A Killing Night (17 page)

“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

T
hat 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

T
he 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.

At the berm I pulled the canoe up into a clump of marsh fern and climbed eight feet to the top. My night vision had returned to me after too long a dose of electric light in the city. In the moonlight I could even pick up the tiny white nodes of snail pods clinging to the razor-sharp strands of sawgrass like short strings of pearls. To the east I could see the false dawn of the city lights, but to the west only the shimmer of moving grass when the wind picked up and blew a pattern over the Glades. That’s the direction I was facing when the chattering of my cell phone sounded in such a foreign way out here that it nearly made me duck. My reaction puzzled me and I let the phone ring again and then realized how on edge I had been waiting for someone else to pull the trigger on this case. On the third ring I punched the talk button.

“Yeah.”

“Max.”

“Billy. You’re keeping late hours.”

“Your Mr. O’Shea has just awakened me. He has been arrested at his apartment in Fort Lauderdale,” Billy said. “As you predicted, Detective Richards has put together a probable cause statement charging him with the aggravated assault of Robert Hix.

“Mr. O’Shea informs that the primary evidence is a DNA match of a blood sample found on the boots that were obtained during the search of his residence.”

Billy sounded professional, but not pleased.

“No surprise there,” I said.

“He will be in magistrate’s court at nine in the morning.”

“You’re still willing to do this?”

“I made you a promise, Max.”

“I’ll see you there, Billy,” I said.

“Two other matters, Max.”

“Yeah?”

“I am presently at the hospital in West Palm.”

“What?”

“Rodrigo was beaten early this evening near the Cuban grill where he said you two have met on occasion.”

“Jesus, Billy. Is he OK?”

“Cuts and abrasions. But nothing too serious,” Billy said. He was using the clean, efficient diction he always fell into when pressed. Don’t waste time on emotion or early supposition.

“It appears that the Hix brother you warned him about made a visit. Rodrigo tried to avoid him, but was cornered. The others backed away when Rodrigo was singled out.”

“What was the message this time?” I said, trying to swallow back an anger that was souring the back of my throat. I could see David Hix’s flat face in front of me. The sneer and the cocky way he’d wielded the bat.

“All he could make out was ‘Go home’ and an indication that he tell the others the same,” Billy said. “He seemed to be blaming Rodrigo for costing him money.”

“If Hix is working for cruise worker contractors and his handlers don’t see progress, he doesn’t get paid,” I said.

Billy was silent on the other end of the phone for a moment.

“He may be in for a payday then, Max. Rodrigo is telling me no one will speak to us now. He’s contacted his wife. He wants to leave and return to the Philippines.”

This brother act was getting old, I thought.

“You said you had two other matters, Billy.”

“When O’Shea called he also downloaded a photo of some man that appears to be sitting in a bar somewhere. He said you had asked him to take it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Any felon that you recognize? Maybe of the drug distribution species?”

“No. I’ll bring a copy with me in the morning,” he said, and I could hear the question in his voice.

“It’s just a hunch, Billy,” I said. “I’ll see you outside the courthouse at eight thirty.”

I put the cell phone in my pocket and stood staring out over the Glades, the wind still moving the sawgrass, rippling through it like giant snakes below were bending the stalks in long curved patterns. I worked my way back down the berm, digging my heels into the soft dirt to fight against the angle. I was knee deep in the water when I got the canoe floated and then climbed over the gunwale and pushed out onto the river. I would have time to stop at the shack for a change of clothes and then get to the landing to clean up. I might get a nap in my truck if I got to the county jail in Fort Lauderdale early enough. It would be a long night but not as long as O’Shea’s. He’d be in with a bunch of drunks and punks and scofflaws and perhaps even a few innocents who got swept up by a justice system that would take its time separating the merely tarnished from true bad boys.

The troubling stones I’d been grinding had, in the span of a phone call, taken on sharp new edges. I stroked the canoe downriver feeling their jagged rub, and the moon followed with me.

At eight in the morning I was outside of the jail, sitting on a concrete bench, watching men moving on a construction site across the New River in the morning sun. They were working the kind of miracle that people like me unfamiliar with the building trades always find unfathomable.

Their project was already some thirty stories high. You could watch the damn thing go up day by day as an observer, from poured foundation to concrete columns to prefabricated steel floor stacks and still find yourself stunned at the end of a month to see what men could raise. As I sat sipping a large Styrofoam cup of coffee I’d watched the distant small figure of a tower crane operator climb hand-over-hand like an insect up a ladder enclosed in a tall column of crisscrossed steel. When he got to the glass box at the top, he disappeared inside. I was too far away to hear him start the electric motors that powered the crane, but I saw it begin to move, swinging its balanced, perpendicular arm to the west and silently dropping its hook three hundred feet to pluck yet another load of materials needed at the top. A project manager in Philly had once told me that a good tower crane operator controlled nearly everything that went on at such a site. He had a bird’s-eye view of all that was below him and as the building went up he was the one bringing the world up to join him. At thirty bucks an hour he was the master each and every day. Not a bad feeling, I thought, for a working man to hold.

