If I Should Die (21 page)

He had cleaned up the mess as well as he could, locked the vivarium, slid the lizard’s corpse, wrapped in newspaper, down the chute to the communal trash area, and
stumbled back to his apartment. He had disinfected the wounds and put antiseptic cream on the blisters, and bandaged his foot, but he was growing weaker and was unable to eat. He supposed he had a
fever, but had no energy to use a thermometer. He knew what he might expect from the venom. Local pain and swelling, general weakness, nausea, ringing in his ears, perhaps respiratory distress.
Even, in the worst cases, cardiac failure. But he knew that would not happen to him. He would not die.

In time, they would come to visit him again, and when they saw how badly his condition had worsened, he guessed they would send a doctor, perhaps even take him to hospital. He would not tell
them about the bite, would wear socks and slippers, however painful, and even when they found it, he would be silent, would not give the other dragons the satisfaction of knowing what one of their
kind had done to him. There was no antivenin for the bite of the Gila monster. All they could do was care for him, while he toyed with them.

Mother used to care for him when he was sick.

Joe was functioning on automatic. He was numb again, with fear, with guilt, with being torn to pieces. Jess was in the hospital, and all the tests so far indicated that the
baby was okay, and they were praying that things would settle down and that Jess could go home. But right now the doctors wanted her to rest up, and it was such a struggle for Joe to keep from
telling her about Lally, and the trouble was that his feelings always showed in his face – Jess always said he’d make a lousy poker player – but this time he was hell bent on
keeping the nightmare from her, and so far he’d managed it.

There had been a storm in Hawaii, and Joe’s temper had blown when Cohen had told him that Lucas Ash had still not been in touch because there was a problem with the phone lines, but at
least the Florida State Police had gotten the prints of Lally’s photographs, and they were already out there, looking and asking questions. Apparently they thought it a real possibility that
Lally and Hugo might be in Everglades City because the big seafood festival was on, and Joe saw some sense in their reasoning that no one who liked food as much as they did was likely to resist
it.

The searching and sifting at both Hagen Pacing and the battery plant had been completed, and nothing, not a sliver or fragment of evidence, had been found to prove that the
sabotaging of pacemakers had happened at either site. Hagen and Schwartz were still home sick – Hagen, he had reported to Cynthia Alesso by phone, with a secondary chest infection that looked
like turning into pneumonia – but Linda Lipman, younger, fitter and made of strong stuff, was back on duty and had gone to visit Ashcroft and Leary at their homes. Olivia Ashcroft had pretty
much fulfilled her expectations, but Lipman had been startled to find Howard Leary markedly different than at the office, a surprisingly convincing family man with a pretty schoolteacher wife, a
long-serving and contented Spanish housekeeper, and three normal, boisterous children at different stages of orthodontia.

Joe badly wanted to search Hagen and Schwartz’s apartments, but he didn’t even bother making out a complaint for a search warrant, for he knew that without specific proof no judge
would agree to sign it. The more Joe thought about it, the more he felt the two men’s illnesses were too damned convenient, but since about a quarter of Chicago had the flu, that was no
evidence either. Because of Jess, and his genuine concern over Lally, the commander had said comparatively little to Joe about his trip to Massachusetts, but Jackson was less than appreciative
about Chris Webber having been told what was being kept from the rest of the country.

“Just what do you know about this man, Duval?” he asked on Saturday night.

“Very little,” Joe admitted.

“Yet you’ve foisted him on the Florida police.” Jackson’s tone was as soft as usual, but held an unmistakable note of menace.

“I think he can help.”

“And what if he opens his mouth to the wrong person?”

“Webber’s only interest is in finding my sister, Commander,” Joe said. “He could care less about selling his story or worrying about other patients in the same position.
He may remember to care about those things after they’ve found Lally – I don’t know enough about him to be sure – but right this minute, I’d stake my life on his doing
anything to help.”

The commander took a long look at Joe.

“When did you last sleep?”

“I caught a nap on the plane.”

