Flame

Chapter 19

Carver waited all the rest of that day, eating supper in a Jack-in-the-Box across the highway, where he could keep an eye on the Sundown Motel parking lot. Neither Jefferson nor Palma had emerged from his room. Apparently they were sleeping through most of the afternoon, maybe resting up for whatever operation they had planned for that evening. Bad boys with badges.

At seven thirty, from where he was sitting in the parked Olds, Carver saw the gray, four-door Dodge pull from the parking lot with its amber directional signal blinking frantically. It turned to head south down the coast highway toward Del Moray.

He resisted the temptation to follow the car. Instead he forced himself to wait until nightfall. Darkness wasn’t absolutely necessary for what he had in mind, but it would help.

Finally he peeled the back of his sweat-soaked shirt from the Olds’s vinyl upholstery and dragged his stiff body out from behind the steering wheel. Stood leaning on the car and stretched the kinks out of his back and arms. Limped across the street to the Sundown Motel and to Jefferson’s end room. Nodded to a fetchingly plump woman and her children splashing in the pool. Smiled at a young girl flouncing down the steps to meet someone waiting near the office. Carver belonged here. Every move he made said that he did. Stayed here every summer.

Even his brief struggle with the room lock shouldn’t attract much attention. Motel locks. Wrong keys. Happened all the time. Only Carver was struggling not with a key but with his honed Visa card.

The lock slipped easily enough, like most motel locks. He pushed the door open and stepped inside, making it a point to switch on the light boldly, as if the room were his or he had some business there known to Jefferson.

It was like a lot of motel rooms. Done in shades of beige and with mass-produced wood-fiber furniture that was bolted to the walls or floor wherever possible. Never could tell when motel furniture thieves might strike. There was a faint, musty smell in the room; the scent of the sea had found its way in. Carver’s heart was crashing in his ears; his blood was racing. He didn’t mind.

To work.

He quickly crossed the room and pulled the drapes closed over the sliding door that led to the beach. Dragged a long canvas duffel bag from beneath the bed and opened it. Pulled out an old worn padded leather gun case and unzipped it.

This was what Jefferson had sat staring at with such wracking emotion. A Remington rifle.

Carver examined it closely. It was a Gamemaster pump-action model, a .30-06 caliber, old but in solid mechanical order. He worked the pump, listening to the precise metallic clicking of the action. Saw that the firing chamber was empty. The rifle wasn’t loaded.

After deciding there was nothing special about the rifle, he slid it back in the gun case and arranged the case in the duffel bag as it had been, surrounded by faded Levi’s and some sport shirts, none of which he could imagine Jefferson wearing. The impression was that the clothes were merely there to round out the long duffel bag and obscure the fact that it might contain the rifle. A DEA agent could travel with this setup, Carver realized. Even airport security checkpoints would pose no problem in the face of U.S. government credentials.

Carver checked the closet and found several suits, some slacks, and a sport coat, all on wooden motel hangers. Good-quality clothes. Stylish but not flashy. Drug agents had to be well dressed, Carver supposed. “Miami Vice” gone conservative.

He let himself out of Jefferson’s room and returned to the Olds. Drove into Del Moray and had a dinner of salad and clams at the Happy Lobster with Edwina.

Afterward, he followed the red taillights of her Mercedes to her house and then made love to her, trying to forget for a while at least dead hogs and clients and backwoods preachers. People who carried knives designed specifically to separate flesh from bone. People who hanged other people and then bounced beer cans off their heads.

He succeeded.

He lay listening to the sea and his own ragged breathing, and felt contentment.

But later that night he dreamed he was swimming in a dark ocean of blood, and that his stiff leg was as unwieldy in liquid as on dry land and made it impossible to stay afloat.

And that his horror and the blackness he sank into were unending.