Tropical Heat

by John Lutz

  Twenty minutes later, at the cash register, the tall waitress with the equine features told Carver and Edwina the same story and assured them that it was fact. The truth was slippery at The Flame, just like everywhere else.

  “What next, O Sleuth?” Edwina asked, on the sunny sidewalk outside the restaurant.

  Carver leaned on his cane with both hands and glanced up and down the street. There was little traffic, no pedestrians other than the two of them. “We go back to the motel and swim,” he said.

  “I’ve already been swimming,” she told him.

  “Then we’ll find something else to do. I can think of a few things. But we’re at a standstill right now because it’s Sunday and city hall won’t be open until tomorrow.”

  Edwina looked curiously at him. “What’s city hall got to do with why we’re here?”

  “We’ll go there tomorrow,” Carver said, “and use your real-estate expertise to find out whether the Blaney property’s been sold.”

  “If it was sold recently, it might not be recorded yet.”

  “That’s where your expertise comes in,” Carver said. “If it isn’t recorded, do you think you can talk to the right people in the right way, find out whether there’s been a transaction?”

  “I think so. There can’t be that many title companies in town, and I’m in the business.”

  That was the way Carver had it figured.

  He drove them back to the Tumble Inn. But they didn’t swim. Instead they made love that afternoon in Edwina’s room, ate supper in the motel restaurant, and made love in the evening in Carver’s room. Each time they were together, lost in the exploration phase of their affair, it was better. Exhilarating. Bad memories were fading. They were both beginning to think highly of the Tumble Inn.

  Carver was asleep when the jangling phone by the bed dragged him from deep, indecipherable dreams to the surface of wakefulness. He resisted, so the dreams couldn’t have been bad ones. As he pulled the ringing, vibrating instrument to him, he dropped it onto the floor. It bounced with a jingling protest.

  He cursed, retrieved the receiver, and pressed it to his ear. He found the wrist near the end of his left arm and squinted at his watch: 10:35. A glance at the window told him it was dark outside. The 10:35 was P.M.

  “Carver?” a voice buzzed in his ear.

  “I think so.”

  “This is Alex Burr. I’m here in Solarville. We’ve got some action tonight. Wear some old clothes and meet us on South Loop, where it curves near the swamp just outside of town.”

  Carver wondered who the “us” were. The DEA? He supposed so. “When?” he asked.

  Burr seemed surprised by the question. “Now. As soon as you can.” He hung up.

  Carver listened to the static of the broken connection for a few seconds, then terminated his end of the conversation.

  He decided not to wake Edwina. He slipped into an old pair of jeans that he’d brought in his new suitcase, put on his wrinkled shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows, and pulled on a fresh pair of socks and his moccasins. Then he got out of there, walking as lightly as he could with the cane.

  “Now,” the man had said. Federal man. DEA. Best to listen. Now.

  Carver carefully locked the motel-room door behind him, breathed in the warm swamp air with its fetid, primal scent, and woke up all the way.

  The swamp loomed close and black around him, loud with the croaking cacophony of a thousand bullfrogs and the shrill, frantic buzzing of night insects. The moon was full and suspended low over the treetops, like an extraterrestrial mother ship overseeing all the wild madness below.

  Working his tongue around the insides of his cheeks to remove the dry, sour taste from his mouth, Carver got in the Olds. He started the engine without gunning it, then pulled the car slowly and as quietly as possible from the parking lot. Then he drove fast toward South Loop.

  He was eager now to find out what all the rush was about, and to learn what kind of action Alex Burr had planned for that night.

  CHAPTER 30

  AS CARVER SLOWED THE Olds and steered it gently into the curve on South Loop, a uniformed cop stepped out of the brush and into the glare of the headlights. He held up a rigid arm and hand almost in a Nazi salute, as if he were halting three lanes of traffic.

  Carver pressed his foot on the brake pedal hard enough to make the Olds’s long hood dip. The cop waved him over toward where he was standing, waiting for him like a Berlin Wall guard.

