Carver said, “I hope not.”
“I have a gun just as you do, Mr. Carver. Is it my turn to shoot you in the leg?”
Carver didn’t answer. He was close enough to strike Ho’s arm with the cane if the little man went for the gun inside his jacket.
“I come from a very hard place, Mr. Carver. Fear lived in me like an animal that devoured me from the inside. First my youth, then my trust, then my love and compassion, and finally my ability to feel even fear. But I have other feelings. I can and will do anything necessary to achieve my desires.”
“You sound hardly human,” Carver said.
“You should know.”
Carver didn’t ask what he meant.
“I will choose when and where, Mr. Carver, and I will make you regret you shot me. It’s a point of honor.”
“You’ve been seeing the wrong kind of movies.”
“No. You understand me, I know. Because I understand you. Though unfortunately, that understanding came too late to prevent my being shot. As I said, we are mirror images. We both know the code and live by it.”
“Then you know I’ll shoot you again,” Carver said. “And not in the leg.”
“Yes, I’m sure now that you will if you can.”
Sincliff appeared in the office entrance and waved for Ho to come back inside.
“We have our understanding,” Ho said, shifting his weight over his cane and beginning to back away. “I don’t like being hindered, having to wait to heal.”
Carver said, “Nothing in life is easy, least of all me.”
Ho nodded ever so slightly, then turned completely away from Carver and hobbled back inside with his cane.
Carver stood in the sun and watched him, for more than one reason not liking what he saw.
25
Beth had decided not to drive into Orlando that evening and instead worked late in the cottage, bent over her Toshiba laptop computer with an elegant intensity. Carver left her alone and sat out on the porch, smoking Swisher Sweet cigars and looking out at the sea, trying to put everything together in his mind and failing.
She was still working at eleven o’clock when he went inside and said goodnight. He was unable to fall completely asleep. It was almost one when he felt her crawl into bed beside him. The springs groaned and the mattress shifted in her direction as she settled in. Still only half-asleep, he heard a steady, persistent pattering sound and realized it was raining. A semi over on the highway gave two long, lonely blasts of its airhorn as it ran through bad weather. The room was illuminated as if by a flashbulb, and a moment later thunder roared and rumbled. Glassware in the kitchen vibrated shrilly on shelves. Within seconds, more lightning washed the cottage with light.
“You asleep?” Beth whispered.
“No,” Carver said, “I was just lying here hoping for high winds.”
“I finished my Burrow article. It’s gonna make some people in the mail-order business mighty uncomfortable.”
“Good.”
Lightning glare danced over the walls and ceiling. “You get to talk with Sincliff?”
Carver waited until a sharp peal of thunder faded into a silence occupied only by the rain. Then he told Beth about his visit to Nightlinks.
She lay quietly for a while, then said, “Beni Ho’s more dangerous now than before he lost some use of a leg.”
“He’s that sort of guy,” Carver agreed.
“You need to be more careful, Fred. Since he’s temporarily crippled, Ho’s liable to use something long-distance, a gun or throwing weapon.”
“I don’t think so. He likes to see the eyes of the people he kills.” Another roll of thunder, this time without lightning. The storm was moving away. “I wonder if the women he escorts for Nightlinks suspect what he’s capable of doing.”
“On a certain level, probably. But they still might request him next time. You know how it is, Fred. Some women like dangerous men.”
He moved his hand over and felt the smooth warm surface of her bare thigh. “Is that why you and I are here together?”
She rolled onto her side and kissed him on the lips, then drew her head back and smiled seductively at him in the faint illumination of a distant lightning strike. “Maybe. On the other hand, some men like dangerous women.”
Carver awoke alone to bright sunlight.
Beth had left quietly before dawn to resume her watch on Gretch’s apartment before Gretch got out of bed.
Carver remembered last night and passed his hand lightly over the cool sheet where she’d lain beside him. He looked out the window, and another hot and glaring Florida day looked back at him. The only indication it had rained heavily last night was that the air felt more humid than usual. It was only a little past nine, and already the cottage was uncomfortably warm. He wished Beth had switched on the air conditioner before leaving.
He lay for a while gazing out the window at blue sky and darker ocean rippling with a diamond glint of sunlight, listening to the wavering snarl of a speedboat playing out of his line of sight. Then he located his cane where it had fallen on the floor during sex last night, knocked by one of Beth’s long legs from where it had leaned against the wall.
He struggled out of bed and hobbled into the bathroom, relieved himself, and splashed cold tap water over his face. Then he got down his swimming trunks from where they were draped over the shower rod, worked them on, and left the cottage for his morning therapeutic swim.
The speedboat had gone somewhere else and the sea was quiet except for the sighing, slapping sound of the swells rolling in from the eastern light and hunkering down in white foam beyond Carver as they encountered the shallows and ran for the beach. He rode the swells easily, rising and falling in the timeless rhythm that had worn away continents. He floated and thought again of last night and realized anew how much Beth meant to him. And how much a woman like Maggie Rourke must have meant to Mark Winship, even in the agony of guilt he’d apparently suffered knowing what he’d done to his wife. Mark and Maggie must have experienced nights like last night, yet Mark had taken his own life rather than face the dilemma of Donna’s death. Of course he’d felt grief and remorse, and perhaps he’d turned on himself, but still there was Maggie, waiting for him. Maggie, possible now for the rest of his life without complication. Mark’s Maggie, like Carver’s Beth. It wasn’t getting any easier for Carver to believe Mark Winship had committed suicide.
The sigh of the swells had become a low roar, and he saw that he’d drifted too far from shore. He rolled onto his stomach and swam with the hot sun on his back.
He’d returned from his swim and showered and shaved, and was eating a late breakfast of eggs, sausage, toast, and coffee, when the phone rang.
The abruptness of the first ring made him start and almost knock his cup over. He hurriedly chewed the bite of toast he’d just taken and reached for the phone where it sat on the breakfast counter. Swallowed and said hello.
“Me, Fred.”
He knew by the flat tone of Beth’s voice that something had happened.
26
It was eleven-thirty when Carver parked the Olds behind Beth’s LeBaron and crossed Belt Street toward Gretch’s apartment.
Hodgkins was standing outside in the hot sun, smoking a cigarette and waiting for him, watching him cross the street. The old man drew hard on the cigarette, as if it might be his last and life-prolonging inhalation, then flicked the butt off to the side in a wide arc that left a trail like a tracer bullet.
He must have been holding his breath. When Carver got near him, he exhaled loudly and the morning breeze shredded the smoke that had been in his lungs.
“We did like you said,” he told Carver, “which was exactly nothin’ and don’t let nobody else do otherwise.”
Carver sorted that out and concluded that Hodgkins and Beth had followed his instructions.