by John Lutz
Carver said, “How big-time is Gomez?”
“He’s one of the major players. Maybe the biggest in Florida. He’s kept his upper East Coast connections and is able to funnel a lot of narcotics from South America into the New York area. And he’s cunning enough to keep changing pickup and drop-off points, and even methods of transport. We’ve been trying to nail his ass for the past three years and we still haven’t got enough to indict. Part of the reason is his ruthlessness; a hotshot like Gomez, we have to work our way up the ladder to build a case. And he doesn’t hesitate to saw off the rungs beneath him. Our agents cultivate informers, and Gomez somehow suspects who they are and they simply disappear.”
Carver wasn’t interested in the details of Gomez’s operation. Drug dealers were more common than Amway dealers in Florida. He said, “So who do you think’s after his wife? And why?”
Strait gnawed his lower lip, no doubt mulling over whether he should talk freely with Carver. It was he who’d come to Carver’s office, apparently to gain Carver’s cooperation.
He finally decided as Carver thought he would. He said, “Well, it might be a rival drug faction, wants to kill her out of vengeance for something Gomez did. He gives plenty of people plenty of reason, and it’s no secret he’s possessive about his wife.”
“Maybe she doesn’t feel the same way about hubby. Maybe she’s had enough of Gomez and simply skipped out on him.”
“Possibly. But it’s more likely she found out somebody’s trying to kill her and she’s on the run.”
“She figures Gomez can’t give her enough protection?”
“Could be. Or maybe it is Gomez she’s running from. Maybe it’s him trying to kill her and he hired you to find her so he could get to her.”
“I thought you said he loved her.”
“I said he was possessive about her. Anyway, love can flip to hate quick as you can turn an ankle.”
“She doesn’t look easy to hate,” Carver said, “but then I never met her.”
“She’s class and he’s scum,” Strait said. “That’s what makes their marriage work. I’ve seen it before. You know how it goes, she’s Gomez’s prize possession and his chief reward. He’s a sleazebag who fought his way to the bottom, and a woman like that allows him to think he’s on top.”
“How long they been together?”
“Only a few years. Elizabeth grew up in the slums of Chicago. Got the looks to travel with the rich and famous and found her way to Miami. That’s where she met Gomez. And after the embezzler con man she was living with went to prison, she and Gomez became thick.”
“Embezzler still in prison?”
“He was knifed to death there a year ago.”
“Maybe Elizabeth thinks Gomez is responsible.”
“Maybe she does, and probably he is responsible. Gomez has influence on both sides of the wall. But a woman like that, it’d make little difference to her. It wouldn’t be the reason she might leave Gomez. She might even feel flattered he had somebody killed for her.”
“That how she is?”
“Must be. Or she wouldn’t have married Gomez.”
Carver thought that made sense, but he wished he’d found Elizabeth Gomez so he could know why she’d disappeared. If she was still alive. Maybe whoever had killed her sister had rectified the mistake and caught up with Elizabeth by now.
“What else do you know about Gomez?” Strait asked.
“Only what you read in the police report. He came to my place up the coast. Said his name was Bob Ghostly and he wanted someone to search for his missing wife. He passed himself off as a medical supply salesman.”
“He was one, for six months in New York. But that was ten years ago, when he was between scams. The company fired him for beating up one of the secretaries.”
“Charges filed?”
“No. There was no way for her to prove who’d done a job on her, but everyone knew. A few months after Gomez was gone, she was killed by a hit-and-run driver.”
“Hirsh?”
“This was before he knew Hirsh. Not Hirsh’s style, either. He looks people in the eye when he kills them. They say he even gives the religious a chance to make their peace.”
“What a guy,” Carver said.
“Well, compared to Gomez he’s a saint.” Strait stood up and gave Carver a stern look. “Sure you’re off this case, Carver?”
“As off it as I can be. I don’t work for people like Gomez.”
“That’s what Lieutenant Desoto said about you. You’ve got the reputation of a tough guy who’s as honest as possible in your line of work, otherwise this interview would have been conducted in another place and another manner. Different questions altogether.”
Carver said, “Different answers, too.” Wondering what was this hard-ass bureaucrat doing threatening him. But then, some DEA agents were like that. The last one he’d met had been a closet fanatic bent on revenge for a long-ago lynching.
Strait stared at him as if doing some reassessment. He pulled a long black wallet out of an inside pocket, withdrew a card, and laid it on Carver’s desk. “Gomez contacts you again, call that number and let me know immediately.”
Carver didn’t say he wouldn’t, didn’t say he would.
Didn’t even say good-bye when Strait walked from the office.
10
AFTER STRAIT HAD LEFT the office, Carver talked by phone to a Del Moray woman who wanted him to follow her husband to confirm adultery with her teenage sister. She told him she’d be in to see him and make arrangements, but he wasn’t sure if she’d show. There was no telling where an investigation might lead, and who’d be hurt by spilled acid. So that kind of thing usually stayed within a family. Sometimes everything worked out, sometimes it festered and the poison spread.
Carver spent most of the day dunning people who owed him money, the only paperwork he enjoyed.
