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each other. But you’re changing the subject. You coming down here with that knife?”
    Time stopped in the bubble of events. Thomas licked his lips. Carver had assumed he was Latin, but up close, even in the dim light, he didn’t look Latin at all, despite the dark hair and mustache.
    “Please come down here,” Carver said.
    That did it. Thomas wasn’t the type to be told what to do, even if a “please” happened to be attached. Deftly folding the knife closed, he retreated another few steps, moving backward up the stairs easily, nimbly, still facing Carver. “I know what you look like,” he said, almost spitting the angry words. “Don’t you forget that.” He backed up two more steps, into the shadows of the landing.
    “And I know what you look like,” Carver told him. “Like a million other guys who know that down deep they don’t have what they need.”
    He edged to the street door, then pushed it open and moved outside. As he limped away, he listened for the door to sweep open behind him, for Thomas’s rushing footsteps.
    But no one emerged from the building.
    Carver returned to the Olds and lowered himself into the warm vinyl upholstery.
    As he put the transmission lever in drive and pulled away from the curb, he saw Enrico Thomas in the second-floor-west apartment. He’d struck an absurdly dramatic pose, standing squarely at the window like an anorexic, miniaturized colossus with fists on hips, watching Carver as kings on balconies gaze down on subjects about to be ill-used.
    Carver thought, A dangerous man with a knife.
    He was shaking badly as he drove away.

4
    T HE LIGHTS WERE burning in his modest but private beach cottage when Carver parked the Olds next to Beth’s car. Her car was a LeBaron convertible, like Donna Winship’s, only white rather than gray, the sort used in droves by car rental companies in Florida and then sold by local dealers. The similarities in the women’s cars was enough of a reminder of life’s impermanence that Carver was eager to get inside the cottage and talk with Beth, touch her, in appreciation of her continued if fragile existence. Of his own.
    Beth, a tall black woman with the look of a tribal queen turned fashion model, was seated on the sofa by the lamp, barefoot and wearing Carver’s faded blue terrycloth robe. When he came through the door, she set aside the three or four sheets of white paper she’d been reading. She was a journalist for Burrow , a small and gutsy local weekly newspaper that sent its reporters where angels feared to tread. Beth liked that.
    “Get what you wanted?” she asked. The lamp starkly side-lighted her strong features, her prominent cheekbones and forehead. She was a woman who’d seen far too much for most people, but not for her. She’d fought her way out from under, starting with the Chicago slum of her girlhood, and would keep fighting. Everything about her told you that, from her regal, undefeated bearing to the bite of her words when she was angry and the directness of her gaze as she assessed the world. Her eyes were different tonight, though; she’d been crying.
    It was cooler inside the cottage, but still too warm. Carver crossed the plank floor to the small kitchen area, opened the refrigerator and got out a cold Budweiser. “I know where Enrico Thomas lives—if that’s his name.” He went to the couch and sat down next to Beth. She snatched away the article she’d been working on before he sat on it.
    He was going to kiss her, but her arm was around his neck and she was kissing him. She smelled of scented soap and shampoo. She leaned away, smiling, but with her eyes still sad.
    He said, “I appreciate you.”
    “Works both ways, Fred.”
    He told her about following Thomas from Riley’s Clam Shop into Orlando, the confrontation inside the building, the different name above the apartment’s mailbox.
    “Where’s that leave you?” she asked.
    “Waiting until morning. Then I’ll call Desoto and see if