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Davy reached beneath his riot-of-flowers shirt and pulled out his sharpened cargo hook. His expression was businesslike as he advanced on Carver. He’d handled Carver easily in Miami, and now it was time to get serious and finish the job. The routine chore.

Carver calmly drew the Colt from its holster, but the cargo hook arced forward with startling speed and slashed his hand. The gun dropped to the floor, landing at an angle and bouncing away from Carver. The back of his hand throbbed and dripped blood from a four-inch gash.

Davy stepped back, grinning now. His eyes had changed. Since Carver had been disarmed, business and pleasure could be combined. Carver had little doubt that if he stooped to retrieve the gun, Davy would be on him for the kill. They both knew Carver wasn’t going to do that. Doomed men tend to cling to time. Davy was obviously relishing the leisurely sport of finishing off a cripple.

But this time Carver wasn’t caught by surprise. He stood almost still as Davy approached him, shifting his weight subtly so Davy wouldn’t notice. His good leg was set so firmly that inside his thin-soled moccasins his toes were curled down tight against the concrete floor. He waited.

As Davy crouched to close in with the hook, Carver lashed out and up with the cane. It missed Davy’s wrist by inches, but Carver pulled it close to his body and, as Davy sprang, he shot the tip of the cane forward into Davy’s sternum, using it as a jabbing weapon to drive the breath from his attacker.
“Ooomph!”
He felt the sour rush of Davy’s exhalation on his face, and the point of the cargo hook snagged for a moment on his shirtsleeve, then tore free. Now Carver slashed down with the cane, and the deadly steel hook flew from Davy’s injured hand and bounced clanging beneath one of the display trays. As Davy instinctively lowered his free hand to grip his damaged fingers, Carver flicked the cane up in his face, jabbing at an eye. Jabbing again.

Davy snarled and leaped back. Stood rocking on the balls of his feet. Glaring and battling his temper.

“Davy,” Rainer said softly, cautioning. Almost a whisper. “Davy!”

But Davy lost his composure and charged.

What Carver was waiting for. He flicked the cane out again, like a nifty boxer using a stiff left jab. Davy stopped and tried to brush the cane away from his face or grab it. Carver drove it into his groin. Davy’s hands dropped again. Carver slammed the cane across the side of his head, feeling and hearing the solid connection of walnut with bone. Nailed him again on the backswing, opening up a cheekbone. He was a fraction quicker than Davy, and now both men realized it and knew it made all the difference. Christ, this was
fun!
Terrifying but fun.

Davy retreated. Streaming blood was making a grotesque mask of his face. His glance shot to where the cargo hook had slid beneath the display tray.

Carver smiled and motioned with the cane for him to attack again. Silently mouthed the word “Please,” urging him to come forward.

But Davy moved fast in the opposite direction, going for the steel hook.

Before he could reach it, Carver was down and struggling for the Colt. His hand was about to close on the gun before Davy could grasp the hook, so Davy reversed direction and scrambled up the steel stairs. He knew when the war was over. In a flurry of noise and desperate energy, he burst through the door and was gone before Carver could raise the Colt above shoulder level and fire.

Carver planted the cane and hauled himself to his feet, holding the gun aimed at Rainer, listening to his own rasping fight for air. His labored breathing was making the gun barrel waver.

Unruffled and unmoving, Rainer said, “You use that cane very well as a weapon. Interesting to watch, but indecisive.”

“Decisive enough so you and I are driving into Fishback to see Chief Wicke.”

“No, no,” Rainer corrected, wagging a ringed finger with impatient amusement. “Didn’t I mention I was a man who took precautions, Mr. Carver? Allow me to set you straight on a few facts, the first of which is that as soon as Dr. Sam committed suicide—and it
was
suicide, brought about by middle-class remorse and self-hatred—I ordered destroyed every scintilla of evidence that the child-smuggling operation ever existed. Dr. Sam indeed had the kind of sickness that compelled him to sexually abuse young boys, but Millicent was certainly enough of an accomplice that she’ll decide to remain silent when I convince her of the consequences of a loose tongue. Especially if we speak with Davy present.” He stood taller, turning slightly as if aiming his jutting stomach at Carver like the prow of a proud vessel. “You see, I’m not merely a part of the smuggling operation, I’m in charge of it, so I have enough control to protect myself. And naturally I’ve exercised that control. There’s no way for you to advance any legal proof of what you know. No way at all.” The fleshy pads of his cheeks bulged in a smile. His eyes glittered. “In short, Mr. Carver, a closure has been reached, but not of the sort you envisioned. What transpired here tonight simply doesn’t matter.”

