Flame

Chapter 31

The bleeding, profuse at first, wasn’t bad now as long as he kept a wad of Kleenex pressed to his ear.

In Pompano Beach he found a medical clinic and walked into the emergency room.

He didn’t attract undue attention there, alongside a twelve-year-old boy who’d had both legs broken when a car struck him on his bike, and a middle-aged man, balder than Carver, who’d suffered a heart attack. Carver heard somebody say the heart-attack victim was the driver of the car that had struck the kid. So what was an earlobe more or less?

Carver sat for a while in a red plastic chair and smelled Pine-Sol and watched white-coated professionals bustle in and out through wide swinging doors.

There were five other people in the waiting room, two men and three women. Relatives and friends of patients. They sat looking worried, or paced looking worried, or leafed through tattered old Newsweeks looking worried.

Finally a young redheaded woman he assumed was a nurse ushered him into a small green room where he was told to sit on top of a vinyl-padded table that had what looked like butcher paper spread over it. She said Emergency was busy but someone would get to him as soon as possible. As she was leaving she knocked his cane over from where he’d leaned it against the table. She scooped it up as it was still rattling on the tile floor, apologized, handed it to him, and hurried out. He sat quietly. Felt the white paper on the table and found that it was cool. The room was cool.

After a while an attractive young doctor who looked like an Indian woman who should have a jewel pasted on her forehead came into the room. She examined his ear and shook her head. Said, “That is a very bad cut. Almost the entire lobe of the ear is missing.”

“An accident,” Carver said.

“Accident?” She didn’t believe him.

He smiled at her. She smiled back. Then she shrugged elegantly. He had a feeling she did everything with a kind of understated elegance. “If you insist,” she said, “an accident and not a knife wound.” She was busy with patients hurt more seriously and didn’t have time to argue.

She dabbed something on the ear, then injected local anesthetic and stitched the lobe. There was some pain, but she had a very gentle and soothing touch. A talent beyond medicine.

“There was hardly enough left to suture,” she told him, standing back and staring at her handiwork.

He said, “When it heals, will I be able to play the piano?”

She merely looked at him somberly. Said, “Medicine is practiced here, not comedy.”

She quickly and skillfully covered the lobe, or what was left of it, with a pad of medicated gauze, laying on lots of white adhesive tape. “You need to be careful and not put strain on the stitches. Try to sleep on your back or right side.”

He said, “If I’m asleep, it’ll be difficult to decide which side to lie on.”

She said, “I see you have Blue Cross. There’ll be some forms for you to fill out. And the girl at the desk will give you a prescription for pain pills. Follow the directions on the label. Have a good day.”

Carver thought it was already too late for that.

The ear didn’t hurt much at all until the anesthetic began to wear off. Then Carver pulled the Ford off the highway and into the parking lot of a truck stop, restaurant, gas station, and souvenir shop. He swallowed two of the pain pills and then read on the label that they were to be taken after meals.

Meals. He decided to go inside and try to get down some lunch; he wasn’t all that hungry but he needed fuel in his body for whatever else might be coming at him today. Besides, he was only twenty miles outside Del Moray; it was time to make a phone call.

He limped through the glitzy souvenir shop and sat in a booth by a window, where he could keep an eye on the rented Ford. Wondered what Hertz would think of all the blood on the front seat.

A young blond waitress who was beautiful despite the fact that she was overweight came over and said hello, said her name was Mandy, said would he like a menu. He said no menu, a club sandwich and black coffee would be fine. She scribbled on her order pad, did a double take when he moved and she saw the wad of white gauze and tape clinging to the left side of his head, but was too well trained or polite to ask him about it. “Be just a minute,” she said, and hurried away. She had about her the same air of efficiency as the people in Emergency.

While he was waiting for the sandwich to be assembled, Carver got up and limped to the pay phone he’d noticed just inside the door. On the wall next to the phone someone had scrawled in pencil For a hot time call Dotty, and then printed a number.

He got the number of the Sundown Motel near Del Moray from Information, then called the motel and asked for Jefferson.

The phone at the other end of the line rang ten times. Jefferson wasn’t in his room. Or if he was, he wasn’t answering his calls.

Beyond a revolving rack of sunglasses, Carver could see Mandy setting his cup of coffee on the table. She glanced around to see where he’d gone. Spotted him and smiled. Great smile; the kid could lose weight and be a stunner.

He decided he’d eat his club sandwich, hope the pills stopped the painful throbbing of his ear despite the reversed order of medicine and food, and then call Jefferson again. If he couldn’t get Jefferson, he’d try Ralph Palma’s room, though the two of them were probably off somewhere together playing catch-the-bad-guys and not having much luck.

The club sandwich was delicious, and it made Carver realize he was hungrier than he’d thought. He had Mandy bring him a wedge of apple pie and a second cup of coffee. Then a third cup. The coffee was revitalizing him, wiring him on caffeine.

