by John Lutz
The Malone boat sat dead in the water. Rather, it sat on land. The Malones had tried to breach a bar of grassy ground that was wider than they’d thought. Their boat had become lodged; the engine had died.
Armont’s boat came into sight, slowed, and drifted in closer to the Malone boat. Two of the men in the boat stood up. Carver heard the pop of gunfire.
Burr yelled and their own boat leaped forward. Marty had the big earphones off and was standing precariously in the bow, blasting away with a handgun. Like Mickey Mouse transformed into Dead-Eye Dick. Burr had a gun out too, and had tripped his safety-belt buckle and was out of his seat, scrambling toward the bow. Carver hit his own buckle, was jarred loose from where he was sitting, and rolled as low as he could between the seats. His cane was bouncing and clattering in the bottom of the boat. He wished he’d brought a gun.
The boat skewed sideways, stopped, bobbed violently. Carver’s right arm was wet from the spray of water topping the hull. More shots. And the resonating roar of the shotguns with their heavy loads.
Then shouting. Some of it in Spanish.
“Okay! Okay, you bastards!” a voice yelled. “We give up, dammit! We fuckin’ give up!”
The boat was drifting sideways. Carver poked his head up. Armont and his cops, and the DEA agents, were all in the knee-deep water, leaning forward and pushing and splashing toward the Malone boat. Two of the drug runners in the boat were standing, their hands raised. Another was slouched in a seat. The fourth lay facedown in the moon-illumined grass beside the grounded boat, with outflung arms, and what looked like a wide-brimmed straw hat upside down next to his head.
Carver cursed his bad leg. He wanted to get out of the boat, wade over, and help out, see what the hell had happened. Instead he sat and waited. He didn’t feel like having to be rescued when he and his cane got stuck in the mud.
“You okay?” Burr yelled over at him, while the agents swarmed around their suspects, frisking them, reading them their rights, tending to the man in the seat, who apparently was wounded. They were ignoring the man on the ground. Carver knew what that meant.
“Okay!” he yelled.
Goddamned cane!
The three padded and plastic-wrapped packages in the Malone boat contained raw heroin and were equipped with homing-signal miniature transmitters. Neither of the men with the Malones was Sam Cahill or Willis Eiler. They were Latins, probably Marielitos. One of them was dead. Gary Malone was shot in the shoulder, and was sullenly waiting for an ambulance back on the side road off South Loop.
Carver and Burr had tried to get the Malones to tell them where Willis and Cahill were, but nobody with anything more to lose was talking until they’d met with their attorneys. They’d been caught in this phase of the game before and knew the moves.
By midnight Gary Malone was being operated on for removal of the bullet. The body of the dead Latino had been taken away for autopsy. And Sean Malone and the surviving Latino were in jail in Solarville, awaiting transfer to federal custody and arraignment on controlled-substance charges.
“You guys do acceptable work,” Carver told Burr.
Burr nodded, then brushed deftly at a mosquito near his eye patch. The black patch had remained firmly fixed through the night’s action. “Sometimes it’s a fun job,” he said.
Carver remembered the expression on Burr’s face back in the swamp and knew that he meant it, dead Marielito and all.
When Carver got back to his room at the Tumble Inn, he saw the mound on the mattress, and the spray of dark hair on the pillow, that was Edwina curled beneath the thin white sheet in the coolness of the air-conditioning. She was still in the fetal position. Apparently she hadn’t awakened while he was away. As far as he could determine, she hadn’t even moved.
He undressed and lay down beside her, listening to his breathing slow until it was in gentle rhythm with Edwina’s rising and falling breathing. He reached out a hand and lightly touched the warm curve of her hip beneath the sheet. She caught her breath, stirred, but didn’t wake.
Her breathing leveled out again, in perfect time once more with his. The sound was soothing, oddly mesmerizing; it seemed somehow to deepen the silence in the room.
The phone call from Burr, the wild chase through the swamp, the gun battle and arrests: It was all taking on the unreality of a dream.
