“I could sense that about you from the beginning,” the man said, edging toward Carver. “You possess admirable but dangerous determination. It borders on obsessiveness, I’m sure. Even when you were at a terrible disadvantage in Gretch’s apartment and agreeing to everything I suggested, I discerned a certain lack of sincerity in you. Would you be more sincere and truthful if I asked why you were talking to the woman on the beach?”
“No.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s Mr. Gretch’s life that you must stay out of, as I tried so hard to impress upon you without breaking any part of you or separating flesh from bone. So painful.” His tiny but muscular body took on a sudden tenseness and deadliness, and his hands unfolded and moved out in front of him. His knees flexed slightly so that he was in a slight crouch, and he began moving in on Carver. “Now the lesson must be more forcefully taught.”
Carver quickly snatched the Colt from beneath his loose-fitting shirt and snapped the safety off, jacking a round into the chamber, then another, so the first round was ejected in the sunlight and the Oriental man would know the gun was loaded. “It’s ready to fire,” he said.
His tiny assailant stopped and stood very still. “But are you ready? I don’t think so, and I’m an excellent judge of such qualities. It takes a certain uncommon willingness to shoot someone, Mr. Carver. I doubt if you possess that rare callousness of soul.”
Holding the gun steady, Carver said, “I possess it.”
The man began walking smoothly and slowly in a circle around Carver. “People who can kill recognize the trait in others. I don’t see it in you at all. No, you’re not a killer, Mr. Carver. Few men are. They think they are, but when it comes time to muster the nerve to actually squeeze the trigger, they find they are too decent, too human. We don’t kill our own so easily. We must first learn how to overcome certain inhibitions.” He was walking faster. The circle, with Carver in its center, was becoming smaller. Carver set the tip of his cane and moved around it as an axis, always facing the tiny, dangerous man with the unfailing grin. Only about ten feet separated them now.
Carver said, “I suggest you don’t come any nearer.”
“I don’t believe you’ve overcome your very human and decent inhibitions, Mr. Carver.”
Carver shot him in the leg.
It wasn’t easy. He remembered his pain and disbelief when he’d been shot in the knee, and he moved his aim higher on the thigh. The gun wasn’t as steady as it should have been.
The little man went down, his grin replaced by an expression of shock.
Seated on the hard ground, he ignored Carver and examined his bleeding thigh with what seemed a mild curiosity. Then with both hands and surprising ease, he ripped off part of the tail of his white shirt, knotted it, and wrapped it around the leg as a tourniquet to stem the bleeding. The brown pants were dark with blood. The wetness spread to below the knee as he struggled to his feet. There was a pattern of blood on the ground near his feet, more blood marring one of his supple brown shoes.
Carver couldn’t believe it. The guy was really something. He was grinning again, bright as ever, and hobbling toward him. Toward the gun. A splinter of doubt pricked Carver. The little bastard might be right about him; he wasn’t sure if he could squeeze the trigger again.
“I misjudged you,” the tiny Oriental man said.
“You’re doing it again,” Carver told him, wondering if it was true.
The man stopped and stood unsteadily, his wounded leg trembling but still supporting weight. Carver leveled the gun at his heart. It was steady now.
Still smiling, the little man nodded as if in admiration. He shuffled backward, then turned and walked stiffly and proudly along the driveway and out of sight behind the shrubbery near the highway.
Carver had to be impressed. He was sure the bullet had missed bone and the injury was superficial, but a gunshot wound was a gunshot wound, and most men would be on the ground and screaming. This guy was walking around as if he’d suffered a charley horse.
The sound of a car starting reached Carver, and he caught a flash of gleaming white metal as his assailant pulled out onto the highway and drove away.
The gun dangling in his free hand, Carver set his cane and made his way to the side of the cottage where he could see the beach.
Maggie Rourke lay on her stomach now on the lounge chair, her bikini strap unfastened so the tan on her back would be unbroken. She might have been sleeping. Apparently the breaking surf had concealed the sound of the shot.
Carver stood perspiring and watching her for a few minutes, then got into his car.
13
Carver stopped at Sir Citrus, a roadside restaurant shaped like a huge orange, to phone Dave Belquest at the Sheriff’s Department. The phone booths, near the back of the restaurant, were also shaped like oranges, only they had doors and orange-colored sound insulation inside. Carver left the door open so he wouldn’t be stricken with claustrophobia and fed the orange phone change.
“I suspected you might call,” Belquest said when Carver had identified himself. “I’ve been talking to people about you.”
Carver didn’t want to know what people had said. “Have you learned anything about the driver of the truck that killed Donna Winship?”
“Sure have. His name’s Elvis Tarkenton and he lives in Alton, Illinois. No police record. Thirty-eight years old, married with four kids. He’s been driving for the same freight line almost ten years and he’s never had an accident.”
“There’s nothing at all to connect him with Donna Winship?”
“Not a thing other than that he ran over her. The man’s a churchgoing Midwesterner who was too shook up to drive after what happened. The freight line sent another driver to transfer cargo and finish his run, then his wife drove their car down from Illinois to take him home.”
Carver didn’t say anything for a while, watching a family being seated by a waitress in an orange uniform. Three blond boys and a small blond girl, all under ten, were arguing over who was going to sit by the orange-shaped window with the Disney character decals on it. The orange-clad waitress stood by looking bored; she’d heard the argument before.
“Carver?”
“Yeah?”
“Donna Winship wasn’t murdered. That trucker isn’t lying. And the parking valet didn’t see anyone else around.”
When Carver rested his bare elbow on the metal shelf beneath the phone it came away sticky. Someone must have spilled orange juice while using the phone. “What do you know about the valet?”
“That he’s a nineteen-year-old kid working a summer job between college semesters. He’s as likely to be a plant witness as he is to know where Hoffa’s buried.”
“I’m not interested in Hoffa.”
“No? I’m surprised that one hasn’t grabbed your attention and you haven’t solved it. You know what the people I talked with said about you?”
The little blond girl got her way and sat by the window, smiling smugly.
“Carver? They said you were obsess-”
Carver hung up.
He crossed the orange tile floor and went out the door, thinking that it was possible in central Florida to get sick of citrus. They were obsessed with it here.
The little blond girl smiled at him through the window as he lowered himself into the Olds to drive toward the Beeline Expressway and Orlando.
Desoto looked as harried as Carver had ever seen him. He’d actually loosened his tie knot.
Carver sat down in the chair facing Desoto’s desk, and Desoto closed the office door, then walked around behind the desk and sat in the swivel chair. He slid the knot of his beige and yellow tie snug to his neck and explained that a woman had been found shot to death in a rented van behind a restaurant over on Orange Avenue. The van was full of suitcases that contained clothes for a man and woman and at least two small children.