by John Lutz
“You were a cop once, weren’t you?” Armont asked, in a way that made it clear he knew the answer.
Carver turned, leaning on the cane. “That’s right. In Orlando.”
“It shows,” Armont said. His tone suggested he was complimenting Carver, in his own begrudging manner. He sat down heavily behind his desk and got busy in a rough way with paperwork that apparently had him frustrated. “You’ll keep me informed,” he said.
Carver said that he would.
Armont didn’t look up from the disorganized spread of papers on his desk. He drew a plastic ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, and with powerful darting motions of his big right hand, he began gouging signatures into some of the papers. A man who attacked his work.
Carver continued out of the office. He nodded to the uniformed patrolman at one of the desks, and to the elderly woman at the switchboard, when they looked over at him as he limped past. They nodded back. The woman smiled in grandmotherly fashion, as if she’d like to pat Carver on the head, give him some cookies, and fix his leg. She looked as if she might actually be able to do that.
Carver levered himself into the sun-heated Olds, wincing as his bare hand pressed too long against the baked vinyl upholstery. The car’s top was up, but the sun had invaded through the windshield and rolled-down side windows.
He drove from the police-department lot, then down Loop Avenue to The Flame restaurant. After making a U-turn, he parked the Olds behind Sam Cahill’s gleaming red Corvette and smiled. Time for breakfast. Bacon, eggs, and information. The Flame was a white clapboard building close to the curb on Loop Avenue. It had a long, green-tinted window that featured a fancy decal of a dancing flame above the restaurant’s name in red letters. Through the window Carver could see several tables and booths, and a long serving counter with stools. There appeared to be about a dozen customers inside, most of them at the tables or booths.
One of those electrified insect traps that attract and then zap bugs on contact was hung above The Flame’s entrance. War was hell, even war on insects. Carver stepped gingerly through the previous night’s bounty of crisp casualties and went inside.
He sat at a table near the counter, not far from one of the big ceiling fans that were rotating their broad blades too slowly to stir any air. A huge antique jukebox was playing a country-western tune, a sincere lament that had to do with cowboys and trucks and desperately unhappy rich women. The place was old, slightly worn at the edges, but it looked prosperous in a small way and clean, except for the insects. Carver felt better about ordering breakfast there.
Two men in jeans and work shirts sat at the counter, sipping coffee. A man and a young blond boy with a mouthful of braces were in one of the tape-patched booths, and an older couple sat at a table near the back. Some teen-agers giggled not far from them. No one in there looked as if he might be Sam Cahill.
A squarish, gray-haired woman bustled out of the kitchen, carrying a tray with platters of eggs and toast on it. She took the tray to the table where the man and boy sat. While the boy went at the eggs, the man smiled and thanked her, called her Emma. Which meant the dark-haired woman behind the counter was probably Verna Blaney.
Carver studied the counter waitress while she drew a refill of coffee from a tall stainless-steel urn. She was older than he’d expected, in her mid-thirties. Slender yet somehow sturdy. He suspected she was built with deceptive lushness beneath her ill-fitting white waitress uniform, the sort of peasant-stock voluptuousness that used to play hell with princes. Her hair was thick, pinned up and back, and would probably fall to shoulder length when she let it down. She turned to set the cups on the counter and Carver got the full impact of her broad-featured face. Her eyes were brown and set far apart, beneath unplucked brows that almost met above a broad, perfectly aligned nose. She had vaguely Slavic, prominent cheekbones, and her wide lips were full, slightly inverted to reveal even, very white teeth. She was feminine, not close to beautiful, but there was a coarse sensuality about her. The air around her seemed to hum with vibrations aimed at the male libido.
She turned in the other direction then, and Carver saw the wide, ugly scar that disfigured the right side of her face. Raised and red, it ran from her misshapen ear, down her cheek, and curved beneath her jaw.
Her eyes met Carver’s, didn’t look away. A direct stare, almost daring him to react to the scar. She was probably a woman direct in everything, one who had come to accept her disfigurement and alternate futures not lived.
