Midnight Guardians (24 page)

My momentum carried us both into the water, where my fingers went straight for the guy’s face. Go for the eyes, make him panic.

We twisted together, slower in the water than we would have been on land, soaked clothes pulling us down and deterring any quick blows. The heel of the man’s hand came up under my chin, a classic defensive move, but the slickness of water made it easy to dislodge. He tried kicking with his feet, shoes dragging, bereft of velocity. I couldn’t get my fingers in his eye sockets and went for the head. The watch cap was long gone. I got a handful of hair and yanked back and down.

I was a good swimmer. Sherry had always been amazed how long I could hold my breath when we used to go reef snorkeling. With a fistful of hair, I took the guy to the bottom with me. He tried to punch me in the throat, but again the movement was slowed by the water. This wasn’t the street, or a karate dojo. I kicked my bare feet, got behind him, and rode his back toward the bottom. In the deep end, Sherry’s pool was only eight feet. I’d gone down several times to clear the bottom suction drain of big oak leaves. Sometimes I’d empty my lungs of air and just sit down here, looking up at the sun rippling at the surface. On those occasions, I felt I could stay down here for days.

My adversary was not made of the same stuff. I could feel his struggle weakening, his arms going limp. I could actually hear the bubbles of oxygen leaving his throat. Maybe he was screaming, or begging. I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t opened my eyes since diving forward off the fence.

When we made the surface, I heard a gasp. It was mine. I opened my throat and my eyes at the same time and started stroking to the shallow end, dragging a shirt collar in my hand. The man had gone full limp, and when I got to the point I could stand, I drew him near. He was faceup in the water. I pushed my fingers into the side of his cheeks, pried open his jaws, and pulled his head back so his throat was in a straight line. As soon as his airway was open, a huge gurgling intake of breath went into the vacuum and then came back out sputtering.

“What the fuck, man? What the…”

Consciousness came back when the air started going in and out. I was still jacked up with adrenaline. I pulled back hard again on his hair. “Ah, ah, ah,” he yelled.

I took an arm up behind his back, putting some pressure on the shoulder joint when I felt muscle function coming back to him. I determined the guy was in his mid-twenties, maybe 150, 160 pounds. I had him in bulk and height, a distinct advantage now that I had my feet solidly on the bottom of the pool in chest-deep water.

“Who are you, and why the fuck are you here?” I growled into the guy’s ear, turning his head a bit with the twist of hair in my fist.

“I ain’t nobody, man, nobody.”

“That’s good. We start with the truth,” I said, using the arm bar and the hank of hair, plunging his head back into the water. He shook and reached back to claw me with his free hand to no avail. I let him bubble for a few second, just to remind the memory cells of oxygen depravation, and then brought him back up.

“Again—who are you, and why are you here?”

Phlegm was now drooling out of the guy’s mouth. He was back to spitting and coughing. He truly did not like the water. “OK, man, OK. It’s just a job, man.”

“A job? What the hell do you mean, a job?” I said, and could feel the astonishment in my own voice. “You came to fuck with my girlfriend’s home as a job?” I could feel my hand twisting tighter in the guy’s hair, pulling some of it out. I could feel my forearm ratcheting up his elbow; tendons would start popping soon.

“What? You’ve got a contract or something out on her? You do the same thing to the kids in the mobile home, kill them on contract? You set up the kid before that, try to gun him down with your gangbanger buddies? You try to blow me up in my car and take out a woman witness as well?”

The guy was twisting his head a different way now, a way to indicate an answer rather than trying to get free. “I don’t run with no bangers. I work alone, man,” he said, taking deep breaths, but getting the words out clear, almost taking time to be prideful of what he was saying.

“What, you’re some kind of assassin, some kind of contract killer?”

He waited before answering, just long enough to make my fingers flex again and my muscles tense for another dunking. “I’m a professional, man. I don’t do no drive-by shit. That’s for punks.”

“Oh, a professional,” I said, the sarcasm legitimate. “That’s why I’m here to drown your sorry ass because you professionally fucked up your little bomb trick. That’s why you’re trying to mess with a woman cop who has nothing to do with any of the rest of them, because you’re such a professional?”

