“I’ll be over in about an hour,” I said.
She was wearing a simple white dress, white sandals, a coil of white scarf in her hair. It was the right contrast for her dark coloring.
Her eyes were large and deep in her face, luminous with strain. She was right. She needed a little rest; she had to forget it for a little while. But she looked more beautiful than ever.
Her bare legs flashed as she preceded me across the living area. Beyond the glass doors that shut out the patio, a brassy hot sky was gathering a few clouds. The air was forming a faint vacuum within itself.
“We might get a squall,” I said.
“Do you mind?” she smiled over her shoulder.
“I’d welcome anything to break the heat,” I said.
‘I’ve got sandwiches and a couple of thermos bottles all packed.”
“I’ve got a rented car out front,” I said. “Where’ll we go?”
“I don’t care, Ed. Just take me someplace.”
I carried the basket of food and towels and beach blanket out to the car. We got in, and I drove for nearly an hour. Out of Tampa on a main highway, off on a state road, off on a shell-surfaced road north of Clearwater.
We jounced between thickets of palmetto, cabbage palm and scrub pine. The heat was a quivering, a humming, the faint song of the dry, rustling wilderness.
Then we rounded a bend, and there was the Gulf, and a mile of pure white beach. The sun crowned the blue-green wavelets with jewels. Not a house was in sight, or a boat, or a single other human being. Everything was as untouched and unspoiled as it had been before the advent of the first man.
Laura got out of the car and stood looking down the half-moon of beach, the water, the tangle of mangrove on the landward side.
I hefted the picnic and swimming stuff out of the car and carried them down the beach.
“Old haunt of yours, Ed?” she chided with a smile.
“I’ve never been here before,” I said. “I didn’t know where that cow-trail excuse for a road ran. I only felt that I had to be lucky today.”
“Turn around,” she said.
I turned around and stood that way for a few moments.
“Okay,” she said.
She had unbuttoned the white dress, slipped it off and dropped it on the blanket. She stood slender and firm in a white bathing suit. She tucked her hair under a bathing cap, raced to the water and plunged in, a tan-and-silver arrow.
I watched her break the surface and start swimming out as I shucked the clothes I was wearing over my bathing trunks.
We swam a good mile out; then I saw the squall moving in. It was still a great distance out in the endless Gulf, but already the water around us stirred as if it held a muffled growl.
We swam in without haste, threw towels around our shoulders, and carried our picnic stuff back of the beach to a giant banyan tree. The tree looked a million years old. It dropped roots in a tangle from its heavy lower branches. The roots, ranging in size from threads to massive supports as big around as barrels, formed a shadowed maze.
We spread the blanket and set the basket in a little place under the vast old tree where pine needles had been carried in by the breeze and accumulated.
Laura sat down, legs crossed and stretched before her. I dropped beside her. She looked fresh and vital, drops of water standing on her face and shoulders. She took off her cap and shook out her hair.
I laid my hand on her shoulder. I felt a faint spasm go through her muscle. A rising breeze from the Gulf brushed the hair from her face.
I kissed her. Not as I’d kissed any of the occasional women who’d dotted the lonely stretch of years. I kissed her the way I’d once kissed a girl many years ago who I’d believed to be good as well as beautiful. There had been innocence in my world in those long-ago, lost years.
I felt her lips come to life. Her hand trailed fire across my back. Her arms grew tight, and the heat and hunger in her lips were the heat and hunger of a female animal.
She began crying.
I raised my head and she put her hands over her face while the sobs ripped out of her.
“Ed …” Her voice sounded far away.
“You don’t have to explain. It’s him, isn’t it? Tulman?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t love him.”
“Not like this. I didn’t know it could be so savage as this. But he’s my husband.”
A pulse was pounding in my temples and I was having trouble breathing. My fingers dug into the sand until it felt as if the nails were tearing loose.
Then I looked at the suffering of her.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s all right.”
“I’m sorry, Ed. I thought … I wanted …”
“I know. We’d better get back.”
We got up, knocked some of the sand off ourselves. I picked up the picnic basket. She gathered the towels and blanket.
Silently, we walked back to the car. The sky was darkening. From the distance came the growl of thunder. The wind was stiffer, blowing in the first fat drops of rain. The drops hit the beach with angry weight.
We slipped our clothes over our swimming things and got in the car.
I stepped on the starter. The motor turned over but failed to start.
I kept it up until the battery was almost down.
CHAPTER
16
WHEN I got out of the car and opened the hood, I didn’t spot the trouble right away. I’m not much of a mechanic, and the distributor and wiring looked all right to me.
I checked the gas line. The trouble was there. The rubber line leading from the fuel pump to the carburetor was swollen and puffy with age. It had sprung a rip on its lower side, separating the engine from its gas supply.
I tried wrapping a strip of towel around the line, but it didn’t work. The toweling admitted too much air.
Finally I leaned against the window of the car. “Looks like I’ll have to walk back to the main road and get some help,” I said.
“Want company?”
