Under Cover of Daylight by James W. Hall

island lighten. His stilt house was twenty feet from Blackwater Sound, a quiet bay rimmed with mangroves. His coral and limestone dock ran out a hundred feet into about two feet of water at high tide. Behind him the two sets of French doors he’d put in were opened, and a breeze stirred the musky air of his house. The smell of pelts, salt marshes, brackish air.
    Dr. Bill had left him the house. When Thorn was still in high school, Dr. Bill had used it as a retreat. Just three miles south from their house, but still a getaway. Thorn had never even seen it till Dr. Bill died, and suddenly it was his.
    It’d been full of carpentry tools, saws and the belt sanders he’d used to smooth off the edges of those molded, sculptured chairs. That was something else Thorn had never seen or known about till after the funeral. The furniture he’d grown up with had been country-simple, straight-backed oak chairs and round oak tables and plain oak breakfront.
    Thorn had scoured his new house, searching for the sex magazines or leather harnesses, any secret that could’ve made Dr. Bill more than the tough, flat-sided man he seemed. It was just chairs.
    Uncomfortable-looking things. Everyone who visited tried to avoid them. Without cushion or pad, they looked like the chairs in the corner of the classroom for the misbehaving kid. But once Thorn had coaxed a newcomer into one, they would sigh, go slack, close their eyes like they’d just eased into a warm bath. It was weird, because Dr. Bill had never been a rester, never been a coddler either. The chairs threw Dr. Bill out of focus.
    Thorn kept a few of them, donated the rest to friends, the Salvation Army. “You sure you want to get rid of these? These aren’t junk.”
    “Absolutely.”
    Now the one-room house was uncluttered. Plank floors. No shades on the windows. He had an acre of buffer on both sides. He was about four hundred yards down a gravel road from U.S. 1. If anyone wanted a peep of him, they’d have to pole into the flats off shore.
    He had a small collection of books, some poetry and sea stories left from childhood. He’d run two shelves for them above his bed and filled up the spaces between them with horse conchs, queen conchs, and cowries he’d salvaged from around the reefs twenty years before. There was a Frigidaire that Dr. Bill had kept stocked with Black Label, still chugging in one corner, and a sink next to it with a red checked skirt to cover the plumbing and Ajax and roach spray. Kate had given him an Oriental rug he laid out between the foot of his bed and the sunset porch. And there were two pole lamps with lampshades covered with nautical insignia, boat wheels, life preservers that an old girl friend had given him. The walls were pine paneling, Dade County pine, supposedly impervious to termites, though he’d been finding suspicious-looking wings in cobwebs the past few months.
    There was a footlocker on one side of his bed where he kept his underwear and socks. And on the other side another footlocker, which was his nightstand and where he kept, wrapped in an oily rag, the blue Colt Python. Four-inch barrel, .357 magnum. The pistol he’d once dreamed of using on Dallas James.

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    E VERY LOAD FIRED FROM IT , every careful squeeze and bruised palm had been for Dallas James. He’d bought it late one night in the parking lot behind the Elks Club his junior year in high school. Hidden it from Kate and Dr. Bill, and had spent a year practicing with it in the woods. Hell of a wallop, made him flinch just to raise it toward the target. But wing somebody with that and he’d stay down, traumatize him out of action.
    Thorn hadn’t ever been proud of the Colt. Had never flaunted it in front of his buddies. It had always made him queasy to hold it, loaded, leather holster off. As if he were looking over the edge of a tall building. Legs drained. Heart wallowing. Afternoon after afternoon of his boyhood, he had forced himself to overcome that feeling in the