Midnight Guardians

by Jonathon King

  Sherry just shrugged.

  “So he didn’t have much of a chance to deny the steroids after you told him IA already had that,” I said, and took another full swallow of coffee.

  “He actually seemed contrite,” Sherry said. “It was like he didn’t want me to think badly of him. He tells me the stuff about the gym group and then says he was trying to distance himself anyway, trying to cut back on his use. He talked about getting older and more mature and how it’s a young man’s game out there—all that shit.”

  I was happy to hear her use that little invective at the end. She was making the guy out to be not such an asshole. Maybe I was feeling jealous.

  “So he spills about the group doing the drugs, how does that tie into him being crushed on purpose?” I said, trying to stay on track.

  “It’s just speculation, Max. Don’t look at me like that,” Sherry said. Her oddly defensive position was rescued by the arrival of our food. I knew she’d continue when she was ready, not before.

  I speared off chunks of the thick meat loaf, dipped them into the mashed potatoes and gravy, and then forked the whole mess into my mouth. I knew she was watching. She hated when I did that. But I had an ex-wife in Philly who’d been as controlling as anyone I’d met besides my father. The woman had gone on to climb the police administration ladder while I’d stuck with patrol—one of the reasons for our divorce. I’d sworn never to try to change myself again to please someone else’s vision. Sherry accepted that, but maybe I pushed my “I’m gonna do it the way I want to do it” thing a little too far.

  “Anyway,” she started in again, “Booker says that in the early days he was the one designated to take delivery of the steroids, supposedly because he was on the night shift, and they could make the exchange in the dark, and no one would question it.”

  I nodded, my mouth full. At least I wasn’t that uncouth.

  “Obviously, he counts the stuff out, makes sure the payment is right,” Sherry said.

  “OK.”

  “After a while, additional stuff starts getting tossed in with the ‘roids, painkillers, and the prescription shit,” she said. “Booker says he started bitching about being a mule, and told the others he wasn’t comfortable doing the gig anymore.”

  I left my green beans untouched and pushed my plate away.

  I didn’t have to say anything to Sherry about the confluence of what Booker was talking about, and the stuff Andrés Carmen had detailed from his visits to the Medicare scam warehouse. But neither one of us was going to make the leap to connect the two. As Billy said, the prescription drug market was expanding all of the time, and here in South Florida, anything that was happening across the nation was happening at an accelerated rate in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and the Keys.

  We had the perfect storm of unadulterated glitz and high living, historical black markets that went back a hundred years to the rum-running days, rampant drug crime fueled over the last fifty years by smugglers from nearby South American growers, and an international culture of backroom bargaining and payoffs. If the illegal buying-and-selling of prescription drugs was the newest game in town, there’d be plenty of it going on here, with multitudes of players sticking their fingers in it.

  Neither of us was going to bring up the possible coincidence that the group Billy and I had stumbled onto was a supplier to a group of steroid-using cops. At least, not yet. We are detectives. We don’t do coincidence.

  “So let me guess,” I said. “When Booker starts getting cold feet over the whole drug thing, they don’t just let him walk away.”

  “He doesn’t ask to,” Sherry said. “It’s his group, Max, his identity. He said he was giving up the drugs, but according to him, that’s when the others started losing trust in him. He says they definitely got nervous, started treating him differently.”

  “So you think the group got so paranoid that they decided to hit one of their own to keep him from ratting them out?” The tone of my voice must have been incredulous enough to piss her off.

  “I didn’t come up with it, Max. Booker did. He’s the one who threw the possibility out there. He says that the guys started moving away from him, finding different machines to work when he was in the gym, stopped inviting him along to Dolphins games, and didn’t have him over to their homes for parties like before.”

  “And this was before the accident?”

  “Yeah, and now they’ve shut him out completely.”

  The waitress came and cleared the table and filled my cup.

  “So let me guess which of these lifters was taking the orders and handling the money before it went over to Booker,” I finally said, already guessing at the answer.

