Free Bloodfire by John Lutz Page A

hair. He thought she was about fifty.
    But when she left the sweet dills and came toward him, the tall body beneath the baggy dress moved with the fluidity of youth. She was younger than fifty, or she wore her age with impressive grace.
    A few feet from him, she pretended to study brands of tea. Then she turned to him, floated up a hand, and lowered the tinted lenses to focus her gaze on him. She had long, pointed fingernails, he noticed, unpainted, and beautiful brown eyes that tilted slightly up at the corners and gave her a vaguely Oriental look.
    He knew who she was and didn’t want this to be happening, didn’t know how to figure it.
    She said, “Fred Carver?”
    “He’s my brother.”
    She didn’t smile. In fact, she looked gravely serious. “I’m Elizabeth Gomez. Bet you can’t guess what I want.”
    She had him there.

11
    E LIZABETH G OMEZ STOOD by the tea and said, “All I want’s about ten minutes of your time.”
    Carver shook his head no. “Sorry. I want nothing to do with you or your husband, Mrs. Gomez. You’ll have to work out your own problems.”
    She had the tinted glasses up on the bridge of her nose again; he couldn’t see her eyes. “Our problems are beyond working out, Carver. The relationship has ended.”
    Carver couldn’t help it; he decided to go fishing. “Roberto still cares for you enough to hire someone to find you and bring you back.”
    “We both know why he wants me found,” she said in a soft, level voice. “He wants me dead, and locating me’s the first step. You didn’t know it at the time, Carver, but he hired you to be the finger man.”
    “Finger man?”
    “The one who points out the victim so the hit man can do his job. And if you’re still around and in the way, like at the condo when my sister was shot by mistake, you get a bullet yourself. You hadn’t got out of the line of fire there, you’d have been found dead lying next to Belinda.” She peeked at him over the plastic frames of the glasses again. “Know how the hit man can get right to his job once the target’s been found? He follows the finger man, especially if the finger man don’t know shit about why he’s looking for somebody. That way there’s no time wasted, no opportunity for the target to slip away. Ever since my husband hired you, he’s had somebody shadowing you.”
    Carver thought she was probably telling the truth. It made him uneasy, and more than a little angry. “I take it since I quit the case, I’m no longer being watched.”
    “Take it however you like, Carver. Nobody knows what the fuck a man like my husband’s gonna do. That’s part of the secret of his success. And part of the reason I left him.”
    An elderly woman with dyed red hair pushed a shopping cart up the aisle, glared at them as she had to detour around Elizabeth Gomez, who didn’t budge an inch to get out of the way. When the woman had huffily grabbed a can of coffee, then made her way to the pickle display at the end of the aisle, Elizabeth said, “This is no place for what I need to say.”
    “We got nothing to talk about.”
    “I say we do.” She smiled. “Anyway, I’m not leaving you any choice. I’ll stick close to you as Superglue till you let me have my say, and if my husband’s hired men find me and follow orders, you’ll go along on the dark ride with me.”
    “Dark ride,” Carver said. “I like that. It’s poetic.”
    “Let’s rap, then. I’ll entertain you some more.”
    Carver thought about it. Thought about it for a while. “You got a car outside?”
    “Uh-hm. Didn’t walk.”
    “Let me pick up a few more groceries. Then, when I drive away, follow me to my place. It’s not far from here.”
    She said, “I know where it is.”
    Carver set the cane’s tip and limped away from her, over to the cooler, where he pulled out a couple of cold Budweiser six-packs. He couldn’t ward off the thought that if he let Gomez know he had his wife at the cottage, she’d be worth twenty