Eye of Vengeance

by Jonathon King

  When nothing in the weekend pile of faxes showed any promise, Nick started going through e-mails. He had one from the Bradenton Sheriff’s Office giving him a number to call to reach the detective handling the shooting of the doctor who’d killed his wife. Another was from a Washington Bureau reporter whom he’d asked earlier to find out more about Fitzgerald:

  Nick: I’ll have to look further on the Secret Service guy. He’s not their usual front man on State visits. Must be a back-roomer. I’ll get back to you.

  Rafael

  The rest of the e-mail stuff looked too routine to bother with. Nick leaned back and started making his regular phone checks. Nick had been at the game for enough years to know who was plugged in and had an ear to the streets.

  His first call was to the medical examiner’s office to see if there were any fresh bodies from the weekend. A receptionist he knew answered.

  “Hey, Margie. Anything new in the back room from the weekend?”

  He heard Margie shuffling papers: “Nothing unnatural, Nick. Sorry.”

  Nick often wondered why they thought that the lack of violence would disappoint him. He didn’t get paid by the number of dead people he wrote about. Sometimes he felt like a phone solicitor for Fuller Brush: Got any death today? No? Sure? We’re having a special for the front page tomorrow. OK, I’ll check back with you later. Have a good day!

  His second call was to the Sheriff’s Office communications desk. He was listening to the fifth unanswered ring when he heard a voice over the police radio near his desk. The dispatcher’s voice was cranked just a notch above dispassionate.

  “Kilo-nineteen, kilo-nineteen. Report of a man down on the sidewalk. One hundred block of East McNab Road. Possible gunshots. Repeat. Possible gunshots.”

  Nick stood up and reached over to crank up the radio volume. He recognized the address as a corrections and parole office. He was listening to the radio with one ear, the ringing phone with the other. The phone spoke first.

  “Broward Sheriff’s Office, dispatch, Sergeant Sortal.”

  “Yeah, hey, Sarge. This is Nick Mullins from the Daily News. Anything going on today or over the weekend that we ought to know about?”

  Nick always tried to sound friendly, like he and they were both on the same team, especially if he didn’t recognize the person on duty.

  “Nothing much over the weekend, Nick,” the female sergeant said. She did not elaborate even though Nick knew that as the dispatch sergeant she was listening to the same radio traffic he was.

  “So, this thing going on up at the DOC office in Pompano, what’s that?” Nick said. Typically, the cops knew how to blow off the press if they could. It was always better to know a little bit going into the questions, like priming a stubborn pump.

  “Well, I’m not sure about that yet, Nick. All we have so far is a man down with units on the way. Might be heatstroke as far as we know.”

  Nick figured this was probably bullshit since he’d already heard the call about possible gunshots.

  “And it’s not at a DOC building. It’s a parole office in the center there,” she said, using her knowledge to one-up him, but inadvertently giving him information that he didn’t have.

  “OK, well, I’ll check back with you later on that. Thanks a lot.”

  “Have a nice day,” she said and hung up.

  Nick did not apologize for being a skeptic—it came with the job. As a daily journalist you want to know immediately what’s going on, even if you discard half of it later. The government or business entities you cover do not share that enthusiasm. They want to spin things so they don’t look bad, or, Nick conceded, they want to have all their ducks in a row before they tell you. Nick recognized this. He in fact held the opinion that everything eventually would come out. Even the identity of Deep Throat came out. Sure, it was thirty years after Mark Felt’s information put an end to President Nixon. Still, a journalist’s hunger to know is what drives the good ones, and Nick was too hyped up about guys dropping in the streets from unheard gunshots to wait. He called a friend at the city of Pompano Beach with the paramedic rescue unit.

  “Hey, Billy. Nick Mullins from the Daily News. How you doin’?”

  “Nicky! Hey, what’s going on? Your girls going to get involved with the softball league this year or what? We really need Lindsay on the mound again.”

