Bloodfire (8 page)

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?”

“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.

E
LIZABETH
G
OMEZ 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. Thought 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.

He drove from the parking lot onto the main highway and headed toward the turnoff to his cottage. A steady breeze was bearing in from the east, bringing with it the rot-and-life scent of the sea. Death and renewal. Had the ocean smelled the same a million years ago?

A small white car, a Ford Escort, appeared in the corner of his rearview mirror and stuck there like a decal. Elizabeth Gomez was driving, still wearing her tinted glasses.

At the cotttage, Carver sat in a webbed aluminum chair with his stiff leg propped up on the porch rail. Elizabeth Gomez refused his offer of the other chair and stood leaning with her buttocks against the rail, her back to the glittering sea. They were in the deep shade of the porch roof, sipping Budweiser from the can. She’d parked the Escort, which Carver noticed had a rental company bumper sticker, alongside the cottage, almost out of sight.

The first thing she said was, “You’re no longer being followed, but Roberto still thinks you might accept his twenty-thousand-dollar offer. That you’ll find me and give me to him.”

Carver touched the base of the moisture-beaded can to his thigh. Cold condensation worked through the material of his pants. “How do you know all that?”

“I have a few friends in my husband’s organization. If I ask, they take a chance, tell me things I should know. They told me Roberto hired you under false colors. You accepted the job, then you backed off when you found out what was going on.” She took a sip of beer and placed the can on the rail. She’d removed the tinted glasses, and it looked for a moment as if her dark eyes were misting. “After Belinda got killed.”

“If you know I know the story,” Carver said, “what do we have to talk about?”

She removed the wide-brimmed hat now. Her hair, raven black and straightened, tumbled to her shoulders, changing her appearance entirely. Made her look like a rock singer, or a funky fashion model. Even the baggy gray dress couldn’t hide the lissome curves of her lean body. He’d heard Elizabeth was a beautiful woman. Heard right. She said, “You don’t know the whole story.”

“About your pregnancy?”

“Yeah.”

“And why you left your husband?”

“Yeah again.”

“I don’t care,” Carver said. “Domestic difficulties don’t interest me. They’re not my business. Point is, you want out, Gomez doesn’t want you out, and he’s a tough guy to leave.”

“Oh, he’s not that hard to leave. Only thing is, you leave everything else when you leave Roberto. I mean, like life itself.”

Carver gazed beyond the toe of his moccasin, at the ocean rolling in the sunlight. A pelican flapped past, dipped suddenly at a fish. Made a splash but came up empty and flapped on. “Here’s how it is,” Carver said. “I believe he’s trying to kill you, and I think you oughta go to the police. Trade what you know in exchange for their protection.”

She shook her head, staring at him with those dark, dark eyes. “Can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Roberto’s into drugs in a big way.”

“Not news to many.”

“I’m into drugs too.”

“I told you, work a deal. Get immunity. The law wants to put Roberto away, Elizabeth.”

“Do me a favor and call me Beth. I don’t like formality.”

“Okay, Beth.”

“What you want me to call you?”

“Carver’s fine.”

“I don’t mean I’m into drugs that way, Carver, the way Roberto is.” She was staring fixedly at him, something in her eyes pleading for understanding. “Not as a dealer.”

He tapped gently on the porch rail with his cane. Not making much noise. “You telling me you’re a user?”

“That’s it. Couldn’t just say no, I’m afraid.”