Lightning

by John Lutz

  “Beth—”

  “Don’t forget the computer.”

  The line went dead.

  Carver, whose cooking skills and experience were limited, sat thinking that it had been years since he’d seen a turkey baster.

  Xaviar Demorose’s address turned out to be the Golden Time retirement home in West Del Moray, not far from Women’s Light. Carver had to drive past the clinic on his way there. The low brick clinic looked normal except for the boarded-up front doors and windows, and the wreaths and bouquets of colorful flowers laid out on the step that led to the entrance. Across the street, two dour looking men were walking back and forth with signs. One sign appeared to show a blown-up photograph of a fetus with a red X slashed through it. The other said simply HIS TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD beneath a crude drawing of an explosion. Carver pushed down his anger and drove on.

  Beneath whatever they used to scent the air, the lobby of the retirement home still smelled like medicine, stale sweat, and desperation. Three very old women sat side by side in wheelchairs, staring at a television set showing a soap opera. On the other side of the lobby, where sunlight fell through a high window to the tile floor, an old man with long white hair sat in a rocking chair, a knotted sheet wrapped around his midsection holding him in place. His head was bowed and he was staring vacantly at his lap. A thread of saliva caught in the sunlight stretched from his slack lips down to his chest.

  From behind a reception desk, a young woman with brown hair and bangs smiled at Carver inquisitively. Her right hand was poised with a pencil, but there was nothing she might have been writing on beneath or anywhere near the hand. She had a round face that swelled when she smiled and made her look overweight even though her body was quite thin. She seemed incredibly young in contrast to the residents in the lobby. The brass plaque on the desk said her name was Claire. Lucky Claire, Carver thought, with all that life ahead of you.

  “I’d like to talk to one of your residents,” he said, returning Claire’s smile. “A man named Xaviar Demorose.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” she said in a despondent tone that made both smiles disappear. “Are you a relative?”

  “No. I’m acquainted with the family.”

  “Mr. Demorose passed over this morning.”

  “Passed over?”

  “Died.”

  That was better, Carver thought. Dying wasn’t like flying over the roof. Or maybe it was.

  Claire was absently pressing the sharp pencil point into her left palm, as if she’d somehow been responsible for Demorose’s death and was punishing herself. “He suffered a heart attack two days ago, and he pass—he died early this morning.”

  “He had a heart attack the day of the Women’s Light Clinic bombing?”

  “I’m afraid that’s so. The news excited him to the point where his heart couldn’t take it.” She realized what she was doing and put down the pencil. “He’d had three bypass operations, you know.”

  “No,” Carver said, “I didn’t. Can you tell me, was Mr. Demorose in the habit of writing letters?”

  “Oh, sure. He wrote to everyone in the news. And when he wasn’t writing to them, he was sending letters to newspaper editors and politicians, just about anyone he could think of. People in here get awful lonely sometimes. Their families forget them after awhile, and they need outside contact. Mr. Demorose, he had an opinion about almost everything, and he needed to share his opinions.”

  “Were they, uh . . . rational opinions?”

  “Sometimes,” Claire said, not willing to speak ill of the passed over.

  “How old was Mr. Demorose?”

  “His ninetieth birthday would have been next Tuesday.” She seemed especially moved by the fact that Mr. Demorose had come so near and then missed making yet another round number. “It’s all so sad, isn’t it?”

  “It’s sad,” Carver agreed, and told Claire good-bye.

  Mildred Otten, the second letter writer, was a different story.

  She lived in an apartment on Evers Avenue a mile from the ocean, where the neighborhood began to decline. Her building was a four-story white stucco structure with green iron balconies and a front walkway that passed beneath a rotted wooden trellis rich with flaming red roses. Her unit was on the fourth floor, rear, and when she opened the door to Carver’s knock, heat rolled out at him.

