Red Sky At Night

by James Hall

Overview

A full-throttle thriller and a powerful human drama of wounded love—and the hurts that afflict the body, mind, and spirit

It was truly a crime against innocents. Eleven dolphins, part of an experiment in healing, are found slaughtered in their saltwater tanks. When Thorn, a Florida renegade who has lived a life of fierce freedom, investigates, he triggers a vicious attack that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down, plagued by unrelenting pain. Now Thorn is starting over in a wheelchair, bitter enough to drive his lover away, desperate enough to seek miracles on the fringes of medical science—where his childhood friend, now a doctor, is doing cutting-edge research in a quest for the ultimate painkiller.

Bean Wilson was once destined for greatness. Then came the war in Vietnam, a debilitating injury, and a simmering rage. Now Bean is running a pain-relief clinic in Key West, assisted by a beautiful six-foot-tall island girl named Pepper Tremaine, who chews hot chilies like gum and carries a scalpel in her blouse. Under the guise of a respectable research facility, Bean and Pepper are using human beings as lab rats, then feeding the bodies of their failures to the shark-churned sea.

Within hours of entering the clinic, Thorn can sense the danger. But when he makes the bizarre connection between eleven dead dolphins and Bean's clinic, the stakes are raised. Because this mad, ruthless doctor may be on the brink of the most dangerous discovery of all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780440613923
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/08/1998
Series:	Thorn Series , #6
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

James Hall, a former art critic of the Guardian, was awarded the first Bernard Denvir Prize for an outstanding young critic. He is the author of 20 novels, 14 of which feature Thorn, the off-the-grid loner who lives a primitive existence in Key Largo, Florida. Thorn and his friend Sugarman, an African-American PI, team up to solve exotic crimes from animal smuggling to piracy to kidnapping to espionage. Hall has won the Edgar Award and the Shamus and several of his novels have been optioned for film.

Read an Excerpt

It was Monday around two on a painfully bright April afternoon. Overhead a flock of white ibis labored by like gorgeous aeronautical blunders. The sky was scrubbed clean of clouds, as it had been for weeks. No rain, no sign of it. What grass there was in Key Largo had yellowed and turned crisp as toast.
In the saltwater tank two of the dolphins were nosing against the scar on Thorn's arm--a glossy pockmark where several years ago a lump of lead had passed through the meat of his shoulder in a red-hot hurry. For the last few minutes the larger of the two dolphins had been bombarding the shiny, thickened flesh with her sonar. Echolocation, it was called.

"Does it tickle?" Monica asked. She was treading water beside him in the twenty-foot-square pool. So far none of the dolphins had homed in on her. Monica's short blond hair was bright in the midday sun, plastered against her head, revealing the shape of her perfect skull.

"More than a tickle," Thorn said. "Like my shoulder's a tuning fork."

"Bliss with flippers," said Roy Everly. "That's what some California idiot called them last week."

Roy sat on the edge of the dolphin tank, feet dangling in the water. He was the owner and caretaker of the dolphin center. He'd been a year behind Thorn at Coral Shores High back in medieval times. Roy had the distinction of being the first person on the island to own a computer. Built it himself; the thing filled half a room. He'd won a scholarship to Stanford in computer science, but had to turn it down because his mother was dying of cancer. That was twenty years ago and she was still dying.

These days Roy weighed well over three hundredpounds, most of it hanging over the waistband of the red thong he wore continually. He still cut his thick blond hair the same way he had his whole life--in a one-inch burr.

"Big debate these days," Roy said. "Are dolphins aliens from outer space come to enlighten us, or are they angels?"

Thorn smiled civilly.

"Bunch of California horseshit," Roy said. "Dimwits eating way too much granola and alfalfa sprouts."

The Down syndrome kids in the adjacent pool had quieted. No more screams of fright, rapturous shrieks. Now all Thorn could hear were soothing gurgles and low croons coming from over there, ten kids and their two teachers, bobbing amid the angels. And in the third tank the cancer patients and paraplegics were finished with their session and were being helped out onto the wood deck by a large black man in a white uniform.

"Now they go back to their van and do the blood tests. Doc Wilson draws a few cc's before they go in, then after the half hour in the tank he gets another sample. Looking for elevated levels of beta-endorphin, lipotropin, serum cortisol, and catecholamines. Brain chemicals, pain regulators. Trying to pin down exactly what's happening, why their intractable pain subsides. Why they suddenly start performing better on all the tests, mental and physical and psychological."

"Bean Wilson's working here?"

"Last year or two," Roy said. "Nice old man. Good doctor too. Helping out some VA clinic down in Key West. Saddest bunch of assholes I ever saw--twisted, mangled old vets. But they seem to get a kick out of the dolphins. They go home happy, anyway."

