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enough to whiten his knuckles.
    “Where are you going?” Edwina asked.
    “For another swim. I didn’t drip enough water on the floor from the last time I was interrupted.” He tap-tap-tapped to the door with his cane.
    “You don’t get around so bad,” Edwina said, following him outside. The screen door slapped shut behind them and reverberated. “You’ve got a lean, strong body; be thankful for that.”
    “I am,” Carver said, making for the beach. “You should see me run.” A gull wheeled in low and then soared away in an exquisite arc, screaming, as if taunting him with its limitless blue freedom.
    “I’m seeing you run now,” she said. “Away from this case. But you can find Willis. I know it. I can feel it. Lieutenant Desoto knew what he was doing when he sent me here.”
    “That’s your own unreasonable optimism you feel.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with being an optimist,” Edwina said. She sounded annoyed.
    “Not if you thrive on disappointment.” The tip of Carver’s cane hit a soft spot and he almost fell. He was walking too fast; he was annoyed, too.
    “I was warned you were cynical,” Edwina said in disgust.
    Desoto again.
    Near the surf, Carver stopped walking and turned to face her. He didn’t want her to see him backcrawl into the water. She got one of her business cards from her purse and handed it to him. It was an expensive thick white card, engraved with QUILL REALTY and her home and office phone numbers. There was a company logo—a red feather—in the upper right corner.
    “Don’t get it wet,” she said. “Consider my offer and phone me.”
    “Ever think about trying to find Willis yourself?” he asked.
    “I know what I’m good at, Mr. Carver. And what I’m not good at.”
    When she turned and began to walk away, Carver extended his cane and used its crook to catch her elbow, gently pulling her around in the soft sand to face him.
    She stared at him, seemingly more amused than angry. She was too tough to be swayed by strong-arm tactics, she was telling him with that look.
    “If Willis Davis did commit suicide,” Carver said, “he was crazy.”
    She removed the cane from her arm. “I know. And Willis isn’t crazy.”
    Carver sat down at the edge of the surf and watched her walk away down the beach. Carrying her high-heeled shoes, she strode erectly in her tailored dark business suit among the sunbathers, among all that tanned and glistening female flesh. She was the sexiest thing on the sand. Half a dozen male heads turned in her wake to stare at her as Carver was doing.
    He patted his stiff left leg. “Getting well,” he muttered to himself. “Getting well. . . .”
    After carefully placing Edwina’s white business card beneath the cane, far enough up on the beach so it wouldn’t get wet, he turned again to the ocean.
    It was time to get back in the water.

CHAPTER 3
    C ARVER WAS AWAKE at five-thirty the next morning, lying in bed in the dimness, turning over in his mind the day six months before when he’d been injured. The kid had taken careful aim and shot him in the knee for the perverse thrill of it. Probably he’d heard about the Irish Republican Army punishing informers by shattering their kneecaps with gunfire, and thought now that he had a cop cornered it might be fun to try this imaginative and permanent imposition of his will. The kid was doing ten to twenty years now in Raiford Prison for armed robbery and assault. Sometimes Carver wished another con would stick a knife in the kid; other times, more and more often now, he didn’t much care and had to remind himself that he should lust for vengeance.
    He did wish he hadn’t dropped his revolver as commanded when the second holdup man had stepped out of the back room of the all-night grocery store.
    Carver had been off duty that evening and stopped at the store for a pound of ground beef, when he realized a robbery was going down. Realized it by the studied nonchalance of the only other