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“I guess you do.”

“So what you’re getting into here might be more dangerous than you think. You best be careful.”

“That’s what Desoto kept telling me.”

“He’s your friend, and I’m more’n that to you. So listen to us. We care about your hide more’n you do. You’re like a combination bloodhound and pit bull, and that’s unhealthy.”

Carver said, “Grrrr,” and pretended he was trying to bite her right nipple. Well, not entirely pretending.

She laughed and shoved him away, and they both lay still for a moment. Then she moved languidly in the bed, rustling the cool sheets, and kissed him, using her tongue. One of her long dark legs curled over him, warmer than the breeze. Her foot hung off his side of the bed.

She rested her head on his chest and said, “You gonna need me?”

He knew she wasn’t talking about, more sex.

Beth sometimes acted as Carver’s business partner as well as lover. She’d gotten tough during her hard years, knew martial arts, could handle firearms. He didn’t need to worry much about her. But he remembered what Desoto had said about Davy Mathis.

“I’m not sure,” he told her. “Let me sniff around down on Key Montaigne for a while, get some sense of things.”

“If that’s what you want. But when you’re ready to tilt at the windmill, let me know.” She unwound herself from him and stood up. Stretched, arching her back. “I’m gonna take a shower.” She padded barefoot across the plank floor, her slender body undulating like dark flame. Carver enjoyed watching her walk. He wondered how she’d look in a light summer dress, luxuriating in the wind. Again he wished he could paint. Maybe he’d take it up. She stopped and turned, smiling at him. “You coming?” she asked.

After showering together, they drove in the Olds to the Happy Lobster, a restaurant on the coast highway. It was a place where Carver and Edwina Talbot, the previous woman in his life, had often spent time, but that didn’t bother Carver or Beth. Neither was the type to wallow in sentiment.

Carver ordered the swordfish steak, and Beth devoured a lobster with mannered and precise enthusiasm.

Over coffee and cheesecake she said, “From what you’ve told me, it seems possible this Henry Tiller’s mind has been affected by age.”

“Desoto doesn’t think so, and he’s seen more of Tiller than I have.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I’m not so sure, but I trust Desoto enough that I need to go to Key Montaigne and find out.”

“I’m not as devout a believer as you are in those cop’s instincts you talk about. I’ve seen them wrong plenty of times.” Her dark, dark eyes became serious. “I’ve seen them get cops killed.”

Carver stared out the wide, curved window at the darkening Atlantic. The horizon was almost indistinguishable from the gray-green sea. So much distance out there, so much emptiness. Anything might be lost in it. Anything.

Beth took another bite of cheesecake. Chewed, swallowed, then sipped her coffee. She extended her little finger when she sipped from a cup. Where had she learned that? Not in the slums of Chicago, or from Roberto Gomez.

She placed her cup in its saucer with a faint and delicate
clink,
then reached across the table and rested her long, graceful fingers on Carver’s bare forearm. She dug in slightly with her painted nails, demanding his full attention. “You need me, you’ll call me. Promise?”

“I promise,” he said. “But first I better call Henry Tiller and tell him I’m driving down to see him in the morning.”

But back at the cottage, when Carver punched out the number scrawled on the envelope from his office, it wasn’t Tiller who answered the phone. It was a woman’s voice that uttered a tentative hello.

“Can I talk to Henry?” Carver asked. Beth was leaning on the breakfast counter, pouring a couple of after-dinner brandies and staring at him.

“No way. I mean, I’m afraid you can’t do that,” the woman on the phone said. She sounded young now, maybe a teenager.

“Why not?”

“He ain’t home. He’s in the hospital.”

“What hospital?”

“Faith United, in Miami.”

“Who is this?” Carver asked.

“My name’s Effie. Sometimes I come in and clean for Mr. Tiller. You Fred Carver?”

“I am.”

“Mr. Tiller said you might call. I was to tell you he’s in Faith United. A car hit him. I think he’s in serious condition.”

“Car hit him how?” Carver asked.

“I ain’t sure. All I know is he said he stopped and ate supper in Miami, and he was crossing the street to go back to his car and got run down.”

“Who was the driver?”

“I dunno. You could talk to the Miami police, I guess. Or the hospital.”

“Did Mr. Tiller himself phone you?”

