Free Silencer by James W. Hall Page B

her again. She’s out there somewhere, still thinking.”
    â€œNow, where’s the back way out of here?” Moses said. “So nobody gets hurt. We wouldn’t want that. People getting shot through the heart at a nice party like this. People dying left and right.”
    Thorn led them through the length of the house, out the front door, outside into the darkness. No longer quite so drunk. Looking for an escape. Looking for a way out of this that wouldn’t endanger anyone at the party. Shoved along by the slinky guy, poked in the spine with the unfunny end of a pistol.
    The two men with Old Testament names marched him away from his house. Outside in the shadowy drive Moses told him to halt and to raise his hands. Thorn complied and Moses patted him down and found nothing in his pockets—no guns, no knives, no leather saps, not a wallet or a key chain.
    As Thorn was lowering his hands Jonah made a huffing noise like the chuckle of an addled child, and a second later he cracked Thorn in the skull, and Thorn’s knees sank, while far away Springsteen crooned on behalf of all the ordinary Joes.
    Floating about ten feet above the scene, the part of Thorn that was still conscious watched his body lifted and carried, then wedged into a tight place. For some indeterminate period he viewed a spool of the evening’s events, disconnected images and snatches of conversation, the lagoon, the mosquito torches, his friends and some strangers splashing drunkenly in the warm water, Thorn giving his speech in Rusty’s honor, suffering the good-natured ridicule. He saw himself writing a note, words on a pad of paper. A note for Rusty. Though he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d written.
    Sometime later he came awake in the cramped backseat of a small car.
    He might have been missing in action for five minutes or an hour. His head was hooded by rough material that smelled vaguely like a feed sack. The hood was held in place by an elastic cord lashed around his throat. Behind his back his hands were so numb he could not tell what material the cuffs were fashioned from. Plastic, steel, leather, or something else entirely.
    For a while he tried to focus on the turns the car made. That’s what you were supposed to do when you were kidnapped. He remembered that much.
    They seemed to travel in one direction for many miles, maybe as long as an hour. No doubt heading north on US 1 back to the mainland, then after that, there were too many choices to be sure.
    The passenger window was open and the rush of wind hid sounds from beyond the car. Three or four times he heard the crack of gunfire close by, then the voice of the big man speaking. Afterward there was no more shooting.
    Only later, much later, when the car turned off the pavement and began to jolt across the washboard ruts of a back road, Thorn got a sense of their location. Through the rough fabric he smelled the fertile night air of the Florida countryside, pine resins and grasses, pennyroyal and sage, the faint honeyed taste of slash pine. And as the car slowed to a crawl, he made out what he believed was the jug-o-rumcroak of a bullfrog and a series of low whoots that might be a great horned owl.
    Impossible to pinpoint from a whiff of breeze and shred of sound, but his senses were telling him they’d landed somewhere in South Florida’s interior, out in the untamed pineland well inland from the coast, a vast area north of the Everglades that was home to cattle ranches and sod and tomato farms and sugarcane fields, a region so remote, so desperately lonely that the closest shopping mall or fullsized grocery store was hours away toward the bright lights of the coastline. The only prominent structures in that wild place were the occasional church or slaughterhouse.
    The car came to a stop and the men got out. Neither of them spoke as they muscled him from the car and prodded him across rough terrain studded with rocks and scratchy