Tropical Heat (26 page)

“The scar isn’t as bad as you think,” Carver said. “And plastic surgery—”

“Good-bye,” Verna Blaney said in a flat voice.

“At least you’ve got two good legs,” Carver said.

Oh-oh, the wrong thing to say, considering what Verna was sure he was thinking.

“And don’t bother coming back,” she said sternly. She took a step toward him and aimed the shotgun.

Carver felt the flesh bunch up on the back of his neck. He used the cane more nimbly than he thought he could and backed up several steps, staring at the black eternity inside the gun barrels. This was a tortured woman he’d caught at a bad time, one who saw before her a member of the sex she feared and distrusted. And she’d obviously had experience in handling a gun. A body sunk in the swamp’s quicksand might never be found.

The shotgun’s long barrels didn’t waver.

It was too nice a day for death. Carver continued his retreat.

When he was on the gravel driveway, near his car, he finally turned his back on Verna Blaney. He opened the door and tossed his cane on the seat.

“Mister!” Verna called, as he was about to lower himself into the Olds.

He turned, standing balanced by supporting himself on the open door, one hand on the warm chrome windshield frame.

“I don’t know anything about Sam Cahill,” she said. “Haven’t seen him in a long spell. Don’t want to. Don’t want to see you again, neither.” She raised the shotgun and fired a blast into the treetops. Birds screeched and flapped into the sky, like a scene from an old Tarzan movie; something Carver didn’t recognize gave an animal scream deep in the swamp.

He climbed the rest of the way into the Olds and drove away from there in a hurry. Verna Blaney still had the shotgun’s other loaded barrel to use against her fear and pain, and Carver’s flesh and blood.

He’d known women like her; she wanted male companionship more than she would admit to herself, and she hated men for that persistent desire, and for shunning her because of her scar. For what one or more men had done to her. Making her different. She was twisted and agonized in her loneliness.

And maybe able to kill.

When Carver got back to the Tumble Inn, he found Edwina sunning herself by the pool. She and two skinny, preteen boys in the deep end were the only ones there. One of the lads appeared to have an erection.

“Where have you been?” she asked, lowering her oversized sunglasses and peering coolly up at Carver above the frames.

“I wanted to talk to Verna Blaney.”

“And did you?”

“Not in any way productive. She ran me off her property. Threatened to shoot me. I would say she hates men.”

“Or would like to think so,” Edwina said. Savvy. Catty.

“I thought she might have some idea where Sam Cahill is, but if she does, she isn’t willing to share it.” Carver felt a bead of perspiration play over his temple, run down his cheek to tickle the side of his neck. Like an insect. He wanted to get in out of the heat. “Had lunch?” he asked.

“I was waiting for you.”

“Get dressed and we’ll drive into town,” Carver said. “Have us a bite. Maybe talk to Chief Armont again.”

Edwina hitched up the top of her suit and stood up from the chaise longue. The two boys splashing around at the other end of the pool took time out from any pretense and gaped at her in unabashed admiration. Carver thought they were developing good taste young.

Armont laughed when Carver told him about his encounter with Verna Blaney. “She usually reacts with disfavor toward men who drive out there uninvited to sweet-talk her, but I’ll admit she’s been a little extreme this time.”

“I wasn’t there to sweet-talk her.”

“Sure, but she don’t usually give her surprise callers a chance to say what they want, just runs them off. Generally she only uses shouts and threats, though, not a shotgun. You want to press an assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charge?”

“No,” Carver said. “Has Verna ever been really serious about a man?”

“She’s had her beaus,” the chief said, “but not for long. She doesn’t have any illusions about what men want from her. That scar disfigured her inside as well as out. Her daddy’s fault; he should have had the damn thing stitched up right after it happened. But he didn’t, cantankerous old asshole, and now it would cost a fortune to have a plastic surgeon fix that scar, and even then there’d be no guarantee. At least that’s what old Ned Blaney used to say whenever anybody brought up the subject.”

“What kind of man was her father?”

“Nobody really knows,” Armont said, pecking out a rhythm with a pen point on his desk. “Kept to himself, ran his airboat rides for tourists who were driving by on the main highway and got steered to his place by the signs he had up and down the road. I think he was fond of Verna, and a good father in his way, but crude. Too crude to realize how deep a scar like that might run in a pretty young girl.”

