O’Shea got in and settled. He had a three-day beard and was wearing jeans and a dark windbreaker. He had on a Phillies baseball cap and black soft-soled shoes, like an umpire would wear. I reached back behind the seat and brought out a thermos. He looked through the windows.
“What, you’re on surveillance?” he said, trying to guess ahead.
“Yeah, in a way,” I said, pouring him a cup. He blew across the top before taking a sip. I was matching his unfocused look outside, waiting, like I was at the edge of some cliff, unsure how deep the water was if I jumped.
“I was up in Philly for a couple of days,” I finally said, still not looking at him. “I talked with your ex. She wanted me to tell you she wished you the best and didn’t think you had anything to do with this or with the Faith Hamlin deal.”
He didn’t react, just kept looking forward, but I could see blue veins at the side of his forehead starting to bulge. He was holding something in. But after a few beats of silence, I knew it was going to stay there.
“You going to give me any kind of inside on the grocery store clerk missing up there?”
“No. I’m not,” he said, and the veins pulsed back down.
“Christ, Colin. You can carry the old loyalty to the blue brotherhood a little too far, you know,” I said.
“It’s not loyalty to them,” was all he said and then put the cup to his mouth and went quiet again.
“Look, Colin. I don’t think you’re in on these disappearances. Maybe I’m missing something, because IA in Philly and Richards down here are on you like stink. But I’m on your side on this, man. For some reason, I’m trusting you.”
He stayed quiet but then turned and faced me.
“You said you needed me to help you help me,” O’Shea said. “That kinda gave it away, Freeman. So let’s get to it.”
“Right.”
I took out the cell phone and handed it to him.
“You know how to use the camera in one of these?”
He flipped the set open, looked at the face and turned it over once.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?” I said, thinking of my hour-long self-lesson.
“Yeah. What? You think I’ve been living in a fuckin’ cave down here, Freeman?” Or a swamp, I thought, but didn’t respond.
“But they don’t have any range to ’em,” he said. “Pretty useless for covert work.”
“This is close-up,” I said. “That’s why I need you to do it.”
I told him about my visit to Kim’s and as much detail as I could about the man I’d seen slipping out the back way. I didn’t mention Richards’s presence.
“I’m thinking drug dealer,” I said. “He and the new girl have something going. If he’s got women bartenders selling over the counter for him, maybe they get caught up in the action, try to skim him or some shit. If he’s ruthless enough, maybe he gets rid of the ones that he’s partnering up with.”
“I don’t know, Freeman. I been in and out of these places for a couple of years now and never saw it,” O’Shea said.
“Right. And you never told any of those bartenders you were an ex-cop?”
“Well, it does have a ring to it, you know.”
“And they don’t pass that around to their coworkers who might avoid doing business when you’re in the place?”
“OK. OK. I get the point,” he said and slipped the camera phone into his pocket.
“Like I said, six-foot, dark hair, clean-cut. Probably likes the same seat at the bar, down at the far end and he’s probably alone.”
“Down under the TV?” O’Shea said.
I looked at him.
“I know the layout.”
“I figured,” I said, still watching him. “Just hang at that end and leave the seat open. See if he comes in,” I said.
“You want me to hit him up for some coke or ecstasy or what?”
“Like someone’s going to buy first time from you, O’Shea.”
“Hey, I could have been all right undercover,” he said defensively.
I let that comment sit.
“Just the photo, all right?” I said and took fifty dollars out of my shirt pocket. “Stay till eleven or so and meet me back out here.” He took the cash without a word, got out and walked, unhurried, toward Kim’s.
I refilled my cup from the thermos, took a sip and when I looked over the rim I realized that all during our conversation I had been unconsciously staring out at a patrol car. The guy hadn’t moved for nearly an hour. Nice work if you can get it, I thought. But I had to admit there had been some slow rainy nights on the Charlie shift when I’d huddled in the dry stairwell of the First Pennsylvania Bank entrance to the Broad Street Subway and lost myself in a paperback when I was supposed to be walking a downtown beat. But this guy’s head had never even turned around to scan the rest of the lot. He was awake. I watched him put what now I was sure was a cell phone to his ear several times. But he seemed to only be focused on the side window of Kim’s. For a paranoid minute I thought maybe I’d sent O’Shea into the middle of some kind of sting operation. Then I saw the cop snap his hand away from his ear. His brake lights flashed as he started the engine and he jerked the patrol car out of the space in reverse. His headlights popped on but not the blue light bar and he dropped the transmission into drive and pulled a screeching hole shot out of the lot. He gunned it past Kim’s and a couple coming out of the Thai place had to jump back between two cars to keep from getting hit.
“Christ,” I said out loud to myself. “I hope that B&E is real important, pal.” And I reflexively memorized the number of his car that was stenciled on the left rear corner of the trunk.
I took another sip of coffee and checked my rear mirrors all around. It could be the only excitement of the night.
This time the rap of O’Shea’s knuckles on my truck woke me out of a half-sleep. My eyes may even have been open, but I could not recall what I was looking at other than the pale glow of neon and lamplight out in front of me. I unlocked the door and checked my watch as he got in. Twelve fifteen.
