Midnight Guardians (12 page)

Andrés’s sneer of superiority lasted all of ten seconds.

“Who were the p-people trying to kill you?” Billy asked.

“They’re just a bunch of dudes who have guns, you know,” he said with a shrug.

“No, I don’t, you know,” Billy said, mocking the young man’s use of the new mantra his generation seemed intent on injecting into every sentence. It was a usage Billy detested.

“What I do know is that your sister told you that the same car pulled up and fired several shots at her and Mr. Freeman in the park the other day, and you didn’t seem to care that you’d put your sister in danger.”

The brother averted his eyes. His hands were folded on top of the worn table. He started picking at the chipped paint with his fingernails. “She did that to herself,” he finally said in a quieter tone.

“Andrés, I am trying to save you,” Luz Carmen said.

It was the first time I’d heard a pleading tone in her voice.

“I told you this would happen, Andrés. I knew you would be caught and arrested. If they send you back to Bolivia now, you know you will not survive there, brother.”

Another first: Luz Carmen began to cry.

“If you had not taken their business to this, this lawyer, there wouldn’t be a problem, Luz. You didn’t have to do that, you know. You could have said nothing, and I would still be making money.”

Billy slammed his open palm down on the table: The actual shock of it made me jump. Any show of anger or frustration was so rare in the man that I was astounded, and speechless.

“Enough!” Billy snapped, and then went silent. His eyes had gone big, his face tight. It was hard for me to see my friend struggling to gain control. He had no practice at it. I could tell that he was biting the flesh inside his mouth when he stared again at Andrés Carmen, and without a hint of stutter demanded, “Who were the men in the Monte Carlo who were trying to kill you?”

Andrés looked at his sister, and then back at Billy.

“They call themselves Los Capos,” he said. “They are like the enforcers, you know, from the old school of the street runners.”

“Dealers?” Billy said.

“Sometimes,” Andrés answered. “But mostly for a show of force, like in the old days.”

“And what old days are we t-talking about here, Mr. Carmen?” Billy said, regaining his lawyerese as well as the stutter he’d temporarily lost in anger.

“You know, the drug hustling from when I was a little kid. You had a lot of the street work going on, the selling corners and the stash houses and all that,” Andrés Carmen said. “With all those dudes running around, you had to have the guns and guys to keep people in line and enforce your areas. But that don’t happen so much anymore.” Andrés Carmen cut his eyes over at me.

“The cops shut a lot of that down. They got to a lot of people, and the money wasn’t there anymore. Gangs started workin’ out on one another. It got too dangerous.”

I was thinking about the Brown Man, the former dealer I’d seen in front of the warehouse where our chase had begun.

“S-So how do these people become involved in a white-collar crime g-group swindling the federal government out of Medicare dollars?” Billy said, even though he knew the answer to the question.

“It’s all about the money,” Andrés Carmen said as though he was passing on a motivation he and his cohorts had just invented. “You make a lot more money with the Medicare stuff, and it isn’t as dangerous as gettin’ shot out on the corners, you know.”

“At least, it was,” Billy said, “you know?”

Andrés Carmen just shook his head and looked down at the tiny pile of paint chips he’d scraped together with his fingernails. We all remained quiet for a minute, sneaking looks at Billy, who was obviously now in control.

“OK, Andrés; this is wh-what I need from you. Put together as many names and descriptions of those people you’ve been working with as you can. Then I want l-locations, where you take the Medicare numbers and forms, where you’ve seen the computers and p-paperwork stored. I also want descriptions of the drugs you’ve seen at these locations b-because I already know that the police confiscated a trunk load from the Monte Carlo. If it’s true that these p-people are employing your “old school” dealers, then they haven’t given up that trade completely.

“You p-put all that together for me, and I will use it as leverage to try and keep you out of jail, and perhaps have some kind of influence with immigration if it comes to that.”

Andrés did not say a word, but subtly nodded his head.

“If you run, you leave your s-sister in the wind, Andrés,” Billy said to make his point. “If you b-believe that these enforcers are going to leave her alone once you’re gone, you are wrong. And you’re street-savvy enough to know you’re wrong. In absence of you, they will go after her.”

