“Trouble, hey?” he said. He looked both ways on the deserted road.
“Flat tire,” Carver said. “I think the spare has air in it.”
The man nodded, still smiling. Pancho Villa with charm. His dark eyes took in the cane and Carver’s stiff left knee. He reached beneath his shirt and drew out a long folding knife, the sort used to cut produce. Metal clicked on metal as, with a deft twist of his wrist, he flipped the knife open. The blade caught the sun.
He was no stranger to knives. This one nestled like a deadly pet in his right hand.
Holding the gleaming blade straight up and far out in front of him at eye level, as if it were a mystical object magically drawing him forward, leading him where it wanted him to go, he began to move in on Carver.
CHAPTER 15
Carver said nothing as the man came toward him. He waited for a demand for his wallet but got only silence. The man kept advancing, not smiling now, in a slight crouch and holding the knife expertly with the experienced knife fighter’s peculiar deadly daintiness. He was suddenly all grim business. He wanted to finish what he’d started; another car might come along at any time. What he’d started wasn’t robbery, but murder. He wanted to lose the long blade in Carver.
Behind the man, far away above the swamp, a large bird was slowly circling, looking for prey. For some reason it drew Carver’s eye, a figure in the scene in which he was trapped, but so distant, out of danger.
The man’s advance became slower, more cautious; he was almost within killing range. Life and death here. It made sense to be careful, even with a cripple.
Years ago on the force Carver had learned from a veteran cop how to use a nightstick not as a club but as a lethal jabbing instrument. A cane should be even more effective than a nightstick. Or so Carver tried to convince himself through his fear, waiting for the young Latino to pounce for the kill.
A cripple deserved some respect, but not much, said the expression on the man’s intent face. There wouldn’t be much sport to this, so he might as well go right for the heart. It was survival time. Carver decided it was nice to be underestimated.
The man bent low at the waist, holding the knife well out in front of him. His arms were skinny but muscle-corded; his body was wiry and he moved neatly and economically on the balls of his feet. He had a matador’s meticulous balance and calm instinct for death.
Carver backed a step and made a deliberately feeble attempt to knock the knife away with the cane. The man drew back his arm easily, swelled with confidence, and stepped in fast for the kill.
Surprise. This time the cane snapped up off the ground, flinging dust with it. Its tip found the soft space just beneath the startled man’s sternum. Carver ignored the knife and eternity and drove the point of the cane hard into the man’s chest; he heard the loud whoosh of air explode from shocked lungs, saw spittle arc in the sunlight.
The man staggered back a few steps, almost fell. Surprise and rage contorted his face, along with the sickly expression of someone struggling to regain his breath.
He came at Carver again, more hunched over now rather than bent in a knife fighter’s classic stance. Carver crossed him up and struck with the cane instead of jabbing, laying the hard walnut across the side of the man’s face and quickly withdrawing the cane before it could be grabbed. That made the man pause, and Carver whipped with the cane and knocked the knife from his hand, maybe breaking the Latino’s wrist.
But the man gave no sign of pain. His hissing breath broke for a moment, then regained its relentless rhythm, was perhaps louder.
The Latino was game. He picked up the knife with his left hand and came again. Carver jabbed at him, missed. The man twirled like a dancer and rushed him. Carver let himself fall to the left, dropping to the ground to avoid the slashing knife blade, and as the man flashed by him he hooked a bare ankle with the crook of his cane, held on tight against the sudden yank of checked body weight. The slippery walnut cane sprang alive and tried to fly from his perspiring fingers, then suddenly lost its life-force and became once more inanimate.
There was no scream. No sound other than the scuff of a sandal in the dirt. Abruptly, the man with the knife was gone.
At first Carver didn’t understand what had happened. Then he used his arms to scoot to the road shoulder and the edge of the embankment. He looked down.
The man lay sprawled on his back in black shallow water at the base of the embankment. Somewhere during his roll down the slope, he’d taken his own knife high in the stomach. Probably, as he’d continued to roll, the blade had slashed around inside him, caught the heart. His hand was curled around the knife as if he’d tried to remove it before he’d died. The red shirt and blue pants were twisted on him, making his limp body seem thin and childlike, harmless. As Carver watched, something long and green-a snake? lizard? the man’s soul?-slithered quickly away into the lush foliage, fleeting as an illusion.
Carver gripped the cane and stood up. He was trembling so violently that he had to lean against the sun-heated metal of the Olds to keep from falling back down. The fetid, rotting scent of the swamp almost overcame him, sending waves of bitter nausea through him. He swallowed, hearing phlegm crack in his dry throat. The man had tried to kill him. For what? For his money? his wristwatch and ring? for pleasure?
Beneath the Florida tropical sun, Carver was sweating beads of ice. He’d never killed anyone, not as a cop or as a private detective. Hadn’t come close to it. That kind of thing done with light consequence was for books, television, and movies. Having killed the Latino was going to take some hard getting used to.
A steady, pulsing sound helped to calm him, as if his wildly hammering heart were adjusting its pace to it. He realized then what he heard. The white Escort’s engine was still idling; he could see the car’s whiplike antenna vibrating.
Now what?
Carver had heard about small-town southern police. They were tough, bureaucratic, and suspicious. The man he’d killed might have been a local, popular, never known to get in trouble. One of those with a dark side known only to himself and briefly to his victims. How could Carver explain this to Armont? Or should he try to explain?
Why not? he asked himself. He hadn’t done anything wrong, God damn it! The man had tried to kill him. He, Carver, had nothing to hide or fear! He reminded himself of some of the rape victims he’d seen, the wronged and ravaged, uncomprehendingly wondering at their guilt.
It was all emotion, had nothing to do with logic.
But he could change the tire, get in the Olds, drive away, and his part in the man’s death probably would remain unknown. The prospect was tempting, but Carver couldn’t bring himself to run from the awesome finality of having killed a man. That would make it worse for him somehow, even if he was never suspected.
Carver realized that his hands were shaking. He felt cold. He glanced to the side of the road where the man had gone over the embankment and his mind flashed on the lifeless face, the unseeing but infinitely wise flat eyes staring up at him.
Carver reminded himself that he’d been a cop in a city with problems. He was supposed to be used to that kind of thing. But how many cops, of the public or private variety, ever actually killed someone?
He again felt the desire to change the tire, climb into the Olds, and get out of there. But he resisted it. He began to feel better. The trembling had passed; his hands were steady now.
Ten minutes later, a pickup truck loaded with jagged sections of broken concrete came laboring around the bend. Carver flagged it down, stood in the dust and told the shirtless kid behind the steering wheel there had been an accident and that a man was dead, and asked him to drive into Solarville and send the police.