Lightning

by John Lutz

  “So am I,” Carver pointed out, “if I neglect to shave for a few days. Al doesn’t shave at all.”

  Beth walked over and sat down on the sofa, next to the valise. Al followed and sat quietly at her feet. That didn’t figure to Carver, since he’d been the one who had fed Al this morning. Maybe his previous owner was a woman.

  Al rested his head against Beth’s thigh. Carver was getting restless.

  Beth ignored Al and unzipped the valise, then withdrew her computer case. She opened the case and removed the computer.

  “You should rest,” Carver said.

  “I’ve been resting, Fred. I’m going to print out my notes and have you read them, then you can let me know what’s missing.”

  She stood up, causing Al to jerk his head back and stare at her questioningly. He followed her over to where her ink-jet printer was set up on a table, watched as if he understood what was going on as she attached the printer cord to the computer. She hooked up the AC adapter and plugged in the computer and printer.

  “I don’t think we need to keep Al,” she said. Al raised his sort-of eyebrows and stared at her as if shocked.

  “He’s a great alarm system,” Carver said. “He might even fight for you if the WASP breaks in.”

  “Al is not a fighter.”

  “You can’t tell by looking.”

  Al barked. It was a deep, dangerous, German shepherd bark.

  Beth couldn’t help looking impressed. She even smiled.

  Carver and Al watched as she switched on the computer and keyed into her word-processing program. In less than a minute, she had the printer grinding out paper.

  The phone rang. Carver went over and picked it up before Beth could. She was apparently determined to forget her grief and her injuries by throwing herself back into life. That wasn’t what Dr. Galt had in mind when he released her.

  “Fred Carver?” a man’s voice asked after Carver said hello. “The private investigator?”

  “It is.”

  “I went to your office this morning but you weren’t there, so I looked you up in the phone directory. I’m Nate Posey.”

  Carver couldn’t place the name and was about to say so when Posey added, “Wanda Creighton’s fiancé. You know, from the Women’s Light Clinic.”

  The gangly young man in the waiting room the day of the bombing. Almost had to be him. “I think we saw each other at the hospital,” Carver said. “I’m sorry about what happened.”

  “So am I. For me, for you, especially for Wanda. I want to talk with you. Can I drive to wherever you are? I’m on Magellan about three blocks from your office.”

  Carver wanted to talk to Posey, but he didn’t want him here. He wanted the cottage to serve as a haven for Beth to fully recover, and he didn’t want a visit by Posey to disturb her and spur her on to more activity before she was ready.

  “Or we could meet someplace halfway,” Posey almost pleaded, reading Carver’s silence as indecision about whether to have a meeting at all.

  “Drive north on Magellan about four miles,” Carver said. “There’s a public beach there, some park benches and picnic tables under some palm trees. I’ll meet you there in about twenty minutes.”

  “I know where it is,” Posey said. “Thanks, Mr. Carver.”

  “You’ll meet who there?” Beth asked when Carver hung up the phone.

  “That was Wanda Creighton’s fiancé.”

  “The woman who was killed in the clinic bombing?”

  “Yeah. He wants to talk.”

  “Maybe I should go with you,” Beth said. “I mean, maybe it would be safer for me.”

  Carver considered that manipulative suggestion. It really didn’t make much sense. Posey might not want to talk in her presence, and she’d wind up sitting alone on a bench or in the car while they conversed out of earshot. For that matter, Carver knew nothing about Posey, or even if the man he was going to meet was really who he said he was. Deviousness seemed to be going around like a virus.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, “You’ll be safer here. That’s why I got Al.”

  Before she could answer, he went into the sleeping area and pulled the top drawer of his dresser all the way out and laid it on the bed. In a square brown envelope fastened to the back of the drawer with duct tape was his Colt .38 semiautomatic. It was actually an illegal gun for a Florida private detective to carry. The investigator’s G license specified .38 revolvers or nine-millimeter semiautomatics. But Carver had never been called on the matter, didn’t ordinarily carry the gun, and had seldom used it. Besides, at a glance it looked like a nine-millimeter.

