Carver rolled off the bed and dropped to the floor, pressing his cheek to the rough carpet and sucking for breathable air, praying for it. He pulled more smoke into his lungs, gagged, and coughed.
For a moment he lay still, willing himself to control the terror that threatened to panic him, trying to blot out the vision of a man he’d discovered in a burned car when he was still in the police department. He hadn’t recognized the thing on the front seat as a man at first. He’d-
Carver actually snarled at himself, jolting his mind from surrender and certain death. He groped for the bed, the legs of the nightstand, to get his bearings, and began to crawl toward the door, dragging his stiff leg. Every few feet he’d press his face to the carpet and draw a cautious, shallow breath, enough air to allow himself another foot or so of progress.
Finally his rigid fingertips bumped into the smooth hard surface of the door. He scrambled against it, raising his body, found the doorknob and turned it.
The door was locked.
Carver grasped the knob tightly, squeezing frantically to keep his sweaty fingers from slipping off the slick metal, and pulled his body higher.
He found the sliding bolt lock, fumbled with it, feeling a shock of pain as he bent back a fingernail and instinctively jerked his hand away.
Grasping the lock again, more carefully, he gradually forced the bolt sideways, until it jammed. He shoved hard against it. He lost his footing then, supporting his entire weight for a second by painfully squeezing the hard metal lock between his thumb and forefinger. Then his grip was torn loose.
He wasn’t sure if the bolt had slid free. But when he fell backward, the door swung open.
Immediately the air down low was breathable, as dark smoke rolled from the room. Carver heard voices, the wailing yodel of a fire truck or police car. The siren got closer, louder, deafening, then growled to reluctant silence like a record running down. He dragged himself forward, over the hard-edged threshold, out onto the concrete in front of the open door. Then he wriggled off to the side, away from the black pall of smoke.
Multicolored lights were suddenly dancing around him. People were shouting. Soles scraped on concrete. Another siren sent up a wail in the distance. Hands grabbed him roughly beneath the arms and pulled him away. His stockinged feet bounced painfully over the rough concrete and he struggled awkwardly to stand and walk on his own, forgetting for a moment that he had only one good leg.
“Easy, fella,” a very calm voice said. He was allowed to slump down against a wall. Something soft and confining, a mask, was placed over Carver’s mouth and nose. For a moment he panicked and tried to shake it from his face. “Breathe in, buddy, not too hard,” the calm voice instructed, making it all routine.
Carver obeyed and instantly knew he was breathing in oxygen. He’d experienced the heady sensation before, during a police training session. He held the mask to his face himself, sucking in more of the clean, smokeless nectar.
He fought off dizziness, then sat for about ten minutes taking in oxygen, his head thrown back. There was the very stuff of life, usually taken for granted.
At last he experimentally removed the mask, drew a breath, and found that his respiratory system had returned more or less to normal.
He began to take an interest beyond his survival. Two yellow fire engines were parked at angles in front of the motel. From one ran a jumble of hoses. Several uniformed firemen were busy at the motel-room door and window, feeding water into the room. One of the hoses ran around to the back of the building. A police car was parked next to the swimming pool, and a skinny redheaded man was in discussion with a tan-uniformed patrolman. There was an ambulance parked next to the police car. The roof lights on both vehicles were flashing red and blue, playing off the still water in the pool with a kaleidoscope effect.
Carver used the wall to brace against and drew himself to his feet. A hand gently touched his arm; a fireman had been standing nearby to make sure he didn’t fall. The man had a round, concerned face, a wild shock of graying hair. The one who’d supplied the oxygen?
“Do you need medical attention?” a voice asked. The cop had walked over to stand next to Carver. A young medical attendant from the ambulance was with him.
Carver glanced at the ambulance and shook his head no. “I think I’m okay,” he said. “A phone call woke me up just in time to get out.”
“Thank God for that!” the redheaded man who’d been talking with the uniformed cop said. He introduced himself as Jack Daninger, the owner of the Tumble Inn, and assured Carver that the motel sincerely regretted this and would do everything possible to ensure Carver’s comfort. Daninger was solicitous enough to be embarrassing. He wouldn’t go away until Carver flatly told him that he wasn’t going to sue the motel. Carver thought, not for the first time, that lawyers had screwed up the country.
An unmarked white Plymouth sedan rocked to a stop behind the patrol car. From the Plymouth emerged a short, paunchy man in a rumpled brown suit. Despite his lack of physical stature and his near-obesity, there was a suggestion of carefully contained power in the way he looked over the scene and walked toward Carver and the uniformed patrolman. He’d been in places like this before, his glance and his walk said; he knew the steps to this dance.