“Yeah. We’re friends. He trusts me, and he knew I’d be here cleaning up.”

“I’ll call him at the hospital,” Carver said.

“I don’t think you can. He told me he was about to be operated on, that’s why he wanted me to let you know where he was and why. He left a message on your office answering machine, he said, but he was afraid you wouldn’t get it. Mr. Tiller don’t trust anything with a microchip in it.”

“Me, either,” Carver said.

He thanked Effie the cleaning girl and hung up. Told Beth what had happened.

“Still driving to Key Montaigne?” she asked, crossing the room and handing him a brandy snifter.

“First thing tomorrow,” Carver told her, passing the glass beneath his nose and breathing in the sharp alcohol scent, like a head-clearing warning. “With a stopover in Miami.”

F
AITH UNITED HOSPITAL
was on Hoppington Avenue in west Miami. Its main building was a five-story arrangement of pale concrete and arched windows, but onto this had been added long, three-story wings of pink brick and darkly tinted glass. The architecture clashed, making it look as if an old building had dropped from the past and landed in the center of a modern one.

At the information desk in the lobby, which was in the original building, an elderly woman behind a marble desk told Carver that Henry Tiller was in Room 504 and could have visitors, but Carver was to stop at the nurses’ station and let someone know he was there.

Carver thanked her, limped past a hideous piece of steel modern sculpture looming in the lobby, and rode the elevator to the fifth floor.

He didn’t like hospitals, and this one was no exception. The hall smelled faintly of disinfectant, and there was a hushed and impersonal efficiency in the midst of disease and suffering, as if Death were merely a member of the staff. White-uniformed nurses and occasionally people in pale green surgical gowns bustled meaningfully about the halls. Patients’ relatives slumped in plastic chairs and read dog-eared magazines, or wandered about with studiously nonchalant expressions, trying to come to terms with the realities of institutionalized illness. Carver told himself at least it was cool in here; outside it was ninety degrees even though it was only eleven o’clock.

There were two beds in 504, but Henry Tiller was the room’s only occupant. His upper body was slightly elevated, and his right leg was in a cast and raised on a thin cable draped over a stainless steel pulley contraption above the bed. A thin white sheet covered his lower body, and he had on a blue hospital gown tied with a drawstring at the neck. There was an opaque plastic tube fitted through one of his nostrils, and something clear was being fed to him intravenously. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t seem to be in any pain. He was much paler than he’d appeared in Carver’s office yesterday. Carver thought he looked dead, only his chest was rising and falling.

Carver stepped all the way into the room, which smelled like spearmint and was dark green on the bottom and pale green from halfway up the walls to the white ceiling. A nightstand with a phone sat beside the bed, and nearby was a traylike arrangement on a stand with wheels. A green plastic pitcher sat on it, and an upside-down clear plastic glass. There was a beige vinyl chair near the foot of the bed, with a pillow and folded blanket on it. Outside in the hall a couple of nurses hurried past, giggling softly. A job was a job.

Carver approached the bed, stood leaning on his cane, and Henry Tiller sensed he was there and opened his eyes.

Carver said, “I got your message. The girl, Effie, said you’d been hit by a car.”

“Effie Norton.”

“Guess so. She didn’t tell me her last name, only about you and the car.”

“Goddamned hit and run,” Tiller said. His voice was slow, a bit slurred, but his eyes seemed focused and knowing. He was making sense—for Henry Tiller anyway. “I was crossing the street after I stopped for supper, out shoots this big car away from the curb, and
ka-blam!
I was on the pavement ‘fore I knew what’d happened. Hell of a jolt, I can tell you.”

“I’ll bet. Get a glimpse of the license plate?”

“Didn’t even think about it till it was too late,” Tiller said disgustedly. “Figured it was an accident, then I realized the bastard drove off and left me.”

“Might still have been an accident,” Carver said. “Driver might have panicked.”

“Or knew just what he was doing,” Tiller said. He was probably right. “It was a Chrysler New Yorker or Fifth Avenue, all white, like the ones car rental agencies got by the thousands here in Florida. White, I said.”

Carver knew what he meant. Hitting a human being with a car often caused very little damage to the vehicle while smashing hell out of the victim. White paint was easy to match, so if minor damage to the car was quickly repaired by someone in on the crime, or who wouldn’t ask questions, after a short drive down a dusty road the car rental agency wouldn’t be able to tell the vehicle had been in an accident.

