Magic City Read Online Free Page A

Magic City
Book: Magic City Read Online Free
Author: James W. Hall
Pages:
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usual.”
    â€œFunny, I thought I was feeling pretty bubbly.”
    â€œYou? Bubbly?”
    â€œRelatively speaking, I mean. Relatively bubbly.”
    â€œOkay, so when’s the last time you tied a bonefish fly?”
    Thorn tugged his line, scanned the basin.
    â€œA month ago? Two months?”
    â€œTwo’s about right.”
    â€œSo what’ve you been doing for income?”
    â€œI’m getting by.”
    â€œYou’re surviving on chunky peanut butter and beer. Raiding the penny jar. Can’t even afford Red Stripe, drinking Budweiser, for godsakes.”
    â€œYou volunteering to be my financial planner?”
    â€œTell you what I will do,” he said. “I’ll go up there myself, babysit the old man. Lawton and I get along fine. You stay here, get to work.”
    â€œNice try,” Thorn said. “But I need to do this.”
    â€œWhat you need is to get back to what makes you sane.”
    â€œSo now I’m insane?”
    â€œYou’re mopey, Thorn. And you been hitting the long-necks hard. Starting early, a six-pack before the sun goes down. You need to get your groove back, my man.”
    â€œMy groove?”
    â€œOh, jeez, now I get it.” Sugar shook his head. Something so obvious taking so long to dawn. “You’re thinking about moving up there, aren’t you? That’s what this is about. Desert the Keys, move in with Alexandra. Jesus, Thorn. That’s it, isn’t it? Live in freaking Miami.”
    â€œHere it comes.” Thorn nodded to his left. “Ten o’clock, five yards.”
    He angled to his right along the dock and tugged the bobber so it was floating a few feet ahead of the big snook’s path.
    â€œAnd, hey, what’s with the bobber?” Sugar said. “Where’s your fly rod?”
    â€œI want to catch this fish, not play with it.”
    Sugarman leaned out and watched the snook swim past the finger mullet that dangled below the bobber.
    He and Sugar went back to grade school. Though it felt like they went back further than that. Brother yin and brother yang. Sugar was the only guy on earth who could give Thorn the level of shit he did. Tell that kind of truth.
    He’d been a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy, now a security consultant, a term he liked better than private eye. Half Jamaican, half Norwegian. Pale blond mother, Rasta father. A lucky blend. Inherited the laid-back genes of the ganja man and the chiseled cheekbones and long limbs and elegant moves of his lovely mom. Her cold focus. After those two abandoned him when he was still a toddler, his scruples were shaped by a foster mom who raised him in the tropical poverty of Hibiscus Park, Key Largo’s ghetto. Crack houses and heroin dens, rusty cars up on blocks; the only lawful neighborhood business was a hubcap stand along the overseas highway. After a childhood like that, Sugarman had developed an indestructible gristle at his core. He grew up quiet and clear-minded, a man so strictly principled, so secure in his humane convictions, that on countless occasions he’d served as Thorn’s true north, hauling him back onto the proper path just as Thorn was about to lurch over some fatal precipice.
    Sugar peered into the lagoon.
    â€œDamn, that’s no snook. It’s Orca, the killer whale.”
    Thorn watched the snook glide across the basin to the mangrove roots that curved into the basin like the bars of an underwater cage.
    â€œIt’s checking an escape route. It’ll try to cut me off on those roots.”
    Sugar said, “Did I see that right? All those leaders streaming off her mouth? There must be a dozen hooks in her lip.”
    â€œAt least.”
    â€œWhat do you figure? Fish that size, it’s got to be ten, twelve years old?”
    â€œCloser to twenty-one,” said Thorn.
    â€œTwenty-one? And how’d you arrive at that?”
    â€œOne of those leaders is
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