“What happened here?” he asked.
“Fire, sir,” the patrolman said, offering the short explanation.
The paunchy man glared at him.
“Don’t know yet where or how it started,” the patrolman said, trying to recover status in the eyes of a superior. The superior. No doubt about the pecking order here.
“Find out.”
When the patrolman had hurried away, the man said, “I’m Harvey Armont, police chief here in Solarville.” He shook hands with Carver. He had beefy, rounded cheeks, with an oddly sharp nose that didn’t appear to belong on such a face. His dark eyes were searching, uncompromising cop’s eyes; his permanently arched black eyebrows gave him a worldly expression. “It looks as if the fire was pretty much confined to your room,” he said.
Carver twisted his body, his palm still flat on the wall, and looked. Armont was right; Carver’s seemed to be the only room affected. There was no more smoke, only the scorched, acrid scent that hung over every water-soaked fire scene. He realized he hadn’t seen flames.
“You here on business, Mr. Carver?” Armont asked. His voice was amiable but insistent, demanding a reply. That voice would probe, soothe, cajole, trick, seep like water through any cracks in the truth.
Carver knew he might as well give Armont what he was going to get anyway. “Yes, I’m a private detective.” He dug his wallet out of his wrinkled pants and showed the chief his license and some identification.
Armont looked over at the open door and soaked carpet of Carver’s room. “That’s interesting, considering the nature of the fire.”
“What nature?” Carver asked. “It might have been spontaneous combustion, or faulty wiring in a light switch.”
“There’s really no such thing as spontaneous combustion,” the chief said.
Another police car pulled into the lot and parked near the driveway, a gray Ford, from a nearby town, its driver drawn by radio traffic to the fire. The driver nodded to Chief Armont, one curious professional to another, but didn’t get out of the car.
The uniformed cop had returned, eager to make amends and get back on the road to promotion. “The conflagration started in a trash can behind the building,” he said. “The wooden eaves over the can caught fire, and part of the second-floor railing. The air-conditioner to this one room sucked in most of the smoke. It looks like somebody might have tossed a lighted cigarette into the can. Or maybe, hot night like this, it was spontaneous combustion.”
Armont looked at Carver without changing expression. The tone of his voice was the same, too. “In this kind of situation, the motel will fix you up with another room, Mr. Carver. Come morning, you drop by my office and we’ll talk.”
Carver nodded, catching sight of Armont’s wristwatch. Eleven-thirty. He realized that most of the illumination there was from the lightbars of emergency vehicles, fooling him into thinking it was early morning. He’d only been asleep for two hours when the phone had rung. Desoto, almost certainly, waking him and saving his life.
“One thing,” Carver said. “My cane is in there.” He nodded toward the disaster of a motel room.
The chief looked down at Carver’s legs, realizing perhaps for the first time that Carver was lame. Then he shot a commander’s sharp glance at the patrolman, and said, “Rogers.”
Rogers bustled into the room, lifting his black regulation shoes high on the spongy carpet. Carver could hear the slosh of the officer’s footfalls.
A minute later he returned, handed Carver the cane, and smiled. He waited around for a moment expectantly, like a dog that had recovered a stick for its owner and anticipated a biscuit in reward.
Carver thanked him; it was the best he could do. He got the impression that with a little incentive, maybe two biscuits, Rogers would charge alone into a Mafia stronghold.
“You lock your door now, Mr. Carver,” Armont said, as Carver turned and limped toward redheaded Daninger, who was standing before an open door to a room at the other end of the motel and maintaining his sickly, don’t-sue-me grin.
“Is there anything you want from your room before morning?” Daninger asked. “Anything at all?”
Carver told him no. His wallet, with all his money in it, and his keys, were in his pants pockets. One of the few advantages of falling asleep with your clothes on. He was missing only his shoes, and knew they’d be soaked and unwearable.
“Curt will launder all your clothes and get them to you in the morning,” Daninger said through his uncertain, pleading grin. “And of course anything you’ve lost will be replaced.”
Carver found himself feeling sorry for Daninger, small-town businessman staring into the loaded barrels of years of expensive litigation. It was enough to make any entrepreneur jittery. “You’ve done everything possible, Mr. Daninger,” he said. “Thanks.”
Daninger was at least somewhat relieved. Carver accepted the key to his new room, went inside, and locked the door carefully.
He lay awake for a long time, listening to the emergency vehicles racing their engines and departing one by one. The fire-truck drivers blasted air horns and clanged bells, as if they were merging with traffic on a crowded four-lane highway.
Finally Carver dozed off.
He slept two hours out of the next eight, popping awake now and then, imagining he smelled smoke.