Burn (13 page)

Carver thanked her and replaced the receiver, wondering when he was going to have to buy a cellular phone so he could chat while he drove. He would have to become part of this fast-developing mobile technology or be run over by it. He didn’t want to become road kill on the information superhighway.

He did paperwork until Van Meter called him just before noon.

“Been a long time,” Van Meter said. He must have had a terrific car phone; he sounded as if he were leaning over Carver’s right shoulder, Carver could picture the obese Van Meter with his flowing white beard, half reclined behind the steering wheel of his big Cadillac, his thick arm draped limp-wristed over the top of the wheel. He didn’t know quite how to dress Van Meter in his vision; Van Meter always surprised. He was a flagrant violator of every rule of style and color. He usually looked as if he’d gotten dressed in a kaleidoscope.

“I need some help here in Del Moray,” Carver said.

“That’s the only reason you ever call, because you need help. What kind of pickle are you in this time?”

“I need someone followed, and I can’t do it myself.”

“Why not?”

“I’m following somebody else.”

“What about Beth? She busy too?”

“She’s pr—Yeah, she’s busy, doing a piece for
Burrow
about the Everglades drying up.”

“Good for her. The wetlands are disappearing faster than Disney World is growing. And we need one more’n the other.”

“I didn’t know you were a conservationist.”

“I’m not. I like alligators.”

“As shoes, you mean. What about my request?”

“Well, I got a good man in Orlando can drive over and take up the task. You know Charley Spotto?”

Carver did. Spotto was a brash little man with a huge mustache, gimlet eyes, and the heart of a terrier. “Sure. He’ll do fine.”

From the corner of his eye Carver noticed a black minivan make a right turn into the parking lot.

“Give me the name and address of whoever you want watched,” Van Meter said. “Spotto will be on him like a second skin he doesn’t know he has.”

Carver gave him Brant’s name, then his home and office addresses, as well as a physical description.

“This guy dangerous?” Van Meter asked.

“I don’t know. That’s one thing I’m trying to find out.”

“Okay, Spotto should be there by late afternoon.”

“Usual rate for this, Lloyd?”

“Of course. I didn’t think you were asking for a favor. You’re too proud.”

Carver hung up, thinking that sometimes Van Meter sounded a lot like Beth.

He resumed trying to clear his desk of paperwork, then he suddenly realized he’d slapped lunch and was hungry. Quickly he placed everything in a semblance of order beneath a paperweight that had been a gift from his daughter, Ann. It was one of those glass globes with miniature buildings in it and imitation snowflakes that swirled around when it was shaken. Carver had moved it enough to cause flurries. He sat thinking about Ann in St. Louis, where some winters a lot of snow fell, and long, gray stretches of cold kept it from melting.

The snowfall in the globe held him hypnotized until it ended.

He was reaching for his cane to stand up and go out into the searing Florida heat when the door opened and the biggest man Carver had ever seen ducked his head to enter the office.

H
E WAS EVEN TALLER
than McGregor, and wide, without a hint of excess flesh anywhere. He wore filth-encrusted jeans and a dirty, wool-lined distressed leather vest without a shirt. At the end of each muscle-corded long arm was a huge hand with hairy-knuckled fingers like sausages. On his feet were immense white sneakers, loosely laced and with their tongues hanging out as if they were exhausted just from transporting him around all day. As he stepped farther into the office, Carver saw that he wasn’t wearing socks.

“Help you?” Carver asked.

The man laughed, almost a giggle. The shrill sound, so incongruous coming from such a mountain, made the flesh on the nape of Carver’s neck crawl.

Carver stood up, not quite leaning on his cane, keeping his weight balanced and his grip tight so he could lash out with force with the hard walnut if the man meant him harm.

The man did mean him harm. His wide face, guileless as a child’s and marked with blackheads and a smudge of grease on the bridge of his nose, broke into what appeared to be a mindless smile. His eyes were so pale they could hardly be called blue or gray; they were almost one with the whites so that Carver couldn’t even be sure they were trained on him. He moved toward Carver with confidence and a surprising liquid grace. When he drew back a gigantic fist, Carver shifted his weight and swung the cane hard, using both hands.

