Scorcher

by John Lutz

  As the door slapped shut behind Carver, he noticed that the house smelled like frying bacon again. He wondered if it always smelled like bacon. Possibly that was all Emmett Kave ate. Maybe the preservatives kept him alive.

  Emmett slouched down on the dark old sofa and motioned for Carver to take a chair. Carver declined. He didn’t feel like sitting. He leaned on his cane and looked around. Sunlight was trying hard to break in but hadn’t made it yet; the house was warm and gloomy. He wished Emmett would switch on the blue box fan that was wedged in the front window.

  “Coffee?” Emmett asked.

  “Nothing,” Carver said. “I missed Paul last night at the Mermaid Motel.” He was immediately aware of the irony of his words. Another few seconds and he wouldn’t have missed Paul; he’d have shot him dead-center through the heart.

  “Television news said somebody with a gun was scared away at the Mermaid late last night. Didn’t say what room he was creeping around. Didn’t say much of anything, really. That’s TV news, ain’t it? Them fashion-plate fuckheads is so busy chatting and smiling at each other they don’t tell you beans in the way of details.”

  “I don’t think it was Paul,” Carver said.

  “Me neither. But it might’ve had something to do with him. Might’ve caused him to run, when all them police arrived and the commotion started.”

  “Could be.”

  “You know anything about what happened there?” Emmett asked.

  Carver put on his best liar’s face, feeling the flesh beneath his eyes stiffen. “It happened before I got there. No one was in room one hundred when I arrived.”

  Emmett’s bushy brows lowered and he looked appraisingly at Carver. He had the injured, shrewd eyes of a lifelong victim; a man not easily fooled even though distracted by demons. “You and me’s the only ones know Paul was at that motel last night, Carver, or the police’d be making a bigger hubbub about what happened.”

  Carver stood waiting. He shifted position with the cane. Emmett suspected something, sensed an undercurrent. Carver would have to handle this carefully. The old guy was sharp enough to shave paper.

  “Sure you don’t know anything about that man with the gun?” Emmett asked. “Seems awful coincidental, something like that happening when Paul was staying there.”

  “Could have been a cop free-lancing,” Carver said. “Maybe he’d traced Paul there and was planning to take him alone, get all the credit. It’s rare, but it happens in cases like this that get a lot of publicity and can make careers.”

  “You shittin’ me?”

  Carver shrugged, wishing he’d come up with a better story. “Hell, I don’t know. I’ve got no idea what went on at the Mermaid before I got there. All I do know is that Paul was gone when I arrived.”

  Emmett seemed to mull over this explanation, absently rubbing the sole of one of his slippers on the blackened toe of the other; a habit that explained the stains. “If what you said about a cop acting alone is true, the law would keep it quiet, I guess.”

  “Sure. He’d be disciplined within the department, probably suspended. Things like that happen. Not often, but they happen. And the public never knows.”

  “Humph! Police! Bureaucratic bastards!”

  Carver was getting uncomfortable standing in one spot, but he didn’t want to sit down. He limped around slowly for a moment, then stopped and looked at a collection of old, framed photographs arranged on the faded wallpaper. The sun had found its way around a shade and illuminated that wall, and the photos were well lighted. One was of a young, square-jawed man standing alongside a short, somber woman with hair piled high on her head. Both wore dark clothes of almost Edwardian style. It was a crack-checked, very old photograph. Another photo was of a cluster of men or teen-age boys, snapped from a distance and out of focus, so that their features were indistinguishable. Behind them was a round lake with a fountain in the middle. There were some shots of a small, pale youth with unruly, very blond hair—possibly Paul as a schoolboy, though this child looked almost albino. Below these hung a group photo of some battle-grimy marines. The soldier on the end, grinning with his helmet tilted well back on his head, was unmistakably the young Emmett Kave. Every man in the photo appeared exhausted and was grinning. There was something about the scene that disturbed Carver, but he couldn’t define it. Or maybe it was the shot of the square-jawed man and his young, sad wife that had touched some sensitivity in the depths of Carver’s mind.