Letting anger get the best of me, I plunged the guy’s head back down into the water and put my knee in the middle of his back. The bubbles rose. The squirming became violent. I considered, twice, drowning him. It wasn’t exactly water boarding, but it was on the same level.

This time when he came up, his eyes were wide and his mouth was like a gasping fish. “OK, man,” he coughed. “I didn’t know she was a cop. I didn’t know. I knew the other one was a cop, but not this one, man.”

I was concentrating on the phrase
I knew the other one was a cop, but not this one
when I saw blue-and-red lights filtering through the low tree bows and bushes. They were coming without sirens. Someone had called.

“What other one?” I yelled into the man’s ear. “What other cop?”

“The dude on the highway, Mr. Muscle Man sheriff’s deputy. Carlyle said that one had to go like an accident and that’s my thing, you know. I make it look like an accident ‘cause I’m a professional.”

I stared into the water, deciphering what I’d just heard. The guy was actually giving his damn résumé.

“Pinched that motherfucker off, man,” he said, somehow putting braggadocio into his wet voice. “Made him scream like a girl.”

I punched the guy in the back of the head just as the first officer came through Sherry’s back gate. My knuckles snapped and mister pro fessional asshole went out like a light. I dragged him unconscious to the stairs and up onto the pool apron as the officer on scene was holstering his gun.

The wannabe assassin was still breathing, though. I don’t know why I let him.

S
HERRY AND I sat next to each other in the dark on her deck. She’d come in with the second wave of cops through the back gate after I had already pulled the electrical breaker feeding the pool and pump and porch lights, just to be safe. She had wheeled herself up onto the deck and watched as officers scoured her home and yard, considering it a crime scene and—after a quick rundown from me—an attempted attack on one of their own.

After officers hauled the would-be assassin away, the sergeant on duty asked me to sit and wait while he went through the evidence left behind. The intruder’s satchel near the pump stand held a small metal toolbox containing splicing pliers, waterproof electrical tape, wire crimpers, and bolt cutters. Lying on top of the bag was a Beretta 92FS loaded with fifteen rounds of 147-grain ammunition. The factory barrel was threaded and a suppressor was screwed onto the end.

The serial numbers on the gun had been melted off with acid, but I told the sergeant that my attorney had a slug obtained during a necropsy of a pit bull at a mobile home firebombing scene in Palm Beach County. I added that the slug would most likely match up with the ballistics on the Beretta he now had in his hand. The sergeant looked at me, turned to Sherry, and without emotion said, “Shit, this isn’t going to be a simple breaking and entering, is it?”

Then I answered questions for more than an hour while Fort Lauderdale Police crime scene officers went over the pool, the pump stand, and the back fence. Their quick conclusion was that whoever the supposed assassin was, he’d been trying to rig the electrical feed to the pump with a spliced wire that he’d intended to route into the water, thus setting up an electrocution of anyone diving into the pool for a daily swim. It might have worked, they said. Or it just might have shorted out the whole system as soon as anyone turned on the pump.

“Would the suspect know anything about your swimming habits?” the sergeant taking notes asked us. I looked at Sherry and even in the dim light of the houselights could see that flicker of green in her eyes that always means she’s pissed.

“Was some asshole doing surveillance on me, Max?”

I’d started to respond, and then thought better of it. Instead, I raised a finger indicating “wait a minute.” Women like Sherry do not like fingers raised in their faces—hell, I don’t like fingers raised in my face. But she waited.

The sergeant looked at Sherry, then at me, and flipped his notebook closed.

“You did say you’d be following up on this with the sheriff’s office and Chief Hammonds, right, Detective?” he said. Sherry nodded.

“This may very well dovetail into an investigation under the chief’s purview, Sergeant,” she said. The sergeant tried unconvincingly not to roll his eyes.

“Very well, then. This is all most likely above my pay grade,” he said, copying Sherry’s official vernacular, a cant that is often used in law enforcement circles when someone is trying to cover his or her ass. “I’ll be sure that a copy of my report is forwarded to the chief’s attention. Good night, Detective.”

