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brimmed in his eyes. He drew a deep breath and held it.
    As the elevator dropped toward the lobby, he fumbled in his shirt pocket for his sunglasses and put them on, then leaned against the hip-high metal rail along the back wall. Casual Carver.
    The elevator lurched to a stop at the second floor, and a large man with a stomach paunch and a loud tropical print shirt stepped in and unnecessarily punched the glowing button for the lobby. Carver allowed himself to breathe.
    When they reached lobby level, Carver and the paunchy man waited patiently for the elevator doors to slide open. Through his dark glasses, Carver saw that the tropical shirt was festooned with a pattern of brightly colored parrots flitting among brilliant flowers. The man stared directly at him, even raising himself slightly on his toes as if he could peer over the rims of the sunglasses and see what Carver might be concealing.
    “You okay, buddy?” he asked.
    “I’m fine!” Carver snarled at him as the doors slid open on the lobby.
    The paunchy man stood and stared at him as he hurried past him out of the elevator.
    “Hey, buddy,” the man said behind him in a loud, annoyed voice, “don’t take it personal.”
    But Carver didn’t answer or look back. He tightened his grip on the crook of his cane and limped quickly toward the exit and the cauterizing sun.

6
    B ETH 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