Bloodfire Read Free Page B

finds a dealer.”
    “The ten thousand won’t last long, the habit she has. And a user by herself in that world, they’ll take every advantage of her. That’s something that scares hell outa me.”
    Carver sat staring at the photograph for a while, then looked up. “So I’ll look into it,” he said, as if it were no big deal and he hadn’t been sitting there carefully weighing whether to get involved. “Where can I get in touch with you?”
    “I won’t be at our condo for a week or so,” Ghostly said. “A convention down in Miami I can’t skip without fear of losing employment.” He worked his out-of-whack eyebrows fearfully. “Christ, that’d be the kicker, if I lost my job on top of the rest of this mess.”
    Carver said, “Go to your convention. If I need more information I’ll phone you at your hotel.”
    “Fine. It’s the Holiday Inn on Collins.” He lurched forward and shook Carver’s hand again. This time there was unsteadiness in his grip, and not much strength. “Find her, Carver, please.”
    Carver said, “I’ll be working at it. Any of your neighbors Beth was particularly thick with?”
    “Not really. We kept pretty much to ourselves. And I traveled most of the time.”
    Carver disengaged his right hand from Ghostly’s. He said he wanted Ghostly to sign a standard contract before he left, then answer a few more questions. Ghostly agreed immediately, and Carver limped to his dresser behind the folding screen and got a contract from the middle drawer.
    Ghostly scrawled his signature, set down the pen, and said again, “Find her.” More prayer than request.
    “If I can’t find her,” Carver said, “she’ll still need to be found. Still need help. Will you agree to go to the police when I tell you I’m wasting your money?”
    Ghostly said, “I thought that out carefully before I walked in here. The answer’s yes.”
    Carver gave him his copy of the contract. “I’ll do what I can to see that doesn’t happen, Mr. Ghostly.”
    Ghostly submitted himself to another ten minutes of question-and-answer. Then he managed a thin grin and walked from the cottage, leaving behind to linger whatever it was that had aroused uneasiness in Carver when he’d approached him on the beach.
    Maybe it was the uneasiness, and his curiosity, that had really prompted Carver to take the case. That and the money.
    And a young woman out there alone somewhere, running and bedeviled.

3
    T HE B EAU C APRI condominiums didn’t look remotely French. As Carver steered his ancient Olds convertible onto the azalea-bordered driveway of the parking lot, he saw a series of three-story buildings constructed of vertical slabs of cast concrete, with what appeared to be seashells embedded in them. The flat roofs had air-conditioning units mounted on them, surrounded by symmetrical, blunt-tipped picket fences that looked as if they ought to be on the ground and not three stories in the air. Set in the middle of the four buildings was the ubiquitous swimming pool, this one as unimaginative as the rest of the architecture. A rectangular pool with high and low diving boards, a wide concrete apron, and uncomfortable-looking nylon-webbed chairs and lounges. The whole bland creation was surrounded by a chain-link fence coated with some sort of pastel pink rubber Carver had never seen before. Voltaire would have defended to his death the residents’ right to live in Beau Capri, but he would never have moved in himself.
    The drive from Del Moray to the Orlando area had taken only about an hour on sun-washed highways, and it wasn’t yet noon. Carver had driven in with the Olds’s canvas top down, letting the wind whip around him and try to mess up hair no longer on his head. A small and bitter triumph over nature.
    He parked the Olds at the far end of the lot, alongside a low red Porsche. After killing the powerful V-8 engine, he listened for a moment to cooling metal ticking beneath the long hood. Most of the cars in the lot