Bloodfire (11 page)

“Well, that wasn’t exactly true.”

“Then what is?”

As she spoke, she rocked the baby ever so gently. “Let me tell you, Carver, I grew up in a slum in Chicago. Like most ghetto kids, I wanted the fast and expensive life; that’s the values you get in a place like that.”

“Sure, I understand.”

“Doubt it. Anyway, I got outa there the only way I knew how, using what Mother Nature gave me before Father Time took it away.”

Carver thought about that, then said, “You’re still a few steps ahead of Father Time.”

Beth glanced over at him, somehow acknowledging the compliment with only those big, dark eyes. She was used to such remarks and had had practice. “I got mixed up with Roberto and lived the fastest of the fast life. Money, cars, sex, power. Then, a couple of years ago, I was surprised to find myself getting sick of my life. And sickened by what I’d become. Sounds stupid, but I wanted to do some giving instead of taking, even up whatever scales there are. Roberto wouldn’t understand. Couldn’t. But he let me more or less do what I wanted, and I began associating with people outside his crowd. Even took some correspondence courses from Florida State University.”

“You don’t sound like you’re from the ghetto,” Carver noted. “Not much slang and slide in the way you talk.”

“I pretty much worked that outa myself long ago, so I’d be acceptable wherever rich men wanted to take me. Though I admit my college communication courses helped some, too. Anyway, when I became pregnant last year I was pleased, but Roberto wasn’t. Not at first. I talked him outa forcing me into an abortion, and when he got used to the idea of fatherhood, he became more enthusiastic than I was over having a son. He never even considered it’d be a girl, and he was right. During my months of pregnancy I began to think about raising my child. I really saw what I was. What Roberto was. What kind of life I’d be bringing my baby into. I didn’t want it to be that way. I decided it
wouldn’t
be that way.”

“What about your drug habit?”

“Never actually had one. I secretly put together some money, which wasn’t difficult the way we lived. Money flowed all around Roberto, like a river around an island. I bribed the doctor who delivered Adam. He told Roberto the baby died because I was heavily addicted to heroin.” She looked away from the child and directly at Carver. “I thought we’d have a chance that way, a door out. Roberto would think his son was dead. He’d think
I’d
be dead within a short time, like most heroin freaks. I could live on what I had for a while, then get some kinda job under another identity and bring Adam up right, not in an environment of narcotics and death and twisted values. Call it the American dream.”

Carver held his cane with both hands. Jabbed at the ground a few times with its tip. There she sat with her son; he had to believe this one. It made sense. A woman begins thinking of her child and not just of herself, and she wants out of the kind of life Beth Gomez had been living. Wants the child’s father to stay out of the picture. A father like Gomez, who could blame her? Attila the Hun would be a better influence.

Beth said, “It only worked up to a point. Roberto thinks Adam’s dead, and that I’m doomed as a heavy user, but he still wants to find me. He thinks I killed his son and he wants vengeance. In all the time I’ve known him, this is the one thing he hasn’t been coldly businesslike about. He won’t stop till he’s killed me, Carver, and now I don’t wanna die. Whatever else you might think of me, I know I can be a good mother, Adam needs me.
We
need
you
if we’re gonna make it through this. You might not like it, but that’s the way it fell.”

Carver said, “I’m no guarantee.”

“None of those in this life.”

“Who else knows the truth?”

“Only the doctor, who has every reason in the world not to talk. And my friend Melanie, who won’t talk. A couple of people I was close to know I’m on the run and Roberto wants me dead. I talk to them now and then, and they tell me what they know about whatever he’s doing. That’s how I found out about you turning down Roberto’s offer. Sometimes they don’t know enough, though. I can’t keep out of his path much longer.”

“Why don’t you get far away from here? Out of the state?”

“Roberto has connections anywhere I’d go; drug trafficking is all about connections. And fear. And I don’t have any family left. Melanie’s closer to me than anyone; that’s why she’s hiding us at her place in Fort Lauderdale for a while.”

“If you’re that close to Melanie, won’t Gomez be watching her?”