Carver thanked the chief and turned to Edwina.

“You two looking for a place to eat lunch,” Armont said, “The Flame should be open now.”

“I drove by there this morning and it was closed,” Carver said.

“They only serve lunch and supper on Sundays,” Armont explained. “Folks like to sleep in late or go to church Sundays in Solarville, depending on what they been up to the night before.” If there was irony in his voice, Carver couldn’t catch it.

He and Edwina left Chief Armont and had salads and coffee at The Flame. There weren’t many customers, but people were wandering in at a steady pace. Soon the place would be crowded. Emma and the horsey waitress were on duty, but not Verna Blaney.

When Carver asked Emma about Verna, she said that Verna wouldn’t be in that day or any other, except possibly as a customer. She’d quit the day before yesterday, and rumor had it that she’d sold her house and ground and was moving away. She’d had enough of Solarville, she’d said. Couldn’t blame the woman, the waitress confided in a lowered voice. Emma cautioned Carver that what she’d just told him was only rumor.

Twenty minutes later, at the cash register, the tall waitress with the equine features told Carver and Edwina the same story and assured them that it was fact. The truth was slippery at The Flame, just like everywhere else.

“What next, O Sleuth?” Edwina asked, on the sunny sidewalk outside the restaurant.

Carver leaned on his cane with both hands and glanced up and down the street. There was little traffic, no pedestrians other than the two of them. “We go back to the motel and swim,” he said.

“I’ve already been swimming,” she told him.

“Then we’ll find something else to do. I can think of a few things. But we’re at a standstill right now because it’s Sunday and city hall won’t be open until tomorrow.”

Edwina looked curiously at him. “What’s city hall got to do with why we’re here?”

“We’ll go there tomorrow,” Carver said, “and use your real-estate expertise to find out whether the Blaney property’s been sold.”

“If it was sold recently, it might not be recorded yet.”

“That’s where your expertise comes in,” Carver said. “If it isn’t recorded, do you think you can talk to the right people in the right way, find out whether there’s been a transaction?”

“I think so. There can’t be that many title companies in town, and I’m in the business.”

That was the way Carver had it figured.

He drove them back to the Tumble Inn. But they didn’t swim. Instead they made love that afternoon in Edwina’s room, ate supper in the motel restaurant, and made love in the evening in Carver’s room. Each time they were together, lost in the exploration phase of their affair, it was better. Exhilarating. Bad memories were fading. They were both beginning to think highly of the Tumble Inn.

Carver was asleep when the jangling phone by the bed dragged him from deep, indecipherable dreams to the surface of wakefulness. He resisted, so the dreams couldn’t have been bad ones. As he pulled the ringing, vibrating instrument to him, he dropped it onto the floor. It bounced with a jingling protest.

He cursed, retrieved the receiver, and pressed it to his ear. He found the wrist near the end of his left arm and squinted at his watch: 10:35. A glance at the window told him it was dark outside. The 10:35 was P.M.

“Carver?” a voice buzzed in his ear.

“I think so.”

“This is Alex Burr. I’m here in Solarville. We’ve got some action tonight. Wear some old clothes and meet us on South Loop, where it curves near the swamp just outside of town.”

Carver wondered who the “us” were. The DEA? He supposed so. “When?” he asked.

Burr seemed surprised by the question. “Now. As soon as you can.” He hung up.

Carver listened to the static of the broken connection for a few seconds, then terminated his end of the conversation.

He decided not to wake Edwina. He slipped into an old pair of jeans that he’d brought in his new suitcase, put on his wrinkled shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows, and pulled on a fresh pair of socks and his moccasins. Then he got out of there, walking as lightly as he could with the cane.

“Now,” the man had said. Federal man. DEA. Best to listen. Now.

Carver carefully locked the motel-room door behind him, breathed in the warm swamp air with its fetid, primal scent, and woke up all the way.

The swamp loomed close and black around him, loud with the croaking cacophony of a thousand bullfrogs and the shrill, frantic buzzing of night insects. The moon was full and suspended low over the treetops, like an extraterrestrial mother ship overseeing all the wild madness below.