Rainer’s words made a horrifying kind of sense. And probably all too soon, in another place, in another manner, he’d be back in his profitable and terrible business.

Willing himself not to tremble with the rage building in him, Carver said, “Don’t you ever feel the same self-loathing that made Dr. Sam hang himself?” He knew even as he spoke that his was a futile hope. The evil wouldn’t corrupt and destroy itself. Real evil seldom did that, and Rainer was the bulky embodiment of genuine evil.

“Ah, Mr. Carver, you should try to move beyond your simplistic and inhibiting delusions of right and wrong. You need to learn what Dr. Sam came to know and couldn’t live with because he was weak. The world’s like the ocean he studied, an arena of prey and predator in endless succession. A food chain without moral meaning. Sappy sentimentalism aside, the abducted children are merely prey, nothing more. They simply fell prey to a larger predator. Despite the naive moral interpretation you put on it, actually nothing could be more natural and correct.”

As Carver listened to Rainer he was watching the huge torpedo shape of the shark gliding in circles behind the fat man, its image wavering and shrinking with distance, then growing into sharp and ominous focus.

“You’re burdened with morality and an absurd code of honor,” Rainer said confidently, “so you’re not going to shoot me. You’re not a predator. Not the sort who can slay a defenseless man in cold blood, anyway. And nothing criminal can be proved, so face the fact that the game’s over. Henry Tiller lost when Davy ran him down. Now you’ve lost. But you get to live, lucky you.” He folded his pudgy hands in front of him. “And that, Mr. Carver, is simply that.”

Still staring at the shark, Carver was backing awkwardly up the stairs. He knew Rainer was right. About too much, but not about everything. He said, “Have you noticed, Rainer, that this room’s smaller than the shark tank?”

Rainer appeared puzzled. He glanced around the square concrete room and shrugged. “So it is.”

“About the size of a swimming pool. You swim as well as your wife, Rainer?”

Rainer cocked his head to the side, pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows. The thought was forming.

Carver said, “Time for you to be introduced to a larger predator.”

That was when Rainer fully grasped it. Carver saw it on his face as he reached the steel landing and opened the door. Set the tip of his cane and emptied the Colt into the thick glass wall of the shark tank, spreading the pattern of bullets from floor to ceiling. He glimpsed Rainer’s mouth gaping soundlessly as the wide expanse of glass behind him went milky and bulged. Carver hurled himself out of the room, slamming and locking the door.

As he limped away he heard the thunder of crashing glass. Water roaring into the tiny room. The thumping and flailing of the startled and ravenous shark.

Possibly a scream.

I
T WAS
R
AINER’S WIDOW
, Lilly, the FBI finally persuaded to talk by allowing her to swim to immunity. She thought it wise to cut a deal with the law before Millicent Bing had the chance.

Arrest warrants were issued for Davy and Hector. Davy was shot to death during a car chase in Nevada the next month. Hector disappeared, probably into Mexico. Mexican authorities were cooperating with the FBI to clean up that end of the abduction operation, while in the United States arrests were made in cities along the eastern seaboard and throughout the Midwest. The Evermans were captured without resistance early one morning in a motel outside Tampa.

Chief Wicke had decided Walter Rainer’s death was as much an accident as Henry Tiller’s. He felt guilty for turning a deaf ear to Henry and a blind eye to what had been happening in his jurisdiction. Silently he’d dropped the spent bullets from Carver’s gun into Carver’s hand, eliminating the evidence that the glass wall had shattered as the result of gunfire, or that Carver had been responsible. The only court appearance required of Carver would be as a witness in the prosecution of the ring members. A repentant Millicent Bing, who’d surrendered to authorities in Ohio and also been promised immunity, would be an even more damaging witness than Rainer’s widow.

