Years ago on the force Carver had learned from a veteran cop how to use a nightstick not as a club but as a lethal jabbing instrument. A cane should be even more effective than a nightstick. Or so Carver tried to convince himself through his fear, waiting for the young Latino to pounce for the kill.
A cripple deserved some respect, but not much, said the expression on the man’s intent face. There wouldn’t be much sport to this, so he might as well go right for the heart. It was survival time. Carver decided it was nice to be underestimated.
The man bent low at the waist, holding the knife well out in front of him. His arms were skinny but muscle- corded; his body was wiry and he moved neatly and economically on the balls of his feet. He had a matador’s meticulous balance and calm instinct for death.
Carver backed a step and made a deliberately feeble attempt to knock the knife away with the cane. The man drew back his arm easily, swelled with confidence, and stepped in fast for the kill.
Surprise. This time the cane snapped up off the ground, flinging dust with it. Its tip found the soft space just beneath the startled man’s sternum. Carver ignored the knife and eternity and drove the point of the cane hard into the man’s chest; he heard the loud whoosh of air explode from shocked lungs, saw spittle arc in the sunlight.
The man staggered back a few steps, almost fell. Surprise and rage contorted his face, along with the sickly expression of someone struggling to regain his breath.
He came at Carver again, more hunched over now rather than bent in a knife fighter’s classic stance. Carver crossed him up and struck with the cane instead of jabbing, laying the hard walnut across the side of the man’s face and quickly withdrawing the cane before it could be grabbed. That made the man pause, and Carver whipped with the cane and knocked the knife from his hand, maybe breaking the Latino’s wrist.
But the man gave no sign of pain. His hissing breath broke for a moment, then regained its relentless rhythm, was perhaps louder.
The Latino was game. He picked up the knife with his left hand and came again. Carver jabbed at him, missed. The man twirled like a dancer and rushed him. Carver let himself fall to the left, dropping to the ground to avoid the slashing knife blade, and as the man flashed by him he hooked a bare ankle with the crook of his cane, held on tight against the sudden yank of checked body weight. The slippery walnut cane sprang alive and tried to fly from his perspiring fingers, then suddenly lost its life-force and became once more inanimate.
There was no scream. No sound other than the scuff of a sandal in the dirt. Abruptly, the man with the knife was gone.
At first Carver didn’t understand what had happened. Then he used his arms to scoot to the road shoulder and the edge of the embankment. He looked down.
The man lay sprawled on his back in black shallow water at the base of the embankment. Somewhere during his roll down the slope, he’d taken his own knife high in the stomach. Probably, as he’d continued to roll, the blade had slashed around inside him, caught the heart. His hand was curled around the knife as if he’d tried to remove it before he’d died. The red shirt and blue pants were twisted on him, making his limp body seem thin and childlike, harmless. As Carver watched, something long and green-a snake? lizard? the man’s soul?-slithered quickly away into the lush foliage, fleeting as an illusion.
Carver gripped the cane and stood up. He was trembling so violently that he had to lean against the sun- heated metal of the Olds to keep from falling back down. The fetid, rotting scent of the swamp almost overcame him, sending waves of bitter nausea through him. He swallowed, hearing phlegm crack in his dry throat. The man had tried to kill him. For what? For his money? his wristwatch and ring? for pleasure?
Beneath the Florida tropical sun, Carver was sweating beads of ice. He’d never killed anyone, not as a cop or as a private detective. Hadn’t come close to it. That kind of thing done with light consequence was for books, television, and movies. Having killed the Latino was going to take some hard getting used to.
A steady, pulsing sound helped to calm him, as if his wildly hammering heart were adjusting its pace to it. He realized then what he heard. The white Escort’s engine was still idling; he could see the car’s whiplike antenna vibrating.
Now what?
Carver had heard about small-town southern police. They were tough, bureaucratic, and suspicious. The man he’d killed might have been a local, popular, never known to get in trouble. One of those with a dark side known only to himself and briefly to his victims. How could Carver explain this to Armont? Or should he try to explain?
Why not? he asked himself. He hadn’t done anything wrong, God damn it! The man had tried to kill him. He, Carver, had nothing to hide or fear! He reminded himself of some of the rape victims he’d seen, the wronged and ravaged, uncomprehendingly wondering at their guilt.
It was all emotion, had nothing to do with logic.
But he could change the tire, get in the Olds, drive away, and his part in the man’s death probably would remain unknown. The prospect was tempting, but Carver couldn’t bring himself to run from the awesome finality of having killed a man. That would make it worse for him somehow, even if he was never suspected.
Carver realized that his hands were shaking. He felt cold. He glanced to the side of the road where the man had gone over the embankment and his mind flashed on the lifeless face, the unseeing but infinitely wise flat eyes staring up at him.
Carver reminded himself that he’d been a cop in a city with problems. He was supposed to be used to that kind of thing. But how many cops, of the public or private variety, ever actually killed someone?
He again felt the desire to change the tire, climb into the Olds, and get out of there. But he resisted it. He began to feel better. The trembling had passed; his hands were steady now.
Ten minutes later, a pickup truck loaded with jagged sections of broken concrete came laboring around the bend. Carver flagged it down, stood in the dust and told the shirtless kid behind the steering wheel there had been an accident and that a man was dead, and asked him to drive into Solarville and send the police.
Then he spat grit from his mouth, sat down on the hard ground in what little shade the Olds provided, and hoped he’d done the right thing.
High and far away, the large bird was still circling above the swamp, its arced wings fixed to the wind.
CHAPTER 16
Carver was free to leave Solarville police headquarters late that afternoon. Armont had waited for the coroner’s preliminary report and lab findings before speaking with him. The chief didn’t like somebody coming into his quiet if corrupt little town and causing problems. Not that he seriously thought Carver had murdered the Latino, but problems of the sort that were raised could lead to problems of another sort. And Armont didn’t need more problems of any sort.
“We snooped around and found the dead man’s clothes and identification in a locker at the bus station,” he’d said to Carver, when Carver had sat down before Armont’s desk. Armont remained standing behind the desk, absently rubbing his protruding stomach with his left hand, as if he suspected he might give birth to something he had grave doubts about. “His name was Silverio Lujan. He was a Marielito.”
Carver knew about Marielitos. In 1980 Castro emptied the prisons and mental institutions of Cuba and sent the inmates, along with legitimate refugees, in the boat lift from Mariel harbor in Cuba to Florida. Only a small percentage of the Mariel refugees were Marielito Banditos, as the press called them for a while. But their numbers were in the thousands. Some of them never were set free on American soil. And many of them had been returned to Cuba by agreement with Castro in 1985. But thousands remained in the United States, and they were criminals of such fierce nature that even the hardest homegrown criminals feared them in or out of prison. It hadn’t taken long for the Marielitos to become deeply involved in drugs, prostitution, and murder.
Murder.
“Why would a Marielito try to kill me?” Carver asked.
Armont stopped massaging his stomach paunch and let both hands drop to his sides, as if suddenly they had become unbearably heavy. “Maybe somebody hired him. He did an expert job of driving a honed piece of steel into your tire, so it would go flat suddenly in a short distance when the metal worked its way loose. Nifty. Or maybe he wanted to rob you.”
“He never asked for money,” Carver said.