The two dolphins that had been analyzing Thorn's scar backed slowly away to the far end of the pool. They hovered there for a moment as if in serious deliberation.

"They're getting another angle on you. Sonar's so highly developed, they can spot a shark a half mile away, tell whether its stomach is empty or full. Doesn't work as well up close."

Suddenly the water surged in front of the two dolphins and they headed directly toward Thorn, twenty miles an hour in less than ten feet. His skiff with a one-fifty Evinrude couldn't accelerate that fast.

As they rushed forward, Thorn held his position, less from bravery than a lack of any other option. Then a foot from his face, the duo split apart like fighter jets passing in review, each dolphin whispering against one of Thorn's shoulders. A moment later they circled back and once again focused their pings on his gunshot wound.

"Wow," Monica said. "What the hell was that about?"

"They're trying to figure out his scar," said Roy. "Violence, guns, bullets. It upsets them; it's too weird. They don't understand it."

"Neither do I," said Thorn.

A small bottlenose had finally taken an interest in Monica and seemed to be nuzzling against the belly of her black bathing suit. Monica's smile relaxed and her head dropped back in the water. There was a rule against touching the animals. Everyone was instructed to let the dolphins determine all contact.

"Oh, my god, he's doing it," she whispered. "He's pinging me."

"I can't watch," Thorn said.

"Been verified with EEGs." Roy stood up, stretched lazily. "Half hour in the tank, brain waves are smoother, more regular. Left brain and right brain in much better harmony. Neurological functioning on a much higher level. Half hour swimming with them boosts the immune system, increases T-cell count. Even evidence it can shrink tumor mass. What I think is the sonar is causing cavitation inside the soft tissue of the body. Cavitation, as in cavities or bubbles, you know. Those echoes you feel are ripping apart your molecules, opening up spaces."

"Sounds painful," Thorn said. "But this feels good."

"You wouldn't feel molecular pain. A little buzz, that's all. It's like your molecules are being rolfed, loosened up, all the calcified masses broken apart. It's pain, but a pain you don't feel. A pain that stimulates endorphin release, which, voil, creates the deep relaxation and increased T-cell production."

"You know a lot about them," Monica said.

"Of course, on the downside," said Roy, "as the word spreads about the beneficial effects of swimming with them, every charlatan from Miami to Seattle is starting to trap dolphins, open healing centers. Angels for rent."

Roy stood there staring gloomily at Thorn and Monica, as if they were the first wave of barbarians.

Monica groaned, eyes closed, off in a euphoric cloud.

Since January, Monica Sampson had been renting a downstairs apartment next to the dolphin center and she and Roy had become friends. For weeks she'd been badgering Thorn to come swim with the dolphins, but he'd resisted. Among other things, he didn't want anyone to get wind of his connection with the place.

When Kate Truman, Thorn's adoptive mother, died a few years earlier she'd left several million dollars' worth of income-producing property to Thorn. He immediately signed it all over to Millie Oblonsky, a cranky Russian matriarch who'd practiced law down in Islamorada for the last sixty years. Nearing ninety, Millie had been Kate's closest friend and had shared her fierce dedication to preserving the Keys in as natural a state as possible. Thorn never asked what charities or environmental groups were receiving the financial help. The money was no longer legally his and he wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. The scant income he got from selling his bonefish flies to local tackle shops and a handful of guides was sufficient to get him through. Anything more was a burden.

Ordinarily Millie kept him out of the loop. But last December, on her Christmas card, she'd scratched a quick message: Check out Kate's dolphins. Included was a photograph of the Key Largo research center, three connecting tanks carved out of the limestone behind a conventional concrete block house that sat alongside a mangrove canal a half mile east of US 1. The eleven dolphins were penned inside the wire fences and were available as swimming partners seven days a week.

Thorn knew the place well. He'd passed by it hundreds of times over the years. Just another shabby roadside petting zoo, as far as he could tell. He'd pictured a bunch of fat, noisy Midwesterners trying to straddle the dolphins' backs, yee-ha. But he'd been wrong.

Last week when Monica finally coaxed him into going, Thorn found the place to be quiet and meditative, and even though penned in such small tanks, the dolphins seemed as amused by the humans as the other way around. Roy admitted tourists only when he didn't have sufficient sick or damaged folks to occupy the tanks.

Thorn had come back twice, though today was his first swim. It had been pleasure enough to stand with the usual gathering of onlookers and watch the sick and crippled slip into the dark pools with those powerful creatures and thirty minutes later to watch them climb out with the exhilarated expressions of the newly sanctified.