That was okay with Carver. It hadn’t been a dream. In the morning it would again acquire the firmness of hard fact. A fun job well done. The Malones would inevitably talk and implicate Willis and Cahill. Reality would wait patiently for sunrise.
In the cool, protective darkness, Carver closed his eyes and slept.
CHAPTER 31
CARVER WOKE SLOWLY, not quite sure why he was relinquishing sleep. He could hear the steady, watery hum of the air-conditioner, and the rolling, crunching sound of gravel beneath the tires of a car outside on the motel parking lot. He wrestled himself over onto his back, used his good leg to kick free of the twisted sheets, and opened his eyes.
The Venetian blinds had been tilted to admit the morning; the room was bright with slanted bars of sunlight, golden swirls of dust particles. Edwina was sitting in the chair by the bed, fully dressed in jeans, a white blouse, and her lightning-streak jogging shoes.
She said, “I’ve been out. I heard about last night.”
Carver raised his arm and squinted at his watch. Eleven forty-five. He’d been even more exhausted than he’d realized when he went to bed. His mind and body hadn’t come down yet from the chase through the swamp. And when finally he did relax, it had been completely and he’d slept deeply and long.
“Have they gotten anyone to talk?” he asked.
“About what?”
“About Willis. And Sam Cahill. The prevailing logic is that they were in on this drug-smuggling deal, the secondary buyers.”
“After last night they’d be on the run, wouldn’t they?”
“If they heard about what happened. But they might not have tried yet to contact the Malones for the drug shipment.”
“It wouldn’t take the Malones to alert Willis and Cahill,” she said. “Everyone in Solarville heard about what happened.”
Carver sat up, maneuvered his body on the mattress until his back was against the cool headboard. He raised his good knee, leaned forward, and rested his forearms on it. He could hear his watch hammering away time. His mind was beginning to catch up with this business of being awake.
He rolled out of bed good-leg-first. Balancing himself by leaning against the mattress, he snatched his cane from where it was propped against the nightstand. Then he limped into the bathroom and took a quick shower.
When he returned, toweled dry, he began to get dressed. Edwina watched as he worked his stiff leg into his pants. She helped him stand while he slipped into a shirt. Then he sat on the mattress and put on his socks and shoes. She didn’t attempt to help him with that.
“City hall should be open by now,” he said, using his hand to smooth back the damp hair above his ears. “We’re going to check into their records and see if the Blaney property’s been sold.” He made his way toward the door.
They went out into the heat and got in the car. Daninger, lecturing a maid pushing a cart loaded down with folded linen near the office, glanced over and saw them. He began walking toward them, probably intending to talk about the previous night. Carver didn’t want that; he started the car and drove from the lot, pretending he hadn’t seen Daninger.
Outside the miniature grandeur of the domed city hall, it occurred to Carver that he hadn’t had breakfast and he was hungry. He asked Edwina to drive to the McDonald’s down the street and bring back a couple of English muffins and coffee, while he began checking records inside.
He found his way down a short hall to the recorder-of-deeds office, and talked to a clerk who appeared to be about sixteen but had the serene manner of a forty-year-old. He gave her the necessary information, and she went away, then returned five minutes later with what looked like a huge ledger book. She
went with him to a table in the corner, looked up a page in the oversized book, and punched up the locater number on a computer. On the green-tinted computer screen immediately appeared the status of the Blaney property.
It was all so quick and easy that it threw Carver for a few seconds. The young clerk had walked back to her desk, and he sat for a moment absorbing the information on the monitor. He thought again of the area encompassed by the red pencil marking on Eiler’s map.
What was on the screen made no sense, fit no pattern.
Or did it? He sat still for a while, letting the doors spring open one by one in his mind, each leading to a room larger and brighter than the last.
Then he got up, thanked the clerk, and limped out.
In the marble-floored hall, he used a pay phone to call Ernie Franks at Sun South. Then he called Desoto and Armont. The chief wasn’t in his office, so Carver left a message.