The fist opened in a flash and caught the cane. It was snatched from Carver’s grip as if he’d been fishing and hooked a shark. The man snapped the cane in half and tossed it in a corner, then effortlessly kicked the desk aside so he’d have more room. Carver had been leaning with his thigh against the desk and would have fallen, only one of the giant hands grabbed the front of his shirt and supported him. He punched the man’s stomach, and pain lamed his right hand and wrist as he made contact with a large silver belt buckle.

He felt himself being dragged across the office, then he was slammed against a wall, lifted, and held there with his back pressed to the plaster and the mammoth fist still clenching his shirt front. He heard material rip and he eased down a bit inside the shirt, then he was held fast. He tried to knee the man in the groin with his good leg, but his knee made contact with a tree trunk of a thigh and bounced off.

That seemed to irritate the big man. With his free hand he began slapping the left side of Carver’s head, holding him in such a way that with each blow his head would bounce off the wall and into the next slap of the meaty palm. It was making a
bam-pocka-bam-pocka-bam-pocka!
sound, like a speed bag being rhythmically pummeled in a gym. Pain exploded in Carver’s head and he felt bile rise in his throat.

Then the dizzying pain and motion stopped abruptly and he felt himself slide down the wall until his feet were on the floor. The fist balled around his shirt still held him tight, and he was staring at the man’s hairy chest, smelling stale perspiration and maybe gasoline.

“Stop going around asking your questions,” the man said. It was a rumbling voice not at all like his high-pitched giggle.

To emphasize his demand, he shook Carver like a lifeless doll. Carver couldn’t summon the strength to resist the whiplike motion. His head began bouncing against the wall again, causing an increasing pain that made him nauseated.

“You understand my meaning?”

“Who are you?” Carver managed to gasp.

Bam-pocka-bam-pocka-bam!
The room whirled and jerked crazily and Carver could barely see it through his tears as his head bounced between palm and wall again.

He was on the floor then, with no recollection of having fallen. His head pulsated with pain and his stomach heaved. There was a terrible stench that it took his addled brain a few seconds to recognize—feet! He saw one of the boat-size, odorous white sneakers draw back. It kicked him almost lazily yet with such force that he felt his breath shoot from his lungs.

“Stop going around asking questions,” the man growled again. “Do you get my meaning this time?”

“Got it,” Carver moaned. There was a hitch in his voice because he couldn’t catch his breath. He hoped he’d spoken clearly enough to be understood.

“Agreed?” the voice thundered above him.

“Agreed,” Carver confirmed.

Nausea overcame him and bile tasted like copper at the base of his tongue. He turned his head toward the wall, trying not to vomit.

“You bastards,” the giant said calmly, “you learn hard, but you learn.”

Carver was braced for another kick at any moment. Then he realized he could no longer smell the man’s huge feet.

He turned his head, craned his neck, and saw that he was alone in a room that was tilting and swaying. He let himself lie flat on his back, breathing more freely now, taking in oxygen and waiting for his stomach to settle and his head to stop aching. There was a stitch of pain in his right side where he’d been kicked, as if he’d run too far and become winded.

What appeared to be a small brown spider was on the ceiling, and he found himself staring at it, mesmerized, trying to determine if it was actually moving or if its subtle change of position was only in his mind. Then he wondered if it was even a spider. The eyes could play tricks.

His stomach calmed down to a knot of pain and the nausea became steady but controllable. His head began to ache more.

He rolled over and started to crawl toward the closet, where a spare cane was hooked over the clothes rod, but every time he moved, dizzyness swept over him and he had to stop.

The phone had fallen to the floor with the rest of whatever was on the desk when the big man had shoved it aside to get at Carver. The receiver had miraculously stayed on the hook. Or maybe the giant had for some reason replaced it. Carver rolled onto his back, then his side, and could reach the phone.

He punched out the number of the cottage, getting it right on the third try. His arm and hand told him the receiver was pressed to his ear, but he couldn’t feel it as the phone on the other end of the connection rang, rang, rang.

Finally, Beth’s voice.

Carver managed to mumble something into the phone that even he couldn’t understand. He was alarmed to find he couldn’t recall what he’d attempted to say. A plea for help. He knew that. Jesus, his mind was mush and he couldn’t think!

