Authors: James W. Hall
Tropical Freeze (36 page)
Darcy was lying in the hammock near the dock, reading what was left of that Ashbery book. Every few minutes she’d smile and turn a page, look over at Thorn, and wink, as though fireworks of understanding were going off inside her. He wasn’t sure. Maybe she was just in love.
Her jaw was wired shut. It would be six weeks before she could take solid food. Thorn had bought an electric blender at the K Mart and had it plugged in next to the sawmill. He’d heard about blenders before, of course, but never seen one up close. They were fascinating things.
Jack Higby had finished turning the lignum vitae sink and was fussing now with the siding. He’d decided he wanted to match the wood grains, so the veins of Indonesian narra blended in with the dark twists of mahogany and tamarind. It might take a little longer to make it all mesh, but come on, what was the hurry? The house was going to stand there for a hundred years, what difference did an extra month or two now make? So, Thorn had said, fine, sure, whatever you think, Jack. A wonderful plan.
Thorn and Sugarman were sitting on the dock. No shirts. Both in cut offs. A few minutes earlier Sugarman had been snorkeling and had found a hermit crab living in a translucent blue jar. Darcy had informed them that it was a Noxzema skin cream jar. Sugarman brought it over to show the others, and now the crab was strutting the length of the dock, carrying that blue jar.
“It’s embarrassed,” Thorn said. “Probably ostracized by all the other hermit crabs.”
“It isn’t smart enough to be embarrassed,” Darcy said in her teeth-clamped tongue. “The crab’s just doing what it has to do. Working with what’s available. Maybe it’s even proud. A one-of-a-kind guy.”
“What’s your vote, Sugar?”
Sugarman shrugged. Not playing today.
Thorn watched him kick at the water, the ripples he was sending out.
“Could you go back, Sugar,” Darcy said, “if you told them you’d changed your mind?”
“No,” he said.
“You said things? You told people off?”
“I told them how I felt is all,” Sugarman said. “How I’d lost faith.”
“Well,” Thorn said, rolling onto his stomach. “How does it feel?”
“I feel weird,” Sugarman said. “I was always a cop. It’s all I ever wanted to be.”
Darcy looked up and smiled. She said, “Don’t worry, Thorn’ll give you unemployment lessons.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Sugarman said.
“It grows on you, Sugar.” He stopped the hermit crab at the edge of the dock and aimed it back down the center.
Sugarman said, “I think I’ll just take a couple of weeks. Relax. Then maybe I’ll take my savings, buy into a tackle shop or something.”
“Need a shrimp dipper?” Darcy said.
“I need somebody,” Thorn said. “To put suntan oil on my back.”
Darcy sat up in the hammock.
“Any volunteers?” Thorn said.
She came over.
“What’d you do before I showed up?” Darcy said.
“Some important places just went untouched,” he said.
Sugarman kicked at the water with his bare feet. He said, “Or maybe a detective agency.”
“I like the tackle shop plan better,” Darcy said. “Less of a gore factor.” She slid her hands across Thorn’s back. He closed his eyes, made a noise in his throat.
“You do that very well,” he said.
“You’re just easily pleased, Thorn.”
He hummed his agreement.
When Sugarman’s beeper went off, Darcy’s hands flinched against Thorn’s back.
“Oh, God, another insight,” said Thorn.
“That, or she’s out of toilet paper,” Sugar said.
Sugarman looked at the beeper for a moment, then nudged it off the edge of the dock and it splashed into the shallow water.
“There’s a law against that,” Darcy said. “Isn’t there? Beeper abuse or something.”
“Call a cop,” Sugarman said.
Thorn tipped his head back, surrendering himself to Darcy’s hands and watching the clouds on their lazy voyages. That last cold front had scrubbed the atmosphere clean and left a crystalline ping in the air. That Arctic wind had cruised for a week at thirty thousand feet, blue-white virginal air with a piney hint, and had swooped down and flooded over them. Now everyone around the island seemed a little daffy from all that oxygen. Smiling, jabbering things that didn’t quite make sense. A little happier than they’d been a few days before.
And people seemed to be making decisions. Standing up, dusting themselves off, stretching fingers to toe, and heading off in new directions. Take Sugar, take Darcy. Take even Thorn. Blenders. Suntan oil.
And though Thorn knew the carbon dioxide fumes and the methane and the ozone and all the rest of it had not been blown very far away, and though he was certain the pollution was already beginning to mount up again, still, for a while, the sky would be fresh. And for those few days he and Darcy and Sugar-man and Jack and the rest of them would be able to feast on that good rich air, breathing again the way they were always meant to breathe.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1989 by James W. Hall
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
978-1-4532-2599-8
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
