John Lutz - Hot

“You charge extra for emergencies?” Carver asked, half jokingly.

She took him seriously and a calculating expression came over her freckled, girlish features. She’d apparently never considered the idea of overtime pay. “No,” she said, “cost is just the same.” Youthful virtue had conquered greed.

He grinned. “Okay. See you later, Effie.”

She crossed her arms again, stood the way she’d been standing when he first saw her. “If you need any help around Key Montaigne, I mean, need to know anything only somebody lives in this place might be able to tell you, I’ll be glad to help that way, too, Mr. Carver.”

“You can do that right now,” Carver said. It was almost five o’clock; he’d taken care of some business by phone from Miami, had a long but light lunch with an old friend, then hadn’t stopped except for gas on the drive south. “Where’s a good place in town to eat supper?”

She gnawed her lower lip a moment, considering. “Ain’t a lotta choices, but mine’d be the Key Lime Pie. That’s what they call it, like the actual pie only it’s a restaurant.”

“Thanks, I’ll try it.”

She smiled, bobbed up and down on her thick-soled jogging shoes as if building momentum, then swept away in a dash. He heard the reverberating slap of the screen door echoing out over the water.

He walked to the window and watched her mount a balloon-tire Schwinn bike with a rusty wire basket attached to its handlebars, then build up speed, her boyish body whipping back and forth as she stood high on the pedals.

Carver removed slacks and shirts from his suitcase and put them on wire hangers from Henry Tiller’s closet. Henry had one of those space-saving fold-down multihanger plastic gizmos in his closet; it came in handy. Carver hung it on a brass hook on the outside of the closet door and placed all the hangers on it so his clothes were draped in descending layers. Neat, he had to admit. He left socks and underwear in the suitcase and placed it in a corner with the lid closed but not latched. His shaving kit he carried into the bathroom and set on top of the vanity, over to the side, where it wouldn’t get wet. There was a large white towel embossed with suncrest motel folded over a rack in the bathroom, that had on it stitched in red, “Hi, I’m Mr. Towel and I live here. If you take me away from home, please bring me back.” Henry must have abducted Mr. Towel. Carver saw himself smiling in the medicine cabinet mirror, a tan, bald man with a fringe of curly gray hair that had grown too long in back. Lean, with a powerful upper body from exercise and walking with the cane. A scar at the right corner of his mouth. Pale blue eyes that were oddly catlike. As soon as his strikingly beatific smile faded, his was a brutal face rather than handsome. He knew the abrupt contrast could be unsettling.

He went outside and stood in the heat for a while, gazing across the expanse of glimmering water at the Miss Behavin’ rocking gently at her moorings. He could only see about half of the back of the large white clapboard house with red canvas awnings, a corner of a swimming pool behind a chain-link fence, a round blue table with a fringed umbrella sprouting from it at an angle. There was no sign of anyone at the Rainer estate.

Listing sharply over his cane, Carver shielded his eyes from the sun with his cupped hand and looked westward over the Gulf. A pelican flapped low above the surface, seeking its dinner. A large vessel that had the look of a cruise ship haunted the hazy, distant horizon like a wavering ghost. Henry Tiller had retired to beauty if not peace.

The sun wouldn’t be setting for a long time, but Carver was hungry.

He locked the cottage door, then he drove toward Fishback to look over the town in daylight. After that, he’d eat an early supper at the restaurant Effie had recommended.

There were a number of things he wanted to find out. One of them was why anybody would name a town Fishback.

No one seemed to know. The waitress, a stout, broad-shouldered woman named Fern, said she thought Montaigne got its name way back in the nineteenth century when the Keys were a haven for pirates. So serious was the problem that a U.S. naval base was established in Key West to stop piracy. It was successful only up to a point. As to who named Key Montaigne’s population center Fishback, and why, Carver would have to ask somebody who knew about pirates, Fern said.

He was sitting in a window booth in the Key Lime Pie restaurant, eating the day’s special, broiled shrimp with salad and a baked potato. He’d driven through the town, consisting primarily of a main street, called Main Street, on which were lined weathered, low buildings housing bait shops, bars, a hardware store, Laundromat, barber shop, supermarket, and various other assuagers of needs and yearnings.

At the foot of Main was the town marina, where dozens of docked pleasure boats bobbed on the gentle waves, along with several commercial fishing boats and a lineup of charter boats for tourists to hire for deep sea fishing. There wasn’t a lot to do on Key Montaigne other than fish, eat, and drink, and the tourists the island attracted usually weren’t interested in theme parks and water slides. Plenty of tourists walked the streets, skin still pale from northern climes, sporting souvenir T-shirts with cameras slung around their necks, but there were few young children with them. The families with kids were farther north, seeing Disney World and Universal Studios and learning about the wonders of citrus.

Where Carver sat he could see a section of Main Street, the small, flat-roofed building that called itself Food Emporium Supermarket, and on the corner a freshly whitewashed service station with a single work bay and two pumps. NORTON’S GAS ’ N’ GO, read the sign over the pumps. Effie’s father’s place. It was a self-service station. A bearded man in a sleeveless gray shirt was pumping unleaded into a dusty black pickup truck, glaring at the pump’s price and gallon meters as if he held a grudge against them. There was a pyramid of Valvoline oil cans at a corner of the building, the kind of display you seldom saw anymore. The work bay’s overhead door was open, and a Ford Escort was up on the rack getting its oil changed. Carver was glad he hadn’t ordered anything fried.

Loud voices drew his attention back inside. The Key Lime Pie restaurant was long and narrow, with round tables on one side and a counter with red vinyl stools on the other. Struggling air-conditioning and half a dozen ceiling fans kept the temperature down and cast flitting shadows over the red-checkered tablecloths and green and brown tiled floor. Beyond the counter was an arch with a swordfish mounted above it. Through the arch Carver could see into the adjoining lounge, where several men sat or stood at the bar. Most of them were wearing jeans or shorts and T-shirts and had deep tans. One of them, a short, stocky guy with an oversized blond mustache that lent him a fierce expression, was arguing vehemently with a man wearing a loud red and yellow tropical shirt with a parrot pattern, who was slouched on a bar stool facing away from Carver. Yellow Mustache was getting madder and madder, while the man in the garish tropical shirt seemed to be ignoring him. Carver couldn’t understand what was being said. Something about shipwrecks, he thought. He popped his last broiled shrimp into his mouth and sat chewing, waiting to see what would happen.

The man on the stool slowly swiveled around and stood up. He was about average height, built blocky, and wore his hair shaved almost short enough to classify him as bald. His loud tropical shirt was untucked and might conceal a weapon. The thick, tan forearms that protruded from the wildly colored short sleeves were so covered with tattoos they almost looked like an extension of the busy-patterned shirt. A colorful snake coiled up one arm. The other arm sported what looked like an anchor and a topless hula dancer.