Bloodfire

by John Lutz

  “Beau Capri?”

  “Yeah. That’s the condo development. Right near the Orange Blossom Trail.”

  Carver used his cane to raise himself to his feet. He limped over to the breakfast counter, thumping the cane on the floor, and made his way around behind the counter. After fishing in a drawer for paper and pencil, he said, “Better give me as detailed a description of your wife as possible.”

  Ghostly seemed to enjoy doing that, pacing absently, hands on hips, as he talked: “She’s thirty-three, kinda tall, and, well, you know, very nicely built. Dresses well, too.”

  “Any distinguishing marks? Scars or whatever?”

  “Uh, yeah. About a five-inch scar on her stomach. From some sort of operation she had before we met.”

  Carver found it strange that Ghostly didn’t know what kind of operation. “She got family in New York?”

  “No, she’s alone. Her family’s all dead.”

  Carver stared at him, then jotted down that information next to Beth Ghostly’s physical description. “Any habits? Hobbies? Anything that could give some hint of where she mighta gone?

  “She likes dancing,” Ghostly said. “Good times, that kinda thing. Not like she’s wild, though. Not looking for action, if you know what I mean. She just likes her fun.” He added defensively, “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “She take any money when she left?”

  “Not more’n a couple hundred dollars. Woman like Beth, she doesn’t need money to have fun.”

  “What kinda food does she like?”

  “Huh?”

  “Food,” Carver said. “People get on the run, go underground, they still tend to frequent restaurants that serve their favorite food. One way to track them down.”

  “If you can find out what city she’s in.”

  “Yeah, that comes first,” Carver said.

  Ghostly gazed up at the ceiling, thinking. “She likes Italian food best, I’d say. Pasta. Never puts on any weight, though. Amazing.”

  “She use drugs? Anything like that?”

  Ghostly’s face reddened beneath the tan. He seemed enraged that Carver would suggest such a thing. “Maybe I gave the wrong impression. She’s not that kind, Carver, believe me.”

  “So give me some kinda handle, Mr. Ghostly. Someplace specific where she might turn up. There’s lots of Italian restaurants and places to dance in Florida.”

  Ghostly put on a helpless look and raised his shoulders in a futile shrug. “Guess it seems odd, you live with a woman over five years and it’s hard to fill somebody in on that kinda thing. But we spent a lotta time together, in places that didn’t serve pasta or play music. I mean, Beth likes her fun, but she’s also a sorta stay-at-home type. Loves to read.”

  Woman of contrasts. “Read what?”

  “Hey, I dunno. I’m not much of a reader myself. She’d usually have her nose in a magazine or a book, is all I know. Liked novels written by people I never heard of.”

  “She get them from the library or buy them?”

  “Bought them.”

  Carver said, “Okay, that’s something.”

  Ghostly rubbed the underside of his jaw with his thumb and forefinger, as if testing to see if he needed a shave. He suddenly seemed uncomfortable. Carver didn’t help him out, but instead sat staring at him. His move. His game, in fact.

  Finally Ghostly took a deep breath. “Okay, there’s some stuff I’m not telling you.”

  “You want me to find her,” Carver said, “it’ll be easier and faster if I know it all.”

  “All, huh?” Ghostly shifted his weight to his other leg. Then he stood more loosely. He seemed to have reached a decision about opening up to Carver, trusting him. “I wasn’t quite straight with you on a few of my answers, Carver.”

  “I got that impression.”

  “The big reason I came here instead of to the police is Beth’s habit.”

  “Drugs?” Well, what else—in Florida, with the wife of a medical supply salesman? Fingernail-chewing?

  Ghostly actually looked ready to sob. He blew out a long breath, flapping his lips the way horses do when they’re winded. “There’s doctors who use heroin to treat certain diseases, as a painkiller for patients sometimes in the final stages. Anyway, there are legal, medical uses for the stuff, if it’s prescribed by a physician. I sold it. And even with the careful controls kept on it, I found out about a year ago that Beth’s been pilfering it from my supplies. She confessed to me she was addicted.”

  “You get her any help?”

  “Treatment? I tried like hell, but she wouldn’t agree to it. She’s . . . well, she’s ashamed.”