  “Nice family photos,” he said. Down the block a power mower sputtered to life and began a monotonous drone; a conscientious homeowner getting in lawn work before the hottest part of the day. There was a smart-ass in every neighborhood.

  “The old folks is my mother and father back in New Jersey,” Emmett said proudly. “That motley bunch of young marines is from my unit in Korea. Them were some wild days.”

  “The young blond boy,” Carver said, “is that Paul?”

  “When he was ten,” Emmett said. “Liked to raise hell back then, from what I hear. Didn’t get withdrawn until just before his teens. Paul give me that photo himself.”

  “He has darker hair now.”

  “Hair changed,” Emmett said. “I had blond hair myself at that age. Even into my late teens, like Paul. Something about the Kave blood; we get darker as we get older.” He absently ran his hand over his hair, which had gone almost completely gray. “Till we get old old,” he added, somewhat remorsefully. For an instant his face was much like that of the woman in the photograph, whose brooding likeness had been captured on a bright day almost a century ago. Certain moments survived time.

  “When I find Paul,” Carver said, “maybe he can explain what happened at the motel last night.”

  “You sound confident you are going to find him.”

  “If he contacted you once,” Carver said, “he probably will again.”

  “Unless that gun business spooked him.” Emmett hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his robe and tugged at the well-worn material. Carver thought he heard thread pop. “You found out anything?” Emmett asked. “I mean, how’s it look for Paul, after that latest burning in Orlando? Lord, poor woman!”

  “The police think Paul did it,” Carver said.

  “Yeah, but what do you think?”

  “I don’t know. The evidence points to Paul.”

  “Evidence lies sometimes.”

  “And sometimes,” Carver said, “the police get more interested in where it points than whether it lies.”

  Emmett shifted on the old sofa and sat up straighter. “Yeah, I know what you mean and it scares me. I’d at least like to see Paul have his say in court. That’s one thing Adam and I agree on. Maybe the only thing in this ass-backward world.”

  Carver thought Emmett might ask how his brother was, but he didn’t.

  “Adam always put too much stock in money,” he said, “had an exaggerated idea of what it could buy. Bet I’m happier here in this ramshackle hovel, living like a hermit with my simple pleasures, than he is in that palace by the ocean.”

  “Right now you are,” Carver said, looking around and not seeing much evidence of even simple pleasures. Well, there was television. Maybe Emmett was a soap-opera fan, involved in that alternate, manageable world that could be relegated to nonexistence at the punch of a remote-control button.

  “Some fucked-up family, eh?” Emmett said, staring at the threadbare carpet. Sunlight was lying across it now in an elaborate pattern that almost reached his slippers.

  “It works out that way sometimes,” Carver said.

  Emmett didn’t answer. After a while Carver realized he was going to remain silent, as if his well of words had gone dry.

  He left the old man on the sofa, still staring down into his past, perhaps wondering what the man and woman in the ancient photograph would think if they could somehow know the success and agony of what they’d set in motion so long ago in their marriage bed.

  Outside, the morning was already unbearably hot. Carver drove away thi
nking about the photograph arrangement on Emmett’s faded wall, trying to figure out what there was about it that acted like a tiny burr on his mind.

  By the time he was out of the depressing neighborhood he was concentrating on Paul Kave again, trying to analyze his feelings about the boy. Paul had lived in his own hell, Carver realized, long before he’d murdered Chipper. And Carver thought that maybe what bothered him about the grouping of family photographs in the old house was that he would never see a similar collection of photos that included Chipper past the age of eight. Looking at the photos had brought home to Carver that his family, such as it was, had been cruelly deprived of its future as it should have unfolded.

  He stoked his rage with the relentless sun pounding through the windshield. He was still determined to make Paul Kave’s hell permanent.

  Chapter 20

  CARVER HAD PARKED the Olds in front of his cottage and was climbing out when the bullet thunked into the left front fender.

  It took him a second to recognize the sound. But there was no mistaking the gouged round hole, silver-rimmed with raw steel, plowed into the fender. Air was still hissing from the punctured front left tire as Carver dropped to his stomach and rolled beneath the car. Pebbles dug into his back and bare arms. Fear pressed in on him.

