Hot

by John Lutz

She smiled and started to back away.

  “Effie,” Carver said, “you never did tell me what you figured was wrong on Key Montaigne.”

  She looked thoughtful. “I only know Mr. Tiller thinks there’s something. Could be a lotta things, I guess.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Huh?”

  “Is there much drug use on the island?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “There’s some, even among kids my age. I don’t know as there’s more here than anyplace else, though.”

  “What about the boy they found drowned, washed up on the beach? He was about your age.”

  “He was lots younger.” She sounded indignant. “At least a year. And I didn’t know him. He was from up north.”

  “Miami,” Carver said.

  “I only drove—been driven through—Miami now and again. Don’t know a solitary soul there.” When she saw he was finally finished questioning her, she started backing away again. Maybe shyly, but Carver wasn’t sure; few things were harder to read than a fourteen-year-old girl. She wore her joggers untied, with the shoelaces trailing. He wondered how she kept from tripping over them. “I got a door key,” she said, “so you don’t have to worry about letting me in if you wanna be someplace else. And my number’s circled in Mr. Tiller’s directory in by the phone, case you make a mess and need spur-of-the-moment cleaning. I live not far down Shoreline and can get here on my bike pretty fast.”

  “You charge extra for emergencies?” Carver asked, half jokingly.

  She took him seriously and a calculating expression came over her freckled, girlish features. She’d apparently never considered the idea of overtime pay. “No,” she said, “cost is just the same.” Youthful virtue had conquered greed.

  He grinned. “Okay. See you later, Effie.”

  She crossed her arms again, stood the way she’d been standing when he first saw her. “If you need any help around Key Montaigne, I mean, need to know anything only somebody lives in this place might be able to tell you, I’ll be glad to help that way, too, Mr. Carver.”

  “You can do that right now,” Carver said. It was almost five o’clock; he’d taken care of some business by phone from Miami, had a long but light lunch with an old friend, then hadn’t stopped except for gas on the drive south. “Where’s a good place in town to eat supper?”

  She gnawed her lower lip a moment, considering. “Ain’t a lotta choices, but mine’d be the Key Lime Pie. That’s what they call it, like the actual pie only it’s a restaurant.”

  “Thanks, I’ll try it.”

  She smiled, bobbed up and down on her thick-soled jogging shoes as if building momentum, then swept away in a dash. He heard the reverberating slap of the screen door echoing out over the water.

  He walked to the window and watched her mount a balloon-tire Schwinn bike with a rusty wire basket attached to its handlebars, then build up speed, her boyish body whipping back and forth as she stood high on the pedals.

  Carver removed slacks and shirts from his suitcase and put them on wire hangers from Henry Tiller’s closet. Henry had one of those space-saving fold-down multihanger plastic gizmos in his closet; it came in handy. Carver hung it on a brass hook on the outside of the closet door and placed all the hangers on it so his clothes were draped in descending layers. Neat, he had to admit. He left socks and underwear in the suitcase and placed it in a corner with the lid closed but not latched. His shaving kit he carried into the bathroom and set on top of the vanity, over to the side, where it wouldn’t get wet. There was a large white towel embossed with suncrest motel folded over a rack in the bathroom, that had on it stitched in red, “Hi, I’m Mr. Towel and I live here. If you take me away from home, please bring me back.” Henry must have abducted Mr. Towel. Carver saw himself smiling in the medicine cabinet mirror, a tan, bald man with a fringe of curly gray hair that had grown too long in back. Lean, with a powerful upper body from exercise and walking with the cane. A scar at the right corner of his mouth. Pale blue eyes that were oddly catlike. As soon as his strikingly beatific smile faded, his was a brutal face rather than handsome. He knew the abrupt contrast could be unsettling.

  He went outside and stood in the heat for a while, gazing across the expanse of glimmering water at the Miss Behavin’ rocking gently at her moorings. He could only see about half of the back of the large white clapboard house with red canvas awnings, a corner of a swimming pool behind a chain-link fence, a round blue table with a fringed umbrella sprouting from it at an angle. There was no sign of anyone at the Rainer estate.

