A Killing Night (4 page)

“His wife filed a domestic abuse charge against him, Max,” she said, and her mouth went tight into a line. “He’s not without some bit of a warm-up.”

I let the words sit. I knew where her head was at, and there wasn’t anything to say.

“You want me to talk to him,” I said, more statement than question.

“Look, Max. God knows you don’t owe me anything. But you’ve got a past with this guy. And you’re good at reading people. Anything you could get might help.”

I leaned forward.

“You got an address and number for my old comrade in blue?”

She pulled a business card and pen from her purse and wrote on the back. “He’s been showing up at Archie’s on Oakland Park on Thursday nights,” she said.

I pinched the card between my fingers. She reached over and touched my hand with her fingertips as she slid out of the seat and then put two one-dollar bills on the table.

“It was great seeing you, Max. Thanks.”

I sat and watched her walk away. This was a woman I’d swum naked with in the turquoise water of her backyard pool, who I’d made love to, with difficulty, in a rope hammock until dawn. Now I had no idea where we stood. No, I thought, maybe I’m not so good at reading people.

I was back at the Flamingo, tying on my running shoes. I was grinding at a case that wasn’t mine, wasn’t Billy’s and that I wasn’t sure I needed to be sticking my fingers in to begin with. My former fellow cop’s face was becoming clearer to me every minute that I worried at the rough-edged stone of memory rolling around in my head. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know his secrets.

I pulled on an old gray T-shirt and walked out to the beach to stretch out on the bulkhead. It was past noon, an insane time to run in the heat of an early September. The summertime highs of the low nineties wouldn’t break for at least another few weeks. The sun was high and white and the only savior was the ocean breeze that had come up in the night and stayed, blowing the smell of salt and sargasso grass in from the southeast. I breathed deep while propping my heel up on the handrail to the wooden stairs. When my hamstrings stopped stinging, I walked the soft sand down to the lifeguard stand where a tall brown-skinned city employee name of Amsler was looking after a smattering of bathers. Weeks ago I’d introduced myself after spotting a setup under his stand where he had rigged a seven-foot-high chinning bar. I knew he saw me coming, but he never shifted his sunglasses from the sea.

“Hey, Bob,” I said in greeting.

“Knock yourself out, Max,” he said without turning.

I did twenty-five chin-ups with my palms turned in, blew out my breath, shook out my shoulders and did eighteen more with my palms out, touching the back of my neck on the bar until I failed at nineteen. I gave Amsler a wave off the bill of my cap and started jogging south against the wind.

I started slow, letting muscle and bone warm to the task. My knees had taken a pounding over the years and tissue had to swell a bit to cushion their ache. Real or imagined, I always felt a lump of pain high in my right thigh where a bullet had burrowed to the bone a couple of years ago. I rolled my head from side to side, stretching the tendons in my neck and picking up the twinge of long-term damage caused by another wound, a through-and-through in muscle near my throat that led me to take a disability payout and quit the Philadelphia department after ten years. I’d lived a violent life, had followed in my father’s footsteps. The inevitability of it haunted and clung to me like an odor.

The sweat and swell and pulse of blood let me open up after a half a mile and I got into a rhythm. I worked a line down on the hard pack, trying to stay just above the surf wash, but still smacking through an occasional shallow film of water. I kept my eyes on the old lighthouse at the Hillsboro inlet and tried to convince myself I was twenty-five again. Though the more dedicated runners I’ve met say they try to get themselves into a mind-clearing state akin to yoga when they do long distance, I can never get that wall up and shut out my internal rambling. I’ve also never been in good enough shape to just run on endorphins and euphoria. It hurts too much. I checked my watch and at the twenty-five-minute mark I turned, waded in to my calves and scooped two hands full of ocean up and over my face and shoulders, and started back.

They tell you not to push so hard you can’t carry on a conversation with a partner during a training run. By minute forty, I couldn’t have had a grunting dialogue with a caveman. My lungs were burning and the blood was thumping in my ears. The wind was behind me but I could feel the push. Instead its direction only made the air I was trying to pull in taste warm and thick. I did the last half mile on guts and pulled up short of the lifeguard stand by a hundred yards. I walked the rest of the way, fingers laced on the top of my head like a prisoner on a forced march. As I passed his perch, my lifeguard buddy called out, “You’re a glutton, Max,” and he didn’t have to say for what.

