Free The Big Finish by James W. Hall Page B

settle this on your own. You have that history, Thorn, a reputation. So not until we’re there, until we’ve finalized our plan, gone over everything.”
    “Sugar,” Thorn said. “He’s coming.”
    She looked out the window, saw him crossing the lot carrying the bags of food, seconds away.
    “I know he’s a good person,” Cruz said. “I have no doubt. Sheffield speaks highly of him, and we could use the manpower, but he can’t come.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he believes in the rule book. We can’t have that.”
    Thorn pulled himself from the screen, stood up again. He blinked his eyes clear and stared at Madeline Cruz.
    “Why?” he said. “Because we aren’t going to be playing by the rules?”
    “No,” Cruz said. “Because where we’re going, there are no rules.”
    He looked back at Sugarman out in the darkness.
    “Your friend, is he willing to step over the legal line? Way across that line? Do whatever it takes to accomplish our goal, despite how many laws we have to break?”
    “No.”
    “Then you have to cut him loose. This is going to be messy.”
    “You’re not FBI, are you?”
    “I was for many years.”
    “But not anymore.”
    “That’s correct. Not since I lost Carmen.”
    Sugar came into the room, set the sacks of food on the desk.
    When he registered the look on Thorn’s face, he halted.
    Madeline stepped over to the laptop and shut the lid.
    “We need to talk,” Thorn said.
    “Aw, great.” Sugar rolled his eyes to the ceiling, then looked back at Thorn. “God help us every one.”
    “We’re not going to need you anymore,” Thorn said. “Cruz and I are going to take it from here.”
    Sugar’s gaze drifted from Thorn to Cruz, then to the window and the open blinds.
    At that second the even-tempered, all-enduring look on Sugarman’s face sent Thorn back to an afternoon from twenty years earlier, Sugar still in his deputy’s uniform, he and Thorn drinking a beer at the Caribbean Club in Key Largo, where tourists stopped in to see the local badasses misbehave and where the local badasses came to put on a show for the tourists.
    Thorn couldn’t recall why they’d wound up there, but he remembered Sugar was talking to a college girl from a little town in Mississippi Thorn had never heard of. Sugar was married at the time, a devoted husband, not the least bit flirty, simply doing his best to shield the girl from the roughnecks in that bar. He and the girl were having a good time, Sugar being funny in the wry, understated way he had, not trying to make her laugh, not trying to charm her, simply describing his afternoon shift, a domestic spat he’d broken up between two eighty-year-old men who’d been roommates for the last half century but now were trying to claw each other’s eyes out over whose turn it was to do the dishes. And one of the badasses across the bar took exception to the fact that the Mississippi girl with the languid eyes and the molasses in her laughter was enjoying the company of a black man in a cop uniform, and he came strutting around the bar, long-haired guy with a drunk’s sloppy smile, wearing only a leather vest over his sunken chest, and he wedged in between Sugarman and the Mississippi girl, planted his elbow on the bar, and proceeded to call her a nigger-loving little cunt who should get her ass back in her rental car and keep on driving down to Key West, where the faggots would be more accepting of her nigger-loving ways.
    Thorn took hold of the badass’s ponytail and gave it a jerk, which was Thorn’s hands-on approach to introducing the asshole to civilized behavior.
    And the badass swung around, spoiling for what came next, but Sugar already had the guy’s left wrist cuffed to a piece of angle iron that supported the bar. The guy swung and lurched but the cuffs had him caught. Sugar and Thorn and the college girl moved around the bar and continued their conversation on stools with a view of the red sun dissolving into Blackwater Sound while