LITMIR.BIZ

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you know that?’

      ‘Saw you on the news this morning,’ she said. ‘You were pulling somebody out of the water. An old man.’

      He nodded.

      ‘It must’ve been awful out there. I can’t even imagine. All that carnage.’

      In the reference section, June showed him how to run a computer search. It took only a minute or two. Morgan Braswell was on the cover of several magazines from a few years back. The library had hard copies of several of them. Business monthlies. Long articles. A couple of newspaper stories. Big turnaround at her father’s company. She flashed a variety of smiles, arms crossed beneath her breasts, looking satisfied, in control, a woman full of bold confidence. From Tragedy to Triumph. That was the theme. After the heartbreaking loss of her older brother in a boating accident, the family business floundered, disintegrated, but with courage and a maturity beyond her years, Morgan managed to pick up the pieces and rebuild her father’s company into a major player in the technology sector.

      June Marcus photocopied the articles and didn’t ask why he wanted them. She patted him on the shoulder as he walked out of the library.

      He took them back to his house and sat out at the picnic table. It was a hot morning, the breeze off the Atlantic shaving away a few degrees. Northeast above Miami, dark blue clouds hovered in the sky. The cold front was going nowhere. He read the articles, looked at Morgan Braswell’s pictures. Read them again.

      At noon he nagged his Volkswagen Beetle to life and drove out to US 1 and headed up the eighteen-mile strip to Miami. Thirty minutes later, at Cutler Ridge, the rain started and didn’t let up till he was in Palm Beach. It was after three o’clock when he found the Braswells’ neighborhood. They lived in a two-story Mediterranean villa three blocks from the ocean. Oak trees lined their street. Fancy lamps on brass poles were planted along the sidewalk. He drove past the house and parked half a block away. He sat for a while staring down the street toward the Atlantic. There was a pleasant lift to the breeze rushing in off the sea, cool and sweet, seasoned by money.

      No traffic. No pedestrians on the sidewalk. Most of the wealthy snowbirds had already fled north to avoid the first upticks of the thermometer. A snowy egret stood on the snipped lawn next to his car and regarded him haughtily. Thorn wasn’t sure why he’d driven all this way, wasted the day, fought I-95 traffic. The photocopies lay in the passenger seat. He picked them up, glanced through them, and dropped them back. These people weren’t any of his business. He had things to do. Bonefish flies to tie, lunkers to catch. He didn’t need this. He’d saved a bunch of people’s lives. He should be feeling good this morning. He should be rejoicing. Not feeling so numb, so crazy.

      He started the car and made a U-turn and drove back past the Braswells’ house. Pink and purple bougainvillea climbed a trellis in the side yard. The cross-hatched wood had pulled loose from its posts and was sagging toward the house next door. The Braswells’ grass was scraggy with yellow patches and weeds. Flakes of white paint curled off the window frames. In an upstairs window a broken pane was covered with what looked like a square of sandwich wrap. The mail slot in the front door was rimmed with rust. Somebody hadn’t been paying much attention to maintenance.

      He drove west beyond I-95 into the golf communities. Heron Glen, Willow Walk, The Banyans. Miles of red tile roofs and guardhouses and endlessly repeating franchise strips. He kept going till he was beyond the turnpike, beyond the last stucco wall, the last rigid row of royal palms. The land was scrubby and wet and of no use to anyone except alligators and woodstorks. Only an occasional straggling 7-Eleven and a couple of industrial parks marked the desolate landscape.

      Seven miles beyond the turnpike, Thorn pulled into a complex of low, windowless buildings. At the guardhouse a young woman with a yellow buzz cut stepped out with a clipboard in her hand. She wore a sidearm in a glossy leather holster and a tailored gray uniform that showed off her bulky shoulders and cinched waist. There were spikes in the road, tilted forward to rip the tread off tires. A yellow steel crossing arm striped with red closed off the entrance.

      She bent to his open window and didn’t smile. Didn’t say a word. She looked at him, looked at the passenger seat, peered into the back.

      ‘Am I in the right place?’

      ‘I doubt it,’ she said.

      ‘MicroDyne?’ said Thorn. ‘Morgan Braswell.’

      She shifted the clipboard to her left hand, freeing up her right to pump him full of lead.

      ‘Is this MicroDyne?’

      ‘You have business here, sir?’

      ‘What do they manufacture?’

      The blank look on her face got blanker.

      ‘None of the news articles say. Government contractor, that’s the phrase. What’s that mean? Is that defense work? Military? Top-secret gizmos? What?’

      She took a step back from the car. Her eyes were working. She was going over procedures in her head, making decisions about how to proceed. Memorizing his face, the car. On a better day Thorn might have trotted out the charm, tried to win her over, seduce a fact or two. But today he was shit out of charm. It was all he could do to press the accelerator, turn the wheel. Hold one thought for more than a few seconds.

      Thorn put the VW in reverse and backed slowly out of the short drive.

      The security guard stood in front of the steel barricade with her legs spread, right hand close to her holster. Annie Oakley about to shoot the hearts out of silver dollars flung high into the air.

      Thorn took the turnpike south.

      He hit rush hour in Miami. Fifty miles of raging incivility.

      ‘Did he give you his name?’

      Morgan Braswell was looking at her computer screen, the freeze-frame of the surveillance tape from the front gate. The man from last night at the crash site, the big hero who’d pulled thirty, forty people from the water. Lanky, blue-eyed, tan, tousled sandy hair.

      ‘No, ma’am. He didn’t say his name.’

      ‘But he mentioned me? By name.’

      ‘That’s correct.’

      Morgan ran her tongue along her upper lip. She leaned back in the leather chair. Behind her desk was a large window that looked down into the testing lab. A quiet, sterile space where dozens of men and women in white lab coats spent their days peering into computers, monitoring the sintering furnaces that were located behind layers of tempered steel in a distant section of the plant.

      ‘Did you get a license number?’

      ‘Yes, ma’am. I’m running it through DMV. But there might be a problem. It looked like it was an expired tag.’

      Johnny was standing at the window looking down into the lab. It was empty now. Everyone gone home for the day.

      Johnny wore navy blue shorts and a white polo shirt with their boat name embroidered on the left breast. His long hair was clenched back in a ponytail.

      ‘He probably wanted a date,’ said Johnny. ‘A little cootchie-coo.’

      ‘Joyce,’ Morgan said.

      ‘Yes, ma’am?’

      ‘Print out the best frames of that video. His face from the front, profile. As many angles as you can get. Enhance them, sharpen the focus.’

      Joyce nodded.

      ‘The pictures and whatever you get from DMV on my desk in the morning.’

      ‘Yes, ma’am.’

      ‘He was a smart-ass,’ Johnny said. ‘He said he saw three of us on the boat. You, me, and a guy in a cowboy hat. I should’ve iced him right then. Filled him full of daylight.’

      Morgan swiveled her chair around and looked at her brother.

      ‘Joyce,’ she

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