Thresh Page 13

  "Someone is missing?"

  I didn't bother trying to hide the worry in my voice; something told me Lola wouldn't see it as a weakness. "Yeah, my buddy Duke. He's never out of communication. He's permanently attached to that fucking iPhone of his. He's even got this bulletproof case he had custom made, so he can take it out on ops without risking it getting blasted. For him to not answer anybody, let alone me? Not like him. Even if he's in the middle of getting it on with a girl, if one of us calls, he answers. Even if just to say he'll call back when he's done. Even Anselm and Lear are having a tough time getting a lock on him. It's worrying, and I don't worry easily."

  "I'm sure he'll be fine. He's probably just doing the same thing we are."

  "Yeah, but you don't know Duke. Subtlety is even less his strong suit than it is mine. And he may not even stop to check in with anyone before he goes on a rampage if he were to catch wind of someone following him. The dude is my equal in every way when it comes to wreaking ruin, but once he gets his ire up, it's almost impossible to rein him in. I learned early how to shut my shit down. Duke...doesn't have that off button. And it can blind him."

  Lola's eyes were soft on mine. "You're really close to Duke, aren't you?"

  I had to look away, because the expression on her face was doing something weird to my heart, and my worry for Duke was putting a lump in my throat. "Yeah. Everybody at A1S is family, and the only family I got, but Duke...he's the brother I never had."

  "He'll turn up. He'll be fine."

  Filipo was approaching on foot, waving for us to join him.

  "He better, or Cain is gonna see a side of me he'll wish he'd left buried." I nodded at Filipo. "Time to go."

  *

  Since it was nearing sundown, Filipo insisted on taking us in himself, and I noticed Lola didn't argue very much.

  The trip was slow, oppressively hot, and stultifying. Bugs bit me nonstop, and every channel looked the same as the last. Oh sure, it was beautiful enough, but not my thing. Give me mountains or white sand beaches and, preferably, the snow bunnies and beach bunnies to go with them. This endless slog through one identical waterway and channel after another, the banks sliding past on either side in sludge-slow increments, the motor buzzing weakly, our bow barely causing a ripple...?

  No thanks.

  I understood within ten minutes what Lola had meant by having to know exactly where you were going, though, because that's how fast I was lost. Filipo, however, obviously knew exactly where he was going, because he never hesitated when it came to turning into a minor offshoot, or cutting across a larger bay and into another tiny canal. When we hit larger, more open areas, Filipo would gun the motor a bit, which always caused me relief but, for the most part, he stuck to tiny, narrow channels, meandering our way slowly south and west. At least, that's how I interpreted our overall vector. It was hard to keep track.

  After what I reckoned to be over an hour, and probably closer to two, Filipo slowed to a crawl, scanning the bank on our left side. When I say bank, I mean a wall of mangrove trees, unbroken, thick boughs waving softly in a slow hot breeze, the occasional tree arching out over the water. I don't know what Filipo was looking for, since there didn't seem to be anything to find, even as I scanned the same bank, looking for any kind of irregularity. Filipo just trawled along slow enough that I could have gotten out and crawled on my hands and knees faster, bum arm and all.

  And then, seemingly at random, he swung the tiller of the boat to angle the bow toward the bank. As we got closer, I saw it: an opening in the trees, so narrow and so well obscured by low-hanging branches that you'd miss it if you weren't looking for it very carefully, and knew what to look for ahead of time.

  As we cut toward the opening, Filipo cut the outboard motor and tilted it up out of the water, and then pulled a long, thick pole from a set of hooks spot-welded to the inside lip of the boat along the right side. The trees concealing the opening were swiftly approaching, despite our slow pace, and it wasn't until Filipo spoke up that I realized exactly how low those were.

  "Best duck, uso," he called up to me, "or you get a nasty whack on the head."

  I ducked, just in time, and even then the branches scraped and grabbed at my head as we slid under them. Once past, we found ourselves in a tree-shrouded tunnel, the water so shallow it was a wonder we didn't run aground. Filipo dug the pole into the water, still sitting, and used it to push us forward, pulling at the pole until he reached the end of it, when he would extend his grip, plant the end in the bottom of the waterway and push/pull us along.

