Bloodfire

33

It had been three months since Carver said good-bye to Edwina at the airport in Orlando. He’d stood and watched the swept-wing airliner rise in two-hundred-mile-per-hour slow motion from the runway, its engines trailing a haze of jet exhaust, and knew he’d never see her again. They’d been lovers, but they’d said good-bye as if they were strangers.

Beth Gomez had given the DEA secret depositions, and there’d been an unprecedented series of drug busts in Florida, as well as in Georgia and Louisiana. The Brainard brothers continued their forever sleep beneath a highway that, in Florida’s endless summer, would last beyond their natural span of years. Far into the next century, their bones might be discovered when the highway finally was repaved or repaired. By then, who and what they were would no longer matter, and the lives of everyone involved would have played out and been pushed into minor history by time.

Carver continued to work out of his office on Magellan Avenue, and he’d taken several cases. One was divorce work, two others were industrial theft. None of them was a challenge. He found himself doing the kind of drone work that reminded him of when he was with the Orlando police. Mostly he stayed around his beach cottage, watching the sea roll in and roll out, and feeling his life ebb and wear with the ponderous and relentless rush of the ocean. He was drinking too often, not shaving often enough.

Now and then Desoto would come to see him and they’d sit and sip beer and watch the sea, and Desoto would try to goad him from his lethargy. Desoto knew what was bothering Carver even more than the parting with Edwina.

Maybe Desoto had something to do with what happened at dusk on a hot, damp day when Carver was lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. He heard the screen door squeak open and closed, but he didn’t bother turning his head to see who’d entered. Not that many people came to visit. Probably if he looked he’d see Johnny the beach prowler, who liked to drop by and talk with Carver and show him his day’s haul of interesting shells and lost jewelry and coins. Or maybe he’d see Desoto.

Beth’s voice said, “You look like something the cat’d drag out, Carver.”

He rolled his head and focused his eyes on her. She was wearing a pale yellow dress and white high heels, had her hair pulled back. Looked fantastic. He felt something stir in him, sending tentacles through his mind to touch places he’d wanted to forget existed.

He said, “Didn’t expect visitors,” and resented the way his voice almost broke. The way he couldn’t look away from her.

She took a few elegant strides farther inside the cabin, like a queen surrounded by squalor. Standing in the soft light, she stared down at him the way people stare at furniture they think might be worth refinishing. He could smell her perfume-familiar, disturbing, pushing buttons in his memory.

She said, “McGregor’s not going to run for mayor.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Carver told her.

“Why not?”

“That night in the swamp, the rifle I handed you to put in the trunk of his car wasn’t McGregor’s, it was the Brainards’. McGregor’s rifle is wrapped in plastic and buried along with B.J. Brainard under the highway.”

Beth propped her hands on her hips and smiled down at him, figuring it out fast. “And the bullets in the Brainard brothers will match the rifle, which is registered to McGregor and is the gun that killed Roberto.”

“That’s it,” Carver said. “McGregor knows if he runs for mayor, I can see that the brothers’ bodies are discovered.”

“Wouldn’t that put you in jeopardy too? I mean, you’d be an accessory after the fact.”

“Yeah, but McGregor’s not sure I wouldn’t tip the law anyway.”

“Would you?”

Carver didn’t answer. Instead he said, “Were the last few months rough for you?”

“Sometimes. Better’n the alternative. Who can ask for more than that?”

He rolled his head again on the perspiration-damp pillow and gazed up at the too-familiar network of cracks in the ceiling. A wasp was crawling around up there; he remembered it buzzing and darting at the window this afternoon, seeking light and a way out.

Beth sighed and said, “I heard about the way you been pissing away your life out here. If you don’t wanna jump up outa that bed right now, it’s okay with me. But I gotta know.”

“Oh? Know what?”

“What I came here to find out. Whether you want me to go or stay.”

Without looking at her, Carver said, “Stay, please.”

She got undressed and climbed into the bed with him. The springs squealed wildly. She draped a long, dark leg over both of his, flung an arm across him. Then she rested her head on his chest and cried softly. They both could feel what was happening, and it made them sad and afraid and joyful all at the same time.

Lakes turning.

Seasons changing.