  “So you’ve been supplying her on the sly.”

  “Yeah. Not much, though. And just before she left me, she’d agreed to use methadone, and if that didn’t work she’d check into a drug rehab clinic.”

  Now Carver understood how it might have gone. The wife knowing she was even more deeply hooked than her husband thought. Knowing, or believing, that she was on the long slide and there was no way off. Maybe she’d left him because he couldn’t understand. Maybe she didn’t want him to see her ride her habit all the way to the grave. She’d had reasons for running, had Beth Ghostly.

  There was little arrogance in Ghostly now. It had cost him, telling Carver this about his wife, and placed him in some jeopardy, too; supplying an addict, even a spouse, with a controlled substance was a crime. Technically, Carver was supposed to report it. Only the fact that Ghostly would deny their conversation kept him from even considering that ethical dilemma. The best thing all around would be for Beth to return to her husband and get treatment for her addiction, maybe have a chance. Some hell to live through, but a chance.

  Carver said, “She get narcotics anywhere except from you?”

  “Well, I guess I better be honest all the way. I think she did buy from someone else. I have no idea who, or where she got the stuff. My only reason for thinking it is that there’s no way she could have become so heavily addicted on what little I gave her. No way.” His eyes teared up. “I mean, Jesus, Carver, she’d beg for it! Do anything for it! It made me fucking sick!” He turned away for a moment to compose himself, then turned back slowly. His face was pale. “It still makes me ill to think about it,” he said.

  “And now she’s out there with only a few hundred dollars.”

  “Well, more than that. I lied about how much she left with. Last week I went to my bank and found she’d withdrawn exactly half our savings.”

  “Amounting to?”

  “Nearly ten thousand dollars.”

  “Enough to keep her in dope for a while, if she makes a connection and finds a dealer.”

  “The ten thousand won’t last long, the habit she has. And a user by herself in that world, they’ll take every advantage of her. That’s something that scares hell outa me.”

  Carver sat staring at the photograph for a while, then looked up. “So I’ll look into it,” he said, as if it were no big deal and he hadn’t been sitting there carefully weighing whether to get involved. “Where can I get in touch with you?”

  “I won’t be at our condo for a week or so,” Ghostly said. “A convention down in Miami I can’t skip without fear of losing employment.” He worked his out-of-whack eyebrows fearfully. “Christ, that’d be the kicker, if I lost my job on top of the rest of this mess.”

  Carver said, “Go to your convention. If I need more information I’ll phone you at your hotel.”

  “Fine. It’s the Holiday Inn on Collins.” He lurched forward and shook Carver’s hand again. This time there was unsteadiness in his grip, and not much strength. “Find her, Carver, please.”

  Carver said, “I’ll be working at it. Any of your neighbors Beth was particularly thick with?”

  “Not really. We kept pretty much to ourselves. And I traveled most of the time.”

  Carver disengaged his right hand from Ghostly’s. He said he wanted Ghostly to sign a standard contract before he left, then answe
r a few more questions. Ghostly agreed immediately, and Carver limped to his dresser behind the folding screen and got a contract from the middle drawer.

  Ghostly scrawled his signature, set down the pen, and said again, “Find her.” More prayer than request.

  “If I can’t find her,” Carver said, “she’ll still need to be found. Still need help. Will you agree to go to the police when I tell you I’m wasting your money?”

  Ghostly said, “I thought that out carefully before I walked in here. The answer’s yes.”

  Carver gave him his copy of the contract. “I’ll do what I can to see that doesn’t happen, Mr. Ghostly.”

  Ghostly submitted himself to another ten minutes of question-and-answer. Then he managed a thin grin and walked from the cottage, leaving behind to linger whatever it was that had aroused uneasiness in Carver when he’d approached him on the beach.

  Maybe it was the uneasiness, and his curiosity, that had really prompted Carver to take the case. That and the money.

  And a young woman out there alone somewhere, running and bedeviled.