  "This little inlet is invisible from the air," Lola said. "Dad showed me once, when I was a kid. He had a friend take us on a helicopter ride, and we passed right over this spot. You wouldn't even know it was there."

  I snorted. "Babe, when you said your dad lived remote, you weren't kidding."

  She grinned. "Thresh, honey, just wait until you see this place. We still have a good ways to go yet."

  She called me honey.

  I tried not to read too much into that, but it was tough. I called her all sorts of stupid names, but that was just how I was. Words like honey and baby and sweetheart just sort of popped out when I was talking to a girl I was digging on, and I dug Lola hard. Anselm was right on that score.

  We traveled via pole-driven locomotion for another ten or twenty minutes, and then the channel just sort of dead-ended in a copse of huge, ancient-looking mangrove trees whose roots extended away from the bank and into the water. Filipo just kept poling us toward the bank, and then when the prow scraped sand, he hopped out.

  "Haul us in, yeah?" Filipo murmured. "I gotta see if Tai is around."

  "Meaning, you'd best stay here until he finds Dad. Unannounced visitors, even me and Filipo, make Dad antsy." Lola had taken off her shoes and socks and was rolling her yoga pants up to her knees, and then she hopped out of the boat and into the water, helping me haul the boat up onto the bank.

  There was another boat there on the bank, a long, narrow, shallow-draft dugout-style canoe, hand-carved from the trunk of a tree, with an outrigger float extending off to one side.

  "That your dad's boat?"

  Lola glanced at it. "Yeah. It's called a paopao." She smiled. "Dad showed me how to build them, actually. We made one together, one summer. It was fun. I did an essay on the process and got extra credit the next year."

  I chuckled. "Suck-up."

  She pulled a face. "Dad made me, as a matter of fact. Despite the fact that I have an M.D, I actually hated school."

  "I still have the one you made, you know," came a honey-slow, cavernously deep voice, from off to my left. He had an accent, but it was soft, arching his vowels, only barely making his words sing-song, unlike Filipo's accent, which was pronounced and thickly Polynesian.

  Lola glanced past me, and her face lit up. "Dad!"

  She jogged past me and into the arms of a truly mammoth individual. Coming from me, that's saying a lot. He wasn't much over six-three, maybe six-four, but what he lacked in height, he made up for in sheer bulk. Lola had said he'd been a bodybuilder, and I believed it. Dressed in a pair of knee-length cut-off khakis and a pair of water shoes and nothing else, I could see he'd lost the ultra-sharp definition of a bodybuilder, but had clearly packed on additional mass in the form of sheer muscle.

  Every inch of his upper body from wrist to wrist, across his shoulders and down his chest to his diaphragm was covered in intricate tribal tattoos done in thick black lines and angles and whorls, and the designs continued down beneath the waist of his shorts, and reappeared on his calves, ending at his ankles. He had a scuffed and battered kukri in one hand, and a modern fishing rod and a string of more than a dozen huge fish in the other.

  His voice as he spoke to his daughter was even, calm, affectionate.

  But when his gaze fixed on me...

  He was not happy to see me.

  "Who is this, Lola La'ei Solomon?" His voice, now, was cold. Still quiet, still calm, but...frigid.

  "I
go by Reed, now, and you know it." Lola put herself between me and her father. "And he's a friend of mine. I know how you feel about visitors, but I...well, I didn't have much choice. You know I wouldn't have brought him here if I could avoid it."

  "I get you changed your name, baby girl, but you'll always be a Solomon." He glared at me past his daughter's shoulder. "You haven't even visited me yourself in over six months, and now you bring a stranger?"

  "I know, Daddy. I just...it's complicated, okay?"

  His gaze flicked down to hers. "Complicated?" He looked from me over to Lola. "You're in trouble."

  "In a word, yes."

  He eyed me again, assessing. It was hard to endure that piercing gaze. It was harder yet to feel as if I measured up to his standards. "You're involved with him?" He returned his gaze to Lola, and now his expression was openly disapproving.

  "Again, it's...complicated." Lola turned away. "Can we not do this, Daddy? Please?"

  If I didn't know better, I'd say that was almost a smirk on his face. "Daddy? You never call me that. Not since you were six years old."