“He doesn’t know about her. Melanie used to be a coke addict. She went through rehabilitation and she’s been clean for the past five years. Used to be a hooker, too, but now she’s outa that game. That’s where I knew her from. I cut her outa my life after Roberto because of the drugs. I knew she’d be back on coke and I’d be responsible. Then we met again at the university, when we were both taking a final. She’s a secretary at a brokerage firm in Lauderdale. So I’d go see her every once in a while, but I kept her, and our friendship, a kinda secret. She understood. We’d talk about my life, but we’d skirt what it was my husband did to make money. I feel reasonably secure at her place, but I know I’m not completely safe, and I don’t want anything to happen to Melanie because of this. But most of all, Carver, I want to save my baby. And I want you to help me.”

Carver said, “I don’t know if I can.”

“I’m asking you to try. I’ll pay you. Information and money, but you never can say where either came from.”

“What kind of information?”

“There’s s’pose to be a big drug drop here in Del Moray soon.”

“How soon?”

“I don’t know. Days, weeks. Not months,”

“Why don’t you go to the law?” he suggested. “Work a deal. Supply them with what they need to put Roberto away, and they’ll set you up with a new identity, give you and Adam a chance.”

She shook her head violently, startling Adam, who squawked again. She fit the nipple back in his mouth and said, “You’re speaking bullshit, Carver. I’ll talk to you ’cause you’re not the law and I’m desperate. That makes it personal. One thing you can’t do with drug dealers at the top of the pyramid is go to the law and be an informer. The dealers got bought-and-paid-for government snitches—they got goddam
governments
—to help them track you down and make you pay. They consider it time and money well spent. It keeps others from informing. I’m gonna stay one of the others. The government witness protection program ain’t for shit. If I talked to the cops or DEA, I’d be dead within a year or two years or five years, and so would Adam.”

“But Roberto figures you’ll be dead within a few years anyway, as far gone as that doctor said you were on heroin.”

“So maybe he’ll stop searching for me after a year or so. But if I talk, he and a lot of other people will
never
stop looking for me. They’ll wanna be certain I’m dead. Not just so I can’t talk anymore, but to discourage anyone else from playing close with the law.”

“You’re between a rock and a rock,” Carver admitted.

“And you’re the only one I can trust. The only one I know who’s refused to do something for Roberto, who’s stood up to him.”

Carver said, “This isn’t
Shane
.”

“Damned right it’s not. If it was, I’d just sit back and wait for the happy ending.”

The tiny face among the blanket folds opened dark eyes and tried to focus them on Carver. Couldn’t do it. Concentrated again on the bottle, which was now almost empty.

Carver said, “He’s going through that milk in a hurry.”

Beth was looking at him. Proud, unbroken, but desperate. Not just for herself. “You gonna help us, Carver?”

He said, “Give me a phone number where I can reach you and let you know. I’ve gotta think about this.”

“But you
might
help?”

“Might, sure.” He lent her his ballpoint pen and she printed her friend Melanie’s phone number on the back of one of his business cards. He told her he’d call her sometime today or tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.

He leaned over his cane and stood up, then looked down again at Elizabeth and Adam Gomez, family unit. The smell of the sea was in the air, the primal stuff of life, of raw survival.

He started to limp away, then turned and said, “Cute kid.”

She said, “I know.”

C
ARVER HAD A CONNECTION
at Florida State University, an entomologist named Fisk who’d helped him identify a certain type of beetle in a previous case. He phoned Fisk and had him check Student Records. Then he sat at his desk and sketched indecipherable shapes on his memo pad. Some of them looked like infants.

Within an hour the phone rang. Fisk. He told Carver there was indeed an Elizabeth Gomez of Fort Lauderdale registered at the university. She was in the correspondence program, six credit hours into her sophomore year, and carrying a 3.9 grade-point average.

Carver thanked Fisk and hung up. So far Beth Gomez had leveled with him. But so far wasn’t very far.

He dragged his cross-directory from a bottom desk drawer and used it to match an address with the phone number Beth had given him in the park. The number was listed in the name of Melanie Beame of 242 Wayfare Lane, Fort Lauderdale. Beth’s friend Melanie, just as she’d said.

Carver glanced at his watch. Past three o’clock, and Fort Lauderdale was over an hour’s drive down the coast. Even if he left immediately, there wouldn’t be much left of the day by the time he got there. On the other hand, what he had in mind might be better accomplished at night, so there was no rush.

