Flame

by John Lutz

  Chapter 3

  HE WAS DANCING, WHIRLING on two good legs. The woman he was with was wearing heady perfume. A scent he couldn’t place. Diamonds shot sparks off her black velvet gown.

  Carver opened his eyes wider.

  There was no woman. He wasn’t dancing. The diamonds were fragments of glass. The velvet wasn’t a gown, wasn’t black, and wasn’t even velvet; it was the blue carpet in his office.

  He was disappointed.

  Why was he lying on the floor? Staring at a thousand glittering glass shards and wondering where the hell was his cane? A curl of blackness broken by light washed over him, then receded. Like a dark surf rushing in, rushing out. He tried to gather his senses.

  What’s going on here?

  Not sure.

  You fully conscious, Carver? Reasoning straight?

  Dumb question. How would I know? But yeah, I think so.

  Where was his cane?

  Stretched out on his stomach, he propped himself up on his elbows and looked around.

  Whoa! The office was some mess. All the papers that had been on his desk were spread over the floor and up against the far wall, like leaves tossed by the wind. Nothing was left on the desk, not even the ashtray or the incredibly complicated Japanese-made combination answering machine, telephone, recorder, and Dictaphone Edwina had talked him into buying. The drapes hung limply at the window and were so shredded they admitted narrow sunbeams that dappled the floor and caused the broken glass to glitter. Diamond, diamond.

  Carver saw his cane lying on the floor near the desk. He started to drag himself toward it, then felt a shard of glass penetrate the heel of his hand and stopped and lay still.

  The sharp pain cleared his mind. Gingerly, he pulled the splinter of glass out with his thumb and forefinger and dropped it off to the side.

  Then he moved more carefully, picking glass out of the carpet before him. Like a fastidious maid removing dangerous lint.

  He reached the cane and gripped it tightly, feeling the hard walnut warm to his grasp. But he didn’t try to stand up. The way he felt, that could wait a minute or two. Instead he worked his way to a sitting position and leaned his back against the wall, his stiff leg angled out in front of him, and wondered what had put him here, what had happened.

  He heard the singsong wail of a siren, way off in the distance, yet red and blue light danced off the glass fragments remaining in the window frame. Roofbar lights. Odd. A police car had turned into the lot and was parking out front, but the siren seemed miles away. Sound and sight didn’t coincide. Didn’t make sense.

  Then he realized there was something wrong with his hearing. And there was a high, steady buzzing in his ears, hardly noticeable because it was so monotonous it seemed part of normal background noise. He’d been ignoring it the way people ignore crickets screaming.

  Then the sky outside the window darkened, lightened, darkened. Smoke drifting on the wind. He could smell it. And he could smell something else. Something sweet and cloying that was burning and creating the black smoke. And he remembered.

  Said, “Holy Christ!” Grabbed the edge of the desk, planted the tip of his cane firmly in the soft carpet, and pushed himself to his feet.

  His head ached and he was dizzy. And now that he’d remembered, he was trembling. He could feel the vibration running like electricity through the cane.

  He leaned hard on the cane with both hands and waited, his body swaying. Finally the dizziness passed. The trembling ceased. The headache decided to stay.

  Another siren wailed outside. Much louder than the first. Through the window, Carver saw the roof of another police car and its flashing red and blue lights as it braked to a halt outside.

  Renway. It had to be Renway who’d triggered the explosion when he started the Caddie. Carver remembered how the sound of the big car’s engine turning over had preceded the blast. Renway, who’d been pretending to be someone else. Who? Oh, yeah, guy named Weston, or Wesley. That was it—Frank Wesley.

  Carver hobbled to the window to make sure he was right about the source of the explosion. Peered outside and saw the long Cadillac burning despite the frantic efforts of two uniformed cops with fire extinguishers. The car’s twisted hood was lying on the ground nearby; its doors were blown open or had been opened by the cops. One of the rear ones hung crazily by only the bottom hinge, like some kind of injured wing.

  The car’s interior was pure orange flame, fed by gasoline and not in the least affected by whatever the cops were spraying on it. The tires were already melted to globs of rubber. What Carver had smelled were the mingled odors of rubber—and Renway—burning. The sickening stench of charred flesh that lodged in the nostrils and lay thick on the tongue to become taste.

