Midnight Rambler jc-1

by James Swain

  “Please answer the question.”

  The injuries that I'd inflicted upon Simon Skell had been in the newspapers enough times that I imagined every person in the courtroom could recite them from memory.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Mr. Carpenter, isn't it true that while you ran the Missing Persons unit of the Broward County Police Department, you conducted a personal vendetta against people committing violent crimes of a sexual nature?”

  “No, I did not.”

  Howe flipped over the sheets of paper in his hand and shoved them beneath my nose. “Do you recognize these, Mr. Carpenter?”

  I looked down and studied the pages.

  “No,” I said.

  “You're saying you don't know what they are?”

  “No, I didn't bring my glasses.”

  The jury rewarded me with a few thin smiles. Scowling, Howe displayed the sheets to them. “These are certificates of death issued by the warden at Florida State Prison in Starke for three sexual predators who Jack Carpenter sent there. These certificates were found thumbtacked to Jack Carpenter's office door the day he left the police force.”

  Howe faced me. “You put them on your door, didn't you, Mr. Carpenter?”

  “That's correct,” I said.

  “Would you care to explain why?”

  “If a bad guy died in the joint, I usually let the other detectives know. We liked to keep up on that sort of thing.”

  Howe bore a hole into me with his eyes. “Isn't it true, Mr. Carpenter, that you sent information to the warden at Starke that was so damaging to these men's reputations that it eventually led to them being murdered by other inmates?”

  “I'm sorry, but which men are you're talking about?” I asked.

  Howe read off the three men's names from the CODs. Finished, he glanced up at me with a smug look on his face.

  “Recognize them, Mr. Carpenter?”

  “They sound familiar, but I'm not sure,” I said.

  Howe looked to the judge's box. “Your Honor, the witness is being evasive.”

  “Mr. Carpenter, you are required to answer the question,” Battles said in a scolding voice. “Do you recognize the three names Mr. Howe just read, or don't you?”

  Howe was accusing me of ethical misconduct. It was a hard charge to make stick, and it would have been easy for me to deny that I'd set those three men up. But I had something else in mind.

  “Your Honor, I honestly don't remember if I did or not,” I said. “Perhaps the defense would be so kind as to jog my memory.”

  Battles was a thirty-year veteran of the legal system and had seen his share of artful dodges in the courtroom. He studied me before replying.

  “How would you propose Mr. Howe do that?” Battles asked.

  “Have the defense read aloud the crimes these three men committed. I'm sure that once I hear what they did, I'll remember them and can tell Mr. Howe if I sent information to the warden at Starke that was inappropriate.”

  A disapproving howl came out of Howe's throat. The last thing he wanted was to have his client associated with the heinous crimes committed by the three men whose names were on those CODs.

  Battles silenced Howe with a wave of the hand. Then he removed his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. There were many people in the Broward legal system who did not approve of the things I did as a cop. But there were also many who did. I had always wondered which side of the fence Battles stood on.

  “That sounds like a fine idea,” Battles said. “Mr. Howe, read the crimes.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I descended the courthouse steps, tugging off my tie. Howe had spent another twenty minutes soiling me before finally quitting. I am a big guy with a reputation for being tough, but it doesn't mean I don't feel pain. The tie landed in a trash bin, which I kicked for good measure.

  Crossing the parking lot, I tried to put the trial out of my mind. I could not change the past or predict the future, so I'd learned to accept the present for what it is. My daughter taught me this trick, and so far, it seemed to be working.

  My car was parked in the back of the lot. I drove a dinosaur called an Acura Legend. The salesman had said it would be a classic one day, but he'd never mentioned that the line was being discontinued. I left it unlocked with the windows open, and no one had tried to steal it.

  Buster was asleep on the passenger seat and didn't stir until I opened my door. Remembering my manners, I let him out. He hiked his leg on a Porsche with a vanity plate that read ISUE, then circled my car while sniffing the ground. Something was bothering him, and I came around the passenger side to have a look.

