Tropical Heat fc-1

by John Lutz

  Lujan began struggling more violently above him, panicking. His free bare foot was beating with increased fury at Carver’s fist clenching the pants leg, but the resistance of the water robbed him of any power.

  Carver forced them still deeper, feeling his ears pop from the pressure. Inanely, the words to an old seafaring song ran through his mind: “Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep…”

  Then Lujan seemed to stop struggling. The leg in Carver’s grasp moved limply, lifelessly.

  Carver could go no deeper. He was afraid he might not have enough air in his lungs now to reach the surface. He released his grip on Lujan’s pants leg and pushed himself away, flexed his aching fingers, and let himself rise, hastening his ascent by paddling with his hands and his tired good leg.

  At least a minute passed, he was sure. Certainly it felt that long.

  Then he broke the surface and saw a star-scattered dark sky that had never looked so vast. He sucked in a long, rasping breath, rolling onto his back. He rotated his head, looked around him.

  He was alone on the moon-splashed, undulating surface of the sea.

  Breathing deeply and regularly, getting his strength back as the burning sensation in his lungs lessened, he floated loosely.

  He was farther from shore than he’d thought. The light of the channel marker seemed almost near enough to touch, the lights along the beach so distant, impersonal pinpoints like low stars.

  It was oddly restful out there alone-relaxing. He rose and dropped with the sea rhythmically, softly, and it seemed from time to time that he actually fell asleep. He was strangely at home in the water, as if he belonged there and not on land: evolution in reverse to a point no one had anticipated-not Carver, not his therapist. His hours in the ocean had altered his being, saved his life.

  The sea seemed to swell and ebb within him as he drifted in solitary peace.

  Then, with a chilling jolt of fear, he imagined that Lujan might still be alive. It was possible. The man might be beneath him now, shooting up underwater with torpedo speed, the knife extended to slash into Carver’s vulnerable submerged softness.

  He told himself that was absurd, that Lujan was dead.

  But there was no way to be positive. The high and lonely yellow moon glowed down at him in benevolent warning. The sea rose and fell and sighed and urged caution, and return to life on land. “That’s where you belong,” it whispered. “Where you belong…”

  Carver shook himself, rolled onto his stomach, and stroked toward shore.

  CHAPTER 26

  The corpse was found bobbing in the surf the next afternoon. A honeymooning couple from Detroit had spotted it on the beach at Okadey, a small beachside community six miles south of where Carver had gone into the ocean with Lujan pursuing him. At first the honeymooners had thought they’d spotted some sort of sea animal; the body was bleached almost white from the salt water. Then they’d seen the dark of the pants just beneath the roiling surface and realized what it was and notified the authorities. Carver wondered if their discovery had ruined their honeymoon or added spice.

  Carver had phoned the local law after he’d made it back to shore the previous night. Then he’d called Desoto and Burr. Burr had turned up at the cottage within an hour. He let the locals do their jobs, staying in the background, watching. Now and then, in an almost noncommittal way, he’d offer a suggestion, probe for an answer or explanation. He knew his stuff. Very professional. Carver had to admit his opinion of Burr had been raised a notch. The DEA agent’s cool yet fervent dedication might not be an endearing quality, or make for the complete man, but it was the sort of dedication that brought results. Not unlike Carver’s dedication.

  The Coast Guard had searched for Lujan for six hours before giving up and assuming he was dead and would be easier to find in daylight. If he could be found at all. Sometimes the sea kept its dead forever; sometimes it toyed with the dead for a while before returning what was left to land.

  They were out there again just after dawn. Carver stood at his window and saw two small craft silhouetted in the early sunlight, tacking in slow circles off the shore. The Coast Guard was patient, systematic. But they had read the currents wrong, and Lujan’s reappearance on land had been a surprise.

  Carver drove the Olds down to Okadey that afternoon and met Desoto in the back room of the tan brick funeral parlor that served as a temporary morgue for the small community. There were yellow canvas awnings over the windows, and a bell mounted like a chimney on the low, sloping roof, doubtless to be tolled as part of the services. Carver imagined that cost extra. MAHON’S MORTUARY, the black-lettered sign peeking from among the hibiscus in front of the place had read.