“Yes, sir?” Emma said. She was standing alongside Carver’s table.
She waited while he glanced over the menu, then she licked a pencil point and jotted in her note pad as he ordered the Gator Special and coffee. He could swear she gave him a crocodile smile.
As Emma walked away, a man came out of the rest room and strode toward the counter, absently checking to make sure his fly was zipped. “Leavin’, Sam?” Emma asked.
“Not yet, sexy,” the man said. He sat down on a stool close to the far end of the counter. Without being asked, Verna poured a cup of coffee with cream and carried it down to him. Sam Cahill. Had to be.
He didn’t look much like Carver had imagined. He was tall and rangy, in his mid-forties but still lean, in good shape. A cigarette-ad cowboy in jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Not the sort who’d sell Sun South units. Did he have an act for each set of customers? Was he the polished smooth-talker for wealthy Sun South buyers, then rough-hewn and one of the boys for the swamptown property he was selling now?
Verna stayed near the end of the counter, leaning on it, and they talked. Carver couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they didn’t seem particularly intimate. There were no lingering looks, no magnetic gestures that prompted and prolonged contact. But Carver noticed that she did keep left and front face toward Cahill, concealing the scar.
After about five minutes, Verna wiped down the counter around Cahill’s coffee cup and walked away, finding things to keep her busy behind the counter. Things she’d just as soon be doing as talking to Cahill. Whatever fire there had been between them, if indeed there had been one, seemed to have burned itself out.
Even before Emma brought Carver’s Gator Special, Cahill got up and strolled out of the restaurant. A still-busy Verna saw him leaving, from the corner of her eye, and waved, managing to keep her scar toward the wall. He nodded an easy good-bye to her, his western boots thunking out a slow rhythm on the floor.
It would have attracted attention to walk out of the restaurant after Cahill without having eaten breakfast. Carver stayed where he was; he knew what Cahill looked like now and could find him easily enough. He wondered about the woman who might have been Cahill’s lover.
Carver ate his eggs, bacon, and toast, drank his orange juice and coffee. It was the kind of salty, greasy breakfast he liked more than was good for him. If he hung around Solarville, he’d return to The Flame for the food if nothing else.
Verna doubled as the cashier. Carver stood up from the table and picked up his check, which somehow had gotten wet at one corner in the way of restaurant checks, and limped over to where the register sat on the counter. The restaurant floor was waxed linoleum, tricky to walk on with the cane.
When she sensed him standing there, Verna turned from the grill she was scraping with an oversized iron spatula and wiped her hands on a towel. She looked at the check. Close to him now on the other side of the counter, she gave off a soapy but vaguely musky scent that cut through the restaurant’s smells of fried grease and perked coffee, like a perspiring athlete not long after her shower.
“Can I still get an airboat ride outside of town?” Carver asked.
“Not anymore,” she said. “Three seventy-six with tax.”
“I rode an airboat here about a year ago,” Carver went on. “I remember you from then.”
She raised her head and gave him a neutral, distant look. “My dad used to take tourists out on those rides. He’s dead now.”
“I’m
sorry,” Carver said, and laid a five-dollar bill on the counter. “An accident?”
“Heart attack.” The neutral expression remained.
“Hearts cause a lot of grief. Sometimes I think it would be better if people had been designed without them.”
Verna said nothing as she counted out his change. Then she told him, “Thanks, come again” in the voice of an automaton, and she laboriously resumed scraping the grill. Her efforts made a sound he could feel in the edges of his teeth.
Carver left a tip for Emma and went outside to his car.
He’d driven halfway back to the motel, along the tree-lined narrow road, when the Olds’s front end dipped and it tried to veer to the right, down an embankment and into the swamp.
Carver yanked the steering wheel left and the car crossed the road and almost plunged down the other embankment. It had developed a yen for an accident. It bounced, skidded, fishtailed, a vehicle with a mind of its own, bent on suicide.
