Midnight Guardians mf-6

by Jonathon King

  “So does this illegal transaction of phony requests and exchange of funds take place in your office, Ms. Carmen?” I finally said.

  “No, they wouldn’t do it there. No, someone gathers the numbers and then delivers them.”

  “And do you know where this place is-the drop-off?”

  “No,” she said, and turned her face away.

  Ms. Carmen did not lie easily or well. There was something there that I needed to read. The sense of indignation was missing. This wasn’t just some employee angered by the unfairness of it all. I’ve seen the disgust of people in North Philadelphia when the drug dealing got so bad that their kids couldn’t safely walk to school, or had to stay inside on summer evenings for fear of getting shot in some 9 mm pissing match over a corner.

  This woman was scared in a personal way: Was this an admission of her own guilt?

  “So who is actually siphoning off the numbers?” I said. “Who makes the delivery?”

  “A few months ago, I got my brother a job there,” she said, keeping her eyes down. “I was trying to help him. He has not done well for himself these past few years. After I vouched for him, he promised he would work hard, and do what he was told, and always be on time.”

  Now her confident voice lost its power and conviction. A tear formed at the corner of one eye, but was held there as if by will alone; it did not drop. She blinked.

  “So your brother is the one delivering the numbers?” I said, stating what she could not.

  “His name is Andres, Andres Carmen. And he does not have good friends, Mr. Freeman. I am afraid for both him and myself.”

  Nothing new here, I thought. Same game with a different name: numbers running, working the outlets, gathering the tickets, hoofing them to a place where they are sorted and used. Can you say Italian lottery, or the numbers game? Bolita?

  If I am surprised at all, it’s because in this day of electronic communication, instant messaging, and email at the press of a finger, this kind of enterprise wouldn’t usually be employing a hand-delivery system. It made me think of old-school criminals doing something new that they weren’t quite used to, so they stick to the tried and true.

  “Your brother makes these deliveries when, at the end of the day? Twice a week?”

  “Only once a week, on Fridays, I think,” Carmen said.

  “And does he go straight there after leaving your office?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to follow him once, but I couldn’t keep up.”

  “OK. What does your brother look like? How can I recognize him?”

  Now she hesitated. This had gone beyond making a whistle-blower complaint, and had taken on the feeling of a personal betrayal. This was where it always got them: a mother turning in a son’s drug use, a daughter confessing her father’s sexual abuse.

  I’d seen it a dozen times in my own home, tucked in a space at the top of the stairs when my father’s own friends, the blue brotherhood, would show up in uniform to answer a complaint from one of the neighbors. They’d always take my father outside first. Then a uniform would stand in the kitchen with my bruised and tearful mother.

  “This is the third complaint this year, Mrs. Freeman. Is he hitting you?”

  My mother knew that if she answered, her husband could lose his job. She knew her son would lose his father. She knew it would be the end of a family, the loss of a confidant, a shoulder, even if the shoulder was sometimes hard and often brutal. I never heard my mother answer. And the uniformed cop would never ask twice.

  “Please don’t let him get hurt, Mr. Freeman,” Carmen said, looking into my eyes. Her strong will couldn’t hold the tear drop this time.

  I stayed silent, waiting.

  “My height, my coloring,” she finally said. “He wears a Marlins baseball cap, turned backward. You know how they do. And he is driving an old Toyota, dusty white you know, from the sun.”

  “And how old is he?”

  “He is nineteen years old.”

  “So he’s not a juvenile.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “His date of birth is June fourteenth, nineteen-ninety,” she said looking hard into my eyes.

  “You know Mr. Manchester is a lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll look up your brother’s juvenile record.”

  “And you will find it,” she said, losing a bit of the bravado now. “I am very much trying to save him, Mr. Freeman.”

  She was back to staring at her fingers, the rubbing more severe now. And for some reason, I was thinking about the callus she’d built up on that fine delicate knuckle of hers. I was trying to think of something to say to assure her that things will be all right, when I knew they wouldn’t. And while both of us were avoiding eye contact, I began to hear the thrumming of an electronic heartbeat pulsing somewhere in the distance, and growing.