  "Yeah, well...it's been a long day." She seemed to visibly wilt, as if the exhaustion from everything we'd gone through to get here was settling on her shoulders. "I just want to rest, okay?"

  Tai rested his hand on her shoulder. "Go. I want to talk to your...friend." He flicked a look at Filipo. "I have some carvings for you to bring back with you, since you're here, so don't go yet."

  Filipo nodded. "I'll see Lola to the fale and gather more wood."

  When we were alone, Tai ambled over to me, moving with that slow, easy grace men of our size and power seem to have. "What's your name?"

  I held out my hand. "Thresh."

  We shook, and his grip was firm, but he wasn't trying to intimidate me by crushing my hand. Good luck with that, anyway. "Tai Solomon." He released me, and then handed me the string of fish. "You know how to clean fish?"

  I nodded. "Sure."

  He gestured at my knife. "Then get to it."

  There was a flat wooden board in the sand near the outrigger dugout, so I tossed the fish onto the plank and got to work gutting them.

  Tai just watched. "Last time my daughter got herself in any kind of trouble, it changed her, and not for the better." There was an accusation in that statement, and a warning, as well as a question.

  I chose my words carefully. "I haven't known your daughter very long, sir, but I've gotten a couple hints at what happened to her. And I can assure you of a couple things. One, the trouble that brought us here isn't that kind of trouble, and two, whatever it was that happened, I'd never allow anything like it to ever occur. I don't need to know the details to know that I'd do anything to protect her from whatever might have happened, or anything else."

  "From what I understand, since all that trouble Lola hasn't done much but go to work and to the gym. I'm having a hard time understanding how she got herself into trouble." A pause. "Which leads me to wonder about your involvement in all this."

  I set aside one cleaned fish, and placed another on the plank, sliced open its belly with my KA-BAR. "It wouldn't be inaccurate to say I sort of got her into this, but it wasn't anything I could have predicted or prevented, I can promise you that. I'd never knowingly bring anyone else into my problems."

  "You have a gun, and you use that knife like you're comfortable with it." He leaned against a nearby tree and crossed his massive arms over his broad, heavy chest. "I'm not liking what that says about you."

  "This shit came to me, sir, and Lola got dragged into it just for associating with me--and trust me, she was doing a bang-up job of sending me on my way. I'm doing everything I can to get her out of it and make sure it stays that way."

  "My daughter has issues with forming relationships."

  I couldn't help a laugh. "No shit. I caught that part."

  "But yet she brought you here. She knows I wouldn't be happy to see someone new, but she brought you here anyway." And thick, meaningful pause. "And she left you alone with me."

  "I can only venture to guess that I've earned a little bit of her trust, then."

  "How?"

  "How much truth do you really want, here, Tai?"

  He lifted his chin. "Tell it like it is."

  "This is a work thing. There's a group of people who really don't like the company I work with, and they're...aggressively taking steps to demonstrate that. Anyone involved with any of us is fair game, it looks like, only the true extent of the prejudice wasn't apparent until I'd already come into contact with Lola." I didn't see the need for details, but I had a feeling Tai wouldn't be content until he understood the lay of the land.

  And I wasn't one to dissemble.

  "And how did that come about?"

  "My boss went through the ICU when she was on shift, and she and I...well, I wouldn't say hit it off, but it felt like there was something there. So when the opportunity presented itself, I...decided to see where things might go."

  "If you had asked me, I would have told you things wouldn't go very far. She was hurt very badly by someone she once trusted, and the experience closed her off. For good, I'd thought."

  "So I gathered. And it didn't seem like things between us were going to go too far, but then this trouble cropped up, and when you go through something hairy with someone you're attracted to...barriers tend to fall faster than they otherwise might."

  Tai was quiet as I finished gutting the fish. When I was done, I handed them to him.

  He caught my eye and held it. "My daughter can make her own decisions. She brought you here, so she must trust you, but that doesn't mean I do. So all I will say is this: I haven't been to the mainland in sixteen years, and I have no plans to ever go back. But if I find out you let anything happen to my daughter, I'll find you. Got it?"

  I nodded. "I'd say that's fair, sir."

