Spark (26 page)

He staggered in a tight circle, drew a deep, screeching breath, then fell facedown on the carpet.

He didn’t moan. He didn’t move. He might as well have been furniture.

Carver sat trembling, sobbing with pain and trying to stay conscious.

H
E WASN’T SURE HOW
much time had slipped past when he felt his bonds being cut away. He opened his eyes to see Beth standing over him, holding a long carving knife.

He tried to speak, but pain held the words inside him like a vise. He swallowed dryly. That hurt, too.

Beth sawed through some more tape binding his left arm to the chair and looked angry in a cold way Carver had seen only a few times.

“Hattie . . .” he finally heard himself mumble.

“She’s okay, lover. Semiconscious, anyway.” He could hear the blade severing tape from his arm, felt his partly numbed flesh pinched, maybe cut. Everything seemed to be happening at a distance.

“They had Val, too,” he said, trying to pull himself into the here and now.

The blade ceased its sawing motion and Beth glanced around.

“He’s next door,” Carver told her.

“We’ll take care of Val later.”

When he was free, Beth handed him his cane and helped him to his feet. She was wearing a white summer dress this morning, high heels that made her slightly taller than Carver. “Gonna make it, Fred?”

He felt sore all over and there was fire along his rib cage. “Be okay if I keep moving and don’t stiffen up,” he said, already dreading tomorrow morning. He was sure to feel as if a bus had hit him then stopped and backed over him. “I wanna call Desoto, then let’s get Hattie and Val to the medical center.”

“Not to mention Fred,” Beth said, and helped to support him as he limped over to the sofa and slumped in it with the phone in his lap. While he pecked out the number with a forefinger that had somehow become bruised and swollen, she went to tend to Hattie.

After he’d talked to Desoto, Carver found that some of the soreness had left him as his circulation returned where it had been constricted by the tape, which seemed to have gotten even tighter while wet. Other areas, especially his ribs and left shoulder, had become more tender. Man wasn’t meant to be shrink-wrapped.

He and Beth managed to walk the semiconscious Hattie out to the rented Ford and get her settled in the backseat. Then they made their way up the driveway to Val’s house.

After Carver used his cane to break one of the small windows in the door, and Beth snaked a long arm in and worked the deadbolt, they entered the house and found Val unconscious but still alive. He was bound to a chair as Carver had been, only with dozens of knotted neckties instead of tape. Shoots the hell out of his wardrobe, Carver thought inanely.

The fingertips of Val’s right hand were bloody. He moaned and regained consciousness as Carver and Beth loosened the knots in the ties and worked his arms and legs free. Carver noticed a pair of pliers on the carpet, lying in the middle of dark stains and something else.

“Fingernails,” Beth said levelly, seeing him staring.

Carver ground his teeth in rage, causing his jaw to flare in agony where he’d been struck.

Fingernails.

No wonder Val had talked.

Beth wrapped a towel from the bathroom around Val’s mutilated hand, and Carver helped her walk him out to the Ford and get him in the back next to Hattie. He slumped low and closed his eyes, his bloody hand resting on his lap.

Beth looked at the frail, gray figures inside the car and said, “Hell of a way to treat senior citizens,” still with the same icy anger.

“Or the middle-aged,” Carver reminded her.

She stared at him with a tenderness in her eyes that somehow didn’t touch the pinpoints of cold light in their centers.

“I’ll drive,” she said, and Carver handed her the keys.

On the way to the medical center Carver explained what had happened.

“Before Beed reached the house, I poured Jerome’s medication into a bourbon bottle from one of the cabinets and left it on the counter. Then I tried to grind up the prescription bottle in the disposal and couldn’t. But the bottle did jam the mechanism down out of sight in the plumbing. I knew if I simply tossed it into the trash or hid it and Beed found it, we’d all be useless to him and killed immediately.”

“It figured an alky off the wagon would go for the booze,” Beth said, staring straight ahead out the windshield, “but he mighta consumed all of exhibit A.”

