Scorcher

said this as if there might be some doubt in Carver’s mind as to his own identity. “Gray day, huh?”

“It just got grayer.”

“Still damned hot, though. But I guess that’s what you can expect this time of year. And the sun’ll be banging down on us again within an hour, I’d bet. Fuckin’ steambath!”

Carver wasn’t in the mood for diversion. He stared out at the dull gray ocean churned into whitecaps by the wind, then he looked directly over at McGregor. McGregor’s name suggested Scottish ancestry, but he looked Swedish. Ruddy, rawboned, lantern-jawed. Straight, lank hair so blond it was almost white. Pale blue eyes, set too close together. He had to bow his head slightly to keep it from bumping the canvas roof. There was something about him that suggested he could be mean. “How did you figure out I was here?” Carver asked.

“Didn’t figure. Desoto told me.” McGregor felt like getting to the point now himself. “That envelope and matchbook told us nothing except that whoever handled them last wore gloves. Cheap envelope that can’t be traced, and addressed with an IBM Selectric typewriter. They’re selling a couple of million of those even while we sit here and chat.”

“And maybe right now the guy who killed my son is killing somebody else’s.”

“Maybe. But we on the Lauderdale force haven’t exactly been standing around with our thumbs up our respective asses.”

“What have you been doing?”

“You know the answer to that; you used to be a cop. And a good one, according to Desoto, and he oughta know. He’s an old friend of mine. Solid guy.”

“He never mentioned you.”

“I hardly ever mention him.” McGregor lit a cigarette without asking if Carver minded. The car hazed up with smoke; the windshield fogged near the top. “How long you been sitting here?” he asked.

“Awhile.”

“Looking for a white-over-blue Lincoln?”

“Yeah. I haven’t seen it.”

“You won’t. We impounded it last night.”

Carver’s stomach knotted and he hit the steering wheel hard with his fist. Pain jolted up his arm and left the heel of his hand tingling. The blow made a dull, reverberating sound. “God damn it, why didn’t somebody tell me?”

“Say again?”

“I’m a victim’s father! I should have been told!”

“We don’t generally run out and notify vigilantes whenever there’s a development. That’s what you are, Carver, fuckin’ John Wayne movie walkin’. You’re on a lone-avenger trip, and that’s not good. I won’t allow it.”

“Desoto told me you were an asshole.”

“Naw. Not my old buddy. You’re making that up.” Mc shy;Gregor cranked down the window all the way and flicked the cigarette away. The rain had stopped. The palm trees that had been whipping around were still now. He left the window down. Warm, fresh air pushed into the car.

“I need to know who owns the Lincoln,” Carver said.

McGregor shook his head slowly, patiently. “What you need to know, Carver, what is essential, is that I am an asshole. I’m not your usual cop-not by half. Like you, I want to catch the garbage that burned your son. I want him to pay. Not as much as you do, I grant you.” The wide jaw set and muscles played in front of McGregor’s oversized, protruding ears. “But I want the bastard. Oh, I do!”

“Let me guess,” Carver said. “There’s a promotion in it if you make the collar on this one? Maybe catapult you all the way to captain?”

“Could be that’s part of it. Could be I don’t think an animal like that has a right to walk around and breathe in and out like decent citizens. It bothers me, I guess more than it should. I’m just like you, only it doesn’t have to be my son. I’m stuck with a strong moral sense; that’s why I’m a cop. But it doesn’t mean diddly shit to me whether you believe me. The proposition is the same.”

“Proposition?”

“The owner of the blue Lincoln is a guy named Paul Kave,” McGregor said. “His address is on Route A1A in Hillsboro Beach.”

“Millionaire’s Mile,” Carver said. That was what Floridians called the area.

And suddenly Carver was afraid and angry. The stretch of beach property in Hillsboro was among the most expensive in Florida. Luxury estates and condominiums with water views front and back-the Atlantic to the east, the Intracoastal Waterway to the west. Money was involved here, all right. Major money. The man who’d killed Chipper was rich. Carver knew what that meant. He told himself grimly that no battery of high-priced lawyers was going to save this killer.

“Paul Kave is the son of Adam Kave,” McGregor said, as if that meant a great deal and Carver should know it and be impressed.

“Is he one of our U.S. senators?” Carver asked. “Or a Disney World founding father? I don’t keep up on things like that.”

“You ever hear of Adam’s Inns, one of those rare times something outside your own experience touches you?”

“Sure.” The fast-food restaurants, featuring hot dogs served in various fashion, were in practically every shopping mall in the South.

“Adam Kave owns them,” McGregor said. “All of them except a few sold off for franchises. Paul Kave is his only son. There was a scuba air tank in the trunk of the Lincoln; it contained traces of naphtha. Paul Kave is an amateur chemist with a lab in his parents’ home. And he’s a skin-diving enthusiast. The kid has an I.Q. over a hundred and forty, but he’s got a history of schizophrenia with paranoid delusions. His mother says he’s been under treatment off and on since he was fifteen. He’s twenty now. He’s also disappeared. Hasn’t been home for two days. He fits like a Florsheim shoe, Carver. He killed your son and he’s running.”

“Is this proposition going to involve me backing off while Kave gives himself up and gets a wrist-slap sentence from a bought judge?”

“No, it involves finding him. Desoto says I can’t talk you out of your vendetta, and I believe him. So I’m gonna channel all that hate, Carver. I want you to go to the Kave family, tell them what kind of work you do, and give them some bullshit story about wanting the killing to end, since you lost your own son in a holdup shooting. They won’t connect you with your real son’s murder because his name appeared in the papers and on television as Montaigne. Tell the family you know how they feel and you sympathize with them, and you want to help find Paul before the police get to him and harm him. You know he’s ill. Tell them the odds are good that the police will kill Paul rather than arrest him. They’ll buy it and hire you; I sort of laid the groundwork.”

Carver sat silently for a while, watching the waves, calmer now, roll in and break in layers of surging foam beyond the palm trees. He could hear the surf pulling on the beach. What McGregor was suggesting, cultivating and then betraying a killer’s family, turned the pure white heat of Carver’s obsession for revenge into something tainted.

“I don’t like it,” he said finally. “It doesn’t set level. It makes me feel dirty.”

“So feel dirty. You want your son’s killer, don’t you? Any way you can nail him?”

Carver squeezed the steering wheel and stared straight ahead.

“I got my neck stuck out a mile and a half on this,” Mc shy;Gregor said. “Taking what you’d call a career gamble.”

“Desoto must have told you how good I am,” Carver said. “The odds are in your favor.”

“You aren’t so good I’m gonna let you go mucking around in an active homicide case on your terms. That’s impeding justice. I’ll fall on you like something very heavy from very high up.”

“I know how to stay legal.”

“Oh, really? I’m kinda like the Supreme Court, Carver. Sometimes I interpret the law any which way.”

“Maybe you oughta just enforce the law instead of trying to turn the screws on me.”

“This is the way to get Paul Kave,” McGregor said. “Listen, I saw your son at the morgue. Holy Christ, I don’t see how you can even sleep nights much less be thinking twice about what I’m proposing. I mean, I’m handing you what you claim you want. I’m fuckin’ turning you loose, tough guy.”

“I like to work in my own way.”