  Through the pulsing, constantly unfolding orange blossom trapped in the car, a wizened black form could occasionally be glimpsed bent over the steering wheel as if trying to coax speed from hurtling steel, like Renway’s narrow shadow. Only it wasn’t his shadow, it was Renway himself. What he’d become in the blast furnace of the Cadillac.

  People were standing across the street and on the edge of the parking lot. Staring, knotted close together as if for protection. Death was always an unpleasant reminder. Another uniformed cop was over there, strutting back and forth like a storm trooper and waving his arms, motioning for everyone to stay well back, though no one was moving. Carver knew there was no danger of another explosion. Everything explosive or flammable in the car was already blazing.

  Sirens. Very loud now. And a clanging bell.

  A yellow-and-chrome Del Moray fire engine, gaudy as a jukebox, belched black smoke of its own from its diesel exhaust, slowed down with more bell clanging, and turned off of Magellan into the driveway. Another patrol car arrived, following the fire engine like a pilot fish trailing a shark. No other vehicles moving out there; Magellan must be blocked to through traffic.

  The breeze caught the smoke and the sweet odor again, carrying them Carver’s way.

  He swallowed the syrupy taste at the base of his tongue and backed away from the window. Limped over behind his desk. Sat down hard in his chair. Dizzy like before. Not feeling well at all. His headache flared, pounded. Jesus! Soon as he felt like standing again, he’d root through the locked bottom drawer of the file cabinet, where he kept his gun and some Extra-Strength Tylenol. Needed three of four tablets to block this baby.

  What happened next didn’t help his headache at all.

  The office door opened and in stepped McGregor.

  Chapter 4

  DEL MORAY POLICE LIEUTENANT William McGregor was probably six-foot-six. In his early forties and skinny but with the kind of wiry, coiled strength seen in pro basketball players. He had straight blond hair, combed severely sideways and beginning to thin, a lock of it lying raggedly down his forehead. A long, narrow face with tiny and close-set blue eyes, a jutting jaw. He looked more Scandinavian than Scottish. His thin lips parted in a smile to reveal the wide gap between his front teeth, and he shut the door behind him and stepped all the way into the office. Like many very tall men, he seemed to move lazily, in sections. Broken glass crunched beneath his boat-size black wing-tip shoes.

  He said, “Looks like your cleaning woman ain’t been in yet today.”

  Carver said, “I’ll tidy up myself just as soon as you’re gone. I’d like to get to it.”

  McGregor hitched his thumbs in his belt and stood with his legs spread wide. A colossus straddling anything he could bully. Not going anyplace. “This is police business, Carver. Let me ask, you notice a car explode right outside your window?”

  Carver’s headache throbbed. “It didn’t escape my attention.”

  “Now, the guy who’s barbecued in the driver’s seat might have come to this building to rent a car, only he arrived in what looks like it was a pretty new and nice car before it got all bent and scorched. Or he might have driven here to buy some insurance next door; that’d be a classic case of bad timing, hey? Or he might have come here to s
ee you, a private investigator sitting with his thumb up his ass in his brand-new office. That seems most likely of the three. Incidentally, what made you rent an office? Edwina get tired of you and throw you outa her house?”

  The last thing Carver felt like doing was talking to McGregor, the most self-involved, ambitious, and unscrupulous person he’d ever met. Add to that bad grooming. Even from a distance of over five feet, he could smell McGregor’s foul breath and cheap perfumy cologne. The afternoon Florida heat was pushing in through the blown-out window, too. Almost enough to turn the stomach.

  “You didn’t answer my question, fuckface.”

  “I thought you said police business.”

  McGregor brushed glass fragments off the chair by the desk and sat down. Draped one long, long leg over the other. There were deep creases behind the knees of his cheap brown suit. Lint and dandruff littered the shoulders. Suit needed to go in for its yearly cleaning. He said, “Okay, you know the guy that got blown up?”

