Afraid of the Dark

by James Grippando

  You should be, it read.

  The music pounded, and the crowd around him was into it, but Jamal could barely breathe. The capital letters—the T and the D—were a familiar signature, even if this was the first time he’d seen it in over three years.

  He glanced toward the ladies’ restroom, where his best shot at a hookup for the night was making herself even sexier. He liked this girl, and he wanted her as badly as any man fresh out of prison would. But if the Dark was here, it was better to leave her out of this.

  Jamal stuffed the napkin into his back pocket and headed for the exit.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Jack kissed his grandfather good night at eleven.

  The west wing of Sunny Gardens of Doral was entirely for Alzheimer’s patients. Jack’s grandfather lived on the ground floor with other “mild to moderate” residents, those with no track record of wandering off in the middle of the night. Soothing colors brightened the interior walls, sound-absorbent carpeting quieted the floors, and calming music played in the hallways. It was an instrumental version of what Jack thought he recognized as an old Cat Stevens song. His own version of another vintage 1970s hit by the same artist came to mind.

  Another Saturday night, and I ain’t got no Andie. . .

  With Andie out of town, it had seemed like a good idea to spend time with Grandpa. Unfortunately, he’d slept the whole time, and after two hours of channel surfing through some really bad Saturday-night television, Jack decided to try another day.

  His cell rang as he crossed through the lobby toward the exit. It was Andie, and it made him smile to know that he wasn’t the only one feeling lonely.

  “You read my mind,” said Jack. “I was just thinking of you.”

  “Me, too.”

  Jack heard music in the background. It sounded like a nightclub. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Jack,” she said, in that tone that said, You know I can’t tell you.

  “Right. Sorry,” he said.

  “Tell me how you’re doing,” said Andie.

  Jack seated himself on the couch next to the birdcage in the lobby. The sleeping parakeet didn’t seem to notice. “Yesterday was horrible,” he said.

  “Horrible?”

  “The court held a hearing on bail for Jamal Wakefield. We won, but I had to cross-examine Vincent Paulo.”

  “Had to, huh? Like somebody was holding a gun to your head?”

  “Andie, come on. Don’t be like that.”

  “I told you how I feel about that case.”

  Jack heard laughter in the background, and then the muffled sound of Andie speaking to someone else—“Just a couple more minutes”—with the phone away from her mouth.

  “Are you on duty?” asked Jack.

  “What?” asked Andie.

  “It sounds like a party going on,” said Jack. “I was just wondering if you were on or off duty.”

  “I’m always on,” she said.

  Always. For an instant, Jack wondered if she was with her “sexually deviant boyfriend,” but he caught himself

  It’s her job, Swyteck.

  “Jack, I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’ll call you again, next chance I get.”

  “Sure.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Love you, too,” he said, and then the line was silent.

  The Sunny Gardens lobby was quiet as a mausoleum, which was the very next stop on the route for just about everyone who lived there. Most were lonely widows or widowers, and probably all of them would have given up their six months or a year at Sunny Gardens for another week or even a day with the spouses who had left them. Jack had all the respect in the world for Andie and her career. But hanging around a place like Sunny Gardens did make him wonder about her readiness to volunteer for assignments that reduced their relationship to weeks or perhaps even months of catch-as-catch-can phone conversations.

  You knew this was her job when you popped the question.

  Jack was parked in the Sunny Gardens private lot, but without a handicapped parking pass, he had a long walk to his car. He counted thirty handicapped spots in the first row of parking alone, not a single one of them being used. It made him want to stake out South Beach and confront the twenty-five-year-old triathlete who was using his eighty-seven-year-old grandmother’s pass to grab the best parking spots all over town.

  Jack followed the sidewalk toward the overflow lot. The first phase of Sunny Gardens was vintage 1970s construction, which meant that there were plenty of mature olive trees along the walkway to block out the street lighting. Jack dug into his pocket for his car keys, stopped, and glanced over his shoulder. He thought he’d heard footsteps behind him, but no one was in sight. Jack continued toward the lot, but tripped over a crack in the sidewalk. The row of olive trees had given way to even larger ficus trees, whose relentless root system had caused entire sections of the sidewalk to buckle. The canopy of thick, waxy leaves made the night even darker, forcing Jack to locate his car more from memory than sight.

  Again, he heard footsteps. He walked faster, and the clicking of heels behind him seemed to match his pace. He came to an S-curve in the sidewalk and, rather than follow the concrete patch, cut straight across the grass. The sound of the footsteps behind him vanished, as if someone behind him were tracing his own silent path. He returned to the sidewalk at the top of the S-curve. A moment later, he heard the clicking heels behind him do the same.

  He definitely felt like he was being followed.

  Jack stopped and turned. In the pitch darkness beneath the trees, he saw no one, but he sensed that someone was there.

  “Andie, is that you?” It was way too hopeful to think that she was going to surprise him again with a visit, but calling out the name of anyone seemed less paranoid than a nervous “Who’s there?”

  No one answered.

