The Blue Edge of Midnight

by Jonathon King

  “What’s with the woman?” I asked Billy, surprising even myself when the question slipped out of my mouth.

  “My guess is sh-she has let herself get too close,” Billy answered. “You know h-how the ch-child you found died?”

  I had missed a few days of news.

  “Dehydration,” he said. “She was d-deprived of water. Probably f-for days.”

  I kept my eyes shut. I had watched Richards when she came in the room, could smell her perfume. I’d seen her move her fingers to her hair and tuck the loose strand behind her ear and the movement raked my insides more than any fractured rib could have.

  “Billy,” I said. “Get me out of here, OK?”

  CHAPTER 11

  It was the first time I’d seen her close up. She was crouched in the shadows, holding an assault rifle, breathing in that same deep rhythmic way of hers that I would watch for years afterward in our morning bed.

  That day we were inside an abandoned Philadelphia elementary school. The electricity was long since gone, pulled out by the demolition contractors who in a few weeks would knock down the thirty-year-old structure and scoop it off the corner near Lehigh Avenue in Kensington. The only light came in through the partially boarded windows and streamed through the haze of dust that seemed to float from the old recessed tile ceilings.

  The Philadelphia Police SWAT team used the building for exercises, practicing how to handle interior room sweeps in the empty hallways and classrooms. Meg had been with them for eighteen months. She was a patrol cop. A good one. Tough when she needed to be and friendly enough when she wanted to be. At least that was the word around the roundhouse. She was also a hell of a good shot with a sniper rifle and that’s why she was working with the Special Weapons And Tactics team.

  I was there on an invite from Tommy Gibbons, a guy I’d known since we were in the police academy who’d asked me to stop in and observe this particular training gig. Gibbons had been trying to get me to apply for a SWAT spot for a couple of years. My lack of ambition bothered him. His constant state of enthusiasm bothered me. Somehow, we were friends.

  “Come on, Max. Just come out and watch,” he’d said, interrupting a perfectly fine glass of Schaefer on draft at McLaughlin’s. “I know there’s an intense guy under that dumb lineman look. I know it. You got what makes these guys tick, Max. Come on. Just come out and watch ’em work and see if you don’t catch a bug.”

  I was into my third glass of beer. It was summertime. A thirty-year-old version of the Drifters singing “Up on the Roof” was on the jukebox. I was staring at the oak scrollwork on McLaughlin’s famous hundred-year-old bar mirror and for some yet unknown reason said, “Yeah, OK.”

  So the next day I was leaning against an empty metal fire extinguisher box watching the team position themselves in the hallway for a drill on “room probes” and watching the woman who would capture and then severely stomp my previously lazy heart.

  Megan Turner was dressed in black, armed and dangerous. There was something about her profile, the sharp straight nose, the small rise of her cheekbones, and her delicate but determined chin that made me stare despite myself. Yet even that first day it was her eyes that caught me. From a distance of fifteen feet their ice-blue color seemed to absorb the fractured light, reflect none of it, and perform the uncanny task of sending an emotional thought across a room. It was her eyes and her hair that day.

  Meg had become the team sniper soon after her recruitment to the team on the strength of her ability to put five out of five .308-caliber rounds from a sniper rifle into the dimensions of a quarter at two hundred yards. Good sharpshooters say they aim for a spot just in front of the ear, right where a close sideburn might end. A .308 round there will kill a suspect instantly, before his reflexes can pull the trigger of his own gun.

  But on this day Meg was playing backup, armed with an MP5 assault rifle and given the task of covering a teammate who was doing a mirror probe of a classroom.

  As the six-person team took up their positions, she had settled in against a hallway corner. Although her eyes were already on the doorjamb of the target room, I could feel her peripheral vision taking me in. She was wearing a pair of black gloves with the fingers cut off and before locking herself into position, knowing I was watching, she consciously loosened a strand of her long honey-blond hair from her baseball cap and stroked it behind her ear. I would learn, much later, that it was a calculated move. And I fell instantly in love.