  Billy Matthews was a city administrator who oversaw the fire and rescue services for the city. His daughter had been on the same athletic teams that Carly and Lindsay were on. They were passing friends due to being fathers. Billy had obviously forgotten about Lindsay and Julie’s deaths when he’d picked up the phone.

  “I’m not really sure yet, Bill. I’m going to have to see if Carly’s up to it yet, you know.”

  “Jesus. I’m sorry, Nick. Yeah, sure, see if she’s up to it. It would be great to see you two back involved, you know?”

  Now it was coming back to him, Nick thought.

  “Yeah. But Billy, right now I need some help on a call you guys have going over near the DOC office. My sources say there might be a shooting victim out there and, you know, I don’t know if I should run up there on it. Could you do a check for me and see how serious it is? I’d appreciate it.”

  “Nobody here has said anything to me yet. Let me check a second. Let me make a call and get right back to you.”

  Nick knew he now had the poor guy over a barrel. The man had forgotten about Nick’s dead wife and daughter. Now he had to figure he owed him something. And hell, it was probably nothing. Maybe some guy did have heatstroke and some old lady passing by started screaming gunshots. It was South Florida, after all, filled with both heat and easily wigged-out retirees.

  Nick sat back down at his desk with the police radio turned up even if he did know that the cops would switch over to an unmonitored tactical channel if they found anything good. He went back to his computer, called up a blank screen and typed in some times and locations on the radio call like he usually did on a breaking story. If the early reports eventually washed out, he’d just kill the notes later. Still better to put some facts down just in case. He stored the file and then went back into some earlier stuff. He had not yet been through all the research on statewide shootings involving high-powered rifles.

  He scrolled through the listings. Lori had been thorough, as was her way:

  A forty-eight-year-old man up in the central part of the state killed by fellow hunter. I.D.s on both of them. Friends since grade school.

  A woman in Tallahassee shot dead by her common-law husband with a rifle during a domestic dispute involving allegations of infidelity.

  A mysterious killing in the Keys in which police found a man dead in his boat with a gunshot wound to the head. The caliber of the gun that killed him was considered a large-caliber in early stories. Nick read the follow-ups, feeling a slight shiver in his blood. Forensics found the bullet lodged in the interior gunwales of the dead man’s boat. An odd .303-caliber. Nick jumped three stories and found disappointment. The killing had been attributed to another fisherman, pissed because he thought the other guy had been raiding his favorite holes. The shooter had turned himself in after four days of speculation. Nick did not recognize the names. He moved on.

  Four stories later was a story out of Sebastian, a city on the east coast up north near Daytona.

  Indian County sheriff’s officials have released the name of a man found dead in front of a west Sebastian home Thursday as Martin J. Crossly, a 32-year-old house painter who had apparently been renting the home for some eight months.

  A medical examiner’s report released over the weekend showed that Crossly, who was a former inmate at the Avon Park Correctional institution in Polk County, died of a single gunshot wound to the head. Police said today that Crossly had an extensive criminal history and had apparently been living in the Sebastian home on the north side along Louisiana Boulevard since being freed from prison in December after serving three years on a conspiracy charge.

&nbs
p; Neighbors in the area near the FEC tracks said they were not familiar with Crossly and indicated that the home had long been used as a crack house before he moved in.

  “The victim was shot once with a large-caliber bullet from an unknown rifle,” said Deputy Chief Larry Longo of the Indian County Sheriff’s Office. “With the kind of background this guy had, I’m sure he had plenty of enemies.”

