Flame

by John Lutz

  “Used him as bait,” Carver said in disgust.

  Palma said, “We don’t see it like that.”

  “Call it what you will,” Jefferson said. “We’re not dealing with Sunday-school teachers, and sometimes we have to use unconventional methods. The Justice Department understands that and gives us leeway.”

  “Christ! That much leeway? Methods that unconventional?”

  “Sometimes. We’re sorry about Bert Renway. You can believe that or not.”

  “So Wesley realized you were on to him, and he decided to stay dead after Renway was killed and mistakenly identified as him. You faked the Miami autopsy report to keep the deception alive.”

  “That’s about it.”

  “But why do you want Wesley to stay dead?”

  “We have our reasons.”

  “Such as not wanting anyone to find out you hired Renway?”

  “That’s only part of it.”

  “But Wesley has to realize somebody must have put Renway up to impersonating him. Somebody must know he isn’t really dead.”

  “He knows we did it,” Jefferson said. “He also knows we can’t have that made public in light of our investigation. It was a rival drug faction that killed Renway, thinking he was Wesley. You heard about the drug wars in Central America?”

  “Sure. Sometimes they make the papers.”

  “Well, Wesley wants to stay dead as far as the killers are concerned, so he’ll be safe from another assassination attempt. I told you, Carver, these ain’t Sunday-school teachers. As much money as there is involved here, it brings out the animal in people. They get to be hogs, just like the ones at Wesley Slaughter and Rendering. Sometimes they end up the same way. And the ones that aren’t the victims are the killers.”

  “Even DEA agents.”

  “Don’t lay that guilt bullshit on us,” Palma said wearily. “Half the kids in this country got fried brains because of attitudes like yours. We’re in a war, we gotta fight it any way necessary to win.”

  “I wouldn’t call Bert Renway a winner. He didn’t die for his country in wartime; he died because a couple of asshole drug agents got obsessed with their cause and became anything-goes zealots.”

  Palma stood up slowly from the sofa, the expression on his face unchanging but his eyes bright and alive.

  Jefferson moved with his smooth little shuffle so his bulk was almost between Carver and Palma. Said, “Ralph, why don’t you step outside for a while. Let me talk to Mr. Carver alone. Maybe convince him of a few things.”

  Palma relaxed enough for the whiteness at the corners of his compressed lips to go away. He said, “Okay. That seems like a sound idea.” He buttoned his gray suitcoat, spun gracefully on his heel, and walked from the room. Carver heard his measured footsteps on the kitchen tiles. Heard the back door open and close.

  Silence.

  Jefferson looked at him almost pityingly. “We’re alone now, Carver. That cane, that gun in your pants, they don’t mean shit.”

  Carver tightened his grip on his cane and thought, Here come some more unconventional methods.

  Chapter 18

  JEFFERSON SAID, “YOU OUGHTA know this about me, Carver. I’m straight serious about what I’m doing. Not dicking around in the slightest. You comprehend?”

  “Sure. I’m the serious type myself.”

  “You think you’re jiving me, but I happen to know about you. Know you’re telling the truth about being serious. Least you’re the kinda guy has to be taken seriously.” Jefferson spread his feet wide and placed his fists on his hips, squarely facing Carver. “I wasn’t always a DEA agent, Carver.”

  “I didn’t figure you emerged from the womb with a badge and read the doctor his rights.”

  “I emerged from the womb in a shack down in Waycock, Georgia. Wasn’t no doctor present, neither; which is maybe why my mother died givin’ birth to me.”

  What was this? Jefferson’s voice had changed subtly, taken on a hint of black street-talk tone. All of a sudden he seemed like a wealthy drug dealer jive turkey dressed as a Wall Street broker. This guy was a pip.

  Carver said, “You gonna give me the poverty-stricken-black-who-made-good tale?”

  “You are a hard sonuvabitch.”

  “I’ll melt some. Go on with your story.”

  “Naw, that’s been told too many times, and hasn’t been a honky-ass like you ever really understood it. My daddy was a hard-rock Baptist preacher.”