  He waited for a follow-up shot, but none came. Dust gritted between his teeth. He swiveled his head and spat. Stretching his right arm, he reached his cane. Then he used his good leg and arms to scoot backward, hooked the crook of the cane over the opposite side of the car, and push-pulled his way on his back beneath the wide vehicle. The car’s undercarriage smelled like fresh earth and old grease, and the exhaust system still breathed hot. It was like freeing himself from a stifling cave when at last he emerged on the other side.

  He struggled up on one knee, his stiff leg extended with his foot braced against the Olds’s rear tire. Oil from the underside of the car streaked his arms and shirtfront. Something sharp had left a long, curved scrape on his wrist; the salt of his perspiration made it sting.

  He peered along the shore to the south; the beach was deserted. The strip of pale sand was isolated and rocky and wouldn’t be occupied until the searing heat of afternoon drove people to the sea.

  The shot had come from the slope north of the cottage, where there was high brush and a few wind-bent palm trees. Carver reached for the Colt automatic tucked in his belt but it was gone. It had fallen out as he’d wriggled beneath the car.

  He bowed his head as low as possible, feeling tight strain in his back and neck, and saw the gun on the ground directly beneath the center of the Olds’s undercarriage. It was about three feet from where he crouched. It looked like ten feet.

  He carefully poked his cane beneath the car and moved it in short, sweeping motions. It bumped the gun a few times. Finally it snagged the Colt near the trigger guard, and he pulled it to him. The cane was coming in handy for more than walking.

  If he kept the protective bulk of the car between him and where the shot must have come from, he could reach shelter behind the cottage.

  If he moved fast enough.

  If the gunman hadn’t changed position for a better angle.

  Carver swallowed the old-metal taste of fear, gripped the cane halfway up the shaft, and made himself move.

  Muscles knotted in his back as he tensed for the rip of a bullet. Fear had settled icy and hard in his bowels, trying to make him weak. Careful to stay in line with the car, leaning hard on the cane, he half crawled, half duckwalked toward the corner of the cottage. His feet and the tip of the cane dug into the soft ground and shot dust and sand behind him as he scrambled for cover. He was sure he looked ridiculous. He’d think about that later. He hoped.

  Then he was around the corner.

  Safe.

  He leaned back against the sun-warmed clapboard wall and took deep breaths. Anger grew alongside his fear, then gained dominance. It was time to go on the offensive.

  Staying low, calculating angles so he wouldn’t be seen, he made his way toward the thick brush on the slope behind the cottage. He intended to reach the coast highway, stay in cover on this side of the shoulder, and try to work in behind his assailant. Whoever had taken the shot at Carver might be surprised by the fact that his target was armed and ready to return fire; a tiger that had turned around.

  Carver backed away from the cottage and into the cover of the low brush. He fought his way up the slope toward the highway, using the cane almost in the way a gondolier powers a boat with a pole along a Venetian canal, setting its tip deep in the soil ahead of him, and pulling then pushing with both arms and his chest muscles as he dug the edge of his good right foot into the loose earth for leverage and propelled his body forward. He was working up a thick sweat, attracting mosquitoes and sand fleas. Something small flitted around one of his nostrils. He ignored it. The soft hushing sound of the surf cautioned him to be as quiet as possible; danger here. The knowing ocean.

  As he neared the highway shoulder, he thought he heard a car spin its tires on the baked, dusty ground and drive away. But he wasn’t sure. By now it was probably unnerving to the gunman not to be certain of Carver’s location. If whoever had taken a shot at him hadn’t immediately fled.

  Making better time now, getting the knack, he made his way along the road shoulder toward the point where he was reasonably sure the shot had been fired. As he got close, he drew the Colt from his belt and moved silently. On the hunt now. Better than being shot at.

  After a moment he paused, forcing himself to breathe evenly.