  He checked the clip in the handgrip, then racked the mechanism to jack a round into the chamber. Making sure the safety was on, he carried the gun in and laid it next to the printer, which had finished its work and was now switched off along with the computer. He didn’t have to instruct Beth in how to use the gun. She was at least as proficient with firearms as he was.

  “You’ll be safe here,” he said, “with this, and with Al.”

  Beth was frowning at him. “What I might do,” she said, “is use the gun on Al.” Al arched an eyebrow and seemed to smile, knowing she wasn’t serious. He was apparently aware of his charm. Like Carver. Only quite often with Beth, Carver was wrong. He wished he could somehow convey that to Al.

  “Lock the door behind me and let no one in,” he said to Beth. “I’ll come back here immediately after meeting with Posey and let you know what it was all about.”

  Beth picked up the gun, hefted it expertly in her hand, and stared down at it. “I hope the WASP does come here,” she said.

  “Don’t go to sleep until I come back,” Carver said. “Al might go to sleep too.”

  He kissed her on the lips so she couldn’t reply, then limped out of the cottage.

  On the porch, he stood still in the shade until he heard the snick of the locks on the other side of the door.

  Carver parked the Olds with its front tires up against a weathered telephone pole that had been laid sideways and was half buried to mark the edge of the gravel parking area between the coast highway and the rough, grassy slope of ground that led to the beach. The beach itself was deserted. The only other vehicles were a red Jeep with a canvas top, the one that Wanda Creighton had gotten out of before walking into the clinic just before the explosion—Nate Posey’s car—and a silver Honda station wagon with a sun-bleached American flag on its aerial.

  Even before Carver climbed out of the car, he saw whom he presumed was Nate Posey sitting on one of the wooden benches beneath some palm trees, facing away from him and staring out at the ocean.

  Hearing the car door slam, the man turned slightly, then stood up and watched Carver approach. He was the gangly young man from the hospital waiting room, as Carver had thought. He was wearing a white pullover shirt with a red collar and a wide red horizontal stripe across the midsection, and khaki pants that clung to his legs in the sea breeze and crept up to reveal red socks. The wind molding his clothes to his lean body made him look thin and misshapen. When Carver was close enough, Posey held out his bony hand and smiled.

  Carver shook hands with him. “Want to sit back down?” he asked. Despite the bright late-morning sun, it was almost cool in the brisk wind off the water.

  “I’d rather walk.” Posey stole a look at Carver’s cane. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Let’s stay on hard ground,” Carver said. “Walking with a cane’s kind of tricky on sand.”

  Posey strolled slowly and deliberately alongside Carver over the sandy but firm soil, about twenty feet away from where the beach began and parallel to the shore. Several minutes passed and he didn’t say anything, as if the words would have to be forced out and he didn’t yet have the strength. Carver idly studied the ground as he walked, careful not to place the tip of his cane on an uneven or soft spot that might cause him to fall. Like walking through life.

  “Wanda’s funeral was yesterday morning,” Posey said finally in a hoarse
voice Carver could barely hear. “I know I’m still in shock . . . or something like shock. But at the same time, something in my heart tells me I’m thinking more clearly now than ever before.”

  “That’s possible,” Carver said. He knew shock could work that way when it began to wear off, like an electrical jolt that somehow cleared one’s thought processes.

  “I’ve been mulling over what happened, Mr. Carver. How I was ignorant and fooled and the world’s never what it seems. One moment everything’s normal. All the pieces are in place and all the machinery of your life is humming away. The future seems almost as predictable and unchangeable as the past. The next moment everything changes.” He wiped his hand down his face, dragging thumb and forefinger over his eyes to staunch any tears. “Wanda was dead as suddenly and unexpectedly as if she’d been struck by lightning, and everything was different, changed forever.”

