pressure against her chest was unbearable, then swam deeper still, squinting into the blurry distance, into the blackwater depths where the sounding fish had disappeared, but she could make out nothing in the darkness of the cold currents.
Then out of those murky depths a trail of bubbles rose toward her, a ghostly silver cloud climbing fast, spreading out, surrounding her, tickling across her bare arms, her belly.
Andy Braswell’s last breath. Her brother. Her love.
Thorn had brought along the .357 magnum not because he was worried about being attacked by pirates, but because he wanted to give the pistol a long-overdue burial at sea. Maybe have a little ceremony, just he and Casey, say a few words, something short and funny, then sling the goddamn thing out into the water. Stand around afterwards and watch the ripples die out, have a sip of wine, put his arm around Casey and hold on.
She didn’t know yet about the gun being aboard. He’d told her about some of the violent incidents in his past, but if he got too specific, she always winced and turned away. Casey had inherited her light and airy view of human nature from her hippie parents. Growing up in Islamorada in an apartment above the gift shop where they sold rolling papers and hookahs and conch shells and custom-made sandals. Now in her late thirties, after years of waiting tables, Casey had started a roadside business in Tavernier, selling life-sized manatees and alligators that she made from plaster casts, then painted in garish sunset colors. The manatees and alligators stood up on their hind legs and gripped US Postal Service mailboxes in their flippers and claws. She was doing well with the mailbox stands. You saw them on nearly every street in Key Largo and Tavernier. People dressed up their manatees with goggles and snorkels or straw hats, cocked fishing poles and scoop nets up against the gators. Put witches’ hats on them at Halloween and white beards for Christmas. Lately, Casey had moved on to a few non-Keys animals. One of her new creations, a full-sized, neon pink buffalo, now stood like some crazed sentinel between Thorn’s house and the water’s edge, where it stared out at the sunsets.
The .357 was inside his tackle box that lay on the deck near where Casey was sunning. When he finally landed the sea trout on his line, he was going to let her know what he had in mind. He’d been holding on to the damn thing too long, and now that they were several hours out into the deserted Florida Bay, it seemed like the right time to dump it.
For the last two years a long string of wonderfully unremarkable days had come and gone. Each night the breeze stirred the curtains and the cardinals trilled their evening song, each morning at first light the mourning doves lowed from the upper branches of the tamarind tree, and almost every hour of the day palm fronds tickled against the tin roof like the whispers of angels. Not even the weather seemed to vary, with steady tropical trade winds pouring up from the south, a constant cinnamon-scented flow.
But even amid that unceasing peace, Thorn often jerked awake in the middle of the night, sheened with sweat, thinking about the pistol wrapped in oily cloths, tucked in a bottom drawer of his desk across the room. He thought about its history, the dark karma that clung to it. More than once he’d taken it out of the desk and walked out to the end of his dock to pitch it into Blackwater Sound, where it would sink into the silt and begin its long chemical unraveling. But something in him had resisted. Some wary voice had murmured in his ear. You are not finished with it. A bad day is coming.
But now, by God, he was determined to heave the thing away. Far enough from shore where no one would ever stumble on it. Far enough away from home that Thorn would forever be beyond its magnetic field. Today he would officially and irrevocably lay down his arms and the voice would go still, the fist in his stomach would unclench, and the days would once more stretch out lazily ahead of him, and he’d take one easy breath after the next, savoring the juicy Florida Keys air for the rest of his stay on earth.
‘You going to catch that fish, Thorn, or bore it to death?’
Casey squeezed more suntan lotion into her hand and slathered it across her bare breasts. She was stretched out on the forward deck, while Thorn stood on the platform perch above the outboard. In the four days they’d been out on the water, Casey had been nude most of the time and her bikini lines had vanished. She had a narrow face, bright green eyes, an easy smile. After all those hours in the sun, her shoulder-length hair was a few degrees blonder than when they left, and even the patch between her legs had lightened. Now when he lowered his face to it, he could smell the golden afterglow of the sun along with the faintly tart citrus scent that rose from Casey when her flesh was heated.
‘It doesn’t feel bored to me,’ Thorn said. ‘It feels kind of excited.’
Thorn cranked the reel, two careful turns. It was wrapped with three hundred yards of four-pound-test monofilament. Line so wispy, if you thought about it too long it would snap. He figured the sea trout probably went about ten pounds and it’d already stripped off two hundred and fifty yards. For the last ten minutes he’d cut the drag back to zero, letting the trout take all the line it wanted in ten-, fifteen-yard surges, then when the line went slack, the lunker taking a rest, Thorn would win back a yard or two. Letting the water wear the fish down. Water and time and the weight of that three hundred yards of fragile monofilament.
‘If you used ten-pound test, you’d have that fish filleted by now.’
‘If it’s too easy to catch,’ Thorn said, ‘it doesn’t taste any good.’
Casey finished oiling her breasts. Head to toe, she was now as glossy as fresh varnish and her nipples had tightened into dark buds. Thorn could feel a tingle working its way down from his navel. Things shifting inside his cutoffs.
Thorn’s skiff was pole-anchored in about two feet of water over some grassy beds where schools of silver sea trout had flickered past all morning. In the last few days they’d seen dozens of tarpon and permit and bones skimming the flats, lots of rays and more sharks than they could count. The sky had been clear all week and Thorn’s eyes were dazzled and aching from staring into the shallows. A good ache.
On that April morning, Monday or Tuesday, he wasn’t sure, the breeze had died off and the Florida Bay stretched out as flat and silver as a platter of mercury, running off toward the western horizon where it turned into a blur of blue chrome. The air and water were within a degree or two of his own body temperature. Dipping in and out of the bay, one element to the other, he hardly noticed.
A hundred yards east of their spot, the Heart Pounder, his thirty-foot Chris-Craft, was anchored in four feet of water on the edge of the flats. Their mothership. A couple of narrow bunks, a stove, a cooler full of fruit and cheese and a few bottles of a cut-rate Chardonnay. They’d towed the skiff behind the big boat to have some way to get into the skinny water, chase the fish.
The Heart Pounder was a teak and white oak beauty. Built before Thorn was born, it was low and slow, with the ancient grace of an era when getting from here to there as quickly as possible wasn’t the point. Thorn had spent all of March and half of April replanking the hull. Tearing out a dozen rotting boards and fitting the new ones into place. Harder job than he’d anticipated. Made harder by the fact that he had absolutely no idea what the hell he was doing when he started. He’d torn out too many planks, used the wrong screws, applied the wrong caulk to the seams between the new boards, then wound up having to pull off his planks and begin over. Finally he’d found a boatwright in Islamorada who gave him a few lessons in carvel-planking, and the use of bunged screws and stealers, those triangular-shaped strakes that allowed Thorn to slightly alter the hull profile. For several weeks with the old man standing over him puffing on his pipe, Thorn managed to learn just enough to get the Heart Pounder watertight again. Skills he hoped he never had to use again.
‘What’s another word for blue?’
‘Blue?’ Thorn looked over at her. ‘What’re you, depressed?’
‘No, that.’ Casey lifted her hand and pointed lazily up