  Mildred Otten didn’t seem to notice the heat, though her thin yellow-and-white cotton dress was plastered with perspiration to her gaunt body. Her face, narrow as a board and with a mottled red birthmark covering most of its left cheek, was gleaming with sweat and she was blinking her tiny green eyes as if they stung. A lock of damp hair dangled down over one ear in a spiritless little curl. It was a strange color between blond and gray, as if she’d begun to dye it and then changed her mind.

  Carver identified himself and showed her his license with its color photo that looked a little like him. She seemed satisfied, as if she didn’t distinguish between private and public cops, and stepped back and invited him in. He was careful not to step on her toes; she was wearing sandals made out of tire tread with rubber loops over the big toe of each foot. On several of her toes were the kind of flesh-colored, circular bandages used to treat corns.

  The apartment was steaming hot. The furniture was cheap and stained, and there was a woven oval rug on the scarred hardwood floor. On gray walls that needed paint were hung various untrained religious prints that appeared to have been clipped from books and magazines. One print was of Prometheus chained to a mountain while his liver was being devoured by a vulture. Carver wondered if Mildred realized she was mixing Greek mythology with scripture. Maybe it didn’t matter. The theme seemed to be suffering. There was no sign of an air conditioner, and only one window was open—about two inches. There was no screen.

  Mildred saw him looking at the window. “I don’t open it wider because of the gulls,” she explained in a firm, positive voice. “They’re the devil’s agents and they might fly in and pluck my eyes out if I allow it.” She glared at him. “It happened to a woman down in Boca Raton.”

  “I think I read about that,” Carver said.

  “Two summers ago, it was.”

  “Yes.” Carver pulled out the letter she’d sent to Dr. Grimm. The paper was damp now, and some of the printing was blurred. “Did you mail this, Ms. Otten?”

  She studied it. “Of course. Isn’t that my signature?”

  “The letter’s a death threat,” Carver pointed out.

  “The other police have talked to me already about that. Didn’t they tell you? I explained to them it wasn’t a death threat, it was a vision from the Lord. The sower hath reaped the whirlwind.”

  “Dr. Grimm, you mean?”

  “Of course. He took lives, and someone took his own. Wasn’t that just?”

  “It depends on your point of view.”

  “Just is just,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Were you at the clinic the day it was bombed, Mildred? May I call you Mildred?”

  “Yes and yes. I saw the wrath and lightning of the Lord loosed on the house of death.”

  “Innocent people were killed,” Carver pointed out.

  “Innocent people are killed there every day, day after day.”

  “Again a matter of opinion, Mildred.” Carver was trying not to get angry, remembering Beth flying backward out of the clinic in a sunlit shower of glass fragments.

  Mildred shook her head again, this time violently, as if flinging away his words before they might stick in her mind. “As you know not how the wind blows, nor how a babe within the womb grows.’”

  “The Bible?”

  “Ecclesiastes. We haven’t the wisdom to judge living tissue other than alive. It is the Lord’s work. That is plain in the Word.”

  “I understand you’re a member of Operation Alive.”

  “I am that, and proud of it. ‘Look at my agony; my maidens and my youth are in captivity.’”

  It took Carver a few seconds to realize that
she was quoting again.

  “Ecclesiastes?”

  “Lamentations,” she said. “ ‘He slaughters and kills the children, the delight of our eyes.’ That verse refers to Dr. Grimm and his kind. So I do what I can, Mr. Carver. I make picket signs, I stand before passersby whose eyes are blind and try to make them see. Ever since they released me from that place of doctors and sins, I’ve worked for the force of life and the reward of life everlasting.”

  “What place was that?” Carver asked. But he knew.

  Mildred suddenly appeared sly. She grinned like a mischievous schoolgirl. “Ask your friends among the Romans.”

  “Romans?”

  “The police. The ones who are crucifying Adam Norton.”

  “Do you know Norton?”

  “He is me and I am he.”

  Carver stared at her. She smiled broadly. He decided she’d had nothing to do with bomb making or conspiracies; they were beyond her. Whatever anger he’d felt toward her dissipated, leaving only pity. She was probably certifiably insane.