He wrestled the slick steering wheel, feeling it slip in his sweaty grasp.
Finally he braked the big car to a stop, half off the right shoulder of the road, and switched off the ignition.
After sitting still for a few minutes, calming down, he got out and stared at the flat right front tire. There was no clue as to what had made it suddenly lose air. He probed the misshapen tire with the tip of his cane, as if checking for signs of life. The faint scent of heated rubber wafted up to him.
Though it was still late morning, the sun and dampness were of the intensity that sapped the energy from a man changing a tire on a dusty road. Or from one thinking about changing a tire. Carver already felt half melted and unenthusiastic. But there was very little traffic on the road, so the odds of being able to flag down a car, so he could ask the driver to send back a mechanic to change the tire, were long.
The clouds of insects that had invaded the motel were there, too. Carver brushed away one of the insistent little bugs as it buzzed around his mouth and tried to flit up a nostril. Then he sighed and walked around to open the trunk and see if the spare still held air; he hadn’t checked it in months.
He was about to insert the key in the trunk lock when a car rounded the bend, slowed, and pulled onto the shoulder a hundred feet beyond the Olds. It was a plain white Ford Escort, the kind used frequently for rental cars in the area. When it stopped, its cloud of dust caught up with it, and the driver waited until the haze settled before opening the door.
A young Latino got out of the Escort. He was wearing a red short-sleeved shirt and dark blue, grease-stained pants. Maybe he was a mechanic. He gave a movie- bandito smile beneath a drooping, ragged mustache as he approached Carver. His teeth were bad. His dusty feet were clad in leather sandals that flopped wildly as he walked, yet he moved very gracefully.
“Trouble, hey?” he said. He looked both ways on the deserted road.
“Flat tire,” Carver said. “I think the spare has air in it.”
The man nodded, still smiling. Pancho Villa with charm. His dark eyes took in the cane and Carver’s stiff left knee. He reached beneath his shirt and drew out a long folding knife, the sort used to cut produce. Metal clicked on metal as, with a deft twist of his wrist, he flipped the knife open. The blade caught the sun.
He was no stranger to knives. This one nestled like a deadly pet in his right hand.
Holding the gleaming blade straight up and far out in front of him at eye level, as if it were a mystical object magically drawing him forward, leading him where it wanted him to go, he began to move in on Carver.
CHAPTER 15
Carver said nothing as the man came toward him. He waited for a demand for his wallet but got only silence. The man kept advancing, not smiling now, in a slight crouch and holding the knife expertly with the experienced knife fighter’s peculiar deadly daintiness. He was suddenly all grim business. He wanted to finish what he’d started; another car might come along at any time. What he’d started wasn’t robbery, but murder. He wanted to lose the long blade in Carver.
Behind the man, far away above the swamp, a large bird was slowly circling, looking for prey. For some reason it drew Carver’s eye, a figure in the scene in which he was trapped, but so distant, out of danger.
The man’s advance became slower, more cautious; he was almost within killing range. Life and death here. It made sense to be careful, even with a cripple.
Years ago on the force Carver had learned from a veteran cop how to use a nightstick not as a club but as a lethal jabbing instrument. A cane should be even more effective than a nightstick. Or so Carver tried to convince himself through his fear, waiting for the young Latino to pounce for the kill.
A cripple deserved some respect, but not much, said the expression on the man’s intent face. There wouldn’t be much sport to this, so he might as well go right for the heart. It was survival time. Carver decided it was nice to be underestimated.
The man bent low at the waist, holding the knife well out in front of him. His arms were skinny but muscle-corded; his body was wiry and he moved neatly and economically on the balls of his feet. He had a matador’s meticulous balance and calm instinct for death.
Carver backed a step and made a deliberately feeble attempt to knock the knife away with the cane. The man drew back his arm easily, swelled with confidence, and stepped in fast for the kill.