When he was finished he left a tip, paid his check to a relentlessly cheerful cashier, then called the Sundown Motel again. Jefferson’s room. Carver figured the room phone wouldn’t be tapped; DEA agents had technology on their side. Little gizmos to detect that kind of thing. Carver usually treated high-tech gadgetry with disdain, but not this time. Vive la microchip. And the public phone Carver was on was surely safe.

He hooked the crook of his cane into the phone’s coin return, leaned his weight against the wall, and waited, the receiver pressed to his good ear.

On the fifth ring Jefferson picked up his phone. Said only a flat hello, as if he’d been pestered all day by salesmen and this was probably another one.

“This is Carver.”

Jefferson said, “Ah!” Not with real enthusiasm.

“I know where the SCBL strategy meeting’s gonna be held. Only it’s not just a strategy meeting; there was mention of some kind of major drug deal about to go down.”

After a few seconds’ silence, Jefferson said, “Talk to me, Carver.”

“Phone safe?”

“You wouldn’t have called here if you didn’t think it was safe. You were right, it is. What about the phone you’re on?”

“Safe enough for Dotty, safe enough for me.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” Carver told him about last night at the estate in Hillsboro Beach.

“Then you actually saw Wesley?”

“Talked to him. Or I’d say he talked to me. Did it to convince me I had no choice but to stay on a tight leash.”

“But here you are chatting with me.”

“Here I am,” Carver said.

Jefferson said, “The man you described who flew in and was picked up in the Caddie is Jeb Garrity from North Carolina. He’s a founding member of the SCBL. The rest of them are probably already in Florida, although I wouldn’t think they’d all congregate at the Willoughby place.”

“Willoughby?”

“Jack Willoughby. He’s the owner of the home you were taken to last night. Owns a chain of fried-chicken restaurants throughout the South, Willoughby’s Wings.”

“I ate at one of them a few months ago,” Carver said. “It gave me indigestion, but nothing like this.”

“It doesn’t figure they’d meet like that, at the home of one member. Appalachian bullshit. More likely they’d choose neutral ground. Decrease the likelihood of being watched or listened in on.”

“Why?” Carver asked. “On the surface, they’re just an ordinary businessmen’s organization. Chamber of Commerce South.”

“On the surface.”

“Courtney get any of this information to you?”

“She hasn’t been heard from for a while,” Jefferson said. “Courtney’s gotta be careful these days, with somethin’ blowin’ in the wind.”

“That was an old Bob Dylan song,” Carver said, “from the sixties.”

“ ‘Courtney’s Gotta Be Careful’?”

“No, that was the Beatles.”

“How come you waited so long to get this information to me?”

“How come you’re so grateful?”

“Come off it, Carver, you ain’t playing PTA politics here. I should think you realized that last night.”

“I was gonna talk to you in person, then I figured you might be under surveillance-this not being PTA stuff. I decided the safest way was to use the phone, only you weren’t there until after I finished my club sandwich.”

“Despite what you been through, you’re still a smartass.”

“In the genes, I guess.”

Jefferson seemed to snort in disgust, but Carver couldn’t be sure. “Okay, Carver, you talked and I listened. Thanks.”

Carver said, “Hold on. I want something in return.”

“Oh? What would that be?”

“Vincent Butcher.”

“What’d he do, talk nasty to you?”

“He cut off my earlobe. That’s another reason I didn’t get in touch with you right away; I had to get it stitched up.”

Jefferson said, “Christ!”

“I want him,” Carver repeated.

“This thing that’s going on has got nothing to do with machismo, Carver. No time here for vendettas. ’Sides, Van Gogh had his whole ear cut off and did okay afterward.”

“He cut off his own ear. Sent it to a woman.”

“Yeah. She wasn’t much moved by it, either.”

“I didn’t ask for pity, I asked for Butcher.”

“I can’t deliver; I’m not Revenge Is Us down at your local shopping mall.”

“You can deliver.”

“Well, if can, I won’t.”

Carver said, “Fuck you, then, you and your assassination rifle.”

“What?”

Carver hung up.

He sidestepped a display of caps lettered FISHERMEN DO IT DEPER above the bills, pushed through the restaurant, and limped out onto the sun-tortured parking lot.

Old Sol was laying it on again today; during the brief time Carver had been in the restaurant, the Ford had gotten almost too hot to touch. When he lowered himself in behind the steering wheel and started the engine, he turned the air conditioner on high and then opened all the windows so the heat that had built up would be replaced by fresh and cooler air. Kept the windows down for almost a mile before sealing himself in again.

He was driving the rest of the way into Del Moray, passing the marina, when he saw a familiar cabin cruiser docked there. He slowed the Ford and peered through the space between two other docked boats, making sure he hadn’t been mistaken when he’d read the name on the bow.

He hadn’t. The flowing black script read exactly the way he’d first seen it driving past. The way he’d seen it last night from the dark ocean,

Bold Entrepreneur.

Willoughby’s boat.