall's books are the sensual ones of place and people. It's the honest feel of South Florida, with all its menacing rhythms and contagious lassitude, that Hall nails down so well." - Carl Hiaasen.
“Mr. Hall's lyrical passion for the Florida Keys, his spare language and unusual images haunt us long after the story has faded.”
Sara Paretsky, The New York Times Book Review
"James Hall is a writer I have learned from over the years. His people and places have more brush strokes than a van Gogh. He delivers taut and muscular stories about a place where evil always lurks below the surface." - Michael Connelly
”An expert creator of grotesque villains and fast action, former poet Hall raises the crossbar with his sensitive insights into the human condition.” Publishers Weekly
"Like top-drawer Dutch Leonard turned inside out..smart, observant, richly grotesque."
James Ellroy.
"Highly original and entertaining." - Elmore Leonard
"James Hall's writing is astringent, penetrating, and unfailingly gripping long after you read the last page...The story and the characters crackle like lingering currents of electricity in your mind." - Dean Koontz.
"Not to be missed! James Hall started fast and gets better and better." - Tony Hillerman.
"Hall nails you to the page until the suspense-laden climax." - Clive Cussler.
"If you don't know the fine suspense novels of James W. Hall, this will get you off to a rousing start." - Scott Turow.
“…a cold eye for detail and a passionate commitment to justice.” Sue Grafton
ALSO BY JAMES W. HALL
Novels
1987 Under Cover of Daylight
1990 Tropical Freeze
1992 Bones of Coral
1993 Hard Aground
1994 Mean High Tide
1995 Gone Wild
1996 Buzz Cut
1997 Red Sky at Night
1998 Body Language
2000 Rough Draft
2002 Blackwater Sound
2003 Off the Chart
2004 Forests of the Night
2007 Magic City
2010 Silencer
2011 Dead Last
2013 Going Dark
2014 The Big Finish
2017 When They Come For You
2018 When You Can’t Stop
Short Story Collections
2014 Over Exposure
1991 Paper Products
Poetry
1976 The Lady From The Dark Green Hills
1980 Mating Reflex
1986 False Statements
1980 Ham Operator
2011 All My Pwoblems (collected poems)
Non-fiction
2001 Hot Damn
2012 Hit Lit
BAD AXE
JAMES W. HALL
Copyright © 2020 JAMES W. HALL
All rights reserved.
Dead Last Press
Cover Design by Lon Shapiro
Guttman Shapiro Creative Group
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot/ That it do singe yourself
shakespeare— HENRY VIII
DEDICATION
Always and forever to Evelyn
And deep thanks to Doug Teel for his inspiration
PART ONE
ONE
September 1
M arco drove the panel van slowly past Savannah’s house, checking it out.
Ingrid said, “Don’t go so damn slow, one of them will notice.”
“They’re gone, I told you. No one’s home.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“I’m sure.”
He kept rolling down that deserted strip of road. Nothing but woods and empty fields along the way. Ingrid raked her fingers through her scarlet hair, jittery.
“First time back in Bad Axe since we were kids. Feels weird.”
“Does it?”
“If you had feelings, you’d know.”
He looked over at her and shrugged. Always looking for a chance to ding him.
Marco kept rolling the three miles down Taggart Road to make sure their old place was still standing. He stopped in the drive, didn’t get out.
“Man, it’s rundown,” Ingrid said. “Whole house is sagging left.”
“Foundation must be cracking,” he said. “What do you expect, twenty years away. Houses don’t take care of themselves. Anyway, the house isn’t important. It’s the barn that matters.”
“It looks just as dilapidated as it always did,” she said.
“It’ll work fine,” Marco said.
He circled back to Savannah’s.
“Well, okay, it does look deserted.”
“Told you,” he said. “They won’t be back till late tomorrow. Let’s get this done and get out of here.”
“Sure this isn’t a trap?”
“I double-checked, found the death notice online. They’re picking up the body like she said on the phone. Dover Air Force Base, military honors bullshit.”
“Where’s that, Dover?”
“Delaware, a long way off from here.”
“You kept that goddamn phone number active all this time, that’s crazy, Marco. Twenty years paying the bill for a phone number you never use.”
“I did it for one reason, and this is it. Her calling me, letting me know they’d be out of town for four days. How else would she have gotten in touch? All in all, I’d say it’s paying off pretty well.”
“Hasn’t yet.”
“It will, you’ll see.”
“I don’t trust her. Calling out of the blue, she could be setting us up.”
“You don’t trust her because you don’t know her. Not like I do.”
He backed the van to the front of the shed, opened the rear doors. Ingrid got out and stood nearby, nervous, scanning the area, brushing her hand across her blouse, touching the .38 revolver tucked in her waistband.
“Savannah must be heartbroken losing her grandbaby.”
“I don’t believe that woman has a heart.”
“Well, if this works out, hell, we can travel. I always wanted to see some of the world. Like Italy, especially Florence. Stay in five star hotels, up high where you could see all the cathedrals and turrets and shit. When I was little, I cut out magazine pictures. Never thought you and me would have enough cash to take that trip. Or maybe Fiji, that would be nice too. What do you think, Fiji or Florence?”
