Midnight Guardians

by Jonathon King

  I pushed a few more pieces of dry pine into the stove to get the heat up and then opened the can, mixed it in the pan, and set it to simmer. Fortunately, the shack is built in the style of Old Florida dwellings. The inside ceiling is no ceiling at all. The roof slants up in four planes like a pyramid, the triangles coming together twenty feet above and meeting at a cupola that’s vented at the top. The heat inside the cabin rises to the top and vents, thus creating a vacuum. And because the entire structure is raised above the water on stilts, the cool shaded air beneath is drawn up—natural air-conditioning. I have never felt overwhelmed by heat out here.

  “There are some books in the armoire on the left,” I said to Luz, letting an apologetic tone invade my voice. “I read a lot out here, and even if Mr. Manchester is constantly warning me that the hardbacks are going to rot in the humidity, I still keep a few at hand.”

  She looked up from the table at me, and I felt I had to prompt her and nodded my head at the stand-up wardrobe.

  “Help yourself.”

  I couldn’t stand the thought of watching her stare at the lantern frame all night.

  She rose and went to the armoire and began browsing the piles of books on the high shelf as I kept stirring my soup. You can ruin it if you let it scald. I kept cutting looks at Luz as she carefully fingered each volume, sliding them out of their tight space, studying the covers, sometimes pulling one down and perusing the flap copy to get a sense of the story. A lot of what I kept here was Florida history, books on the wildlife of the southern United States, and travel books by Jonathan Raban, Peter Matthiessen, and Paul Theroux. I have some fiction, mostly southern stuff by Tom Franklin and some collections of Harry Crews. I was only a bit surprised when she returned to the table with a copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

  “Do you like the magical realism, Mr. Freeman?” she said as I brought my warm bowl of soup to the table along with a cold Rolling Rock from the cooler.

  “I liked One Hundred Years of Solitude,” I said, recalling another García Márquez novel.

  “It is better in its original Spanish,” Luz said, flipping through the early pages of the novel in her hands. “But I can see how you would enjoy Mr. García’s themes of solitude.”

  I took a long sip from the neck of the beer. Yeah, pretty obvious, I thought.

  “You are not a religious man, Mr. Freeman,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “You are a practical man.”

  I nodded, an action I was using a lot lately.

  “And your woman—is she practical as well?”

  “My woman?” I did not recall bring Sherry’s name up during any conversation with Luz Carmen.

  “You told her you loved her on the phone while we were in my house.”

  “Yes,” I said, remembering the conversation. “She is a practical person.”

  Luz was quiet again, looking at the pages of the novel, but not reading them.

  “It’s a good thing to love someone. But it is hard to do in solitude,” she finally said. “You should call your woman and tell her again that you love her.”

  This comment was made while Luz was seemingly concentrating on reading the opening pages of the book she’d selected. I said nothing in return and finished my soup. Then I washed off the dishes at my old iron slop sink, using the old-time hand pump that drew water from below. I pulled out another beer, took my cell phone outside, and went down the steps to the small dock platform, far enough away, I thought, to keep Luz Carmen from listening in.

  “Hey, how you doin’?”

  “Just finished swimming. What’s up?”

  “I’m out at the shack.”

  “Yeah? Dark out there by now.”

  Sherry was right. This far out there is little ambient light at night, though if you know which direction to look in, you can still detect the glow of the urban world rising and then reflecting off the cloud cover. And on clear nights, if there is a moon, you can actually navigate the river in that natural luminescence.

  “I’m with the client,” I said.

  “You think that’s a good move?”

  “For right now, anyway,” I said, studying Sherry’s question, her voice. She doesn’t usually question smart tactics.

  “You and a woman out in the Glades?”

  Sherry is not a jealous woman. The statement caught me unawares. I was stumbling with a response and she read the hesitation.

  “I’m kidding, Max.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, waiting for her to continue the so-called joke by warning me not to permanently disfigure the girl while I was out here. But I said nothing.

  “So I got a call from Mr. Booker,” she said, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

  “Yeah?”

  “He wants to meet with me again.”

  “Progress,” I said.

  “Well, actually, he invited me to meet him at his home. He wants to show me some sort of classic car he’s been rebuilding. Says he’s thinking of adding a hand system for the accelerator and brakes; he thinks if he started driving, things might open up for him.”