  “You got it,” Sherry shook her head. “McKenzie. Why is it that the mouthiest, yappiest dog in the kennel is the one they put in charge?”

  “Every gang has its lead mutt,” I said. “The rest like to come in after it takes the first bite.”

  I looked over the rim of my cup and noticed that Sherry was shifting in her seat, subtly rocking her weight from hip to hip. She was anxious and fidgety.

  “Are you going to check McKenzie’s IA file?” I said, taking a stab at what she might be thinking.

  “I could do that. But it would have to be handled carefully,” she said, catching me watching her. “For some reason, I don’t want to blow this guy’s trust.”

  “Booker?”

  “Yeah, he’s obviously coming out. Telling me all this is a big step for him, Max. If he thinks I’m just using him for some internal steroid investigation bullshit, he’ll shut down again, and never trust anyone.”

  I just nodded, tried not to see the questions that started popping up in my head. Sherry was concerned about some stranger shutting down, when she herself had never completely opened up about her own feelings about her amputation. Maybe this guy Booker was the mirror she’d refused to look into. Maybe if I just let it go, she’d see her own reflection in there, and we could all move on.

  Leaving a hefty tip and a wink to the waitress, we left for the parking lot. The old Gran Fury had a big enough trunk to easily fit Sherry’s wheelchair. I was just hitting the ignition when my cell rang.

  “Max, I apologize for the lateness of the call,” Billy said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been notified by a source in the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office that they have arrested the last of the gunmen who chased you and Andrés Carmen. Deputies from Broward have been called to come and question them tomorrow.”

  “That’s a good thing, Billy,” I said, reading the slight anxiety in his voice.

  “True. But my information is that they belong to a well-documented gang up here, one that numbers some two dozen members.”

  “Right,” I said. Sometimes Billy has the lawyer’s way of circumlocution.

  “The newest arrestee already admitted that there was some kind of Wild West-style bounty out on Andrés Carmen. I fear that just because they failed in their attempt doesn’t mean the next level in their gang won’t take the hit money offer.”

  “You need me to go up and get Andrés out of his girlfriend’s trailer?”

  “I would be remiss if I didn’t at least try,” he said.

  “I’m on my way.”

  — 16 —

  IT WAS LIKE being back walking a summer beat behind South Street in Philadelphia: middle of the night, sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades and settling in my waistband, eyes trying to adjust to the dark while searching every shadowed corner and parked vehicle with a clear shot at the trailer in which Andrés Carmen was still staying.

  It was like sniffing out the drug runners and their hidey holes in the city. As a foot patrolman, I’d known most of the dealers who fed the appetites of the South Street crowd in the 1990s. It was always a game to actually catch them with product in their possession. Sometimes I’d win; sometimes not. But back when I was creeping the alleys, I had a badge and a gun. Tonight, even though I might find some gangbangers wait
ing to hit our friend Andrés, I was sneaking around with nothing but a PI business card in my pocket.

  I’d parked the Gran Fury two blocks away and put on my old blue-black windbreaker just to give me some cover. The night was quiet and warm. And as I did a perimeter around the trailer, I tried not to underestimate the shooters who had fired first at me and Luz Carmen, and then had tried to chase down Andrés. Yes, you could write them off as idiot street criminals hard up for money now that the drug trade had moved to a more businesslike, hand-to-hand market. But these guys had been armed with automatic weapons. And they were brazen enough to stage a wild-ass car chase in the middle of the day. So would they not just storm Andrés’s girlfriend’s place if they knew he was there, and kill him the way same they tried to in the cul-de-sac?

  Sure, that was an option. But I was hoping that wasn’t going to happen while I was inside talking Andrés into leaving. Maybe my little surveillance here had more to do with self-preservation than trying to save the kid again.

