Hot

9

The game seemed to be intimidation. The black van accelerated to within a few feet of the Olds’s rear bumper. Even the windshield was tinted so dark the driver was visible only as a vague and ominous form. Darth Vader on wheels.

Carver goosed the Olds, and the van stayed on its bumper as if being towed. To his left was a shallow slope to the sea. Flashing past on his right were driveways, fence posts, shrubbery, terrain he’d rather not test in a straight line at high speed.

The Olds was roaring along with speed in reserve, but the way the van had stayed with it suggested it had plenty of power, too. Probably a modified engine. It was questionable that the Olds could simply outrun the van, even if the island were large enough to allow it.

Carver tapped the brake pedal and gradually slowed to thirty, tensing his body and waiting for impact as the van tried to force him off the road.

But the van’s driver was skillful and had other ideas. It slackened its speed in perfect synchronization with Carver’s and continued to fill the rearview mirror. The sun glinted dully off its blunt black nose. The shape of the driver was as still and remote as an obscure reflection in the dark glass.

Carver braked the Olds hard, twisted the sweat-slippery steering wheel and made a skidding right turn onto a narrow gravel road that led through dense foliage. The van followed, but fell back to about a hundred yards behind Carver. Maybe the sudden maneuver had spooked the driver. Nice to know he might be human. Though the terrain was flat, the road snaked and became even narrower.

It ended at a faded, red and white diagonally striped barrier that was almost overgrown with bougainvillea.

Carver stopped the Olds a few feet from the barrier, sat with the motor rumbling and stared into the rearview mirror. Heat from the exhaust system was building beneath the car; he could feel it rising through the metal floor and going up his pants legs. The sole of his left moccasin was growing warm against the rubber floor mat.

The van had also stopped, about a hundred yards back. It, too, simply sat with its motor idling.

The two vehicles stayed that way in the bright sun for almost a full minute. Perspiration was trickling down Carver’s face, stinging the corners of his eyes. His jaws ached and he realized he was clenching his teeth. The van stayed in his rearview mirror as if painted there. Its headlights reminded him of malevolent, unblinking eyes.

Time dragged. The haze of dust raised by the braking vehicles slowly settled in the sunlight, like particles after an explosion.

“Hell with this!” Carver said aloud, and jammed the transmission into Reverse.

He twisted his torso and slung his arm over the seat back, feeling his sweat-plastered shirt peel away from the upholstery. His palms were moist, but he got as firm a grip as possible on the slick steering wheel and tromped the accelerator. The Olds snarled and shot backward, raising more dust that partially obscured his vision and rolled in through the windows so he could feel its grit between his teeth. The car swayed and bucked as he aimed it with difficulty at such high speed, but despite the delicate reverse steering, he was able to stay dead on course. The driver of the black van was about to get a face full of vintage Detroit.

Dust billowed from the van’s back wheels. For an instant Carver thought it was going to speed forward to meet him. Then he realized it was moving in reverse, too.

The Olds got to within ten feet of it before they reached the coast highway. The van didn’t pause as it roared backward onto the paved road; its driver’s guess that there’d be no cross traffic was right. With a screech of tires, the van leaned hard to the right and skidded in a sharp turn so its blunt nose was pointed north on Shoreline. Carver stood on the Olds’s brake pedal, yanking the steering wheel to the left.

But his sweating hands slipped from the wheel and it spun out of control, bending back his thumb. The Olds shot across the road and skidded sideways on the soft gravel shoulder, met the grade and rocked up on two wheels. Higher, higher, tilting the view out the windshield. Carver hooked an arm through the steering wheel and braced himself.

The car hung poised for what seemed like minutes, while his heart stopped beating and he didn’t breathe.

Too heavy to turn over, the Olds dropped right-side up with a heavy Whump! as the suspension bottomed out. Carver’s teeth clacked together as he bounced from the seat. The safety belt kept him from bashing his head on the roof.

He shook off his disorientation, seeing the black van disappear around a curve on Shoreline. His arm or leg must have hit the transmission lever as he’d been jounced around, forcing it in Neutral. He crammed it into Drive, stomped on the accelerator, and realized the engine had died.

By the time he got it started again, he knew he’d never catch up with the van.

As he pulled slowly back onto the road, he saw that the temperature light on the dashboard was winking red. He drove cautiously and found if he kept the big car at around twenty-five, feeding it very little gas and letting the ocean breeze sift through the grill and play over the radiator and engine, the light blinked less frequently. If it didn’t glow red steadily, he figured he wasn’t doing the engine permanent harm.

He nursed the Olds into Fishback, then down Main to Norton’s Gas ’n’ Go. Norton was nowhere in sight, but a cheerful teenage boy with greasy blue overalls and a thousand pimples replaced a sprung hose clamp that had pulled loose when the big engine had rocked on its mounts. Apparently that was the only reason the Olds was running hot.

Carver splashed cold water over his arms and face while the car was being worked on, then paid the kid with Visa and drove down Main to police headquarters.

The grandmotherly receptionist-dispatcher recognized him and gave him a milk-and-cookies smile. A gangly uniformed cop he hadn’t seen before was bent over at the waist and rooting through a bottom file drawer. His legs were long, his blue uniform pants creased too sharp to touch. Chief Wicke was standing nearby watching him with his fists on his hips, as if he’d just chewed out the skinny cop.

