Kiss (27 page)

“Well, I’m sure he thought he could make it look like she was leaving with him of her own accord. For a while it did look that way, story I get. Probably scared the living shit outta her and it took her a while to realize what was really happening. As to why he wanted her, maybe he figured she was on to whatever’s going down here at Sunhaven and she posed some kinda danger to him. Or maybe he just wanted her in case he might need a hostage for a bargaining chip. Could have been an impulsive thing, for that matter. The guy thinks that way, especially these days.”

Carver’s stomach tightened as he thought about Birdie rifling the files for the information he’d asked her to get for him. Possibly she’d been seen. Ortiz might have been told. Possibly Carver
had
caused her abduction. And whatever else would happen to her. Was happening to her now. Possibly.
Oh, Christ!

“Way I see it,” McGregor was saying, “Pauly and Ortiz are on the run, and they wanna clean up whatever mess they might leave behind.”

“They got a bigger mess now, though,” Carver said, “since Raffy was seen dragging Birdie away from here by force.”

McGregor shrugged and held the pose. It made him look like a gaunt blond vulture. “Not necessarily. They go underground. Maybe head for another country. Raffy changes his name, hacks fucking sugarcane for a while in Brazil or someplace. Dr. Pauly treats lepers in some godforsaken jungle. Makes atonement and all that. Feels good about himself. Albert Schweitzer bullshit, hey? Who the hell knows? One thing they
ain’t
gotta worry about is somebody here in Del Moray, Florida, U.S. of A., able to pin anything on them.”

“Other than kidnapping.”

“Hah! I tell you, Carver, the staff here, meaning one attendant and that butch-looking nurse, only saw Raffy walk out with Birdie, holding her arm like a perfect gentleman. Witnesses saw her struggle getting into the car are about four hundred years old, you add up their ages. Raffy and Pauly stay clear of here for about a year or so, anybody can do them any damage in court’ll be looking on from some other world. Even if some witnesses
are
still among the living, who’s gonna believe a couple of old feebs that drool when they make an identification?”

Carver said, “I hope I see you in about twenty-five years and remind you you said that.”

“You’re not the type to live that long,” McGregor said.

“I’ll outlive you.”

“Asshole! You’ll outlive me like a rabbit’ll outlive a fox.”

McGregor might be right, Carver thought. “At least you’ve got enough evidence to come down on what’s happening at Sunhaven.”

McGregor’s blond eyebrows crawled high on his forehead. “Oh? And what evidence is that?”

“There’s a link between Raffy and Kearny Williams’s daughter, Melba, and her husband, Jack Lipp. The Lipps have got a business that’s in trouble—they need money. That means motive. Raffy and Dr. Pauly are choosing convenient times for Sunhaven residents’ deaths so the survivors will benefit. Raffy handles the business end and Pauly fakes the death certificate. No doubt they both get a cut of whatever their clients inherit.”

“No doubt, huh? If you was a judge, would you issue warrants and exhumation orders on what you just said?”

“Damned right I would!”

“Shows why you ain’t a judge. This is the day and age a defendant’s gotta be standing there with the victim’s blood on him, if you’re thinking conviction. Evidence needs to be so strong some pansy-ass judge won’t let a killer walk or let him spend a little time behind the walls where he can learn new techniques and come out a state-of-the-art criminal. We need more than we got, Carver. I know it. You know it. Come on back outta dreamland.”

Carver knew it. He was back. “I’d like to talk to one of the residents here.”

“A witness?”

“Maybe.” Carver wasn’t going to tell McGregor about Amos Burrel’s phone call. It was McGregor himself who’d told Carver about Birdie’s abduction, before Carver had had a chance to tell
him.

“Nope. Sorry, the ones seen the perpetrator leave here with the victim are still making their statements.”

McGregor didn’t seem sorry. But he had the badge and the rank and knew how to use them. Felt like using them this evening.

Carver traced circles on the floor with the tip of his cane, sensed it was time to go. “Let me know soon as you hear anything on this,” he said.

McGregor shot his nasty grin. “Oh, you betcha. You make sure your Radio Shack police scanner’s tuned and I’ll see you’re posted right up to the minute. Won’t make a move without you.”

“I’ll call you from time to time,” Carver said.