  “The police know that when the lightning struck, I was on the other side of the street picketing,” she said, “toiling in the service of the Lord. He is my salvation and my alibi.”

  Maybe not so insane, he decided, thanking her for her time and easing his way out the door.

  Maybe it was the heat.

  10

  AFTER LEAVING MILDRED OTTEN, Carver drove to Poco’s Tacos on Magellan near the public marina, where he sat outside at one of the small, round metal tables and had two burritos and a Diet Coke for supper. He watched the white-hulled pleasure boats bobbing gently at their moorings. They appeared impossibly clean and pure in the slanted bright sun of early evening; emblematic of money and position. Florida was different if you possessed wealth. It could be a vast playground then, Disneyworld bounded by Georgia, Alabama, and the sea.

  When he was finished eating, he disposed of his paper plates and cup in an orange-and-white trash receptacle around which bees buzzed, then walked over to a bench where he wouldn’t bother any of Poco’s other customers and fired up a Swisher Sweet cigar. He put on his tinted glasses so the sun’s reflection off the water and the white hulls wouldn’t hurt his eyes. Then he sat back and smoked and looked out at the sea and the pelicans, so awkward on land and so graceful in the air, passing low over the water.

  Beth hated Poco’s and had refused to eat there with Carver. She’d warned him that the food tasted tainted beneath the hot spices and he was going to contract some sort of illness from it. It had all started, he was sure, when she became sick here during the early days of her pregnancy, though she didn’t see it that way. He decided not to tell her he’d been here when he saw her that evening. Why upset her? He’d mention having eaten supper in the hospital cafeteria. A lie to facilitate healing.

  More pelicans arrived. They put on a show, skimming low, sometimes splashing down to dive for a fish, always coming up empty. Beyond them at sea, boats with brightly colored sails tacked and canted to the wind. And beyond the boats, white clouds lay low and immense on the horizon. It was such a beautiful world, Carver thought; why did people have to plant bombs in it? But he knew the sick and the pained and possessed were out there, the ones who were sure they were striking back at something. They always had been, but now there seemed to be more of them, and coming from both ends of the spectrum. He’d always tried to practice and endorse the politics of reasonableness. He hadn’t moved much in his basic beliefs. But the rest of the world had moved. People he had admired and with whom he had agreed had made a journey from dedication to zealotry to fanaticism. He couldn’t go with them. He tried now to be apolitical, but people were dying.

  The light had dimmed and he no longer needed the sunglasses, and there were no more pelicans. He tossed the dead stump of his cigar into a trash container next to the bench. Then he stood up and limped to his car to drive to the cottage for the Toshiba to take to Beth at the hospital.

  It was official visiting hours, so the hospital parking lot was almost full. He had to park the Olds in a slot at the far end, near a low stone wall and a row of palm trees that marked the property line. It was a long walk to the entrance. The day’s heat lingered and with each step the tip of his cane sank slightly into the warm, graveled blacktop.

  A nurse he hadn’t seen before was leaving Beth’s room as he entered. Beth was sitting up in bed, leaning back on her pillow and reading a Gazette-Dispatch. Her hair was pulled back and tied with a red ribbon, and the front of her gown sagged to reveal the cleavage of her large breasts. Carver knew it wasn’t the time to be thinking what he was thinking. She smiled at him, as if maybe she knew what he was thinking, and he went over and kissed her.

  “How are you?” he asked when he straightened up, leaning on his cane. He saw now that her eyes looked weary and her features were strained.

  “Better. Mad.”

  “Better, all right.”

  She straightened her gown, then touched his hand where it gripped the crook of his cane. “Just set it on the table where I can reach it.”

  “What? Oh.” He’d forgotten he was holding the notebook computer in its black carrying case. He moved a plastic water pitcher and placed the case on the table.

  “The battery charger in there?”

  “Everything,” he said.

  She folded the newspaper, which she’d laid aside, and tossed it onto a nearby chair. “They’ve indicted Adam Norton.”