  According to published reports, Crossly’s prison stretch was the result of …

  Nick did not need to read further. He knew Crossly’s name, and knew his crime. Crossly was the delivery boy of a bomb that was sent to a small North Florida city meant to kill a woman who was turning state’s evidence on a Broward drug dealer. Crossly’s car was stopped by a Florida Highway Patrol trooper for speeding on an interstate near Tallahassee, only forty miles from his destination. Suspicious of the man’s answers to questions concerning where he was headed and the fact that he was driving a rental car, the officer asked Crossly to open the trunk. Inside was a box wrapped in birthday paper. The trooper asked Crossly if he could open the package. When Crossly said sure, the cop unwrapped a microwave oven and, looking through the door window, saw a package of some sort inside. When he opened the door, a powerful bomb rigged to the handle exploded, blowing the trooper into pieces. In the grisly aftermath a medical examiner’s team had to do a step-by-step inspection of a forty-yard circle around the point of detonation to collect the trooper’s remains.

  Nick had written a huge story on the case and had quoted several street sources about the close personal link between the drug dealer who sent the bomb and Crossly. On the corners of northwest Fort Lauderdale, Crossly was known as the dealer’s enforcer. There was no doubt among rival dealers and runners that Crossly knew exactly what he was carrying that day. In time, the dealer was arrested and charged with the murder of a law enforcement officer and sent to death row. But despite Nick’s stories, which, as usual, were never allowed in court, Crossly was able to lighten his load by agreeing to testify against the dealer. Prosecutors offered him a conspiracy charge and he took it. He had been out on parole when someone shot him dead on his porch.

  Dr. Chambliss.

  Martin Crossly.

  Steven Ferris.

  All criminals with ugly homicides in their pasts. All subjects of extensive stories Nick had done for his newspaper. All killed on the street. Coincidence?

  Nick had done hundreds of stories about criminals over the years, and no doubt other journalists would have done pieces on these guys too. But Nick had stepped up on these guys. He’d been both pissed and fascinated by their crimes, and to prove they were evil he’d checked more sources, dug into pasts, quoted more than the official side. He hated to admit it, but Deirdre had let him do the kind of extensive pieces on these guys that few reporters were allowed, bless her clompy shoes.

  He started to scroll down the research list again, hungry this time for names that he recognized. He was about to call Lori’s desk to get her to run another search, this time matching any names in the stories she’d sent him and his own byline. He was reaching for the phone when it rang just as his fingertips touched it, causing him to flinch.

  “Nick Mullins,” he said, finally picking up the line.

  “It’s Billy, Nick. Hey, this is all on the QT, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, Bill. I just need to know if I should run up there, you know?”

  “OK. Rescue has a white male by the name of Trace Michaels, DOA when they got there. Single bullet wound to the head. It was actually in the doorway of the probation and parole office in that block. They didn’t move the body because he was obviously dead when they got there. Guys said half his head was missing from the back. Ugly scene, Nick.”

  Matthews listened to silence for a moment.

  “Nick? Did you get that?”

  “Repeat that name for me,” Nick said, his brain now flashing.

  “Trace Michaels. M-I-C-H-A-E-L-S.”

  “Thanks, Bill. I appreciate it,” Nick said.

  “OK, Nicky, but remem—”

  Nick hung up before the administrator could finish his sentence.

  Three was too many. Four was impossible. Nick was up and on his way through the newsroom, his eyes glazed with remembering, when an editor called out his name.

  “I’m going to a shooting in Pompano,” he answered, snapping his notepad on the edge of the woman’s desk as he walked by and left it at that. On his brisk walk to the elevators he was thinking, Trace Michaels, dead. Maybe they should give this shooter a medal.

  Nick drove north on Dixie Highway through the bedroom communities of Wilton Manors and Oakland Park, thinking about Mary Chardain’s face, the skin on her left cheek and forehead whitened in splotches where the burned and crinkled skin had to be removed. Her thin arms, lying out straight on the hospital bed, were still gauzed and Nick had already been told by the nurse of the agony the woman would have to go through as those bandages were regularly removed, dead skin removed and then the new raw layer rewrapped. Trace Michaels had sloshed rubbing alcohol over the head of his lover of six years and set her on fire. “Jesus,” Nick said aloud in the car, remembering the guy’s face. A public defender had argued Michaels’s case, claiming that both he and Chardain were drug addicts and the alcohol had accidentally spilled on Mary when they were cooking another dose together and had caught fire. Nick had done a story on Chardain and her daughter, a bright eleven-year-old who witnessed the incident and had jumped to her mother’s aid. Michaels had gone down for attempted murder. But somehow—and Nick was thinking about the prison overcrowding that was forcing the release of model prisoners and the use of gain time, which cut their sentences down for good behavior—Michaels was back on the street.