Still, Andrés said nothing.

“You know?” Billy repeated.

“Yeah,” Andrés finally said. “I know.”

W
HEN I GOT home, Sherry was still at the office. Soon after her rehabilitation, she’d gone back part-time, but now she was an 8-to-5 woman, working cases from inside the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s corporate palace. It was mostly phone work, case evaluation, and meeting on occasion with crime victims. It was not what she was meant to do. She was the kind of cop who worked best on the outside, moving, watching, evaluating from the streets and the crime scenes. A lot of cops make the transition; after years on the streets, they move into the command structure, and behind a desk. Sherry’s move was premature because of the leg, but she was pushing them on that.

The victim advocacy thing was a step. Several times, she’d gone out to meet with the victims and their families in her capacity as a detective. The guys who caught the case weren’t always happy with what they considered her horning in on their investigations, but she’d played it carefully: “Only here to help with the social stuff, fellas. I’m not taking anything from you, and any intel I get goes straight to your ears only.”

I knew it was a step back for her. She’d worked long and hard to get her detective’s shield, and hated the idea of playing second fiddle to the others. Every time I told her she’d get it back, she just nodded. “Yeah, I know, Max. I just have to work harder now, right?”

In the kitchen, I rooted through the refrigerator and came up with salami and provolone on wheat bread for lunch. I popped the top of the last beer and went out onto the patio and sat in one of the lounge chairs next to the pool. Under the big oak, there was enough shade to take off the heat of the day. While I stared at the pool water, I ran the trailer park scenario through my head again.

At the end of our picnic table discussion, Billy laid down the law to Andrés, who assured him that the enforcers he’d told us about had no knowledge of his girlfriend’s home. Billy and I both knew that the criminal grapevine would lead there eventually. Some guy would ask some guy who would know Andrés’s girlfriend, or a girlfriend who knew his girlfriend, and they would track the location down.

I offered to let Andrés hide out at my shack in the Glades. My quick description of the place seemed to the scare the shit out of the kid, but Billy convinced me that ethically we didn’t want to get in the business of trying to hide him from the authorities.

Instead, Billy left him with orders: “Don’t use your car and stay put right here until I get in touch with you. That’s for your sake, and your sister’s.”

Luz Carmen was another matter. After leaving Andrés, we took her home to pack up enough belongings to last a week. While the two of them were inside, I drove Billy’s car around the neighborhood, watching for any kind of surveillance by either the so-called enforcers or the now-alerted cops. We doubted whether the sheriff’s office would jump on an investigation so quickly, but Billy didn’t want to take a chance.

When Luz was packed and ready to go, we drove south to Deer-field Beach, where Billy had a safe house on the sand where he kept out-of-state clients or witnesses when trial dates were close. The Royal Flamingo Villas was a perfect, low-key, unobtrusive collection of one- and two-room bungalows that straddled either side of A1A. Billy’s place was given to him as payment by a client whose ass he’d saved in a lawsuit. The small stucco building sat directly on the oceanfront, out of sight to any traffic. Luz Carmen objected the entire trip to the house until she saw the accommodations, and then agreed: “Yes, this will work.”

When we got back to Billy’s, I told him that I would rent a car while my truck was being fixed so I could take the descriptions of the dealers Andrés had given us, and do some tracking. Billy just winked at me as we pulled into the parking area of his building.

“Already t-taken care of,” he said. “I m-made a call while we were at Luz Carmen’s house.” He stopped his Lexus in the outside parking lot in front of a glossy black 1989 Plymouth Gran Fury and tossed me a key ring.

“It’s the p-police pursuit model,” he said. “The client who gave it to me p-put a 360, four-barrel engine in when he restored it. I’m told it is very fast, and very heavy, and can take quite a b-beating without doing damage to the occupant.”

I just looked at him in amazement, and then got out, walking around the Gran Fury like a kid seeing his first Hot Wheels. It was vintage, replete with the old police black-wall tires and small hubcaps. The spotlights were still mounted in front of the side windows, a handle and trigger on the inside. I opened the driver-side door and got in. The interior was pristine and had even been sprayed with that stuff that gave it the smell of new carpet and vinyl. I hit the ignition and felt the rumble as much as heard it when I gassed the motor. When I looked up, Billy had already gone—no doubt with a smile on his face.