  When I looked up out from the shade of the tree, I saw a metallic green Chevrolet Monte Carlo swinging through the parking lot, its chrome wheels spinning the sunlight. The windows were illegal black. The driver didn’t seem to be in a hurry. At first, I thought it was “just kids.” But when I turned and looked back at Carmen, she was knitting her brow.

  “It’s OK, Ms. Carmen,” I said.

  But she was looking past my shoulder to the approaching car.

  Then I heard the bass pounding of the music suddenly go louder, as if a barrier had been lowered. When I glanced back, a rear window was rolling down.

  Bap, bap, bap.

  It wasn’t until the third round that I launched myself over the top of the picnic table and swept Luz Carmen off the bench with a flying tackle. I could hear the bullets in the tree leaves above us making the sound of ripping cloth.

  Bap, bap, baaaaaaap.

  Fucking automatic, I registered in my head. When I looked through the legs of the picnic table, I could see the muzzle flash coming out of the Monte Carlo’s back window just as the driver punched it and sent the ass end of the car slewing to the right. The scream of the friction between hot rubber and asphalt added a whining alto to the bass line. In seconds, they were gone.

  Now it was stone quiet-amplified silence after chaos. I rolled off Luz Carmen, whose entire body was trembling. I scanned her for any sign that she was hit. When I got to her eyes, they were wide and locked on something in the distance, instead of squeezed shut like most people’s eyes would be under the circumstances.

  “You OK?” I said.

  No reaction. I pushed up to my knees. “Ms. Carmen, are you all right?”

  She was still wide-eyed and stiff.

  “Ms. Carmen,” I said, not sure why I was asking a question of someone in shock. “Please don’t tell me that was your brother.”

  – 5 -

  “Jesus, Max.”

  As I said, Billy is not often taken to swearing. So when he starts out that way, it’s a warning that you’ve probably crossed one of his lines, and he is not pleased.

  “Your new client can be very convincing,” I said, trying that tactic where you bring in the fact that your boss was the one who sent you out there to begin with, hoping you might spread the blame.

  “Max, you left the scene of a crime.”

  “Well, technically, yes.”

  “Well, technically it was an assault with a deadly weapon. Nontechnically, it was a drive-by shooting, during which you were able to identify the car involved-and if I know you, the caliber of the gun, and possibly the license plate number.”

  “No. They were smart enough to remove that ahead of time,” I said, realizing that I was getting defensive now. I knew that any good law enforcement agency in the area would have a pretty good file on a metallic green, jacked-up Monte Carlo with blacked-out windows, even with no numbers.

  “No one was injured, Billy,” I repeated. “Once your Ms. Carmen was calm, she was adamant that we return to her office. She said if she came in late after lunch it would only raise suspicions among her bosses. She said she didn’t want to break any of her normal
routine, because all eyes were going to be on her if you should get someone from the feds to raid the place.”

  I took a long breath, listening to silence on the other end of the cell phone.

  “See,” I finally said. “She’s pretty damned convincing.”

  “So you’re in the parking lot now?” Billy said, moving past it, like the good lawyer he is. What’s done is done; you move on and tackle the problems that you can.

  “Yeah,” I said. “She said she always leaves work at five fifteen. I’m going to follow her home, just to make sure.”

  I figured that the least I could do was keep an eye out for the woman, even if our little lunchtime surprise was just a carload of idiot punks getting a kick out of scaring people in the park. Of course, I didn’t believe that. Coincidence is crap in this business. And besides, since leaving the Philadelphia Police Department after getting shot, I’d had the luxury of time. I also had an off-the-clock burden of responsibility.

  If something happened to Ms. Carmen after I blew off the incident as an urban prank, wrote up a report, and forgot it after shift change, I’d be right back where I’d often been as a cop: cynical, depressed, and complicit.

  “OK, Max,” Billy said, perhaps forgiving. “That sounds prudent.”