  Once the drill started, she fixed her rifle sites on the doorjamb while her partner crawled quietly along the floor, inching like an awkward snake along the baseboard of a scarred and dirty wall. When he got to the open doorway, he pulled out a long-handled mirror similar to a dentist’s tool and slipped it around the corner, squinting and tilting the reflection to search the room.

  For thirty-two minutes the heat in the hallway climbed. And for thirty-two minutes I watched Megan Turner’s concentration. The sweat started in tiny beads at line of her cap and I watched them build and then roll in strings down her brow and neck. The air grew thick and nearly impossible to draw in. She sighted her weapon and never flinched. I’d never seen such a display of total focus.

  When the officer on the floor yelled “Clear” the sharp sound of his voice made me jump and bang my shoulder against the extinguisher box. Megan simply exhaled, a slight grin tugging at the corner of her mouth.

  After the exercise the squad gathered in the parking lot where they stripped out of their dark clothing and bulletproof vests, dumped cups of water over their heads and inhaled Gatorade. I was hanging near Gibbons and one of the team leaders when Megan looked up and caught me watching her again.

  “So what do you think, Freeman?” she said, and the voice seemed way too soft, far too feminine.

  “Impressive,” I said, surprised that she knew my name.

  “Challenging enough for you?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Love to have you.”

  Gibbons looked up with the rest of the team, but I didn’t see them rolling their eyes. I was watching Meg loosen a strand of her now wet hair and stroke it into position behind her ear.

  “Yeah,” was all I could manage.

  We dated for six months and I tried every day to figure out if I’d fallen for the toughness it took to hold the crosshairs of a sniper rifle on a suspect’s head for several minutes, or her ability to cry after separating another kid from his junkie mother on yet another domestic violence call.

  Both of the attributes fascinated and scared me.

  How I got past that and asked her to marry me I still didn’t know. I was not a commitment kind of guy, more out of apathy than avoidance. I didn’t think of myself as a man who needed companionship. I’d never had a date in high school. I’d gone out with friends that friends had set up for me, but rarely made a move myself. Women unsettled me. I’d grown up in a male- dominated household and had little clue how the female psyche worked. I’d tried to study them from afar, to grind out answers to their odd emotional abilities, but had obviously failed. Even Megan was indecipherable. But her energy hooked me.

  We got married in a relatively small ceremony in South Philly. Her family side was huge and varied. My side was full of cops, mostly friends and family from my father’s side. After the wedding we went to Atlantic City for a week. Meg discovered blackjack and the dealers and pit bosses loved her. She cussed when she lost and shrieked when she won and her smile and flashing blond hair made everyone at her table happy to be there. I often stood back from the green felt table, watching, touching her spine through the sheer fabric of her blouse just to remind her I was there.

  For three years we kept a small townhouse apartment tucked away between the tight center city streets just north of Lombard. We went to the Walnut Street Theatre and she watched quietly and then drank loudly at the Irish pub across the alley. We took the Broad Street subway to the Vet to see the Phillies and I watched quietly and we both drank deeply at McLaughlin’s afterward.
When she worked out at the local Nautilus club, I left her alone. When I holed up with my books, she left me alone. When we made love, she was enthusiastic. I’m still not sure what I was.

  Throughout the marriage, Meg stayed on the SWAT team. Sometimes, when she got called out in the middle of the night, I would show up in uniform and stand out on the perimeter, talking with the crowd-control guys, trying to picture her inside or up high on a rooftop, sighting in her sniper rifle. But the night she took out a suspect holding three hostages at gunpoint in Overbrook, I was on another call.

  The guy had been chased by campus police after a robbery where he’d already wounded a security guard. He had slipped in behind three women, students at St. Joe’s, as they walked into their dorm room, and then forced them into a lounge on the second floor, screaming that he would kill them if the cops tried to arrest him.