  Then I cursed.

  Someone had keyed the passenger door and left a message.

  SICK COP

  I ran my fingers across the words. They were too deep to buff out. The door would have to be repainted. Only I don't have the money. I looked disdainfully at Buster.

  “Some watchdog you are,” I said.

  I lived in nearby Dania, a sleepy beach town known for its musty consignment shops and antique stores that sold the world's best junk. Most days, time stood still here, which suited me just fine. As I drove down Dania Beach Boulevard toward home, the ocean's dank, funky smell filled my car.

  Pulling into the Sunset Bar and Grille on the northern tip of Dania Beach, I parked in the building's shade. The Sunset was a rough-hewn two-story structure, with half sitting on the beach and the other half resting on wood stilts over the ocean. I lived in a rented studio directly above the bar. My room was small, but the ocean view made it feel big. My rent was four hundred and fifty bucks a month, plus sitting on a stool next to the cash register on busy nights with a mean look on my face. So far, no one had robbed the place, and the owner seemed happy with the arrangement.

  My cell phone rang, and I glanced at the Caller ID. It was Jessie, checking up on me. My daughter did this every day. I knew I should be grateful, but all it did was remind me of how far I'd fallen.

  “Hey, honey, how's it going?” I answered.

  “Great,” Jessie said. “How are you? How's Buster?”

  “I'm okay. Buster is Buster.”

  “How was the trial? Did you make out okay?”

  “I survived.”

  “I hope they strap that son of a bitch into Sparky and fry his brains out.”

  Sparky was the infamous malfunctioning electric chair at Starke prison. A few days after Ted Bundy got juiced, the favorite joke among cops was to call each other and say, “Did you hear the news? Ted Bundy just stopped smoking.”

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” I said, “but the state has switched to lethal injection.”

  “That sucks,” Jessie said. “Do you have any tips for me? The game is tomorrow night, and I need to get the team ready. We've got practice in an hour.”

  I grabbed a legal pad covered with scribble off the backseat. I hadn't done much with my daughter until she started playing basketball. Then I attended every high school game she played, and traveled with her to state finals. When she went to Florida State University on a basketball scholarship, I started calling a local bookie I knew. Women's hoops are big in Florida and, as a result, had a betting line. My bookie would get the skinny on the teams Florida State was playing, and pass it on to me.

  “Here you go,” I said. “Mayweather, their leading scorer, is in a slump. She picks up her shooting in the second half, so double-team her late in the game. Cooper, one of their forwards, missed December with a mystery illness, and is only good for twenty minutes. Run her around and she'll fold. Fisher, Cooper's sub, can't shoot but is a good passer. The team has a tendency to rush their shots when they get behind. That's it.”

  “That's brilliant,” my daughter said. “Coach wants to take you out to dinner the next time you visit.”

  “Tell her she's on.”

  “I will. Have you talked to Mom? I did. She asked about you the other day, wanted to know how you were making out.”

  “I'm
doing fine. Tell her that, okay?”

  “Why don't you tell her?”

  I stared through the windshield at the Sunset. Talking about my wife made me want to get drunk. I had screwed up our marriage and couldn't bear discussing it.

  “Mom wants to know how you're doing financially,” my daughter went on. “How are you making out, Dad?”

  My financial situation was a disaster, courtesy of Simon Skell's sister, who had brought a civil suit against me for the beating I'd inflicted upon her brother. The cost of hiring a lawyer to defend me had wiped me out.

  “I'm living like a king,” I said.

  “But where's the money coming from? You're not robbing banks, are you?”

  “I'm doing jobs for people.”

  “You mean detective jobs that you don't want to talk about.”

  Most of the work I did these days was helping understaffed police forces around the state find missing kids. It was my specialty, and the departments paid me under the table for my services, not wanting my name to appear on any internal documents.

  “That's right,” I said.

