Midnight Guardians (13 page)

I was running the possibilities through my head when I heard the jiggling of the gate door leading in from the drive. After a few seconds, I heard the door clack shut, the familiar sound of Sherry returning from a day at the office. She rolled in dressed in her business attire: a conservative short-sleeved blouse and a dark skirt. She had adamantly stated while still in rehab that she would never wear a “pinned-up pair of pants” in public. If she wanted to show her incredibly taut and muscled single leg, she would.

“Let them use their imagination,” she’d said. “I don’t give a shit.”

I greeted her as she made it up the ramp.

“Hi.”

“Hey,” she said. “I thought you were going to be with Billy all day.”

“Didn’t take that long,” I said. “We found the sister and her brother. Made sure the sister was safe, and Billy’s going to see if he can put some leverage together to get the feds in on busting the Medicare scam and get her into a protection program while they do it.”

I gave her a quick rundown on the case. Sherry and I tried not to get too deep into the ongoing investigations in which each of us was involved. It could get dicey sometimes.

“And was that car sitting in my driveway any kind of recompense for making a deal with the brother,” she said, a playful look in her eyes, one that I rarely saw these days.

“Uh, nope, that would be the loaner that Billy gave me while the truck is being fixed,” I said, unable to keep from matching her smile.

“Nice. Reminds me of my daddy’s old prowl car,” she said and rolled up next to me in the wheelchair. “I like the side lights. I used to hear old stories of the boys spotlighting deer along the roadside with those things up in Apopka.”

Sherry rarely talked about her family. Her father had been an old-time sheriff up in Central Florida. She called herself an original Florida cracker, born and raised in an area that thirty years ago was more open field and cattle range than the Disney World spillover it now represents.

“Those old spotlights would catch the deer right in the eyes, and they’d freeze up like statues—easy killing.”

“Cheating,” I said. Spotting game was illegal throughout most of the country. Some considered it an unfair advantage. But then the same folks thought nothing of feeding deer for eleven months out of the year under a tree stand. Then on the first legal day of hunting season, they’ll sit up there with a high-powered rifle and blast away—fish in a barrel. I could never see the challenge in it.

“You didn’t personally know any of these spotters?” I said.

“Considering who my daddy was, I probably kissed one every night after the family dinner,” she said, looking out into the light of the pool. “The law gets interpreted in different ways, even by lawmen.”

There was something on her mind and it didn’t have anything to do with deer hunting. She finally looked over at me and asked, “Could you get me a beer?”

“Sure,” I said, getting up and kissing her on the forehead as I headed for the kitchen.

When I got back with two cold beers, Sherry had gotten out of her wheelchair and moved to the side of the pool. Her foot was in the water, lazily kicking up a soft boil. Her stump was on the edge. It looked uncomfortable, but I suppressed the urge to ask if she wanted a cushion or pillow to put underneath. If she wanted that, she’d ask.

I sat down on the deck behind her, looking in the opposite direction, and matched up my back to hers, and leaned into it. I felt her give her weight back into mine, and we adjusted the balance until it was just so.

“So what did you find out?” I asked.

“About?” was her answer.

“Booker.”

I felt her head turn just a bit.

“Did I tell you I was going to look into him?”

“No. But you did.”

“You know me too well, Max.”

“I try.”

I heard the plop of her foot when she brought it up and let it splash back into the water. I felt a chuckle in her chest ripple and vibrate into my own. I liked the feel of her laughter.

“I pulled the files on his accident, both the initial reports, and the investigative sheets afterward.” Her voice was careful. I knew her well enough to know that this was an effort to be unbiased. Just the fact that she’d started out using that voice let me know it would soon change.

“The woman he was pulling over was a seventy-eight-year-old retiree from Sunrise. When the car rear-ended her, she suffered a whiplash, broken nose, and lacerations from her face ramming the steering wheel on the rebound. She was nearly unconscious when the paramedics got there. She never saw a thing.”

“OK,” I said, letting her start wherever she wanted.

“Her ID and ownership of the car all checked out. She told the investigators she was going to pick up her granddaughter at the airport. That checked out, too.

“The car that hit them was stolen. The owner, some old fiberglass marine worker from Sailboat Bend in Fort Lauderdale, didn’t even know the car had been stolen until the deputies got to his place and woke him up at eight the next morning. He was sleeping with his sixty-three-year-old girlfriend, who said they’d been in bed together all night.