“See the driver?” Carver asked.

“Yeah, but it was all so fast I couldn’t give you an ID. A man, I’m pretty sure, but there was glare on the windshield and I can’t even be positive of that. I do know the bastard had both hands on the steering wheel and was staring straight ahead, at me. I got a mental image of that, all right.”

“You figure Walter Rainer’s behind what happened?”

Tiller snorted. “Whadda
you
figure?”

“How badly you hurt?” Carver asked. “I mean, how long they say you’re gonna be in here?”

“Weeks, the way it looks. Busted leg, cracked pelvis, and some internal injuries they ain’t quite sure about yet. They did some minor exploratory operating yesterday, and they’re gonna get into me good tomorrow morning. Know where that leaves us, Carver?”

“I know where it leaves you: right there in that bed, probably for the next month.”

“Where I’d like it to leave you,” Tiller said, “is in my cottage down on Key Montaigne.”

A young nurse came in, smiled at Carver, and walked directly to Tiller. She had blond hair pinned up off her neck, and wore one of those old-fashioned starched white caps that look like the newspaper hats kids make in grade school. After a concerned and appraising glance at Tiller, she adjusted the angle of his suspended leg slightly, then she peered at the glucose bottle as if it might be changing form before her eyes.

Gazing up at her, Tiller said, “You don’t come back in about ten minutes, I’m gonna yank all these tubes out and get outa bed so I can hop to the bathroom on my good leg.”

She grinned. “I’ll be back in nine minutes, Mr. Tiller.”

“Call me Henry,” he said as she sashayed out. He looked at Carver. “Whaddya say, Carver?”

“I think she’ll be back.”

“You know what I mean.”

Carver didn’t have to think about it for long. “Well, I was gonna call and tell you I was on my way there.”

Tiller’s right hand, the one with the IV needle in it, rose and fell feebly. A gnarled forefinger pointed. “My clothes are in that closet, key ring in a pocket. Take the brass key with the square top; that’s the one to the cottage. Address is number ten Shoreline Road. You remember that?”

“Sure.” Carver went to the locker-size closet and fished the key ring from Tiller’s pants pocket, then worked the brass key off the ring. He returned the cluster of keys to the pocket and left things the way they’d been in the closet, so Tiller’s clothes would be as little wrinkled as possible in two weeks or a month or whenever he’d put them back on.

“Tell me more about Effie the cleaning girl,” he said.

Tiller tried to shrug but only managed slight movement that obviously hurt. “She’s a fourteen-year-old kid lives nearby. Her daddy runs a gas station in Fishback, mentioned to me she was looking for work, asked if, being alone, I needed somebody to come in once or twice a week to clean. I told him sure, I’d help the kid out—not that I need anybody. I can damn sure look after myself.”

Carver considered pointing out Henry’s present position, then thought he’d better be quiet. After all, he’d made a mistake himself and was limping around with a cane.

“It was a white Chrysler that hit me,” Henry said. “I mention that?”

“You did.”

“I never got so much as a peek at the license plate.”

“Uh-huh.”

Tiller let out a long breath and looked up at the pipework and pulley system elevating his broken leg. An expression of infinite sadness passed over his features, for a moment making him look a hundred years old. “I forget some things these days, Carver, I know that. But I also know I’m a long ways from senility. I guess that’s another reason I want you to go on down to Key Montaigne and prove I’m right about something not being as it should there, prove I’m not some paranoid old man just a shell of what he was. Maybe in the same way, after you was shot, you had to prove you was more’n just a cripple people could write off. You understand that?”

“I understand my big problem was writing myself off, Henry. It took me a while to understand it, but now I do. Don’t get down on yourself because you’ve got a lot of miles on your odometer.”

“If you tend to forget things, Carver, how do you know? I mean, how do I know how
much
I forget?”

Carver said, “Well, how much is worth remembering, anyway?”

“All I wanna remember for now,” Tiller said, “is that I got some good years left in me. Not many, but a few. It ain’t easy holding on to that thought when there’s people treating you like you’re halfway in the grave. It works like voodoo or something; they give up on you, so you give up on yourself. You wither and die like a plant that gets no water.”