“Sleeping on the job will get you a write-up, Freeman.”
I let the comment pass. O’Shea settled into the seat, letting his body relax and deflate as if he had just done a hard shift down on the docks of the Delaware. He’d dragged in the odor of cigarette smoke and the sweet smell of whiskey came off his breath when he spoke. But his eyes were still clear and he would have convinced a highway patrolman that he was just tired. Some guys just had that capacity.
“Nobody that fits your mark in there tonight,” he said, taking the cell phone out of his pocket. “Few old regulars, a couple I recognized from before. Some kids that I eavesdropped on who were from some alternative newspaper staff and your typical football experts blattin’ on about how they would run the Dolphins’ offense like they were on fuckin’ talk radio. Bartender is new, though.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Marci.”
“Good-looking little blonde. Marci,” he said, looking away from me out into the night.
“But if she’s running drugs, it’s over the phone, ’cause she was on the damn thing every fifteen. Speaking of.”
He held the cell out to me.
“Keep it,” I said. “I want you to go back in tomorrow. Maybe stay till closing. It’s a Saturday night and maybe something will be different.”
He shrugged and pocketed the phone.
“You say so, boss,” he said and sat silent, making no move to get out.
“You want me to drop you someplace?”
“No, I’m good. I’m just wondering, Freeman, if it’s such a great idea for me to be hanging out in one place night after night, you know. Considering the circumstances.”
Both of us were looking straight out over the lot now, showing no interest in each other’s faces.
“You thinking about running, Colin?” I said.
“Shit, no.”
“If Richards is going to grab you up, she’ll find you anyway. You know the
drill.”
“Too fucking well,” he said, popping the handle and stepping out.
“And if she gets you here, I’m your alibi,” I said. “I’m trusting you.”
“Yeah.”
He closed the door and I watched him walk in the direction of the movie theater and disappear around the corner.
CHAPTER 19
That was it. She’d hung up on him and that was just over the fucking line.
Damn it, he thought. He’d had hopes for this one. He might even have been in love with her. Of course, he thought, he could have been in love with the others, too. But, shit. Why couldn’t they just do what he asked them to do instead of turning on him? He knew Marci needed him. He could see it in her eyes when he told her how beautiful she was and when he had to protect her like that time with the jerk boys, Thing One and Thing Two, on the street that day. She was a little freaked out by that, he could tell when he got back into the car and her mouth was hanging open: “Jesus, Kyle. What did you do to those guys?”
What did I do? You stand up for your girl when a couple of ring- nosed, fake-leather twerps insult her on the street and you get questions? Shit, they were lucky it hadn’t been dark. It had been hard enough for him to hold back from ripping that little shit’s earring out. But he knew that might have sent the twerp to the hospital and he would have called his mommy and she’d have filed a complaint. But Marci had settled down after he told her she was too special to him to let anyone diss her. Later she even laughed when he gave them the Dr. Suess monikers. “You’re crazy,” she said and he agreed and they had crazy sex that night. So why the hell couldn’t it just be good like that all the time? No. They always had to start bitching. You give and give and they take and take and then they start telling you what to do. They always gotta try to run you.
He was driving out west. It always made him feel better when he was in the car when he was pissed. He made a rolling stop at the Hillsborough light onto 441 and punched it north. The car in front of him pulled to the shoulder when the driver saw him flying up in the rearview. Fucking right, he thought, rushing past, checking it in his mirror. Some people did the right thing. They recognized their place in the world.
He had known his place since he was a kid growing up in Oak Park in Chicago. He could still remember that day in fifth grade, that pasty-faced teacher with the flowery, down-to-the-ankles dresses and the perfume that smelled like the thick, hot summer lilac bush outside his mother’s bedroom window. But that day was winter because they were inside in the gym and the time for P. E. was running out and they were trying to get one shuttle run in before the bell rang. Just one. He’d been ready for at least five minutes when the other idiot kids tried to figure out what three straight lines were, Christ! He’d spit in his hands and wiped the dust off the bottom of his sneakers so they’d grip on the tile floor and he knew he’d have the fastest time. But there she stood explaining for the third time that you had to pick up the first eraser and bring it back to the line and set it down, not throw it down, and then run back and get the second one and then race back to the starting line. OK, OK, Jesus! Let’s go. But there was always some shit-head talking or pushing in line or asking if they had to set the second eraser down, too. So she started into the explanation again and he could see they weren’t going to have enough time and “Come on! Let’s just go!” he’d yelled and Christ you’d have thought he’d smacked her in her old, powdery face.
“Well! Since Mr. Morrison thinks he’s in charge, we can all line up and follow him back to class. And you can all thank him for missing your chance to run the race.”
Just like some wack job to blame her ineptitude on someone else. Put it on him because she was too weak to just get the lames to shut up and run.
