It was such a violent motion that the bedsprings whined.
Raffy gave his brittle chuckle again and slowly moved the knife away.
Then he stopped smiling and put on a serious expression. “Thing for you to know, Carver, is if I make up my mind you’re dead, then you’re dead. Oh, you might not stop breathing and lay down right away, but you’re dead all right. Understand that?”
“I get what you mean,” Carver told him. He couldn’t keep his body still. His hands were cold above the knotted tie.
“It’s good you understand.” Raffy leaned over and very deliberately used the edge of his free hand to chop at Carver’s elbows. He was an expert. On the first try each time, he struck what’s sometimes known as the crazy bone. Something like electrical shock jolted along both of Carver’s arms. He felt a painful kind of lameness in them as Raffy cut through the knots binding them and then straightened up.
Raffy deftly folded the knife and slipped it back in his pocket, pushing it all the way in with his thumb because the Levi’s were so tight.
Carver tried to roll away, off the other side of the bed, but his arms were useless. He kicked at the soggy mattress with his good leg but couldn’t even turn his body.
Raffy said, “Hey, you’re a real man. Didn’t even shit in your pants.”
Laughing, he swaggered from the room, closing the door behind him softly, with an odd gentleness.
Carver lay quietly in the stench of urine and fear. And with an anger so deep and volcanic it scared him. Right now he’d do anything destructive to Raffy Ortiz and love doing it.
He didn’t move for about ten minutes. Then he sat up, located his cane, and limped into the bathroom. He ignored the jagged hole at eye level in the wall.
He turned the shower on full blast, peeled off his wet clothes, and climbed in beneath the hot needles of water with a fresh bar of the Belle Grande’s bargain soap.
Carver stood there for a long time, scrubbing himself over and over with the soap-his face, his chest, everywhere-until the bar had melted to a knife-edged sliver that slipped from his hand.
Then he twisted the cracked porcelain faucet handles to turn off the shower. Nude, clean, he returned to the room with the broken bed.
He slowly got dressed. The shower had helped, but emotion, rage, was returning to him full force. Every few minutes he literally shuddered with revulsion and fury.
When he was dressed, he sat in the chair Raffy had kicked, feeling the protruding wad of batting lumped between his shoulder blades.
The phone jangled.
He could easily reach it from where he sat, but he waited five rings before lifting the receiver and holding it to his ear.
He heard himself mumble a hoarse hello.
“Wake you up, amigo?” Desoto.
“No. I just had a talk with Raffy Ortiz. He’s sick. Even sicker than we thought. And more dangerous.”
Desoto said nothing. He must have heard something in Carver’s voice.
“Another very physical warning to stay away from the Sunhaven thing,” Carver said. “He could have killed me but it wasn’t on his agenda tonight.”
“What’d he do?”
“Never mind.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Not happy, but okay. No lasting injuries.”
“He’s toying with you.” Desoto sounded angry. Then a resigned sigh came over the phone. “That’s the way of him,” Desoto said. “He’s a sadistic bastard. Doesn’t kill anybody right out unless he has to. Gets his jollies watching people suffer deeply and die slow. Not a nice man, Raffy Ortiz.”
“Not one of my favorites.”
“What now, amigo?”
“Find that Indianapolis address?”
About ten seconds passed with only static and oceanlike whispers on the connection. Then Desoto said softly, “Maybe you should listen to Ortiz.”
“I am listening to him. I’m on to something live or he wouldn’t be taking all this trouble with me.”
“It isn’t trouble to him, my friend, it’s his amusement.”
“He won’t know I’m in Indianapolis.”
“He found out you were in New Orleans.”
“That’s because he knew I might come here to dig into Kearny Williams’s death.”
Carver watched the shadows on the far wall while he waited for Desoto to say something. The intermittent sounds of traffic over on Canal drifted to him. Jesus, the room stank!
“You don’t have to do this, amigo.”
“Yeah, I do,” Carver told him.
“I figured you’d say that. You’re fucked up in such a way you can’t let it drop, eh? Not ‘won’t’-‘can’t.’ Seen it in you before. Tough guy. So fucked up. Still, I feel responsible for you this time.”
“That doesn’t change where we are now.”
“Thing I’m afraid of,” Desoto said, “isn’t where we are now. It’s where you might be going.”
But he told Carver Linda Redmond’s address in Indianapolis.
What friends were for.
24
Linda Redmond was in the phone directory, along with the address Desoto had given Carver. Carver phoned her from the Indianapolis airport. She was home. In a weary, cynical voice, she tried to brush him off, treated him like a siding salesman-until he mentioned Beatrice Reeves. Then she agreed to talk with him. He told her he didn’t have a lot of time, and she said there was none like the present.
Since Carver wasn’t going to be in town more than a few hours, instead of renting a car he took a cab to Linda Redmond’s address.
She lived in an old brick apartment building on Meridian, in a neighborhood that lay in hot and despairing limbo while it waited for demolition.
Carver limped into the graffiti-marked vestibule. There was a three-speed Schwinn bicycle leaning against the wall, near a bank of tarnished brass mailboxes beneath round black holes where doorbell buttons used to be. The bike’s front wheel had been removed and the frame was chained to a floor-to-ceiling steam pipe. A large padlock dangled from the chain, and the pipe had nicks and dents in it where the chain looped around it, as if the bike had been secured there countless times. The floor was littered with trash, some of which had probably been there so long it would take an archaeologist to fix the dates. In a far corner, near steep wooden steps, sat a rusty baby stroller with three wheels. Nobody figured to steal that. The vestibule smelled like humidity-dampened varnish and stale urine, and rage and nausea welled up in Carver for a moment as he flashed back to the Belle Grande and Raffy Ortiz. Then he whacked aside a crumpled McDonald’s bag with the tip of his cane, found Linda Redmond’s apartment number on the mailboxes, and began climbing the stairs.
She’d heard the clatter of his cane on the wooden steps. When he reached the third floor she had her door open and was standing waiting for him.
Linda Redmond was in her late thirties. She’d been pretty once, possibly beautiful. Time had taken care of that, worked on her lean face and frame as it worked on ancient artifacts; it hadn’t left a major mark, but in a myriad of minor ways it had exacted its toll. Her straight blond hair was thinned and lank, her blue eyes faded, her pale cheeks too sunken even for the gauntest of fashion models. Carver wondered if she’d lost most of her molars to disease or violence. She was wearing an untucked white blouse above raggedy cutoff jeans that reminded him of Dr. Pauly’s. But her legs were thinner and better-looking than Pauly’s, even though there were scars around her knobby knees, as if she’d done a lot of kneeling on rough surfaces.