He limped from the office, lowered himself into the sunbaked Olds, then drove to his cottage, where he stuffed a change of clothes and a shaving kit into his scuffed leather suitcase. Then he phoned Edwina, but she wasn’t home. She wasn’t in her office at Quill Realty either, and no one there knew how to reach her.

She seemed to be distancing herself from her employer as well as her lover, he thought, weakening her ties as she prepared to cut them. He tried to ignore the hollow sensation around his heart as he punched out her home number again and left a message on her machine, explaining he might have to be gone for a while on business and he’d call her soon as he returned. He said he’d miss her, then added just before he hung up, “This is Fred, by the way.” A joke. He wished he hadn’t said it.

He locked the cottage behind him and tossed the suitcase in the back of the Olds. On the highway, he stopped at a Texaco station and bought gas, a quart of oil, and a pack of Swisher Sweet cigars.

The station’s bell dinged twice as he ran over the signal hose on the way out. A guy in a greasy service uniform and holding a can of oil as if he were going to drink it glared at him, then poked his head back beneath the raised hood of a station wagon.

Carver turned left onto the highway to point the nose of the Olds south toward Lauderdale.

He’d stopped for supper, and it was dusk when he checked into the Pelican Motel, off A1A. It was on a side road and not near the ocean, so it was inexpensive and saved him the time of trying to find a beachside motel with a vacancy.

The Pelican was a rehabbed old tourist court whose individual stucco cabins had been converted to duplexes. All except the first and largest cabin, which was office and living quarters. There was a flying stork painted on the sign by the road, and plastic pink flamingos perched on thin metal legs were stuck into the lawn in front of the office. On the wall behind the desk was a large oil painting of a heron standing on one spindly leg by the sea. Not a pelican in sight. The place probably wasn’t owned or operated by ornithologists, but that was okay with Carver if the sheets were clean.

He registered and paid in advance, and the wry-faced old man behind the desk directed him to the end cabin, then handed him a key attached to a plastic tag in the shape of what looked like a seagull.

Carver drove the Olds to the far end of the gravel lot and parked it in front of the last in the line of small beige stucco cabins. There were only a few other cars parked at the motel, and he’d been told no one was staying in the other half of the cabin, so there’d be no loud TV or crying child to keep him awake. No late-night sounds of lovemaking to cause him to wonder what he was doing here instead of back in Del Moray with Edwina.

He lugged his suitcase to the cabin door, used the key, and pushed the door open with his cane. The air was hot and stale and smelled faintly as if someone had just stubbed out a cigarette. He flipped the light switch, then limped directly to the air conditioner jutting from one of the curtained windows and turned it on. It sounded as if it were trying to commit mechanical hara-kiri, but it shoved out a steady current of cold air,

The cabin was even smaller than it appeared from the outside. There was room for only a double bed, a time-scarred oak dresser with a mirror, a rickety wooden chair, and a TV mounted on a metal bracket that angled from the wall. The tiny bathroom was incongruously modern: white fixtures, white tile, and a white fiberglass shower stall. Black cockroach scurrying out of sight behind the vanity. Carver shut the bathroom door and turned back to the main room. There was only one small closet, standing open, and a bolted connected door to the other half of the cottage.

He didn’t bother unpacking, leaving his suitcase lying flat and unopened on the luggage stand at the foot of the bed. There was no way to know how long he’d be in Fort Lauderdale; might be a couple of hours, might be a couple of days. It depended on how things went at 242 Wayfare Lane.

He limped back down to the office and coaxed a Fort Lauderdale newspaper from a battered and stubborn vending machine, then asked the old guy behind the desk if he had a street map of Fort Lauderdale. He got no street map, but was told the drugstore a mile down the road sold that kind of thing and most any other item Carver might want. The old fella got so enthusiastic that Carver wondered if he owned part interest in the drugstore.

Carver returned to his cabin. It was too cool now; seemed the air conditioner’s thermostat wasn’t working. He turned the blower on low and stretched out on the creaking old bed, opened the newspaper, and read about the latest standoff between Congress and the White House, the Irish Republican Army killing a British trooper in Belfast, a man in Miami who’d set himself on fire to protest the rollback in civil-rights legislation. There sure were a lot of people out there with causes, but none with one so simple as that of Roberto Gomez, who had devoted himself to killing his wife. Carver turned to the comic strips and got a yuk out of “The Far Side,” the only sane thing in the paper.