Accustomed to the Dark (24 page)

“Fine. But he doesn't know where, exactly, Lucero and Martinez are hiding out?”

“Somewhere near Harmony Station. Back in the swamp somewhere. But listen. I'm way ahead of you. There's a man in Clearwater—that's near Tampa. He knows the Glades. Probably better than anybody in the state. Used to live there. I talked to him. He's willing to go in there with you, help you find them, but he's going to cost.”

“What's his name?”

“Carpenter. That's what he calls himself, anyway. I think the name's a flag. I'm pretty sure he used to be a spook. CIA, maybe.”

“I don't care what he calls himself, so long as he can help me find Martinez.”

“If they're there, he'll find them. You want his number?”

“Go ahead.”

He gave it to me.

“Thanks, Dick,” I told him. “Look, I apologize for being so abrupt. I've been kind of ragged lately.”

“Yeah, I know. No problem. Give Carpenter a call. He's expecting to hear from you.”

“I'll call him now.”

“Listen, one other thing. He's a little weird. Carpenter, I mean.”

“Weird how?”

“You'll find out. I just wanted to let you know up front.”

“All right, Dick. Thanks. I'll talk to you later.”

We hung up. I dialed the number he had given me. After two rings, a man's voice came on. “Carpenter.” The voice was soft but raspy, almost a whisper.

“This is Joshua Croft. Dick Jepson said I should call you.”

“Where are you now?”

“Tallahassee.”

“Jepson said you left New Orleans this morning.”

“Yeah.”

“Get some sleep. In the morning, find Nineteen South and take that. You're about five, six hours away. Call me when you get to Dunedin. I'll give you the rest of the instructions then. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Did Jepson tell you how much this'll cost?”

“No.”

“Five hundred a day. Thousand-dollar retainer.”

“Fine,” I told him.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

25

I
LEFT
T
ALLAHASSEE
at seven-thirty in the morning. The sun was shining brightly in a sky of blue, a blue much softer and paler than the blue that domed the New Mexico high desert. The air was warm and threatened to become a lot warmer.

For a few hours, Route 19 was mostly clear, slowly rolling over green farmland and pasture. But when it entered Pasco County, it became an endless belt of shopping centers, gas stations, automobile showrooms, fast-food emporiums, malls that ranged from strip to large to very large. The empty plains of Kansas and Texas began to seem a lot more inviting.

The speed limit was posted at fifty miles per hour, but not many of the drivers seemed to notice, probably because half of them were legally blind.

Years ago, when I was first learning to drive, someone told me that if you saw, sitting in the front seat of the car ahead, two white-haired women or a single man wearing a hat, you should start being very careful. A lot of the cars on Route 19 held two white-haired women or single men wearing hats. Some of the cars seemed to hold no one at all—until I passed them, cautiously, and looked to the right and saw a tiny old man, or a tiny old woman, leaning forward to peer over the dashboard, hands grimly clamped to the sides of the steering wheel.

I reached Dunedin at a little after one. I pulled into a 7-Eleven, refilled the gas tank, and called Carpenter. He gave me terse, whispered directions. I returned to the car and I followed them.

I got off Route 19 at Sunset Point Road, turning right, and followed that for a mile or so and then turned right again and drove past a small lake on my left, bordered with what looked like saw grass. I turned left, drove for about a hundred yards, and turned left again, into Carpenter's gravel driveway. It was hard to believe that I was within a pistol shot of Route 19 and its traffic.

It was a big white frame house with a big screened-in porch on a huge piece of property that sloped down to the flat blue lake. The sweep of lawn was very green in the shade of tall live oaks bearded by lacy wisps of Spanish moss. On the lush grass before the house stood two white statues of storks, and I was just thinking that they were a bit hokey when the statues lifted their wings in slow motion and magically rose off the ground to sail slowly up between the trees and vanish.

I parked the car beside an old gray Ford pickup, got out, walked up to the front door. I knocked at the door.

The door opened.

Carpenter was tall and rangy, in his late fifties but very fit. His square face had the kind of reddish tan you don't get from coconut oil. His white hair was closely cropped, brushed flat and forward along his scalp. He wore brown leather walking boots, neatly pressed khaki slacks, and a gray plaid shirt of thin flannel, the sleeves folded back from thick red wrists.

Across his corded throat, notching the bottom of his Adam's apple, was a thin white scar. Whatever had caused the scar had probably also caused the raspy whisper I'd heard over the phone.

He held out his hand and I took it. It was calloused and strong.

“You had lunch?” he whispered.

“No.”

He nodded. “Not much in the house. I'll take you out. You want to drive?”

“You're welcome to it.”

He nodded. “We'll use the truck.”

Carpenter drove the truck back to Sunset Point Road and aimed it toward the west.

“What kind of food?” he asked me. “Any preference?”

“So long as it's not gray,” I said.

He turned to me. “Gray?”

“I've been eating a lot from the gray food group lately.”

He smiled briefly, a flicker of movement at the right side of his mouth, quickly there, quickly gone. It seemed less a sign of amusement than a recognition that amusement was expected. “Chinese okay?” he said.

“Fine.”

He nodded. “I know a place.”

He didn't say anything else for a while. I assumed that when he wanted to talk about Lucero and Martinez, he would.

Traffic was heavy but he drove well. We went past neighborhoods of low, ranch-style suburban homes. Past a small shopping center—a 7-Eleven, a pizza place. Past a large brick church on a broad green lawn. Past some more suburban neighborhoods. Into, and then out of, the shade of some overhanging live oaks. Past another neighborhood, this one older, the houses taller, their paint chipped and faded.

