Free Tropical Heat by John Lutz

phone tomorrow?”
    “Yes, at the office or here.” She seemed pensive, as if she were talking to Carver and mulling over something else altogether at the same time. Had she seen something in the bedroom she didn’t want him to notice? Winston Churchill would have liked Edwina. She was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a great shape.
    She stood in the doorway and watched as Carver got in his car and negotiated the winding driveway to the street. Low branches scratched an unheeded warning on the Olds’s canvas top as he made a right turn at the end of the drive.
    He didn’t notice the rented white compact car that followed the Olds, like a pilot fish trailing a shark, as he hadn’t noticed it when it followed him from the restaurant.

CHAPTER 7
    C ARVER DROVE AROUND Del Moray for a while, looking at the wide streets, neat rows of palm trees, the rambling, expensive houses. As he drove west, away from the ocean, the streets became narrower, with hills and terraced lawns. The houses were still expensive. Only when he neared the western outskirts of town did he find himself in a poorer section, where the streets needed repaving and the houses repainting and the people hope. Most of the faces he saw on these streets were Latino or black, the maids and gardeners of the wealthier residents in the east end of town. There were shabby-looking night spots here, too, and small and obviously struggling businesses. The poor seemed to be a smaller minority in Del Moray than in most other cities. Still, they were there, and were oddly necessary in a way few would admit. Without the poor, there could, of course, be no rich. It was comforting to some people to have clearly defined rungs on the ladder.
    Carver stopped at a drugstore and bought a Del Moray Gazette-Dispatch and a six-pack of Budweiser. He placed the paper and beer on the front seat of the car and got back in.
    Ignoring the taunts of a group of young Latinos lounging on a corner near a frozen-custard stand, he made a U-turn, then drove back the way he’d come, toward the highway and home.
    The next morning Carver swam for half an hour, then showered and cooked up a big breakfast of eggs, toast, and Canadian bacon. He felt good. He could look at his left leg now and not worriedly compare its size or shape with his right. The exercise regimen the therapist recommended would keep atrophy to a minimum if he followed it faithfully, and that was that—all he could do.
    Carrying his third cup of coffee and the Del Moray paper from the day before, he limped out to the cottage’s small wooden porch and sat in the sun in a webbed aluminum lounge chair. The cup balanced okay on the chair’s plastic arm while Carver turned the paper to the classified ads. A glossy bluebottle fly landed on the real-estate section, and Carver watched it wobble down the page to a list of properties for sale by Quill, then take to the air to tend to more important matters.
    After a while, Carver took a pen from his pocket, braced the folded newspaper against his thigh, and circled an advertisement for a vacant Del Moray house on Edgewick Avenue listed for an even half a million dollars. If he wasn’t going to buy a house, it might as well be an expensive one.
    He tossed the rest of his cool coffee over the porch rail, admiring its bright amber arc, then went back inside and phoned Quill Realty.
    The conversation worked out fine. He told whoever answered the phone that he was interested in seeing the house on Edgewick, and that someone had recommended an agent named Alice who had experience as an interior decorator. Alice could give him decorating tips while she was showing him the property.
    Within half a minute he was talking to Alice, and they made an appointment to meet at the Edgewick property at ten o’clock.
    Until it was time to leave for Del Moray, Carver idly watched a taped Atlanta Braves baseball game on television, mostly commercials. Somewhere in this land did flat-bellied cowboys