Bloodfire

11

Elizabeth Gomez stood by the tea and said, “All I want’s about ten minutes of your time.”

Carver shook his head no. “Sorry. I want nothing to do with you or your husband, Mrs. Gomez. You’ll have to work out your own problems.”

She had the tinted glasses up on the bridge of her nose again; he couldn’t see her eyes. “Our problems are beyond working out, Carver. The relationship has ended.”

Carver couldn’t help it; he decided to go fishing. “Roberto still cares for you enough to hire someone to find you and bring you back.”

“We both know why he wants me found,” she said in a soft, level voice. “He wants me dead, and locating me’s the first step. You didn’t know it at the time, Carver, but he hired you to be the finger man.”

“Finger man?”

“The one who points out the victim so the hit man can do his job. And if you’re still around and in the way, like at the condo when my sister was shot by mistake, you get a bullet yourself. You hadn’t got out of the line of fire there, you’d have been found dead lying next to Belinda.” She peeked at him over the plastic frames of the glasses again. “Know how the hit man can get right to his job once the target’s been found? He follows the finger man, especially if the finger man don’t know shit about why he’s looking for somebody. That way there’s no time wasted, no opportunity for the target to slip away. Ever since my husband hired you, he’s had somebody shadowing you.”

Carver thought she was probably telling the truth. It made him uneasy, and more than a little angry. “I take it since I quit the case, I’m no longer being watched.”

“Take it however you like, Carver. Nobody knows what the fuck a man like my husband’s gonna do. That’s part of the secret of his success. And part of the reason I left him.”

An elderly woman with dyed red hair pushed a shopping cart up the aisle, glared at them as she had to detour around Elizabeth Gomez, who didn’t budge an inch to get out of the way. When the woman had huffily grabbed a can of coffee, then made her way to the pickle display at the end of the aisle, Elizabeth said, “This is no place for what I need to say.”

“We got nothing to talk about.”

“I say we do.” She smiled. “Anyway, I’m not leaving you any choice. I’ll stick close to you as Superglue till you let me have my say, and if my husband’s hired men find me and follow orders, you’ll go along on the dark ride with me.”

“Dark ride,” Carver said. “I like that. It’s poetic.”

“Let’s rap, then. I’ll entertain you some more.”

Carver thought about it. Thought about it for a while. “You got a car outside?”

“Uh-hm. Didn’t walk.”

“Let me pick up a few more groceries. Then, when I drive away, follow me to my place. It’s not far from here.”

She said, “I know where it is.”

Carver set the cane’s tip and limped away from her, over to the cooler, where he pulled out a couple of cold Budweiser six-packs. He couldn’t ward off the thought that if he let Gomez know he had his wife at the cottage, she’d be worth twenty thousand dollars. Not that he’d consider doing it. And Elizabeth Gomez was right, he’d never see the twenty thousand; Gomez would snip all loose ends to her murder, one of which would be Carver.

He gathered up a quart of milk and a dozen large eggs. Some vitamin-fortified cornflakes with TV cartoon characters on the box. He carefully selected a head of lettuce that would probably turn brown in his refrigerator. On the way to the front of the store, he found room between the groceries tucked beneath his arms to fit in a can of sliced peaches. For the cornflakes.

Impulse buyer, he admonished himself. He shouldn’t have reached for the peaches. And he shouldn’t have listened even as long as he had to Elizabeth Gomez. There was a point where judgment crumbled.

He checked out in the express lane, behind a guy not only with more than ten items, but with half a cart full of groceries. That was criminal, but the checkout girl let him get away with it, so what could Carver do?

Still irked by having to wait in line, he carried his paper sack of groceries to his car. He didn’t look around as he set the sack on the front seat, slid it over, then leaned on his cane and lowered himself in behind the steering wheel.

He drove from the parking lot onto the main highway and headed toward the turnoff to his cottage. A steady breeze was bearing in from the east, bringing with it the rot-and-life scent of the sea. Death and renewal. Had the ocean smelled the same a million years ago?

A small white car, a Ford Escort, appeared in the corner of his rearview mirror and stuck there like a decal. Elizabeth Gomez was driving, still wearing her tinted glasses.

At the cotttage, Carver sat in a webbed aluminum chair with his stiff leg propped up on the porch rail. Elizabeth Gomez refused his offer of the other chair and stood leaning with her buttocks against the rail, her back to the glittering sea. They were in the deep shade of the porch roof, sipping Budweiser from the can. She’d parked the Escort, which Carver noticed had a rental company bumper sticker, alongside the cottage, almost out of sight.

The first thing she said was, “You’re no longer being followed, but Roberto still thinks you might accept his twenty-thousand-dollar offer. That you’ll find me and give me to him.”

Carver touched the base of the moisture-beaded can to his thigh. Cold condensation worked through the material of his pants. “How do you know all that?”

“I have a few friends in my husband’s organization. If I ask, they take a chance, tell me things I should know. They told me Roberto hired you under false colors. You accepted the job, then you backed off when you found out what was going on.” She took a sip of beer and placed the can on the rail. She’d removed the tinted glasses, and it looked for a moment as if her dark eyes were misting. “After Belinda got killed.”

“If you know I know the story,” Carver said, “what do we have to talk about?”