  Lujan wasn’t refrigerated, but the back room was cool, down in the fifties, probably, and he’d keep until the body was identified and taken to Orlando. There he’d be autopsied, methodically dissected and discussed by the big-city experts.

  Somber introductions were made. Mahon himself, a short, animated man in a muted plaid sport jacket, who would have looked more at home selling aluminum siding, drew a sheet away from the body.

  Carver flinched inwardly, as he always did when viewing a dead body; then he sent that part of his mind away, as he always managed to do. The emotional vulnerability had lasted only a few seconds before professional detachment took over. Mental armor. Sanity retained.

  “It’s got to be him,” Carver said. The sea and its inhabitants had worked on the face, making what was left of it unrecognizable, but the pants looked the same, and the general size was the same. There were slashes near the left pants cuff, where Carver had gripped it and had barely avoided Lujan’s knife blade. And how many bodies dressed this way were bobbing around in the ocean off the resort beaches of central Florida?

  Desoto nodded to the unconcerned Mahon, and the pale yellow sheet was drawn up again over Lujan’s ruined face.

  “A closed-casket ceremony would be my recommendation,” Mahon said in a cigarette-throat wheeze.

  Neither Carver nor Desoto offered a comment on that professional assessment. It was Mahon’s backyard they were playing in, and he was welcome to it, headstones and all.

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” Carver said, as he and Desoto walked outside into the sun, Carver with his replacement cane.

  The day was hot and humid, but after the chill of death in the back room, the heat felt fine to Carver. The mosquito that sampled his right forearm, the dank smell of the sea, the pelican that skimmed the blue water offshore, all represented life.

  “We’ve opened the case wider,” Desoto said, “so the game has changed somewhat. It’s thought officially, and in some quarters unofficially, that Willis Eiler might have been murdered.”

  “Not a Missing Persons case?”

  “No, not with dead Marielitos turning up wherever you go looking for him. Death by violence is contagious.”

  “He’s still alive,” Carver said.

  “I think so, too.” Desoto reached into the pocket of his tailored suit, withdrew a folded white handkerchief, and used it to wipe his hands thoroughly, as if he’d touched the body inside the mortuary and encountered some kind of contamination. “But I’m not positive about what I think; that’s what’s interested me about this case from the beginning: the possibilities.”

  Carver nodded, understanding. Traffic on the coast highway whizzed past them, eddying the air and spreading wind patterns over the grass. They were standing only a hundred feet or so west of the pavement. An odd location for a mortuary; too near the living.

  “How do you see it now?” Desoto asked.

  Carver leaned on his cane, thought for a moment. How did he see it? Really. He said, “Drugs, probably. The hundred thousand was seed money to buy a shipment of something that could be cut and resold at four or five times the price.”

  “Not big money for a drug scam, Carver. My friends on the narcotics squad talk in terms of millions, not thousands. They do so with a certain arrogance.”

  “Bur
r thinks Willis might have partners, that the deal is bigger.”

  “Sam Cahill?”

  “And others. Maybe two swamp turkeys called the Malone brothers.”

  “What about Raymond Mackenzie?” Desoto said. “He’s still missing.”

  “I can’t see him involved in a drug-running scheme,” Carver said. “But it’s possible; with so much money at stake, he might forsake the whooping crane and the snail darter. And his campsite was within the area red-penciled on the map I found in Eiler’s apartment.”

  “You figure Burr is right?” Desoto asked. “About this being a major deal?”

  “He might be. But even if he isn’t, there’d be enough money to provide plenty of incentive for Willis and Cahill. People have been murdered for less.”

  “People have been murdered for bottlecaps,” Desoto said. “That’s irrelevant. You think Willis and Cahill hired the Marielitos to try to kill you?”

  “It’s possible. Even likely.”

  “What bothers me,” Desoto said, “is that the Marielitos wouldn’t be satisfied to be hired help; they’d cut themselves in on the deal. Or maybe they were in it from the beginning and it really is as big as Burr thinks.”