  Listing sharply over his cane, Carver shielded his eyes from the sun with his cupped hand and looked westward over the Gulf. A pelican flapped low above the surface, seeking its dinner. A large vessel that had the look of a cruise ship haunted the hazy, distant horizon like a wavering ghost. Henry Tiller had retired to beauty if not peace.

  The sun wouldn’t be setting for a long time, but Carver was hungry.

  He locked the cottage door, then he drove toward Fishback to look over the town in daylight. After that, he’d eat an early supper at the restaurant Effie had recommended.

  There were a number of things he wanted to find out. One of them was why anybody would name a town Fishback.

  6

  NO ONE SEEMED to know. The waitress, a stout, broad-shouldered woman named Fern, said she thought Montaigne got its name way back in the nineteenth century when the Keys were a haven for pirates. So serious was the problem that a U.S. naval base was established in Key West to stop piracy. It was successful only up to a point. As to who named Key Montaigne’s population center Fishback, and why, Carver would have to ask somebody who knew about pirates, Fern said.

  He was sitting in a window booth in the Key Lime Pie restaurant, eating the day’s special, broiled shrimp with salad and a baked potato. He’d driven through the town, consisting primarily of a main street, called Main Street, on which were lined weathered, low buildings housing bait shops, bars, a hardware store, Laundromat, barber shop, supermarket, and various other assuagers of needs and yearnings.

  At the foot of Main was the town marina, where dozens of docked pleasure boats bobbed on the gentle waves, along with several commercial fishing boats and a lineup of charter boats for tourists to hire for deep sea fishing. There wasn’t a lot to do on Key Montaigne other than fish, eat, and drink, and the tourists the island attracted usually weren’t interested in theme parks and water slides. Plenty of tourists walked the streets, skin still pale from northern climes, sporting souvenir T-shirts with cameras slung around their necks, but there were few young children with them. The families with kids were farther north, seeing Disney World and Universal Studios and learning about the wonders of citrus.

  Where Carver sat he could see a section of Main Street, the small, flat-roofed building that called itself Food Emporium Supermarket, and on the corner a freshly whitewashed service station with a single work bay and two pumps. NORTON’S GAS ’ N’ GO, read the sign over the pumps. Effie’s father’s place. It was a self-service station. A bearded man in a sleeveless gray shirt was pumping unleaded into a dusty black pickup truck, glaring at the pump’s price and gallon meters as if he held a grudge against them. There was a pyramid of Valvoline oil cans at a corner of the building, the kind of display you seldom saw anymore. The work bay’s overhead door was open, and a Ford Escort was up on the rack getting its oil changed. Carver was glad he hadn’t ordered anything fried.

  Loud voices drew his attention back inside. The Key Lime Pie restaurant was long and narrow, with round tables on one side and a counter with red vinyl stools on the other. Struggling air-conditioning and half a dozen ceiling fans kept the temperature down and cast flitting shadows over the red-checkered tablecloths and green and brown tiled floor. Beyond the counter was an arch with a swordfish mounted above it. Through the arch Carver could see into the adjoining lounge, where several men sat or stood at the bar. Most of them were wearing jeans or shorts and T-shirts and had deep tans. One of them, a short, stock
y guy with an oversized blond mustache that lent him a fierce expression, was arguing vehemently with a man wearing a loud red and yellow tropical shirt with a parrot pattern, who was slouched on a bar stool facing away from Carver. Yellow Mustache was getting madder and madder, while the man in the garish tropical shirt seemed to be ignoring him. Carver couldn’t understand what was being said. Something about shipwrecks, he thought. He popped his last broiled shrimp into his mouth and sat chewing, waiting to see what would happen.

  The man on the stool slowly swiveled around and stood up. He was about average height, built blocky, and wore his hair shaved almost short enough to classify him as bald. His loud tropical shirt was untucked and might conceal a weapon. The thick, tan forearms that protruded from the wildly colored short sleeves were so covered with tattoos they almost looked like an extension of the busy-patterned shirt. A colorful snake coiled up one arm. The other arm sported what looked like an anchor and a topless hula dancer.

