Bloodfire (25 page)

McGregor said, “Remember he was gonna feed you to the alligators.”

Beth surprised Carver. She nudged Gomez’s corpse with the toe of her shoe and said, “I remember. And further back than tonight. Good riddance, Roberto.”

McGregor looked at her with a flicker of approval.

Carver and McGregor got the bodies wrapped. Carver retrieved his Colt from where it was stuck in Junior’s belt and shoved it down his waistband at the small of his back. Then he picked up the Uzi the Brainards had confiscated from Beth, and a rifle, and wound them in plastic along with B.J.’s body.

B.J. wasn’t much of a problem. McGregor slung his plastic-clad corpse across his shoulders and carried him fireman-fashion to the truck while Carver and Beth trudged along behind.

McGregor found an old wheelbarrow in a toolshed near the shack, and they used it to transport Junior. Even then, they spent most of their time carrying him over soft mud, and Beth had to help several times when the wheelbarrow’s narrow wheel sank into the ooze.

They loaded the bodies in the cargo area of the Blazer. Carver sat in back with them and watched while McGregor opened the trunk of the blue Plymouth that had been parked at the motel. Beth dropped the rifle into the dark trunk, and McGregor hurriedly slammed down the lid and made sure the trunk was locked.

McGregor drove the heavily laden four-wheel-drive Blazer out of the swamp and to the interstate highway. He maneuvered the ruts and bumps as if he’d spent his entire life in Dark Glades. Like so many egomaniacs, he could rise to necessity and find dormant talents.

In less than an hour they’d reached the deserted construction site, and shortly thereafter the Brainards were buried like plastic-shrouded mummies in shallow graves. Clouds had closed in. The night was almost totally black, and only infrequent sets of speeding headlights, like tracer bullets on the distant detour, broke the darkness. The grisly job was completed in privacy.

When the last shovelful of loose earth had been tossed, McGregor stood back and placed a hand over his heart, his head bowed. For a moment Carver actually thought he was going to say a few words over the graves. What he said was, “Better thee than me, assholes.” Then he laughed. “Ready? Let’s get the fuck outa here.”

Carver was ready.

Carver and Beth stayed in Carver’s room at the Casa Grande that night. They heard distant sirens. McGregor, having a high time with Chief Morgan and the DEA. With the news media. A hero being born.

Beth snuggled close to Carver. They’d showered together, and she smelled like perfumed soap and shampoo.

She said, “You think McGregor can really make it work?”

Carver said, “Trust him.”

And fell asleep.

At Whiffy’s the next morning, the talk was of nothing other than what had happened in the swamp near the Brainards’ shack. How a big-time drug dealer and his partner had been killed during some kind of narcotics transaction, but the Brainards had escaped. Behind the long counter, Whiffy looked briefly at Carver and Beth and offered the opinion that Dark Glades had seen the last of the Brainards. Several customers agreed, and opined that that was just fine.

Carver and Beth ate their bacon and eggs silently, enjoying the cool breeze from the ticking ceiling fan.

Over fresh coffee, Beth stared across the table at Carver and said, “Guess I better tell you.”

He saw it in her eyes, though he didn’t understand it. Felt something cold close in on him. A premonition. “Tell me what?”

She inhaled and held her breath for several seconds, as if not wanting to turn the words loose. Then she said, “Adam’s not my son. He’s Melanie’s.”

Carver couldn’t believe it. He set down his cup too hard, almost breaking it against the saucer as he sloshed hot coffee onto his thumb. He sat back and stared at her.

Beth said, “I sorta borrowed Adam. Got Melanie to cooperate.”

“And your real son?”

“He died in childbirth. Not from drug addiction complications, but because he was a breech birth and the umbilical cord got wrapped around his neck. It was asphyxiation.”

“Roberto knew this? “

“No. I planted the heroin addiction story, just like I said. I didn’t know it’d turn him into an animal, out for revenge. Didn’t realize how ferociously he’d hunt me and try to kill me.”

“He was an animal to begin with, and he thought you killed his son.”