  “The cut will be even bigger now,” Carver said, thinking about the Lujan brothers, wondering if there might be a third brother, or a homicidal cousin. Blood feuds tended to be longer-lived than their participants. “You’re right,” he said, “some of the pieces don’t quite fit.”

  “Either that,” Desoto said thoughtfully, “or as we get older and more experienced we notice the irregularities around the edges.”

  That could be, Carver thought.

  “Have you told Edwina Talbot about what happened last night?” Desoto asked.

  “Yes, I phoned her this morning.”

  “And she was upset?”

  “I couldn’t tell.” He wished Desoto would mind his own business.

  “Ah, a lovers’ quarrel?”

  “I don’t know,” Carver said. “Our last parting was ambiguous.”

  “Love is ambiguous, amigo.”

  “You don’t know love,” Carver said, “you only know sex.”

  Desoto exposed a toothy grin to the sunlight, made a wavering gesture with a palm-down hand. “A gray area.” He looked beyond Carver, beyond the highway, out at the shimmering ocean. Carver followed his gaze. The pelican was making another determined pass at lunch, inches off the sun-shot water.

  “I didn’t feel like driving out here today,” Desoto said. “I promised to take my nephews fishing, then to Disney World. They want to see EPCOT there, the society of the future.”

  “Your nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie?” Carver asked.

  “You’re in the wrong cartoon, my friend.”

  “Yeah, that’s the feeling I’ve had lately.” Carver remembered his own trip to Disney World a few years ago with Anne and Fred Jr. He’d been more impressed than the kids by the Haunted Mansion, Tomorrow World, Space Mountain, the monorail system. Disney World was more than simply a magnificent theme park; it was a startling example of lockstep efficiency and the reach of technology. It left on its adult visitors subtle impressions not anticipated.

  Desoto sighed. “My day off. I was looking forward to deep-sea fishing and Mickey Mouse. I guess instead I’ll go home and watch television.”

  “You watch too much television,” Carver said.

  “I know, amigo, I’m a vast wasteland.” Desoto grinned and wiped a finger across his teeth, as if he suspected spinach might be stuck to an incisor. A good-looking guy protecting that smile. “What about Willis Eiler?” he asked. “Have you told Edwina that her Willis is another Willis?”

  “Not yet,” Carver said. “I will today. Soon.”

  “I don’t envy you, telling her that.”

  “It’s not an enviable job,” Carver said, “but it’s a necessary one.”

  “You’ll find the right time to tell her,” Desoto assured him. He lifted a hand in parting, sparking sunlight from a gold cufflink. “Maybe then love or sex or whatever will lose some of its ambiguity.” He turned and walked toward where an unmarked car with a driver was waiting.

  Maybe, Carver thought.

  They sat in the shade of the fringed umbrella, at the white metal table on Edwina’s veranda, where Willis Eiler had sat as Willis Davis and had his breakfast the morning of his disappearance. The departure point where, in one manner or another, he had left his lover in one of the ways not covered by Paul Simon’s fifty.

  Carver had told Edwina of Willis’s real identity, his background, the inescapable conclusion. Her expression remained impassive as she listened. The reaction to his words must have been violent, but she’d kept it inside her. There was no indication of the cold shock of the undeniable, the burgeoning emotional storm. That scared Carver. It was as if she’d chosen not to face the truth but to recede further back into delusion. He had to stop her, draw her out.

  “He used you,” Carver told her. “That’s what it was about from the beginning. He wanted you to help him get employed at Sun South so he could work his phony time-share racket. He’d probably done it before, knew it was his quickest route to a lot of money.”

  Edwina stared across the table at him; a wavering reflection of the sea behind him played subtly in her gray eyes. What was going on behind that reflection? For an instant he wondered if she had known Willis’s identity all along.

  “I don’t sense pity in you,” she said.

  “I’m frustrated,” Carver admitted. “Scared, and a little angry.”

  “At me?”

  “At you. At Willis. At the situation. He used you. You’re still letting him. He’s causing you to suffer, even from a distance. Even if he’s dead.”