Surprise. This time the cane snapped up off the ground, flinging dust with it. Its tip found the soft space just beneath the startled man’s sternum. Carver ignored the knife and eternity and drove the point of the cane hard into the man’s chest; he heard the loud whoosh of air explode from shocked lungs, saw spittle arc in the sunlight.
The man staggered back a few steps, almost fell. Surprise and rage contorted his face, along with the sickly expression of someone struggling to regain his breath.
He came at Carver again, more hunched over now rather than bent in a knife fighter’s classic stance. Carver crossed him up and struck with the cane instead of jabbing, laying the hard walnut across the side of the man’s face and quickly withdrawing the cane before it could be grabbed. That made the man pause, and Carver whipped with the cane and knocked the knife from his hand, maybe breaking the Latino’s wrist.
But the man gave no sign of pain. His hissing breath broke for a moment, then regained its relentless rhythm, was perhaps louder.
The Latino was game. He picked up the knife with his left hand and came again. Carver jabbed at him, missed. The man twirled like a dancer and rushed him. Carver let himself fall to the left, dropping to the ground to avoid the slashing knife blade, and as the man flashed by him he hooked a bare ankle with the crook of his cane, held on tight against the sudden yank of checked body weight. The slippery walnut cane sprang alive and tried to fly from his perspiring fingers, then suddenly lost its life-force and became once more inanimate.
There was no scream. No sound other than the scuff of a sandal in the dirt. Abruptly, the man with the knife was gone.
At first Carver didn’t understand what had happened. Then he used his arms to scoot to the road shoulder and the edge of the embankment. He looked down.
The man lay sprawled on his back in black shallow water at the base of the embankment. Somewhere during his roll down the slope, he’d taken his own knife high in the stomach. Probably, as he’d continued to roll, the blade had slashed around inside him, caught the heart. His hand was curled around the knife as if he’d tried to remove it before he’d died. The red shirt and blue pants were twisted on him, making his limp body seem thin and childlike, harmless. As Carver watched, something long and green-a snake? lizard? the man’s soul?-slithered quickly away into the lush foliage, fleeting as an illusion.
Carver gripped the cane and stood up. He was trembling so violently that he had to lean against the sun-heated metal of the Olds to keep from falling back down. The fetid, rotting scent of the swamp almost overcame him, sending waves of bitter nausea through him. He swallowed, hearing phlegm crack in his dry t
hroat. The man had tried to kill him. For what? For his money? his wristwatch and ring? for pleasure?
Beneath the Florida tropical sun, Carver was sweating beads of ice. He’d never killed anyone, not as a cop or as a private detective. Hadn’t come close to it. That kind of thing done with light consequence was for books, television, and movies. Having killed the Latino was going to take some hard getting used to.
A steady, pulsing sound helped to calm him, as if his wildly hammering heart were adjusting its pace to it. He realized then what he heard. The white Escort’s engine was still idling; he could see the car’s whiplike antenna vibrating.
Now what?
Carver had heard about small-town southern police. They were tough, bureaucratic, and suspicious. The man he’d killed might have been a local, popular, never known to get in trouble. One of those with a dark side known only to himself and briefly to his victims. How could Carver explain this to Armont? Or should he try to explain?
Why not? he asked himself. He hadn’t done anything wrong, God damn it! The man had tried to kill him. He, Carver, had nothing to hide or fear! He reminded himself of some of the rape victims he’d seen, the wronged and ravaged, uncomprehendingly wondering at their guilt.
It was all emotion, had nothing to do with logic.
But he could change the tire, get in the Olds, drive away, and his part in the man’s death probably would remain unknown. The prospect was tempting, but Carver couldn’t bring himself to run from the awesome finality of having killed a man. That would make it worse for him somehow, even if he was never suspected.
Carver realized that his hands were shaking. He felt cold. He glanced to the side of the road where the man had gone over the embankment and his mind flashed on the lifeless face, the unseeing but infinitely wise flat eyes staring up at him.
Carver reminded himself that he’d been a cop in a city with problems. He was supposed to be used to that kind of thing. But how many cops, of the public or private variety, ever actually killed someone?