  Meg’s team was on call and as the uniform guys cleared the dormitory to isolate the room, they took position. She was on the third floor of the student affairs building across the street with a clear view inside the lounge. Her teammates were silently creeping the halls while a hostage negotiator was getting an earful of cuss words on the only telephone in the room, a wall-mounted set that was directly in Meg Turner’s sight line.

  The negotiations were short. The fourth time the negotiator rang the phone in an attempt to keep the suspect talking, he pulled one of the women over to the phone with him. He had his gun to the girl’s head and through Meg’s telescopic sight, she could see his finger on the trigger and his face in full profile.

  “You motherfuckers done called one damn time too many already and now you gone see what the hell it’s gone cost…”

  The man never finished his sentence. The .308 round exploded perfectly on his right sideburn. All three students were rescued unhurt.

  Hours later, after my shift, after the SWAT crew had been debriefed and let loose, I found them at McLaughlin’s. The place was full. The Phillies were in New York, getting whipped by the Mets on the overhead television. Off-duty cops were in every corner and clustered at the bar, sifting in and out among the members of the shooting team.

  When I came in out of a light rain, I stood in the vestibule and could see her through the frosted glass. She sat at the end of the polished bar, her perfect profile caught by the light coming off the ancient mirror, her ice-blue eyes shining with that soft electric emotion I’d seen the very first day in the halls of the elementary school.

  She wasn’t drunk. She wasn’t loud. She seemed to be carrying nothing extra in her head only hours after killing a man. She just looked damned beautiful. But her eyes this time were subtly moving on a blond, broad-shouldered member of one of the other Special Weapons teams. He was smiling widely and moving his hands in animated expression. I’d seen him before and some sense of his ambition caused me to avoid him.

  I stayed behind the glass, watching her play him. The rain dripped off my jacket and pooled at my feet. I watched my wife take up her glass of draft, draw a sip, and then with her eyes on another man she loosened a strand of her long honey-blond hair and stroked it into position behind her ear.

  CHAPTER 12

  I am cold. In my dream I can hear water sluicing through concrete gutters. A swirling rain, caught in the wind that shears around the Wanamakers building, tunnels down Chestnut Street and whips against my face. Water is running black into the storm drains in center city Philadelphia and I am running, hard, my black Reeboks slapping the sheen of water on the sidewalk. I am breathing hard, gasping against the rainwater pelting my face and I keep looking up to see the corner at Thirteenth Street, but I’m confused. Am I getting closer? Or farther away? Am I running at it? Or running way from it? Suddenly my foot hits a spot. I skid, lose my balance, start to fall.

  The scraping sound of stiff plastic on concrete jars me awake and my eyes pop open and I am gripping the arms of a chaise lounge. I am on Billy’s patio, sitting in the late-morning sun. I got to my feet and walked into the kitchen, trying to shake the dream out of my head. I cupped my hands under the faucet and splashed water into my face. I was back in the world.

  Billy had gone to his office. He’d taken me out of the hospital two nights ago. With a few carefully folded fifty-dollar bills, he’d gotten help from hospital security to get me out a back entrance and avoid any lingering members of the media. He’d waited until after 9:00 P.M., after television’s main broadcast hour, when the reporters would be easing back from any live standups they might have done.

  “I’m a-afraid you’ve 1-lost your anonymity,” he’d said.

  Billy of course was right. After the plane crash, my name was in the accident reports. Gunther was going to recover. And since the Glades ranger was going on about how I’d dragged the pilot to the dock, the instant inclination of the press was to do a hero story. In my favor was the fact that I had no address for them to find and no phone to call. No sound bites, no quotes, no hero.

  But I also knew reporters weren’t all slaves to the news cycle. Someone would have seen Hammonds and his team at the hospital and made a connection: What’s the lead investigator of the child killings doing interviewing a guy who crashed a plane in the Everglades? Television might not care, but the newspapers would question whether or not to make a hero out of a guy being questioned about serial killings. The media didn’t like stories that didn’t fit into pigeonholes. How do you portray a cop who gets shot in the line of duty but kills a twelve-year-old in the process? I knew the drill. They’d back off to see “what develops.” They might eventually move on. I hoped Hammonds would be smart enough to let them.