  He turned away from me and headed deeper into the mangrove forest. As we walked, he spoke over his shoulder. "Hope you like fish, and don't mind sleeping in the open."

  I hiked my bag a little higher on my shoulder. "Don't mind fish, and sleeping in the open don't bother me all that much. Wouldn't mind some bug spray, though."

  That just got me a sarcastic snort. "Nothing like that out here. Bugs get bad enough, you could smear on some mud."

  "Figured as much."

  We entered a clearing, in the middle of which was a circular domed structure fashioned out of whole tree trunks for upright supports, with a thatched roof and open sides, and a floor suspended a good three feet off the ground. I could see some kind of shades or slats that could be lowered to keep out inclement weather. So craftily fashioned was the dwelling that until I realized what I was looking at, I didn't immediately recognize it as human-made structure. It just blended in perfectly with the rest of the surroundings. The roof thatching was woven from palm leaves which, considering all I'd seen on the trip in were mangrove trees, I assumed he must have brought them in himself from somewhere else for this purpose. Having gone to FSU, I'd taken a few filler courses in the history of Florida and the Everglades, and the Seminoles who had once inhabited this area, so I recognized some elements of the structure as being of Seminole origin, but the photographs and drawings I'd seen had shown the Seminole dwellings to be rectangular, whereas this one was more rounded. Something was off about the structure, but I couldn't figure it out.

  Tai had noticed that I'd stopped and was staring at the structure. "Can't figure it out?"

  I shook my head. "Anthropology ain't really my thing, Tai. I know there's something, but...I can't pin it down."

  "No shame there. It'd take familiarity with the traditional dwellings of two different cultures to spot it." He thumped his chest with a huge fist. "I'm Samoan. I was born there and lived there most of my life, and my tama was a big believer in the old ways. He taught me how to build the va'a and the paopao." He indicated the ink decorating his body: "I got the pe'a the old way, from a tufuga ta tatau. He also taught me to build the fale, in
the old way. But then I came here, and discovered the mangrove forests, and learned of the Seminole culture. Some twenty years ago, I met an old, old Seminole man, who showed me some of their old ways. So, when I decided to make a place for myself out here, I fused the styles of my culture and that of the Seminole. So, what you're seeing is a combination of Seminole and Samoan style dwelling structures."

  Now that he explained it, I could see it. I'd also spent a few weeks of leave time in the Polynesian islands, and had come across a few of the old-style houses, which, like this one, were rounded, with the roofs extending down to barely a few feet from the ground, and those were built flat on the ground. The Seminole, living in a wetland, built their rectangular dwellings a couple feet off the ground, and didn't extend the roof quite as much. I shook my head in wonder; the fusion of the two styles was brilliant, blending both cultures to create a home for himself that suited the climate, used local materials, and was practically invisible until you were right on top of it. Plus, when he eventually died and years passed, it would all return to the earth without leaving any permanent mark of his presence.

  If you're gonna be a hermit, this was the way to do it.

  There was a fire built on the ground near the dwelling, with a few chairs hand-made from lengths of wood and rope-knot webbing. In one of these chairs, barefoot, clad in only her bra and yoga pants, eating fruit from a can with a six-inch boning knife, was Lola.

  There was nothing special about the moment. She didn't even notice me. She was lounging in the chair, skewering pieces of fruit from the can with the knife, one leg hooked over the side of the chair, foot kicking. Her hair was loose, taken down out of the braid to flutter in the breeze, gorgeous, beautifully long, draping past her shoulder blades to nearly mid-spine. The yoga pants were shoved up to her knees, baring toned, muscular calves, and her upper body was bare but for the bra, and I just--

  I couldn't figure out what was happening to me.

  It wasn't the usual feeling I got when I saw a hot woman, which was the urge to rip her clothes off, fuck her sideways, and then have a stiff drink. I mean, yeah, that was there, because Lola was the sexiest damn woman I'd ever seen. Now that I was really looking, and wasn't blinded by lust, I realized how fucking ripped she was. She had serious muscle development going on, from hard, rounded biceps and shoulders to flat, toned, defined abs...it was ridiculous. The girl had serious gym cred. She was fucking stacked, and ripped.