  “You Carver?” he asked, when Carver had stopped the car and stuck his head out the window. The cop was young and already thick around the middle. Another ten years of sitting in patrol cars or at a desk and he’d be downright fat; already his face was the jowly one of a middle-aged man, but his eyes were young, consciously expressionless peering out from the curved-moon shadow of his cap’s visor. He was putting on the tough front, hardening to his trade.

  Carver showed him some identification. Official paper. That did it. The pudgy cop smiled a one-of-us smile and said, “Follow that road, sir. They’re waiting just over that rise. And I’ve been instructed to tell you to turn off your headlights.”

  Carver didn’t see any road, but he killed his lights and aimed the Olds’s long snoot at the blackness of the swamp. Then, by moonlight, he did see that there was a narrow, mostly overgrown road leading to the rise the cop had pointed out. It wasn’t a dry road. Long bent grass glistened wetly between the shadows cast by the trees. Carver could see recently made tire ruts in front of him, and now and then the car would lurch and he could hear the sucking sound of swamp water beneath the wheels, telling him he was driving where no car should go.

  As the Olds’s hood topped the crest of the rise and then dropped, Carver saw four cars parked close to each other near what looked like a broken section of fence. Two of the cars bore Solarville Police markings. There was a knot of men standing by the cars. Carver recognized Alex Burr, the cop Rogers, who had retrieved his cane from the smoked motel room, and the aggressively paunchy form of Chief Armont.

  When he parked the Olds by one of the police cars and got out, he could see the dark, humped shapes of two airboats. What had appeared to be broken fence was part of a decrepit dock; the two boats were moored to it. Though Carver could hear water lapping, the airboats weren’t bobbing. They were sitting in the kind of shallow water they were made to skim.

  Burr said hello to Carver and introduced him to two other men who were DEA agents. Armont nodded to Carver. He was wearing dark slacks and a short-sleeved blue shirt. His two men were in uniform. The DEA agents, including Burr, wore dark pants and black windbreakers with DEA lettered on their backs in foot-tall orange letters. The better to know friend from enemy if the action got heated. And heated action seemed to be anticipated: two of the agents were carrying semi-automatic shotguns as well as the handguns Carver was sure were concealed beneath the windbreakers.

  Everyone except Burr seemed calm. He was in control, of himself and the operation, but it was easy to see that his adrenaline was pumping. There was a stiffness to his features and his single eye moved rapidly. When he spoke, tension like taut, vibrating wire grated in his voice. “Come on,” he said to Carver in his DEA way. “I’ll explain as we go.”

  Carver didn’t ask where they were going. He limped to the nearest airboat, almost stumbling as his cane sank into the soft ground.

  “Need some help?” Burr asked, trying to hurry him.

  Carver declined, and almost dropped his cane as he scrambled into the boat and sat next to Burr. The boats were aluminum, about twenty feet long, with the familiar wide propellers in high cages mounted on the stern, well out of the water. They had everything to make them aircraft except wings. Armont, along with one of the DEA agents and the two uniformed cops, got in the other airboat. That boat was older and sat higher in the water. Carver peered at the two boat trailers half concealed in the reeds but couldn’t make out the license plates. He guessed the newer boat he and Burr were in was a DEA b
oat, the other belonged or was on loan to the Solarville police. A DEA agent sat behind the low windscreen in front of Carver. Up in the bow, a boyish blond agent with a pug nose, whom Burr had introduced as Marty something or other, was hunched over what looked like a small radio and was wearing bulky earphones that lent him a curiously mouselike appearance. Marty made a circular motion with his right arm, then pointed toward the swamp.

  Lines were unlooped from the moorings, and the two air-boats came alive with sputtering roars and hunkered lower in the water. Carver could feel the powerful vibration shake the boat, run up his back from the base of his spine. The seats they were sitting in were hard, with straight backrests, bolted to the standard bench-type seats built into the boat.

