Midnight Guardians (21 page)

So you’re trying to get your shit straight, be cool, be more upbeat than you are, and what does she say right off, “Hey, 1969 Mustang, right?”

I mean, what are you gonna say to a woman who knows a ‘69 Mustang when she sees just the ass end of one? Then she legitimately likes the car, rolls around the garage, touching the body, letting her fingers glide along the fenders, flips the chrome rings on the cable hood tie-downs. Then she asks you, actually asks you, to start the car up again, so she can listen. You swing your chair around and get the driver-side door open, and reach in to hit the ignition. We listen to the purr. Then you swing around, roll yourself up the lifts, and while she watches, you poke the accelerator arm and get that bubble of power going through the exhaust manifolds. She seems legitimately interested.

Then she starts saying something, maybe asking questions. But the noise gets in the way, so you shut the engine down again.

“You know, there’s this guy down in Hollywood who had hand controls installed on his restored GTO.”

You nod, but don’t say anything.

“He came back from Iraq without any feet after some IED explosion wounded him—happy as a clam to be driving again.”

Yeah, OK, possible, you say. But then she looks at you and gets it out of her mouth, coming straight to it, no more bullshit. “What’s really bothering you, Marty? What’s got a hold of you inside?”

It was that plain and simple. She asked, and you spilled, man. Don’t know why. Even now you don’t know why. But you tossed it all right out there and, man, if she were a plant by IA and were wearing a wire, you put it all down there on tape—stool-pigeoned on the whole gang. Fuck ‘em.

Fuck me, too. I mean, how the hell did you get involved in taking deliveries of drugs from a fucking twelve-year-old kid anyway? Shit, the first time, you actually thought the other guys were just messing with you. Hey, go pick up the box from the dealer out at the Swap Shop on Sunrise. Here’s the money everybody put together. And when you get there at the designated time, this kid walks right up to my Mustang and starts checking her out, staring and cooing and touching her just like the detective did.

He’s saying, “Whoa, a ‘69 Stang! Man, that’s sweet.”

And you say, “Hey, great kid, but I got business here, so take off, eh?’ The kid just nods his head, squeezes the box under his arm, and says, “You got the rim blow steering wheel and that teak accent stuff inside?”

He’s starting to stick his head in the passenger-side window. You’re like, “Hey, hey, hey, little dude, you know your cars. But I’m workin’ here.”

Then he backs off and holds up the box and goes, “Cool. If you don’t want your merchandise, I’ll just take it back home.”

And fuck the guy who sent him out. Fucking Brown Man. Shit, the drug squad says they’ve been messing with that guy for years, say he doesn’t work the streets anymore, but he’s plugged into whatever anyone wants. Still, what kind of dealer sends a child out to make deliveries?

Yeah, I know—the kind who knows that a minor won’t get popped as hard as an adult even if he gets caught. But shit, you even felt sorry for the kid. He loved the car, man, loved the classics as much as I had when I was his age. You actually like the kid. So why make the exchange?

Shit. You don’t even know why. You fucked up again, got into it, and could have gotten out, but didn’t. You made the exchange and had been making them ever since, buying up the steroids, and then turning the other way when the other shit started showing up in the box as well.

And you told all of it to her—told Sherry Richards the whole deal. I ratted them out to a pretty, one-legged detective, and you know what? Fuck ‘em. It felt good.

I
N THE MORNING, I was sitting outside on my small dock at water level when Billy called. The sun was still rising, and low beams were working their way through the veil of green.

After my conversation last night with Sherry, I’d rejoined Luz Carmen at the table and silently finished my coffee. Then I gathered a sleeping bag from my armoire and told my guest that I’d be sleeping down on the dock. It wasn’t the first time I’d spent the night there. At certain times of the year, the mosquitoes are dormant and the temperature pleasant. I like the openness of the air. I like to stare up at the tree canopy and watch stars slip in and out of the foliage. That wasn’t my motivation last night. With a woman client upstairs, I told myself I was being a professional. Maybe sometime in the future, I’d tell Sherry the same thing.

Billy’s call had come while I’d still been dozing.