At eight thirty I saw Billy walking up the wide stairway of the jail. He was dressed in a dark business suit. Conservative, not showy. Professional, not overly so.

“M-Max. You l-look tired,” he said, shaking my hand.

“Sleep deprivation therapy,” I said. “Does wonders for the soul.”

“Yes. Those b-bags under your eyes certainly do m-make you look wiser, and older.”

“Thanks.”

He opened his leather briefcase and took out a photograph and handed it to me. Even though the lighting was dim and the shot too close, the detail was sufficient. The man was handsome. A strong cleft chin. Cheekbones high but perhaps that was from the shadows. The bridge of his nose was as straight as a rule. Never been broken, I thought. He wasn’t a close-in fighter. The eyes were dark and even though they were focused off in another direction, one had the feeling that they were very aware of the photographer if not the actual lens of the phone camera. In the background I could make out the front of the jukebox at Kim’s and the reflection of mirrors.

“F-From our client,” Billy said. “You can explain later w-why you are farming out surveillance. R-Right now, we are due in c- court.”

Inside, the lobby of the county jail was done in all government design. The floor was that easy-to-clean polished stone. The walls an institutional bone white. Floor-to-ceiling windows, double pane, made up the wall to the east and, since the entrance was actually two floors above ground level, there was a view of the river and the condo building going up on the other side. The preconstruction prices across the way were starting at $375,000 to $1.2 million for the top floors. The future residents would have a wonderful unobstructed view of the seven-story jailhouse. Real estate in Florida, I thought. Some gang of government officials had approved the building of a house for criminals on waterfront property. Location, location, location.

On the other side of the lobby were three lines queuing up to Plexiglas-covered windows as if they were selling tickets. There were women in work clothes, two toting small children. A man wearing navy, grease-stained pants and a light blue shirt with his name over the pocket was arguing with a young woman whose tear-stained face held a look of worry, heartbreak and befuddlement all at once. Both of them were comparing the content of their wallets, searching, I figured, for some way to make bail for a family member inside.

Down a wide corridor a security checkpoint was set up and beyond it a single wood-veneered door. It was topped with the sign
MAGISTRATES COURT
. We passed through the metal detectors with all the requisite emptying of pockets, removal of pagers and cell phones. Billy went through with smiles and nods. I had to stop for a wand check of belt buckle, sunglasses and the metal buttons on my canvas shirt.

“Clothes m-make the man, Max,” Billy said.

“And the terrorist?” I answered.

He grinned but then went all business when we entered the courtroom.

There was nothing ornate about the place. The judge was already sitting up behind the large raised desk, his reading glasses down on his nose, his hands shuffling paper to a woman clerk standing beside him. There were less than a dozen people in the gallery, which was made up of rows of plastic chairs instead of the usual wooden pews. There was a freestanding half-wall that separated those chairs from another row. Two tables, left and right, that acted as a buffer between those empty seats and the judge.

I sat behind the wall while Billy went around to the table on the left and introduced himself to a harried, middle-aged man in a suit who seemed mildly surprised as he shook Billy’s hand. He then sorted quickly through a sheaf of papers and handed Billy two pages. He almost looked relieved. Billy sat at the defense table to read and I watched the judge take a moment to look up over his glasses to access the new presence in his court. At the table on the right, an equally busy and equally suited younger man was going through his own stack of files. He would be some low-on-the- seniority-scale attorney for the prosecutor’s office. He too stole a look at Billy.

At exactly nine, a barrel-chested officer who had been standing near the bench, apparently flirting with the judge’s clerk, became serious and opened an adjoining door. Twenty men filed in, handcuffed in twos, a left wrist to a right wrist.

They were instructed to sit in the row of chairs in front of the short wall. They came in with the sound of shuffling feet and the soft clinking of loose stainless steel. Some were still wearing the street clothes they had on when they were arrested. Others were dressed in orange jumpsuits. They all had tired eyes and unshaven faces. A few looked tentatively around the room, into the gallery to find a family member or a friend. There were twenty of them and eight of us.

O’Shea was the twelfth man in, attached to a huge black man in a jumpsuit. His face was a stoic mask. He would not have said a word all night. He would have stared at a spot on the wall with the smell of gang sweat and alcohol puke and the single open toilet for ten men in the holding cell without comment or expression. His reaction to any attempt at conversation or query would have been that same hard stare that held his face now. I could not measure the anger or frustration behind his eyes as he came in and looked around the room, finally finding me and raising his stubbled chin in acknowledgment.

There was no formal call to order. When the men were seated the judge simply nodded his head and the clerk began to call out names. Each man would stand with his handcuffed partner, who was forced to rise with him. After the first few calls the named arrestee learned to raise his unshackled hand when the judge repeated, “Which of you is Mr. Whomever.”

The charges against the man were then read. He was asked if he was represented by counsel or wanted the judge to appoint the public defender to act on his behalf. Again, it took only a few examples before the next man repeated: “Public defender, sir.”

The P.D. would then walk over to his newest client with paperwork and have a quick and far from private discussion, and then return to his table.

“Status, Mr. Marsh?” the judge would repeat.