  Carver trusted McGregor about as far as he’d trust Charles Manson with a badge. The lieutenant often worked outside the police department and outside the law itself in his pursuit of personal glory, wealth, and promotion. It had led to his dismissal from the Fort Lauderdale police, but he’d come north to Del Moray and quickly lied and cheated his way up the ranks in that small department.

  “I knew him,” Carver said. He leaned into his cane and stood up. Limped idly around the office, extending his bad leg out in front of him now and then, with the heel on the floor, and doing a kind of cane-supported deep knee-bend to pick up things from the carpet. A file folder. The ashtray. The third thing he picked up was the Japanese-made combination phone, answering machine, recorder, and Dictaphone. As he did so, he pressed the record button. Casually placed the machine on the desk corner with the built-in mike aimed at McGregor. Lifted a nine-inch shard of window glass and tossed it over near the upended wastebasket. Just tidying up. The conversation in the office would be recorded now, without McGregor’s knowledge.

  “So go on, tell me about it,” McGregor said. “Gonna make like a shy talk-show guest and force me to drag every answer outa you?”

  “His name was Bert Renway. He came here to hire me.”

  “That figures. Guy musta been a loser from the get-go. Everything in that car’s been burned or melted, so you’re the main source of information. Don’t lie or hold anything back, Carver. This is a murder investigation.”

  “Maybe the car exploded by itself. Gas fumes.”

  “Don’t give me your coy act. First thing I smelled when I drove up was cooked meat. Second thing was cordite from a blasting-powder charge. It was TNT or something sent your client on his way, not super unleaded.”

  Carver knew McGregor was right—this was a murder investigation and no time to play cute. Not unless he had some other occupation in mind. Which he didn’t; he had a love-hate relationship with investigative work.

  He sat back down behind the desk and told McGregor every detail of Renway’s visit.

  When Carver was finished, McGregor sat rubbing his thumb along the side of his long jaw. He said, “You and I both know the likely reasons somebody’d hire some fool to take over an apartment and car.”

  Carver said, “I was gonna approach it from that angle.”

  McGregor’s close-set, beady eyes took on an intense look. Carver had seen that expression before. The lieutenant was thinking hard, turning it all over in his mind, figuring how to use to best advantage what he’d just heard.

  Then he smiled, poking the pink tip of his tongue through the space between his front teeth. It lent him a thoroughly evil, lascivious air that perfectly matched his character. He said, “Fort Lauderdale, huh? I got no use for any of the worthless fartbrains in that department.”

  “They feel the same way about you,” Carver said. “Difference is, they’re right.”

  “The murder happened right here in Del Moray,” McGregor said thoughtfully. “You’ve fulfilled your professional obligation and informed the police of what you know. From now on, I think you better keep the story to yourself. So it’ll be just between the two of us.”

  One part of Carver couldn’t believe it. The other wasn’t surprised. He’d seen too much of McGregor to assume limits on his deviousness or unethical behavior. Where ethics should be, McGregor had a vacuum.

  Carver said loudly, so the recorder would be sure to pick it up, “You mean you’re not going to tell the Fort Lauderdale police about Renway living in Wesley’s apartment? Getting blown up in Wesley’s car?”

  “This is a Del Moray matter,” McGregor said. “We’ll see what the Fort Lauderdale police find out for themselves. See how they play this thing. See if they share with us.”

  “You sound like a schoolkid arguing on the playground over whose turn it is to be It.”

  “It was Renway, and if he could, he’d tell you we ain’t playing schoolyard games.” He slumped his lanky frame to the side. His suitcoat fell open to reveal a wrinkled lining, a brown leather shoulder holster, and the checked butt of a Police Special. “Maybe now it’s your turn to be It, Carver. You say this Renway gave you two thousand dollars?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you’ve been officially hired. Bought and paid for.”

  “Thing is,” Carver said, “my client’s dead.”

  “You still better do what you were hired for,” McGregor said. “Go to Fort Lauderdale and figure out what the Wesley impersonation’s all about. Let me know what’s going on, but don’t let anyone else in on it. Not even anybody in the Del Moray department. Our little secret. Ain’t it deliciously fun?”

  “No.”

  “But ain’t you curious?”