“He drank most of it,” Carver said, “but there should still be enough left in the bottle that it can be separated from the bourbon and analyzed. Or they can analyze Beed’s stomach contents. Either way, it’ll make the case against Mercury Laboratories.”

“So Beed went the same way Jerome Evans did,” Beth said. “Sudden massive coronary.” She smiled in a way Carver didn’t like. “Hattie’ll appreciate that.”

Carver thought she was probably right. These two women from different backgrounds might understand each other in a way he could never fathom. Beth had once told Carver he had a prehistoric view of women. Called him a dinosaur, specifically a brontosaurus, but said he could learn from her.

She tapped the horn as they pulled into the medical center driveway, then parked by the Emergency doors and ran inside.

Less than a minute later, several attendants and Solartown volunteers bustled out with stainless steel wheelchairs and removed Hattie and Val from the back of the Ford, rolled them into the medical center.

“This one, too,” Beth said, pointing to Carver.

“Not yet,” he told the young nurse who was appraising him while moving toward him. He pushed past her and limped in through the darkly tinted glass doors, Beth close behind him. The pain in his ribs was getting worse, making him take shallow breaths that hit like fresh blows from the rubber hose.

Emergency was tiled and painted in shades of green. There was a long counter with computers on it, a small waiting area lined with brown plastic chairs. Two old women sat in the end chairs near the TV jutting from the wall, staring not at the game show in progress but at what was going on around them. A dog-eared
Reader’s Digest
slipped off the lap of one of them and dropped to the floor, but she didn’t notice.

Several wide halls led from the admitting area, two of them sectioned off by swinging doors.

The old man Carver had seen drive into the Warm Sands lot after Roger Karl’s body was found in Carver’s car was leaning against the wall near the waiting area.

He strutted over to Carver and said, “I’m Commander Rubin, Solartown Posse. That Dr. Sanchez shagged ass outa here just after I picked up the call on the police frequency. Two Posse patrol units pulled his car over near the highway exit. Against the rules, but what the hell? He didn’t resist. He’s being held till the other police get there.”

“Right now,” Carver said, noticing that Rubin smelled strongly and dizzyingly of pipe tobacco, “what I’m interested in—”

He stopped talking as he saw Dr. Wynn and Nurse Gorham approaching. They were halfway down the long hall and hadn’t noticed him. He moved over out of line with the doorway, almost out of sight, but where he still had a narrow view of the hall. Waited. Commander Rubin squinted at him and stepped aside, as if Carver might have been struck unaccountably mad and needed reassessment. But Beth had observed him and figured out what was happening.

Wynn saw Hattie Evans being wheeled into one of the observation rooms and stopped. Nurse Gorham, surprised, halted with him, so abruptly that her rubber-soled white shoes
eep
ed on the tile floor.

It was too late. They were already too far into the waiting room and couldn’t retreat.

Wynn turned, saw Carver, and froze while realization and fear distorted his features. He instinctively started to bolt. Carver brought his cane across the doctor’s back and he stumbled and fell. He scrambled to get up and run, making it halfway to his feet, but Carver tripped him with the crook of the cane and he fell again. This time he crawled to a corner and sat curled with his head bowed.

Nurse Gorham had stood paralyzed and watching during the few seconds this had taken. Then she moved. Maybe she’d recovered from shock and intended to run, or maybe she was simply walking over to stand by Wynn. She only managed two steps before one of Beth’s black high heels flashed out and slammed into the back of her nyloned knee, driving her to the floor.

On her hands and knees, eyes wide with astonishment, she turned around awkwardly on the hard tiles and struggled to rise.

The shoe darted out again, catching her squarely in the side of the neck with a sound Carver felt in his stomach. Nurse Gorham lay flat on her back, whimpering in pain and pawing the air in slow motion with clawlike hands.

Beth, standing over her, said, “Guess you changed your mind about leaving.” Carver knew she’d said it to plant in the minds of witnesses that Nurse Gorham had attempted to escape, and the violence had been necessary. Beth covering herself in the event of future litigation.