I looked at the nearing squall. The sky was a nasty gray, and the front was moving in fast. The rain was steadying out, becoming more than isolated drops.
“It’s less than half a mile,” I said, “and I think we passed a filling station on the main road not too far down. You’ll be more comfortable in the car. It won’t take me long.”
She nodded, and I turned away from the car. I plodded through the yielding sand to the state road. A wicked flare of lightning cut through the massing clouds. Kettledrums of thunder crashed against earth and sky.
As if the thunder had been a signal, the clouds opened. The rain came with a rush. A tiny part of it turned to steam in the heat, forming a veil like fog.
I didn’t mind the wetting. It was cooling. I started down the highway, squinting into the rain. The clouds made war overhead, throwing big bombs of lightning.
Then a brief stillness came, as is the nature of such squalls. The wind held. The lightning held until more static electricity could build up. The last volley of thunder rolled to silence.
I heard the whine of the car’s engine. My first thought was that I might get a lift.
He was coming fast behind me, when I turned. I jerked up my thumb.
And in the length of time it took me to lift my hand I realized something was wrong.
The accelerator of the light, black car was down to the floor. The car was coming right at me. The grillwork was a hungry mouth.
I stopped breathing. I almost stopped living. I moved, without willing myself to move.
I guess my face carried a nightmarish expression. My mouth was open in a silent scream.
The right front fender of the car grazed the waistband of my pants. The contact between metal and my flesh was barely made. Even so, I felt as if a sledge hammer had hit me in the side.
An invisible rope jerked me off my feet and hurled me off the highway.
I pinwheeled for about twenty feet, landing on my bac
k, feeling nothing for a moment.
Then the rain stung my face. I’d crashed in swampy palmetto, and I pulled myself around in the muck and started crawling away.
I heard the car slow. Then I heard the steady chug of a diesel engine. A tractor and trailer was moving down the highway.
I was shaking all over. I kept moving, bellying along through the palmetto.
I don’t know whether or not the black car stopped. Maybe whoever was in it came back to see if he’d finished the job. Maybe the passing truck scared him off.
In any event, he couldn’t afford to be conspicuous. He couldn’t risk a passing car seeing his car parked, seeing him prowling a palmetto thicket beside the highway.
So he didn’t have time to find me.
I eeled out of the palmetto onto the sandy beach road and lay there a moment getting some strength back. It was good to breathe, to feel the sand beneath me. The rain smelled sweet. If he’d found me in the palmetto, I wouldn’t have had the strength to raise a finger to save myself.
I got my feet under me and felt my side. The numbness was going away. I was going to have a sore rib cage for a week or ten days, but I couldn’t feel anything broken.
Favoring the side, I limped back to the rented car on the beach.
Laura was smoking a cigarette and looking at the stormy reaches of the Gulf. She had the windows of the car down. She heard the sound of my footstep as my shoe crushed a shell.
She looked around quickly. Her eyes went wide. “Ed!”
I moved to the car and leaned against it.
She got out. “I didn’t expect you back so quickly. Your face—it’s so gray!”
“Somebody in a car tried to flatten me on the state road.” “Oh, Ed …”
“Must have followed us. Slipped in here while we were swimming and gimmicked the gas line. Then went back to his car and waited in the shelter of the pines, off the shoulder, for the target to come walking out.”
She lifted the back of her hand to her cheek and stood staring at me. The rain plastered wisps of her hair about her cheeks, beat unnoticed against her face.
I pulled myself around and opened the hood of the car. I jerked the rubber fuel-pump-to-carburetor line all the way out.
The line left black, greasy marks on my hands. I turned the line over. The rip in it had been hacked there by a knife. The cords woven into the line showed clean where they had been cut.
The squall was moving on inland. The rain slackened, the earth began to steam.
I dropped the line in my pocket.
Laura was standing perfectly still beside the car.
“Do you want to quit, Ed?”
“Do you want me to?”
“I don’t think that’s the question. It’s your life that’s in danger. I won’t blame you, if you decide to quit.”
I put my hand on her bare arm. My fingers curled around the flesh. Then I eased my grip. “I don’t think you understand me very well.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then why’d you ask me that?”
“I thought it was proper.”
“Okay, so you’ve asked me,” I said. “Let’s go get a replacement for this line. This time you’re walking with me. I don’t want you on a deserted beach with a character like that around.”
As we started toward the state road, my right leg dragged a little. But there was nothing wrong with my right hand.
It rested in my pants pockets.
So did the .38.
If he was still out there, he’d find the target fighting back.
CHAPTER
17
IT WAS almost two miles to the country-store filling-station. The highway was as peaceful as a Sunday afternoon. The sun was bright and hot again. Tendrils of steam rose from the black surface of the road. The day was muggier than ever.
The outpost of civilization was a rambling building of weathered clapboards sheltered by some huge and beautiful willow trees. There was a single gas pump out front. The building was decorated with tin signs, in various states of decay and rust, advertising Coca-Cola and Bruton’s snuff. A redbone hound dog crawled from under the building and came snuffling toward us.
