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“He hasn’t,” Martinson said firmly. “Except for
your
suspicion, which, as I understand it, is secondhand by way of a late retired cop.”

“Secondhand but good as new.”

“You’re stubborn, Mr. Carver.”

“I keep hearing that.”

Martinson studied him, sweating now in his gray suit. The sun was suddenly getting very hot, promising a temperature like Hell’s today. “Tell you what,” Martinson said, moving back a step, obviously trying to get the conversation over so he could get out of the heat, “I’ll keep an open mind. You stumble on something more solid, you let me know.”

“And you’ll what?”

He handed Carver a card and smiled. “Act on it, of course.” He nodded, still smiling, and turned and walked toward a gray Dodge sedan parked in the wavering shade of a palm cluster, his gray suitcoat unbuttoned and flapping like wings in a gust of wind off the ocean.

Martinson didn’t look at Carver as he started the car and drove away slowly, as if he didn’t want the tires to crunch too loudly in the driveway. He probably knew Beth was sleeping inside the cottage. Probably knew a lot more than he was saying. Carver hated government types.

He stood with both hands on the crook of his cane, not moving until he heard the car accelerate on Shoreline, heading in the direction of Fishback. The futile search of the
Miss Behavin’
hadn’t helped matters. He decided that now he’d have to come up with incontrovertible proof before Rodney Martinson would act, maybe photographs of Walter Rainer powdering himself with cocaine. He glanced again out to sea, where the gulls had been soaring, but now there was only empty blue sky, then he went back .into the cottage.

Beth was up, in the kitchen making coffee.

“You hear any of that?” Carver asked.

“Yeah, all of it. I was standing on the porch eavesdropping.” She poured water into the coffee brewer and stood staring at it as it began to trickle dark and transformed into the bulbous glass pot. “So where do you think this leaves us?” she asked, still not looking at Carver, hypnotized by the coffee.

“More or less where we were before I called Desoto,” Carver said.

“Not quite.”

“Meaning?”

She turned away from the brewer to look directly at him. The coffee was heating up, making the kitchen smell good, but Carver had no appetite this morning. She said, “Meaning people like Rainer, once they got you on the run even a little bit, they go on the offensive and they do it right now. You think they were ruthless dealing with poor Henry Tiller, just you watch them kick into high gear. I understand their kind; I was married to one and knew dozens of others, and I know what millions of dollars of drug money can do to people, how they think it puts them beyond the law, how it burns in the blood and rots and warps them. They got the killer instinct, Fred. Not like it’s talked about in sports, I mean the
real
killer instinct.”

Carver stood trying to plumb the depths of his thoughts, pushing down through shadows and ugliness and dead faces and dead emotions. Down through the past. Did
he
have the killer instinct?

“You gotta be much more careful now, Fred. You understand?”

There was a current of fear, of pleading, in her voice that surprised him. He knew that not much scared her.

They both heard the soft creaking sound at the same time and turned toward it.

Someone on the porch.

C
ARVER STAYED WELL
to the side of the door and peered out through its tiny window. He caught a glimpse of red hair, a green barrette shaped like a leaping dolphin.

Effie.

He opened the door and she grinned at him. Beyond her, through the screen, he could see her bike leaning against a tree in the shade. Its handlebar basket was stuffed with cleaning equipment. Effie was cradling a spray can of Lemon Pledge and a rag in her right hand. “Thought it was past time I came over and cleaned,” she explained.

Carver shifted his weight over his cane and moved aside to let her in. She was wearing a green T-shirt, black shorts, her big jogging shoes without socks. Her long, coltish legs were marked with mosquito bites.

“Hi, Miss Jackson.” Beth had wandered in from the kitchen.

“Told you to call me Beth.”

Effie’s grin got wider. “Beth, then.” She stopped and looked at Beth, wearing her robe and apparently nothing else, then at Carver, still shirtless and barefoot. “I come at a bad time?” She leered ludicrously, trying to look sophisticated and knowing.

“Not if you want some breakfast,” Beth said.