Two days after Rainer’s death at the research center, Norman Tiller, Henry’s cousin from Milwaukee, showed up at the cottage and said he was in a legal hassle with the state of Florida over his inheritance, and his attorney had advised him to move into Henry’s cottage. Carver and Beth introduced him to Effie and left for Del Moray. Effie’s father needed a part shipped in before he could repair Beth’s car so it would run dependably, so she left the LeBaron at Norton’s Gas ’n’ Go. She paid a transport service to drive it north when it was repaired, and traveled in the Olds with Carver.

On the sun-drenched highway just north of Miami, he slowed the car after passing a teenage girl hitchhiking on the gravel shoulder. Beth laid a hand over his on the steering wheel, then shrugged and removed it. Carver stopped the Olds, put it in Reverse and backed toward the girl. She snatched up a faded blue duffel bag and ran toward him, glad she had a ride.

Up close she looked even younger, no more than fifteen. Blond, pretty despite a fresh scar beneath her left eye. She was wearing dirty jeans and a T-shirt with v
irginia is for lovers
lettered faintly across the chest.

“Hey, thanks,” she said, as she ambled the final few feet to Carver’s side of the Olds, her charity-case Reeboks crunching on the gravel.

“How far you going?” he asked.

“Don’t really matter how far or where.”

“How about back to Virginia?”

She studied his face, and her expression changed to one of fear and wariness. She’d been awhile on her own.

“Climb in,” Carver said. “I’ll drive you to a bus station, stake you to your fare home. It’s a promise.”

She was slowly backpedaling now. She hooked a middle finger at Carver and yelled, “Fuck you!” Wheeled and began jogging away, her shadow stark in the brilliant afternoon sun.

“Hey!” Carver yelled after her, thinking of his own daughter in St. Louis. St. Louis was no safer than Florida. “Get back here, please!”

Beth said, “Forget it, Fred. Maybe home’s not so good for her, either.”

The girl glanced back and made another obscene gesture, switching her hips deliberately as she stopped running and walked away fast.

“Jesus!” Carver said.

“It’s luck she’ll need,” Beth told him. “It’ll all be in her luck.”

“Luck hell! Why can’t she be
made
to see it’s dangerous being fifteen and thumbing your way through life with strangers? Why can’t she be made to understand so she’ll go someplace safe even if it’s not back home?”

“She doesn’t wanna understand.”

“Why not?”

Beth smiled and shook her head. “People don’t know why they do anything, Fred, or why things turn out the way they do. Kids, adults, none of us. We think we know, but we don’t. You shoulda learned that by now.”

The sun was giving him a headache. “I don’t like to think the world’s that way.”

“Nobody does. That’s why it works the way I said.”

He watched the girl’s slim form disappear around the corner of a bridge abutment. Caught a brief glimpse of her cutting across a grassy field toward a cloverleaf. He felt helpless. Furious.

He slammed the Olds into Drive and pulled back onto the highway, spinning the tires until burning rubber screamed his rage. Drove too fast and didn’t look back.

He almost made it. Ten miles outside Del Moray a state patrol car pulled him over and he was a given a lecture and a speeding ticket.

He thought, Just my luck.

John Lutz is one of the foremost voices in contemporary hard-boiled fiction.

First published in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
in 1966, Lutz has written dozens of novels and over 250 short stories in the last four decades. His earliest success came with the Alo Nudger series, set in his hometown of St. Louis. A meek private detective, Nudger swills antacid instead of whiskey, and his greatest nemesis is his run-down Volkswagen. In his offices, permeated by the smell of the downstairs donut shop, he spends his time clipping coupons and studying baseball trivia. Though not a tough guy, he gets results. Lutz continued the series through eleven novels and over a dozen short stories, one of which—“Ride the Lightning”—won an Edgar Award for best story in 1986.

Lutz’s next big success also came in 1986, when he published
Tropical Heat
, the first Fred Carver mystery. The ensuing series took Lutz into darker territory, as he invented an Orlando cop forced to retire by a bullet that permanently disabled his left knee. Hobbled by injury and cynicism, he begins a career as a private detective, following low-lifes and beautiful women all over sunny, deadly Florida. In ten years Lutz wrote ten Carver novels, among them
Scorcher
(1987),
Bloodfire
(1991), and
Lightning
(1996), and as a whole they form a gut-wrenching depiction of the underbelly of the Sunshine State. Meanwhile, he also wrote
Dancing with the Dead
(1992), in which a serial killer targets ballroom dancers.