  “Sounds like a song title.”

  “Ain’t though. This was real, down in godforsaken Waycock. Full-time man of the cloth, part-time janitor at the county library. Back in 1968 when I was fourteen years old in a Deep South that wasn’t much like the South we got now, though in some ways there ain’t a bit of difference. Was a lot goin’ on then with the civil rights movement, an’ both blacks an’ whites was all riled up mosta the time. Got especially so when certain things happened, like the riots after Martin Luther King got himself shot in Memphis. Hell to pay then. Lots of demonstrations in them days.”

  Carver was surprised to see Jefferson’s large brown eyes shine with moisture. Either he was an Academy Award–class actor, or what he was saying was wrenched from down deep and dragging painful memories up with it. Hard to say for sure whether he was faking it or really going to the well.

  “My daddy decided to lead one of them demonstrations,” Jefferson went on. “Peace and equality and all that stuff it’s s’pose to be naive to believe in these days. Said it was his Christian duty and his mission on this earth.”

  Carver said, “Maybe he was right.”

  Jefferson’s Adam’s apple worked. He flexed his thick fingers, clenching and unclenching his hands into fists. “Could be. I’ve thought about that. But the thing is, the Klan figured their mission was to stop him.”

  “Klan as in Ku Klux?”

  “The same.”

  “Did they stop him?”

  “Yeah. Within an hour of word gettin’ out about his plans. They stopped him by hangin’ him from the big willow tree next to his church. Willow branches are real flexible, Carver; Klan had to find a big one, high up, but even then Daddy’s feet nearly touched the ground. I remember it. His big brown work shoes came to within a few inches of solid earth, but them inches made all the difference between here and eternity. I was hidin’ in the church like my daddy told me the night they came, just before it got dark. There was over a dozen of ’em, all drunked up, drivin’ their cars and pickups right up into the churchyard. Gunnin’ engines and spinnin’ tires till you could smell hot rubber. One of the bastards even parked his truck in the cemetery out back. Can you picture that? Knocked over a tombstone and didn’t give a shit. Couple of ’em tromped into the church and found me where I was curled up in the rectory. Hee-hawed when I got scared enough to wet myself. Dragged me out so I could see what was goin’ on. What they was gonna do. Few of ’em wanted to hang me alongside Daddy, but some of ’em said it wouldn’t work, the willow branch’d bend and touch the ground. Couple of ’em wanted to shoot the young nigger dead, but that ain’t their style so it didn’t happen. What they did, they held me and made me watch while my daddy kicked and his eyes rolled back and his tongue got all purple and slithered outa his mouth farther’n you can imagine, like some foul thing that’d lived in him an’ was seekin’ light now that it was the end.

  “Then his bowels emptied out and he stopped twitchin’ an’ that was that. Some of the Klansmen laughed and hooted. One of ’em threw a beer can so it bounced off Daddy’s head, as if it made any difference by that time. I can still hear the sound it made, though. Don’t ever open a beer can that I don’t think about it. Then the ones holdin’ me tossed me aside like somethin’ used up and didn’t matter, and they all climbed back in their cars an’ trucks an’ tore ass outa there.

  “I sat in the dark and cried till the congregation members with the guts to show themselves come an’ got me. Everything goin’ on around the country at the time, it was hardly noticed what happe
ned that night in Waycock, Georgia, little shitpile of a place not even a flyspeck on the map. Not important.”

  Carver tried to speak. Found he had to clear his throat. Said, “Important to you, though.”

  “Uh-huh. Most important night of my life.”

  “Guess it would be.”

  Jefferson’s breathing was loud. Even and deep.

  “What’s it got to do with now?” Carver asked. “You suspect Frank Wesley was one of the lynch-mob faces under those hoods?”

  “Hoods shit!” Jefferson said. “They didn’t bother wearin’ sheets and hoods. Didn’t care who saw their faces. You don’t understand, killin’ a dirt-poor nigger back in them days in the South wasn’t much different from doin’ away with a dumb animal. Same thing, in lotsa people’s minds. Some people that part of the world still think that way. Last several years, things gone backward ’stead of forward.”

