John Lutz - Tropical Heat

The screams became louder, higher-pitched, like a woman’s screams.

Verna stared at Edwina, who stared back. Their stoic expressions revealed nothing, but Carver knew something was happening between them; he could actually feel its subtle vibrancy. It was like an understanding beyond words, between sisters. Maybe it could have passed between them only there, in the deep swamp.

Willis began screaming Verna’s name. Then Edwina’s.

The two last, maimed women in his life stood motionless and unfeeling, statues in the rain.

Carver shivered. He held tight to the crook of his cane with both hands and bore his weight down on it to steady himself.

Willis screamed Edwina’s name last.

Three times.

Pleading.

In tearing, banshee wails of horror.

Then suddenly he was quiet. Sunk beneath the quicksand where Verna had directed him. The abrupt silence rolled from the swamp and settled heavily over the clearing.

Verna slowly lowered the shotgun and bowed her head.

Carver heard footsteps behind him, then Armont and his men passed him at a fast walk, moving in on Verna.

Armont gently removed the gun from her hands, then held her arm tenderly, like a concerned lover, and led her into the house.

The rainfall became heavy, steady.

The storm was still attacking the swamp, Mother Nature miffed, hurling down lightning bolts and sending sheets of rain sweeping across the flat road, when Carver, with Edwina beside him, drove from Solarville and turned onto the main highway.

Armont had taken charge and sorted things out with a finesse that surprised Carver. The chief was tough and a pro, but he was tuned to human sensitivities. A good man in a bad job.

By late that afternoon, just before Carver and Edwina left Solarville, word had come that Sam Cahill had been stopped by state troopers on Interstate 75 in his red Corvette. When told that Willis Eiler was dead, he demanded legal counsel and became closemouthed. Most of Ernie Franks’s money was in a suitcase in the car’s trunk.

There was a bad exchange rate on that money; it had cost far more than it bought.

The rain had slacked off to a mist that the sun was working to burn away, when Carver glanced sideways at Edwina and turned the Olds north on Route 1, toward home, his place on the edge of the sea. He was sure that they were finally and in every way free of Willis, that the obsession had ended.

But Carver didn’t go to his place. Instead they drove to Del Moray. To her place.

Their place.

In the middle of the night she called him Willis.