Gomez said, “All I do for the bitch, and what do I find out? She’s been dipping into the stock. Got herself a habit. She’s a fucking heroin user, already halfway to hell. You know the average life of somebody’s been on that stuff super-heavy, Carver?”
“Couple of years?”
“At best. I mean, I sell it, so I oughta know. But I tell you, I never suspected. She’s built real lean anyway, so there wasn’t any weight loss to tip me off. And she’s smart. Took mail-order college courses, all that shit. Probably what fucked her up. But she knew how to trick me into thinking she was clean; I give her that. Fooled me until the doctor came and told me about how her addiction killed my baby son. How the heroin in the mother’s blood found its way into the womb and the baby’s own blood. I didn’t know the news’d hit me so hard, not till I heard it.” He was trembling, either from pity or rage. “A tiny body like that, Carver, it can’t handle that shit. That’s what the doctor told me. He didn’t say it in those words, but any way you say it, my son died less than an hour after he was born.”
“What’d Beth say when you saw her?”
“I never did see her after I heard. When I got to the medical clinic, she was smart enough to have cleared the hell out. I been looking for her ever since, and I’ll fucking keep looking.”
Carver didn’t doubt it.
Gomez was sitting stiffly, powerful jaw muscles flexing like living beings beneath his skin as he clenched his teeth. A vein in his neck was throbbing, a blue hammer pounding out time.
“If her habit’s gonna kill her soon enough anyway,” Carver said, “why should you bother looking for her?”
Gomez gave a kind of snorting laugh, as if Carver’s question was so stupid it didn’t warrant an answer.
Maybe Gomez was right. When Carver’s son died, he’d felt the same way.
Gomez’s chest heaved. A stillness came over his body. He was himself again, the emotionless, tough entrepreneur in the toughest of businesses. “You ain’t in, so you’re out, Carver. All the way out. That’s what I want you to understand. I don’t want you around complicating things. Because if I figure it’d be less complicated to see that you disappear in the swamp country, then you’ll be introduced to some alligators. We clear on that?”
Carver said, “Alligators or crocodiles?”
Gomez didn’t blink. “The hard-guy act’ll carry you only so far. Till you become food.” He rapped on the glass partition and Hirsh made a slight movement, reaching for something.
There was a muted click from the door next to Carver. He hadn’t realized he was locked in.
Gomez was staring straight ahead. He said, “Good luck, stranger.”
Carver worked the door handle. Pushed open the vaultlike door and felt hot outside air close in on him. He said, “Wait here a minute, okay?” and didn’t move until Gomez had nodded.
Then he limped into his office and over to the file cabinet. He unlocked the fireproof bottom drawer and got out the envelope containing the thousand dollars Gomez had given him as a retainer to find his wife.
When he returned to stand by the back of the limo, Gomez lowered the power window. The soap-opera volume was up now on the TV; a woman said, “God, I love you, Damien. I’ll love you forever!” Carver had never known anyone named Damien. He handed Gomez the envelope, then watched him lift the flap and look inside. Money was obviously his intimate friend.
Gomez frowned. He didn’t understand this and didn’t like it. “Why you giving this back?”
Carver said, “I didn’t earn it.”
“That don’t mean shit to me, Carver.”
“Guess it wouldn’t.”
Gomez stared at him with eyes that seemed to absorb rather than reflect light. He said, “Stay out of my life, you hear?”
Carver said, “I’m glad to be out of it.”
The tinted window slid back up and the limo backed out of its parking slot, made a sharp turn to the driveway, then accelerated smoothly out onto Magellan.
Carver stood in the searing sun, watching the long black car until it disappeared, wondering himself why he’d returned the money.
13
The woman who suspected her husband and sister of having an affair called again and apologized to Carver for not showing up for their appointment. She said she’d had second thoughts; she was afraid of what he might find out. He told her he understood, and that when she got straight in her mind what she wanted to do about the situation, he’d still be available to help her. He didn’t think she’d call back.
Only a minute or so after he’d hung up, McGregor walked into the office. If everybody who hated McGregor formed a single-file line, it would be hard to walk around it. Del Moray police lieutenant McGregor was an infuriating man to be around; he saw humanity as rotting meat and himself as a happy maggot. It was difficult to deal with someone like him, who embraced, and even exulted in, being completely amoral. Sometimes his logic was impeccable.
He was a coiled and lanky six and a half feet of bad taste and bad manners. He had on a cheap brown suit that hung from his bony shoulders as if from a bent hanger. His white shirt was wrinkled and stained. The narrow end of his kinked tie dangled below the wide. His huge brown wingtip shoes were scuffed. He loomed in an almost visible odorous cloud of the perfumey cheap cologne he favored over bathing. Grinning his gap-toothed smile, he shoved back the straight lock of his lank blond hair that always flopped over his forehead, stared at Carver with his intense, close-set pale blue eyes. He had a long, narrow face with a prognathous jaw, a ruby of dried blood on his chin where he’d cut himself shaving.
Carver tried not to breathe the cologne-fouled air too deeply and said, “You given up knocking on doors?”
McGregor kept smiling. He propped his giant’s hands on his hips. “I like to walk in unexpected on shitballs like you. Catch them off guard so I can see how the lower fifth lives.”
“You got an upside-down view of the world,” Carver said.
McGregor stuck the tip of his tongue, like a pink viper, through the wide gap between his yellowed front teeth, His grin became more of a leer as he said, “How’s you and your lady sackmate getting along these days?”
Carver couldn’t help it; he felt the anger stir in him. He put on a calm act, wondering if McGregor had somehow found out about his troubles with Edwina.
“Can’t answer, asshole? Tongue-tied by love? Or just tongue-tired?”
“That why you’re here, to ask me about my love life?”
“Hardly worth my time to find out how some gimp does it between the sheets.” McGregor probed at a molar with his tongue, staring at Carver with his cheek lumped out grotesquely. Then he said, “I see by the news you got yourself mixed up in a murder over in Orlando.”
“Not in your jurisdiction,” Carver said.
“But this is my jurisdiction, fuckface. Where we’re looking at one another right now. The name Roberto Gomez was in the same news items. It was his sister-in-law got herself offed, right?”
“Still in Orlando,” Carver said, “not Del Moray.”
“Well, I’d be remiss in my duties if I learned a known big-time drug lord like Gomez was in my fair city and I didn’t find out why. He left your office not long ago, didn’t he?”