I stood under the outside shower for at least five minutes until a young boy whose parents must have been renting one of the bungalows came up with a bucket in hand and stared at me long enough to shame me into letting him have the spigot. I went inside, toweled off and made an overdue call to Billy’s office. His assistant, Allie, answered on the second ring—a modern-day rarity in the new business world—and was her usual cheerful and professional self.

“Hi, Mr. Freeman. Mr. Manchester is back in town and left a request that you have dinner with him and Ms. McIntyre at the apartment this evening.”

“Great. How was their trip?”

“They were both smiling this morning despite the jet lag,” she said. “But Venice, who wouldn’t,” she said.

CHAPTER 4

I
went to the kitchen, used the microwave to cook bacon, and put together two huge BLTs. I hooked a cold beer out of the fridge and had lunch on the porch in a chaise longue. Out on the horizon huge anvils of cloud were anchored several miles out, their flat bottoms a soot gray and tops bunched up like thick rolls of white smoke. There was weather out there, but I didn’t know enough about the pattern to say what. I took a long pull of the beer and lay back, grinding on Richards’s words, trying to pull her face into focus but instead coming up with Colin O’Shea’s on the streets of Philly years ago.

I was out of my patrol car, walking the west end of my South Street beat like I’d been told not to do. The action on South was down by the riverfront where the street had recently taken on this hip revival. Artists and musicians and slackers pretending to be cre- atives had first moved in to low-rent apartments and storefronts that had been long ignored. And sure enough, the buzz that something different was happening brought more. People showed up to check it out. Capitalism followed the people. Now it was shops and clubs and restaurants and suburbanites with money and time on Saturday night. It wasn’t a new phenomenon. People cluster together, commerce breaks out. The same thing had happened up on Market Street back in the 1680s when the city was first founded and look what came of it.

Of course the other element that followed commerce and people with money in their pockets were the predators. So my shift sergeant’s orders were pretty clear: “Safeguard the tourists and business owners. Stay where the money is, Freeman, east of Eighth Street.”

So I was west of Eighth, checking out rumors of a crack-cocaine stash house that was feeding the area addicts and newbies testing out the new high. I had parked the squad car next to a hydrant, took the portable radio with me and walked down past the “art garden.” The garden was a funky strip of empty lots and old tenements that was festooned with painted designs, murals, gaudily decorated mobiles in the trees and collections of junk turned into baffling artworks. Even at night the collection of buffed aluminum and brushed tin would glitter in the street-lamp light. I ducked into a recessed entryway and frowned at the neon green color the door had been painted and peered around the brickwork. I was following my boy Hector the Collector who was dragging his cuffs a block away and didn’t even bother to check behind himself.

I had pulled up on Hector’s action in the crowds on the east side. For two weeks I’d spotted him making his surreptitious deliveries to the corner dealers and the bartender suppliers in the clubs. I’d even braced him in an alley one night, but my timing had been off and he was empty-handed but for a small wad of twenties that might have had some trace cocaine residue on them but hell, eight out of ten bills on South Street did.

“Yo, officer. What up, man?” he’d said when I spun him and pushed his face into the brick of the side wall of Mako’s Bar and Grill.

“Spread ’em out, Hector,” I said, rapping the inside of his knees with my baton and then going through his sweatshirt pockets and finding the cash. I stepped back and he snuck a look over his shoulder.

“Hey, it’s the walkin’ man,” he said, smiling with his voice.

“Business a little light tonight, Hector?” I said, holding up the roll. “Or you change your hours of collections?”

He shook his head slowly and I knew there was a grin on the other side of it.

“No, sir, officer. You got me all wrong, walkin’ man.”

“You know I’m not wrong, Hector. I’ve been watching your game for weeks. And I told your salesmen, especially your man Sam down at the Palace, not on my shift,” I said, poking the baton in his kidney for emphasis. “And not on my beat.”

Now I knew the grin was gone. I saw the kid’s scalp inch forward, pulled down by his frown. He didn’t like me knowing the name of one of his main dealers who I’d caught passing rock in small plastic bags he tucked under the hollowed-out bottoms of beer schooners. The buyers were giving him huge tips and then always cupping the glasses with their opposite hand as they slid the drink off the bar, and then slipping that hand into their pockets. They thought it was stealthy. I picked up on it in ten minutes. It took less time to get Sam to flip on Hector.