  3

  THE BEAU CAPRI condominiums didn’t look remotely French. As Carver steered his ancient Olds convertible onto the azalea-bordered driveway of the parking lot, he saw a series of three-story buildings constructed of vertical slabs of cast concrete, with what appeared to be seashells embedded in them. The flat roofs had air-conditioning units mounted on them, surrounded by symmetrical, blunt-tipped picket fences that looked as if they ought to be on the ground and not three stories in the air. Set in the middle of the four buildings was the ubiquitous swimming pool, this one as unimaginative as the rest of the architecture. A rectangular pool with high and low diving boards, a wide concrete apron, and uncomfortable-looking nylon-webbed chairs and lounges. The whole bland creation was surrounded by a chain-link fence coated with some sort of pastel pink rubber Carver had never seen before. Voltaire would have defended to his death the residents’ right to live in Beau Capri, but he would never have moved in himself.

  The drive from Del Moray to the Orlando area had taken only about an hour on sun-washed highways, and it wasn’t yet noon. Carver had driven in with the Olds’s canvas top down, letting the wind whip around him and try to mess up hair no longer on his head. A small and bitter triumph over nature.

  He parked the Olds at the far end of the lot, alongside a low red Porsche. After killing the powerful V-8 engine, he listened for a moment to cooling metal ticking beneath the long hood. Most of the cars in the lot were expensive; the dented and rusty Olds looked like a wino who’d crashed a swank party.

  Carver checked addresses emblazoned on the visible sides of each building and saw that the Ghostly unit would be in the extreme left building, on the third floor. As he climbed out of the Olds, heat from beneath the car wafted out and embraced his ankles. He set his cane on the sun-warmed concrete and began limping toward the sidewalk that flanked the pool’s pink fence.

  There were a few kids splashing around in the pool. Also an old man with a chest thick with gray hair and gold medallions. A lean and beautifully built woman about fifty, in a scanty black bikini, stood hipshot near the fence. She had platinum blond hair, skin the color of burnt toast, and sharp white teeth, which she showed as she glanced at Carver and either grimaced or smiled—he wasn’t sure which.

  “Help you?”

  An elderly, gray-haired man with a huge stomach paunch was blocking Carver’s way on the sidewalk. He wore dark slacks and a white short-sleeved shirt with some sort of insignia on one shoulder. Low-key but alert security. Apparently people didn’t simply walk into Beau Capri. If it wasn’t exclusive, what was it selling?

  Carver flashed his reassuring, beatific smile, in surprising contrast to the harshness of his features. “I’m looking for the Ghostlys’ condo. It’s in that end building, they said.”

  “That’s right.” The old man’s faded blue eyes had narrowed. He was measuring Carver, staying affable but suspicious, in the manner of security guards. He tugged his belt up on his right hip, as if he was used to having a gun there. A former cop, maybe. “Mind if I ask the nature of your business, sir?”

  “I’m not a pesky salesman,” Carver said.

  The old guy said, “Didn’t figure.”

  Carver drew out his wallet and showed his ID.

  “Private, huh?” the guard said. “Ghostlys got some kinda trouble?”

  “Maybe. Seen Mrs. Ghostly lately?”

  “Not in a while. But that ain’t unusual, what with the baby and all.”

  “Baby?”

  He brushed aside a mosquito that had been droning around his eyes in defiance of authority. “Sure. She’s pregnant as hell. Been that way for about eight months.”

  Here was something Bob Ghostly hadn’t mentioned. Carver leaned on his cane. He felt something cold slink up his spine. “We talking about the same Elizabeth Ghostly?”

  “ ’Magine so. Husband name of Robert. One nice gal. Well liked around here, even though she does tend to keep to herself. Got her reasons, I expect.”

  “What kinda reasons?”

  “Oh, they’d be personal, I’m sure.”

  “I noticed you didn’t say hubby was well liked.”

  The guard seemed to consider leveling with Carver. A warm breeze ruffled his white hair, rattled the palm fronds overhead. He said, “ ’Tween you and me, hubby’s a prick. Acts like he owns this place and everyone in it.”

  “Really?” Carver feigned surprise. “He told me he was hardly ever here. Said he traveled around selling medical supplies.”