  With the tattooed man standing staring at him, Mustache suddenly was quiet. The evening had turned serious. The guy with the tattoos grinned at him, then in a quick motion grabbed his belt buckle and lifted and twisted, drawing Mustache’s pants tight into his crotch. Mustache screeched in pain, and Tattoo snapped a thick-wristed forearm up below his chin and pressed. The screeching became a series of strangled pleas for mercy. Tattoo shoved Mustache out of sight, toward the street door, then swaggered after him with a deliberate bow-legged gait, as if he were on a ship in high seas. Carver could no longer see either man, but in a few seconds Mustache appeared out on Main, limping bent over and in obvious pain toward a parked four-wheel-drive Jeep. With a hand cupped to his crotch, he climbed into the Jeep and got the engine started. He glared angrily but with terror in the direction of the Key Lime Pie, then drove away, the Jeep’s knobby tires spinning and throwing gravel. The conversation and noise level of the bar increased to what it had been before the trouble started.

  “The boys get frisky sometimes when the charters are back for the day,” Fern said, “’specially if the fishing ain’t been good.” She was standing near Carver with her order pad in one hand, yellow stub of a pencil in the other.

  “Who’re the boys?” Carver asked.

  “Some of ’em are commercial fishermen, others are charter boat captains and crew. You can always tell if it’s been a good day by the way they behave.”

  The tattooed man had returned to his bar stool. “Who’s the guy in the parrot shirt?” Carver asked, figuring he knew the answer.

  “Some of those are cockatoos.”

  “Yeah, I can see that now you point it out.”

  “Anyway, that’s Davy inside the shirt. He’s part of the crew of a yacht belongs to some rich fella out on Shoreline. That joker that was arguing with him I never seen before, and if he hadn’t been a stranger, he wouldn’t have crossed Davy. That Davy’ll argue anything from baseball to politics, but he won’t stand for no badgering. He just wants to be let alone, is all, but if people push him just a little bit, they pay. He’s the sort that likes to make ’em pay. That fella he shoved outa here’s lucky it didn’t get more serious.”

  Carver watched Davy calmly drinking his beer. No one was talking to him, or near him. He didn’t seem to notice. “So Davy’s a bad boy?”

  “I dunno for sure, as he never caused any real trouble in here. Or anyplace else, far as I know. But I been told he’s bad, all right.”

  Carver thought the mustached man might regard what had happened as real trouble.

  “Don’t repeat this,” Fern said, “but he gives me the creeps. Maybe it’s all those tattoos.” She gave a mock shiver, almost dropping her pencil. “They tell me you’re a private detective of some sort.”

  “Who tells you?” Carver asked. He shoved away his plate so he’d no longer have to breathe in the shrimp smell of the leftovers. He wished Fern would clear the table.

  Fern shrugged. “That’s one of them questions like why’s the town named Fishback. Word just gets around, is all. They say you’re staying up at the Tiller place. You here about whoever it was run over Henry Tiller?”

  “That’s it,” Carver said.

  “How is Henry?”

  “I think he’ll be fine, but it’ll take some time.”

  “Shame what happened. He’s a nice old bird. A little vague at times, but ain’t we all?”

  Carver agreed we all were. “There anyone here you think might feel strongly enough about Henry to try running him down?” he asked.

  Fern shook her head. “Everyone figures he’s harmless, you know? Ask me, I’d say he was just the victim of an accident. But I guess, with a hit and run like that, the law’s gotta investigate.”

  “That’s what I’m doing,” Carver said. If she wanted to think of him as the law, that was okay. Even convenient.

  “Get you anything else?” Fern asked.

  “A refill on the coffee.” He swished around the mud-colored inch of liquid left in his cup to draw it to her attention.

  “How about some dessert?”

  He looked up at her. “What’s good here?”

  She laughed. “You kidding? There’s only one item on the menu.”

  “Then I’ll have it,” he said.

  She licked the point of her stubby pencil, added the slice of key lime pie to his check, then scooped up his dirty dishes and ambled away toward the kitchen. A few minutes later she returned with the round glass coffeepot in one hand and the wedge of pie on a white china plate in the other. She refilled Carver’s cup, laid his check in a puddle on the table, then went around the restaurant topping off everyone’s coffee.