  “Then you know who the men were?”

  “Just recognized two of ’em. Never saw the others again.”

  “What about the two you recognized?”

  “They went to trial. Got acquitted. No surprise. Couple of weeks later, they both got killed when a train hit the car they were in. I know what you’re thinking, but it ain’t true; I had nothin’ to do with the accident.”

  “You wouldn’t be dumb enough to admit it if you had.”

  Jefferson smiled; there was nothing behind it but darkness. “True enough,” he admitted.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Carver asked.

  “ ’Cause I want you to know where I’m comin’ from, as they used to say. I got somethin’ personal against the scum of this world, and I fought my way out of an orphanage and through school just so I could do somethin’ about ’em. What I do, it’s more’n a way of turnin’ a dollar. I got no family and few friends, so this occupation’s who and what I am. You understand? Helluva lot more’n just a job.”

  “A mission?”

  “Might call it that. Preacher blood in me, I suppose. Thing is, I want you to know this: You might be a hard-ass, but I’m harder.”

  Carver said, “I kinda sensed that from the beginning.”

  Jefferson smiled and nodded. The dark eyes that had softened and misted were unblinking and had a hard sheen on them now, revealing nothing. Even as the outwardly amiable smile revealed nothing of why the facial muscles had arranged themselves in that configuration.

  Jefferson said, “Afternoon, then, Mr. Carver,” almost in a mocking emulation of Southern black subservient dialect.

  But he didn’t bow before he left.

  Carver didn’t show Jefferson out. But as soon as he heard the DEA agents’ car start and gravel crunch under tires, he was limping toward the door with his own car keys clutched in his perspiring hand.

  He drove for only a few minutes along the coast highway before spotting the gray Dodge half a mile ahead.

  Whichever of the two agents was driving held steady to the speed limit. The Olds, with its muscle-car V-8 engine, throbbed beneath Carver and wanted to take a big bite out of the highway. Carver restrained it.

  About a mile outside Del Moray, sun glinted off the Dodge as it slowed and turned off the highway into the lot of a motel.

  Carver knew the place: the Sundown Motel, a recently constructed two-story structure of pale brick and stucco, forming a U around a swimming pool and featuring its own wide, private beach. A well-appointed motel, but not one of the luxurious ones. It was nice to see that Jefferson and Palma weren’t abusing their expense accounts, though no motel along the Florida Gold Coast was exactly cheap.

  Carver slowed the Olds and coasted to a stop on the road shoulder where a grouping of date palms and tall red azaleas obscured the car from view. Beyond the tops of the azaleas that were swaying gently in the breeze, he could see Ralph Palma strolling along the catwalk to a middle, second-floor room. Just the top of Jefferson’s head was visible as he walked to a first-floor corner room facing the beach. Then his entire body came into view. He managed to let himself into the room after a brief struggle with the lock.

  The Sundown Motel was doing a good business. The sun was glancing off the roofs of fifteen or twenty cars in the parking lot. Beyond the flat-roofed, sharply angled structure, the sea lay blue and shimmering, the primal magnet that drew tourists even in the high heat of summer. Aside from a drifting, dissipating vapor trail from an airliner, there was nothing in the sky that resembled a cloud. It wasn’t going to rain today.

  Carver figured the Olds would be okay parked where it was for a while. He placed the Colt in the glove compartment. Then he climbed out of the car and locked it behind him. It wasn’t exactly secure, but someone would have to slash the canvas top in order to get in.

  He limped off the gravel shoulder, over soft and sandy ground toward the motel. Almost jabbed a small lizard with the tip of his cane. Didn’t realize it was there, sunning itself, until it escaped in a sudden flash of green.

  At the edge of the parking lot Carver stopped and peeled off his shirt, wadded it and carried it in his free hand as he continued toward the side of the motel where he’d seen Jefferson enter his room.