  “Yeah, he’s gone mosta the time, but when he’s here he expects folks to get outa his way. Beth Ghostly, now, she’ll always stop and talk to the other residents. They was cool to her at first, her being black and all, but once they got to know her they had no choice but to like her. Most everyone here’s interested in her pregnancy. Lotsa folks figure she disappeared ’cause she went into labor, maybe had the baby. Couple of people tried to ask her husband, but he just ignored them and hurried on about his business. Always in a major fuckin’ rush, that one. Important man on the run. Or so he sees himself.”

  Carver considered telling the guard Bob Ghostly had hired him and that Beth was missing, but he decided not to get the residents all excited and gossiping. The main reason Ghostly had come to him instead of going to the law was to keep the investigation low-profile.

  He handed the guard one of his cards. “Maybe she did have that baby. I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, will you give me a call if you see her?”

  “Sure.” The guard slipped the card into his shirt pocket. “You don’t figure . . . well, I shouldn’t ask this. I mean, why you’re working for the Ghostlys is none of my business, and I guess you wouldn’t tell me if I asked.”

  Carver said, “That’s right. Client confidentiality.”

  “I’m curious, though. There some kinda trouble between Beth and her husband?”

  “No reason to think that.”

  The guard smiled. He’d have thought less of Carver if he’d gotten an answer.

  Sweat was trickling down Carver’s ribs and the inside of his right arm. “I’ll go on up to their unit now,” he said, “if it’s okay with you.”

  “Sure,” the guard said, stepping completely off the walk and onto the thick grass to let the cripple pass. “Hope there’s no kinda trouble for Beth Ghostly, though.”

  “I hope so, too,” Carver said, meaning it. He limped through glaring sunlight toward the pale, far building.

  Ghostly hadn’t supplied him with a key, but that was okay. Cheap apartment locks gave easily to Carver’s honed Visa card. Only dead-bolt locks frustrated him, but most of the time they were mounted on interior doors separately, above the main knob and lock.

  Carver had the door unlocked in less than a minute. He shoved it open and noticed immediately that the air was stale and motionless. Warm, too. The thermostat had been set to Off or turned up.

  He planted the tip of his
cane and moved inside, then stood braced on the cane in the condo’s spacious living room and glanced around.

  The place was wall-to-wall glitz, but expensive glitz. Ghostly must do better than all right selling medical supplies. The carpet was lavender, the ceiling-to-floor drapes cream-colored with bright flecks that matched the carpet. The wallpaper was fuzzy, white cardboardlike stuff shot through with silver that appeared to be real metal.

  The furniture was made up of leather and glass and sharp angles of stainless steel. A long, low sofa dominated the room, white leather with gleaming steel arms, crowded with a scattering of lavender throw pillows. In front of it was a steel-framed coffee table with a glass top and glassed-in sides. The glass-enclosed cubicle contained an ornate and colorful arrangement of plastic flowers and fake butterflies. The wide window’s drapes were open, admitting brilliant sunlight that made the wallpaper glitter. There were several chrome-framed oil paintings on the wall. One of them was of a bullfighter victoriously holding high the slain bull’s severed ears while an array of flowers and hats rained down on him from an admiring crowd. The bullfighter was wearing a crooked grin and looked a bit like Bob Ghostly.

  Carver limped across the living room to a hall that led toward what he presumed was the bedroom, noticing there was a thin, almost imperceptible layer of dust over everything, which robbed it of truly eye-aching luster. He glanced in the bathroom and saw a maroon hot tub for two, a washbasin shaped like a flower, gold plumbing. The wallpaper in there was fuzzy, too. It had a fleur-de-lis design. Hey, French!

  No wallpaper in the bedroom, but it was painted a pale rose and all the furniture was white. The bed was round with a white spread and resembled a huge mushroom that had sprung up from the carpet. Carver went to it and rested a palm on it. The wide expanse of spread undulated; a water bed. He glanced up and saw himself. A mirrored ceiling. Sure.

  His cane left quarter-size depressions in the thick rose carpet as he limped toward the mirrored closet doors. He shoved the nearer door open on its rollers and saw men’s suits and sport coats. A lot of them, and of good quality. The closet was set up with those white wire shelves and drawers for maximum use of space. One shelf contained half a dozen pairs of men’s shoes, all of them black except for a pair of gray Etonic joggers with thick white soles.