He rolled onto his back again, still clinging to the receiver and hoping he wasn’t pulling the cord from the phone jack.

A spider, he decided with satisfaction, staring straight up at the small brown dot that undoubtedly had moved a few feet from where he’d noticed it on the ceiling earlier. The question of its authenticity was answered.

It was definitely a spider.

“Fred?”

He made an effort and dragged his mind down from the ceiling. “At the office,” he said.

“Fred!” Alarm in her voice now.

“C’mon in here. Need some help.”

“What’s happened?”

“Big guy . . . slammed my head , . . warned me . . .”

And suddenly he wondered if the man had been demanding he stop asking questions about Marla? Or about Brant?

That was the question Carver needed answered. Not the one about the spider.

“Beth?”

“I’m getting you an ambulance, Fred.”

“No, just you . . .”

“. . . ambulance,” he heard her say again as the room dimmed, then became dark.

He should never have called her. She was always bitching at him for never wanting to see a doctor, as if a pill . . .

The floor pressing against his back spun and dropped faster and faster through the darkness, a wild carnival ride from long ago.

His pain, and his question, followed him into unconsciousness.

C
ARVER FLOATED UP
from sleep slowly, listening to women’s voices far away. Light seemed to sift beneath his closed eyelids, and he couldn’t understand what the women were saying. Soft voices, distant murmurs.

He moved his head only slightly, but it exploded in pain.

“Lie still,” one of the women was saying, nearer to him now. Was hers the hand on his shoulder? When he tried to move again, a sharp pain grabbed at his side and his headache flared.

“Lie still, Fred.”

He opened his eyes and saw Beth standing over him. Above her head was a white metal smoke alarm, and a stainless steel pipe with a green curtain slung from it by plastic hooks. A faint medicinal scent struck him and he knew he was in a hospital room.

“The nurse has gone to get an ice pack for your head,” Beth told him.

“It doesn’t hurt if I lie very still,” Carver said.

Beth smiled. “Good.” There were tears in her eyes. “Lie still, then.”

Most of the room’s illumination came from indirect lighting around the perimeter of the ceiling. Vertical blinds on the window were angled so that only cracks of light penetrated and he couldn’t see outside. “Where am I?”

“You’re in Good Samaritan Hospital, Fred. After you called me, you were found in your office unconscious.”

“So you brought me here?”

She shook her head no. “Ambulance. To Emergency. By the time I got here they were well on their way to having you diagnosed.”

“And?”

“Concussion, and a cracked rib.”

“How bad?”

“Rib not bad, concussion not good.”

“Huge guy came into the office—”

“I know, Fred. You were babbling yesterday when you were half conscious.”

Oh-oh. “Yesterday?”

“Right. It’s”—she glanced at her watch—“two-fifteen now. That’s in the
A.M.,
Fred. You remember anything else about the big guy, now you’re awake?”

“That’s an odd question,” Carver said, “considering I was half conscious when you heard me tell it the first time and wouldn’t remember what I said.”

She grinned. “Testing you, Fred. Your gray matter’s still working OK.”

He told her the story as he recalled it. He didn’t remember calling her on the phone but he took her word for it, hoping it wasn’t another of her tests.

A stout, redheaded nurse came in with an ice pack and laid it gently on Carver’s forehead.

“Better?” she asked.

“I don’t need it,” Carver said.

The nurse removed the ice pack and set it on the green plastic tray on the table by the bed. Also on the tray were a green plastic water pitcher sweating with condensation and a small green plastic glass. Next to the tray was a box of white tissues, one erupting from it like a freeze-frame explosion.

“It’s right here if you change your mind,” the nurse said. She came around the bed and pinned the cord with the call button to the sheet where he could reach it easily. “I’ll be nearby if you need me.” Whenever she moved, her rubber-soled shoes yipped softly on the slick floor.

Another woman entered the room, dressed not in white like the nurse but wearing a surgical gown the same green as the water pitcher and glass. She was a dark-haired, attractive woman about forty, average height but slender, with shrewd, assessing eyes, gaunt cheeks, and lips that pouted crookedly as if she were thinking so hard she was making a face. The name tag on her gown said she was Dr. Woosman.