  Carver thought about how close he’d come to losing Beth that morning at the clinic and understood Posey’s state of mind. “None of us sees it coming,” he said. “That’s the nature of lightning—it’s sudden, out of nowhere, a blast of change. It happened with my leg.”

  “Your leg?”

  “When I was shot. I was an Orlando police officer, happy with my life, assuming the kind of future you mentioned, useful work rewarded by promotion and eventual retirement. Then one day I was off duty and went into a convenience store to buy groceries, and ran into a boy who was holding up the place. I wasn’t playing hero. He was on his way to escaping with the money when he suddenly giggled and lowered the gun and shot me in the leg. I don’t think he even knew he was going to do it. And suddenly there was a muzzle flash and his future and mine were radically changed.”

  “That’s why you’re a private investigator?”

  “I was a pensioned-off, self-pitying beach bum for a long time, then people who cared about me talked sense into me. I needed something to do, so I got into the only thing I knew well. I had the experience, the contacts, and a case came my way. Then I met a woman who changed my life again.”

  “The black woman? Beth?”

  “A different woman. She was there when I needed her. So was Beth, but that was later.”

  Posey stopped walking and stared down at his dusty loafers. They were the kind with a leather slot on each instep where people used to insert pennies. There was only sand in the slots. “You saying I’ll meet another woman?”

  “I’m saying the world will keep turning and your life will change. More slowly than it did the morning of the bombing, but it will change.”

  “Maybe, but right now I’m thinking about Wanda.”

  “You should be.”

  “I want to hire you to find out if Norton really is the bomber, Mr. Carver. And if he is, who if anybody was behind him and involved in planting that bomb.”

  Carver looked over at the youthful face made younger by a sun that revealed no mark of experience or hard-earned wisdom. “You want revenge.”

  “No. I want to understand what happened, all of it. I need to know why Wanda died; then maybe I can let her go someday.”

  “She died because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “I can’t just accept that. Why was it the wrong place and time? The days leading up to the bombing, and earlier that morning, I need to know about them so maybe they can provide an explanation for what happened, how it all fit together and why. I can pay you—I’ve got money. I can write you a big retainer check right now.” He reached toward his back pocket.

  Carver gripped his arm at the elbow and held it motionless. Posey winced and stared at him, surprised by his strength. A man and woman, probably from the Honda station wagon, were on the beach, he in baggy red shorts, she in a one-piece black swimming suit. They were strolling along the surf line, staring over at Carver and Posey. The woman said something and they looked away.

  “I don’t want you to pay me,” Carver said. “I’ll find the answers to some of your questions because I need to know them myself. Beth was carrying our child. She’d decided not to have an abortion and was at the clinic to cancel her appointment. It was only a matter of chance that she was there, just like with Wanda.”

  Posey stopped wincing and blinked. “Then maybe you know how I feel. Maybe you feel the same way yourself.”

  Carver released his arm. “Same bolt of lightning,” he said.

  20

  ON THE DRIVE BACK TO the cottage, Carver thought about his conversation with Nate Posey. Posey was still young and discovering how life could stun him and the future could dart away in unexpected directions.

  Carver pitied the grieving youth. Despite the kind words of mourners and assurances of professional counselors, what had happened at the Women’s Light Clinic would always be with him, and the pain, even if eased, would remain a part of him. The past was immortal and lived with the present.

  Before making a right turn off the coast highway onto the road to the cottage, he pulled the Olds onto the shoulder and braked to a halt.

  He’d slowed the car deliberately and studied the area where he knew someone watching or visiting the cottage unobtrusively might park, and he’d caught a glimpse of gleaming blue metal. Almost certainly a car, not quite well enough concealed among tall brush and a copse of sugar oaks. The low rumbling of the Olds’s idling V-8 engine was probably carried away by the ocean breeze, but Carver switched off the engine anyway. He reached into the back of the car and got the Gator-lock that in crime-ridden areas he used to lock the steering wheel in place. It was tempered steel and heavier than the cane and would make a more devastating weapon up close—an ideal club. He climbed out of the car, shutting its door quietly. Gripping his cane in one hand and the rubber handle of the Gator-lock firmly in the other, he started walking through the brush toward the parked car below.