“Hey, man. Chill,” he said, trying to recover. “Why’n’t you just stay in your damn car where it’s nice and warm like the others, man?”

I didn’t say anything, just took a step back, confusing him. He snuck another look but had to twist around to find me. His eyes were holding that I-don’t-give-a-shit look and they were aimed at my hand where his roll was still in my palm.

“You can keep that, walkin’ man.”

I lifted my arm like I was shooting a free throw and bounced the wad off his head, and the bills separated and spilled down around his feet.

“No, Hector,” I answered, using his own words. “You got me all wrong, man.”

I’d left him alone for four days and now he was leading me to the stash house Mamma Blue had told me about. Four doors down from Mamma’s Down South Country Kitchen, Hector checked the traffic and skipped across the street and disappeared into the alley between two boarded-up storefronts. I waited a couple of minutes in case he was smart enough to check for a tail and then continued down to Mamma Blue’s.

A woman with a lot of hard years behind her eyes and a magical way with smothered pork chops and pan-fried chicken, Carline Dennis had opened her little restaurant years before the revival of South Street and had refused to move east to join the new current of money. She had built a clientele that cut across all racial and socio- economic lines because her place was friendly and courteous to everyone who walked across the threshold and her food was unmatched anywhere north of Savannah. The cars on the street in front included a BMW, two Mercedes, a sprung-bumper Cadillac and a sagging Corolla. I had been slipping in and out of her place since I was assigned to the district and twice had spotted the mayor inside having lunch.

When I stepped in tonight I was greeted by Big Earl, a man with mahogany-colored skin and hooded eyes who went about 320 pounds or more. It was Earl’s job to deter any riffraff from entering or panhandlers from hitting on the patrons at the curb. He stuck out a ham-sized fist and we touched knuckles.

“What’s up, boss?” he said in a burbling baritone.

“Mamma in back?” I said. “I need to use the phone.”

Big Earl tilted his head straight back but the pupils in his yellowed eyes never moved, just rolled with the movement like buoy markers in water. With that permission I walked back through the full tables of diners, trying to be as unobtrusive as I could.

The kitchen was filled with the sound of crackling grease and the odor of seasoned steam. There was a high-rhythm dance going on between cooks and prep workers and busboys and dishwashers and in the middle of it all was Mamma Blue, sipping at a wooden ladle and looking like hurry-up was not a characteristic she ever wished to possess. The woman was as thin as a broomstick and her back was similarly straight. When I excused myself from the path of a waitress with a saucer of gumbo balanced on her palm, Mamma turned at the sound of my voice in her kitchen and gave me a full measure with her dark eyes.

“You ain’t back here for no donation to the policeman’s ball, baby,” she said.

“No, Mamma. I need to use your phone, ma’am.”

Her hair was steel gray and her pinched and leathery skin was so black it gave off a bluish hue just below the surface.

“You know where it at, Mr. Max,” she said and turned back to the large pot of bubbling gravy she was doctoring.

As I slid past I touched her small crumpled ear with my cheek and whispered thank you and she smiled, but just as quickly a shadow of concern came across her face.

“You ain’t doin’ nothin’ gone cause problems for my people in here now, Mr. Max?”

It was Mamma who had tipped me to the comings and goings of known crack dealers and runners from the building across the street. She had surmised that the suppliers had picked the location because of the block’s eclectic mix of rich and poor diners. A fancy car here drew no second look, or a young man sporting a new Nike warm-up.

“Right under they nose,” she’d said. “Lord, your own police commissioner eat here twice a week.”

I had asked her why Big Earl hadn’t told me. The man surely would have picked up on the action.

“Earl don’t care ’bout nothin’ cept me an his own self. What them boys doin’ over there ain’t his concern,” she said.

Then why did she care? I thought.

Mamma seemed to recognize the question in my face and had said: “Earl is a man. He ain’t never gave birth to no daughters who smoked they life away and they children’s lives to ash with that crack. It’s us women who carry that burden, Mr. Max. If you can stop it. Stop it.”

That next day I’d started tracking Hector the Collector and tonight the trail was ending.

“I wouldn’t put your people in harm’s way, Mamma. I’ll be here,” I said and went to the phone and called the narcotics squad. I’d been feeding them my surveillance for a week. Now I told them one of the main players was in the building. The sergeant on the other end asked a few questions, had a quick conversation with someone while cupping the mouthpiece of his phone, and told me they’d move on it with an entry team within the hour. I winked at Mamma Blue as I left her kitchen and she narrowed her dark eyes and turned back to her simmering pot.