  She shook her head slowly. “He isn’t dead.”

  “No,” Carver said, “he isn’t. That was only something else he wanted you to believe.”

  “You seemed to relish telling me this.” There was a kind of agonized disbelief in her voice, a note of betrayal.

  “I hated telling you,” Carver said. “But I relish the fact that at last the truth is out about Willis. I regard that as the necessary first step in you finally freeing yourself from him.”

  She caressed the warm metal of the tabletop with her fingertips, as if it were a live thing that might respond to her touch. “There’s a cruelty in you; I knew that from the beginning. Maybe I was attracted to it. Me looking for trouble in men again. I’m like that, I suppose.”

  “Maybe I am cruel,” Carver told her, “if doing what has to be done is your idea of cruel. Maybe it takes someone like me to push you out of the prison of your obsession and into the light.”

  “Light?” she said, with a vagueness that disturbed him. She seemed to be slipping away, into a dimension of pain where she’d be alone and he couldn’t follow. “Is it light you’re moving me toward? Or is it darkness? Emptiness? Where there’s nothing to hold on to. Other times, other places, people we know, eventually they all leave you, gone away into nothing, remembered, fading, taking part of you with them.”

  “You have to learn to let them go,” Carver said, “grab the future.” He was terrified by the way she was talking. “You use the years you have left.”

  She cocked her head to the side and stared at him. “Are you the future? You and your drugstore philosophy?”

  “Maybe. But that’s irrelevant. The future is on the way, the past is receding. Willis is over, but that doesn’t mean the end of your life.”

  She smiled dubiously. “A new beginning?”

  “A continuation,” Carver said. “New beginnings are mostly bullshit. We’re only allowed so many of those and we tend to use them up in a hurry. I’m talking about a continuation of you as you. The you that was getting by before you met Willis.”

  “You seem to have this all worked out for me.”

  “I worked it out for myself, and not so long ago.”

  She stood up and walked to the low wall around the veranda, loo
king out to the sea. Then she stepped over the wall and walked to the edge of the drop, the point where Willis had left his folded jacket and his shoes and allegedly leaped to his death.

  Carver wanted to jump up, shout her name, run to her and snatch her back away from the edge. But he didn’t. He knew that kind of rescue would be only temporary, and he was sure she wouldn’t follow Willis’s imagined plunge to the sea. She knew he hadn’t leaped. She knew now what he was. She had to know!

  But she was leaning outward, her hair flung like a pennant in the breeze. The wind off the sea might grab her, claim her.

  Carver stood up, bumping his head on the damned umbrella.

  She turned, as if sensing his movement.

  Then she walked back onto the veranda.

  They both remained standing.

  Keep it out in the open, he thought. Keep it out where she has to face it. She was strong enough now; he could see that in the depth of her eyes, the raised, smooth sweep of her jaw. She was one of this war’s survivors. He said, “Ask yourself how you feel about Willis. How you really feel.”

  She crossed her arms, hugged herself as if she were chilled in the ocean breeze. “I don’t feel love anymore. But there’s something-a kind of passionate need I can’t identify.”

  Carver walked over to her and stood beside her but didn’t touch her. Without speaking, she moved as if drawn toward the house.

  He walked beside her with the cane, and she slowed her pace to match his.

  Inside the house, she slid the glass doors to the veranda closed. The roar of the surf became distant, a constant, seductive whisper. Carver circled her waist with his free arm, kissed her.

  In the bedroom the sea was louder. The window was open and the drapes swayed lazily. Carver lay on the bed and watched Edwina undress. She was no longer even slightly shy with him; there was, in fact, a meticulous, unhurried grace to her movements that suggested she enjoyed undressing before him.

  She walked over and stood nude next to where he lay, so he could reach her. Her sun-darkened flesh had goose bumps on it and she was breathing rapidly, quaking so that he could see the vibrant trembling in her breasts. He reached out and with the backs of his knuckles caressed the paler, smooth flesh of her inner thigh. She jerked a breath inward, lightly closed her eyes.