  Jack reached for his cell phone. Just as he flipped it open, a crushing blow between the shoulder blades sent him, flailing, face-first to the sidewalk. The phone went flying, and the air rushed from his lungs. As he struggled to breathe and rise to one knee, an even harder blow sent him down again. This time, he was too disoriented to break the fall. His chin smashed against the concrete. The salty taste of his own blood filled his mouth.

  “Why . . . are,” he said, trying to speak, but it was impossible to form an entire sentence.

  He was flat on his belly when the attacker grabbed him from behind, took a fistful of hair, and yanked his head back.

  “One move and I slice you from ear to ear.”

  Jack froze. A steel blade was at his throat. The man’s voice sounded foreign, but Jack couldn’t place the accent. More important, the threat sounded real.

  “Take it easy,” said Jack.

  “Shut up,” the man said. “Did he give you any photographs?”

  “Who? Photos of what?”

  “Ethan Chang. Did he give you the photographs he told you about?”

  “No. I never met him.”

  He yanked Jack’s head back harder. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying. I never met him, I swear.”

  “Lucky for you. But now consider yourself warned.”

  “Warned of what?”

  “Forget everything you ever heard about Prague.”

  “I don’t—” Jack stopped in midsentence. The blade was pressing harder against his throat.

  “The lawyers have been way too subtle. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. And by the way. Remember how Ethan Chang heard you talking to your grandfather’s girlfriend about Pio Nono?”

  “Yes.”

  “I heard it, too,” he said. “So believe me when I tell you this: Until you have a wife or children, there is nothing more painful than watching your grandfather suffer at a time in his life when he is too old and too confused to understand why anyone would want to hurt him.”

  “Leave him out of this.”

  “That’s up to you,” the
man said as he pulled the blade away from Jack’s throat—and then slammed the butt of the knife against the back of Jack’s skull.

  Jack fought to stay conscious, but he saw nothing, heard nothing, as his world slowly turned darker than the night itself.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Vince woke early on Sunday morning.

  He was seated on the front step outside his house, the canopy of the porch overhang shielding him from a light, cool rain.

  Rain was in some ways Vince’s best friend. The bond had formed on his first rainy day without sight, just moments after he’d stepped out the front door and stood on the top step. His mind was gearing up for the usual mental exercise, the memorized flower beds, shrubbery, and footpaths that defined his morning walk. But the rain changed all that. It was the sound of falling rain that brought the outdoors and all of its shapes, textures, and contours back into his world. Where there was once only blackness, suddenly there was water sloshing down a drainpipe. The patter of raindrops on the broad, thick leaves of the almond tree. The hiss of automobiles on wet streets. Even the grass emitted its own peculiar expression of gratitude as it drank up the morning shower. A sighted person would have heard nothing more than rainfall in its most generic sense, a white noise of sorts. To Vince, it was a symphony, and he reveled in his newly discovered power to appreciate the beautiful nuances of each and every instrument. Nature and his old neighborhood were working together, calling out to him, telling him that everything was still there for his enjoyment. He heard the drumlike beating on his mailbox, the gentle splashing on concrete sidewalks, and even the ping of dripping water on an iron fence that separated his yard from his neighbor’s. Rain, wonderful rain. It made him smile to have such a friend. Friends were not always so loyal and dependable.

  Especially the ones named Swyteck.

  “Did you finally get to sleep, honey?” asked Alicia. She was standing in the foyer behind him, speaking through the screen door.

  “Not really,” he said.

  Swyteck’s cross-examination on Friday had been nothing short of torture, and it had left him tossing and turning for the past two nights. Once upon a time, Officer Vincent Paulo had been a criminal defense lawyer’s worst nightmare on the witness stand. He’d anticipate their every move and thwart their clever tactics. His first experience under oath and without sight had left him doubting his ability to do real police work.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Alicia.

  “Tell that to the state attorney. McCue gave me an earful after the hearing.”

  “Tell him to go to hell.”

  “He had a point,” said Vince. “I blew it when I called my answering machine to record McKenna’s words. Calls to nine-one-one are recorded as a matter of course and are admissible as evidence in court. If I had simply stayed on the line with the nine-one-one operator and let McKenna talk into the phone, we wouldn’t have to worry about this hearsay objection.”

  He could hear her sigh. “Vince, you loved McKenna, and she was literally bleeding to death in your arms. How on earth is anyone supposed to be thinking clearly about the legal admissibility of a recording under those circumstances?”

  The rain continued to fall. Vince heard a car pass on the wet pavement. The screen door squeaked as it opened; even that sounded different in the rain. Alicia knelt behind him, and her arms slipped around his shoulders, the silk sleeve of her robe caressing his chin. Things had been a little rocky between them after she’d challenged him—albeit gently—as to his whereabouts on that Saturday night. In anger he had phoned Chuck Mays so that he could tell her directly that they were hanging out by his pool until nine o’clock, nowhere near the Lincoln Road Mall. After Friday’s hearing, Alicia did a 180, seeming to appreciate how sickening it was for Vince to have to provide an alibi to his wife while Jamal Wakefield walked free.

  “I’ve been thinking about that recording,” said Alicia.

  She was still kneeling behind him, her arms around him and the side of her face resting between his shoulder blades.

  “What about it?” asked Vince.