“My ballistics guy says it probably came from a pistol with a suppressor attached. He based that on the lack of extensive powder burns on the animal’s scalp,” Billy said.

“You have a ballistics guy?”

“I took photos of the bullet removed during the necropsy and passed them on to an expert, Max.”

“And the original went to the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office?”

“Of course,” Billy said. “We are cooperating one hundred percent with the authorities.”

“They could trace it with a comparison,” I said. “Maybe get lucky.”

“Yes. If they expedite it, they might come up with something in a year or two.”

Again, that cynicism in Billy’s voice—that’s usually my way of talking. But we both know how swamped and understaffed crime labs are. No one in the business watches the popular TV shows without scoffing at how they depict results that magically pop up instantaneously.

“Anything else with the dog?” I said.

“Like?”

“Well, maybe it had a wallet in its mouth along with a chunk of butt flesh?”

“No such luck, Max. But that breed is known to clamp down and never let go. I wouldn’t doubt if Fido got in a bite. You saw how silent and sneaky the beast was. We can turn the dog’s remains over to the sheriff along with our theory. They might take some blood samples from its mouth, but again…”

“Yeah, by next year,” I said.

As we spoke, I became aware of a subtle movement to my right. I did not turn my head, and looked only by cutting my eyes in that direction. A tricolored heron about two feet tall was just yards away, stalking the shallow water for baitfish. The eye on my side of its head wandered, but I can never tell what direction a bird is looking. This one’s bill was long and tapered, like an old woman’s knitting needle, and its wings, neck, and head were slate blue. A white line ran the length of its throat. It raised one orange-colored foot and then froze, like a dancer, balanced for a strike or for a sudden leap in the choreography. Billy’s and my conversation had stopped, and the silence seemed to have frozen us all.

“How is Ms. Carmen?” Billy finally asked.

“Upstairs,” I answered. Suddenly, as if I had been directing the bird alone, there was a flutter and then a big
whoosh
of wing and air and the utterance of a harsh
GAWK
as the heron rose and pirouetted gracefully through an opening in the trees, and vanished.

“She’s fine,” I said, looking up through the now empty hole in the canopy. “Safe.”

“Can she stand it for a couple of days while I keep pushing the feds for some protective custody? This proof that someone shot the dog and that same someone probably set off the explosion should crank up the pressure.”

I turned my head to the doorway up the stairs above me. “I don’t know, Billy. I’ll have to ask her.”

“Be convincing, Max.”

Convincing someone to stay isolated in the middle of nowhere is mostly determined by whether that someone has an affinity for being alone. I discovered the ability in myself by crawling into books when I was young, disappearing into worlds I’d never seen, reading conversations between people I would never meet, absorbing life lessons through characters overcoming odds I would most likely never face. I used the ability as a refuge, taking a book and a flashlight under my covers as a kid while my drunk and violent father bounced my mother off the walls downstairs in the middle of the night. I wiped tears from my eyes and read the pages, trying to escape with Huck Finn or walk a new beach on Treasure Island while the muffled gasps and sharp curses ricocheted up the stairwell.

But Luz Carmen’s brother was dead, and I had not seen her shed a tear. She had not yet claimed his body. She might hide, but the reality was not going away.

I stepped quietly up the stairs, and when I opened the door to the shack, my eyes went immediately to the sunlight sifting through the east window. Luz had figured out how to adjust the Bahama shutters and was raised up in the bottom bunk of the bed, reading. She met my look and nodded a good morning.

“Coffee?” I said, moving to reload the stove with wood, and then start the fire.

“Yes, please.”

“Did you sleep?”

“Did you?”

I rinsed and then filled my tin coffeepot with water.

“Some,” I said. “It was a little cool.”

“The heat rises,” she said. And when I looked over, she was still looking at the book, her knees up, acting as a platform.

I scooped coffee into the small, one-legged basket, and then lowered it into the pot. I washed the cover after removing the small glass percolator bubble, and then remounted it. I opened a lid on the stove top and set the pot over the open flame.