  As I tightened the circle around the trailer, I took in the sounds and smells of the beaten-down trailer park: the distinctive odor of overused kitty litter dumped behind one place; the leftovers from a recent fish-fry, stashed in an old-style metal garbage can, some procrastinating resident leaving it in the alley instead of at the pickup spot on the street. The overloud blabbing of a television sitcom spilled from a window screen along with canned laughter.

  Closing in from the north, I spotted a misplaced light. Closer still, I finally made out some sort of battery-powered candle set on a picnic table. A young girl, middle-school age, was huddled over what looked like a fat textbook, with a pencil in hand, scratching at a notebook. From the trailer beside her came the noise of an argument between two adults. Something crashed inside, and the raw sound of flesh slapping flesh stung the air.

  I watched the girl put her forehead down onto the open pages of the book. Though I tried to move away quietly, she looked up at the sound of my footfall, and we made eye contact. I raised my index finger to my lips. Shssss.

  She rolled her eyes at me—whatever—and went back to her homework.

  Finally, I stepped up to the door of Andrés’s and looked first to the spot where Billy and I had seen the pit bull in the light of day. There appeared to be nothing there, though I was half-expecting a glowing pair of evil eyes. Taking one more glance behind me, I rapped on the door. It opened slowly, making that gum rubber sound of a seal being pried.

  When I stepped into the light, I was greeted by the black-eyed barrel of an over-under shotgun. At the other end was the scrunched face of a blonde woman, her eyes narrowed to slits, her forehead furrowed beyond her age.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  While my hands were shoulder-high, palms facing outward, I explained who I was, and that I did not deserve to die on the rusted iron steps of a faded Florida house trailer. The woman, small-boned and too defiant for her size, finally backed up, but did not put the shotgun down. When I stepped up into the entry, the smell of onion-fried liver hit my nose, which might have been pleasant under other circumstances, but in the claustrophobic space—already ripe with a scent of its own—I felt my stomach twinge.

  The teenage kid was still on the couch as if he hadn’t moved since the last time I was here. He cut his eyes to me for only long enough to assure his boredom, and then went back to the television screen running the same Grand Theft Auto game he’d been on before. He was about the same age as the girl out in the dark working on her studies. The juxtaposition made me feel sorry for him.

  “Andrés,” the woman screeched down the hall. “Your boy is here.”

  Your boy?

  Andrés came out wearing a strap T-shirt that used to pass as white and the floppy blue scrub pants I presumed he wore at work.

  “What’s up?”

  The girlfriend stepped back next to him as if to present some kind of united front. She was wearing a stained waitress uniform and looked ridiculous holding the big shotgun. I tried to relax my shoulders and clasped my hands in front of me, one holding the other like a salesman during a formal presentation.

  I was controlling my anger.

  “What’s up? Is it that the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office found the guys who were trying to shoot you?” I said, watching the woman’s dirty-green eyes to see if she’d been brought up-to-date on her boyfriend’s escapades. She didn’t flinch.

  “And put that gun down before you accidentally hurt somebody,” I added, now staring into the woman’s eyes.

  Andrés put his palm out and touched the gun barrel gently.

  “It’s OK, Cheryl,” he said.

  She looked disappointed, but sat down on a nearby rocking chair and laid the gun across her lap like a hillbilly—which she very well could have been, given her posture and ashen skin.

  “Yeah, my friend told me he heard they popped the last guy over near the projects. So that’s a good thing, right?” Andrés said. “They’re just a bunch of gang assholes, anyway.”

  “Yeah, gang assholes,” I said. “The operative word being gang, which means they’re part of a bigger whole, along with others who share the same information, rumor, word on the street and all. You know—like the word that there’s a price on your head.

  “But since you’ve already been out there talking to your friends, you probably already know that, too, right? And since you’ve been out chatting, your friends also know where you are. They’re probably out there yakking to others about that very fact.”

  Now I was pissed.

  The girlfriend made a show of picking up a cigarette pack, tamping it down on the surface of the table next to her, and then opening it. Andrés looked as if he were waiting on her to respond to me. The woman picked a cigarette out of the pack and fit it between her lips.