When he got outside, Edwina was starting up the city hall steps, carrying two white McDonald’s bags. She stopped, then went back to the bottom of the steps to wait for Carver in the sun.
“They don’t serve breakfast after ten o’clock,” she said, “but I talked them into a couple of cinnamon danish.”
“Fine,” Carver said. He could smell the warm cinnamon.
“Did you find what you wanted so soon?”
“I did. They’re more up-to-date in there than you’d imagine,” Carver answered. He began walking toward the parked Olds.
“Where are you going?” Edwina asked, surprised.
“To Verna Blaney’s place. I’ll drop you at the motel. No time to explain.”
“No,” she said calmly. “You won’t drop me off. I’m coming along.”
Carver thought about that. He didn’t see why she shouldn’t go, and there were solid reasons why she should. There was little time to try to talk her into staying behind even if he decided to give in to his impulse to protect her, leave her safe and confined. That was the sort of thinking that had led to trouble for him before.
He tapped the pavement with his cane and said, “Come on, then. We can eat breakfast on the way.”
Carver knew where he’d been misled. Since Eiler had been in prison for drug dealing, and since Florida, and Solarville in particular, was an active area of drug trafficking, he’d suspected that whatever scam Eiler was executing involved drugs. The packet of cocaine and the red-penciled map found in the apartment seemed to confirm that drug dealing was the game. Carver knew now that the coffee can containing them had been planted in Eiler’s apartment after the police had conducted their search; that was why Desoto’s men hadn’t discovered it when they went through the place. They probably had looked behind the kitchen plumbing access panel and found nothing, because at the time there was nothing there.
After the two unsuccessful attempts on Carver’s life in Solarville, the fire at the motel and then the knife attack, Eiler had decided on diversion rather than a third attempt. A second obvious attempt to murder Carver then, successful or not, would almost certainly have drawn attention to Eiler as doubts about his own death, or fake suicide, had grown. Jorge Lujan and his cohorts, such as brother Silverio, were working for Eiler and Cahill, and had planted the coffee can in the apartment after the police search so that Carver, or whoever else conducted a deeper search, would assume that Eiler was involved in a drug deal.
But the two Disney Productions executives, David Panacho and Mildred Kern, had somehow stumbled onto what Willis was really doing, and had to be killed. And they had become curious about Carver nosing around in Solarville and had found out his name, possibly what he was doing in town. If they had to die, it now made sense to Willis and Cahill to wipe Carver off the slate, also. And the Marielitos involved in the deal were probably pressing for revenge for Silverio Lujan’s death. They’d already murdered the naturalist Mackenzie, to buy time or his silence.
So Jorge Lujan, or possibly one or more confederates, had killed the Disney executives and faked their accident on the highway. That same night, Jorge tried to murder Carver and wound up dead himself.
Within a few minutes, Carver and Edwina were on the road outside of town. The sun seemed unnaturally large and hot, as if it had slipped a million-mile notch nearer to earth. The stark contrast between light and shadow was vivid enough to cause mental jolts as the car sped through alternating patches of brightness and darkness, as if some of the shadows might be solid enough to cause impact.
Carver pushed the Olds hard on the highway, then along the narrow dirt road that led to Verna’s sanctuary deep in the swamp.
CHAPTER 32
SHE MUST HAVE HEARD them drive up; she was waiting for them on the front porch. Verna was barefoot, as she’d been on Carver’s first visit, only this time she hadn’t yet dressed and was wearing a faded blue robe. Her dark hair was mussed, and her eyes were intent and red-rimmed, as if from lack of sleep. She was carrying the shotgun this time, too, cradling it gently beneath her breasts, almost as if it were an infant.
“Just there’s about right,” she said, shifting the long shotgun so that her finger was on the trigger and the twin barrels swung like bleak fate toward Carver and Edwina.
Carver reached over and touched Edwina’s arm. They simultaneously stopped, then stood motionless on the bare earth in front of the porch. The huge sun pulsated above, its heat weighting them down.