  “Oh crap, look at the time,” my daughter said. “I've got to run.

  Love you, Daddy.”

  “I love you, too.”

  A cold beer was calling me as I walked into the Sunset's horseshoe-shaped bar. Sitting at the bar were the same seven sunburned rummies who had been there since I started renting my room. I called them the Seven Dwarfs, since it was rare to see any of them standing upright. Sonny, the multi tattooed, multi pierced, shaven-headed bartender, sauntered over.

  “Nice suit,” Sonny said. “You getting married or laid out?”

  “I was in court,” I said.

  “All those traffic tickets finally catch up with you?”

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Peace, love, and understanding. Barring that, a good blow job.”

  Sonny was an ex-con and loved to get under my skin. Because of his record, he legally shouldn't have been tending bar, just as I shouldn't have been doing private jobs for the police. Knowing each other's secret had formed a special bond between us.

  “What do you want?” I repeated.

  “A woman has been calling for you,” Sonny said. “She sounded hysterical, said she needed to talk to you. Sounds like a booty call.”

  “What's her name?”

  He started to wipe the bar with a dirty rag. “I put it in the till.”

  “You going to get it for me?”

  “What's it worth to you?”

  Sonny was going to end up back in prison if someone didn't straighten him out. I dropped my voice. “A punch in the face-that's what it's worth.”

  “You'd hit me in front of all these customers?”

  “If I ask them, they'll probably hold you down.”

  The loopy grin left Sonny's face. He got a slip of paper from the till and slapped it on the bar. I read the name printed on it and felt myself shudder. Julie Lopez. Six months earlier, I had helped Julie come to grips with a loss that no one should have to bear. I hadn't seen her since, knowing that my presence would only open deep wounds.

  I walked outside and punched her number into my cell phone. Julie answered immediately, her voice riddled with grief.

  “It's Jack Carpenter,” I said. “What's wrong?”

  “The police found Carmella,” she wailed.

  “Where?”

  “In my backyard!”

  My head started to spin, and I leaned against the building and tried to compose myself. What Julie was saying couldn't be true. Carmella Lopez was murdered by Simon Skell, who made her disappear just the way he made seven other young women disappear. Of all the places he might have put Carmella's body, Julie's backyard couldn't be one of them.

  “What are the police saying?”

  “They think Ernesto did it.”

  “Is Ernesto there with you?”

  “The police arrested him and took him away.”

  “Did you call a lawyer?”

  “I ain't got no money. You've got to help me. I don't know what to do.”

  My head would not stop spinning. The police were wrong. I told myself that if I went to Julie's house I would get to the truth of the matter.

  “I'm coming right now,” I said.

  “Hurry,” she begged me.

  Dania Beach was separated from the mainland by a short steel bridge. I raced across it and soon was on 595, driving toward the western reaches of the county. The sky was a murderous black, and large drops of rain pelted my windshield. I was heading into a storm, but I didn't slow down.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I parked at the end of Julie Lopez's driveway, my wipers furiously beating back the rain. The neighborhood had always been marginal but had slipped further since my last visit, with cars parked on lawns and black security bars on most windows.

  Two police cruisers were parked in front of me. The cops were not going to be happy to see me, but it was a free country. I told Buster to lie down, and he shot me a disapproving look. Aussies are bred for herding, and my dog would have liked nothing better than to spend every waking moment by my side.

  I got out and within seconds was soaked to the bone. I trudged up the driveway to the wooden privacy fence that enclosed Julie's backyard. When I stepped through the gate, my feet went ankle-deep in water. If lightning hit nearby, I would be history, yet I continued to slosh ahead. Four uniformed cops and a plainclothes detective were huddled in the backyard. They were looking at something, and I wanted to see what it was.

