Scorcher (16 page)

Half a mile down the highway, a patrol car approached him going in the other direction, siren yodeling wildly and roofbar lights flashing red and blue glare. The driver swerved to avoid a station wagon slow in pulling to the side. In a hurry, all right. Too late, pal, Carver thought as the cruiser zipped past. He watched the light show recede in his rearview mirror.

The pulsing lump in his throat receded and his breathing evened out. He was away clean. The cigar smoker had barely glanced at him and probably hadn’t noticed the cane, scared as he was. Probably busy fouling his underwear and saw nothing but the gun swinging his way. And Carver had hobbled into the black night before anyone else had a chance to see him.

Near the expressway he parked the Olds on the shoulder and sat for a while, feeling the low drumbeat of the idling engine through his buttocks and thighs. He was sweating hard and his hands were shaking. Something in his stomach wanted out. He wasn’t sure he could drive.

What he was experiencing was more than simply delayed reaction to stress. He’d felt that before and knew it well enough to recognize it. This was something else, at a deeper level.

If he hadn’t been interrupted, he would have squeezed the trigger and sent bullets smashing through glass, and then the flesh and bone of Paul Kave. Killed the scared kid with the phantom mustache. No doubt at all.

The thing about it, Carver wasn’t sure how he would have felt afterward. And for the first time since his son’s death, afterward mattered.

H
ER PHONE RANG TWELVE
times before she answered, even though it was right beside her bed. He wasn’t surprised. She slept deeply.

She cleared her throat. “ ’Lo.”

“Edwina, this is Carver.”

“Four inna morning. Whassa matter?”

“I’m not sure. I’m sorry; I wanted to hear your voice.”

“S’okay. You know it is.”

“I almost shot Paul Kave last night.”

She paused one, two, three beats. “Why didn’t you?” As awake now as she could be at 4:00 A.M.

“I was seen and had to get away.”

“Will anyone be able to identify you?”

“I don’t think so.”

She was quiet for a while, then she said, “You still want to kill him?” He reached far back into the mysteries of his mind before he answered.

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay now?”

“Okay.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Go to sleep then, baby. Go to sleep.”

“Edwina?”

“You rather talk awhile? It’s fine, if that’s what you want.”

“No, I guess not. No.”

“Go to sleep, baby.”

“All right.”

She waited for him to hang up first. He was finally able to sleep, but not without dreams or fear.

It was nine that morning when Carver knocked on Emmett Kave’s door. The sun was already glaring hot and harsh, angling in beneath the sagging gutters to cast brilliant rectangular patterns on the concrete porch. The porch floor had been painted gray long ago, but nothing of the color remained except for a stubborn peppering that had penetrated the concrete too deeply to be dislodged by weather. A large palmetto bug, brown and glistening and ugly, dragged itself across a sharp corner of sunlight and then disappeared beneath the wall near the edge of the porch, seeking darkness.

Carver had a headache; he wanted out of the sun, like the bug.

Emmett opened the inner door and peered through the patched screen at him. The old man was wearing a green, limp terrycloth robe that had gone through the wash too many times. When he swung the screen door open, Carver saw that the robe hung to his knobby knees, and his thin, hairless ankles disappeared into old leather slippers with dark stains on the toes, as if oil had dripped on them long ago. He said, “Don’t you look like something the cat crapped out this morning.”

“I didn’t get much sleep,” Carver said.

“Here to tell me about last night?” Emmett asked, shuffling backward so Carver could enter. The slippers made soft sighing sounds on the floor.

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 thinking 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.

C
ARVER 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.