  From where he was crouched he could see the Olds several hundred feet away. In the bright morning light the silver-rimmed bullet hole near the flat left front tire was barely visible. From this distance, the gunman had probably used a rifle. Not with a telescopic sight, or the shot would have been more accurate.

  Unless it had been fired by a scared young killer on the run. One used to another murder method. Paul Kave, trying to take out two generations of Carvers.

  There was a slight sound, like a long sigh, directly in front of Carver, He aimed the gun in that direction and tried to crouch lower, feeling pain in his hip above the stiff knee. A lump formed in his throat; he swallowed it.

  His flesh tingled and he waited.

  Waited.

  Foliage rattled, and a man with a revolver emerged from the brush and trudged toward the road.

  He wasn’t Paul Kave. He was a big man in saggy Levi’s and a yellow T-shirt with an orange setting sun printed on it and stretched tight across his meaty chest and stomach. He was in his late thirties and had a dark beard and perpetually arched eyebrows, and a hooked nose that was much too large for his round face. Carver thought he looked like an Arab terrorist. The man moved as if tired, letting the revolver brush at his thigh as he swung his long arms. It was a bulky, large-caliber gun, maybe a .357 Magnum.

  Carver let him take a few more steps toward the highway and then said, “I can pop three holes through you before you can turn around.”

  The man stopped and his body stiffened. “Not ‘freeze’?” he said. He sounded scared, but not scared enough. Something didn’t fit here.

  Carver leaned on the cane and stood up. His good leg was shaky, the knee rubbery. “Toss the gun away, then turn around and face me or I’ll show you what I meant about those three holes.”

  “This thing’s expensive,” the man said. “I don’t wanna get sand in the action, you don’t mind.” He stooped slowly and placed the revolver lovingly on the ground, then straightened up and turned toward Carver in one gradual motion. He was smiling now, so cooperative. “Guy who shot at you got away,” he said. “Drove off a few minutes ago.”

  “Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he’s right here lying his ass off.”

  “That piece didn’t put the bullet in your car,” the man said, nodding toward the revolver at his feet. “Hasn’t been fired, in fact.” He moved two slow steps to the side. “Pick it up and give it a sniff.”

  “Smell
your own gun.” But Carver knew the man was probably telling the truth. It would be difficult with a high-powered handgun even to hit the car from this distance.

  They stood there in the hot morning for a while, neither man moving. Gulls screeched about some difference of opinion on the beach. A jet plane tracked past out over the ocean, very high.

  When the trailing thunder of the plane had faded, along with some of the tension of the moment, the man with the beard sighed loudly through his nose—the sound Carver had first heard—and said, “Mind if I dip something out of my pocket?”

  “Depends on what.”

  “My identification. I’m a police officer.”

  For some reason, Carver wasn’t surprised. “Orlando?”

  “Fort Lauderdale,” the man said. “Name’s Gibbons. I’m McGregor’s man.”

  “That’s not moving you any further away from getting shot,” Carver said.

  The man smiled wider. Such a charmer.

  Carver said, “You been following me in a white Ford?”

  “Yep. It’s parked down the highway. McGregor wants me to keep a loose tail on you, let him know if you’re doing the job. Looks like you could use a bodyguard, while we’re at it. I scared off somebody when I heard the shot and saw you duck down. I ran hell-for-leather up here, but whoever plinked at you drove away. There’s tire tracks over there, and the dust was still settling when I arrived.”

  Plinked, Carver thought. “Get a look at the gunman?”

  “I told you, I heard the shot and saw nothing but dust. I don’t even know which way the guy went. I’m pretty sure he used a rifle, though. You can tell from the sound.”

  “I was too busy to reason all that out,” Carver said. “Let’s see your shield.”

  Gibbons fished in a hip pocket and drew out a wallet-size leather folder with his Fort Lauderdale I.D. He moved a few steps toward Carver and held it far out in front of him. Carver scanned it but didn’t really need to look. Gibbons had flashed the I.D. in the smooth, practiced manner of a longtime cop. McGregor’s man, all right. In on the deal and looking out for his future. His wagon hitched to a dark star that might soon be on the rise. Politics and justice, in bed together like the old lovers they were.