Tropical Heat by John Lutz Page B

to good cops,” Carver said, not without a touch of bitterness. Edwina would arch an eyebrow at him if she were there. Cynical Carver. Pessimist. Maybe she was right. It took a while to get over a bullet. Catching one wasn’t like catching a cold.
    He watched a teen-age boy hop up from where he’d been stretched out on a towel and run to dive with splashing abandon into the surf. Carver thought about how he had to enter the water. How he had to crawl.
    Then he thought about how he might be dead now, how the kid at the grocery store might have aimed higher with the junk revolver. The jasmine scent of the flowers became sharper, sweeter.
    Franks stopped walking, leaned on the iron rail, and gazed out over the beach and ocean, his domain on the edge of the world. Disney didn’t have a monopoly on magic kingdoms in Florida; they were dotted up and down the coasts. “There’s something I didn’t tell the police when they asked me about Willis,” he said. “I’ve decided to confide in you.”
    “Why me?”
    “Practicality. My sources tell me you can be trusted, and you’re already into this thing, already searching for Willis.”
    “Then you don’t think he’s dead either?”
    “I’m not sure,” Franks said, “but my bet would be on him being alive. Your earlier visit helped me to decide that. I think he knew it was time to get out, so he faked his suicide and went into hiding.”
    “Time to get out of what?” Carver asked.
    Franks straightened up from the railing. Still looking seaward, he lit a cigar, shielding the flame of his gold lighter expertly with a pale, cupped hand. He exhaled heavily; the breeze shredded the smoke and whisked it away. There was pain on his seamed, congenial salesman features. The gray, suave guy was suffering; this wasn’t going to be easy for him. “For each Sun South unit there are, of course, only a maximum of fifty-two potential buyers, one for each week of the year. I discovered that Willis was selling some of the units more than fifty-two times, writing contracts to different customers for time shares for the same prime weeks. He’d collect their down payment or earnest money, in some cases a large percentage of the time-share price, and deposit the money in a secret Sun South bank account that operated on his signature.”
    “What was supposed to happen when two or more ‘owners’ showed up at the same time to claim their week in the same unit?”
    “Willis planned to have disappeared by then. He made sure the weeks he sold were for next winter, or for units still under construction that wouldn’t be completed until then, so he had months to work his scheme before he had to get out.”
    “How did you discover what he was doing?”
    “Two days after he disappeared, someone at the bank where he had the account contacted me on routine business, keeping up personal contact so Sun South would continue to use the bank. He thought we were happy with their service, and he was surprised when we’d drawn out so much money without explanation. He was even more surprised when I told him we didn’t have an account at his bank. Then I was surprised when he told me Sun South had carried an account there for the past four months, and had drawn out over a hundred thousand dollars the previous week.” Franks smiled helplessly around the cigar, puffed some more smoke, then withdrew the cigar from his mouth and flicked gray ash for the wind to take. “He told me the account’s balance was two hundred dollars.” Franks tried to laugh; it caught like a barb in his throat. “Just enough to keep the account open and not attract too much suspicion.”
    Carver walked away from the railing, to a small concrete bench in the shade of a palm tree, but he didn’t sit down. He looked from the shade out into the sun, where Franks was standing just a few feet away as if he sought the heat to help purge him of what had been done to him.
    “He was an even better salesman than I thought,”