The elevator lurched to a stop at the second floor, and a large man with a stomach paunch and a loud tropical print shirt stepped in and unnecessarily punched the glowing button for the lobby. Carver allowed himself to breathe.
When they reached lobby level, Carver and the paunchy man waited patiently for the elevator doors to slide open. Through his dark glasses, Carver saw that the tropical shirt was festooned with a pattern of brightly colored parrots flitting among brilliant flowers. The man stared directly at him, even raising himself slightly on his toes as if he could peer over the rims of the sunglasses and see what Carver might be concealing.
“You okay, buddy?” he asked.
“I’m fine!” Carver snarled at him as the doors slid open on the lobby.
The paunchy man stood and stared at him as he hurried past him out of the elevator.
“Hey, buddy,” the man said behind him in a loud, annoyed voice, “don’t take it personal.”
But Carver didn’t answer or look back. He tightened his grip on the crook of his cane and limped quickly toward the exit and the cauterizing sun.
6
Beth slept most of that day. At six that evening she was examined and was awake for another hour, during which she and Carver were never alone. Within minutes after the doctors and nurses had left, she was asleep again. Carver stayed with her in the room until eleven o’clock, then left and drove back to the beach cottage.
He lay awake in the dark for a long time, listening to the ocean and wondering. The evening news had revealed that the explosion at the clinic definitely had been caused by a bomb. The somber and handsome newscaster quoted police as saying they had leads and expected an arrest to be made soon. Then there was an interview with Operation Alive members who’d been picketing at the clinic that day. All of them denounced violence and professed to know nothing about the bombing. Carver stared into the shadows and thought about the irony of the bomb injuring a woman who had gone to the clinic to cancel her appointment for an abortion. What would Operation Alive think about that?
Probably that it was too late for her to be exculpated after the sin of making the appointment in the first place.
From up on the highway came the sound of a truck accelerating along the curve that paralleled the coast, a faraway whine of tires on still-warm concrete, then gradations of engine noise as the driver shifted through the gears.
It was the last thing Carver heard in the sultry night before falling asleep.
In the morning, when he returned to the hospital to visit Beth, he was pleased to see that she was sitting up in bed. She had her head wrapped in a pale yellow scarf wound like a turban. The IV needle had been removed from the back of her hand, leaving a black-and-purple bruise tinged yellow with antiseptic. She looked much better, more clear-eyed and alert.
Carver walked to her and kissed her on the lips, then placed the valise with the clothes and cosmetics she’d requested on the chair next to the bed.
He was suddenly aware of an odor in the room that didn’t belong. It had about it the cloying sweetness of something rotting in the sun.
“Just who I wanna fucking see,” said a voice he recognized.
He turned around to see Del Moray police lieutenant William McGregor, and he realized the familiar odor was the cheap deodorant McGregor used as a substitute for bathing. The lieutenant was nobody’s favorite cop. He was corrupt and ambitious and blatantly reveled in his evil. He hated Carver. Carver hated him.
“I’ve been talking to your dusky friend here,” McGregor said. He was a skinny but strong man, six and a half feet tall, wearing his usual rumpled brown suit and stained shirt, his boat-size brown wing-tip shoes. He had a lean face, lank blond hair that flopped down over his forehead like Hitler’s, and a wide space between his front teeth through which the pink tip of his tongue habitually peeked like a serpent. He didn’t approve of interracial love affairs, said his mean little blue eyes, and he didn’t feel at all sorry for Beth. If Carver had asked him, he probably would have said as much.
Carver looked at Beth. “Do you feel well enough to talk to the police?”
She nodded. “Might as well get it over with. It can’t take long, because I don’t have much to tell. All I know is that I walked inside the clinic, then got blown back out through the door.”
“Wages of sin,” McGregor said with a wicked grin, pulling a small, leather-covered note pad and a pencil from his pocket. The movement made his suit coat open wider and revealed the checked butt of his shoulder-holstered nine millimeter. Also fanned the stench and failure of his deodorant across the room.
“What sin?” Carver asked.
“Yours and hers, dumbfuck. You knocked her up and she let you do it, or she wouldn’t have been anywhere near that explosion.”
Beth knew how McGregor fed on other people’s misery and tried not to show she was upset. “I thought you were going to tell us you were pro-life or pro-choice, but that would mean you believed in something other than yourself.”
McGregor looked over at Carver and grinned, poking his tongue through the space between his teeth at the same time. It made him look incredibly lewd. “Hey, she’s still feisty, even after getting her ass blown through some glass doors.”
“Still thinking clearly, too,” Carver said. “She’s got you figured out.”
McGregor shrugged. “Pro-life, pro-choice, who gives a flying fuck? I’m pro-me and I’m not ashamed to admit it.” He poked at his concave chest with a long forefinger. “Pro-me, just like everybody else is, when push comes to shove.”
“You sound proud of it, though,” Beth said. Despite Carver’s warnings, she was always surprised anew by the totality of McGregor’s evil. He wished she’d be quiet; inspiring others’ loathing was McGregor’s crude way of communicating with people. It would have been pathetic if it weren’t so . . . well, loathsome.
“Damned right I’m proud,” McGregor boasted. “Charles Darwin would be proud of me, too. He and I both understand nature, including human. I accept my nature, which is just like yours. Only you don’t accept what you are. Don’t even admit it to yourselves. Hell, I admit it and like it. Tell you, Carver, I feel good about myself, just like all the psychology assholes advise.”
Carver tried to imagine McGregor reading psychological self-help books but couldn’t. Maybe I’m Despicable, You’re Despicable.
“You’re as repugnant as anyone I’ve ever met,” Beth told McGregor.
He smiled at her, happy to have roused her ire. “Thanks. And you should be a good judge, considering you’ve slept with repugnant characters. Even married one. Way it goes, you lie down with shit, and you can’t help but get up with it all over you.”
Carver felt his anger surge and took a step toward McGregor. He wanted to grab him by his wrinkled brown lapels and knock out some of his oversize yellow teeth.
He almost raised his cane to swing it at McGregor’s head. Then he stopped. McGregor was staring at him, still smiling. This was what he wanted. Anything he’d said that was out of line could be denied, and McGregor could lie like a corrupt choirboy. And a scuffle would bring people, leave evidence. The kind McGregor wanted in order to nail Carver with the law he sometimes wielded like a hammer.
“Keep right on coming, dickface,” McGregor said, obviously disappointed that Carver had stopped. “This is exactly the kind of thing I’d expect from a dumb gimp like you.” He moved his hand slightly so it was resting on the butt of his holstered gun.
Carver didn’t move. “Find out what you need to know, then get out,” he said tersely.
“Humph!” McGregor said, opening his notebook. “You’d think you gave the orders around here. Dr. Carver, pilfering drugs from the supplies between fucking the nurses. You should be so lucky.” He turned his attention to Beth. “What did you see when you entered the clinic?”