  Carver was soon out of sight of the highway and whoever might be in the parked blue car. He maintained his sense of direction easily and kept moving toward the sound of the sea. Grit from the sandy soil worked into his moccasins, and once he almost fell when the tip of his cane broke through a crust of sand and plunged about six inches into a sink hole or the burrow of a small animal.

  There! He saw blue metal again, slightly off to the left. He veered that way, moving slower and more quietly, and worked his way up to the edge of the stand of trees. Though he was in the shade, sweat streamed down his face and he could feel it trickle stop-and-go down his ribs. Concealed by a wild, thorny bush with tiny red blossoms, he stared at a blue Dodge parked well off the narrow road, in a spot where the driver had a clear view of the cottage and the beach.

  But the driver wasn’t in the car. He was standing facing away from Carver on the other side of the vehicle, leaning back against its front fender. The first thing Carver noticed was that the man was too small to be the WASP. He was wearing gray slacks and a blue shirt. His suit coat, carefully folded inside-out so that only its gray silk lining was visible, had been laid neatly across the car’s waxed and gleaming hood. The man had bright red hair, cut short on the sides and grown bushy on top, combed neatly except for a single lock standing straight up on the left side of his head, displaced by the ocean breeze. A narrow dark strap traversed his back just below the armpit. Another strap lay at an angle across his shoulder. He was wearing a leather shoulder holster. He raised his right hand to his face now and then, as if he were eating something. From his angle, Carver couldn’t see what was in the hand.

  A sudden soft rustling sound off to Carver’s left caused the redheaded man to stand up straight and turn that way. In that instant Carver saw the holstered gun and a pair of binoculars slung around his neck by a black leather strap. Carver turned his head then to see what had caused the rustling sound.

  Nothing was visible. The redheaded man walked around to the back of the car, the binoculars bouncing gently against his stomach, and stood by the trunk. Carver saw now that he was carrying a brown paper sack that must have contained whatever he’d been eating.
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  There was the noise again. The redheaded man stiffened, placed the paper bag on the trunk, and removed the small handgun from its holster.

  Carver hunched lower, watching.

  Branches moved, the soft rustling resumed, and Al trotted out of the foliage.

  The man smiled and tucked his handgun back into its holster.

  “Hi there, boy,” he said, not loud, but Carver heard him.

  Al walked over to the man, who bent down and patted the top of his head. Then the man reached for the paper sack on the trunk and drew out a sandwich. He tore off part of the sandwich and tossed it to Al, who caught it effortlessly in mid-air and scarfed it down.

  This wasn’t what Carver had had in mind when he got Al. Instead of protecting Beth at the cottage, here Al was accepting food from a man who was obviously spying on Beth.

  Carver looked more closely at the man, then at the blue Dodge. He began to understand. Trying not to make noise, he cautiously began backing away behind the bush, careful to avoid the thorns.

  Al suddenly looked in his direction, turned toward him, hunkered down and pointed his nose and cocked a front leg.

  “So you’re part pointer,” the redheaded man with binoculars said, as if delighted. “Well, I’m not hunting quail today, fella.”

  Al continued to stare and point at Carver.

  Carver raised a forefinger to his lips, urging the dog to be quiet, but immediately realized how stupid that was. And the motion caused him to wave the red steel Gator-lock around, which might attract attention.

  The man tossed Al another bite of sandwich. As Al broke the classic pointer stance to pick it up from the ground, Carver moved back quickly.

  He turned and walked as swiftly as he could toward where the Olds was parked, digging his cane in deep with each step. It wasn’t easy, moving uphill toward the highway instead of downhill toward the beach, and he feared that any second Al would begin barking and run to join him.

  But apparently Al’s stomach took precedence over his pursuit instincts, and Carver made it to the Olds reasonably sure that he hadn’t been seen or heard by anyone or anything other than the dog.