Now the patrol car was blowing up on the taillights of another car on the two-lane. He reached over and hit the switch for the light bar and sent swirls of blue strobes out into the dark. The beams swept the open tree lines back off the edge of the highway and then exploded in blobs of color when they hit the white front wall of the feed store past Boynton Beach Boulevard. The car in front tapped its brake lights and started to slow and he moved out over the double yellow and punched it past. He caught a glimpse of the woman driver’s face, tinted blue in his lights, eyes big and startled and helpless. Just like the old teacher. Just like his mother. The same face she wore that night when he was fourteen.
The old man had been making it a habit of coming home late in the night, drunk with the thick tissue of his eyes swollen with drink and his jowls flaccid. He woke up the house with the noise of the aluminum screen door slamming and everyone knew the routine was on. Upstairs he would hear the clumping of his father’s greasy work boots, blackened from the oil and metal shavings of the tool and die shop, on the kitchen floor. His mother was anal about keeping that floor clean, always making everyone take their shoes off in the mudroom, scrubbing and even waxing the cheap linoleum on her hands and knees. And he wondered if the old man recognized that and tracked across it on purpose or was just too drunk to realize it. Then the thumping would start. The grunting, guttural barking of one voice against the high whine that started off demanding and brave but would lose that battle against a meaty hand smacking against thin skin and light bone. Before that final night he’d dealt with it by cowering. Pull the cover over your head. Stick your fingers in your ears. But that night he was tired of rules being repeated over and over. He went to the gun rack that hung on the basement wall. The .22 rifle was for rabbits. The big British .303 was for larger animals. He took the gun down and was surprised that the weight did not overwhelm him as it had in the past. He loaded the receiver with ammunition from the small wooden drawers on the rack. He’d never really been taught, he’d just learned by watching his father and other men from the shop prepare for deer hunting season up north. The only thing he had been taught was never to point a gun at anything you weren’t prepared to kill. He slid a round into the chamber with the bolt action, locked it down and went upstairs.
In the hallway he heard the command and the sharp wet slap and went into their bedroom unannounced. The barrel of the .303 came up and centered on his father’s chest. The old man’s hooded eyes went almost comically wide. His mother’s were pleading.
He slowly circled the room where his mother had been slapped to the bed and held the gun amazingly steady and weightless. He put himself between them, giving his back to his mother so he would not have to see her weakness. Each time his father tried to slur some useless attempt at apology, he could remember his own steady, mechanical response: “Shut up!” and took another step forward, raising the rifle site to his father’s face. If the old man still thought he had any dominance over him, it leaked away, replaced by the knowledge that his son was capable of blowing his brain matter all over his own bedroom wall.
He backed his father out of the room, down the stairs and over the once pristine kitchen floor. Through the screen door he forced him, stumbling, down the steps and out into the night and it was the last he saw of him, and from that time on, he, Kyle, was the man of the house.
He’d crossed Forest Hill Boulevard and was coming up to Southern by now and had lost track of time. He was not on duty and had turned off all the radios in the patrol car that would have been updating the hours in military time. He looked at his watch and it was past two so he turned around in a construction area at the roadside. He killed the headlights and sat there in the dark with the engine running.
Why couldn’t she just do what he asked her to do? He shook his head, now looking back south. And then she’d gone and hung up on him in the bar and that was just over the fucking line. He’d give her one more chance, but it was becoming all too familiar. Don’t test me, Marci. Nobody’s going to love you out in those cold dark weeds with the rest of them. You’ll be out there all alone.
CHAPTER 20
The moon was high and dusty white, mottled by its features, but still its reflected light put a pale sheen on the acres of
Everglades sawgrass that lay out before me.
I was on the berm that formed the northern back of the L-10 canal. I’d come back to my shack and spent my time reading in silence and pretending to fish and paddling my river. I was still grinding the rocks of O’Shea’s innocence, Richards’s vendetta against him and the possibility of a stalker still working the bars. I was pissed that O’Shea refused to talk about the Faith Hamlin case, even while I was sticking my neck and Billy’s out for him. What the hell was he hiding? He didn’t owe those other three cops. Was I way off base on the bartender drug theory? Was there really someone stalking the girls, or were they just working the trade and then moving on while a drug pimp recruited his next one? Richards said she’d done backgrounds on all the girls without a sign of drug use or involvement. But if that was all it was, she was going to be kicking herself around worse than her superiors. I was turning the ideas in my head, trying to rub them smooth with logic and the sandpaper of “What if?” But I knew I was waiting for someone else to act, make a mistake, uncover a body, wound instead of kill. The anxious feeling that crawled just under the muscles in my back and shoulders had sent me out in my canoe paddling hard up the river in the middle of the night.
I’d pushed myself all the way to the culvert that the water management district had opened to divert canal water into the river. The natural slough of hundreds of wet acres that spread north and west had been the river’s water source for thousands of years before men had started re-plumbing the Glades to fit their needs. Thirsty cities along the coast, a desire—no, a need—to lower the naturally high water table to create dry farmland for the sugarcane and winter vegetables and dry plots for yet more suburban housing. It was homo erectus in control of something as natural as the flow of rainwater.
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