“Go home now. You look like hell.”

“I can’t.”

“It wasn’t a request, Duval.”

“I won’t be able to sleep, Commander.”

“Wanna bet?”

Joe went home. The house was lonely without Jess or Sal, and it seemed suddenly to be crammed with reminders of Lally. The photographs, books she’d given him, the
watercolour of the Berkshires she’d bought to keep home fresh in his mind, the silver candlesticks she’d given him and Jess for their fifth wedding anniversary. He flicked the TV remote
until he found a rerun of
The Odd Couple
, found a frozen pizza and heated it in the microwave, and drank a beer, and normally that was all it took to knock him out, but tonight, if he was
hoping to get any rest, he knew he’d need more, so he followed it up with a shot of Jack Daniels. And the comedy show ended and
The Red Shoes
began, and Joe knew it was one of
Lally’s favourite movies, and suddenly he was drunk, and sadder than he could ever remember feeling in his life, and with no one there to see, he began to choke up a little, sat there looking
at the screen and sniffing like a teenage girl.

He woke up as the closing credits were rolling, and it was after two, and his head ached. He dragged himself out of the armchair and filled a glass with cold water and drank it down, and then he
called the hospital to check on Jess, and called Florida to check on Lally, but no one anywhere had any news for him, and so, very slowly and rather painfully, he went upstairs and pulled off his
clothes and went to bed, and slept like a dead man.

Chris had never felt so useless in his life. He had thought over the last few years that he had cornered the market in helplessness as he’d watched Andrea drink herself
over and over from Jekyll into Hyde, but running around south Florida like a headless chicken for the past twenty-four hours, scanning tourists and staring into cars, getting more and more
frustrated and weary, knowing that he was about as likely to run into Lally Duval as he was to see a snowflake, he had become increasingly filled with a sense of self-mockery and despair.

Chief Hankin having asked his Miami counterpart for assistance in the search, had enabled Joe Duval to ask the local police to meet Chris at Miami airport on Friday night, and they already knew
that Hugo and Lally had rented a red Pontiac Sunbird, and every available officer from Miami to Key West had a copy of the car description and Lally’s photograph. It would have been useful if
someone had thought to give them a snapshot of Barzinsky, too, but never mind, because now that they had their licence place number they were one hundred per cent better off than they had been
before, and no one put up a fight when Chris told them he’d decided to go it alone rather than stick with any one group of officers.

“You do have people on all the islands?” he’d asked one young officer with a golden crew cut and snub nose.

“Pretty much.”

“What do you mean pretty much?”

“Word’s gone out, sir. To all the camp sites and tourist offices.”

“And hotels?”

“There are hundreds of hotels and motels, Mr Webber. We can’t get details to all of them, but they’ll all get checked out in time.” The officer had looked and sounded
patronizing.

“How much time?” Chris had asked.

“As long as it takes, sir.”

“You know how important it is that we find Miss Duval, don’t you?” Chris was a non-violent man, but he’d experienced a sudden intense desire to shove this young asshole
up against a wall and show him his fist.

“Yes, sir, we know, and we’ll be doing our best.”

“Then it won’t matter to you if I look for them on my own.”

“So long as you don’t go getting yourself into trouble, sir. You wouldn’t want to use up any more valuable manpower, would you?”

Chris gritted his teeth. “I’ll keep in touch, in case you have news for me.”

“You do that, sir.”

Assuming that even if they had spent time in the Everglades they’d have long since moved on south by now, away from the wetlands to the Keys, Chris had stayed at a hotel
in Florida City on Friday night. Saturday morning had proven hotter than he’d anticipated, and he hadn’t stopped to pack properly, and his denims and sneakers felt too heavy, but he had
no intention of wasting time shopping for shorts or sandals, and gradually he’d grown acclimatized. As the day went on, everywhere he’d looked there’d been young women with long,
straight dark hair, but whenever he ran up to them, or honked the horn of his own rented Mercedes, or touched them on the shoulder, they turned around, looking startled or amused or angry, and none
of them had those soft grey eyes or that magical slenderness, or that wonderful dancer’s neck, and he knew it was hopeless, worse than hunting for a needle in a haystack, because there was no
way of knowing if she was
in
this particular haystack or in another, twenty or forty or even a hundred miles away.