  “Yeah,” Carver had to admit. He knew he’d have gone to Fort Lauderdale even if McGregor hadn’t suggested it. The police wouldn’t think kindly of a private investigator mucking around in an open case, but McGregor was solving that problem. The police were requesting Carver’s help, and it was all on tape. Carver decided to put up some resistance anyway, for the recorder. The reluctant virgin. “Being curious doesn’t mean I’m on my way to Lauderdale.”

  McGregor began making obscure but unmistakable threats about pulling strings and having Carver’s investigator’s license revoked if he didn’t cooperate. Carver tuned him out and let him talk in the direction of the microphone. McGregor was right, this was fun.

  “I dunno,” Carver said, stringing him along, “this is an open case. I can wind up in the wringer.”

  “You’re in the wringer now,” McGregor said. “Balls and all.” He leaned forward and smiled with all the earnestness of a Yugo salesman. “Listen, Carver, we both know this smells like something big and important. The kinda thing where there’d be plenty of credit to spread around if we broke it. Fame and money for you, and a career maker for me. Be fucking captain someday.”

  “Another way for you to make captain again might be old-fashioned good police work.”

  “Screw good police work. Sticking parking tickets under windshield wipers, standing and waving traffic through on streetcorners too hot to touch, peeling dead winos off the sidewalks—that’s good police work. If you’d stayed with the Orlando department instead of pulling a dumb-ass stunt like getting your knee shot away doing good police work, you wouldn’t’ve gone higher than patrolman. It’s ’cause of the way you think. Way you see the world. Like you got some kinda mission and can’t bend with the wind. Kinda dumb hero who dies defending the bridge and then gets marched over and forgotten. Small-time shit, that’s you.”

  “No way to talk to a man whose help you want.”

  “Hey, it’s a two-way street, fuckhead.”

  “Until you decide to put up a new sign.”

  “I’m not asking you to cut off your dick, Carver. And this way you keep your client’s two grand instead of it gets confiscated for evidence. Use it to cover expenses in Fort Lauderdale. Figure out what’s happening down there and keep me tuned in. We’ll be t
he kinda goddamn heroes that collect medals, we play this right.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  McGregor snorted and looked disgusted. “It ain’t like you got a choice, Carver. Not a real one, anyway. I gotta know now, or I got no recourse but to put your story in my report. Haul you in as a suspect, maybe. Hey, why not? You were the last person to see the victim alive. You and him argued.”

  “I don’t recall an argument.”

  “Then why’d you tell me about it? I gotta put it in my report. Hell of an argument. Over some money you owed him, I think it was. Root of all evil, hey?”

  “And I excused myself, ducked outside, and planted a bomb in his car?”

  “Who’s to say you didn’t have help?” McGregor flashed his gap-toothed, Satanic grin. “You’re over a barrel, Carver. You don’t wanna get fucked, you best do as I tell you. Either you drive down to Fort Lauderdale, or you go for a drive to headquarters and log some jail time. Get muddied enough to lose the privilege of taking people’s money for uncovering dirt and screwing up their lives. Which direction you wanna travel?”

  Carver pretended to think about it. Finally said, “South to Fort Lauderdale.”

  “Very sensible,” McGregor said, unfolding up out of his chair to loom over the seated Carver. Guy probably hadn’t trimmed the hair in his nostrils for years. “Kinda rare for you, to be so reasonable.”

  “As you pointed out, I don’t have much choice.”

  McGregor grinned and took two long strides to the door. Paused and said, “Keep in touch, assface. Don’t forget that part of our arrangement.”

  “You’ll know what I know,” Carver said, in the mood to be agreeable. He wanted McGregor to leave as soon as possible, before the combined odors of cheap cologne and scorched flesh became too much for his stomach.

  “When you know it,” McGregor added, and ambled out the door, swinging his long arms wide.

  Carver waited a few minutes, then pressed rewind on the machine to make sure the conversation was recorded. He could put the cassette in his safe-deposit box, conduct the investigation his way, and tell McGregor to go fuck himself if push came to shove. Serve the dumb yahoo right for not keeping up with Japanese technology.