  Prudent started with a pr that would have taken him three attempts to get off his tongue if we’d been speaking face-to-face.

  “What can you give me over the phone?”

  I told him about Ms. Carmen’s brother, gave him the name and the DOB, knowing he’d be punching the information into one of his array of computer databases as we spoke.

  “All right, Max, that’s a start. I’ll work on this and review it with you later,” Billy said. As a bit of a techno-wizard, he didn’t even like using cell phones to discuss business. Anyone with money could put together the kind of listening devices and triangulation tracking governments use surreptitiously these days. Billy is no Big Brother phobe, but you only have to read the newspaper to know the capabilities of these systems. And as every law enforcement officer in the world knows, if we have the equipment, the bad guys are usually a step ahead of us.

  After hanging up with Billy, I sat. Surveillance is the armpit duty of every private investigator, police detective, security officer, tinker, tailor, spy who ever worked it. You sit and turn your head on a swivel, running through the checklist, thinking about possibilities and scenarios for as long as you can stand it-about fifteen minutes. Then you get bored as hell and fight to stay awake.

  A former Philly partner of mine didn’t even pretend. He’d straightaway start snoring, with his wristwatch alarm set to go off every thirty minutes his only show of loyalty to the job. Another acquaintance, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent, busied himself writing novels while he was on watch. After an hour’s time sitting in the South Florida heat at midday, I moved my truck. I’d been eyeballing the only spot of shade in the lot while people, some obviously medical personnel, others looking like everyday patients, came and went. When the shady spot opened up, I stole it.

  With my windows rolled down and a blessed breeze flowing through, it was tolerable as I ran the shooting through my head for the umpteenth time. Metallic green ghetto car-obviously amateurs to be driving such a recognizable and easily tracked auto. Loud bass music: So they were also not concerned with anyone hearing them coming.

  I closed my eyes and tried to do a bit of relaxation therapy and self-hypnosis: The darkened back window rolls down and the muzzle of what, a rifle, at least eight inches of barrel, a V-site on the front, the well-machined bap, bap, bap of semiauto; and then the baaaaaaap of full auto ripping the tree leaves.

  I opened my eyes. The shitheads inside the car might have been simpleminded gangbangers, but the weapon was not. It wasn’t some cheap TEC-9 or Lorcin pistol they could buy for 150 bucks on the street. It was a hell of a lot more sophisticated, an MP5-style rifle and a hell of a lot more accurate. So how had they missed?

  An incompetent shooter would usually start firing low; the recoil might jerk his aim up into the trees. But this guy started high, and stayed there. Also, what was with changing the semiauto rounds to a full spray? Yeah, it’s just the flick of a switch on a quality weapon-but why?

  Maximum fear factor? Had the whole thing been a warning, the shooter spraying the trees above our heads to show how easily it could be done? Christ knows, I’d done enough in my past to piss people off. In my last assignment, everyone but Sherry and I died. And I hadn’t put myself in the sights of any drug dealers since I’d moved to Florida. That, of course, left Ms. Carmen and her still-mysterious brother. But as far as I knew, white-collar Medicare criminals weren’t blowing away informants, or one another, in the streets yet.

  Still, there was that coincidence thing. I blinked my eyes fully awake, swiveled my head again, went through the list, and then checked my watch. If she was as anal as I thought, Ms. Carmen would be out of work in two more hours. I would follow her home. I’d check around back to make sure there wasn’t an alley or a maintenance lane behind her townhouse. I’d sit in my truck and watch until dark, and then sit for an hour longer. Then I’d talk myself into leaving, figuring that if the shooters in the metallic green Monte Carlo were only trying to scare her, they, or whoever paid them to do their little gunplay act, would wait until tomorrow to see if she’d cower.

  At 7:30 P.M., I called Billy.

  “I’m going home,” I said. “She seems to be safe inside.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Find anything on the brother?”

  “Lots of minor drug arrests. Delivery and so forth-minor stuff if you’re a teenager living along Tamarind Avenue in West Palm.”

  “But enough to make connections with a variety of buyers and sellers,” I said.