“Thanks, but I already ate.” Effie put the Pledge and rag on a table. “Be right back.” She hurled herself out of the room like a ten-year-old rushing to play, then returned in a few minutes with her arms laden with cleaning solvents, brushes, a squeegee, and a box of steel-wool pads. She dropped the squeegee, hurriedly stooped and picked it up, dropping a can of mildew remover that rolled when it hit the floor. “Damn!” she said, then looked embarrassed and carefully transferred items one by one to the table to surround the Lemon Pledge. She stared at Carver, did a little bounce in her joggers with the blue checkmarks on them. “I feel terrible about Mr. Tiller,” she said.

“We do, too,” Beth told her, before Carver could reply.

“I mean, like, I wanna go to his funeral or something. You know, show some respect for the dead.”

“He’s going to be buried up north,” Carver said. “Tomorrow morning. He’d understand why you can’t be there, Effie.”

She seemed close to tears. “He was my friend, really. Not just some old man I cleaned for.”

“I know. That’s how he saw it, too.” Carver thought he’d better change the subject, but Beth beat him to it.

“I’m gonna cook some eggs and bacon,” she said. “You sure you already ate?”

Effie tried another grin but didn’t succeed. Henry was still on her mind. Death and youth. Her young, mobile mouth twitched and turned down at the corners. “Yeah, I’m not hungry at all.” She sniffed, wiped her nose with a straight-up motion of her palm. “I’ll start in the bathroom, if I won’t, like, be in the way.”

“That’s fine,” Carver told her.

He started to return to the kitchen with Beth, when Effie stopped gathering her cleaning supplies from the table and said, “Mr. Carver, I don’t want you to think I went against your wishes or anything.”

He twisted his upper body over his cane and looked at her. “Why would I think that?”

“I mean, I didn’t go asking for information, but a friend of mine, Bobby Curlin, works at a Texaco station on Highway One up on Marathon Key, and we was just talking, and when I mentioned that Davy gorilla, that was when Bobby said him and his van stopped for gas real frequent at the station. Davy always does a lotta driving north and south and that’s where he always gasses up his creepy black van. It’s a self-service station, and Bobby said whenever Davy finishes pumping gas he pulls the van way out and parks it at the edge of the lot before he comes into the station and pays. Anyway, you said I wasn’t to take any chances, but Bobby kinda volunteered to sneak over and try and peek in the van next time Davy gasses up and is inside at the register.”

Carver felt a twinge of horror. A teenage gas station attendant might get himself killed because of him. “Tell . . . Bobby, is it?”

She nodded.

“Tell Bobby not to sneak anywhere or peek anyplace,” he said.

“Well, I’m afraid he already did it.”

Oh, Christ! “No more,” he told Effie, too angrily. She winced, but her eyes stayed fixed on his face. “No more of that, please,” Carver said more gently. “I don’t want you or any of your friends hurt.” He thought of Davy and his sharpened steel cargo hook. His burden of sadism. “And believe me, Effie, it’s possible.”

“Bobby said he wasn’t afraid.”

“All the worse,” Carver told her. Teenagers! He’d never had much luck dealing with teenagers, and wondered again how it would be when his own daughter reached her teen years.

Effie was still looking at him, her young face serious beneath the freckles.

“Fred just doesn’t wanna be responsible for putting you in harm’s way, honey,” Beth said softly.

“He wasn’t.” Not looking away from Carver, Effie now had the same expression he’d seen on much older and more experienced women. Or maybe experience had nothing to do with it. “Ain’t you gonna ask me?” she said, faintly smiling, dangling bait. Sure, he hadn’t wanted her or any of her friends snooping around, but now that she’d acted, now that she knew something, where did he stand? Was he going to be such a hard-ass he wouldn’t ask for or use any of her information?

“All right,” Carver said, tapping his cane on the floor, “what was inside the van?”

“Well, with the windows tinted so dark, Bobby couldn’t see much. Looked like a rolled-up carpet or something laying in the back, and a big wood crate.”

“Crate?”

“Yeah, but there were like spaces between the boards, and Bobby could see it was empty.”

Spaces. So laden with cargo, the crate would sink almost instantly if shoved overboard at sea. “Anything else?” Carver asked.

“Nope. That Davy creep came out from inside the station, so Bobby had to beat feet outa there or he’d have been seen.”

“Is he sure he
wasn’t
seen?”

“Says he is, and I think we can trust him.”

“You
can trust him,” Carver said. “I never even met him.”

“Well, Bobby’s a straight-ahead reliable dude.”

“How old is he?”

