Scorcher

“The old folks is my mother and father back in New Jersey,” Emmett said proudly. “That motley bunch of young marines is from my unit in Korea. Them were some wild days.”

“The young blond boy,” Carver said, “is that Paul?”

“When he was ten,” Emmett said. “Liked to raise hell back then, from what I hear. Didn’t get withdrawn until just before his teens. Paul give me that photo himself.”

“He has darker hair now.”

“Hair changed,” Emmett said. “I had blond hair myself at that age. Even into my late teens, like Paul. Something about the Kave blood; we get darker as we get older.” He absently ran his hand over his hair, which had gone almost completely gray. “Till we get old old,” he added, somewhat remorsefully. For an instant his face was much like that of the woman in the photograph, whose brooding likeness had been captured on a bright day almost a century ago. Certain moments survived time.

“When I find Paul,” Carver said, “maybe he can explain what happened at the motel last night.”

“You sound confident you are going to find him.”

“If he contacted you once,” Carver said, “he probably will again.”

“Unless that gun business spooked him.” Emmett hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his robe and tugged at the well-worn material. Carver thought he heard thread pop. “You found out anything?” Emmett asked. “I mean, how’s it look for Paul, after that latest burning in Orlando? Lord, poor woman!”

“The police think Paul did it,” Carver said.

“Yeah, but what do you think?”

“I don’t know. The evidence points to Paul.”

“Evidence lies sometimes.”

“And sometimes,” Carver said, “the police get more interested in where it points than whether it lies.”

Emmett shifted on the old sofa and sat up straighter. “Yeah, I know what you mean and it scares me. I’d at least like to see Paul have his say in court. That’s one thing Adam and I agree on. Maybe the only thing in this ass- backward world.”

Carver thought Emmett might ask how his brother was, but he didn’t.

“Adam always put too much stock in money,” he said, “had an exaggerated idea of what it could buy. Bet I’m happier here in this ramshackle hovel, living like a hermit with my simple pleasures, than he is in that palace by the ocean.”

“Right now you are,” Carver said, looking around and not seeing much evidence of even simple pleasures. Well, there was television. Maybe Emmett was a soap-opera fan, involved in that alternate, manageable world that could be relegated to nonexistence at the punch of a remote-control button.

“Some fucked-up family, eh?” Emmett said, staring at the threadbare carpet. Sunlight was lying across it now in an elaborate pattern that almost reached his slippers.

“It works out that way sometimes,” Carver said.

Emmett didn’t answer. After a while Carver realized he was going to remain silent, as if his well of words had gone dry.

He left the old man on the sofa, still staring down into his past, perhaps wondering what the man and woman in the ancient photograph would think if they could somehow know the success and agony of what they’d set in motion so long ago in their marriage bed.

Outside, the morning was already unbearably hot. Carver drove away thinking about the photograph arrangement on Emmett’s faded wall, trying to figure out what there was about it that acted like a tiny burr on his mind.

By the time he was out of the depressing neighborhood he was concentrating on Paul Kave again, trying to analyze his feelings about the boy. Paul had lived in his own hell, Carver realized, long before he’d murdered Chipper. And Carver thought that maybe what bothered him about the grouping of family photographs in the old house was that he would never see a similar collection of photos that included Chipper past the age of eight. Looking at the photos had brought home to Carver that his family, such as it was, had been cruelly deprived of its future as it should have unfolded.

He stoked his rage with the relentless sun pounding through the windshield. He was still determined to make Paul Kave’s hell permanent.

Chapter 20

Carver had parked the Olds in front of his cottage and was climbing out when the bullet thunked into the left front fender.

It took him a second to recognize the sound. But there was no mistaking the gouged round hole, silver- rimmed with raw steel, plowed into the fender. Air was still hissing from the punctured front left tire as Carver dropped to his stomach and rolled beneath the car. Pebbles dug into his back and bare arms. Fear pressed in on him.

He waited for a follow-up shot, but none came. Dust gritted between his teeth. He swiveled his head and spat. Stretching his right arm, he reached his cane. Then he used his good leg and arms to scoot backward, hooked the crook of the cane over the opposite side of the car, and push-pulled his way on his back beneath the wide vehicle. The car’s undercarriage smelled like fresh earth and old grease, and the exhaust system still breathed hot. It was like freeing himself from a stifling cave when at last he emerged on the other side.

He struggled up on one knee, his stiff leg extended with his foot braced against the Olds’s rear tire. Oil from the underside of the car streaked his arms and shirtfront. Something sharp had left a long, curved scrape on his wrist; the salt of his perspiration made it sting.

He peered along the shore to the south; the beach was deserted. The strip of pale sand was isolated and rocky and wouldn’t be occupied until the searing heat of afternoon drove people to the sea.

The shot had come from the slope north of the cottage, where there was high brush and a few wind-bent palm trees. Carver reached for the Colt automatic tucked in his belt but it was gone. It had fallen out as he’d wriggled beneath the car.

He bowed his head as low as possible, feeling tight strain in his back and neck, and saw the gun on the ground directly beneath the center of the Olds’s undercarriage. It was about three feet from where he crouched. It looked like ten feet.

He carefully poked his cane beneath the car and moved it in short, sweeping motions. It bumped the gun a few times. Finally it snagged the Colt near the trigger guard, and he pulled it to him. The cane was coming in handy for more than walking.

If he kept the protective bulk of the car between him and where the shot must have come from, he could reach shelter behind the cottage.

If he moved fast enough.

If the gunman hadn’t changed position for a better angle.

Carver swallowed the old-metal taste of fear, gripped the cane halfway up the shaft, and made himself move.

Muscles knotted in his back as he tensed for the rip of a bullet. Fear had settled icy and hard in his bowels, trying to make him weak. Careful to stay in line with the car, leaning hard on the cane, he half crawled, half duckwalked toward the corner of the cottage. His feet and the tip of the cane dug into the soft ground and shot dust and sand behind him as he scrambled for cover. He was sure he looked ridiculous. He’d think about that later. He hoped.

Then he was around the corner.

Safe.

He leaned back against the sun-warmed clapboard wall and took deep breaths. Anger grew alongside his fear, then gained dominance. It was time to go on the offensive.

Staying low, calculating angles so he wouldn’t be seen, he made his way toward the thick brush on the slope behind the cottage. He intended to reach the coast highway, stay in cover on this side of the shoulder, and try to work in behind his assailant. Whoever had taken the shot at Carver might be surprised by the fact that his target