BEFORE CARVER COULD MOVE, Davy suddenly stepped in close. Carver felt something sharp and painful digging into his crotch.
He tensed his body, looked down, and saw that Davy had the point of the cargo hook pressed into his scrotum. Davy patted him down skillfully with his free hand, making sure Carver didn’t have a weapon. Carver thought of his gun back in Henry’s cottage, still in Beth’s suitcase. He hadn’t figured he’d need it to talk to bereaved parents in Miami. It might not have helped anyway; it would probably belong to Davy now.
The length of the hook allowed Davy to move back slightly and still use his and Carver’s bodies to shield what was happening from view. Anyone passing on the street might glance at them and see only two men having a casual conversation.
“You move a fuckin’ millimeter,” Davy said with a grin, “and I’m gonna gaff you and hoist you a foot off the ground. Give you a vasectomy while I’m goddamn doing it.” He made a slight upward motion, an almost imperceptible shrug, and the hook moved. Sudden pain coursed through and nauseated Carver, making him dizzy. “You and I gonna have a talk,” Davy said. He was wearing white pants and a sleeveless T-shirt; the sweat-coated hula dancer on his muscular forearm had wriggled when he made the move with the hook. He must have had fish for lunch; it was still on his breath.
“Where’s your van?” Carver asked through clenched teeth.
“Parked down the street a ways. You don’t know how lucky you are. I’m awful fond of my wheels. If you’da backed into the van the other day down in Key Montaigne, I’d have got out and gutted you asshole to belly button.”
“Then you admit it was you who tried running me off the road?”
“Sure. You gonna fuckin’ quote me?”
The point of the hook again rose a fraction of an inch, and Carver sucked in his breath. He couldn’t answer, but that was okay with Davy, who probably asked a lot of rhetorical questions.
More fish breath. “If I’d have been trying to run you off the road, Carver, you’da fuckin’ run off the road. What I was attempting was to get you to see plain reason, realize your future was someplace else.”
“Or not at all.”
“Ain’t you per-fuckin’-ceptive?”
“Were you acting on Walter Rainer’s orders?”
Davy sneered. “You’re amazing. I got you by the balls directly, and you think you’re the one doing the quizzing. Maybe I need a bigger hook. You talk when I ask you a question and not a word otherwise. Understand?”
“Yeah, I get the point.” The words came out in a wheeze.
Davy laughed and spittle tattooed Carver’s face. “Hey, maybe I really do need a bigger hook. What I come to tell you is, Henry Tiller’s nothing but an old geek talking out his asshole. There’s nothing to his fuckin’ paranoid ideas. Now, you know what that means?”
“I got a feeling I’m about to find out,” Carver said. His mind was whirling, trying to figure out a way for him to defend against the sharp cargo hook so he could go on the offensive. But there was no way. Any sudden motion would prompt Davy to hoist him like a live side of beef on the hook, and Davy would enjoy that.
The hula dancer jiggled her hips again and Carver felt the hook rotate. The twisting motion didn’t add to his pain, but it carried a psychological horror that made his insides go cold and metallic-tasting saliva collect under his tongue. “Means you oughta seriously consider moving outa the Tiller place,” Davy said, “and returning to whatever rock you live under on the mainland. You got that message loud and clear, fuckface?” Now the hook lifted another eighth of an inch and Carver heard his shrieking intake of breath as another shock of pain jolted through him. “Loud and clear?” Davy repeated.
“Loud and clear,” Carver groaned. He swallowed. Nausea threatened to reverse the process.
Davy spat in his face and smiled like a man who’d just accomplished his mission. He lowered the hook and stepped back. “I really do enjoy dealing with assholes like you. Fuckin’ small-time gimp, did you really think you were gonna cause somebody with some real grease any kinda trouble without bringing ten times more down on yourself?”
“I didn’t know Rainer had that kinda grease.”
“Well he does, and it’s green, and you don’t follow my advice, you’re gonna get a special kinda lube job.” Davy kicked Carver’s cane under the car, then moved farther back and slid the cargo hook through a belt loop so it was concealed beneath his untucked shirt. “I tried to give you a hint the day before yesterday on Shoreline you wasn’t wanted on Key Montaigne, but you insisted on ignoring it, so here we fuckin’ are.”
Davy paused as if expecting Carver to answer, but Carver remained silent. He still ached where the hook had gouged his testicles. Somewhere deep in his mind he tried to create a place the pain couldn’t reach.
Davy gave a snorting kind of laugh, then said, “Miami’s a great city. Got jai-alai, the races, nice beaches. What you wanna do now, Carver, is maybe enjoy yourself here, take in a few sights, find yourself some whore’ll bed down with a gimp, catch some rays—being careful you don’t get sunburned—then set a course to the north. Stay the fuck outa the Keys. That’s my advice, and it’s best if you got the sense to listen. Consider me a lighthouse warning you away from the rocks.”
The warning was plain enough. And if Carver had any reservations about Rainer being mixed up in something criminal, they were gone now. He must be a threat to Rainer, or Davy wouldn’t have been sicced on him. Henry must have stumbled upon some vulnerability that scared Rainer.
“You the one ran over Henry Tiller?” he asked, since Davy was in a gloating mood.
“That’s another question you asked,” Davy said, “after I told you not to. You’re lucky I don’t feel like going to the trouble of getting the hook back out.”
“Gonna answer?”
“Let’s just leave old Henry an ordinary hit-an’-run victim,” Davy said. He gave Carver a little half salute, then turned and swaggered away.
Carver leaned against the car for a few minutes, perspiration rolling down his face. Then he worked his way down and crawled on the hot pavement to a point where he could lie flat and grope for his cane beneath the Olds.
As soon as his fingers closed on the hard walnut he felt better, less vulnerable, as if he’d recovered a flesh-and-blood missing limb. Part of him wanted Davy to return so he could smash the cane across his confident smile and then feed him his cargo hook. Wanted it badly.
Carver placed a hand on the chrome windshield molding and stood up straight. A dull pain throbbed in his groin, but he didn’t think he’d been seriously injured. He’d been kicked there a few times, and he knew how that felt; this pain was similar but not as debilitating, though it made him dizzy and sick to his stomach with each cautious breath.
He brushed dirt off his clothes, then he lowered himself into the car and for a long time sat very still behind the steering wheel, waiting for the world to stop tilting and whirling. He was sweating coldly and trembling. From fear or pain or rage, he wasn’t sure which. Probably a combination.
When he finally did start the car he drove north, exactly as Davy had instructed.
Not toward Del Moray and home, though. Toward a phone booth.