The road ended at an intersection. Beyond the cross street was the Gulf of Mexico, the blue water winking in the sunlight, a few faraway sailboats loafing across it. This was the first time I'd been near a large body of water since Rita and I had stayed in Catalina. Out there in the distance, maybe a hundred feet up, a pelican wheeled in a turn and then knifed back its wings and plunged like a rocket toward the sea.

Carpenter made a left. As we went through a short strip of cheap motels, the Gulf disappeared behind them. We drove through a quiet, slightly rundown area. Through downtown Clearwater, brick buildings, old-fashioned gaslights. Past a park on the left, a large brown hotel on the right.

Marching along the sidewalks in front of the hotel were brisk young men and women wearing what looked like uniforms, some of them nautical, some of them military.

“Who are they?” I asked him.

“Scientologists,” he whispered. “The hotel, that's their international headquarters.”

I couldn't tell from the whisper how he felt about Scientologists. He didn't ask me how I felt, and I didn't tell him.

We drove for another two or three miles and then Carpenter turned right. Past a golf course, down a slope through some trees, up to what appeared to be a guardhouse squatting in the center of the road. As Carpenter rolled down the truck's window, a fat man in a security guard's uniform leaned from the window of the small building.

“Lunch,” Carpenter told him.

The man nodded, saluted him with a jaunty wave.

Carpenter shifted gears and gave the truck some gas. He turned to me, smiled his fleeting smile. “They like to keep out the riffraff.”

“Who could blame them.”

When we swung up to the right, through some more trees, I saw an enormous white building about two hundred yards away, three or four stories tall and stretching out, left and right, for hundreds of yards.

“The Belleview Mido,” Carpenter said.

We parked in the big parking lot and we walked up to the entrance. Shiny glass and polished copper, it had obviously been added long after the original building had gone up.

Inside, beyond the expanse of gleaming lobby, the corridors seemed to go on forever. We finally reached the restaurant. It was a small place, elegant and subdued, done in black and dark blue. A hostess seated us and asked if we'd like a drink. I asked for a beer, Carpenter for an iced tea.

A waitress brought us the drinks and a pair of menus, left us to decide. “What's good?” I asked Carpenter.

“Most of it,” he said.

Small talk evidently wasn't his strong suit.

When the waitress returned, Carpenter ordered something with tofu. I ordered hot and sour soup and Szechuan Chicken.

As she left, Carpenter sat back in his chair and said to me, “Okay. What's the story on these men?”

I told him about Martinez first. I was halfway through with it when the waitress came back, carrying our food. Carpenter held up his hand to me. “Eat now,” he whispered. “Talk later.”

We ate. The food was good. After the waitress had cleaned away the plates, Carpenter nodded to me. “Go ahead,” he said.

I told him the rest of it. I mentioned Rita's coma, but not the fever. He listened quietly, nodding from time to time.

Then I told him about Luiz Lucero. He showed only two reactions throughout it all. When I said that Lucero had been a Marielito, he frowned slightly. When I told him about Lucero shooting his victims in the eyes, his mouth twitched in that small quick smile, and he shook his head slightly. I got the feeling that he'd made an aesthetic judgment.

“Okay,” he said, when I finished. “We find them. Then what?”

“We bring them back.”

“Likely they'll have something to say about that.”

“We may have to persuade them.”

“Uh huh. You have weapons?”

“A pump shotgun. Slugs and double ought shot. A nine-millimeter Beretta. A couple of thirty-eights.”

The mouth twitched. “Loaded for bear.”

“And a Swiss Army knife.”

Another twitch. “I've got most of the gear we need, back at the house. You need another pair of boots. And we need some supplies. We'll get them up this afternoon.”

“What's wrong with the boots?”

“They're fine for Roy Rogers. He didn't spend much time in the swamp.”

I nodded. He knew the swamp and I didn't. “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow morning, early. You have the retainer?”

“You'll take a check?”

He shrugged. “Sure.” He didn't need to tell me that the check had better be good.

I wrote him a check. He used his own cash to pay for the lunch.

The air had kept its threat and gotten warmer. When we returned to the truck, the interior was as hot as a sauna. As I climbed in, I felt a droplet of sweat prickle down my ribs. I wondered what the Everglades would be like this time of year.

We drove back the way we'd come, along Sunset Point, passing the turnoff for Carpenter's place and continuing on to Route 19. In a big shopping center, we stopped at a sporting goods store. Inside, we picked up a blend of insect repellent and sunscreen, some packages of gorp, and some freeze-dried food, half of it vegetarian. I tried out a pair of comfortable walking boots, leather and Gore-Tex. As I was lugging them toward the cash register, Carpenter appeared at my side and handed me three lightweight brown and green camouflage shirts, starched and pinned to card-board inserts.

“We'll wash them when we get home,” he whispered. “Otherwise the starch'll drive you crazy. You have a cap?”

“No.”

“Hang on.”

I hung on.

When he returned, he handed me a floppy gray cotton hat. “The brim gives you some neck coverage.”

“Yes, dear.”

Now there was a hint of irritation in the quick smile. “This is why you're hiring me.”

“Yeah. Personal shopper.”

He shrugged, smiled. “Forget the hat. Fry your brains out.”

“No.” I smiled. “You're right. I'll take the hat.”

I paid for everything with my credit card.

Back at the truck, we dumped it all behind the seats. Carpenter turned to me. “We'll get some food for tonight. Can you live without meat?”

“If I have to.”

He nodded. “Come on.” I went.

A few doors down from the sporting goods store was a Safeway. I followed him into the building. He maneuvered a shopping cart free and I followed him down the aisles.