The hours slipped past and the woman who suspected her husband and sister of having an affair didn’t come into the office. Carver skipped lunch and ate supper alone in Del Moray, and considered driving by Edwina’s to see if she was home. Then he decided against it. He lowered the Olds’s canvas top and drove north along the coast toward his beach cottage, while the sea went from blue to dark green as the sun arced like a slow-motion meteor toward land.
She was waiting inside the cottage, sitting on the small sofa with her legs crossed, wearing a flowered, silky white blouse and white shorts that showed off her tanned thighs. Seeing her there made Carver ache when he thought of losing her. The dependency he’d feared had become fact.
When he leaned on his cane and closed the door behind him, she said, “I thought we oughta talk.”
Carver limped over behind the breakfast counter and opened the refrigerator. He got out a Budweiser and popped the tab, spilling some of the cold, fizzy beer to form a small puddle on the wood floor. Bracing with the cane, he spread the dampness around with the sole of his shoe. He came out from behind the counter and said, “Well, we didn’t do much talking last night.”
She smiled, remembering. The sun was in the final, rapid stages of setting, softening the light in the cottage and taking ten years off her. Then her face set in hard lines. “I had a conversation with Lester today.”
Jack Lester was the real-estate developer who was building the huge condo project in Hawaii and wanted Edwina as marketing director. Carver could imagine what the conversation had been about. He was right.
“I have to let him know within a week whether I’ll take the job.”
“Pressure,” Carver said.
“Lester’s under pressure himself.”
Carver didn’t care about Lester. He took a pull of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A gull screamed outside, wheeling in the darkening sky. He said, “You want the job.” Not a question.
“Yes,” she said.
He stood for a while, leaning on his cane and listening to the ocean whisper ancient secrets. “Gonna take it?”
&n
bsp; “I don’t know.”
He thought she did know.
“Think I should take it?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” But he did know. Jesus, how did they get into this?
He walked to the wide window and gazed out at the timeless ocean undulating with an orange tint from the sunset behind the cottage. The horizon seemed higher than where he was standing; the sea was overwhelming.
“Fred?”
He turned around to face her. She’d uncrossed her long tan legs and had her knees pressed together, her hands folded in her lap. He said, “You think love’s always a trap?”
She gave him a brief, hopeless smile. “Maybe that’s the nature of the beast; we should ride it while we can before it turns on us.”
“That seems more applicable to wild horses.” He crushed the empty beer can and tossed it at the wastebasket. Missed. The can clattered on the floor. He’d pick it up later, in the morning.
He limped over to Edwina and leaned down and kissed her lips. She was quietly crying. Not like her to cry.
She sighed and stood up. “C’mon, Fred.” She leaned on him as they made their way to the bed.
He made love to her with a passion that knew its time was limited. Used his hands, his mouth. Lost himself in her soft warm flesh while the ocean rushed and ebbed outside.
Afterward, he lay back silently while she slept. He stared out at the darkness and knew that it inevitably consumed love and life and there were no exceptions. Delusions kept people alive, and they were perishable.
But hadn’t he always known that? Carver the cynic?
The hot black night enveloped him, and he tried without luck to sleep.
The next morning he woke up alone and miserable. Edwina had left a note on her pillow saying she needed to get back to Del Moray early for a sales meeting. The sun, glaring like a malevolent orange eye, sent slanted morning light crashing through the wide window to wash the cottage in heat and brilliance.
Carver crumpled up the note and dropped it back on the pillow. Clenching his eyes shut against the aggressive sun, he ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth and grimaced at the terrible taste. He used his cane to help him stand up and hobble to the bathroom, where he immediately brushed his teeth.
He took a hot shower that he gradually adjusted to ice cold, then toweled himself dry and was feeling somewhat human again as he got dressed. Up to the Paleolithic era, anyway.
Carver limped to the breakfast counter and the Braun coffee-maker Edwina had given him as a birthday present. He rooted in a drawer and saw that there were no filters, just an empty cardboard box. Not that it mattered; there was no coffee, either. Twisting his torso, he reached for the refrigerator door and swung it open. He was looking at three cans of beer, some inedible cottage cheese, a glass decanter with a dribble of orange juice in it. There was some month-old bacon in the meat keeper, he was pretty sure. He closed the door. The refrigerator began to hum, doing what it could to keep things fresh and compensate for his irregular eating habits. GE trying to save him from food poisoning.
He drove to a restaurant on the main highway and had a breakfast of pancakes and sausage, drank three cups of coffee. Carver decided against smoking a cigar, though he felt like it. The Surgeon General and countless cancer studies were hard to shake off. He left a generous tip for the flawlessly efficient and friendly Hispanic waitress, then paid the cashier and limped back out onto the parking lot.
Heat radiated up through the thin leather soles of his moccasins. It was only ten o’clock and the temperature was already in the nineties.
He brushed away a large mosquito that wanted blood from one of his nostrils, then limped toward the Olds. The mosquito followed; he heard it drone past his right ear, felt it light on the back of his neck. He slapped at it and heard it buzz away. It seemed discouraged, anyway.