  He’d learned long ago that if you acted as if you belonged somewhere, few people would question your presence. The veracity of the act sprang from inner conviction. Carver told himself he was one of the guests at the Sundown Motel, as he leaned into his cane and limped around the building to the beach.

  The rooms that faced the ocean had the usual wide glass doors that allowed guests to walk directly out onto the beach. There were a lot of people sunbathing behind the Sundown Motel. Or sitting at the edge of the sea to let the surf foam around and over them and then withdraw. Two blond girls about seven, his Ann’s age, were tossing a red Frisbee back and forth and never managing to catch it. Half a dozen people were in the water, laughing and shouting and riding the breakers as they rolled in. A couple of brave souls were far out at sea swimming parallel to the beach. A speedboat snarled past, skipping on the waves before they had a chance to break, farther out than the swimmers. The man at the wheel was wearing a yellow shirt and a crumpled white hat. As the boat bounced past, leaving a roostertail of spray, he turned his head toward the beach. Carver got the impression he was staring straight at him, but that had to be imagination. Nerves. Sometimes Carver’s occupation played hell with the nervous system. Dried the mouth and shriveled the stomach. Yet—God help him—he knew there was a part of him that was enjoying this. For some people, adrenaline was a narcotic.

  He glanced at the Frisbee-tossing girls again and thought of Ann. And Laura. Laura. When she and Carver were first married, it had seemed such a sure bet that it wasn’t a bet at all. It was visceral. When they were in the same room, it was as if each of them had swallowed powerful magnets and were drawn to each other. Had to be together. To touch.

  Then, when the magnetism had finally worn off, they’d discovered they hadn’t much in common. Didn’t really like each other’s company. Mystified and helpless, they’d let the marriage drag on wounded until it died. How many people had that happened to?

  Not the time to think about it, Carver told himself. Concentrate on the here and now.

  The motel had furnished blue lawn chairs that were scattered about not far from the building. Most of them were occupied by sunbathers, but Carver found a free one and dragged it across the sand and positioned it carefully, as if seeking a precise angle of sunlight. What he was doing, actually, was arranging the chair at the desired angle to the wide glass door of Jefferson’s room.

  He settled down in the chair, resting the cane between his legs where it couldn’t be seen if Jefferson glanced outside. He was facing three-quarters away from Jefferson’s glass door, but by turning his head slightly he could see the vague shape of Jefferson moving around inside the dim room.

  Carver felt safe enough here. Just another Sundown Motel guest and sunbather—as long as Jefferson or Palma didn’t decide to log some beach time and happen to see his face. Sh
ould have brought my sunglasses, Carver told himself. Maybe a false nose, mustache, beard, and a toupee, some cotton wadding to puff out the cheeks. Newspaper with a peephole cut in it.

  He knew his best protection was that Jefferson would never dream that he’d be here, lounging and soaking up rays not a hundred feet from his motel room.

  Jefferson was moving around inside the room. He seemed restless. Too edgy to stay still. Peering through the plastic chair-webbing, Carver could see him pass in front of the pale corner of the bed. Bend over and open what looked like a suitcase near the bed. Not exactly a suitcase; a large duffel bag, probably. Jefferson withdrew something from the bag, a long object that appeared to be wrapped in cloth. No, not wrapped; in a case of its own. He unzipped it, and Carver knew: a gun case.

  From the case Jefferson withdrew a rifle or shotgun. Guy came armed for anything.

  What now? Was Jefferson going to clean the gun? Play agents and bad guys? What?

  Nothing Carver could have guessed. Jefferson stood holding the long gun sideways before him in both hands, then slumped on the edge of the bed and laid it across his knees. Bowed his head and stared at it. After a while, his shoulders began to quake. Or was it the play of sunlight over the wide glass door?

  No, Jefferson’s shoulders were heaving, Carver was sure. The DEA agent was staring at the gun in his lap and weeping.

  Made no sense.

  Possibly it wasn’t a gun. That could be it. But what then? Some sort of bizarre religious object that might prompt such emotion?