This time he found Lujan’s legs easily, avoided a kick, clutched a knee, and worked his way down a bulging calf. He tried to grab Lujan’s ankle, then decided a pants leg would provide a better grip.
Bunching a thick cuff in his fist, he began to stroke in upward motions with his left arm and good leg, forcing himself and the struggling Lujan deeper.
In the darkness of the depths he felt Lujan writhing above him, trying to kick free, trying to bend his body enough to strike at Carver’s hand with the knife. But as long as Carver maintained their downward momentum it was impossible for Lujan to reach him with the blade. And as long as he held his grip on the pants cuff, it was impossible for Lujan to break free.
Carver’s lungs were burning and he was tiring rapidly as he took them deeper and deeper, into blacker, cooler water. Something brushed his leg. A fish? A strand of drifting seaweed? Whatever it was, it floated away like a brief premonition.
Lujan began struggling more violently above him, panicking. His free bare foot was beating with increased fury at Carver’s fist clenching the pants leg, but the resistance of the water robbed him of any power.
Carver forced them still deeper, feeling his ears pop from the pressure. Inanely, the words to an old seafaring song ran through his mind: “Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep…”
Then Lujan seemed to stop struggling. The leg in Carver’s grasp moved limply, lifelessly.
Carver could go no deeper. He was afraid he might not have enough air in his lungs now to reach the surface. He released his grip on Lujan’s pants leg and pushed himself away, flexed his aching fingers, and let himself rise, hastening his ascent by paddling with his hands and his tired good leg.
At least a minute passed, he was sure. Certainly it felt that long.
Then he broke the surface and saw a star-scattered dark sky that had never looked so vast. He sucked in a long, rasping breath, rolling onto his back. He rotated his head, looked around him.
He was alone on the moon-splashed, undulating surface of the sea.
Breathing deeply and regularly, getting his strength back as the burning sensation in his lungs lessened, he floated loosely.
He was farther from shore than he’d thought. The light of the channel marker seemed almost near enough to touch, the lights along the beach so distant, impersonal pinpoints like low stars.
It was oddly restful out there alone-relaxing. He rose and dropped with the sea rhythmically, softly, and it seemed from time to time that he actually fell asleep. He was strangely at home in the water, as if he belonged there and not on land: evolution in reverse to a point no one had anticipated-not Carver, not his therapist. His hours in the ocean had altered his being, saved his life.
The sea seemed to swell and ebb within him as he drifted in solitary peace.
Then, with a chilling jolt of fear, he imagined that Lujan might still be alive. It was possible. The man might be beneath him now, shooting up underwater with torpedo speed, the knife extended to slash into Carver’s vulnerable submerged softness.
He told himself that was absurd, that Lujan was dead.
But there was no way to be positive. The high and lonely yellow moon glowed down at him in benevolent warning. The sea rose and fell and sighed and urged caution, and return to life on land. “That’s where you belong,” it whispered. “Where you belong…”
Carver shook himself, rolled onto his stomach, and stroked toward shore.
CHAPTER 26
The corpse was found bobbing in the surf the next afternoon. A honeymooning couple from Detroit had spotted it on the beach at Okadey, a small beachside community six miles south of where Carver had gone into the ocean with Lujan pursuing him. At first the honeymooners had thought they’d spotted some sort of sea animal; the body was bleached almost white from the salt water. Then they’d seen the dark of the pants just beneath the roiling surface and realized what it was and notified the authorities. Carver wondered if their discovery had ruined their honeymoon or added spice.
Carver had phoned the local law after he’d made it back to shore the previous night. Then he’d called Desoto and Burr. Burr had turned up at the cottage within an hour. He let the locals do their jobs, staying in the background, watching. Now and then, in an almost noncommittal way, he’d offer a suggestion, probe for an answer or explanation. He knew his stuff. Very professional. Carver had to admit his opinion of Burr had been raised a notch. The DEA agent’s cool yet fervent dedication might not be an endearing quality, or make for the complete man, but it was the sort of dedication that brought results. Not unlike Carver’s dedication.
The Coast Guard had searched for Lujan for six hours before giving up and assuming he was dead and would be easier to find in daylight. If he could be found at all. Sometimes the sea kept its dead forever; sometimes it toyed with the dead for a while before returning what was left to land.
They were out there again just after dawn. Carver stood at his window and saw two small craft silhouetted in the early sunlight, tacking in slow circles off the shore. The Coast Guard was patient, systematic. But they had read the currents wrong, and Lujan’s reappearance on land had been a surprise.
Carver drove the Olds down to Okadey that afternoon and met Desoto in the back room of the tan brick funeral parlor that served as a temporary morgue for the small community. There were yellow canvas awnings over the windows, and a bell mounted like a chimney on the low, sloping roof, doubtless to be tolled as part of the services. Carver imagined that cost extra. MAHON’S MORTUARY, the black-lettered sign peeking from among the hibiscus in front of the place had read.
Lujan wasn’t refrigerated, but the back room was cool, down in the fifties, probably, and he’d keep until the body was identified and taken to Orlando. There he’d be autopsied, methodically dissected and discussed by the big-city experts.
Somber introductions were made. Mahon himself, a short, animated man in a muted plaid sport jacket, who would have looked more at home selling aluminum siding, drew a sheet away from the body.
Carver flinched inwardly, as he always did when viewing a dead body; then he sent that part of his mind away, as he always managed to do. The emotional vulnerability had lasted only a few seconds before professional detachment took over. Mental armor. Sanity retained.
“It’s got to be him,” Carver said. The sea and its inhabitants had worked on the face, making what was left of it unrecognizable, but the pants looked the same, and the general size was the same. There were slashes near the left pants cuff, where Carver had gripped it and had barely avoided Lujan’s knife blade. And how many bodies dressed this way were bobbing around in the ocean off the resort beaches of central Florida?
Desoto nodded to the unconcerned Mahon, and the pale yellow sheet was drawn up again over Lujan’s ruined face.
“A closed-casket ceremony would be my recommendation,” Mahon said in a cigarette-throat wheeze.
Neither Carver nor Desoto offered a comment on that professional assessment. It was Mahon’s backyard they were playing in, and he was welcome to it, headstones and all.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” Carver said, as he and Desoto walked outside into the sun, Carver with his replacement cane.
The day was hot and humid, but after the chill of death in the back room, the heat felt fine to Carver. The mosquito that sampled his right forearm, the dank smell of the sea, the pelican that skimmed the blue water offshore, all represented life.
“We’ve opened the case wider,” Desoto said, “so the game has changed somewhat. It’s thought officially, and in some quarters unofficially, that Willis Eiler might have been murdered.”
“Not a Missing Persons case?”
“No, not with dead Marielitos turning up wherever you go looking for him. Death by violence is contagious.”
“He’s still alive,” Carver said.
“I think so, too.” Desoto reached into the pocket of his tailored suit, withdrew a folded white handkerchief, and used it to wipe his hands thoroughly, as if he’d touched the body inside the mortuary and encountered some kind of contamination. “But I’m not positive about what I think; that’s what’s interested me about this case from