  “No surprise,” Carver said. “He’s probably guilty. Question is, was he put up to it?”

  “I think he was. By Operation Alive.”

  “He might have been simply a fanatic acting on his own. There are plenty of them these days. We tend to look for reason and conspiracy sometimes when they don’t exist. It’s not always a rational universe.”

  “Hardly ever. Did McGregor find you?”

  “No. Lucky me.”

  He thought she was reaching for her computer, but instead she picked up the plastic water pitcher. She poured water with a few chunks of ice into the plastic cup that served as the pitcher’s lid, then leaned back into her pillow and sipped. When her thirst was assuaged, she held the cup in her lap with both hands and said, “Tell me about the outside world, Fred.”

  He filled her in on his visits with Dr. Grimm’s widow and with Mildred Otten.

  “There’s a lot of rage out there,” she said.

  “There is around abortion clinics.”

  “The paper said the police found blasting caps in Norton’s car, and traces of dynamite in his garage workshop. Not to mention several books on how to make bombs.”

  “He’ll need a good lawyer,” Carver said,

  “He’s got one. Name of Jefferson Brama. Burrow did a piece on him last year, when he was defending a pro-life demonstrator in a property damage case. He won, despite a ton of evidence against his client. He’s aggressive and smooth and a winner.”

  “He’s also the attorney for Operation Alive,” Carver said, remembering reading about the Reverend Martin Freel referring media questions about the bombing to his attorney and naming Brama. “You’d think Operation Alive would be trying to distance itself from Norton,”

  “Oh, no. He’s one of theirs. You know how those kinds of organizations play it. They goad their members into doing something drastic, then step back and deny culpability. But while they emphatically don’t condone what was done, they don’t actually condemn it. So they’re acting as if Norton is merely a sheep strayed from the flock, instead of a calculating killer on a mission. That’s how Operation Alive is playing it. Tongue clucking, but with a ‘well, that’s what you can expect when you murder babies’ tone.”

  “How do you know all this?” Carver asked, glad to see her angry, taking an interest as a victim. Righteous rage was preferable to depression.

  “I’ve been reading the papers, watching TV. That Reverend Freel is like all the rest of the smug bastards who’re causing the trouble, putting themselves above the law, frig
htening pregnant teenage girls and calling them murderers on the way into clinics.”

  “And you think he’s behind the Women’s Light bombing? That he hired or instructed Norton?”

  Her jaw set. “I think he motivated him. The Freels of this world, they yammer about saving lives, but they killed my—” She stopped talking suddenly and looked as if she might break into sobs.

  “I know,” Carver said softly to her, thinking she was more delicate right now than she appeared. Balanced on a fine edge. “I know what you mean and I feel the same way.” He sat down on the bed and held her, waiting for her to cry, but she didn’t.

  She sucked in a deep breath and lay back. He noticed that she cocked her head slightly to the right on the pillow so she could hear him better with her left ear. Her face was dark stone. “Keep me informed on what’s going on, Fred. When I get out of here, I want to help you pin this on whoever’s responsible.”

  “Maybe Norton really did act on his own.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Neither did Carver, but he didn’t say it. He angled his cane and stood up from the bed.

  “Do you know a tall, broad-shouldered man with black horn-rimmed glasses and a blond crew cut?” Beth asked.

  “No.”

  “He was wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. I thought he might be police.”

  “Maybe he was. Or FBI. Where’d you see him?”

  “He stepped into the room earlier today, while a nurse was in here. Then he only smiled, nodded, and turned around and left. I thought he might be one of McGregor’s men, looking for you.”

  “Could be he was. Or just some guy who wandered into the wrong room.”

  “He was kind of creepy. That’s why I thought he might be connected to McGregor.”

  “Logical,” Carver agreed. “Creepy how?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess because he was so perfectly groomed and conservatively and neatly dressed that it almost had to be a front. He was like an automaton who’d been to Brooks Brothers.”