  “True enough. Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” Billy said. “No doubt you’re due at Sherry’s.”

  “Yeah,” I said, but then worried about the lack of enthusiasm in my voice.

  “Go see your girl, Max,” Billy said.

  “Good night, Billy.”

  It was late when I got to Sherry’s. Light from a half-moon was filtering down through the big oak trees spread throughout her neighborhood. Years before the residential boom in downtown Fort Lauderdale, this had been a quiet collection of 1950s bungalows called Victoria Park. When she bought the house, Sherry used her status as a deputy for the Broward Sheriff’s Office and worked the real estate agent until she got him below eighty thousand dollars.

  “The last house east of Federal Highway that’s ever going to go for under a hundred,” she liked to quote the guy as saying. That was in the late 1980s. The going price went to six times that in the crazy postmillennial years. Now it was sinking back to where it always should have been, and marketing mouths were going back to pass the area off as “historical.”

  I had to admit, if large trees with hanging moss, heavily laden trellises of bougainvillea and plumbago, and minimal street lighting meant historic, then so be it. I liked it because most of the time it was quiet.

  I parked my truck at the end of the driveway and walked up past Sherry’s MG convertible, shrouded with a canvas covering since our ill-fated Everglades trip.

  I bypassed the wooden ramp I’d built to the front door before Sherry was released from the hospital and went on through a gate to the enclosed backyard. I knew she’d be in her refuge. As I closed the gate behind me, I could hear the hum of the water circulators, and the slight splash-kick-splash of her relentless, rhythmic swimming stroke.

  I stepped up onto the wooden deck and tossed my backpack into the empty rope hammock. The house was dark save for a small kitchen light we always left on. Out here, there was only the glow of the pool lights, a cast of aqua blue that shimmered up into the oak tree above and played in the leaves there, dappling and flickering with soft color, creating an opposite feeling to what was going on in the water.

  There Sherry was working. After her amputation, she had decided to insta
ll a current system at one end of her backyard pool. With the flick of a switch, a series of jet sprays kicked in and shot a steady stream of water in one direction just below the surface. The setup required a big pump for recirculation but effectively created a current Sherry could swim against, stroking at her steady pace for as long as electricity held out. Sometimes I wondered which would give out first.

  I stood with my hands in my pockets, watching. While the pool lights gave the world up here an ethereal look, below it had a paling effect. From here, Sherry’s long, single slender leg appeared as a bloodless white color as she kicked, moving with the constant rhythm of a double thunk- flump, flump, flump-flump -like a heartbeat. The crisp movement caused the water around her foot to cleave and then fold in on itself to create a hollow sound. I watched for a full five minutes, and her rhythm never faltered.

  If she could see me through her tinted goggles, she didn’t stop to acknowledge me. Maybe her eyes were closed in concentration, I thought; maybe she didn’t give a damn. I turned and walked inside the house.

  I didn’t turn the lights on, negotiating only by the stove’s overhead. I took two bottles of Rolling Rock from the refrigerator door and then stood at the sink, looking out the window at the rippling aqua glow while I drank the first beer with three long pulls. The coldness gave me a small brain freeze, and when I squeezed my eyes shut, I could feel tears at their edges. I rinsed the empty, dropped it into the recycling bin, and went back outside.

  Sitting in one of the patio chairs, I took off my shoes, rolled up my pant legs, and opened the second beer. I took a smaller sip this time and then sat for a bit, watching Sherry’s movements, the turn of her head, always breathing on the left side, not alternating like they teach you, her hands coming up out of the water, each stroke ending with a flip of the wrist: Reach out, pull through, kick out at the end, her rhythm like a metronome. And always the flump-flump of that single foot.

  There was no telling when she was going to stop. Sometimes she’d be at it for an hour, sometimes two. I told myself it didn’t bother me, and then moved down to the pool corner to sit on the steps. I sat on the edge, with my feet and calves submerged, and sipped the beer. I waited as I watched her head, her usual sunlight blonde hair darkened by the water.