The cops gathered their evidence and left us alone. It was time for me to atone for my raised finger. “I didn’t mean to cut you off,” I started.

“Yes you did.”

“OK,” I said. “I did.”

I let that sit. Medicine, my mother used to say; take it.

“What I wanted to say, but only to you, was that we found a tracking device on my car, the Gran Fury, I mean. We think this guy has been tracking my movements, following wherever I went. A witness saw him at Billy’s beach bungalow where we were keeping Luz Carmen.

“We think he planted a bomb under my car at the ranger station by the shack. And the gun they just took off of him was probably the gun that killed a pit bull at the firebombing of the trailer that killed Carmen’s brother and girlfriend and her teenage son.”

Only part of Sherry’s face was illuminated in the light from the house. She was a tough woman, but not unforgiving.

“So you came racing down here to protect me.” She didn’t voice the
awww
that might come with such a statement—that particular expression was not in Sherry’s vocabulary. But I knew what she meant.

“I tried to call,” I said. “I left messages. I couldn’t reach you.”

“Did you call 911? Did you tell dispatch that a potential assassin might be at an officer’s home?”

“No.”

“Had to do it yourself, right, Max? Knight in shining armor stuff.”

I looked straight out into the darkness. OK, the woman knew me— no wiggling out of it.

“But I did try to call…”

“I was out with Marty Booker,” she said.

I turned to look at her face, the one that has never lied to me.

“He admitted the steroid drug use to me, Max. And he gave me the boxes that the stuff came in. I took the lot numbers to the guys who raided the warehouse and matched them up with the stuff they removed from the place. Booker and his friends were pipelined into the same operation. The Brown Man was supplying the drugs. When Booker got sick of it and told the rest of them he was getting out, that’s when they turned the cold shoulder on him.”

“And how long after that did he end up getting squashed in the accident on the I-595?” I said.

She was running the possible permutations in her head. I was doing them out loud.

“The Brown Man hired an assassin to clean up anyone who could lead back to him,” I said. “He put the asshole onto everyone, including Booker. The collision that crippled him was done by the same idiot they just hauled out of here.”

Sherry was staring at me. Even in the dim light, I could see incredulity on her face, and Sherry does not do incredulity often. “Big supposition, Max.”

I looked out on the pool water, the dark surface reflecting some of the ambient light, the small ripples from a breeze catching glints of it.

“He admitted it.”

“The hit man?”

“Yeah. He named the Brown Man. He said Carlyle named the targets, and then paid him when it was done.”

“Jesus, Max, how’d you get him to give that up?”

“Persuasion.” I couldn’t look up at her.

“The kind that causes unconsciousness and a knot on the back of the head?” she said.

“And probably a little chlorine in the lungs,” I said, still looking away from Sherry’s eyes.

Again, there was silence, but there wasn’t a question in it, more a weighing of justice deserved or denied.

“They won’t be able to use that in court,” she finally said.

“They can flip him,” I said. “A good prosecutor can use the attempted murder of a law enforcement officer to make that kid sing like an American Idol.”

“That would be one legal way to do it,” Sherry said, and the implication was clear.

“I’m not a cop; I’m a PI,” I said, justifying.

She let that excuse sit for several beats, and then reached out and put her hand on top of mine.

“You’re a good man, Max.”

I waited as long as she had before answering.

“Sometimes,” I said.

Y
OU SHOULD HAVE been smarter. But fuck it, man—this was the way it had been pointing all along, isn’t it? You’ve been walking, ha, rolling, down this path, and now it comes to this.

“Marty, I don’t know what to tell you,” the blonde detective said after you spilled your guts.

Yeah, she did know what to tell you. She could have told you straight out that you’d broken the law. Cheated, did the steroids, bought illegal drugs, conspired with a known drug dealer, and broke your entire fucking covenant with the law enforcement community you’d always dreamed of being part of.

But it’s always
what if
, isn’t it?

Enough
what if
, Marty: You know what has to be done.