Carver told Wicke he’d like to talk to him, and Wicke glared at the cop and said, “Don’t give up till you find it, Dewey!” He motioned with a jerk of his head for Carver to come into his office.

Wicke listened silently as Carver told him about the encounter with the black van. He rocked far back in his padded chair and stared up at the ceiling, as if maybe pictures accompanying Carver’s words were up there.

“Davy Mathis has such a van,” he said, when Carver was finished. He let the chair fall forward. The breeze from his sudden descent stirred papers on his cluttered desk. “Was it a Dodge?”

“I don’t know,” Carver said. “Production model full-size vans look pretty much alike, and I was busy trying to stay alive. Except for the black-tinted windows and missing license plates, it was just a van.”

“Well, it mighta been Davy’s, all right, but I gotta tell you there are a lotta vans like that running around the Keys.” Wicke stood up out of his chair and paced around the massive desk, dragging his fingertips on its surface as if testing for dust. “I think I better drive out and talk with Davy nonetheless. If it was him driving the van, he’ll have a solid alibi. Probably playing cards with ten people a hundred miles away, or doing charity work for the world’s unfortunates.” Wicke grinned. “I’d say the better the alibi, the more likely it is he was the one in the van.”

Carver said, “I like your approach.”

“What’s your plan now?”

“I’ll try talking to Millicent Bing later today. Other than that, I’m not sure.”

“Millicent was probably home,” Wicke said. “I wouldn’t call her a recluse, but she’s shy.”

“Too shy to answer the door?”

“Sure. It’d be just like her.” Chief Wicke chewed on the inside of his cheek, staring at Carver. “The business with the van don’t scare you, huh?”

“It scares me,” Carver said. “A nautical nasty like Davy’s a scary guy.”

“If it was Davy.”

Carver said nothing.

Wicke played with a massive turquoise ring on the middle finger of his right hand. It looked like cheap souvenir-shop jewelry, but it would be as formidable as brass knuckles if Wicke punched someone. “I talked to a few people I know up north, Carver. Inquired about you.”

“What’d these people say?”

“Not to be fooled by the fact you walk with a cane. That you was one tough sonuvabitch. They right?”

Carver said, ‘”Tough’s relative.”

“Uh-huh.”

Wicke tucked his shirt in beneath his meal-sack stomach paunch and ambled toward the door, a signal that he had matters to attend to and Carver had taken up enough of his time. Fair enough, Carver thought, and braced with his cane and stood up.

Wicke said, “I’ll give you a call after I talk with Davy, let you know what he said.”

“If it was Davy,” Carver told him, “it means there might well be something to Henry Tiller’s suspicions.”

“Could be. Davy’s a real piss-cutter, though. Running interlopers off the road might be his idea of sport.”

“Interlopers?”

“That could be how he sees you. You can bet he knows about your staying up at Henry’s place, getting around the island and asking your questions.”

“It’s the hit and run I’ve been asking about,” Carver pointed out.

“But Davy sees the connection between you and Henry, and he might know about Henry’s suspicion that Walter Rainer’s up to no good. Davy might add that together and figure his employment’s in jeopardy. Or maybe he’d do something crazy like trying to throw a scare into you just because of loyalty to Rainer. After all, Rainer was the one gave him a chance in this world when nobody else’d give him spit.”

“You make it sound like him killing me on the highway would’ve been an admirable act of servitude.”

“Now, now, it ain’t that bad, Carver. But keep in mind we’re standing here just assuming it was Davy in that van to begin with.”

“Davy or the Easter Bunny,” Carver said, remembering what Henry Tiller had said about the likelihood of coincidence.

Wicke knew what he meant. “That bunny don’t have a valid Florida driver’s license, far as I know. In my capacity, I can’t afford to lean on the wrong man.”

Carver wondered if he meant Walter Rainer had too much money and local clout to risk going up against. It was people like Rainer who kept an appointed chief of police like Lloyd Wicke in office, and people like Rainer who could start a political ball rolling that might knock a cop all the way back to civilian. But Carver didn’t know for sure that Wicke was intimidated by Rainer, so he said nothing.

“I’ll just clean up some paperwork here,” Wicke said, “then I’ll go talk to Davy. Maybe we can throw light on this thing.”

Carver thanked him and limped from the office. There was no point getting on the wrong side of Chief Wicke, but he didn’t think he could count on him for a lot of help. The incident had convinced Carver that Henry was on to something. Carver, younger and taken more seriously than Henry, would pose a genuine threat, so Davy, on his own or on Walter Rainer’s orders, had attempted to scare him off the case.

He slid in behind the Olds’s steering wheel and sat with the windows up and the engine and air conditioner off, thinking and perspiring. It would be necessary to move in on the Rainer estate and watch it carefully, and for that he’d need help. It was time to ask Beth to drive down and join him.

Carver was aware he tended to be too independent, to become obsessive and develop tunnel vision to go along with what Desoto often referred to as his dog-with-a-rag neuroses. Once committed to anything, he found it very difficult to give up, even when logically he should. Obsession could be his weakness as well as his strength; a dog tugging on a rag sometimes lost a tooth and the rag.

He was sure he wanted Beth on Key Montaigne because he needed somebody reliable to spell him staking out the Rainer estate. It couldn’t be because he missed her and needed her in ways other than professional. Sitting there on the sweat-moistened upholstery and suffering in the heat, that kind of need must be the farthest thing from his mind.

Right.

That settled, he started the engine and got what he could from the laboring air conditioner.