As he limped out he noticed Nurse Rule and Dr. Macklin standing near each other and talking in low tones. They moved apart and stood silently when they saw McGregor walking back toward them, like a couple of conspiring schoolgirls.

Carver needed to talk to somebody about all this himself. So he could unburden his heart of some of the guilt he felt for placing Birdie in danger and making her a maniac’s hostage. So he could get a perspective from someone who wasn’t a twisted cop or a Sunhaven resident or a murder suspect.

Edwina fell into none of those categories.

He stopped the Olds at a phone booth on the coast highway and called her at Quill Realty. Reminded her of last night and asked her if she wanted to meet him again for dinner.

She did. She was as easy for him as he was for her.

T
HEY SAT AT A TABLE
in The Happy Lobster a circular restaurant on the edge of the sea. They were next to the vast curved window that looked out on the Atlantic, dawdling over drinks before dinner and watching night creep in. The purple line of the horizon became indistinct and then disappeared. The sea became as black as the sky, and only whitecaps were visible, dancing like playful spirits on the water. Then they also disappeared, until a high wind swept the clouds from in front of a gold sliver of moon. Darkness, shimmers of white, distant low stars like a galaxy that had fallen. Some of the stars were very slowly moving. Ships’ lights, far out at sea.

“Endless dark,” Carver said, and sipped his scotch. It had too much bite.

Edwina said, “Don’t be so exuberant. It takes my breath away.”

Still gazing over his drink, out at the black ocean, Carver told her everything about his day. About how a murderous sadist had dragged a fifteen-year-old runaway into his car and driven off with her. Because of foolish and melodramatic cloak-and-dagger work that Carver had virtually forced the child to do. He gave Edwina the details, the eyewitness accounts. See how cheerful that’d make her.

She said, “You’re feeling sorry for yourself. I find that disgusting in a man.”

Carver was irritated. “What I feel,” he said, “is guilt.”

“Think there’s a difference?”

He thought it over and said, “Not much, I guess.”

Edwina stirred her martini with the olive impaled on a little plastic red sword, holding the sword’s handle deftly between thumb and forefinger. “Well, you screwed up. You can sit there and loathe yourself, but that won’t work you back in time so you can make things right. Besides, you don’t
know
if your having Birdie go through the Sunhaven files has anything to do with why this Ortiz monster abducted her.”

“Don’t I? If I were a gambling man . . .”

“But you are,” Edwina said. She stopped stirring. “Not with money, maybe, but you are.” She was smiling at him. Popped the olive into her mouth and slowly withdrew the tiny red sword from between her pressed lips. Seductive, all right; apparently she approved of his gambling. “There are all kinds of currency. You’ll keep gambling with whatever’s being used and you’ll figure things to their logical conclusion. And you’ll find out that people do things for their own reasons and you’re not to blame for the human condition.”

“And what is that condition?”

“Totally fucked up.”

“You wouldn’t like it if I said who you sounded like.”

“Okay, not totally. Nothing’s totally. There’s you and me. I mean, together.”

She had a point. Seemed to right now, anyway.

He watched the flashing red and white lights of a high-flying aircraft, heading north. Out of Miami? Winging to Washington or New York? Carrying passengers and legitimate cargo? Or narcotics? He knew drug shipments were flown out of Mexico and even South America to points along the coast. Sometimes the planes landed at private airfields. Other times they dropped their cargoes in the sea with flotation devices, so the drugs could be picked up by small, fast boats and ferried to shore.

The waiter came with the food. Edwina had ordered crab legs. Carver had the stuffed flounder and asparagus. She asked for wine. He was drinking beer. The spiced scent of the seafood heightened his appetite and prodded him at least partly out of his gloom. Food, sleep, sex, shelter—maybe simple gratification was all there really was to life. Maybe McGregor was right.

After dinner they had ice cream and coffee. Carver was still thinking about Birdie Reeves, and halfway through dessert he realized something wasn’t right.

He pulled the list of the past year’s Sunhaven deaths from his shirt pocket and unfolded it. Scanned it twice. There was no James Harrison from Oregon on it, the resident whose death had prompted old Amos Burrel to call Carver after overhearing his conversation with Kearny Williams. An oversight by Birdie? Or had Harrison’s file been removed before she’d searched the records?

