Kiss

33

They sat at a table in The Happy Lobster a circular restaurant on the edge of the sea. They were next to the vast curved window that looked out on the Atlantic, dawdling over drinks before dinner and watching night creep in. The purple line of the horizon became indistinct and then disappeared. The sea became as black as the sky, and only whitecaps were visible, dancing like playful spirits on the water. Then they also disappeared, until a high wind swept the clouds from in front of a gold sliver of moon. Darkness, shimmers of white, distant low stars like a galaxy that had fallen. Some of the stars were very slowly moving. Ships’ lights, far out at sea.

“Endless dark,” Carver said, and sipped his scotch. It had too much bite.

Edwina said, “Don’t be so exuberant. It takes my breath away.”

Still gazing over his drink, out at the black ocean, Carver told her everything about his day. About how a murderous sadist had dragged a fifteen-year-old runaway into his car and driven off with her. Because of foolish and melodramatic cloak-and-dagger work that Carver had virtually forced the child to do. He gave Edwina the details, the eyewitness accounts. See how cheerful that’d make her.

She said, “You’re feeling sorry for yourself. I find that disgusting in a man.”

Carver was irritated. “What I feel,” he said, “is guilt.”

“Think there’s a difference?”

He thought it over and said, “Not much, I guess.”

Edwina stirred her martini with the olive impaled on a little plastic red sword, holding the sword’s handle deftly between thumb and forefinger. “Well, you screwed up. You can sit there and loathe yourself, but that won’t work you back in time so you can make things right. Besides, you don’t know if your having Birdie go through the Sunhaven files has anything to do with why this Ortiz monster abducted her.”

“Don’t I? If I were a gambling man…”

“But you are,” Edwina said. She stopped stirring. “Not with money, maybe, but you are.” She was smiling at him. Popped the olive into her mouth and slowly withdrew the tiny red sword from between her pressed lips. Seductive, all right; apparently she approved of his gambling. “There are all kinds of currency. You’ll keep gambling with whatever’s being used and you’ll figure things to their logical conclusion. And you’ll find out that people do things for their own reasons and you’re not to blame for the human condition.”

“And what is that condition?”

“Totally fucked up.”

“You wouldn’t like it if I said who you sounded like.”

“Okay, not totally. Nothing’s totally. There’s you and me. I mean, together.”

She had a point. Seemed to right now, anyway.

He watched the flashing red and white lights of a high-flying aircraft, heading north. Out of Miami? Winging to Washington or New York? Carrying passengers and legitimate cargo? Or narcotics? He knew drug shipments were flown out of Mexico and even South America to points along the coast. Sometimes the planes landed at private airfields. Other times they dropped their cargoes in the sea with flotation devices, so the drugs could be picked up by small, fast boats and ferried to shore.

The waiter came with the food. Edwina had ordered crab legs. Carver had the stuffed flounder and asparagus. She asked for wine. He was drinking beer. The spiced scent of the seafood heightened his appetite and prodded him at least partly out of his gloom. Food, sleep, sex, shelter-maybe simple gratification was all there really was to life. Maybe McGregor was right.

After dinner they had ice cream and coffee. Carver was still thinking about Birdie Reeves, and halfway through dessert he realized something wasn’t right.

He pulled the list of the past year’s Sunhaven deaths from his shirt pocket and unfolded it. Scanned it twice. There was no James Harrison from Oregon on it, the resident whose death had prompted old Amos Burrel to call Carver after overhearing his conversation with Kearny Williams. An oversight by Birdie? Or had Harrison’s file been removed before she’d searched the records?

“I think a repeat of last night is in order,” Edwina said, finishing her ice cream and fastidiously licking the spoon. She sure was oral tonight.

Carver said, “You’re talking to a middle-aged man.”

“Middle-aged woman doing the talking. It’s logical that something wonderful has to come from all that experience.”

“I agree with your logic,” Carver told her, “but the experience will have to be one night less, I’m afraid. I need to get back to the cottage. Somebody might try to get in touch with me about what happened.”

She shrugged. “Okay, I’ll go with you. We’ll sleep there.”

“Not a good idea.”

“Dangerous, you mean?”

“Yeah. Maybe very dangerous.”

“Then why do you have to be there?”

“Gambling,” Carver said.

She smiled. “I’m your best bet. No way to lose.”

“There’s a way. For both of us.”

She tried not to show she was aggravated, but she was. Finally she said calmly, “Damn you. I love you so much it makes me terrified of losing you. I hate that.”

Carver knew exactly what she meant.

He also knew what it would do to him if he brought her the kind of harm that was possible, even likely, because of where the Sunhaven case had taken him.

He promised he’d make it up to her. Make it up to himself. She seemed unmoved. The earth had cooled. He resisted the urgings of his heart and groin to change his mind and tell her to come with him. Love, perhaps the most basic emotion in the world, could create the most wrenching complications. Could make people the victims of cosmic practical jokes.

When they left the restaurant, he sat in the Olds in the parking lot and watched the taillights of her Mercedes dwindle and disappear down the highway. Then he waited for a tractor-trailer with a hundred red and yellow running lights to roar past. He listened to its howl change to a diminishing high-pitched whine of rubber on pavement. When the sound had almost died, he drove from the lot and hit the accelerator hard.

He followed the wildly speeding truck all the way to the turnoff to his cottage. Warm air crashed and boomed through the car and flying insects bounced off the windshield like stray bullets.

He parked in his usual spot, not being as careful as he might have, still locked in gloom. Ortiz was running now, with Dr. Pauly, perhaps. And with a hostage. Anyway, Carver hoped Birdie was still a hostage and nothing worse had happened to her. Possibly Raffy realized her struggle at Sunhaven had been seen, and to decrease the intensity of the hunt for him he’d set her free.

But Carver knew better. Knew Raffy Ortiz well enough to be sure he wouldn’t simply turn Birdie loose on some deserted road and drive away. He would kill her, or he would kill everything in her. Cruelty lived in him like an animal.

Carver slammed the Olds’s door and limped over to the dark porch.

The tide was high, and behind him the sea was giving the beach a beating. A warm breeze carried to him the smell of things alive and dead that the waves had washed onto the sand. He set the cane firmly on each step with a solid thunk! as he took the stairs.

On the top step he froze in surprise. His heart seemed to swell and began hammering ferociously. Thudding so powerfully he was sure he could hear it-or was that the pounding of the surf on the beach?

In the shadows at the end of the porch was the outline of a man sitting in the webbed lounge chair. Sitting almost casually, with an ankle crossed over a knee, dangling foot pumping rhythmically, nervously.

The dark figure’s right arm rose slowly. The shape in its hand was unmistakable. A gun.

A voice as strained as taut wire said, “I’ve been waiting for you.”