Bloodfire by John Lutz Read Free Book Online Page B

the pipes and washing so forcefully over his body could cleanse inside as well as out, dissolve the past and afford second chances.
    By the time he’d toweled dry and limped nude back into the cool bedroom, Edwina was awake.
    Still on her back, she’d pulled the sheet up to cover her nakedness. There was nothing coy about it, he knew; she was simply cool in the morning breeze. She’d fluffed both pillows behind her head and was staring at Carver. Her dark hair was wildly tangled, making her look like a refined savage. Which she could be.
    He awkwardly pulled on the Jockey shorts he’d gotten from his stash of clothes remaining at her house, switching hands to lean on his cane. Mr. Nimble.
    Watching him through narrowed eyes, as if there were cigarette smoke bothering her, she said, “Leaving?”
    “Yeah. I better get to the office in case somebody’s been phoning.”
    “I thought you said the case you were on was ended.”
    He snapped the shorts’ elastic waistband, then glanced around for the rest of his clothes. “All but the murder investigation.”
    “Whose murder?”
    “Woman named Belinda Jackson. Sister-in-law of my client. I mean, former client.”
    “Killed here in Del Moray?”
    “No. In Orlando.”
    “Desoto’s territory.”
    “Yeah.” He sat on the edge of the bed and struggled into his pants. He’d laid them folded on the chair, not carefully enough, because they were very wrinkled. Well, he’d been in a hurry. Barefoot, he limped to the small dresser and got out a fresh pair of socks, then went back to the bed and worked them on. He slipped his feet into the moccasins he didn’t have to bother tying. Shoelaces weren’t much trouble in the mornings, but he hated it when laces came untied in public, and he had to find someplace to sit down and contort his body simply to tie his shoe. The pitying stares made him furious.
    He got a clean brown pullover shirt from the closet and yanked it over his head, then stood at the foot of the bed and tucked it into his pants. Smoothing the thick and curly fringe of gray hair around his ears and at the back of his neck, he caught his reflection in the full-length mirror. Dark pants, dark shirt, catlike blue eyes, harsh features with a scar at the right corner of his mouth that lent him a sardonic expression unless he smiled. Left earlobe missing as the result of a knife wound. He looked like a Paris hoodlum, as usual. Didn’t give a fuck, as usual.
    Edwina sat up straighter and raked her red-enameled fingernails through her wild hair. It didn’t change anything. “Got time to hang around for breakfast?”
    “Better not,” he said. “Sorry.”
    “Sure. Well, I gotta get to work anyway. Some choice beachfront property to show.”
    “Fat commission?”
    “If I sell it.”
    “You will.”
    She nodded almost solemnly. “Yeah, sooner or later I will.”
    He limped around the side of the bed to stand over her, then moved the cane close for leverage, leaned down, and kissed her forehead. Her flesh was damp and cool.
    She didn’t move or look up. “ ’Bye, Fred.”
    He braced on his cane and got out of there.
    Across the street from Carver’s office was the pure white stucco combination courthouse and jail. In the now-glaring sunlight it looked edible, an iced pastry. Beyond it stretched the blue and glittering Atlantic. The view was the stuff of postcards.
    The building that housed Carver’s office was cream-colored stucco, low and not very long and with a red tile roof. His was the end office. The other two businesses in the building were an insurance brokerage and a car-rental agency. Customers for all three enterprises came and went, but nobody was getting rich here.
    Carver parked the Olds in its usual slot on the gravel lot, closer to Golden World Insurance than to his own office, because the car would be in the shade sooner there as the sun moved across Magellan and behind the building’s roofline.
    He raised the canvas top so the vinyl