I told Earl to stay inside for a while and the giant man either chuckled or belched and said: “Wasn’t plannin’ nothin’ but.”

I went out on the sidewalk and took up a spot in the shadows just east of the restaurant where I could watch Hector’s stash house. The night was warm with the smell of alley trash mixed with exhaust fumes. If I smoked I would have lit a cigarette. I hated stakeouts. After twenty minutes my portable radio hummed with static and I stepped further back and answered.

“Just passed your squad, Freeman. You on foot again?” It was my narcotics friends.

“Affirmative.”

“Switching to tack four,” he said. I switched the channel on the radio to a less congested frequency where half the district wouldn’t be listening in.

“We’re calling in some patrol backup for a perimeter and we’ll be going in through the back. You’ll have some help when we go, Freeman. But you’ve got the front for now.”

“I’m ten-thirteen.”

A young couple came out of Mamma’s and got in their car. When they pulled out, I saw their headlights slide over a dark figure across the street who was moving down the east side alley, the word police stenciled onto his back in bold yellow letters. I walked back down to Mamma’s entrance where Earl was standing, watching his customers drive away.

“Do me a favor, Earl,” I said. “Keep everybody inside for the next few minutes.”

He nodded his head, but his eyes stayed level, focused on something over my shoulder. I turned and saw Hector coming out of the west side alley, just starting to pull his sweatshirt hood up over his head, and he looked into my face.

“We’re going in,” the entry team’s leader spat out from the radio at my side and the crackle was like a starter’s pistol. Hector bolted.

“I got a runner,” I barked into the radio and started sprinting.

Most foot pursuits are useless. Belts and radios and handguns and batons flailing on your hips. And most cops won’t muster the kind of adrenaline it takes to outrun the fuel of fear that is jacking up the guy they’re chasing. But Hector had become a special case for me, and he wasn’t much of a track star. Within a block I was gaining on him. He made a stupid move no non-athlete should attempt by trying to hurdle and slide over the hood of a parked car to make the corner. He went down and I heard that ugly snap of leg bone when he hit the street. He’d gained one knee when I got a fistful of hood and hair and yanked him back down to the ground.

The kid reacted to the pain by squirming, but I put my own knee into the middle of his back and pushed his face into the asphalt with one hand while using the other on my radio.

“This is Freeman. My runner is in custody,” I said, then had to catch my breath and look around. “Uh, corner of South and Thirteenth.”

Hector had smartened up and quit struggling when the headlights of a car caught us from the north and stopped. I squinted into the brightness and heard the car door slam.

“Goddamn, Freeman. What kinda squirrelly animal you got there?”

When the uniform and the face stepped up I recognized Patrolman O’Shea. He was too handsome to be a real cop, and every time I saw him he had a bemused look on his Irish face.

“You on the perimeter, O’Shea?”

“Yeah. Heard on the tack that you had something going, Freeman.”

I clipped my radio and took my handcuffs off my belt. O’Shea leaned in.

“Hey, it’s good ole Hector down there. How you doin’, boy?” he said, and then I felt and heard the patrolman kick the kid hard underneath me.

“Nasty-looking angle on that leg bone, Hector,” O’Shea said. “Guess you won’t be running too much in the yard over at Greaterford.”

Hector sucked at his teeth in pain and whispered something about someone’s
madre.
O’Shea cocked his boot.

“Hey, I got him, O’Shea,” I said. “I got him under control here.”

The words had barely cleared my mouth when the crack of gunfire sounded in the distance down South Street. O’Shea and I both looked up and stared out into the pools of shadow and light. Within seconds I caught a glimpse of spinning blue lights and heard the swell of sirens. I’d paid little attention to the movement of the kid below me and was just fumbling with the radio when I sensed O’Shea step forward and bark: “You little bastard!”

Hector cried out and I looked back to see a polished boot crushing the kid’s hand into a small .38 caliber pistol he’d pulled from somewhere. I dug my knee harder into his back and heard the bones in his hand crack like a crab shell as O’Shea put all of his weight into it. He then reached down and I could smell the Dentyne on his breath as he wrestled the cheap gun from under the kid’s hand and chucked it into the nearby gutter. He stood up with that smile and looked down at me.