and flips him over. Carr slides an arm under Bessemer’s arm and across his chest, and Bessemer’s head rolls back against Carr’s shoulder. Even in the dark, through the spray, Carr can see the ashen face, the blood flowing down his cheek, and the deep, depressed gash at Bessemer’s left temple. He puts his ear to Bessemer’s mouth and hears faint, uneven breathing.
“Howard,” he yells, again and again over the wind, and Bessemer mutters weakly. The rip is pulling them out and under, and pulling Bessemer from him. Carr strikes out perpendicular to the current-to what he thinks is the east.
The current is twisting them, and he fights to keep Bessemer’s face out of the water. His legs and shoulders are cramping, and his fingers, wound in Bessemer’s shirt, are numb. He closes his eyes and concentrates on his breathing, on coordinating it with his kicks and his sculling arm, on ignoring the lead in his thighs and the weight clutched against his chest. And finally he finds it-the metronome he’s been straining to hear, the rhythmic four count that silences the wind and the flailing sea: his heart, his lungs, in, out.
Carr loses himself in the cadence and loses track of time, and then, suddenly, the outbound surge is gone. They’re free of the rip. Carr keeps kicking and realizes that another current, a lateral one, is pulling them slowly eastward. He lets it carry them, lifting his head to look for lights or land or anything at all, but he sees only darkness. They’re well out of the bay now, he’s sure-well beyond the reefs-and the waves are larger here and even more chaotic. One lifts them up high, and for an instant Carr sees a light, or thinks he does, and then another wave breaks across them, nearly tearing Bessemer from his grasp. Carr catches his arm, pulls him close again, and gets a better grip across his chest, and it is only then he realizes that Howard Bessemer has died.
46
From this height there’s no trace of the storm-just pale sky, turquoise sea, and the edge of Cuba-brown and green and wrinkled as a fallen leaf. No trace, but he can still feel it moving in his arms and legs, and in his gut: a surge, a lift, a queasy drop. He can still hear the roar. Or is that the jet’s engines? Carr signals the flight attendant and asks for another coffee and a blanket. Half a day since he came out of the water, and still he can’t get warm.
He doesn’t know how long he was in. Hours, certainly. Long enough for the lateral current to carry him miles to the east. Too long for him to hang on to Howard Bessemer’s drowned and battered body. A wave finally tore it from his grasp, and some time afterward-he didn’t know how long-Carr’s foot found a sandbar, and eventually the shore.
It was a spur of rock off Old Robin Road, and there was a house under construction nearby, and a trailer to shelter in, once Carr had kicked in the door. He collapsed on a sofa, slept, and dreamed of nothing. In the drizzly morning, he’d hitched a ride with some housepainters to George Town.
A barefoot man in damp, salt-stained clothes hadn’t raised as many eyebrows as Carr had expected. Maybe the locals wrote it off to the exigencies of the storm, or the eccentricities of tourists. Maybe it was Carr’s still-wet cash that preempted their questions. In any event, it got him a ride to the strip mall, where he bought clothes and a toothbrush and a prepaid cell in a discount store. He washed up and changed in the store’s bathroom, then sat on a curb and made phone calls.
The first one was to his father, and the relief he felt when he heard Arthur Carr’s voice- Why the devil are you calling? You never call -took him by surprise. The next ones were to Valerie, and Bobby, and Dennis, and Mike, and Tina, and they all went unanswered.
Two tries, three tries, and then he’d taken a taxi to a cruise ship pier. He’d invested in sunglasses and a ball cap there, with a smiling pirate turtle stitched above the bill, and joined a large group of tourists riding a shuttle bus to the airport. He’d spotted two of Rink’s men in the terminal, but he stayed with the crowd and kept his ball cap low, and he didn’t think they’d seen him. At the gate he’d made more phone calls, but with no more success.
