Daninger was at least somewhat relieved. Carver accepted the key to his new room, went inside, and locked the door carefully.
He lay awake for a long time, listening to the emergency vehicles racing their engines and departing one by one. The fire-truck drivers blasted air horns and clanged bells, as if they were merging with traffic on a crowded four-lane highway.
Finally Carver dozed off.
He slept two hours out of the next eight, popping awake now and then, imagining he smelled smoke.
CHAPTER 13
In the morning, Curt showed up as promised. The friendly, pimply teen-ager grinned at Carver and sauntered past him to the closet. Slung over his shoulder were all of Carver’s cleaned clothes draped on hangers.
“Got most of the smoke smell outa these,” he said. He ducked back outside and returned with a suitcase about the same size as the one Carver had lost to smoke and water the night before. Best of all, he was carrying a new pair of black dress shoes similar to the ones Carver had lost in the fire. The design was much the same, only these were wingtips, thin-soled and flexible; not the thick, clompy kind Willis Davis wore. The shoes were 10s, Carver’s size.
“You’re pretty lucky,” Curt said, standing by the open door.
“Yeah, I made out okay; this is a new pair of shoes.”
“I mean about still being alive,” Curt said. He wasn’t one for subtlety.
Carver tested the zipper on the suitcase, running it back and forth. Smooth.
“This town is rumored to be a haven for drug runners,” he said, glancing at Curt. “Any of that true?”
“Naw. There’s always talk about the Malone brothers. Sean and Gary. But believe me, they blow a little grass now and then and that’s it. Some drugs at the high school, too, even with a few of the teachers. Some hard stuff, but not much. Like it is everywhere. Big deal, huh? Folks just need somebody to talk about.”
“That’s the truth,” Carver agreed, thinking they wouldn’t be likely to talk to Curt if they didn’t want their words spread around like flu at an orgy.
He attempted to give Curt a tip, but Curt would have none of that. Not from a poor cripple the motel had almost smoked like a ham.
“Daninger said to tell you there’ll be no charge for the room as long as you wanna stay,” he said.
“Thank him for me,” Carver said. “Tell him I’ll send home for the family and the rest of my things.”
Curt’s acne-marred face split into a mottled grin. Nothing bled; a testimonial for Clearasil. “Really?”
“No,” Carver said. “I’ll be here a few more days at most.”
Still grinning, Curt hitched up his faded Levi’s and ambled slowly out to return to the office. Walking at normal speed seemed alien to the boy’s nature.
His clothes might be fresh, but Carver still smelled faintly like charred hickory. He went into the bathroom and took a long shower in lukewarm water, lathering up twice.
He stayed in the shower until he no longer smelled like a forest fire. Then he toweled dry, dressed in some of his freshly laundered clothes, and tried out his new shoes.
The shoes fit well. Someone had even pressed his clothes, and Daninger had managed to have Carver’s blue sport jacket dry-cleaned. No expense or effort had been spared in the attempt to sidestep litigation.
Carver felt okay after the night before, only a little tired. But he knew about fire; another ten minutes in that small room that was filling up with smoke and he would never have awakened, except perhaps for a few terrified, airless last seconds before eternity.
He smoothed the thick, damp gray hair above his ears, palmed water from his bald crown, and was about to leave the room when the phone rang.
Carver thought it would be Daninger, checking on his well-being, wondering if the clothes were to his satisfaction. But it was Desoto. The Cahill report.
“I phoned you last night,” Desoto said. “You didn’t answer.”
“You saved my life last night,” Carver said.
“Hey, don’t blame me. I wasn’t near you.”
Carver explained what happened.
“This fire I saved you from,” Desoto said, “was it an accident?”
“Maybe. It could have been spontaneous combustion. What about Sam Cahill?”
“He was in trouble over in Fort Lauderdale nine years ago. Assault with a deadly weapon, suspended sentence. A domestic quarrel over a woman when her husband showed up unexpectedly. The treacherous paths of love. Cahill tried to bean the guy with a lamp. Relatively minor stuff. There’s nothing else on him in Florida.”
“Nothing? No drugs?”
“Not on the record.” Desoto paused. “You know what the Chinese say, amigo?” he asked, mixing cultures without a qualm. “When someone saves your life, you’re responsible for them, share the blame or credit in whatever they do from then on.”
“You’ve got it backward,” Carver said. “ You share the blame for whatever I do.”
“If that’s the way it is,” Desoto said, “I’m going to hang up and stay away from the phone, in case there’s another fire there.”
“Thanks for the call last night,” Carver said, “and for the rundown on Cahill.”
“Part of what makes my job a joy,” Desoto said. “It’s possible that you might be onto something too big for you to handle, amigo. Something nobody else has noticed.”
“I don’t know yet what I’ve got hold of,” Carver said honestly.
“You’re out there alone, Carver. The first to suspect something. Not healthy, my friend. The early worm gets devoured by the bird. Maybe you should get out of there, count your bullets, and look forward to another day, eh?”
“Not yet. The fire might really have been an accident.”
“You seen the local law yet?”
“No, I’ll get around to that this morning.”
“You worry me.”
“That Chinese thing.”
Desoto snorted. “I got to go, Carver. Crime calls. A busy day shaping up. Folks killing each other at a brisk pace.” Latin music came faintly over the phone; Desoto had turned on his radio, building rhythm and momentum to carry him through the day.
“Thanks again,” Carver said. “Really.”
Desoto hung up without answering. No sentimentalist he.
Carver left to talk to Chief Armont, as promised, locking the door carefully behind him, catching a whiff of charred wood from the direction of his old room.
The morning was hot. And the air was filled with clouds of some kind of tiny insect that had ventured out of the swamp to mate or die or act out some other mysterious rite of nature. The bugs were good at being pests. They flitted abruptly this way and that and had no respect for humans. Carver brushed the irritating insects away as he limped toward his car.
The man watching him from behind the trees at the end of the parking lot didn’t seem to mind the insects at all. Until he was sixteen, he’d endured worse inconveniences every day of his life, indoors and out. Inconveniences that to others had seemed an inexorable grinding that had finally worn them down, destroyed them.
That kind of background gave a man certain hard-won advantages, if he followed the right course and played his own game. A man like that could do things some people would faint just thinking about, because they’d always had a choice; it had never been necessary for them to learn what they could really do on sheer nerve, what they might even come to enjoy. He grinned, tasted and then spat out one of the unpredictable tiny bugs, and started walking through the moss-draped woods toward town.
CHAPTER 14
Solarville’s Police Headquarters had once been somebody’s home. The ordinary problems of life had been shared there, solved or not solved, and probably children had romped and brooded to maturity within its shelter. Now the inside of the low white house had been purged of hominess and rearranged into a booking area and offices. Carver figured Chief Armont’s office was in what had once been the master bedroom. There was what appeared to be a closet door on one wall, on another a window that looked out on a sloping stretch of ground ending at a tall chain-link fence bordering the backyard of the house in the next block.