“I can make some oatmeal,” I said, pulling a chair out from the table. From here, I could see that Luz Carmen was still fully dressed. She’d slept in her clothes, as had I.

“I want to see my brother,” she said, finally letting the book slide down into her lap.

“I know,” I said, and then recounted Billy’s morning message—that the dog had been killed by a gunman. “They’ll most likely want to do an autopsy now on your brother’s body. They’ll probably assign homicide now. They’ll start working it harder, faster.”

Luz took in the information without reaction, staring ahead at some vision all her own. But the filtered sun caught the moisture on her cheeks and glistened. “I killed my own brother,” she said, the words coming out of her mouth even though I couldn’t even see that her lips had moved.

“If you play along, and if you keep your mouth shut. If you simply work and keep your head down and see nothing, you live,” she said. Her voice was not whiny or complaining, but stilted and rote and without emotion. “My brother would be alive if not for me.”

Billy and I have had this conversation deep into many nights on his balcony facing the sea: Is the man who sits by and ignores the criminality taking place in his sight as complicit as the man doing the crime? What about the Germans who watched the camp trains being loaded with Jews, or the Iraqi citizens who saw the roadside bomb being planted and turned the other way? Not to mention the Wall Street underlings who shook their heads and zipped their lips when they knew the bundled mortgages would never pass muster?

I was not up for a debate with a grieving woman. I stayed silent for a long time.

“I need to bury my brother,” Luz said.

“You will,” I told her.

B
Y EARLY AFTERNOON, I had replaced a rotting plank of wood on the port side of my dock, freed up a jammed window sash, fixed a hole in a screen that looked like it had been plucked open by an animal—rodent, bird, or reptile based on its size, the meticulous snipping, and random uselessness. I’d also finished the first quarter of Peter Matthiessen’s
Shadow Country
, a Florida history lesson unparalleled.

Luz Carmen staked out a spot down on the dock. Apparently, she’d finished the English-language version of
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
and was starting on my paperback copy of
All Quiet on the Western Front
, which she must have dug out of the back of the armoire while I was sleeping outside. Her choice of reading material while grieving over a dead brother was not mine to ponder, but I do have an innate problem with people who can read so damn fast. How do they do it without missing the subtleties, innuendo, and small word gems that authors sweat through and take days of writing and rewriting to achieve? It seems both cheating, and self-cheating.

But I am a slow reader, and it’s probably just jealousy. I read slowly. I write slowly, and none too poetically considering that most of my experience has been filling out incident reports as a cop and now writing up surveillance narratives for Billy. When I stole glances at Luz, I noted that every once in a while she would look up from the book and stare out into the green of the river forest.

What was in her mind’s eye was hers alone. I thought of the advice shrinks give, that people shouldn’t be alone at times of great loss. But who isn’t alone with their thoughts? You handle them your own way, and hopefully grow stronger. Closure is bullshit. In the absence of some kind of biological memory wipe, there is no such thing. Personal loss is always with us. We learn to live with it; we don’t make it go away.

I was about to interrupt Luz for a late lunch when my cell phone rang.

“Mr. Freeman, this is Dan, over at the ranger station.”

“Yeah?”

“I just wanted to give you a heads-up that Joey finished with your truck and dropped it by here. So it’s in the parking lot.”

“Great, Dan. Thanks. I appreciate it,” I said, wondering what the hell the real reason for the call was. Dan had been around long enough to know that when I was at the shack I often didn’t make contact with him or anyone else for days or weeks at a time. He wouldn’t call with something as minor as my truck being dropped off.

“What else, Dan?”

“Uh, well, I wanted to let you know there was somebody messing around near your Gran Fury early this morning, just around daybreak. I was up, and I keep an eye out. When I saw the guy, I scared him off with my big beam flashlight.” The ranger had started out with reticence, as if he didn’t want to be the one giving me bad news. Now his words were running as fast as he could get them out.

“He scrambled the hell out of there fast. I looked over the car this morning; it doesn’t look like he got it open or anything like that—no scratches or nothing. Probably just some kid, you know, looking for an unlocked car to steal change and stuff out of.”