  The pie was a delicate and delicious combination of sweetness and tartness. Carver ate it staring at the garish parrot-and-cockatoo pattern shirt stretched over Davy’s broad back, wondering if the wildly colored material concealed a steel cargo hook tucked in Davy’s belt.

  One thing he did know, he shared Henry Tiller’s cop’s instincts about Davy. He was a bad one.

  7

  THAT NIGHT CARVER sat on Henry Tiller’s screened-in porch, smoking a Swisher Sweet cigar, listening to the screaming lament of a thousand crickets, and looking out over the water at the lights of the Walter Rainer estate. There was movement over there, for a few seconds what appeared to be a man walking with a flashlight down by the dock. But the Miss Behavin’ itself stayed dark. Carver blew a smoke ring he couldn’t see but imagined as perfect in the darkness, and wondered if the boat would still be at its moorings in the morning.

  It was. As soon as he’d climbed out of bed he limped onto the porch and checked, saw the sleek white hull with the red trim, the rising sun shooting sparks off the brightwork. For a moment he found himself speculating, if Henry were here, would he see the boat, or the unoccupied dock he wanted to see?

  After getting dressed, Carver burned two eggs and three strips of bacon in a heavy iron skillet in Henry’s kitchen. His cooking was heating up the kitchen, so he switched on the air conditioner. That helped some, but the tropical climate was gaining. When he was finished eating, he turned on a paint-speckled radio on top of the refrigerator and listened to local news while he sipped a second cup of coffee.

  Apparently not much happened on and around Key Montaigne. A couple of wedding announcements; the Holy Rock of the Keys Baptist Church was planning a fish fry next weekend; an octogenarian named Ida Fletcher had died in her sleep; and the Fishback Dinner Theatre was doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After the news, it was time for music, a medley of numbers from Cats.

  Carver washed the breakfast dishes and left them on the sink to dry, then switched off the radio, even though he liked Cats. Slow as things were on Key Montaigne, it would be a good time to extend the professional courtesy of dropping by to meet Chief Lloyd Wicke.

  Key Montaigne police headquarters was a squat clapboard structure near the marina on Main. There was a steeplelike antenna next to a satellite dish on the roof. At the front curb was a dust-coated blue Ford Taurus with red
and blue roofbar lights and an official-looking gold badge decal on its door. Through the windshield Carver could see a twelve-gauge riot gun mounted to the dash. Once, that had seemed a formidable weapon, in the time before drug dealers had taken up AK47 and Uzi automatic weapons. Beyond the police cruiser a dented tow truck and a maroon Toyota station wagon were parked at an angle in the small lot alongside the building. The lot was layered with chat, small white stones the size of gravel, which was used often in Florida. It was the reason for the pale coating of dust on the vehicles, like talcum powder.

  Carver parked the Olds next to the Toyota, then narrowed his eyes against the sun and limped around to the front of the building. Down the block, at the marina, the commercial fishing boats had already left, but the charter crews and tourists were preparing to set to sea. A large sailboat, canvas lowered, putted on diesel engine power across Carver’s field of vision, trailing wisps of black exhaust in the clear morning air.

  It was cool inside headquarters. The building had once been a house, but most of the interior walls had been removed to form a rectangular area sectioned off by low wooden railings. An elderly woman with a blue hairdo sat behind a big walnut desk near the door. There were four gray metal desks beyond her. At one of them a man with sun-bleached curly blond hair, wearing a yellow Bart Simpson T-shirt, was studiously working at an old gray IBM Selectric. He was a nifty typist; the venerable Selectric tupita-tupita-tupita—dinged! its contentment to be in such capable hands. Three identical closed doors, in a neat row beyond the desk, probably led to back offices, and maybe the holdover cells. There was a control panel and microphone near the blue-haired woman’s desk. Aside from her other office duties, she was apparently the dispatcher.

  “Help you?” she asked, smiling at Carver. She had a round face and soft, pliable skin much younger than her eyes.

  Carver told her who he was and that he’d like to see Chief Wicke.

  “You the one staying at the Tiller place?” she asked, still smiling warmly.