  “Don’t you think it’s kind of . . . weird? McKenna’s response, I mean.”

  “In what way?”

  She hesitated, obviously sensitive to how painful this subject was for Vince. “You said, ‘McKenna, tell me who did this to you.’ And she said, ‘Jamal.’ ”

  “What’s weird about that?”

  “Nothing. But then you asked, ‘Your boyfriend?’ And the natural response to that would have been a simple ‘yes.’ But she said, ‘My first.’ ”

  “So?”

  “Why would she say that?”

  Vince considered it. “I don’t know. She was confused, dying. Maybe it was part of her shock and disbelief that her first love killed her.”

  Alicia was silent. She stayed just as she was, and the warmth of her body and the rhythm of her breathing felt good on his back.

  “I suppose,” she said.

  The rain started to fall harder—so hard that it was no longer possible to discern the sound of water falling on leaves from the patter on pavement. It all sounded the same—like too much information, the details completely drowned out. It was no longer a friend.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Alicia.

  He could barely hear her over the roar of the downpour. They were protected by the overhang, but huge drops splashed up from the steps and onto his slippers.

  “Nothing,” he said, but that was a huge lie. Vince was thinking about the final text message that McKenna had sent to Jamal and that Vince had intercepted: FMLTWIA. With his help, it had remained secret. Only over his dead body would it someday land in the newspapers.

  Vince would always be McKenna’s friend.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said.

  He rose and took her hand. Together they retreated indoors, the screen door slapping shut on the falling rain.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Jack woke to the rumble of a motorboat behind his house. His head still hurt from last night’s sucker punches, but after a minute his thoughts became less fuzzy, and he realized that it was his boat. Jack climbed out of bed, pulled on jogging shorts and a sweatshirt, and walked out back to the dock. Theo was already in the boat.

  “Ready when you are, Ahab,” he said over the idling outboards.

  Jack had forgotten all about their plans to go fishing, but just the sound of the motors was making his head buzz all over again. He climbed aboard and killed the engines. The silence was sweet, as if someone had stopped hitting him in the head with a hammer.

  “Got a knot on the back of my skull like a golf ball.”

  “What happened?” asked Theo.

  Jack told him the same story he had told the police officer last night at the hospital emergency room: from the phone call he had gotten from Ethan Chang last Saturday to the Sunny Gardens employee who had found Jack lying on the sidewalk and called an ambulance.

  “Scumbag,” said Theo. “Theatening an old man with Alzheimer’s.”

  “I’m not backing down. The cops kept an eye on him last night. But I’m going to have to hire a bodyguard to sit with him.”

  “I can help you with that,” said Theo.

  “Thanks.”

  “Oh, well,” said Theo. “Looks like we’ll have to wait for another perfect Sunday morning to take you to my secret spot.”

  Theo went to the radar and erased the GPS coordinates, which reminded Jack of the ankle bracelet his client was required to wear as a condition of pretrial release. That little intrusion was all Jack needed to stir up any number of nagging questions that had kept him awake last night. One, in particular, was gnawing at him all over again: the chain of “Pio Nono” from Grandpa to Chang to the man who threatened Jack and his grandfather.

  “How do you think Mr. Chang knew about Pio Nono?” asked Jack.

  Theo settled into a deck chair. “You talking about the guy who got killed on Lincoln Road Mall?”

  “Right. Wh
en he called to set up a meeting with me, I didn’t answer. So, to grab my attention, he texted me using the name Pio Nono.”

  “Pio what?”

  “He was a controversial pope from the nineteenth century. My grandfather took his girlfriend to see a play about him a few years ago. I was sitting with her in the cafeteria at the nursing home talking about the play when Chang sent me a text that said, “ ‘It’s Pio Nono. Call me. NOW!’ ”

  “Kind of creepy. Maybe he bugged the cafeteria.”

  “But how would he have known I was going to be in the cafeteria? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “He could have planted some kind of listening device on you. Or on her.”

  “I patted myself down afterward and didn’t find anything. And now we know that Chang had flown into Miami from Prague just a couple of hours before contacting me. How would he have had time to plant listening devices?”

  Theo considered it as he glanced at the storm clouds to the west. It was definitely raining over Coconut Grove, but they were east of it on Key Biscayne.

  “Have you had your phone checked for spyware?” asked Theo.

  “I wasn’t talking on my cell. It was a face-to-face conversation in the cafeteria with Ruth.”

  “Doesn’t matter. They have spyware that can pick up conversations around a cell phone even if you’re not talking on it. The phone doesn’t even have to be turned on. It works so long as there’s a battery in it.”

  “How would he get hold of my phone to plant spyware?”

  “They don’t need to touch it. They can install spyware through the Internet from anywhere on the planet. Especially people who know something about computers.”

  People who know something about computers. He’d met a couple of those types lately. Chuck Mays. His client.

  “Every time I think I’m starting to know what I’m doing with computers, something new comes along to make me feel like an old fart.”

  “You’ve been an old fart since you were eleven.”

  “Thanks,” said Jack. His head was hurting again, but another one of those gnawing questions was buzzing in his brain. “How do you suppose the guy who clobbered me last night overheard the same conversation?”