“I think a repeat of last night is in order,” Edwina said, finishing her ice cream and fastidiously licking the spoon. She sure was oral tonight.

Carver said, “You’re talking to a middle-aged man.”

“Middle-aged woman doing the talking. It’s logical that something wonderful has to come from all that experience.”

“I agree with your logic,” Carver told her, “but the experience will have to be one night less, I’m afraid. I need to get back to the cottage. Somebody might try to get in touch with me about what happened.”

She shrugged. “Okay, I’ll go with you. We’ll sleep there.”

“Not a good idea.”

“Dangerous, you mean?”

“Yeah. Maybe very dangerous.”

“Then why do
you
have to be there?”

“Gambling,” Carver said.

She smiled. “I’m your best bet. No way to lose.”

“There’s a way. For both of us.”

She tried not to show she was aggravated, but she was. Finally she said calmly, “Damn you. I love you so much it makes me terrified of losing you. I hate that.”

Carver knew exactly what she meant.

He also knew what it would do to him if he brought her the kind of harm that was possible, even likely, because of where the Sunhaven case had taken him.

He promised he’d make it up to her. Make it up to himself. She seemed unmoved. The earth had cooled. He resisted the urgings of his heart and groin to change his mind and tell her to come with him. Love, perhaps the most basic emotion in the world, could create the most wrenching complications. Could make people the victims of cosmic practical jokes.

When they left the restaurant, he sat in the Olds in the parking lot and watched the taillights of her Mercedes dwindle and disappear down the highway. Then he waited for a tractor-trailer with a hundred red and yellow running lights to roar past. He listened to its howl change to a diminishing high-pitched whine of rubber on pavement. When the sound had almost died, he drove from the lot and hit the accelerator hard.

He followed the wildly speeding truck all the way to the turnoff to his cottage. Warm air crashed and boomed through the car and flying insects bounced off the windshield like stray bullets.

He parked in his usual spot, not being as careful as he might have, still locked in gloom. Ortiz was running now, with Dr. Pauly, perhaps. And with a hostage. Anyway, Carver
hoped
Birdie was still a hostage and nothing worse had happened to her. Possibly Raffy realized her struggle at Sunhaven had been seen, and to decrease the intensity of the hunt for him he’d set her free.

But Carver knew better. Knew Raffy Ortiz well enough to be sure he wouldn’t simply turn Birdie loose on some deserted road and drive away. He would kill her, or he would kill everything in her. Cruelty lived in him like an animal.

Carver slammed the Olds’s door and limped over to the dark porch.

The tide was high, and behind him the sea was giving the beach a beating. A warm breeze carried to him the smell of things alive and dead that the waves had washed onto the sand. He set the cane firmly on each step with a solid
thunk!
as he took the stairs.

On the top step he froze in surprise. His heart seemed to swell and began hammering ferociously. Thudding so powerfully he was sure he could hear it—or was that the pounding of the surf on the beach?

In the shadows at the end of the porch was the outline of a man sitting in the webbed lounge chair. Sitting almost casually, with an ankle crossed over a knee, dangling foot pumping rhythmically, nervously.

The dark figure’s right arm rose slowly. The shape in its hand was unmistakable. A gun.

A voice as strained as taut wire said, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

T
HE FIGURE GOT UP FROM
the lounge chair and stepped from shadow into moonlight. Dr. Pauly. He held the gun steady on Carver, held it as if he were familiar with firearms and knew how to use them as effective life-and-death instruments; part of his medical training.

The surf breathed in slow rhythm and frogs croaked behind the cottage, but Carver felt as if he and Dr. Pauly were somehow caught in silent suspension of time.

Until Dr. Pauly said, “I don’t want to shoot you, Mr. Carver, but if you try to come near me, I will. I swear it!”

Carver folded his hands over the crook of his cane and leaned on it. Might as well stay where he was for a while.

Dr. Pauly’s deep-set eyes were in shadow. His thin mouth was a tight line arced downward at the corners as if scrawled that way in a child’s crude drawing. He glanced down at the automatic in his hand, back up at Carver. “I don’t want anyone else killed,” he said. “For God’s sake, I’m a doctor! That’s why I came here to warn you.”