John Lutz - Hot

Carver considered pointing out Henry’s present position, then thought he’d better be quiet. After all, he’d made a mistake himself and was limping around with a cane.

“It was a white Chrysler that hit me,” Henry said. “I mention that?”

“You did.”

“I never got so much as a peek at the license plate.”

“Uh-huh.”

Tiller let out a long breath and looked up at the pipework and pulley system elevating his broken leg. An expression of infinite sadness passed over his features, for a moment making him look a hundred years old. “I forget some things these days, Carver, I know that. But I also know I’m a long ways from senility. I guess that’s another reason I want you to go on down to Key Montaigne and prove I’m right about something not being as it should there, prove I’m not some paranoid old man just a shell of what he was. Maybe in the same way, after you was shot, you had to prove you was more’n just a cripple people could write off. You understand that?”

“I understand my big problem was writing myself off, Henry. It took me a while to understand it, but now I do. Don’t get down on yourself because you’ve got a lot of miles on your odometer.”

“If you tend to forget things, Carver, how do you know? I mean, how do I know how much I forget?”

Carver said, “Well, how much is worth remembering, anyway?”

“All I wanna remember for now,” Tiller said, “is that I got some good years left in me. Not many, but a few. It ain’t easy holding on to that thought when there’s people treating you like you’re halfway in the grave. It works like voodoo or something; they give up on you, so you give up on yourself. You wither and die like a plant that gets no water.”

Carver knew what Tiller meant. He’d seen it happen. He patted Henry Tiller gently on the shoulder and told him he’d move into his cottage and poke around Key Montaigne. Not to worry, if Rainer was up to anything illegal, he’d tumble to it.

“Let me know if and when,” Tiller said.

“Sure. I’ll stay in touch by phone.”

Tiller gave him a feeble wave, bumping a tube and causing his glucose bottle to sway on its steel pole, making Carver worry for a moment that the IV needle might pull from the back of his hand. “I give you the key?” he asked.

“I’ve got it,” Carver assured him. “Try to get some rest, okay?”

“Not much else to do here.” Tiller closed his eyes.

Thinking about his dead son, maybe, Carver thought. Remembering. The way Carver remembered.

Or maybe just thinking about the pretty blond nurse due back with the bedpan.

Clutching the key tightly in his free hand, Carver limped from the room.

South of Miami, U.S. Route 1 trails like a thread unraveling from the sleeve of the Florida peninsula. It connects the Florida Keys, a string of small islands that curves gently southwest to end at Key West, only ninety miles from Cuba.

Route 1 was constructed after a hurricane in the thirties had devastated the Keys and swept an Overseas Railroad train and all its passengers out to sea, forever ending rail service from the mainland. The highway, built in part over the remaining railroad trestle, was a safer, more durable way to connect the islands to each other and to southern Florida. For the first several miles from the north, it cuts through flatlands and is mostly a level two-lane road, where passing slower traffic is almost impossible. Farther south it’s flanked by water, the Gulf of Mexico on the west, the Atlantic on the east, and has long four-lane stretches. The islands, some of them almost too small to appear on a map, are sometimes so close together only the highway signs let the driver know he’s bridged open water and passed from one key to the next. Some of the keys, like Marathon and Isla Mirada, are larger and well populated. Even many of the smaller islands support condo developments, retirement communities, and fishing resorts. And tourist shops. Even ahead of fishing, tourism ranks as the Keys’ primary industry.

The bridge from Duck Key to Key Montaigne was a narrow, arced ribbon of concrete that still had the fresh, sunwashed look of new construction. Studying it through the windshield, Carver thought that probably an older bridge had recently been replaced.

Key Montaigne wasn’t exactly kidney-shaped; it more closely resembled a miniature Africa, one that barely showed up on the standard road map. According to the more detailed map Carver had bought when he’d stopped for gas at a Texaco station on Marathon Key, Key Montaigne was slightly more than half a mile across at its widest point, and about a mile from its northern to southern tip. It was flat, like the rest of the keys, and heavily overgrown with lush tropical foliage that concealed the condo developments and single-family residences.

Carver was driving the Olds with the top up and all the windows down. Key Montaigne was hot, but there was a wind off the sea that might be more or less constant, like farther south in Key West. Outlying reefs prevented incoming waves from breaking into surf, leaving the offshore waters calm. And there didn’t seem to be any beach, except for a stretch of public beach that a sign proclaimed was built with sand trucked down from the north. A few sunbathers were lounging on the beach, and two sailboats leaned into the wind not far from shore. In the brilliant sunlight the transplanted sand appeared almost white and looked unnatural in its setting.

It was easy enough to find Shoreline Road, and just a few minutes on it brought Carver to a narrow driveway meandering off through palm trees and undergrowth toward what a rural mailbox proclaimed to be Henry Tiller’s cottage.

Gravel crunched beneath the Olds’s big tires as Carver followed the driveway to the sea and a small weathered structure with a screened front porch and an almost flat roof. He recognized it as the sort of building Key Westers called Conch houses, solid homes built by nineteenth-century ship’s carpenters to withstand hurricane-force winds. Modest but enduring structures that ignored time.

Carver parked the Olds beside the cottage, climbed out and set the tip of his cane in the sandy soil. He squinted out at the Gulf, which was undulating and glittering with silver sparks in the glaring sunlight. To his left the shoreline curved and he could see, some distance away, a manicured stretch of green land sloping gradually to a dock where a large white-hulled private yacht rested as if posing for a postcard. Carver figured it must be the Miss Behavin’, Walter Rainer’s boat.

A mosquito droned close to his ear, and he raised a hand and brushed at it. He hadn’t seen it, but if volume was any indication, it was large enough to fly mail. He wiped the back of his wrist across his perspiring forehead, hoisted his scuffed leather suitcase from the trunk of the Olds, and limped up the wooden steps to the cottage’s front porch. Behind him the cooling metal of the Olds’s engine ticked like a bomb.

The screen door was unlocked. He opened it partway, then shoved it wider open with a corner of the suitcase and stepped up onto the shaded and noticeably cooler porch. The plank floor creaked beneath his weight. There was a green AstroTurf carpet on part of the porch, and a chipped yellow-enameled metal glider. Instead of a porchlight, there was a paddle fan mounted on the rough wood ceiling. Carver used Henry Tiller’s key on the front door and went into the cottage.

The interior was small but neat, with matching white wicker furniture that looked as old and serviceable as the cottage. There was a multicolored braided oval rug on the floor, a bulky old air conditioner mounted in a side window. On the cream-colored walls were oil paintings that were probably done by local artists -a flower arrangement, a stormy seascape, three domestic cats posing in tall grass as if they were a pride of lions. Carver liked that last one. He could see into the tiny kitchen with its dated white appliances. A door led to what he assumed was the bedroom. Another door, half open, was to the bathroom. The air in the cottage was hot and still and smelled like lemon furniture polish. It took the fun out of breathing.