Working his tongue around the insides of his cheeks to remove the dry, sour taste from his mouth, Carver got in the Olds. He started the engine without gunning it, then pulled the car slowly and as quietly as possible from the parking lot. Then he drove fast toward South Loop.

He was eager now to find out what all the rush was about, and to learn what kind of action Alex Burr had planned for that night.

A
S
C
ARVER SLOWED THE
Olds and steered it gently into the curve on South Loop, a uniformed cop stepped out of the brush and into the glare of the headlights. He held up a rigid arm and hand almost in a Nazi salute, as if he were halting three lanes of traffic.

Carver pressed his foot on the brake pedal hard enough to make the Olds’s long hood dip. The cop waved him over toward where he was standing, waiting for him like a Berlin Wall guard.

“You Carver?” he asked, when Carver had stopped the car and stuck his head out the window. The cop was young and already thick around the middle. Another ten years of sitting in patrol cars or at a desk and he’d be downright fat; already his face was the jowly one of a middle-aged man, but his eyes were young, consciously expressionless peering out from the curved-moon shadow of his cap’s visor. He was putting on the tough front, hardening to his trade.

Carver showed him some identification. Official paper. That did it. The pudgy cop smiled a one-of-us smile and said, “Follow that road, sir. They’re waiting just over that rise. And I’ve been instructed to tell you to turn off your headlights.”

Carver didn’t see any road, but he killed his lights and aimed the Olds’s long snoot at the blackness of the swamp. Then, by moonlight, he did see that there was a narrow, mostly overgrown road leading to the rise the cop had pointed out. It wasn’t a dry road. Long bent grass glistened wetly between the shadows cast by the trees. Carver could see recently made tire ruts in front of him, and now and then the car would lurch and he could hear the sucking sound of swamp water beneath the wheels, telling him he was driving where no car should go.

As the Olds’s hood topped the crest of the rise and then dropped, Carver saw four cars parked close to each other near what looked like a broken section of fence. Two of the cars bore Solarville Police markings. There was a knot of men standing by the cars. Carver recognized Alex Burr, the cop Rogers, who had retrieved his cane from the smoked motel room, and the aggressively paunchy form of Chief Armont.

When he parked the Olds by one of the police cars and got out, he could see the dark, humped shapes of two airboats. What had appeared to be broken fence was part of a decrepit dock; the two boats were moored to it. Though Carver could hear water lapping, the airboats weren’t bobbing. They were sitting in the kind of shallow water they were made to skim.

Burr said hello to Carver and introduced him to two other men who were DEA agents. Armont nodded to Carver. He was wearing dark slacks and a short-sleeved blue shirt. His two men were in uniform. The DEA agents, including Burr, wore dark pants and black windbreakers with
DEA
lettered on their backs in foot-tall orange letters. The better to know friend from enemy if the action got heated. And heated action seemed to be anticipated: two of the agents were carrying semi-automatic shotguns as well as the handguns Carver was sure were concealed beneath the windbreakers.

Everyone except Burr seemed calm. He was in control, of himself and the operation, but it was easy to see that his adrenaline was pumping. There was a stiffness to his features and his single eye moved rapidly. When he spoke, tension like taut, vibrating wire grated in his voice. “Come on,” he said to Carver in his DEA way. “I’ll explain as we go.”

Carver didn’t ask where they were going. He limped to the nearest airboat, almost stumbling as his cane sank into the soft ground.

“Need some help?” Burr asked, trying to hurry him.

Carver declined, and almost dropped his cane as he scrambled into the boat and sat next to Burr. The boats were aluminum, about twenty feet long, with the familiar wide propellers in high cages mounted on the stern, well out of the water. They had everything to make them aircraft except wings. Armont, along with one of the DEA agents and the two uniformed cops, got in the other airboat. That boat was older and sat higher in the water. Carver peered at the two boat trailers half concealed in the reeds but couldn’t make out the license plates. He guessed the newer boat he and Burr were in was a DEA boat, the other belonged or was on loan to the Solarville police. A DEA agent sat behind the low windscreen in front of Carver. Up in the bow, a boyish blond agent with a pug nose, whom Burr had introduced as Marty something or other, was hunched over what looked like a small radio and was wearing bulky earphones that lent him a curiously mouselike appearance. Marty made a circular motion with his right arm, then pointed toward the swamp.