“Maybe we’ll do both. Go in alphabetical order.”
“Really, you’re serious?”
“We’ll figure it out when we’ve got the cash.”
“All I say, coming this far, taking this kind of risk, it damn well better be worth it. Savannah’s going to know it was you and me stole them.”
“No, she won’t. It could be anybody. Lot of crazies would kill for one of these bad boys, much less two dozen.”
“She’s not stupid. She’ll guess it was you.”
“So? What’s she going to do, call the feds, turn me in? Get her own ass thrown in jail.”
He used the bolt cutter on the padlock and rolled open the shed doors.
Big Blue was still in her cage. Still alive after all these years.
“We ought to get a macaw,” Ingrid said. “I’d like a bird for a pet.”
“That bird’s worthless,” he said. “Does nothing but eat and shit.”
“It talks, doesn’t it? I remember it cussing like a trucker.”
They loaded the crates into the van. Heavier than he’d expected. Both of them sweating through their clothes in the late summer heat. Big Blue watched the whole time, head turning back and forth like a tennis match. Never making a sound.
“Maybe it got old and doesn’t talk anymore,” Ingrid said.
He loaded the last three crates. With all twenty-four of them stacked inside, the van’s suspension was sagging, but he was pretty sure it was still drivable. They didn’t need to go far.
He slammed the rear door and went back to the shed and looked at the empty shelves. Big Blue fluffed up her wings and croaked so loud it made him jump.
“Marco, Marco, Marco, Marco.”
“Jesus,” Ingrid said. “After all this time she remembers your name.”
“Stupid bird just signed her death warrant.”
TWO
Five weeks later.
“W here the hell you disappear to, Thorn?”
On the upstairs deck of Thorn’s stilt house, Sugarman leaned against the railing, his back to Blackwater Sound. The bay gleamed in the morning sun, its surface as bright and flawlessly flat as a silver platter. Overnight the first cool front of the fall swept through, bathing Key Largo in dense, chilly Canadian air that flushed away the October humidity and officially brought to a close six months of summer doldrums.
“I’ve been out on the water. Where’ve you been?”
“For a whole week?”
“Is there a problem?”
“And that music,” Sugar said. “What’s that?”
“‘Hey Jude,’” Thorn said. “It’s a Beatles song.”
“I know that. You buy a stereo or something?”
“It’s a portable,” Thorn said. “She likes having a sound track.”
“She?”
Thorn nodded at the screen door.
Sugar tilted his head to see past Thorn into the living room. Sofia Mendoza was perched at t he workbench, focused like a brain surgeon on the bonefish fly pinched in Thorn’s custom vice.
Sofia was naked, her face, shoulders and breasts radiant from a week’s unremitting exposure to the sun. She looked up and trilled her fingers at Sugar.
Sugar ducked his eyes and turned away.
“Sorry,” he said. “I interrupted something.”
“It’s okay. She’s not shy. Sofia’s a naturist.”
“Like a nudist?”
“Different word, same thing, yeah.”
“All the time? Everywhere?”
“Just about, though she dresses for work.”
“Well,” Sugar drew a quick breath. “I guess you get used to being around her like that.”
“Haven’t yet,” Thorn said.
“Where’d you meet her? You been hanging out at nudist camps?”
“She tends bar at the Lorelei. You’ve seen her a few hundred times.”
“Oh, Sofia Mendoza,” he said. “I didn’t recognize her.”
“Yeah,” said Thorn. “Cause you didn’t notice her face.”
“What can I say?” Sugar said. “I’m human.”
“One of your better qualities.
Hanging loose down her back, Sofia’s black hair glistened like the iridescent wings of a crow. She one-handed a thick strand away from her face and bent close to the fly, and snipped an end of the GSP thread with Thorn’s micro-tip scissors, looked up and smiled at him then bent back to her work.
“Must be true love,” Sugarman said. “Letting her use your tools.”
“She’s got better eyesight than I do and steadier hands.”
“Has she like moved in with you?”
“Getting close.”
“Thought you were too damn independent for the shacking-up thing.”
“People change,” Thorn said.
“Well, good for you. Another Rubicon crossed.”
“We enjoy each other’s company. It seems natural.”
“How long’s this been going on?”
“We been seeing each other, I don’t know, a few weeks.”
“And I’m just finding out about it?”
“It wasn’t serious enough to mention.”
“But it is now.”
Thorn shrugged in the affirmative.
“Where’d you cruise?”
“Took the Chris Craft to Key West,” Thorn said. “Sofia’s family owns a hotel down there. They were balseros, came over on a homemade raft, inner tubes and plywood. Sofia’s little sister nearly died of thirst, spent a month in the hospital. Now her parents run an inn on Caroline Street, place is packed all year. You’d like her family. They’re loud and funny and make their own spiced rum.”
“They nudists too?”
