John Lutz - Torch

Ho knew his car, so Carver had to be especially careful. He stayed far back, sometimes losing sight of the black Porsche in the bright traffic and sun glare, but he was able to stay with it.

Ho drove to an apartment building on Seventh Street, a four-story blue and white structure with a wooden railing around the perimeter of its flat roof. Carver parked beneath a bent and shaggy palm tree a block down and watched, listening to the drooping fronds rattle in the breeze.

Ho entered the building carrying the briefcase, then returned to his car about five minutes later, still with the case.

He drove over to Egret Avenue and made a similar visit to a small, vine-covered house. Then it was all the way to the other side of town for another brief stop at an apartment building. He headed east then, toward the ocean.

Carver followed, but he was getting worried. Ho was driving at the speed limit, not behaving in any way unusual, but he wasn’t the sort anyone could follow indefinitely without being seen. Carver hoped the little assassin’s dark glasses obstructed his vision enough to take the edge off his awareness.

It wasn’t until Ho had parked and climbed up out of the Porsche again that Carver realized where they were. At the motel where he’d last seen Mandy Jamison after her date with Reverend Devine. The place she seemed to call home.

He took a chance and let the Olds’s idling engine ease it down the street so he could see where Ho was going.

The little man limped directly to Mandy’s cabin. He rapped on the door with the crook of his cane, as Carver might have done. Mandy opened the door. Carver caught a glimpse of her, wearing jeans and an oversized blouse and looking ghostly pale without makeup, as she moved back to let Beni Ho enter.

Ten minutes later, Ho hobbled outside and back to his car. He drove over to Ocean Drive, then south. Turned right on Wellington. There wasn’t much traffic now, so Carver had to stay even farther behind the Porsche. At one point he even cut over to run parallel to Ho in the next block for a while, sneaking looks at the black Porsche at intersections, guided at times by only the throaty roar of its powerful engine.

The neighborhood began to decline. Run-down office buildings, some of them boarded up, lined the streets. Here and there stood a desolate house or apartment building with despondent-looking old men or women on the porches or stoops. More of the businesses on the street seemed to be permanently closed than open.

When Carver cut back to the next block to fall in behind the black Porsche again, he was surprised to find that the neighborhood looked familiar. He was on Gull Avenue.

Then the Porsche’s brakelights flared. Carver slowed the Olds and pulled to the curb.

Ho parked across the street from Shellie’s Lounge and limped inside.

Carver drove past, then parked around the corner. He walked back to Gull and found a spot near a bus stop where he could stand back in the doorway of a boarded-up shoe store and not attract too much attention. Passersby would take him for a man waiting for a bus, or for a wino or junkie seeking shade.

He settled back, sweated, and waited.

Ho was inside Shellie’s for almost half an hour. When he returned to the Porsche and drove away, he didn’t have his briefcase.

Carver stood watching the Porsche travel north on Gull Avenue, gliding fast and shiny like some huge beetlelike insect working up nerve to test its wings.

He watched it until, as it flashed past a line of parked cars, he noticed a red plastic rose taped to an antenna.

Maggie Rourke’s car was parked at the curb.

Carver paused just inside the door. It was dim and cool as a cave inside Shellie’s, and the low-volume sound system was playing something forlorn and slow by Eric Clapton. There were about a dozen customers scattered around, four or five of them at the bar. The TV above the bar was tuned soundlessly to a cable channel showing jai alai from Miami, but nobody was paying attention except for the bartender, not the stocky woman today but a fat man with sandy hair and a white shirt.

Maggie was seated on a stool at the end of the bar, a drink in front of her and the briefcase lying at her feet like a weary pet she’d been walking. Her clothes were casual-baggy red tee shirt and skin-tight black shorts that came down almost to her knees. She was wearing black sandals, letting the left one dangle so loosely from her toes that it seemed an instant away from dropping to the floor and subtly changing everything in her world.

When Carver approached, she looked over at him with a flash of surprise and then careful disinterest.

“Still sick?” he asked, sliding onto the stool next to her, not glancing down at the briefcase.

“Why should you care?”

“Is this the woman-scorned act?”

“Don’t overestimate yourself.”

She was working hard to get him to leave. He didn’t blame her. The bartender sauntered over to them, never taking his eyes off the TV. Carver asked for a Budweiser. It was set before him, half of it poured into a glass, all without a word from the bartender. Carver wondered if he had a bet down on the jai alai match.

“Listen,” Maggie said, turning toward him, “excuse my bad manners. I’m a little drunk, early as it is.” Since he wasn’t leaving, she’d apparently changed her tactics.

“Going into work when you leave here?”

“Huh?” She smiled. “Not a chance. Why would you ask that?”

“Your briefcase. I thought maybe you stopped here on your way to work.”

“Actually I was in early this morning and picked up some papers to take home and study.”

“What kind of papers?”

“Information on an initial public offering. Savings and loan going public. You interested?”

He smiled. “Nothing to invest.”

“Damn, damn, damn!” the bartender said, reacting to something on television. Clapton began crooning achingly about love lost forever.

Maggie took a sip of her drink, then rested her hand on the back of Carver’s. Her fingers were cool from being curled around her glass. “Last time we were here you offered to drive me home.”

“I thought you were drunk then. You’re not drunk now.”

“Nice of you to think not. You’re a gentleman, Ferd.”

“That’s Fred. I’ll be glad to carry your briefcase out to your car for you, gentleman that I am.”

Her eyes picked up the light from the TV and glowed with alarm and lucidity. “No, thanks. I’m not leaving yet. Not for a while.”

“Me either, I guess.”

She was quiet for a moment, staring into her drink. Then she said, “You still think Mark’s death was murder?”

“Yes.”

“Any proof?”

“Not yet.”

“If it was murder, Fred, I’d like to see you catch the bastard who did it.”

“You’re not convinced anymore it was suicide?”

“I’ve found it hard to stay convinced of anything since Mark died. The world keeps shifting on me, meaning one thing then another. I turn around and everything’s changed.” Her sandal dropped to the floor, and she absently lowered her foot and snagged it with her toes without looking. “It scares the shit out of me.”

She didn’t sound scared, even though she should have been. Carver remembered the mutilated doll in her bed. He thought maybe she really was feeling the effects of the liquor.

“Everybody’s scared from time to time,” he said.

“Even big bad Fred?”

He said, “You scare me, Maggie.”

“I scare a lot of men. Then they try to prove to themselves they’re not scared. It’s a pattern.”

“Life’s full of patterns, only sometimes they’re hard to see. Like those optical illusions that are one thing then another, depending on how you look at them.”