Now both of Crusty’s eyes bulged. The glass one — if it was glass — threatened to pop out.
“Ten nights in advance,” Carver explained. “I always give myself enough time to fish until I catch something.”
Crusty took the money and handed him a key with a large red plastic tag with the numeral 10 on it. “End unit, south side,” he said. Carver thanked him and moved toward the door.
“You got one of the rooms with a TV, no extra charge,” Crusty said. “Ice machine’s down t’other end of the buildin’. Just keep pressin’ the button till the ice quits comin’ out brown.”
“I’ll make myself at home,” Carver told him and limped out into the sultry afternoon, astounded to realize it was cooler outside than in the office.
Number 10 was a small room with a dresser, a tiny corner desk, and a wall-mounted TV facing a sagging bed. The carpet was threadbare red. The drapes were sun-faded red. The bedspread matched the drapes. An old air conditioner was set in the wall beneath the single window that looked out on the unhealthy hole that was the pool, then across the road to the shadowed and menacing swamp.
Carver tossed his single scuffed-leather suitcase onto the bed, then went over and opened a door, flipped a wall switch that turned on a light, and examined the bathroom. The swimming pool should have prepared him. There was no bathtub, only a shower stall with a pebbled-glass door. The commode and sink were chipped, yellowed porcelain and so similar in design that they looked interchangeable. A fat palmetto bug, unable to bear the light, or maybe its surroundings, scurried along the base of the shower stall and disappeared in a crack in the wall behind the toilet.
I guess I’ve stayed in worse places, Carver thought, but in truth he couldn’t remember when.
As he was unpacking and hanging his clothes in the alcove that passed for a closet, he laid his spare moccasins up on the wooden shelf and felt them hit something, scraping it over the rough wood. He reached back on the shelf and felt something hard that at first he thought was a coin, but it was a brass Aztec calendar, about two inches in diameter and with a hole drilled in it off-center, as if to make it wearable on a chain.
Carver stood for a moment wondering what to do with the brass trinket, then tossed it back up on the shelf. People might have been doing that with it for years.
He sat down on the bed and picked up the old black rotary-dial phone. Then he thought better of talking on a line that would undoubtedly be shared by Crusty the innkeeper and replaced the receiver. He decided to drive into town and make his call.
Outside Muggy’s Lounge was a public phone, the kind you can park next to and use in your car, if you can park close enough and your arm is long enough. There was a dusty white van parked next to the phone, with no one in it. So Carver parked his ancient Olds convertible on the edge of the graveled lot, climbed out, and limped through the heat to the phone. If the humidity climbed another few degrees, he might be able to swim.
He used his credit card to call Ollie Frist in Del Moray. Frist was a disabled railroad worker who’d retired to Florida ten years ago with his wife and teenage son. The wife had died. The son, Terry, had grown up and become a cop in the Del Moray police department. Terry had come to Mangrove City six months ago, telling anyone who’d asked that he was going on a fishing trip. Ollie Frist had gotten the impression his son was working on something on his own and wanted to learn more before he brought the matter to the attention of his superiors. Two days later Ollie Frist was notified that Terry had been found dead in the swamp outside Mangrove City. At first they’d thought the death was due to natural causes and an alligator had mauled and consumed part of the body afterward. Then the autopsy revealed that the alligator had been the natural cause.
The Del Moray authorities had gotten in touch with the Mangrove City authorities. Accidental death, they decided. The grieving father, Ollie Frist, didn’t buy it. What he had bought were Carver’s services.
“Mr. Frist?” Carver asked when the phone on the other end of the line was picked up.
“It is. That you, Carver?” Frist was hard of hearing and roared rather than spoke.
“Me,” Carver said. He knew he could keep his voice at a normal volume; Frist had shown him the special amplifier on the phone in his tiny Del Moray cottage. “I’m checked into the motel where Terry stayed.”
“It’s a dump, right? Terry said when he phoned to let me know where he was staying that the place wasn’t four-star.”
“Astronomically speaking, it’s more of a black hole. Did Terry actually tell you he was coming to this place to fish?”
“That’s what he said. I didn’t believe it then. Should I believe it now?”
“No. There’s some fishing here, I’m sure. But there’s probably more poaching. It’s the kind of backwater place where most of the population gets by doing this or that, this side of the law or the other.”
“You think that’s what Terry was onto, some kinda alligator poaching operation?”
“I doubt it. He wouldn’t see it as that big a deal, or that unusual. He probably would have just phoned the Mangrove City law if that were the case.” A bulky, bearded man wearing jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt had walked around the dusty white van and was standing and staring at Carver. Maybe waiting to use the phone. “I’ll hang around town for a while,” Carver said, “see if I can pick up on anything revealing. There’s something creepy and very wrong about this place. As of now it’s just a sensation I have on the back of my neck, but I’ve had it before and it’s seldom been wrong.” The big man next to the van crossed his beefy arms and glared at Carver.
“Keep me posted,” Frist shouted into the phone. “Let me know if you need anything at this end.”
Carver said he’d do both those things, then hung up the phone.
He set the tip of his cane in the loose gravel and walked past the big man, who didn’t move. His muscular arms were covered with the kind of crude, faded blue tattoos a lot of ex-cons sport from their time in prison, and on his right cheek was tattooed a large black spider that appeared to be crawling toward the corner of his eye. He puffed up his chest as Carver limped past him. He probably thought he was tough. Carver knew the type. He probably was tough.
The striking thing about Mangrove City’s main street, which was called Cypress Avenue as it ran between the rows of struggling business establishments, was how near the swamp was. Walls of lush green seemed to loom close behind the buildings on each side of the road. Towering cypress and mangrove trees leaned toward each other over the road as if they yearned someday to embrace high above the cracked pavement. The relentless and ratchety hum of insects was background music, and the fetid, rotting, life-and-death stench of the swamp was thick in the air and lay on the tongue like a primal taste.
The humid air felt like warm velvet on his exposed skin as Carver crossed the parking lot and entered Muggy’s Lounge.
Ah! In Muggy’s, it was cool.
There were early customers scattered among the booths and tables, and a few slumped at the long bar. Carver sat on a stool near the end of the bar and asked the bartender for a Budweiser.
The bartender brought him a can and let Carver open it. He didn’t offer a glass. He was a tall, skinny man with a pockmarked face, intent dark eyes set too close together, and a handlebar moustache that was red despite the fact that his hair was brown.
“So whaddya think of our little town?” he asked.
It’s conducive to insanity, Carver thought, but he said, “How do you know I’m not from around here?”
The bartender laughed. “There ain’t that many folks from around here, and we tend to know each other even if we ain’t sleeping together.” Someone at the other end of the bar motioned to him and he moved away, wiping his hands on a gray towel tucked in the belt of his cut-off jeans.