"Better than a hit of morphine," Roy said. "Dolphins discover what ails you and more often than not they set about making it right."

Thorn found himself agreeing. The two dolphins who'd been bombarding his glossy pockmark with their invisible rays seemed to be trying to ease the tension in his scar. A tension he hadn't even realized was there until now.

"Your time is up," Roy said. "I'd let you stay longer except I got a busload of schizophrenics coming in at five. I want to clear the place out before they arrive. There's only ten of them, but what with all their multiple personalities, it gets a little crowded around here."

Roy didn't smile, didn't seem to get his own joke. A lifetime of caring for his mother had sapped the humor from him. He might even have been beyond the help of dolphins.

As Thorn and Monica were toweling off, he noticed a tall, heavyset man standing at the back of the half dozen tourists gathered at the fences. He'd seen the same man on one of his other visits that week. The guy's paunch was so pronounced it looked like a German helmet beneath his shirt. He wore a red baseball hat with the brim tipped very low and a pair of gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses. But what snagged Thorn's attention was the way the man wasn't watching the dolphins or the swimmers. His gaze was fixed on Roy Everly as he went about his duties, opening and closing the gates between the pens to keep the dolphins circulating among the groups, turning the pumps on and off, tinkering with the aerator. As Monica ruffled the towel across her hair, Thorn watched the man insert his thumb into his mouth and work at something that was lodged between his front teeth. When he got it free, he examined it briefly, then flicked it over his shoulder into the grass.


All that night Thorn's scar tingled. Monica came over for dinner and they talked for hours on the upstairs porch, stars flooding the sky. They laughed and held hands and shared a bottle of excellent red wine she'd brought along. If there were any mosquitoes, neither of them noticed.

"Something's wrong with me," Thorn said. "I feel too good."

"It's like we're getting the afterglow without the sex."

"You feel that good?"

"Better," she said, smiling. "Like all my knots have been untied."

They watched a twinkling sailboat motor along the distant Intracoastal. In the woods nearby an owl shrieked. A pair of bats fluttered close overhead, skimming bugs from the breeze.

"I wonder," Thorn said. "The dolphins make us feel this way, but what do we do for them? What the hell do they get out of it?"

"Maybe they're altruistic. They get pleasure from giving it."

Thorn looked over at her. Her legs were propped up on the porch railing, sleek and burnished with moonlight. She sipped her wine and stared out into the boundless dark. With her free hand she reached across and trailed her fingertips over his arm as delicately as fog. Thorn took a long drag of the sweet night air. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt so good, so relaxed.

And it worried him. It worried the hell out of him.

Interviews

Before the live bn.com chat, James Hall agreed to answer some of our questions.

Q:  Do you have a favorite place to write?

A:  I have a little office in my house. What appeals to me about it is the house used to belong to an FBI agent who was primarily involved in drug prosecutions. He was putting away some very bad guys, so he was understandably paranoid. This office was his bunker. It's quite conducive to isolating yourself.

Q:  You are swimming in the ocean, and you see a shark fin. What do you do?

A:  Well, I've had that happen to me. I've done exactly what you're not supposed to do: scream "shark"...flap my fins like I don't know how to swim. I've seen some pretty big ones...an eight-foot brown shark swam right up to me. I've seen a 12-foot hammerhead.

Q:  If you could be any character in a film, whom would you be?

A:  William Hurt in Body Heat. I would go to jail for that experience.

Q:  How about a character in a book?

A:  Travis McGee in the John MacDonald novels...he had a pretty good life.

Q:  What are some of your favorite books?

A:  The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway. On the crime side, La Brava -- an early book by Elmore Leonard. Underground Man -- a Ross McDonald novel with the character of Lew Archer, a California detective.

Q:  What is your favorite food?

A:  Extra chunky peanut butter.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
June 1997

Pain. Think of the myriad meanings of the word. There is physical pain: the pain of cutting your finger with a knife; psychological pain: pain caused by years of resentment and anger; spiritual pain: the pain of losing a loved one. There are different gradations of pain: uncomfortable, agonizing, excruciating — and beyond that, there are levels of pain that are unique to each individual. James Hall's latest novel, Red Sky at Night, handles the diverse and interesting nature of pain while giving it a curious poignancy.

Phantom pain is an ailment that plagues para- and quadriplegics. Thorn, Hall's multifaceted loner from his book Buzz Cut, visits a pain clinic run by a friend in which victims of phantom pain are given great relief by swimming with dolphins. A day later, the dolphins are found dead, their tanks empty and their bodies horribly mutilated. Thorn begins to investigate, provoking a vicious attack that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down. In a wheelchair, embittered and desperate, Thorn enters the pain clinic of a childhood friend; however, this is anything but fortuitous.