“Yep, the whole clan. Brown as coffee beans, nose to toes. Hotel has high walls and thick hedges, so the place is clothing optional.”
“And you? Did you keep your pants on?”
“When in Rome.”
Sugarman looked down at his loafers and shook his head as if to clear away the image. He was outfitted in khaki slacks and a red and yellow flowered shirt.
Sugar was a handsome fellow, a striking blend of his hard-partying Jamaican dad and his svelte milky-blond mom. His skin tone was café con leche, a double shot of leche. Arm against arm, Thorn’s tan was darker. Sugar inherited his mom’s delicate features and long lashes and got the rangy physique of his Rastafarian dad as well as his rawboned tensile strength that fooled some people into thinking he was merely lanky.
Something about the combination of his skin color, elegant looks and his carefree style was a provocation to certain bully boys. They sniffed Sugar out, spotted him across a bar room, a restaurant. That guy. Too pretty, too calm, his tranquil smile causing the assholes to mistake him for an easy mark. Let’s go slap the shit out of that prissy son-of-a-bitch.
It was such a moment that brought Thorn and Sugar together back in grade school before Thorn even knew Sugarman’s name. Spotting an after-school four-against-Sugar brawl on the playground, Thorn waded in, and after he and Sugar sent those four shit-stains running off bloody and blubbering, Sugarman and Thorn began a lifelong alliance, brothers-in-arms for the duration.
Sugar’s Jamaican father disappeared shortly after his birth and his Norwegian mother, a fragile teenager, stayed around Key Largo a year or two more before she too vanished. There was a single overexposed photo of her hanging in Sugarman’s office. Not more than eighteen at the time, his mother sat on a ratty sofa, a cigarette in one hand, a can of Schlitz in the other, laughing at someone’s joke. An attractive young woman whose eyes seemed filled with an insatiable yearning.
After she disappeared, Sugar was raised by two church ladies in Hibiscus Park, Key Largo’s black district that abutted the Overseas Highway—a collection of tumbledown shacks and lopsided mobile homes where roadside entrepreneurs sold fresh mangos and hubcaps off their front porches. Growing up under the watchful care of those elderly sisters, Sugar absorbed their modesty and devotion to the rules of fair play and as an adult, he turned out as serene, steady and trustworthy as Thorn was the polar opposite.
Thorn liked to think their yin and yang friendship endured because Thorn’s recklessness was the poetry to Sugar’s prose, the jalapeno in the guacamole. Though the truth was more complicated. Sugar’s methodical and disciplined approach had more than once saved Thorn’s ass, and Thorn, despite his all too frequent rash outbursts had a few times returned the favor.
“You got that look,” Thorn said.
“Which look is that?”
“Man on a mission.”
Sugar took a lengthy breath as if steeling himself for what came next, then said, “You know Bobby Tennyson, right?”
“Bobby Tennyson?”
Sugar nodded.
Ten years earlier Tennyson had saved Thorn’s life. Thorn was fishing in the backcountry, anchored up on a shoal near Nine Mile Bank. Bobby arrived, waved hello, then picked a spot a courteous distance away. Close enough to see each other, but too far to hear a cry for help.
For the next half hour a few schools of bonefish ghosted by, but all snubbed Thorn’s flies. He was climbing down from his poling platform to reposition the skiff when he snagged the leather lace on his boat shoe on a gap in the aluminum frame. A freakish mishap. He lost his balance, tumbled headfirst and clipped his skull on the upraised prop. Knocked unconscious, face under water, shoe still trapped in the poling frame, inhaling seawater.
Bobby was there in less than a minute, hauled Thorn out, gave him CPR till Thorn spit up all he’d swallowed, then Bobby patched up the gash from his first aid kit.
Afterwards he brushed off Thorn’s gratitude. Nothing heroic about it, Bobby claimed, just right-place-right-time, what anybody would’ve done. And sure, Bobby was probably right about that, but it still left an indelible memory that had replayed a hundred times since, especially when Thorn was fishing alone in a remote backcountry spot. No one around to save his ass if he got clumsy a second time.
“What’s Bobby’s problem?”
“You knew he was a pilot in the Air Force?”
“Sure. But he’s not a big talker, so not much beyond that.”
“Nothing about Johnston Atoll?”
Thorn shook his head. He wasn’t sure why, but the special bond he had with Bobby had never turned into friendship. Bobby always seemed to shy away whenever Thorn took the bar stool next to him and tried to chat.
“Go on, Sugar. What’s this about?”
“I need your opinion. I can’t decide if Bobby’s story is terrifying or nuts.”
“I may not be the best judge of what’s nuts.”
“You willing to hear him out?”
“Sure, tell him to come over.”
“He’s downstairs in my car.”
“Oh, this is serious.”
Sugar nodded.
“Mind if Sofia listens in? A woman’s perspective.”
“Does she own any clothes?”
“They’re around here somewhere. Give us five minutes then bring him up.”
When Thorn explained the situation to Sofia she said, “Sure, I know Bobby. Never thought he was a prude.”