“Fourteen and a half. Same as me.” She stood up taller. “Plenty old enough, no matter what you think.”

Carver looked at Beth. Said, “Jesus!” Beth smiled.

Carver said, “Did Bobby mention which way the van turned on Highway One when it pulled outa the station?”

“Sure he did. The van went north. Came in from the south, then gassed up and went on north.”

“You’re right,” Carver said, “Bobby’s a reliable dude.” The fact that the crate was empty meant Davy wasn’t hauling contraband north, at least on that trip. Carver had envisioned drug shipments from Mexico to Florida, then north to the major markets in the greater United States. Of course, there might be other reasons for Davy’s trip north, this time not involving a drug shipment. Carver knew what he’d have to do to satisfy his curiosity.

“Guess I better get busy,” Effie said, making a circular motion with a commode brush.

“Tell your friend Bobby I said thanks,” Carver told her, “but also tell him not to do anything from now on other than observe, and from a distance.” To impress her with his seriousness, he added, “It looks as if Henry Tiller was murdered. Keep that at the top of your mind.”

But she didn’t seem impressed. His somber advice glanced off the armor of her youth; he could almost imagine it dropping useless to the floor. Well, what had he expected?

She said, “I knew the day I heard he was run down it was somebody tried to kill him.”

She scooped more cleaning supplies from the table and sashayed into the bathroom. Carver heard the toilet flush and whine, water pipes knocking.

“Young, huh?” Beth said, knowing what he was thinking.

“Only fourteen.”

“I didn’t mean in years,” Beth said, the woman who’d matured by twelve in a Chicago ghetto. “It’s her naiveté’s gonna get her into trouble. Not like you, Fred. It’s your bullheadedness gonna do you in someday.”

“Why don’t you try thinking of me as simply resolute?” Carver asked, irritated.

“Resolute ain’t psychotic, baby.”

He was even more irritated by the way she’d fallen into the slip-and-slide lilt and slang of her youth; she did that sometimes for effect. He said, “I love it when you call me insane.”

“Yeah? Well, that can be a turn-on for some.”

The scent of Pine Sol was drifting in from the bathroom. “If you think I’m an obsessive nutcase, how come you stay with me?

“Huh? It’s why I love you. Even though it’s what makes you do things that’re downright dumb and dangerous. It’s like living with a sky diver.”

He shook his head, then limped toward the phone.

“What you doing now, Fred?”

“I’m gonna make a call to Miami.”

“Have to do with our friend Davy?”

“Sure does.”

She smiled wickedly. “Geronimo!”

C
ARVER INSTRUCTED
B
ETH
not to stake out the Rainer estate that night. He’d rented a Ford Taurus from Hertz, dark blue and inconspicuous and powerful, and that evening sat parked where he could see anyone entering or leaving the Rainer driveway.

His hopes had been high, but after the gray Lincoln pulled into the drive, Hector at the wheel and Walter Rainer almost reclining in the backseat, no other vehicle came or went.

Carver returned to the cottage, but parked the Ford on the far side of the structure where it wouldn’t be noticed.

After waking around nine-thirty, he ate a hurried breakfast of toast and jelly, not minding that he’d burned the toast. Leaving Beth still asleep, he took his coffee and the day binoculars out to a shady spot, settled into an aluminum lounger and watched the Rainer estate. The sun had climbed high and brightened the sea and was lancing warm beams through the palm fronds. Shade or not, Carver didn’t want to stay where he was for very long.

After about half an hour he saw Davy amble down to the
Miss Behavin’,
hop on board, and fifteen minutes later return to the house. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. Even from this distance the tattoos on his muscular arms were plainly visible. Carver never could figure why anyone would have themselves tattooed; the permanency of it would bother him. Maybe permanency bothered him, period.

He sipped coffee and from time to time raised the binoculars to his eyes, though he’d fixed on the spot where the van would have to pass if it left the garage, and he could surely spot it with the naked eye.

A few minutes past noon, when the heat had almost driven him inside, the van did back from the garage. Carver watched it slowly maneuver in the driveway like a huge black roach among lush foliage, then start forward. When it was out of sight, he tossed away the rest of his coffee in a sun-illumined amber arc and watched it splatter on the sandy soil. Then he limped to the Ford and drove down to Shoreline, parked and waited. If Davy was driving north, he’d have to pass Carver, and soon.