John Lutz - Spark

Carver tucked the folded paper into his shirt pocket and thanked Faravelli for his time. As he was limping toward the door, Faravelli said, “We sell houses to perfectly healthy couples in their fifties who might live well into their nineties. Think of that, Mr. Carver, whenever you consider a case like Maude Crane’s, where we reacquire the house after only a few years.”

Carver turned around and said, “I’m surprised you’re aware of individual cases.”

He couldn’t see Faravelli’s reaction, now that he’d returned to stand behind his desk. The old back-to-the-light trick again. Upwardly mobile jerkoff must have read all the success manuals. Make your visitor feel uncomfortable, inferior, easily manipulated. The manuals didn’t explain that it worked only on people who felt that way when they walked into the office. Other people it sometimes got mad. In some cases, suspicious.

Faravelli continued to stand very still, not speaking. Enough of his busy day had been consumed by this minor and unpleasant digression.

“Morning,” Carver said. “It’s been edifying.” He limped out the door.

In the Olds he unfolded the thick gray notepaper on which Faravelli had identified the members of Solartown’s partnership.

They weren’t names of people. In precise, slanted print, Faravelli had noted the names of an investment company, a retail clothing chain, a major bank, a lumber firm, and an insurance company. Most of them were names Carver recognized. Not at all the sort of partners that would devise what to them would be a penny-ante confidence game, not worth the effort, considering the ratio of profit to risk.

Back at the Warm Sands, Carver called Beth’s room. She answered after five rings, and he wondered if she’d still been asleep. He’d known her to sleep till noon.

He read Faravelli’s precise printing to her and asked her to find out what she could about Solartown and its investors.

“ ’Bout time you gave me something to do,” she told him. “Where you gonna be, Fred?”

He said, “Under rocks, mostly. Looking for Adam Beed.”

Carver parked the olds on Skyview Lane, three lots up from Lou Brethwaite’s rundown blue trailer. Skyview was aptly named, Carver decided, as the only view worth looking at in the trailer park just outside Orlando was the sky. Rows of single and double-wide trailers were connected by streets where grass and weeds had burst through the cracks into sunlight. Some of the trailers had decrepit wooden latticework around their bases so they resembled actual houses, but the wood had rotted away on Brethwaite’s trailer and the wheels showed like guilty secrets in the shadows beneath faded blue fiberglass and rust-stained steel.

Except for a skinny young woman in a green T-shirt and baggy gray shorts, no one seemed to live on Skyview Lane. She let the screen door slam behind her on the trailer across the street from Brethwaite’s, sauntered out to get her mail from a metal box that looked like a lunchbucket on top of a crooked post, then scratched her left buttock and ambled back inside. She’d only glanced at Carver, revealing she had a black eye. The homes might have wheels, but life on Skyview Lane could be an inescapable trap.

He climbed out of the Olds and limped toward Brethwaite’s trailer. There were no sidewalks, and he had to be careful negotiating the slanted concrete street. After crossing the patch of weeds that passed for a front yard, he climbed three dangerous wooden steps, stood in the hot shade beneath a rusty blue and white metal awning, and knocked on the trailer door. It shook crookedly on its hinges, and the cloudy plastic that served as a window rattled noisily in its frame. Carver was afraid the opaque phony glass was going to fall out, but somehow it held. Maybe the way people here held onto life.

“Who’s it?” called a voice from inside.

“Police, F.B.I., D.E.A., and Publishers Clearing House,” Carver said. He knocked again, harder. The warped aluminum door shook like six kinds of Jell-O, all noisy.

A moment passed, then the door slowly opened.

Lou Brethwaite squinted out at Carver. He seemed shorter, thinner, with eyes that held nothing but pain. Carver had known him as an informer for the Orlando police. That was how Brethwaite managed to indulge his habit and stay out of prison. But the drugs were his personal prison, and he was dying there, faster now. “Fred Carver,” he said, as if christening Carver. “Thought I recognized your voice, even before I peeked out the window and seen it was you.”

“You don’t look good, Lou,” Carver said. He didn’t mention that Brethwaite didn’t smell good, either. The air moving from inside the trailer felt hotter than outside, and it carried the stench of sweat and urine and spicy fried food. A radio or television was on inside the trailer, tuned to a Braves game.

“I been sleeping,” Brethwaite said. “You should catch me when I’m dressed to go out and I got a fresh haircut.” He ran dirty fingernails through his thinning black hair. He was wearing a blue denim work shirt and incredibly wrinkled gray slacks, no shoes. A man in his twenties who could pass for forty. “Guess you’re waiting for me to invite you in, huh?”

“Why don’t you step out?” Carver said. “Cooler out here.”

“Guess it is. Air conditioner’s been busted the past month.” Inside the trailer, somebody hit a double. The crowd was roaring as Brethwaite let the door slam shut.

Carver stepped down into the yard to give Brethwaite room to plod down the sagging stairs. Brethwaite stepped on a fat palmetto bug with his bare foot, but he didn’t seem to notice nearly as much as the insect. Carver looked away.

“It ain’t so bad seeing you now you’re not a cop,” Brethwaite said. “Been what, about three, four years?”

“About,” Carver said. “I need some information, Lou.”

Brethwaite smiled. There were more gaps in his yellowed teeth than when Carver had last seen him, not three or four years ago but last year, stoned in a bar in downtown Orlando. Still, cleaned up, after a trip to the dentist, he would have been a good-looking guy, one you’d be happy to see hanging around your sister. If you didn’t know what he carried in his pockets. “I figured you didn’t drop by to talk baseball, Mickey, and the Duke,” he told Carver.

Carver said, “Some things never change.”

Brethwaite sniffed with obvious pain, brushed at his nose with a knuckle, then examined his hand as if looking for blood. All he might see there was part of his disappearing future. Still doing coke. “That being the case, I expect you wanna pay for this information.”

“A hundred in it for you, if it’s good,” Carver said. The sun, the smell, were beginning to get to him. He wanted to get this over with and go where it was fresh and cool. “I’m looking for a man named Adam Beed.”

“No, don’t do that,” Brethwaite said. He frowned and spat off to the side. There was blood in his spittle. Some of it dribbled down onto his chin. “He’s a fella best not found.”

“Nevertheless,” Carver said.

“Yeah. Well, I won’t pretend I ain’t scared to tell you, but it don’t matter how I feel, ’cause I don’t know where you might latch onto Beed.”

Carver drew two fifty-dollar bills from his pocket and held them creased over his forefinger.

Brethwaite glanced at the bills and gave his yellow smile. “Keep your hundred, stay alive, I’ll stay alive, that’s the best way this conversation can go. Beed’s a genuine through-an’-through bad-ass, Carver, Last I heard he was outa prison and on booze so as to stay legal and not violate parole.”

“He’s broken parole. Otherwise I’d be able to find him.”