Beth slept most of that day. At six that evening she was examined and was awake for another hour, during which she and Carver were never alone. Within minutes after the doctors and nurses had left, she was asleep again. Carver stayed with her in the room until eleven o’clock, then left and drove back to the beach cottage.
He lay awake in the dark for a long time, listening to the ocean and wondering. The evening news had revealed that the explosion at the clinic definitely had been caused by a bomb. The somber and handsome newscaster quoted police as saying they had leads and expected an arrest to be made soon. Then there was an interview with Operation Alive members who’d been picketing at the clinic that day. All of them denounced violence and professed to know nothing about the bombing. Carver stared into the shadows and thought about the irony of the bomb injuring a woman who had gone to the clinic to cancel her appointment for an abortion. What would Operation Alive think about that?
Probably that it was too late for her to be exculpated after the sin of making the appointment in the first place.
From up on the highway came the sound of a truck accelerating along the curve that paralleled the coast, a faraway whine of tires on still-warm concrete, then gradations of engine noise as the driver shifted through the gears.
It was the last thing Carver heard in the sultry night before falling asleep.
In the morning, when he returned to the hospital to visit Beth, he was pleased to see that she was sitting up in bed. She had her head wrapped in a pale yellow scarf wound like a turban. The IV needle had been removed from the back of her hand, leaving a black-and-purple bruise tinged yellow with antiseptic. She looked much better, more clear-eyed and alert.
Carver walked to her and kissed her on the lips, then placed the valise with the clothes and cosmetics she’d requested on the chair next to the bed.
He was suddenly aware of an odor in the room that didn’t belong. It had about it the cloying sweetness of something rotting in the sun.
“Just who I wanna fucking see,” said a voice he recognized.
He turned around to see Del Moray police lieutenant William McGregor, and he realized the familiar odor was the cheap deodorant McGregor used as a substitute for bathing. The lieutenant was nobody’s favorite cop. He was corrupt and ambitious and blatantly reveled in his evil. He hated Carver. Carver hated him.
“I’ve been talking to your dusky friend here,” McGregor said. He was a skinny but strong man, six and a half feet tall, wearing his usual rumpled brown suit and stained shirt, his boat-size brown wing-tip shoes. He had a lean face, lank blond hair that flopped down over his forehead like Hitler’s, and a wide space between his front teeth through which the pink tip of his tongue habitually peeked like a serpent. He didn’t approve of interracial love affairs, said his mean little blue eyes, and he didn’t feel at all sorry for Beth. If Carver had asked him, he probably would have said as much.
Carver looked at Beth. “Do you feel well enough to talk to the police?”
She nodded. “Might as well get it over with. It can’t take long, because I don’t have much to tell. All I know is that I walked inside the clinic, then got blown back out through the door.”
“Wages of sin,” McGregor said with a wicked grin, pulling a small, leather-covered note pad and a pencil from his pocket. The movement made his suit coat open wider and revealed the checked butt of his shoulder-holstered nine millimeter. Also fanned the stench and failure of his deodorant across the room.
“What sin?” Carver asked.
“Yours and hers, dumbfuck. You knocked her up and she let you do it, or she wouldn’t have been anywhere near that explosion.”
Beth knew how McGregor fed on other people’s misery and tried not to show she was upset. “I thought you were going to tell us you were pro-life or pro-choice, but that would mean you believed in something other than yourself.”
McGregor looked over at Carver and grinned, poking his tongue through the space between his teeth at the same time. It made him look incredibly lewd. “Hey, she’s still feisty, even after getting her ass blown through some glass doors.”
“Still thinking clearly, too,” Carver said. “She’s got you figured out.”
McGregor shrugged. “Pro-life, pro-choice, who gives a flying fuck? I’m pro-me and I’m not ashamed to admit it.” He poked at his concave chest with a long forefinger. “Pro-me, just like everybody else is, when push comes to shove.”
“You sound proud of it, though,” Beth said. Despite Carver’s warnings, she was always surprised anew by the totality of McGregor’s evil. He wished she’d be quiet; inspiring others’ loathing was McGregor’s crude way of communicating with people. It would have been pathetic if it weren’t so . . . well, loathsome.
“Damned right I’m proud,” McGregor boasted. “Charles Darwin would be proud of me, too. He and I both understand nature, including human. I accept my nature, which is just like yours. Only you don’t accept what you are. Don’t even admit it to yourselves. Hell, I admit it and like it. Tell you, Carver, I feel good about myself, just like all the psychology assholes advise.”
Carver tried to imagine McGregor reading psychological self-help books but couldn’t. Maybe I’m Despicable, You’re Despicable.
“You’re as repugnant as anyone I’ve ever met,” Beth told McGregor.
He smiled at her, happy to have roused her ire. “Thanks. And you should be a good judge, considering you’ve slept with repugnant characters. Even married one. Way it goes, you lie down with shit, and you can’t help but get up with it all over you.”
Carver felt his anger surge and took a step toward McGregor. He wanted to grab him by his wrinkled brown lapels and knock out some of his oversize yellow teeth.
He almost raised his cane to swing it at McGregor’s head. Then he stopped. McGregor was staring at him, still smiling. This was what he wanted. Anything he’d said that was out of line could be denied, and McGregor could lie like a corrupt choirboy. And a scuffle would bring people, leave evidence. The kind McGregor wanted in order to nail Carver with the law he sometimes wielded like a hammer.