The operational puzzles-clothing, transpo, evasion-had kept Carr’s mind focused, anchored to the present and to the next step. When they were solved, and his pace slowed, other questions had crowded in. Questions about timing, about passwords, about access to Amy Chun’s laptop. About where the fuck the money was. Carr had no answers to them, but he didn’t mind that they filled his head. They gave him something to do and left no room for his anger, or for the images that seemed to rise up whenever he closed his eyes-of Howard Bessemer, white and drowned and dropping through black water.
Carr wakes with a start, and for an instant Bessemer’s soft round face floats before him. He squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again and looks out the window. In the distance he sees the towers of Miami.
It’s blue dusk when he arrives in Boca Raton. The rendezvous is on a quiet street of breeze-block homes in earshot of 95, and just two exits from the airport. Like every other house in the neighborhood, it’s a neat, one-story rectangle, with a shallow pitched roof, a carport, and a brown lawn. It’s painted some pastel shade, maybe pink, maybe yellow, though in this light everything is gray to Carr. He drives past the house and turns the corner three blocks down.
The whole ride up from Miami, he’s thought more about the timing-how tight it was, how rapid the sequence of events. Dennis gets Prager’s password. Prager’s money is stolen. Prager gets a call, telling him he’s been robbed by Greg Frye. Prager grabs them from the hotel lot. All in the space of not quite three hours. By then, Dennis, Bobby, and Mike would’ve been in the air, en route to Miami-according to the plan, at least. But no one seemed to care much about the plan these days-not about Carr’s plan, anyway.
He’s thought about Dennis too. Young Dennis, skinny Dennis, pimply Dennis, tentative Dennis, genius Dennis. It’s hard for Carr to believe that he’s involved, but impossible to figure a way that he’s not. Dennis and Valerie both. Dennis had Prager’s password, Valerie had access to Amy Chun’s hardware. They couldn’t do it on their own, but they could do it together, and Valerie could be very persuasive.
He drives past the house a second time. The carport is empty; the shades are drawn; no lights-the house has a buttoned-up look. The streets are quiet. Few cars and no pedestrians. He turns the corner, parks two blocks down, and sits behind the wheel for forty-five minutes, until night has finished falling.
There’s a tension in his stomach as he walks down the empty sidewalk, and it winds tighter as he vaults the alley fence into the darkest corner of the house’s backyard. No lights back here either, and no open windows. Buttoned up. He’s soft and quiet moving up on it, but that’s more habit than anything else. He has the feeling he could launch fireworks and no one would care. The house has that look.
He stands against the back wall, by the screen door, and listens. A chorus of night bugs, a television playing in Spanish, half a block down, and the ceaseless whisper of 95. Nothing from inside. He takes out his cell and punches Dennis’s number once more and holds the phone away from his ear. He rests his head against the door, and hears-very faintly-a ringing from inside.
“Fuck,” he says aloud, and he cuts off the call and punches Bobby’s number. Again, faintly, a ringing inside. “Fuck,” he says again. He snaps on plastic gloves, takes a flashlight and a screwdriver from his pocket, and wishes he had something more substantial.
He slides the screwdriver into the frame and the back door opens with a whisper, and the smell hits him right away. It’s one that’s familiar, but still, his stomach nearly empties. He rubs his eyes and pulls his shirt up to his nose and steps inside.
It’s a small house, and the smell has filled it to bursting, and so have the heat and the flies. It takes no searching to find them: they’re in the living room, Bobby sideways on the sofa, Dennis genuflecting by a card table. Carr can’t tell how long they’ve been dead.
He stands over Bobby’s body and runs the flashlight up and down. There’s a beer bottle on the cushion next to him, and the remains of a cigarette that scorched his pants and the flesh underneath. The flies buzz and hover and Carr shoos them away from Bobby’s head. He can see the entry wounds then-one to the back of the neck, one to the back of the head. He can’t tell if there are powder burns.
Dennis also has two wounds, also to the head and neck. His laptops are missing, but his clothes are there, still packed in a duffel, as are Bobby’s. Mike’s are not. Carr stands stock-still as a van drives slowly past, and then he leaves. He waits until he’s in the alley, two blocks away, before he throws up.