  “We ain’t afraid of a bunch of gang punks,” she said, her voice a pathetic, almost humorous tough-guy growl, the cigarette bouncing with her words.

  I shook my head and looked at Andrés. “Like I offered earlier,” I said. “I have a place you can go where they won’t find you. You could stay there a few days until the cops get things cooled down a bit. Mr. Manchester is trying to get the feds to talk with your sister, and if they start taking her seriously, they could come in to give both of you witness protection.”

  Andrés looked away. The girlfriend rolled her eyes and lit the cigarette and whispered “Luz” with an edge of disgust.

  I pulled a kitchen chair out from under the nearby table and put it in front of the woman. Then I sat down to indicate that I wasn’t leaving until I got an answer. The place was silent but for the sound of the boy on the couch clacking buttons on his handheld controller.

  When I followed his eyes to the television screen, I saw a caricature of a stubble-faced guy holding a handgun. The figure had obviously just crashed his car into a police cruiser. On the ground in front of him was a uniformed caricature of an officer. Stubble-face was shooting the cop as he lay on the street. Each time the boy punched his thumb on the controller, the gun would fire and the cartoon body of the cop would actually jerk. The kid kept doing it over and over again.

  I could feel my lips tighten into a hard line. I flexed my fingers to loosen them. When the girlfriend tipped her head back to take another long drag off the cigarette, I snuck a look at her other hand to make sure her finger wasn’t inside the trigger guard of the shotgun. It wasn’t.

  When she relaxed to savor the smoke in her lungs, I grabbed the barrel of the shotgun and ripped it from her in one quick motion. She started to yelp, but when I banged the end of the barrel down into the floor, she jumped, coughed out a belch of smoke, and remained silent.

  Andrés wasn’t moving. I looked over at the kid, his eyes gone big.

  “Turn that thing off before I put this gun butt through the screen,” I said, pointing the shotgun stock in the direction of both the television and the hallway. “Go crawl into the place where you sleep.”

  The kid looked at his mo
m, who turned away. Andrés stepped back to clear a path for the boy. The kid sneered at me, but turned off his game, got up, and left sullenly, taking his time—the only thing left to do to show his tail wasn’t between his legs.

  “Sit down,” I said to Andrés, motioning him to the empty couch. With the butt of the gun as a visual aide, I directed the girlfriend, “Join him.”

  She copied the same slow motion as her son, but moved. I planted the muzzle of the gun onto the floor between my feet. When I felt I had Andrés’s attention, I started.

  “I talked with the guy you call the Brown Man today,” I said. Andrés looked up at me without moving his chin. “He’s a drug dealer who used to sell crack on the street to junk men and whores.

  “He’s probably doing the same thing now, but his clientele has changed and he’s moved up off the corners and into your warehouse. Tell me what you know about him.”

  The girlfriend had stopped at the hallway corner and snuck a look at Andrés, who kept his head down, his eyes seemingly on the video game controller the boy had dropped on the floor.

  “They said he’s a bad dude and not to fuck with him,” Andrés said. “Nobody but the guy who runs the place and the IT dude ever say anything to him. But he’s OK to me. He says hello to me when he sees me.”

  “Like one of his punk runners,” the girlfriend said with a little snort in her voice.

  I was losing my patience. “Shut up or leave,” I said, staring at her. She would not meet my eyes, but slouched against the wall.

  I turned back to Andrés. “Is the Brown Man there all the time?”

  “No. I only see him once in a while. But when he’s there, everybody gets nervous, you know—uptight. Even the IT guy gets nervous, and all he does is the computer work. He don’t have nothin’ to do with the drugs.”

  “So the Brown Man’s like the enforcer or something?”

  “No. He ain’t carryin’ or nothin’ like that. But they all straighten up when he’s there, even the guy who’s like the manager,” Andrés said. “It’s like he’s got the juice, man, and everybody knows it.”