Carver probed the ground with the tip of his cane, found it as hard as it had been the day before, and set the cane and leaned on it.
“We have to talk,” he said.
“I do doubt that.”
Carver was sweating miserably. The humidity had risen. Despite the relentless sun, black clouds loomed high and heavy in the west; a storm gusting in off the gulf. Distant thunder rolled across the shadowed swamp, like the rumbling of dinosaurs roaming where they had lived forever.
“I’m no more interested in what you have to say today than I was the first time you came poking around out here,” Verna said.
“You’ll be interested if you take the time to listen,” Carver said. “Is Willis inside?”
“Willis?” Her voice took on a hollow quality; she was no good at deception. She tightened her grip on the shotgun. Carver watched her right forefinger caress the trigger guard with an odd kind of affection.
“Willis Eiler,” he said. “He’s your husband, Mrs. Eiler.”
Beside him, Edwina took an involuntary step back and to the side, as if Carver’s words had struck her with solid force. Then she moved forward again, beside Carver.
Verna stood quietly, considering. Carver and Edwina stood just as quietly and waited. Insects buzzed and chirped frantically around them in the swamp, sensing the coming storm. The birds that had been singing were silent, as if they’d already taken shelter.
“How’d you find out we was man and wife?” Verna asked.
“Checked the real-estate records at city hall. I wanted to know if you’d really sold your property. There hadn’t been a sale, but the property had been retitled in the names of Willis Eiler and his wife Verna.”
“Why was you interested in my property changing hands?”
“I thought your leaving town might be pertinent to a narcotics case, but I was wrong. About almost everything. I was being led. Now I understand. The object of the game was never drugs, it was real estate. Land. Willis stole money to purchase your property through his partner, Sam Cahill. When you wouldn’t sell to Cahill, Willis courted and married you to get the land.” It probably had been simple for Willis, Carver thought, looking at Verna. Lonely, more easily understood than she imagined, she was easy prey for a handsome, experienced con man with a hundred-thousand-dollar bankroll.
None of this made much sense to Verna. “Is Willis why you’re here?” she asked softly.
“Partly,” Carver said. “But I’m also here because there’s something you should know, Willis or no Willis. The Disney corporation is interested in using this area to create a theme park they’d call Everglades
Kingdom, an expansion of Disney World into southern Florida. They’re keeping their intentions as quiet as possible to prevent land prices from soaring. Willis Eiler found out about the project when he was going through his boss’s desk in Del Moray, where he was selling time shares that didn’t exist, and came across some Florida Real-Estate Commission correspondence. Disney plans to drain some of the land here, build up roads, create a scenic waterway and a monorail system serving luxury hotels and tourist attractions.”
Verna seemed vaguely disbelieving of what Carver was telling her. “Tourist attractions, monorails, luxury hotels . . . here?”
“We’re standing right in the middle of the proposed area,” Carver told her. “Your property. Land Disney will pay a fortune to acquire because they must have it.”
Verna’s jaw set firmly and something cold moved into her eyes. Her hair was brushed down and forward to conceal her disfigurement, but Carver saw the lower half of the scar flush bright crimson. A breeze danced through the leaves, parted the folds of her robe for a moment to reveal one of her fine, bare legs halfway up her thigh.
She knew how to get to the point: “You saying Willis married me for my swampland and this tumbledown place?”
“He knows what it’s really worth,” Carver said. Let her put the pieces in place, figure it out for herself. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes, just someone with the proper slant. Even Watson might have managed it.
“We was keeping our romance and marriage a secret until we’d moved away, because Willis said we could expect trouble from his ex-wife.” Verna motioned smoothly toward Edwina with the shotgun barrels. “This her?”
“No,” Carver said. In the corner of his vision he saw Edwina straighten and stand tensely. “This is a woman he was living with, another woman he took advantage of to get what he wanted. He served prison time for cheating a widow out of her property in Missouri. You’re the latest in a succession of women in Willis’s life, Verna. He uses women then throws them away. He’s using you.”