As soon as he got the Olds’s engine running, he put the top up and switched the air conditioner on high.
Then he got back on the highway and stopped at the B&B Fast Food Market just as the car’s interior was beginning to cool down. He needed coffee and more beer.
As he was picking up a can of Folger’s coffee, he noticed a woman staring at him from the other end of the aisle, near a display of pickles that were on sale. She was black and had on an oversized cheap gray dress. Flat white shoes like the ones nurses wore. Amber-tinted sunglasses. There was a wide-brimmed white canvas hat pulled low on her head, the kind a lot of boaters in the area wore, that concealed most of her hair. He thought she was about fifty.
But when she left the sweet dills and came toward him, the tall body beneath the baggy dress moved with the fluidity of youth. She was younger than fifty, or she wore her age with impressive grace.
A few feet from him, she pretended to study brands of tea. Then she turned to him, floated up a hand, and lowered the tinted lenses to focus her gaze on him. She had long, pointed fingernails, he noticed, unpainted, and beautiful brown eyes that tilted slightly up at the corners and gave her a vaguely Oriental look.
He knew who she was and didn’t want this to be happening, didn’t know how to figure it.
She said, “Fred Carver?”
“He’s my brother.”
She didn’t smile. In fact, she looked gravely serious. “I’m Elizabeth Gomez. Bet you can’t guess what I want.”
She had him there.
11
ELIZABETH GOMEZ STOOD by the tea and said, “All I want’s about ten minutes of your time.”
Carver shook his head no. “Sorry. I want nothing to do with you or your husband, Mrs. Gomez. You’ll have to work out your own problems.”
She had the tinted glasses up on the bridge of her nose again; he couldn’t see her eyes. “Our problems are beyond working out, Carver. The relationship has ended.”
Carver couldn’t help it; he decided to go fishing. “Roberto still cares for you enough to hire someone to find you and bring you back.”
“We both know why he wants me found,” she said in a soft, level voice. “He wants me dead, and locating me’s the first step. You didn’t know it at the time, Carver, but he hired you to be the finger man.”
“Finger man?”
“The one who points out the victim so the hit man can do his job. And if you’re still around and in the way, like at the condo when my sister was shot by mistake, you get a bullet yourself. You hadn’t got out of the line of fire there, you’d have been found dead lying next to Belinda.” She peeked at him over the plastic frames of the glasses again. “Know how the hit man can get right to his job once the target’s been found? He follows the finger man, especially if the finger man don’t know shit about why he’s looking for somebody. That way there’s no time wasted, no opportunity for the target to slip away. Ever since my husband hired you, he’s had somebody shadowing you.”
Carver thought she was probably telling the truth. It made him uneasy, and more than a little angry. “I take it since I quit the case, I’m no longer being watched.”
“Take it however you like, Carver. Nobody knows what the fuck a man like my husband’s gonna do. That’s part of the secret of his success. And part of the reason I left him.”
An elderly woman with dyed red hair pushed a shopping cart up the aisle, glared at them as she had to detour around Elizabeth Gomez, who didn’t budge an inch to get out of the way. When the woman had huffily grabbed a can of coffee, then made her way to the pickle display at the end of the aisle, Elizabeth said, “This is no place for what I need to say.”
“We got nothing to talk about.”
“I say we do.” She smiled. “Anyway, I’m not leaving you any choice. I’ll stick close to you as Superglue till you let me have my say, and if my husband’s hired men find me and follow orders, you’ll go along on the dark ride with me.”
“Dark ride,” Carver said. “I like that. It’s poetic.”
“Let’s rap, then. I’ll entertain you some more.”
Carver thought about it. Th
ought about it for a while. “You got a car outside?”
“Uh-hm. Didn’t walk.”
“Let me pick up a few more groceries. Then, when I drive away, follow me to my place. It’s not far from here.”
She said, “I know where it is.”
Carver set the cane’s tip and limped away from her, over to the cooler, where he pulled out a couple of cold Budweiser six-packs. He couldn’t ward off the thought that if he let Gomez know he had his wife at the cottage, she’d be worth twenty thousand dollars. Not that he’d consider doing it. And Elizabeth Gomez was right, he’d never see the twenty thousand; Gomez would snip all loose ends to her murder, one of which would be Carver.
He gathered up a quart of milk and a dozen large eggs. Some vitamin-fortified cornflakes with TV cartoon characters on the box. He carefully selected a head of lettuce that would probably turn brown in his refrigerator. On the way to the front of the store, he found room between the groceries tucked beneath his arms to fit in a can of sliced peaches. For the cornflakes.
Impulse buyer, he admonished himself. He shouldn’t have reached for the peaches. And he shouldn’t have listened even as long as he had to Elizabeth Gomez. There was a point where judgment crumbled.
He checked out in the express lane, behind a guy not only with more than ten items, but with half a cart full of groceries. That was criminal, but the checkout girl let him get away with it, so what could Carver do?
Still irked by having to wait in line, he carried his paper sack of groceries to his car. He didn’t look around as he set the sack on the front seat, slid it over, then leaned on his cane and lowered himself in behind the steering wheel.