He had tried, from the start, to envisage the trip through Lally’s eyes. She was an energetic young woman, and a creature of impulse, he knew that much, but she had been sick, so there
must be some limitations, and he guessed that even if Lally didn’t want to accept that, Hugo Barzinsky would take care of her. Chris had seen the way Hugo looked at her, the way his eyes
changed when he talked about her, and he recognized that look, for he’d seen it in his own eyes in the shaving mirror over the last two weeks.

There were two ways Hugo and Lally might have tackled the Keys, either driving all the way through to the last island, Key West, and then backtracking leisurely, or dipping in to some or even
all the Keys on their way down to the tip. He wasn’t sure about Barzinsky, but he didn’t see Lally as a methodical traveller, so Chris had taken a chance on the second alternative, and
he’d bypassed Key Largo on the assumption that, as with the Everglades, they’d have been and gone by now, and headed straight for the Islamorada group of islands.

“Have you seen this woman?”

He’d asked the question over and over again, feeling like a cheap private eye in a bad movie, except that most people he asked were happy to look at Lally’s picture, or too polite to
refuse to. But no one had seen her, and it
was
hopeless, and he understood the young cop’s attitude a little better already, for according to the leaflets he’d picked up at the
tourist centre there were at least a dozen sites that might have attracted them, and any number of hotels, motels and mom-and-pop establishments they might have stayed at, or restaurants, diners
and cafés they might have eaten at.

He’d hit pay dirt on Saturday evening.

“Have you seen this woman?” he’d asked the man at the cash desk at the entrance to one of the camp sites on Long Key.

“Yes.”

Chris stared at him. “You have?”

“Sure.” He was Hispanic and had an easy, swinging accent. “Like I told the cops, she and her friend camped here Wednesday and Thursday night. What did she do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you all looking for her?”

“She didn’t do anything.”

Chris couldn’t believe it. There were sixty camp sites on Long Key, and he’d struck the right one first time.

“So they left yesterday morning?” His spirits soared, his feet stopped aching, the throbbing in his head went magically away.

“I guess so.”

“Do you know where they went from here?”

“How should I know?”

The headache came back. “Is there anyone else they might have talked to about their plans?”

The man shrugged. “Maybe a turtle, maybe a bird.”

Another wise-ass. Chris had thanked him and gone to a payphone to check in with the police. They had been there before him, and the discovery hadn’t gotten them much further along, but
they said that it was good to have confirmation of their presence in the Keys, and it was only a matter of time before they were found.

It wasn’t that Chris didn’t believe that. The trouble was, he couldn’t be be sure they had the time.

Sunday morning he felt no better. He’d spent the night in a motel on Route 1 and now he was back on the road, heading south, and he felt like a washed-up gambler,
sticking pins in the map to decide where to try next.

He was filled with self-disgust. He was an amateur, and arrogant, and a damned fool. He also had a wife in a clinic in New England, and a ten-year-old daughter he should have been looking after,
and if anyone was going to find Lally, it was almost certainly not going to be him. But he’d promised Joe Duval that he would do his best. And besides, he was in love. He was thirty-five
years old, and he was head-over-heels in love with a woman who was not his wife. A beautiful, talented, impulsive, decent young woman whose life was in unthinkable, unbearable danger.

There was a red Sunbird three cars further along. Chris’s pulse-rate quickened. He put his foot down, swung out to get a better look, but it wasn’t a Sunbird at all, it was a
Japanese import, and the driver and his passenger were both black.

He bit down hard on the disappointment, and drove on.

Joe heard the phone ringing while he was in the shower. He grabbed a towel and ran, making wet footprints on the bedroom rug, a thing Jess abhorred.

“Yes?”