  “Better strap yourself in,” Burr said.

  That seemed like sound advice. Carver felt around, found a safety belt, and fastened it, yanking it hard a few times to make sure the buckle had caught. He stuck his stiff leg out in front of him to get as comfortable as possible.

  The throbbing rumble of the engines rose, and the boat Carver was in led the way into the dark swamp. Carver was aware of thick saw grass and reeds bending and parting in front of and under the boat. Now and then there was a rough bounce and hard vibration beneath the hull as they briefly skimmed over land rather than water. They were only going about fifteen miles per hour. The propeller that drove them forward made a muted beating sound like a helicopter rotor, barely audible beneath the roar of the converted aircraft engine that powered it.

  Marty raised his arm again in a silent signal and held it steady.

  The engines of both boats died, and they were drifting in a shadowed clearing, surrounded by the black trunks of partly submerged trees. Moonlight silhouetted the branches and the elegantly drooping Spanish moss and vines. Some of the vines dangled all the way down into the water. Carver couldn’t see much on either side; the reeds they were near were taller than the boat.

  The boats bobbed silently in softly lapping water. No one in either of them talked for a few minutes, until Burr leaned close and said to Carver, “The Malone brothers are out there somewhere in their airboat.”

  “How do you know?” Carver asked.

  “We hid a bumper beeper on their boat. Kept a man on the signal, and when they went into the swamp, we knew about it.”

  A bumper beeper was nothing more than a tiny radio transmitter that emitted a steady pulsing signal. They were magnetic and could be affixed to the bumper, or any other metal part of a car, and a listener tuned to the beeper’s frequency could follow the car, track it from a distance, unobserved. No reason it couldn’t work with a boat.

  “The Malone boat is sitting motionless now,” Burr said. “Just like us. We’re about a quarter of a mile from them. They’re waiting for something, and we’re waiting right along with them.”

  “You think they’re waiting for a drug drop?” Carver asked.

  “They’re not out here fishing,” Burr said. “When they meet another boat or go to pick up anything dropped from a plane, we’re going to be there right afterward and see what we can find on them, who they’re dealing with.”

  Carver wondered if Willis Eiler or Sam Cahill might be out in the swamp with the Malone brothers. “Are they alone?”

  Burr slapped a mosquito. “No way to know. All we’ve got is a radio signal that gives us direction and distance.”

  Carver was getting uncomfortable. He shifted position and was warned to move around as little as possible. Aluminum boats made noise when they were bumped, and sound carried far on the water. The frogs in the area were getting used to the boats’ presence now and started croaking again, providing a counterpoint to the hum of insects.

  The swamp had accepted them, if grudgingly. Persistent mosquitoes reminded Carver of how grudgingly.

  After about ten minutes, Burr stood up and leaned forward. He touched his forefinger to his lips in a gesture for complete silence, then he pointed skyward.

  Carver could hear it now: the distant drone of a small plane. The noise seemed to be to the south, moving nearer. He tried to find the plane’s running lights but couldn’t. Either it was flying without lights or the canopy of moss-and-vine-draped trees completely blocked the view.

  When the drone of the plane was nearer, it suddenly became much louder, as if the craft had dropped to a lower altitude.

  Then it became fainter again, began to fade. The plane was climbing and flying away from them now.

  Marty of the huge headphones said with urgency in his voice, “They’re moving!” The Malone brothers were on the prowl. Marty pointed out the direction to the agent at the controls.

  The motors of both boats roared to life again, and they were off at high speed in the direction the agent had pointed. The police boat was behind and about a hundred yards to the left, keeping pace with them like a dark shadow of their boat.

  The agent manning the controls was good and appeared to know the territory. The roaring boat vibrated, veered to miss trees by fractions of inches, shot through fields of reeds and tall saw grass that bent and snapped and whipped at Carver’s exposed right arm. The wind forced him to squint as they skimmed the water and sometimes the land as they sped through the moonlit swamp. He glanced behind them; the boat with Armont in it was still back there, a dark specter flitting among the partly submerged tree trunks and foliage. Neither boat was running with lights, which struck Carver as strange considering all the noise they were making.

