Armont laughed when Carver told him about his encounter with Verna Blaney. “She usually reacts with disfavor toward men who drive out there uninvited to sweet-talk her, but I’ll admit she’s been a little extreme this time.”
“I wasn’t there to sweet-talk her.”
“Sure, but she don’t usually give her surprise callers a chance to say what they want, just runs them off. Generally she only uses shouts and threats, though, not a shotgun. You want to press an assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charge?”
“No,” Carver said. “Has Verna ever been really serious about a man?”
“She’s had her beaus,” the chief said, “but not for long. She doesn’t have any illusions about what men want from her. That scar disfigured her inside as well as out. Her daddy’s fault; he should have had the damn thing stitched up right after it happened. But he didn’t, cantankerous old asshole, and now it would cost a fortune to have a plastic surgeon fix that scar, and even then there’d be no guarantee. At least that’s what old Ned Blaney used to say whenever anybody brought up the subject.”
“What kind of man was her father?”
“Nobody really knows,” Armont said, pecking out a rhythm with a pen point on his desk. “Kept to himself, ran his airboat rides for tourists who were driving by on the main highway and got steered to his place by the signs he had up and down the road. I think he was fond of Verna, and a good father in his way, but crude. Too crude to realize how deep a scar like that might run in a pretty young girl.”
Carver thanked the chief and turned to Edwina.
“You two looking for a place to eat lunch,” Armont said, “The Flame should be open now.”
“I drove by there this morning and it was closed,” Carver said.
“They only serve lunch and supper on Sundays,” Armont explained. “Folks like to sleep in late or go to church Sundays in Solarville, depending on what they been up to the night before.” If there was irony in his voice, Carver couldn’t catch it.
He and Edwina left Chief Armont and had salads and coffee at The Flame. There weren’t many customers, but people were wandering in at a steady pace. Soon the place would be crowded. Emma and the horsey waitress were on duty, but not Verna Blaney.
When Carver asked Emma about Verna, she said that Verna wouldn’t be in that day or any other, except possibly as a customer. She’d quit the day before yesterday, and rumor had it that she’d sold her house and ground and was moving away. She’d had enough of Solarville, she’d said. Couldn’t blame the woman, the waitress confided in a lowered voice. Emma cautioned Carver that what she’d just told him was only rumor.
Twenty minutes later, at the cash register, the tall waitress with the equine features told Carver and Edwina the same story and assured them that it was fact. The truth was slippery at The Flame, just like everywhere else.
“What next, O Sleuth?” Edwina asked, on the sunny sidewalk outside the restaurant.
Carver leaned on his cane with both hands and glanced up and down the street. There was little traffic, no pedestrians other than the two of them. “We go back to the motel and swim,” he said.
“I’ve already been swimming,” she told him.
“Then we’ll find something else to do. I can think of a few things. But we’re at a standstill right now because it’s Sunday and city hall won’t be open until tomorrow.”
Edwina looked curiously at him. “What’s city hall got to do with why we’re here?”
“We’ll go there tomorrow,” Carver said, “and use your real-estate expertise to find out whether the Blaney property’s been sold.”
“If it was sold recently, it might not be recorded yet.”
“That’s where your expertise comes in,” Carver said. “If it isn’t recorded, do you think you can talk to the right people in the right way, find out whether there’s been a transaction?”
“I think so. There can’t be that many title companies in town, and I’m in the business.”
That was the way Carver had it figured.
He drove them back to the Tumble Inn. But they didn’t swim. Instead they made love that afternoon in Edwina’s room, ate supper in the motel restaurant, and made love in the evening in Carver’s room. Each time they were together, lost in the exploration phase of their affair, it was better. Exhilarating. Bad memories were fading. They were both beginning to think highly of the Tumble Inn.
Carver was asleep when the jangling phone by the bed dragged him from deep, indecipherable dreams to the surface of wakefulness. He resisted, so the dreams couldn’t have been bad ones. As he pulled the ringing, vibrating instrument to him, he dropped it onto the floor. It bounced with a jingling protest.
He cursed, retrieved the receiver, and pressed it to his ear. He found the wrist near the end of his left arm and squinted at his watch: 10:35. A glance at the window told him it was dark outside. The 10:35 was P.M.
“Carver?” a voice buzzed in his ear.
“I think so.”
“This is Alex Burr. I’m here in Solarville. We’ve got some action tonight. Wear some old clothes and meet us on South Loop, where it curves near the swamp just outside of town.”
Carver wondered who the “us” were. The DEA? He supposed so. “When?” he asked.
Burr seemed surprised by the question. “Now. As soon as you can.” He hung up.
Carver listened to the static of the broken connection for a few seconds, then terminated his end of the conversation.
He decided not to wake Edwina. He slipped into an old pair of jeans that he’d brought in his new suitcase, put on his wrinkled shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows, and pulled on a fresh pair of socks and his moccasins. Then he got out of there, walking as lightly as he could with the cane.
“Now,” the man had said. Federal man. DEA. Best to listen. Now.
Carver carefully locked the motel-room door behind him, breathed in the warm swamp air with its fetid, primal scent, and woke up all the way.
The swamp loomed close and black around him, loud with the croaking cacophony of a thousand bullfrogs and the shrill, frantic buzzing of night insects. The moon was full and suspended low over the treetops, like an extraterrestrial mother ship overseeing all the wild madness below.
Working his tongue around the insides of his cheeks to remove the dry, sour taste from his mouth, Carver got in the Olds. He started the engine without gunning it, then pulled the car slowly and as quietly as possible from the parking lot. Then he drove fast toward South Loop.
He was eager now to find out what all the rush was about, and to learn what kind of action Alex Burr had planned for that night.
CHAPTER 30
As Carver slowed the Olds and steered it gently into the curve on South Loop, a uniformed cop stepped out of the brush and into the glare of the headlights. He held up a rigid arm and hand almost in a Nazi salute, as if he were halting three lanes of traffic.
Carver pressed his foot on the brake pedal hard enough to make the Olds’s long hood dip. The cop waved him over toward where he was standing, waiting for him like a Berlin Wall guard.
“You Carver?” he asked, when Carver had stopped the car and stuck his head out the window. The cop was young and already thick around the middle. Another ten years of sitting in patrol cars or at a desk and he’d be downright fat; already his face was the jowly one of a middle-aged man, but his eyes were young, consciously expressionless peering out from the curved-moon shadow of his cap’s visor. He was putting on the tough front, hardening to his trade.
Carver showed him some identification. Official paper. That did it. The pudgy cop smiled a one-of-us smile and said, “Follow that road, sir. They’re waiting just over that rise. And I’ve been instructed to tell you to turn off your headlights.”
Carver didn’t see any road, but he killed his lights and aimed the Olds’s long snoot at the blackness of the swamp. Then, by moonlight, he did see that there was a narrow, mostly overgrown road leading to the rise the cop had pointed out. It wasn’t a dry road. Long bent grass glistened wetly between the shadows cast by the trees. Carver could see recently made tire ruts in front of him, and now and then the car would lurch and he could hear the sucking sound of swamp water beneath the wheels, telling him he was driving where no car should go.