Beth bowed her head and began to sob quietly. “Christ, I don’t know, maybe I
did.
Maybe it happened because of the life I led. Because I let myself get pregnant by somebody like Roberto in the first place. He didn’t love me; he only married me for legal reasons—so I could refuse to testify against him if push came to shove in court. I was heartbroken when our baby died, but I saw it as an opportunity to get away. You don’t walk out on a man like Roberto; a marriage is over when
he
says so. If I got by with the heroin story, I figured he wouldn’t want me after the baby dying with an addiction, and that he’d think I’d be dead in a short while anyway, so he wouldn’t come looking for me. I was wrong.”

Carver said, “Jesus, you were wrong! About everything.” He tried to take a sip of coffee but found his hand was trembling too much. He placed the cup back in its saucer, gently this time, listening to the brief music of china on china as his hand shook. “You got me going, though. One lie after another.”

“Would you have helped me otherwise?” she asked calmly and sadly.

“No,” he admitted. The truth cut him like a blade. “If the baby’s not yours, why did you call Melanie from the motel?”

“I needed to keep you convinced, and I wanted to make sure Roberto hadn’t traced our moves and harmed Melanie for helping me.”

“You are something,” Carver said. “An actress good enough for the movies.”

Beth sat up straighter. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, as if she were infinitely weary, then gave Carver the look of a woman twenty years older. “I did what I had to in order to survive. Can’t you understand that?”

He said, “I do understand.”

“Then can you forgive me?”

Carver said, “No. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

Another thing he couldn’t do was look at her. He put down a ten-dollar bill to cover breakfast and a tip and stood up, then he limped out of there. She let him leave without calling to him.

Well, she was finished using him.

On the drive back to Del Moray he listened to the news on the Olds’s radio. McGregor was selling his story to the DEA and the media. Carver hadn’t doubted he would, but still he was impressed. The force of McGregor’s evil and ego was such that it engulfed and persuaded.

Carver had heard enough. He switched off the radio and settled back in the sun-warmed vinyl seat. The car’s canvas top was down. He draped a wrist over the top of the steering wheel and let the wind swirl around him.

As he drove past the highway construction site, he saw a procession of cement trucks with their mixers slowly revolving, lined along the dirt shoulder and inching forward as their stacks belched dark diesel fumes. One by one pouring the Brainard brothers’ gravestone.

I
T HAD BEEN THREE
months since Carver said good-bye to Edwina at the airport in Orlando. He’d stood and watched the swept-wing airliner rise in two-hundred-mile-per-hour slow motion from the runway, its engines trailing a haze of jet exhaust, and knew he’d never see her again. They’d been lovers, but they’d said good-bye as if they were strangers.

Beth Gomez had given the DEA secret depositions, and there’d been an unprecedented series of drug busts in Florida, as well as in Georgia and Louisiana. The Brainard brothers continued their forever sleep beneath a highway that, in Florida’s endless summer, would last beyond their natural span of years. Far into the next century, their bones might be discovered when the highway finally was repaved or repaired. By then, who and what they were would no longer matter, and the lives of everyone involved would have played out and been pushed into minor history by time.

Carver continued to work out of his office on Magellan Avenue, and he’d taken several cases. One was divorce work, two others were industrial theft. None of them was a challenge. He found himself doing the kind of drone work that reminded him of when he was with the Orlando police. Mostly he stayed around his beach cottage, watching the sea roll in and roll out, and feeling his life ebb and wear with the ponderous and relentless rush of the ocean. He was drinking too often, not shaving often enough.

Now and then Desoto would come to see him and they’d sit and sip beer and watch the sea, and Desoto would try to goad him from his lethargy. Desoto knew what was bothering Carver even more than the parting with Edwina.

Maybe Desoto had something to do with what happened at dusk on a hot, damp day when Carver was lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. He heard the screen door squeak open and closed, but he didn’t bother turning his head to see who’d entered. Not that many people came to visit. Probably if he looked he’d see Johnny the beach prowler, who liked to drop by and talk with Carver and show him his day’s haul of interesting shells and lost jewelry and coins. Or maybe he’d see Desoto.

Beth’s voice said, “You look like something the cat’d drag
out,
Carver.”

He rolled his head and focused his eyes on her. She was wearing a pale yellow dress and white high heels, had her hair pulled back. Looked fantastic. He felt something stir in him, sending tentacles through his mind to touch places he’d wanted to forget existed.

