John Lutz - Torch

He and Beth were only going to keep a loose stakeout on Gretch’s apartment; it would be almost impossible, and probably unproductive, for one of them to be in position all the time. Old Hodgkins would doubtless know if Gretch returned, and he’d call Carver.

Carver turned on the radio and tuned it to a Marlins game, heard immediately that the score was nine to one in favor of the New York Mets, and sat only half listening. The play-by-play man gave the scores around the league and mentioned the St. Louis Cardinals. St. Louis, where Carver’s former wife, Laura, lived with their daughter, half a continent away from where Carver sat in the heat in an ancient convertible and watched a stucco apartment building darkening to join the shadows of the night,

At least he shouldn’t have to worry about Beni Ho. The little man would have to take things slow for a while, maybe a long time if the bullet remained in his leg and he was forced to seek medical treatment from a doctor who’d follow the law and report a gunshot wound to the police.

But Carver knew that people like Beni Ho had their own medical plans with doctors who’d been compromised. Beni Ho, bionic little bastard that he was, might be limping after a limping Carver in no time. And there was always the possibility that Desoto was wrong about Ho’s adherence to the martial arts’ manly code. Ho might be hiding in the foliage right now, drawing a bead on Carver through an infrared scope mounted on a rifle.

Carver sat back and watched the apartment building through half-closed eyes, listening to the third inning and trying not to think about Beni Ho.

He was about as successful as the Marlins.

A smiling Beni Ho crept toward Carver, who was teetering without his cane. When Carver turned to see if the cane was on the ground behind him, he saw that there was no ground. He was on the edge of an abyss that whistled and echoed with grief and loneliness. Ho stopped a few feet short of him, and with a wide, wide grin, extended a single, slender forefinger and nudged Carver into the abyss. As he plunged through blackness, wind or a scream whistling in his ears, he heard a voice say, “Stay away from that route if at all possible.”

He realized he was no longer hurtling through blackness but was lying on his back on perspiration-soaked sheets, listening to the clock radio blare the morning traffic report.

Beth was beside him, sleeping through the back-up on Magellan, the accident on the Camille drawbridge, the nude jogger running with a dog on the coast highway. The clock radio was on her side of the bed.

“Beth!” he called fuzzily, still staring at the ceiling.

There was only the ranting of the radio. A disc jockey had taken over from the guy in the traffic copter and was yammering almost faster than the ear could follow.

“Beth!”

“Whazzit, lover?”

“Turn that damned thing off!”

“ ’Zat?”

“The clock radio-hit the button!”

The deejay said, “Doin’ the rock an’ roll review to get you in the mood for the office zoo. We’ll play while you’re on your way for pay. We’re gonna spin till you clock in. Music back through the years just for your ears!”

Stretched out on her stomach, her cheek mushed on her extended right arm, Beth opened her eyes sleepily and smiled at Carver.

Carver said, “Clock radio. Please!”

“Idea, Fred, is the device is s’pose to wake you up, get you vertical.”

As Carver rolled onto his side and groped for his cane, he bumped it with his wrist and it clattered to the floor. Little Richard began to scream at him. He rolled onto his back again, bumping his bald pate on the wooden headboard. Ordinarily he liked Little Richard. But not at the moment. Not at the moment at all.

“Beth!”

She languidly reached out with a long arm, and silence dropped over the room like a blanket.

After a while she said, “I’ll make coffee.”

Carver said nothing. He found his cane, sat up with one leg on the floor, then swiveled around to slump on the edge of the mattress. He heard Beth, behind him, climb out of bed. The springs whined as she stood up. He sat staring at nothing, listening to her bare feet pad across the plank floor, hoping she’d get a splinter in a toe. She never had and didn’t this time. Probably the woman could walk barefoot on hot coals. Pipes bonged and banged in the wall, and tap water ran for the coffee.

Too late on the stakeout last night, Carver told himself. It had been almost midnight when he’d driven away from Gretch’s apartment. He’d observed little other than old Hodgkins standing as motionless as a statue for half an hour, holding a hose at his hip and watering the pathetic lawn. Like a fountain statue of a gunslinger. The great patience of the old often amazed Carver. It was something you noticed in Florida.

Drawing a deep breath, he stood up over his cane, steadied himself, and walked into the bathroom. He rinsed out his mouth, then splashed cold water on his face to wake up. Looked in the mirror. Looked quickly away. Then he went back out to his dresser, got out his red pair of swimming trunks, and sat down on the bed and eased into them.

“Coffee before or after?” Beth asked, when he was standing again and fastening the trunks’ drawstring.

“After,” he told her, and got a white towel from the bathroom and left the cabin.

The morning was cloudless but still cool. He hobbled toward the beach, walking with difficulty when he left the wooden steps and trod on sandy soil.

Near the surf line, he stuck his cane in the sand, dropped his towel beside it, and crawled backward into the surf. The water felt cold at first, waking him all the way. When a large swell roared in and burst onto the beach, he shoved himself seaward with both arms and let the wave’s backwash carry him out to deeper water where he was floating free, then swimming.

He swam straight out from shore, using long, reaching strokes and breathing deeply and evenly. Then he treaded water for a while, looking back in at the cottage where Beth was brewing coffee, or maybe sitting at the table by now sipping it from her mug that was lettered with reproductions of newspapers’ flubbed captions, such as Police Help Dog Bite Victim and Prison Warden Says Inmates May Have 3 Guns. Looking in at his life, really, and wondering why it had turned out as it had, what the mainspring was that powered its clockwork. But nobody ever really understood that one. Donna and Mark Winship hadn’t understood. He thought of beautiful Maggie Rourke, grieving by the sea for her dead illicit romance that had been doomed from the beginning. Love could be such a disease, sometimes fatal. Sorrow swelled in his throat for Maggie, who was still suffering because she was the one still alive. People only thought they knew the reasons why they acted, while they kept on loving and hating and moving through life toward death and not understanding that, either.

He floated on his back for several minutes, staring now in the opposite direction, out to sea, focusing his gaze on a small patch of white sail. For a moment he felt an almost overwhelming impulse to swim toward it even though it was too far away to reach. Then he turned back toward the shore and the cottage and Beth.

He entered the cottage with his towel slung across his shoulders, his feet leaving wet prints on the floor. The scent of freshly perked coffee made him hungry. Beth was standing at the stove, wearing white panties and bra and spraying a frying pan with Pam. So she intended to prepare breakfast as well as coffee. Maybe she’d planned it that way from the moment she’d heard the blaring clock radio. Maybe. She was a difficult one to read. A surprising nest-feathering, domestic streak sometimes surfaced in her, like a sheen of something elemental from deep water. Though not often.