W
AITING FOR SHERRY to come home, I had the same stupid smile on my face, as I imagined her seeing the Gran Fury sitting in her driveway.

While I sat poolside, I sipped a beer and took out my copy of the list of names and descriptions of the men Andrés had met, and the menu of drugs he’d seen at the warehouse. When I’d asked him who the man was who greeted him outside the warehouse before our chase began, Andrés told me, “That was Carlyle. They call him Brown.”

“Carlyle” was the real name of the Brown Man. A few years back, he’d been running a lucrative drug corner in Northwest Fort Lauderdale. I’d run into him trying to find the notorious Eddie the Junkman, the ghostly but all too real serial killer Sherry had saved me from by putting a bullet in his head. Eddie was a mentally challenged drug user who roamed the neighborhood in the guise of being homeless. He had needs, the most prevalent being sex and drugs. Prostitutes and young women in his hunting area had learned to turn down his sexual advances after he shared his crack cocaine with them. But Eddie had learned, too.

A huge and thickly muscled man, he entrapped the women with his bulk, then put a broad hand over their mouths while he satisfied his sexual needs. The fact that the women suffocated in the process did not bother him. During Billy’s and my investigation of elderly women being similarly suffocated in a life insurance scam gone ugly, I’d swung a deal with the Brown Man. He’d given up Eddie for the exchange of his own business survival. It was time I revisited Carlyle.

Considering the foot dragging of any governmental agency like the sheriff’s office, Hammonds’s investigators would move slowly on the warehouse address. I might get a chance at the Brown Man before they spooked him.

The other names Andrés had given us were probably a.k.a.’s as well. There were two guys known as the Marlin brothers, who may or may not be brothers at all; a so-called supervisor known as Anthony Monroe; and a computer tech everyone called Joey “the code writer” Porter. According to Andrés, Carlyle was the man who did most of the drug movement, a line of products considered a sideline by the others, who seemed to tolerate it, but kept their hands off unless there was some reason to party— like when some big government check came in, and everyone was flush.

When asked to list the drugs, Andrés had written down mostly prescription drugs like painkillers: oxycodone and Percocet, over-the-counter amphetamines like Dexedrine and Adderall, and opiates like buprenophine, as well as boxes of Xanax and anabolic steroids.

Though the kid’s spelling was atrocious, Billy had been impressed by Andrés’s recall of the supply. The kid simply said, “I keep my eyes down when I’m in there, like I don’t want to know nothing, or I’m afraid to look them in the eye. Instead I’m looking at the boxes, you know, the labels and stuff. They pay me to do what I do, not to know what I know.”

I’d asked him if he knew where the drugs went after they left the warehouse. “I don’t do drugs. I don’t know nothing about them, man,” he said, lifting his chin, as if this was a point of pride for him. “My money ain’t drug money.”

Billy’s face had tightened as he’d read through the list of drugs. He knew that every one of them had been on the A-list of adolescent abused prescription drugs for years. “Feeding the children,” he’d simply said, staring into Andrés’s eyes.

Andrés put his head down, eyes again on the tabletop. “I don’t use them, you know.”

It was the mantra of every low-level drug runner I’d ever arrested or known: Take the money and don’t get involved. Get what you can, do what you’re told, and don’t be ambitious.

It’s ambition that gets the runners and couriers and corner boys shot, left for dead in an alley after they’d try to skim or short, or peddle a little on their own. Andrés probably wasn’t ambitious. He probably never put his fingers on the real money in an operation like this. But his sister’s dreams for him had put him in someone’s gun sights now.

The list of drugs somehow made sense: The Medicare scam had to touch the medical community—doctors’ offices, pharmacies, nursing homes—at least on the edges. Hell, Billy had pulled up a story that showed how a hospital in California had been running a similar billing scam, bringing in “patients” off the street, and then billing for expensive equipment and testing that was never used or done. It would not be too slippery a slope to find out that someone also had their fingers in the prescription drug till.