He said, “Didn’t expect visitors,” and resented the way his voice almost broke. The way he couldn’t look away from her.

She took a few elegant strides farther inside the cabin, like a queen surrounded by squalor. Standing in the soft light, she stared down at him the way people stare at furniture they think might be worth refinishing. He could smell her perfume—familiar, disturbing, pushing buttons in his memory.

She said, “McGregor’s not going to run for mayor.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Carver told her.

“Why not?”

“That night in the swamp, the rifle I handed you to put in the trunk of his car wasn’t McGregor’s, it was the Brainards’. McGregor’s rifle is wrapped in plastic and buried along with B.J. Brainard under the highway.”

Beth propped her hands on her hips and smiled down at him, figuring it out fast. “And the bullets in the Brainard brothers will match the rifle, which is registered to McGregor and is the gun that killed Roberto.”

“That’s it,” Carver said. “McGregor knows if he runs for mayor, I can see that the brothers’ bodies are discovered.”

“Wouldn’t that put you in jeopardy too? I mean, you’d be an accessory after the fact.”

“Yeah, but McGregor’s not sure I wouldn’t tip the law anyway.”

“Would you?”

Carver didn’t answer. Instead he said, “Were the last few months rough for you?”

“Sometimes. Better’n the alternative. Who can ask for more than that?”

He rolled his head again on the perspiration-damp pillow and gazed up at the too-familiar network of cracks in the ceiling. A wasp was crawling around up there; he remembered it buzzing and darting at the window this afternoon, seeking light and a way out.

Beth sighed and said, “I heard about the way you been pissing away your life out here. If you don’t wanna jump up outa that bed right now, it’s okay with me. But I gotta know.”

“Oh? Know what?”

“What I came here to find out. Whether you want me to go or stay.”

Without looking at her, Carver said, “Stay, please.”

She got undressed and climbed into the bed with him. The springs squealed wildly. She draped a long, dark leg over both of his, flung an arm across him. Then she rested her head on his chest and cried softly. They both could feel what was happening, and it made them sad and afraid and joyful all at the same time.

Lakes turning.

Seasons changing.

John Lutz is one of the foremost voices in contemporary hard-boiled fiction.

First published in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
in 1966, Lutz has written dozens of novels and over 250 short stories in the last four decades. His earliest success came with the Alo Nudger series, set in his hometown of St. Louis. A meek private detective, Nudger swills antacid instead of whiskey, and his greatest nemesis is his run-down Volkswagen. In his offices, permeated by the smell of the downstairs donut shop, he spends his time clipping coupons and studying baseball trivia. Though not a tough guy, he gets results. Lutz continued the series through eleven novels and over a dozen short stories, one of which—“Ride the Lightning”—won an Edgar Award for best story in 1986.

Lutz’s next big success also came in 1986, when he published
Tropical Heat
, the first Fred Carver mystery. The ensuing series took Lutz into darker territory, as he invented an Orlando cop forced to retire by a bullet that permanently disabled his left knee. Hobbled by injury and cynicism, he begins a career as a private detective, following low-lifes and beautiful women all over sunny, deadly Florida. In ten years Lutz wrote ten Carver novels, among them
Scorcher
(1987),
Bloodfire
(1991), and
Lightning
(1996), and as a whole they form a gut-wrenching depiction of the underbelly of the Sunshine State. Meanwhile, he also wrote
Dancing with the Dead
(1992), in which a serial killer targets ballroom dancers.

In 1992 his novel
SWF Seeks Same
was adapted for the screen as
Single White Female
, starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh. His novel
The Ex
was made into an HBO film for which Lutz co-wrote the screenplay. In 2001 his book
The Night Caller
inaugurated a new series of novels about ex-NYPD cops who hunt serial killers on the streets of New York City, and with
Darker Than Night
(2004) he introduced Frank Quinn, whose own series has yielded five books, the most recent being
Mister X
(2010).

Lutz is a former president of the Mystery Writers of America, and his many awards include Shamus Awards for
Kiss
and “Ride the Lightning,” and lifetime achievement awards from the Short Mystery Fiction Society and the Private Eye Writers of America. He lives in St. Louis.