“Keep right on coming, dickface,” McGregor said, obviously disappointed that Carver had stopped. “This is exactly the kind of thing I’d expect from a dumb gimp like you.” He moved his hand slightly so it was resting on the butt of his holstered gun.
Carver didn’t move. “Find out what you need to know, then get out,” he said tersely.
“Humph!” McGregor said, opening his notebook. “You’d think you gave the orders around here. Dr. Carver, pilfering drugs from the supplies between fucking the nurses. You should be so lucky.” He turned his attention to Beth. “What did you see when you entered the clinic?”
Beth thought for a moment. “A reception desk with nobody sitting behind it. A hall leading to some doors. A woman in the hall, well ahead of me. Then I saw . . . I don’t know, the explosion, pieces of wall and wreckage flying upward, outward, toward me. The force of the blast lifted me up, and I found myself sitting outside on the sidewalk. That’s all I can remember about it. The next thing I knew I was here, at the hospital.”
McGregor kept writing for several seconds after she’d finished talking, his tongue protruding from a corner of his thin-lipped mouth. Then he lifted the pencil and said, “Notice what was going on outside the clinic as you were walking in?”
“You mean the demonstrators?” Carver asked.
“I’m not questioning you, Carver,” McGregor said “I wanna do that when your lies won’t help you. That day’s coming.”
“Most of the demonstrators were across the street,” Beth said. “They were waving their signs around and yelling at me.”
“Yelling what?”
“Insults. A few of them called me a murderer. One said I was a nigger bitch and was going to hell.”
“Some of those people must know you,” McGregor said.
Carver stirred.
McGregor grinned.
“Notice a blond man carrying a sign come out from around the building at about the time you entered?”
“I don’t think so,” Beth said.
“Think before you answer,” McGregor told her.
She closed her eyes, then opened them. “I can’t remember much in the way of details from that time, but I don’t think I saw anyone run out from behind the building.”
“Run?” McGregor thrust out his long scoop of a chin. “I didn’t say anybody was running. You probably saw this man running and forgot till now.” He began scribbling in his note pad.
“I saw people running,” Beth said. “I remember that now. They were down the street, though. I think they were, anyway.”
“What about a blond man? Dark pants, white shirt, carrying a sign?”
“No,” Beth said, “I don’t remember anyone in particular.”
“Then you might have seen him.”
“Well, yeah, I suppose he could have been there.”
“Good. You might have to testify to that.”
“The news said it was definitely a bomb,” Carver said. “And that you’ve got a line on the bomber.”
“Of course it was a bomb, Mister Fucking Curious. And we’ve not only got a line on a suspect, we got the suspect himself in custody. Brought him in about an hour ago. Mechanic named Adam Norton, got himself an arrest record for assault, and he’s a member of Operation Alive. That’s the bunch of religious nutcakes that were picketing the clinic yesterday morning. Beth’s not the only one who saw Norton run out from behind the clinic just before the explosion.”
“What’s Norton say?”
“Nothing, to you.”
Carver leaned on his cane and stared at McGregor.
“Okay,” McGregor said. “You read the papers anyway, and I want it made clear there’s no reason for you to go sniffing around this case, maybe fuck up some evidence we need. Norton claims he’s innocent and only went behind the clinic so he could wave his sign where it would be seen through an operating room window.”
“Not much of an alibi,” Carver said.
“Hardly one at all. Why would he wave a sign in a back window, so some pregnant bitch would look over and read his message while the doctor was taking a half-baked roll outa her oven? It’d be too late by that time.”
“If Norton -”
But Carver stopped talking as he heard Beth sob. McGregor had become too much for her. Carver understood.
“Time for you to leave,” he said to McGregor.
“Oh, we on a schedule here?” Then he too noticed Beth had her head lowered and was sobbing. Tears were tracking down her cheeks, spotting her gray hospital gown. He smiled and shook his head. “Well, it appears our patient’s having a relapse.”
Carver tightened his grip on his cane. McGregor took a step toward him, suitcoat held open to reveal his gun.
“Please give it a try,” McGregor said. “Go ahead and swing that cane.”
“Ring for the nurse,” Carver told Beth, without looking away from McGregor.
She pressed the button pinned to her sheet. Neither Carver nor McGregor moved.
Beth stopped sobbing.
When the nurse entered, she stopped and stood still also. She was the same serious nurse with the shockingly mirthful smile who’d been in the room yesterday. She looked at Beth, then at Carver and McGregor.
“We think it’s time for Lieutenant McGregor to leave,” Carver said.
There was no hint of the smile on the nurse’s face. “Time for both of you to go,” she said.
“No,” Beth said. She pointed at Carver. “Not him. Please.”
The nurse glared at McGregor. “That leaves you odd man out,” she said in a voice that would have made Dirty Harry proud.
McGregor grinned, snapped his note pad closed, and slid it and the pencil into his shirt pocket.
“I was leaving anyway, sweet cakes,” he said to the nurse. “I’ve had my health fix for the day.”
He strode over and pushed out through the swinging door, leaving behind only the lingering scent of his cheap deodorant.
“That is a man,” the nurse said, wrinkling her nose, “who is not very nice.”
“Like cancer isn’t a cold,” Carver said.