Carver stared, feeling his heart banging away at his sore ribs, and said, “Christ!”

Beth smiled over at him, then calmly and with accuracy spat on Nurse Gorham.

Said, “You need a wheelchair, Fred.”

I
T WAS A WEEK
before Carver’s bruises began to fade. He’d suffered two hairline rib fractures on his left side, and he still wore elasticized wrapping around his midsection most of the time. The pain still sneaked up on him at night, or grabbed him after sudden movement, but less frequently now and with less bite.

He and Beth stayed at the Warm Sands while he healed, giving up her room so she could move in with him.

They were lying now on the artificial beach, side by side on large towels they’d carried down from the room. Carver was on his back with his eyes closed, letting the sun do its healing work, listening to the shouts and laughter of kids down by the artificial lake.

His eyelids fluttered as he felt Beth’s light touch on his bare chest, the pleasant coolness of the sun tan lotion she was rubbing into him with soft circular motions. She had hands like no woman he’d ever known.

“I got a call from Hattie this morning,” she said.

Carver said, “Hmm.”

“She’s feeling pretty good now, comparatively. Jaw still hurts, but it’s getting better. Least you can understand her on the phone okay.”

Women and phones, Carver the brontosaurus thought.

“She didn’t say it, but she’s enjoying nursing Val back to health, taking care of him. She called from his house. I don’t think she’s spending much time in hers these days.”

Hmm.

“Things work out for people sometimes,” Beth said, “if they just keep keepin’ on. That old bastard Val’s finally got what he wanted. He’s happy as a pig in shit just to lie around and let Hattie nurse him. Kinda pathetic.”

Carver didn’t say anything. A warm breeze moved over his body. Beth’s hands continued to work their miracle. He knew exactly how Val must feel. Felt the same way himself.

Liked it.

John Lutz is one of the foremost voices in contemporary hard-boiled fiction.

First published in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
in 1966, Lutz has written dozens of novels and over 250 short stories in the last four decades. His earliest success came with the Alo Nudger series, set in his hometown of St. Louis. A meek private detective, Nudger swills antacid instead of whiskey, and his greatest nemesis is his run-down Volkswagen. In his offices, permeated by the smell of the downstairs donut shop, he spends his time clipping coupons and studying baseball trivia. Though not a tough guy, he gets results. Lutz continued the series through eleven novels and over a dozen short stories, one of which—“Ride the Lightning”—won an Edgar Award for best story in 1986.

Lutz’s next big success also came in 1986, when he published
Tropical Heat
, the first Fred Carver mystery. The ensuing series took Lutz into darker territory, as he invented an Orlando cop forced to retire by a bullet that permanently disabled his left knee. Hobbled by injury and cynicism, he begins a career as a private detective, following low-lifes and beautiful women all over sunny, deadly Florida. In ten years Lutz wrote ten Carver novels, among them
Scorcher
(1987),
Bloodfire
(1991), and
Lightning
(1996), and as a whole they form a gut-wrenching depiction of the underbelly of the Sunshine State. Meanwhile, he also wrote
Dancing with the Dead
(1992), in which a serial killer targets ballroom dancers.

In 1992 his novel
SWF Seeks Same
was adapted for the screen as
Single White Female
, starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh. His novel
The Ex
was made into an HBO film for which Lutz co-wrote the screenplay. In 2001 his book
The Night Caller
inaugurated a new series of novels about ex-NYPD cops who hunt serial killers on the streets of New York City, and with
Darker Than Night
(2004) he introduced Frank Quinn, whose own series has yielded five books, the most recent being
Mister X
(2010).

Lutz is a former president of the Mystery Writers of America, and his many awards include Shamus Awards for
Kiss
and “Ride the Lightning,” and lifetime achievement awards from the Short Mystery Fiction Society and the Private Eye Writers of America. He lives in St. Louis.