John Lutz - Torch

“Are you doing Enrico Thomas a favor?”

“Doing Megan Winship a favor. There’s no reason she or anybody else has to know about Thomas and her mother.”

Beth took another sip of beer then gave him back the can. “Some world, huh? A person steps outside the lines, maybe only once, and there can be a multitude of victims.”

“That’s why I’m returning the check to Mark Winship.”

“Maybe I can get this company I’m writing about to send him a thousand dollars worth of crappy merchandise along with a bill addressed to Donna.”

Carver laughed. He finished the small amount of beer left in the can, then got his cane from where it was propped against the cushions and stood up. On the way to the bathroom he tossed the empty can into the kitchen wastebasket. It made a satisfying clatter in the bottom of the metal basket, as if signaling the end of a miserable day.

As he was rinsing out his mouth after brushing his teeth, he noticed the reflected Carver in the mirror looked exhausted, older than his forty-odd years. Certainly older than he’d looked this morning, and than he hoped he’d look tomorrow. The scar at the right corner of his mouth was dragging on his lips, giving him an especially sardonic expression. He was bald except for a fringe of thick gray curly hair that grew well down the back of his neck. His catlike blue eyes, tilted up at the corners in his tan face, were bloodshot and eerie-looking from fatigue; no wonder Thomas had been afraid of him despite the knife. When he twisted the faucet handle to stop the flow of water, muscles danced in his corded arms and across his bare, tan chest. His upper body was hard and powerful from his therapeutic morning swims in the sea and from dragging himself around with the cane. One of the few advantages of having a locked and ruined knee.

When he returned to the cottage’s main room, he saw that Beth had gone to bed. He turned off the light and joined her in the screened-off sleeping area.

She was awake, waiting for him in the humid darkness. Nude, as she always slept. He felt the warm length of her lean body, then the wetness of tears as she moved her head onto his pillow and her cheek brushed his. One of her firm breasts, surprisingly large for such an otherwise slender woman, pressed against his ribs. The sound of the surf playing itself out on the beach drifted in through the open window like urgent, incomprehensible whispering, as if the sea knew something profound it would share if only its ancient language could be understood. Had human beings ever understood it? Beth flung a long leg across Carver and sighed.

He remembered what she’d once told him in her blunt and incisive manner: Sometimes women needed to be fucked, sometimes they needed to be held, sometimes they needed both. Though it sounded a bit like something from The Playboy Philosophy , he figured she was probably right.

Without having to be told, he knew this was a night for holding, then for sleep and whatever absolution it might bring.

Carver swam out to sea to the point where he could watch other early morning risers walking the curved shoreline, some of them with their heads lowered, combing the beach for shells. The sun was still low and the ocean was cool. He stroked parallel to the shore for a while, feeling that the strength of his arms, his endurance, could power him forever, even though he knew better. In the water, kicking from the hips, his powerful upper body working in rhythm with his legs, he was as physically capable as any man and more capable than most. He loved his morning swims, so much so that at times he wondered if evolution might be working on him in reverse, luring him back to the sea.

He turned over and floated on his back for a while, gazing up at a cloudless sky going from gray to blue. The sun felt warm and heavy on his upper chest and face. The only sounds were the massive slide of the ocean and the occasional cry of a gull, like that of a woeful, desperate woman. He rode gentle swells that would become higher then flatten out before crashing onto the beach. As he rose on one of the swells to its peak, he glanced in at his cottage, a small, flat-roofed structure nestled where the beach curved to form a thin crescent of sand. The Olds sat by itself near a grouping of date palms beside the cottage; Beth had risen earlier and left to pursue her story for Burrow. He raised a wrist and glanced at his waterproof watch. Almost eight o’clock. Desoto would be at his desk in police headquarters on Hughey in Orlando.

Carver rolled over on his stomach and began swimming at an angle toward the beach, using the momentum of the waves to hasten his crawl stroke. Within a few minutes he was near enough to feel the backwash of the surf, and to see his cane jutting like a beacon from the sand near his white towel.

Next came the part he didn’t like. He waited for a particularly large and powerful wave, then stroked hard and rode it in as far as possible onto the beach, using the great momentum of the ocean to help him ashore. He lay still then, holding his ground as wet sand and shells around and beneath him moved again toward the sea in the backwash of the surf.

No matter how well this method worked, he still had to crawl several yards to the cane and his towel on dry sand. This morning was no exception, and he was glad as he often was that the stretch of beach in front of his cottage was almost completely private because of the curve of the shoreline.

In a sitting position, he dried off with the towel as best he could, then used the cane for support as he stood up. He draped the towel around the back of his neck, then set out for the cottage, careful where he placed the cane in the soft sand.

After showering and dressing, he poured a cup of coffee from the pot Beth had left on the burner of the Braun brewer, leaned on the breakfast counter near the phone, and called Desoto.

He got through to the lieutenant right away and filled him in on what had happened, and why he wanted the Corvette’s license plate number run through the Motor Vehicles Department.

For a few minutes Desoto said nothing, and all Carver heard on the line was a soft Latin melody he was sure came from the portable Sony that sat on the windowsill behind Desoto’s desk. Guitars, he thought. Desoto loved slow guitar music.

Then Desoto said, “A terrible way for a woman to go, amigo , stepping in front of a speeding truck.” Desoto truly loved women, the entire sex, and it pained him to see or hear about a woman in the kind of agony that had prodded Donna Winship to her death. “Are you thinking it might not have been suicide?”

“No, I think she killed herself,” Carver said.

“And you also think that by saying something else in the restaurant, treating her differently in perhaps some small matter, you might have prevented her death.”

“Yes, but I know that’s a stupid way to think.”

“It is. The world is always much simpler in retrospect. But if you’re satisfied the woman’s death was suicide, what’s your interest now?”

“I feel I owe her something.”

“Because you do feel remotely responsible for her death?”

“Maybe. And because she was Beth’s friend. And because when I went to Riley’s Clam Shop to get a look at Enrico Thomas just to satisfy my curiosity and to try to get some hint as to why Donna wanted herself followed, Thomas turned out to be worth learning more about.”

“And what will you do with the information?”

“Nothing, probably. He’s a dangerous sleazeball, but that isn’t illegal. I’m driving over to return Donna’s retainer to her husband this morning, then I should be out of whatever it is I’m in.”

“So this is merely more of your curiosity satisfying, hey?”