Bean Wilson is the austere doctor who runs the clinic, assisted by Pepper Tremaine, a mysterious and voluptuous woman who chews hot peppers like candy and wears a scalpel as a daily accoutrement. Their work, as it doesn't take long for Thorn to find out, is directly connected to the brutal slaughtering of the dolphins. They say a thriller is only as good as its villains, and here, with Bean and Pepper, Hall exemplifies his inclinationtowardbizarre and unique antagonists who have a touch of humanity, even if slightly mutated.

The element of Thorn's pain, along with that of his fellow patients, is apparent. But what about the other types of pain? Thorn is staunchly independent and taciturn. Does this ever cause him pain? Pepper longs for the love of Bean. She can hardly wait for the day when they will be together for all of eternity. Does this cause her pain? And Bean? Bean's pain is the result of an insidious rage that he harbors for Thorn, and at last, he has him, weak and incapacitated. Red Sky at Night, while a unique and bizarre thriller, transcends this material to become a thoughtful elegy on the nature of hurting. With Red Sky at Night, there is pleasure in pain.

When an author lays waste to his usual protagonist, it's often to add snap to an aging series. The ploy can work, as when Robert B. Parker took Spenser to near-death in the recent Small Vices. More often it doesn't, as in Hall's crippling of his dour amateur sleuth Thorn (Buzz Cut, etc.) in this awkward outing. The novel begins with the decapitation of 11 dolphins at a Florida Keys research center and diabolical experimentation in controlling the phantom pain of maimed vets at a Keys V.A. clinic. Both crimes are masterminded by the clinic's director, Bean Wilson Jr., once Thorn's boyhood friend but now his enemy for a misperceived wrong. When Thorn is on the verge of discovering that Bean is harvesting dolphin endorphins for his work and using vets as guinea pigs, Bean orders an attack on his former buddy that puts Thorn in a wheelchair, maybe forever. Unusual for Hall, the backdrops and secondary characters form the novel's strong suit. There's a convincingly tortured romance between Thorn and a young woman; the crippled vets Thorn encounters at Bean's clinic are sculpted in poignant cameos; Bean is backed by two memorably eccentric assistant villains. Bean himself, however, is a cartoon of a mad doctor. And while the drama of Thorn's newly challenged life is meant to drive the novel, the psychological digging is superficial, and few readers will doubt Thorn's eventual fate. By the time he and Bean engage in a histrionic showdown, each speechifying at length as the ship they're on sinks beneath them, most will conclude that they are not the only ones who are close to being all wet. Major ad/promo; author tour. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Thorn, last spotted in the best-selling Buzz Cut (LJ 5/15/96), must come to grips with his own paralysisthe result of a savage beatingwhile holed up in a pain clinic run by a mad scientist.

Library Journal

Thorn, Key Largo's most heroic fishing guide, confirms his credentials as self-ordained savior of the Florida ecosphere when he avenges the killings of 11 dolphins.

The dolphins were the property of Thorn's friend Roy Everly, who used them as therapeutic swimming companions for the ailing until somebody sneaked into his healing center and slaughtered them in a grisly, elaborate manner. Why would anybody want to kill the harmless, friendly, restorative dolphins? Endorphins, decides Roy; the killers tortured them in order to flood their brains and spinal columns with miraculous painkilling chemicals and then harvested the endorphin-rich organs. It's only natural that Thorn, looking for information about the likely harvesters, should ask his old sawbones, Dr. Bean Wilson, and Wilson's anesthesiologist son Bean Jr., Thorn's childhood buddy and rival. But what's natural this time isn't what's good, since Bean Jr., a researcher in pain management who runs a VA clinic that's come under the watchful (if unofficial) eye of the local DEA chief, is the bad guy, engineering an incident that leaves Thorn's legs seemingly paralyzed. He keeps Thorn immobilized in his Key West clinic while he waits to load him onto the yacht where he conducts his (so far hideously unsuccessful) endorphin experiments. Since Hall is as generous as ever with his subplots, it's no surprise to find the yacht also stocked with Tran van Hung, the Vietnamese money man who's bankrolling Bean Jr.'s experiments; Greta Masterson, the undercover DEA agent they've picked for their latest guinea pig; and Carlos Echeverria, the turncoat DEA agent who keeps Bean up on what the good guys are doing. Looks like the unlegged Thorn and his self-described fiancée, plucky Monica Sampson, have their work cut out for them.

If you can overlook Thorn's preening for the Hemingway Attitude award, there's lots of expert action and some entertaining pop psychology here, without the overblown self- importance that sank Buzz Cut

Kirkus Reviews