Scorcher

to normal. After a while, he told her everything.

Like an ancient sin eater she absorbed his pain and fear. He wondered, though, if now he’d burdened her more than he should have.

What he didn’t want to share with her was the danger he was in. So he showered and dressed, then told her he was driving to his cottage.

Edwina objected, but not for long. She could read Carver’s determination, and sense when not to push. She didn’t like love having its limitations. He didn’t blame her, but he couldn’t do much about the situation. Life seldom fell into place like a late-night movie. That was why people watched late-night movies.

“Lock your door,” he cautioned her.

She shrugged. “You’ll leave anyway.”

He left her sitting on the veranda, staring out over the moonlit ocean and sipping a tall Tom Collins, her thoughts as inaccessible to him as distant clouds.

The phone was jangling when Carver walked into the stuffy heat of the cottage. He had no way of knowing how long it had been ringing and suspected he wouldn’t reach it before the caller hung up. But he clomped with his cane across the hard floor, groped for the phone in the dimness, and lifted the receiver.

“This Carver?” a voice asked. A familiar voice but he couldn’t quite place it.

“It’s Carver.”

“Emmett Kave here. Paul called me. He’s here! Well, he ain’t here exactly. But he’s in Orlando.”

Carver waited, suddenly aware of the internal sounds and movements of his body, his hammering heart, the coursing of hunter’s blood through his veins. His teeth ached; he was clenching his jaw. It reminded him of how he’d felt the first time he’d fired live rounds through a handgun. The real thing! “Where in Orlando?”

“What you gonna do if I tell you how to get to him?” Emmett asked.

“Talk to him,” Carver said. “Try to get him to go with me and a lawyer to surrender to the police.”

“And if he don’t want to?”

“I’ll try to talk him into going back to his family, let them decide what’s best.”

Emmett’s laugh was like a hard object grating over a washboard. “Not much chance he’ll listen to that kinda bullshit, Carver. He’s scared, but he ain’t that scared.”

“I want to help him,” Carver said. His voice was level, but he felt like driving to Emmett’s house in Kissimmee and shaking the old man until dentures and information flew.

“He said something bad happened in Orlando, Carver. Was it that woman on the news got herself burned to death?”

“Yes. Paul did it,” Carver said. “He’s gotta be stopped, Emmett. For him and for anybody else he might kill. He’s mixed up and almost beyond help. Jesus, you must understand that!”

“Guess I do,” Emmett said in a tired voice. “Guess I got no alternative. He’s at the Mermaid Motel on the Orange Blossom Trail, just outside town. Room one hundred. You promise me he won’t get hurt, Carver?”

“You know better, Emmett. I’ll promise you I’ll do what I can.”

“That’ll have to be good enough. Not much choice in this crazy world. Not much at all.” Emmett hung up, leaving an echo of betrayal.

Carver limped to his dresser and slid the top drawer all the way out and laid it on the bed. The dresser’s wood back had been removed, leaving room for the old Colt. 38 automatic that was in its holster tacked to the back of the drawer.

He removed the gun, checked its action, and stuck it inside his belt. It felt cool and heavy and important. Then he replaced the drawer and put on a loose-fitting dark shirt with squared tails that he left untucked. The gun wasn’t noticeable beneath the shirt.

He went outside and got in the Olds. The big car was still gurgling and ticking in the night heat after the drive from Del Moray. Telling Carver it was ready to go again.

Carver started the engine and switched on the headlights. As he jockeyed the Olds onto the road to the highway, he heard sand and gravel patter against the insides of the fenders. The obsolete dinosaur of a motor roared like thunder from an ancient past, something civilization and Japanese imports could never tame.

He bent forward over the steering wheel, like a jockey urging a horse to greater speed down the stretch. He could hardly wait to reach Orlando and the Mermaid Motel.

Chapter 18

Carver slowed the car when he saw a neon mermaid with a tail that flitted jerkily back and forth in rhythmic spasms of light. Beneath the dizzying, blinking white neon was lettered in blue: MERMAID MOTEL, SLEEP, EAT, CHEAP. Brief but to the point.

He pulled the Olds onto the canted shoulder, braked to a halt, and let traffic swish past while he looked over the motel.

It was small, no more than thirty rooms built in a low U-shape around a swimming pool. The construction looked like cinder block painted dull tan. A dark brown or black iron railing ran along the catwalk fronting the upper rooms. The doors were all the same color as the railing. No one was in the swimming pool. The water appeared greenish and coated with algae. There was a metal sign on the chain link fence surrounding the pool, probably informing guests that the pool was out of order, no swimming. The pool looked like a great place to meet alligators.

Like many of the surrounding businesses, the motel was seedy-looking and had an air of resigned despair about it. This was a stretch of the Orange Blossom Trail outside Orlando that was lined with bars, used-car lots, service stations, topless joints, and a few porn bookstores and massage parlors. Not the central Florida the Tourist Bureau bragged about. Maybe Desoto was right in speculating that Paul Kave was running short of money.

Carver U-turned, then parked in the gravel lot of a closed service station and climbed out of the Olds. Hot, humid air enveloped him, holding the smell of rot and of grease and oil that had seeped below the gravel. A cat, or perhaps a large rat, skittered off the lot into the dark brush, running hunkered low. Or was it something he’d imagined? Carver dragged his bare arm across his perspiring forehead.

He walked up the road several hundred feet to the motel, skirted the office, and located room 100. It was an end room on the lower of the motel’s two levels. He made his way down a corridor, past an ice machine, and beyond a hulking trash dumpster overflowing with cardboard and reeking of overripe garbage. After testing the ground with his cane, he edged off the pavement and behind some bushes growing parallel to the back wall of the motel.

It was dark there; he clenched his eyes shut and then opened them, trying to adjust his sight well enough not to trip over anything or turn an ankle. Night vision wasn’t his strong suit. He moved tentatively, feeling ahead with the cane like a blind man, because the ground was soft beneath the grass, as if it had just been watered. The sweet garbage stench of the dumpster faded as he limped the length of the motel. About half the rooms had lights burning in them.

Opposite the rear of room 100, he found a shadowed area and stood leaning against the trunk of a palm tree. Above him the long fronds rattled softly in the hot night breeze, like clacking dice about to be loosed from a gambler’s hand.

Lights were on in Paul Kave’s room. The drapes were drawn over the rear sliding glass doors but there was a gap in them, widening toward the bottom. Carver remembered his uneasy vision of someone peering through a similar gap in his motel room in Pompano Beach. Nervous speculation. If Paul Kave saw him looking into the room, Paul would freeze for a moment, wondering if it were his nerves, his guilt and fear, causing him to see things that weren’t there. In that vital moment of inaction, he’d be a target. And Carver would need a portion of that suspended time to be sure the room’s occupant was actually Paul Kave. The thought of killing the wrong man made his stomach twist in on itself.

He drew the gun from beneath his shirt and limped toward the small pool of light outside the gapped drapes.