  When he got to McNab he turned east and as he went through the light at Cypress Road he could see the collection of cop cars and Pompano’s yellow-green rescue trucks blinking in the next block. He pulled over into a small shopping center, parked his car and walked the rest of the way, watching, searching the rooflines of any building tall enough to give a sniper an angle on the offices where the largest knot of paramedics and cops were gathered. By now Nick had lost his skepticism. This was another one. As he approached he saw the paramedics reloading their truck, no one to treat or transport. A couple of deputies were standing just off the sidewalk, talking quietly, their backs purposely turned to the yellow sheet that covered a lump behind them. The body had not been moved and still lay mostly on the sidewalk, only its feet jamming open the door of the parole office. Nick stopped at the crime scene tape that was stretched around three parked cars, positioned to keep the gawkers at a distance. He was looking for a familiar face among the officers to signal to when he saw Hargrave step out of the building with a pen in his mouth and a leather-bound notebook in his hand. Nick stayed silent, watching the detective look down at the body. The ballpoint pen was between his teeth and was flicking back and forth like a metronome. He bent his knees and folded himself down like some adjustable ladder so that he was on the balls of his feet. Then he peeled back the yellow sheet, looked under it and finally turned his gaze to the sky, the rooflines. Nick knew he had been right.

  “Detective?” Nick called out, as any reporter at the scene would.

  But unlike any other reporter, he was summoned by a crook of Hargrave’s finger and he raised the plastic tape and slipped under.

  The beefy sergeant who seemed to run with Hargrave as protection, though Nick doubted that the wiry detective would need any in a street fight, stepped up to block his advance only a few feet from the body.

  “It’s OK, Tony,” Hargrave said and the big man backed off.

  The detective stayed in his crouch and Nick joined him. Hargrave said nothing and instead pulled back the yellow tarp and exposed the dead man’s face. Nick was not squeamish and knew that it was not Hargrave’s intent to shock him. In profile, the man’s face had already gone whiter than normal. The dark stubble on his cheek and chin was unnaturally distinct,
as if each follicle were raised in relief. Nick knew that the other cheek on the ground would be the opposite, growing dark purple as the blood settled at the lowest point. The man’s exposed and wide-open right eye had already lost its glisten of moisture. Hargrave pulled the sheet back farther. The back portion of the man’s head, behind the ear, had been ripped open by a heavy round.

  “The woman in front of him opened the door and then dropped a set of keys. Our victim apparently had just begun to bend down to get them when she heard a ‘slap,’ as she described it,” Hargrave said. “She’s inside, trying not to look at the blood spatter all over her dress.”

  Nick stood up, not needing to see any more. Hargrave replaced the sheet and stood with him.

  “Look familiar?” the detective said.

  “Trace Michaels,” Nick said quietly. “I did a takeout piece on him a few years ago. He’s the guy who doused his girlfriend with alcohol and set her on fire.”

  “Good memory,” Hargrave said.

  “I remember them all,” Nick replied.

  They both went quiet for several seconds, maybe realizing what they both shared.

  “I think we better step into the office here, Mr. Mullins.”

  Hargrave led the way around the body and into the reception area of the parole office. There were plastic chairs against two walls. A glassed window, slid shut, was in the middle of the third wall. They passed through a door into an interior hallway and Nick saw a small huddle of what he took to be employees sitting around a small break table in one room, talking quietly but in voices that were unnaturally high with anxiety and the breathlessness that goes with, “My God. I could have been walking in that door myself.”