The Big Finish by James W. Hall Page A

the ceiling. He played back every second he could recall of his brief time around Flynn Moss. From the first moment he saw him on the set of a television show Flynn was starring in, to the night when Flynn embraced Thorn, told him good-bye, and drove off with his radical friends. Then he played it back again. This might be all he’d have of the kid, these aching memories, so he worked to retrieve each second, stash them in some long-term storage file. He worked through each recollection and worked again until his weariness began to mix and blur the images together and the exercise grew too agonizing to continue.
    At one A.M . Thorn got up and took a shower and dressed in fresh clothes. He moved to the adjoining doors that stood open and listened to Cruz’s fluttery snuffle, then he slipped out his door and walked across the parking lot toward the fast food joint. Its outside signs were dark, and inside there was only a faint glow where a young man was mopping up.
    He walked beyond the hamburger place out to the two-lane and headed back toward the ramps onto I-95. He would hitch rides, head north, catch a bus if he had to, get to Pine Haven any way he could. Take as long as he needed. Do this alone. He didn’t trust Cruz. There were too many slippery places in her story. Her voice quivered and her eyes wandered. She swallowed too often as she was speaking of her daughter, Carmen. She was lying. He wasn’t sure how much of what she’d said was a lie, but some of it, maybe all.
    He’d do this on his own. When he arrived in Pine Haven, he’d parade up and down Main Street announcing his arrival, whatever it took to lure Flynn out of hiding, then whisk him away to safety in the Keys.
    It was a crazy idea. No idea at all. But he continued to walk.
    He walked beneath the underpass, a mile from the motel, then another, moving beyond the buzz and flicker of gas stations and all-night convenience stores into the darkness. Past a state park, Twelve Mile Swamp Conservation Area, and caught a cool breeze scented with ferns and pines and cypress.
    Forget the interstate. He’d hitchhike the back roads. Or hell, he’d walk every step of the way to Carolina if he had to. He had nothing better to do, nothing of consequence. He could send Sugarman postcards from the road.
    He was exhausted and felt old. He felt beyond old. A paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, or however the hell it went. He remembered the other phrase, the quotable one from that high school poem, the “mackerel-crowded seas,” an image for the overflowing, ridiculous energy of youth, the irresistible drive and vigor, the flailing excitement, the way young people threw themselves forward, churning up the waters, high on the potency of their dreams and convictions and passionate about their ideals, a level of intensity that had also driven Thorn twenty years ago, thirty, a steadfast belief that justice must be served even if violence was necessary, and a conviction that it was also his sacred duty to assemble a moral code and live by it strictly, at least until some savage impulse tempted him to break loose from everything he’d worked so hard to build.
    And that, he saw, had been his son’s pattern as well, cycling between self-discipline and impulse. Flynn was a wild spirit, robust, a reckless live wire spewing sparks who’d learned to hold all that crazy energy in check, trained himself to master the tricky craft of acting, then just as his career was gaining shape and substance, he chucked all that and threw himself into the shadowy world of insurgency with equal fervor.
    Along the shoulder of a road whose name he didn’t know, he walked through a darkness as complete as any he could recall. Walked for another half hour until he saw ahead in the distance the golden radiance of some outpost, a town or a trailer park, or commercial gathering place. He halted in the quiet dark, listening to his pulse tick away the seconds, looking at the glow of the