  Carmella Lopez had been my last case as a cop. She and her sister were both prostitutes. Carmella turned tricks in a massage parlor, Julie through a live-in pimp named Ernesto. When Carmella went missing one day, Julie called and asked me to find her. I took the case and during my investigation stumbled across Simon Skell, whom I linked to Carmella's disappearance as well as to seven other missing women in the sex business. There wasn't much hard evidence, just a lot of circumstantial threads that pointed to a rampaging sociopath. The district attorney bought my theories and took Skell to trial. The judge threw out everything but Carmella's case, so the DA tried that. We won, and Skell was sent to Starke.

  Yellow police tape lay on the grass. Ignoring it, I sneaked up behind two uniforms and peeked through the gap between their broad shoulders. They were standing beside a coffin-shaped hole. A decomposed woman's body rested at the bottom of the hole. Dressed in a red bikini, she clutched an object between two hands propped on her stomach.

  Something in my chest dropped. Even though the woman's face was gone, I knew who it was. Carmella.

  Lightning crashed nearby, rocking the ground. None of us flinched. We'd all stood in this shit before. I started backing up. This was the last place on earth I should've been. Suddenly a voice roared my name.

  “Carpenter!”

  Plainclothes detective Bobby Russo broke from the group and rushed toward me. The head of Broward Homicide, his meaty Irish face resembled a four-alarm blaze. Around his neck hung a necktie painted to look like a dead fish. It was Russo who'd coined the phrase “My day starts when your day ends.”

  Russo threw me to the ground and started kicking me. He was out of shape, and the kicks lacked sting. He shouted my name as if he'd already looked into the future and seen what a nightmare I'd created for him and the other detectives who'd helped put Skell away. It was hard to believe that I'd ushered at his wedding and that we were once friends.

  The uniforms pulled Russo back. I got in a sitting position and assessed the damage. Nothing felt broken, and I stood up and faced him.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Russo shouted.

  “She called me,” I answered.

  “Who?”

  “Julie Lopez. She called me. What happened?”

  “That's none of your business.”

  “Come on, Bobby. It was my case.”

  Russo cocked his fist as if he was going to take my head off. Instead of throwing the pu
nch, he spoke to one of the uniforms.

  “Arrest him.”

  “On what charge?” I asked incredulously.

  Russo pointed at the police tape lying on the ground.

  “Trespassing on a crime scene.”

  “This is bullshit,” I said.

  “Welcome to my world,” Russo said.

  The uniform patted me down and handcuffed me. Together we walked down the driveway. He pulled my wallet from my hip pocket, then got into a cruiser and called in my driver's license on his radio. He knew I wasn't wanted for anything, just as Russo knew. They just wanted to harass me. Another crash of lightning shook the ground.

  “I'm going to get killed out here,” I yelled.

  The uniform's face appeared in the driver's window. His eyes were lifeless, his face the same. I cursed, and saw him flash a smile.

  The rain continued to drench me. I had planned to go swimming later, and I told myself that standing in a downpour accomplished the same thing. This was another of my daughter's maxims. I'm supposed to look on the bright side of things.

  The uniform took his sweet time, and I let my eyes roam. A cable company repair truck sat on the street with two workers inside. Trenching equipment was in the truck, and I imagined the workers running a line across the backyard and happening upon Carmella's grave.

  “Jack, is that you?” Julie Lopez stood inside the open garage, her face ravaged from crying. Shaped like an hourglass, she wore ragged cutoffs and a Miami Heat athletic shirt.

  “Hey, Julie,” I said.

  “It's Carmella's body, isn't it?” she asked.

  I nodded, and Julie stifled a sob. She had clung to the hope that her sister Carmella would turn up alive one day, even though Skell had been put away for her murder. A false hope, but sometimes those are the ones that keep us going.

  “They took Ernesto away,” Julie said. “What am I going to do, Jack? Will you tell me what I'm going to do?”

  During the trial, Simon Skell's defense attorney had tried to paint Ernesto as Carmella's real killer. Ernesto was no angel, but I'd never pegged him for a killer, and neither had any of the homicide detectives who'd worked the case.