  “Sure. A hobby—something to get back into,” I said. Sherry’s idea of a hobby after her amputation was physically beating herself into exhaustion on Loop Road or in the pool. “What does the sheriff’s office counselor think of that?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t reported in yet,” Sherry said. “But I think something else is up.”

  “Like he’s making a move on you?” I said, trying to make it light, like a joke for a joke, but then regretting it instantly.

  “Max.”

  “Sorry, babe.”

  “Let’s not joust, OK?” she said. “I think the guy is busting to tell me something that he’s holding out on.”

  “Like?”

  “Like something to do with the accident that he’s unwilling to tell anybody else. You saw the alienation going on in that gym. He’s not going to spill anywhere near those meatheads. We always learned that if you get an interviewee in a place where he’s comfortable, the better chance of him opening up, right?”

  It was interview technique 101, but rarely happened in police work. You get them at the scene. You get them in an enclosed room downtown. You get them in a cell. But you don’t often interview anyone sitting on their couch at home or out back in on their patio overlooking the garden, or in their shop tinkering with a favorite engine.

  “What do you think he’s holding out on?” I said. “He’s been pushing the investigators on the hit-and-run, right? Wouldn’t he have given them everything to help get the guy who chopped him in half?”

  Again I was ruing the words the instant they left my lips, but Sherry never hesitated.

  “I don’t know, Max. But that’s why they wanted me to work the guy, to get into his head.”

  “Unless they’re playing you to get to the boys in the gym through him,” I said, finally just tossing it out there, an angle both of us had to play since seeing McKenzie and the steroid pimples popping up on the gang in the muscle factory.

  “God, that’s pretty despicable.”

  “Which rules it out?”

  “Not in the least,” Sherry said.

  — 20 —

  JUST LISTEN TO that rumble, to that jacked-up purr, burring into your chest, vibrating your ribs. Nice, eh? That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Just looking at her makes me proud. The Mach 1 body style, Ram Air version; the spoiler on the back to keep that back rubber to the road; the shaker hood scoop sucking up the air to feed that sweet 428 Cobra Jet; the whole package black on red.

  Yeah, you can still feel her rippling the air around you. And here you sit, in a wheelchair, poking a fucking screwdriver into the accelerator armature just to rev her. Fucking garage, man. No open road, no Alligator Alley to speed-shift her at 2:00 A.M. The car you love, and all you can do is listen to her. You are screwed, brother—all you are, is screwed.

  OK, OK, maybe you shouldn’t have been doing the negative vibe thing when the
blonde detective came over. I mean, you did invite her, right? You called her. That was a step right there, wasn’t it? Maybe you shouldn’t have put it out there like you were needy, but holdin’ all this shit inside is killing you. And you gotta admit it, Marty, she listened good, and knew something about where you were coming from.

  So you call her and she says yes, she’ll come over, but you can’t take the wait, too nervous, too hyper, and too stupid for doing this in the first place. So you go where you always go now to calm down. You listen to the Mustang, chill, feel the rumble, feel a little bit alive. But it still wasn’t working.

  Then you saw her from inside the garage, the cab pulling up outside your place. The driver gets out and pulls her chair out of his trunk and wheels it around to the passenger-side door. You had to smile when she kind of slapped the driver’s hand away from helping her. She’ll do it herself, dude. This girl has her shit together; don’t baby her.

  You were watching from up high, your own chair rolled up onto the lifts you used to use to raise up the front end of the car to change the oil. She couldn’t see you yet; the sun outside too bright, making the inside of the garage dark. She was checking out your house, the neighborhood—the whole two-bedroom middle-class thing going on here. Yeah, she probably noticed the lawn hadn’t been cut for weeks, and that the front windows were carrying a film of dust, and that the hedges had gone fucking wild without a trim.

  But what the hell—I’m a legless man. What do you want? So you gave the accelerator one last jack before shutting the engine down, rattling the raised garage door a little. Her head snapped around. Nice hair, catching the sun and those blue-green eyes, piercing when she looked at the place. That alone was enough for you to lose some anger. She rolled up the driveway, and you rolled down the lifts to meet her. Not exactly the Hollywood scene of the guy and girl running in the meadow to meet in some corny slow-motion embrace, but you take what you can get, right?

  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.

  — 21 —

  IN 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 subtl
e 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.