She removed the wide-brimmed hat now. Her hair, raven black and straightened, tumbled to her shoulders, changing her appearance entirely. Made her look like a rock singer, or a funky fashion model. Even the baggy gray dress couldn’t hide the lissome curves of her lean body. He’d heard Elizabeth was a beautiful woman. Heard right. She said, “You don’t know the whole story.”

“About your pregnancy?”

“Yeah.”

“And why you left your husband?”

“Yeah again.”

“I don’t care,” Carver said. “Domestic difficulties don’t interest me. They’re not my business. Point is, you want out, Gomez doesn’t want you out, and he’s a tough guy to leave.”

“Oh, he’s not that hard to leave. Only thing is, you leave everything else when you leave Roberto. I mean, like life itself.”

Carver gazed beyond the toe of his moccasin, at the ocean rolling in the sunlight. A pelican flapped past, dipped suddenly at a fish. Made a splash but came up empty and flapped on. “Here’s how it is,” Carver said. “I believe he’s trying to kill you, and I think you oughta go to the police. Trade what you know in exchange for their protection.”

She shook her head, staring at him with those dark, dark eyes. “Can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Roberto’s into drugs in a big way.”

“Not news to many.”

“I’m into drugs too.”

“I told you, work a deal. Get immunity. The law wants to put Roberto away, Elizabeth.”

“Do me a favor and call me Beth. I don’t like formality.”

“Okay, Beth.”

“What you want me to call you?”

“Carver’s fine.”

“I don’t mean I’m into drugs that way, Carver, the way Roberto is.” She was staring fixedly at him, something in her eyes pleading for understanding. “Not as a dealer.”

He tapped gently on the porch rail with his cane. Not making much noise. “You telling me you’re a user?”

“That’s it. Couldn’t just say no, I’m afraid.”

“Heavy user?”

“The heaviest. And that’s no exaggeration.”

Carver said, “What’s that change?”

“Roberto doesn’t do drugs,” she said. “Nobody who works for him does. He figures that’s the only way to run his business. It’s a strict rule. Strict rule for me not to use any of the stuff, either.”

“But you broke the rule.”

“Been breaking it for the past two years. Did coke at first. Then heroin.”

“Heroin, huh.” Almost disinterested. Then he said, “Oh, Jesus!”

She had a way of knowing what he was thinking. “That’s right. Our baby-Roberto’s son-died from addiction complications immediately after birth. That’s why Roberto wants to kill me, even though he knows my own addiction’s such it’ll probably kill me within a year or so.”

It was difficult for Carver to feel sympathy for her. A baby born with the raging blood of her habit, too frail to survive, where was there room for compassion for the mother? For an instant he knew how Gomez must feel. Why he needed vengeance. “How’s Roberto know you’re hooked that badly?”

“The doctor told him. The one that delivered the baby. Roberto wanted as few people as possible to know I was pregnant. That’s why he put me in the condo in Orlando. He arranged for me to have the baby at a private clinic, run by a doctor he knows. The doctor told him what happened, and I found out Roberto was furious. The day after the birth, I got out of the clinic. I laid low at a friend’s place till I healed up enough to get on the run, and I been running ever since.” She swallowed, her Adam’s apple working in her lean brown throat. “Roberto wants his revenge. That’s the way he is. He wants me before Mr. Heroin can have me.”

Carver looked out at the hazy horizon. She had to be in the last and worst stages of her habit to have killed her child. She was being optimistic in saying she had a year or two at most to live. A heroin addict in her league could measure the future in months. He said, “Does it really matter much which way you go, or how soon?”

She looked hard at him, and it seemed for a moment as if she might break down and sob. “Get yourself in my position, you hard-ass bastard. Find out how it feels. See how much you love life.”

“Maybe you’re right. But I’ll ask you what I asked Roberto the day he showed up here to hire me. Why me?”

“Because you got the courage to turn down Roberto. You refused to help him murder me, even for twenty thousand. Know what that means?” She was quietly sobbing now. Her body was quaking inside the baggy gray dress. The body he’d assumed was lean and sensuous was a doper’s wracked, thin frame, shaking itself in despair.

“Means I got humongous balls?”

“Damn you!” She turned away, toward the sea, so he couldn’t see her crying.

He sat sipping beer, not liking himself. Telling himself he didn’t feel compassion for her, this woman who’d chosen a fast life and then killed her child with her weakness. Carver couldn’t help it; weakness had always repelled him. In himself, especially, but too often in others who’d had some choice in the matter. What was free will about, if not that?

She turned around to face him again, composed now. “Everybody’s got some kinda weakness,” she said. She was a goddam psychic.

He said, “I wouldn’t argue it.”

She stood up straight. She was probably about five-ten. “You gonna help me, Carver?”

He said, “I’m sorry, I don’t do bodyguard work.”

Her demeanor changed. She moved closer to where he sat. Gazed down at him as if she pitied him.

Then she nodded. He wasn’t worth speaking to. She’d made her appeal and failed, and that was that.

She walked from the porch toward her car, not glancing back at him, her head held high. There was something unmistakably defiant in her long, loose-jointed stride. Even haughty. He’d doomed her and she was saying piss on him, she didn’t need him after all in order to die the way she wanted.

He liked that about her, that spit-in-the-eye quality. Liked it a lot. But he didn’t try to stop her as she drove away.