Magic City Read Online Free

feign interest as Sugar flashed through dozens of digital photos of his twin daughters, zoomed in and out on their beautiful smiles, showing Thorn how to filter away messy backgrounds, crop off the edges.
    Now Sugar took a swallow of his Bud and watched Thorn tug his red-and-white bobber toward the center of the basin. It was a muggy April afternoon, closing in on suppertime with the sun drifting behind the sabal palms on the western edge of Thorn’s property. A gust off the Atlantic riffled the lagoon, and for a moment the water went opaque, then a moment later the breeze died and the rocky bottom came back into focus fifteen feet below.
    â€œYou ever spent seven consecutive days in Miami?”
    â€œNot that I recall.”
    â€œYou’ll freak, Thorn, you’ll break out in boils.”
    â€œOh, I’ll survive.”
    â€œSo what’s the deal? Alexandra’s quitting her job? Going to do search and rescue full-time?”
    â€œShe and Buck have to pass final certification. But yeah, Miami PD is setting up a team. She’s first in line.”
    â€œLost children, old people wandering off? Cadavers?”
    â€œThat’s the idea.”
    â€œThat’s why she hasn’t been down lately? This extra work?”
    â€œPart of the reason, yeah, but I’ve been going up there. All of us slogging around the Everglades. I mind Lawton while she and Buck search for scented dummies.”
    â€œFirst I heard of that.”
    Thorn gave another light tug on the line.
    â€œIt’s interesting work. Puzzle solving, following clues.”
    â€œNot just the dog sticking its nose up in the air, then taking off?”
    â€œA little more complicated than that.”
    â€œWell, that mutt’s smarter than I thought he was,” Sugarman said.
    â€œHe’s a Lab. Even the dumb ones are smart.”
    Thorn watched his bobber drifting with the incoming tide.
    â€œTwenty years snapping photos of corpses, working around hard-ass homicide cops, I see how she’d find search dogs more stimulating.”
    Thorn was silent, focused on the bobber.
    Sugar said, “Why doesn’t Lawton come down here, spend seven nights at scenic, relaxing Club Thorn?”
    He gestured at the house behind them, the one-story Cape Cod where Thorn had grown up. Tucked in an insolated cove, it faced into the steady Atlantic winds.
    Fifteen years ago when Kate Truman, his adoptive mother, died, Thorn shuttered the place and settled into a stilt house a few miles south on the opposite side of the island. Then last year a fire turned his stilt house to cinders, and all these months later, he still hadn’t found the heart to clean up the debris, much less rebuild. So he’d returned to the white wooden house where he’d spent his youth, opened it up, aired it out, and for the past few weeks he’d been adjusting to the ghostly echoes. Scenes from his youth replaying at odd moments, a whiff of a baseball glove, a moldering fishing rod, would set off long rambles through his teenage years.
    â€œWhile she’s in Tampa taking her tests, she gave me a list of projects she needs done, a roof leak, that kind of thing. So I putter around while Lawton’s at day care, take charge of him in the evening. Seven nights, how bad is that?”
    â€œAlex never really liked the Keys, did she?”
    â€œShe likes it fine, but all the driving back and forth gets old, an hour each way, traffic getting worse all the time. Her life is up there.”
    â€œIn Miami.”
    â€œYeah, Miami. The streets, the hum.”
    â€œAnd your life is here, the water, the hush.”
    â€œYou trying to say something?”
    Sugarman tightened his lips.
    â€œAll right. You want the barefaced truth?” He drew a wary breath. “Ever since Alex stopped coming down here, you’ve been seriously gloomy.”
    â€œOh, come on.”
    â€œI’m serious. Bleak. Moodier than