  Burr seemed to know what he was thinking. He leaned close and yelled, “The Malones can’t hear us over the sound of their own engine when they’re moving! And we only move when they do!”

  Carver braced his body with his stiff leg and nodded. It seemed pointless to try to scream an answer over the din.

  Marty raised a forefinger and made a rapid circling motion with his hand, then he looked back and grinned like a schoolkid on a snipe hunt. He was having a grand time.

  So was Burr. He was grinning, too. This was what his life was about. “We’re getting the signal now from the homing device on the packages dropped by the plane!” he shouted.

  Now they didn’t really need the signal from the bumper beeper to keep from losing contact. They and the Malones were tuned to the same guiding signal emanating from the transmitter packaged with whatever had been parachuted into the swamp. The beeper on the Malone boat was being used only to track it in relation to the DEA and police boats. The signal from the swamp was drawing all three boats like a magnet; only the timing of the operation was in doubt.

  The boat changed direction slightly, continued at high speed through the swamp. Whenever it skipped over dry land the thumping and jolting on the hull seemed about to tear it apart. Carver bounced constantly and would have left the seat if he hadn’t been belted in. He didn’t see how Marty, up in the bow, where the motion was more violent, could stay in the boat even with a seat belt. The DEA agent swayed and rolled with the thrashing of the bow, as if he could read the dark terrain and anticipate the boat’s reactions.

  He raised a hand. The boat slowed, the bow dropped, and water began to slap at the sides of the metal hull. They began to drift. The other boat also had slowed. It moved in closer, and both idling engines were cut off.

  Now the silence of the swamp closed in.

  But not quite.

  Carver could hear the rising, falling drone of the Malones’ airboat in front of them. Except for its warbling, it was similar to the sound of the plane that had dropped the drugs.

  The drone changed pitch drastically, remained steady for a while, then died.

  “They’ve picked it up!” Marty said.

  Burr shouted something Carver didn’t understand, waved his arms, and both engines kicked over, then snarled to full throttle. The bow of the boat rose again and they were speeding toward a rendezvous with the unsuspecting Malone brothers and their smuggled drug shipment.

  Both boats had spotlights switched on now, playing brilliant white beams over the swamp in
front of them, sending reflected light dancing like wild spirits among the trees. Secrecy and silence were impossible now, and unnecessary so close to the end of the hunt. Their quarry would know they were being pursued. The airboat with Armont in it even had a siren, which howled an eerie singsong yodel as the two boats screamed across water and lowland and closed in on the Malones. The police boat pulled wide left, circling like a night predator among the trees.

  And Carver could see the Malone boat ahead, in a clear pool of moonlit black water beneath huge, overhanging moss-draped limbs.

  There appeared to be four men in the boat. One of them—it looked like a Malone—stood up and turned to the others. The Armont boat was almost on the other side of them now, threading its way through the trees and hanging vines. Both boats would be on them in less than a minute.

  The four figures in the Malone boat milled around frantically. Carver saw the stern drop, then rise again as they tried to start the engine. Apparently whoever was at the controls was too panicky to get the boat going.

  Then the Malone boat did start. Its bow rose unbelievably high, and it shot off among the vertical shadows of tree trunks, toward the deeper, denser swamp.

  Carver was shoved back in the seat as his boat gave chase. Wind blossomed his shirt, and small vines and branches whipped at his arms and face. He leaned toward the middle of the boat to avoid them. A large flying insect bounced hard off his forehead; for an instant he heard it buzz past his ear as it tumbled behind into the whirring propeller.

  The airboat suddenly skidded sideways over dry land, dropped jarringly back in the water, roared ahead several hundred yards, then stopped with the huge propeller barely ticking over inside its cage.

  Carver was still leaning forward, his seat belt digging into his stomach. He peered ahead over the lowered bow.