“Howdy.”
A tall, rawboned old geezer stood in the doorway of the store. Age had dried him out, but it hadn’t sapped him.
He squirted tobacco juice in the yard, wiped his mouth, looked me up and down.
“Have an accident?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Got a replacement part for this?”
He stepped into the store yard and I handed him the gashed line.
He hmmmmmmed over it. “Reckon I might have.”
I followed him around the building. He owned a considerable junk pile, some of it in boxes. He scratched around in a wooden barrel for a few minutes.
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“Here you are, friend,” he said. “That’ll be a dollar.”
I paid the old man and asked him if he’d seen the black car. Or the diesel rig. Maybe if I could identify the rig, the driver could tell me something about the black car that had been just ahead of him.
It was a long chance, and I didn’t expect anything from it.
I got exactly what I expected. The old man had seen neither. He’d been napping on a cot in his store.
I left Laura at the old man’s place, walked back to the rented car, and installed the second-hand gas line.
We ate the picnic sandwiches as we drove back to town.
When I dropped Laura and went to my apartment, I stripped down, ran a tub of cool water and got cleaned up. My right side was settling purple. It was tender. It would stiffen up some, but it would take something more to keep me from moving around.
I put on a short-sleeved cotton sport shirt and a well-worn Palm Beach suit. Then I went out in the kitchenette and turned on the fan. I sat in front of it while I drank a quart of icy beer.
I thought of the way that car had looked coming at me. Like a thing alive. I shivered faintly, thinking how close I’d come to being a statistic in the accident column.
The car meant desperation.
Desperation meant I was getting close.
Still, I didn’t know what I was close to.
And if I was that close, I’d have to watch my step.
Patrick had said I might get killed, and Patrick could be so right.
It wasn’t just a case any longer. I guess I knew it from the first. It was a fight for survival, and I could avoid it only by letting Wallace Tulman die.
The phone rang.
I got up, went in the other room and picked the phone up.
I said hello.
A smooth, well-modulated voice said, “Is this Ed Rivers speaking?”
“That’s right.”
“I understand you’ve been wanting to see me.”
The muggy heat prickled me. “That depends on who you are.”
“Giles Newell.”
“Where are you?”
“In. town. I’ve just made arrangements for my sister’s cremation.”
“I’m sorry about her,” I said.
He was silent a moment. “Yes. I’m sorry, too. And more than sorry. They say it was a very unfortunate accident.”
“That’s what they say.”
“You saw her not long before she—fell.”
“Yes.”
“Did she talk very much, about me?”
“No,” she didn’t,” I said.
“We hadn’t much of a family,” he said. “Just her and me.”
“I understand. When can I see you?”
“Tonight.”
“Couldn’t you make it—”
“Tonight, Mr. Rivers.”
“All right. Where?”
He hesitated a second time. “You know where the big Walgreen’s is out Grand Central?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a small hotel up the block on the next corner. Called The Palms. Know the place?”
“I can find it.”
“C
ome there. At eight o’clock. Ask the clerk to ring Mr. Southers’ room.”
“I got it,” I said.
The line went dead. I hung up slowly. I stood beside the phone thinking.
The thoughts all added up to the same thing.
There wasn’t a move I could make, nothing I could do.
Except wait until eight o’clock tonight.
I cruised slowly by the big super drugstore. Its parking area was crowded. Carefree shoppers made an early night rush hour in the drugstore.
Bright street lights, traffic blaring in a night that was even more oppressive with heat than the day just finished. Up ahead a neon winking off and on in the outlines of a palm tree.
I parked the rented car at the curb in front of the hotel.
It was a small, modernistic place. Rawhide and rattan furniture in the lobby. A smart cocktail lounge to one side. A couple came through the swinging doors of the lounge, letting into the lobby the soft sound of laughter and the muted music of a jazz combo.
A dark young man, very neat in a white suit, was at the desk.
I moved over to the desk. The squirt looked up, and I said, “I’ve got an appointment with Mr. Southers. Will you ring his room?”
“Mr. Southers isn’t here.”
I glanced at my watch, at the clock on the wall behind the desk.
Western Union and I couldn’t both be wrong. It was eight o’clock.
“I’ll wait,” I said.
“It might prove dreary,” the clerk said. “Mr. Southers checked out for good an hour ago.”
“Alone?”
“Really, I don’t discuss—”
“Okay,” I said, “did he leave a message for me? The name is Rivers.”
“I’m afraid he didn’t.”
I turned and walked out.
I sat in the rented car for a few minutes, my fingers tapping the steering wheel.
Then I started the car, turned left at the next intersection, and drove to the Estates.
I parked half a block away, got out of the car and walked to Evie Grove’s cottage.
The cozy, low-built, stucco house was dark. I strolled on a few paces, stopped and put my foot on a fire plug to tie my shoe.
My right side screamed bloody murder as I bent over the shoe.
When I straightened, I knew the street was all right for a few seconds. Until a car happened into an intersection, or somebody came out of a nearby house.
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