Off the Chart
A chance encounter with an old flame sets reluctant investigator Thorn on a collision course with some of Florida's most ruthless killers in a heart-stopping story of modern-day piracy from the acclaimed author of Blackwater Sound, hailed by Dennis Lehane as ‘the king of Florida noir’.Anne Joy first fled to the Sunshine State to escape a violent past. Now, years later, she slips back into bad company when she gets entangled with Daniel Salbone, a rising figure in the local mob whose men have been terrorising shipping lanes. When Thorn’s old connection with Anne comes to light, he is desperate not to be dragged into dangerous waters. But the kidnapping of his best friend’s daughter forces him to embark on a hunt that will take him from the deceptive lushness of the Florida Keys to a nightmare climax in one of the most remote and blood-chilling spots in the Caribbean.
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JAMES HALL
OFF THE CHART
For Evelyn, my rock, my love
Contents
Glittering with moonlight and sweat, Thorn and Anne Joy were lying naked in Thorn’s bed when she launched into the story of her turbulent childhood in Kentucky. Her parents murdered. Lunacy and violence. Pirates, pirates, pirates.
Until that night, they’d shared nothing about their pasts. A breathless fever possessed them for their monthlong affair. An unquenchable horniness. Bruises from the clash of hipbones, flushed and tender tissue, their heat rekindled with the slightest rasp of skin on skin. For hours at a time they barely spoke, and when they did it was increasingly clear the chief thing they had in common was this agitated lust.
Then that night in a calm moment she told the vivid story of her youth, details she claimed to have never shared with anyone before. Saying she had no idea why she was confessing this to him but blundering ahead anyway.
Struck by the oddity of this tight-lipped woman opening up in such detail, Thorn lay quiet, listening intently. At the time, of course, he had no inkling that lurking in that account of Anne’s youth was a foretelling of the torture and torment of Thorn’s own loved ones, the kidnapping of a child, the murders of many others. But even though there was no way in hell he could have known, no way he could have heard in her gaudy tale the dark rumbles of his own future, that didn’t keep him from blaming himself forever after.
It was a raw afternoon in eastern Kentucky. The winter sky had turned the brittle gray of old ice, but Anne’s outlaw father and her older brother, Vic, were shirtless in the cold, hammering together the rickety frame under her mother’s watchful gaze. As Anne described it, the Joys’ yard was treeless and mangy, their property perched on a bluff overlooking the grim, defeated town of Harlan.
Anne stood at her bedroom window watching her family work in the front yard. For an hour she’d ignored her mother’s calls to join in. Only seven years old, Anne already knew she wanted nothing to do with this foolishness.
By dusk the structure was finished and her father and brother had strung Christmas lights along its edges and raised the Jolly Roger flag on its mast. Skull and crossbones flapping in the frigid breeze. When her father plugged in the cord, the flimsy creation burst to life in a phosphorescent flash. Twenty feet high, fifty feet long with red and green and blue lights twinkling in a perfect outline of the brawny hull and blooming sails of a pirate schooner.
For the next eight years the contraption stood in their front yard with those strands of colored bulbs flickering all through the gloomy winter nights of that Kentucky hill country and even into the first soft breaths of spring and the muggy, star-dazzled evenings, blinking in time with summer crickets and the whoop of owls, blazing incessantly into the fall when the sky above the sugar maples filled with the sweet perfume of rot and looming cold; those lights shimmered and winked and that pirate ship sailed endlessly through the rocky, mortified seas of Anne Joy’s youth. Visible for any sane man in that region to see – a ludicrous beacon, a steady rainbow pulse of don’t-give-a-damn lunacy.
Since her own childhood in the Florida Keys, Anne’s mother, Antoinette, had been consumed with pirates, a juvenile hobby that over time turned into a full-blown obsession and finally was to become the compulsory enthusiasm of the entire Joy clan. Even Jack Joy succumbed. Anne’s father was a raven-haired, extravagantly tattooed ex-navy man who drove a fuel-injected Nash Rambler to distribute a variety of unlawful drugs for the Woodson brothers to truck stops throughout eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Even such a roughneck as Jack Joy yielded to his wife’s fixation and became an authority on Long John Silver, Captain Kidd, and Blackbeard and eventually came to measure his own daring and lawlessness by their far-fetched standards.
Anne learned to endure the schoolyard catcalls, the relentless smirks, and those chilling midnights when carloads of boys parked out front and hooted and whistled and slung beer cans at Antoinette’s pirate ship until she or Jack snatched the shotgun from the brackets on the back of the front door and stalked outside and fired a warning shot over the bow of that landlocked schooner.
Other than those visits from local hooligans, the Joy home was peaceful and Anne’s parents’ love affair was luminous and sweet-hearted. Although the townsfolk gave Jack Joy a wide berth whenever he went out in public, Anne never caught so much as a whiff of violence on him once he entered those four walls. There was even a boyish innocence about the way he adored his wife and indulged her every caprice.