  For a full, quiet day it had worked. I’d lain here, stretched out in the warm morning sun and then through the shady afternoon. Billy had mixed up some kind of hydrating mixture of watered-down fruit juice and vitamins. I’d been able to eat, bowls of brothy soup and then some thin pita bread. I drifted in and out of sleep with the ache in my ribs and the one in my dreams taking turns waking me.

  This morning my body was stiff, but my head wasn’t going to let me rest any longer. I got up and went inside and poured myself a cup of coffee, washed down a prescription Percocet with it, and looked out through the wall of windows at the thin line of the horizon. The coffee cup shook when I tried to raise it and I needed both hands to steady it. I was still wobbling despite the sleep and the medication. My skin was dry as paper and my lips were still swollen and cracked. The hot coffee stung them but I couldn’t deny my habit. Diaz’s card lay on the counter and I picked up the phone.

  “You have reached the desk of Detective Vince Diaz, if you would like to leave …”

  I waited for the damned beep.

  “Look, Diaz. This is Max Freeman. I’ve been able to locate your piece of electronics. If you want to pick it up, call me.” I left Billy’s cell phone number, even though I knew the detective bureau would have a caller I.D. readout and probably already had Billy’s private number. I looked at the digital clock on the stove. Diaz called back in eight minutes.

  “Hey, Mr. Freeman, that’s great. I’d like to come up as soon as possible. Get moving on that particular thing, all right?”

  I gave him the address and told him he could call from the lobby when he arrived.

  “Yeah, you kind of surprised us leaving the hospital so soon.”

  “About an hour?” I said.

  “Yeah, sure, an hour.”

  I punched him off and dialed again.

  “Ranger Station twelve, Cleve Wilson.”

  “Cleve. Max Freeman.”

  “Good God, Max. Where the hell you been?”

  It might have been a question, or a statement of wonder.

  “I’ve been a little busy Cleve, I’ll fill you in when I get out there but I’m not sure when that will be.”

  “You know those detectives were back out here with a warrant. I had to show them to your place,” he said and this time I could hear the apology in his voice. “But I went in with them, you know, just to watch if they m
essed things up.”

  “It’s all right, Cleve. I appreciate it.”

  “And boy, they do not miss anything, if you know what I mean.”

  Cleve was a pro at understatement.

  “Anything interest them in particular?”

  “Well, they did perk up a bit when they found that nine millimeter of yours in the bottom of your duffel.”

  I had forgotten about the gun and sat there in Billy’s kitchen wondering how I’d been able to let it slip far enough into the back of my mind as to finally let go of its memory, the feel and smell and sound of it echoing off the brick and glass of Thirteenth Street.

  “But they didn’t take it,” Cleve said quickly, breaking the silence. “I heard one of them wondering if it was your old service issue. Then they put it back.”

  “Yeah? Well, thanks, Cleve. Like I said, I’ll see you when I get back out there. I was actually calling to check on my truck.”

  “It’s sitting here. The boy come back with it and since the scratch was gone and it was all shined up, I figured he was telling the truth about you letting him use it. But I’ve got the keys back in my desk.”

  “Thanks, Cleve.”

  I punched the phone off and finished my coffee while I watched the beginning of an afternoon rainstorm drive the sunbathers off the beach below.

  I met Diaz in the lobby. I was carrying a small gym bag and a traveler’s cup of coffee. I’d taken a shower and dressed in a pair of light cotton trousers and the loosest long-sleeved shirt I had. My skin was still tight and had started to flake off my forearms, either from the salve for the mosquito bites or from the dryness of dehydration. The Percocet had taken the edge off the ache in my bruised ribs.

  Diaz was waiting under the watchful presence of the tower manager to whom he’d presented his I.D. before having me called. The manager bowed slightly when I thanked him, but continued his careful vigil as we drifted to a sitting area in an anteroom off the main entrance hall.