Carver, though he wasn’t sure why. Burr might very well be right about an impending drug buy with Marielito involvement. “Why didn’t you tell me Silverio Lujan had a brother?” he asked.
“I didn’t know it at the time,” Burr admitted. “It got by us. I’m sorry.” He admitted the mistake and apologized with an easy grace. Carver thought a little better of him. Or maybe Burr was used to admitting mistakes and apologizing, had gotten good at it.
“Will brother Jorge forgive and forget?” Carver asked.
Burr shook his head no; the blue eye was bright as a stalking bird’s. “You spilled Marielito blood, family blood. That’s why I came here, to warn you and ask if you wanted protection. Someone to watch you, maybe move in with you until this is settled.”
“It seems a long way from being settled,” Carver said. “You don’t even know where Jorge Lujan is, or if he knows his brother is dead.”
“He knows by now,” Burr assured him.
“I’ll live alone,” Carver said. “Not that I don’t think your protection can be effective. But it has its time limit. And I can’t do my job with a DEA man following me around on his scooter.”
Burr didn’t acknowledge the mild slur tossed at his organization. He turned and gazed out at the rolling ocean. “So many damn miles of coastline,” he said. “So many ways to get the stuff in from Mexico or South America. And so many people making so much money the easy way, at other people’s expense, off other people’s misery.” He turned back toward Carver. “You got any ideas on how to stop them?” he asked.
Carver had been put in his place for that scooter remark. He had no idea, short of moving the citizens out of Florida and the U.S. Army in. And probably that would only slow the drug smugglers. “You’ve got a tough job,” he conceded. He held up a hand like a traffic cop warning a speeder to put on the brakes. “But please don’t bore me with statistics.”
“I wasn’t going to. But I think you might have grabbed a thread leading to something big. With more people involved than if this were simply a hundred-thousand-dollar buy.”
“Maybe the money’s a down payment.”
“These folks don’t extend credit, Carver. It’s all cash up front. That way they don’t have to get mad over a deadbeat or bad check and carve up someone. They do business in a very direct way.”
Carver knew just how direct. “What do you make of the map?” he asked.
Burr looked up and watched a sea gull glide over the cottage. He obviously wasn’t sure how much he should confide in Carver. Finally he said, “My guess is that the red-penciled area on the map is a drop point, where somebody’s going to pick up a load of smuggled narcotics.”
“Can a boat get that far into the swamp?”
“Maybe. But it might not be brought in by boat. The area circled is large, maybe three square miles. Most likely a plane will drop the shipment by parachute somewhere in the swamp inside the red-penciled area, and whoever’s going to pick up the drugs will go by boat to retrieve it. They install electronic signaling devices in shipments delivered that way; a man in a boat can hone in on them with a receiver tuned to the same frequency and go right to the drugs.”
“Wouldn’t he have to move fast, before someone else might pick up the signal? Someone like you?”
“Sure, but the smugglers have the jump on us; they know the frequency beforehand and the approximate location of the drug drop.”
“Sounds risky,” Carver said.
“It is risky. So’s stocks and bonds and betting on horses and cards and on where bouncing little balls will land on numbered wheels. But people do all those things because the potential payoff can be worth the risk. This is big business, Carver. We might be talking about a multi-million-dollar deal shaping up in the swamp near Solarville. I’m interested in making the potential profit not worth the risk this time around.”
“I’m only interested in finding Willis Davis,” Carver said. “And speaking of finding people, has Raymond Mackenzie been located?”
“You know about him?”
“Chief Armont told me.”
“He hasn’t been found yet. I’m aware of where he disappeared from; there might well be a connection with what interests us.”
“Or might not be.”
Burr straightened up and tucked in his white shirt more neatly. He wasn’t a large man, but he was built with compact strength, lean-waisted and with a springy kind of erectness to his posture. Carver wondered if there was military service in his background; he wondered about the eye.
“I lost the eye in Vietnam,” Burr said, experienced and sensitive enough to suspect what Carver was thinking. “Stepped on a Claymore mine.” He crossed his arms and looked directly at Carver. “What about the leg? How did it happen?”
“A holdup kid’s bullet,” Carver said. “I got careless. I should have checked the back room in a store that was being robbed. A kid with a gun was back there.”
“Don’t flog yourself about it,” Burr advised.
“I don’t,” Carver said. “Everybody gets careless now and then, and usually gets away with it. My timing was off.”
Screaming and squawking from the beach made both men pause and watch a couple of gulls fight over a dead something that had washed up onto the sand. They watched until one of the gulls flapped away with an object grasped in its beak. The defeated gull flew off in search of easier offerings from the sea.
“The way of life, huh?” Burr said.
“Some lives.”
“The way it is in our line of work, with the people we deal with. Maybe the way it is in most lines of work.”
Carver wasn’t sure about that. He didn’t think most assembly-line workers had to worry about being met on the road by a man with a knife. Burr walked over and stepped down off the porch. Carver envied him his two good legs.
“Don’t be careless again,” Burr cautioned. “You might be onto something bigger than you know. Be on the alert, think before you jump, be careful.” He made it sound like a Boy Scout oath.
Carver nodded to Burr and watched him round the corner of the cabin. A few minutes later a car engine about a hundred yards away racketed to life.
As Carver listened to Burr drive up the road toward the coast highway, he understood why the DEA man had parked so far away and come up on the house quietly. He wanted to demonstrate to Carver that his advice was sound. Be careful; you’re not as secure as you might think.
Carver decided to be careful. But he knew that being careful wouldn’t have made any difference on the road with Silverio Lujan. People like Burr fooled themselves about how much control they could exercise over events. So much of what happened in life, good or bad, was the result of luck. Or if you weren’t a gambler, you could call it fate. Carver didn’t think it made much difference what it was called; people had to learn to fend it off or roll with it in order to survive.
He went inside out of the sun, sat for a while gazing at the sea beyond his hanging plants, then called Edwina and made a date for lunch.
CHAPTER 24
Carver showered, then dressed in worn jeans, gray sweat-socks, his moccasins, and a black sportshirt with a riotous pattern of colorful tropical birds splashed over it. Edwina had an afternoon appointment to show some citrus-grove property outside of Del Moray, so she and Carver were going to meet where she recommended, a restaurant called Orange We All, on Highway 17 near Sanford.
Orange We All was quintessential central Florida. It was built to resemble a huge half-orange, complete with a stem and artificial leaves on top to hide the air-conditioning unit, and had laughing Disneylike characters painted all around it halfway up.