“The guy volunteered to take a blood test for alcohol or drugs or whatever they wanted. The deputies noted that he seemed to be legitimately saddened when they told him what had happened. He didn’t even ask about the car. They checked out his story anyway, and found out he’d worked for the same yacht builder on the New River for more than thirty years, and did old-time car restoration on the side.”

Now Sherry’s voice was picking up, in both emotion and volume.

“When the crime scene guys had the car towed in, they went over the thing with a fine-tooth comb. Found nothing useful—pristine inside. All surfaces wiped clean, no inconsistent fibers: There was nothing inside that didn’t belong to the owner. Clean.”

“Too clean,” I said.

“Way too clean,” Sherry said, and I felt her back shift again.

“So the crime scene guys didn’t find a laundry ticket on the floor belonging to an ex-con car thief, or a soda can in the cup holder with his DNA spit on the side, or a lock of blonde hair with a one-of-a-kind conditioner sold at only one salon in the country?”

I felt Sherry’s head shake back and forth. She knew my predisposition to bitch about the public’s expectation that criminal investigations actually mirror the bullshit they see on television. But I agreed: This wasn’t the time or place.

“Sorry,” I said. She took a minute and a long swallow of beer before continuing.

“I can see a party-time car thief racing down I-595 and rear-ending a parked car; but what kind of guy sees that he’s pinched a cop off at the knees, and then takes the time to carefully wipe down the inside of the car before he books on foot?”

“Someone who isn’t just partying; someone who is very cool in an emergency,” I said. “A pro who does the car thing for a living—a guy who knows how to handle himself when shit goes wrong.”

“That’s some cool customer to be thinking of that while a cop is a hood ornament, screaming and squirting blood all over your car.”

“Jesus,” I said, the vision actually making me shudder. She must have felt it through her back.

“Sorry,” she said.

We took a sip of beer at the same time, our heads lightly thumping together as we both went back to swallow. The slight collision made us both laugh.

“Hard head,” she said.

“Pot calling the kettle,” I said, and then added, “so what did you get when you went to internal affairs?”

This time I felt her turn, and knew she was looking at the side of my face.

“You’re starting to scare me, Max,” she said with a hint of fun, but also a bit of seriousness in her voice.

“Well, if you start to entertain the thought that Booker might have been the target of a pro, you have to find out why some ruthless son of a bitch would do such a thing, right?”

“IA wouldn’t give me anything,” Sherry said. “They wouldn’t say whether somebody he’d busted had a grudge for Booker, or that he’d gotten any threatening messages—nothing. They stonewalled me completely. So I had to go over their heads to a source.”

This was the line in our respective work that didn’t get crossed. I wasn’t going to ask who she used as a source in the department. But I knew that a law enforcement organization is no different that any other office enterprise. People talk. It’s a human trait you don’t give up just because you’re told to. Civilization demands it. Societal living depends on it. It is why I do not believe in government conspiracies. Someone always spills eventually.

“So?”

Sherry waited, assessing whether she was talking out of school.

“The skeleton is in their closet,” she finally said. “The word is that Booker had steroids in his blood system, and that they found elevated levels of caffeine during a tox screen at the hospital. They kept it out of the media and off the books so he could get the maximum coverage for his disability payout.”

“A lifter doing Red Bull,” I said.

“The guy was hurt enough losing his legs, Max. They didn’t want to hurt him more by putting an illegal-steroid-use sheet in his file, and having that put his health coverage in jeopardy.”

The guy was hurt enough? Even if she was talking about someone else, it would be the first time Sherry admitted that losing a leg was a devastating thing. I thought about a Robert Frost quote: “Tell other people’s stories as if they happened to you, and tell your own as if they happened to other people.”

We sat in silence awhile. Was burying the steroid use an act of compassion by the sheriff’s office? Did you let an infraction of the steroid ban screw up Booker’s life more than it already was?

“So does he feel beholden to the department, or to his buddies?” I finally said, talking out loud more than anything else. It didn’t take a genius to figure that if Booker was doing steroids, then his buddies at the gym either knew it, or where into it themselves.

I heard Sherry’s foot plop a few more times in the pool, could feel her hip working against mine.

“Not sure,” she said. “But I’m going to have lunch with him again tomorrow. I know there’s a lot in his head he’s not giving up. Maybe he needs a release.”

As do you, my love, I thought, but didn’t say it out loud.

T
HE NEXT DAY, I followed the Brown Man home. I’d parked the Gran Fury in the warehouse parking lot, where I could watch the front door of BioMechanics Inc., and had not been disappointed. The Escalade that had been there the day before was in place when I arrived at 9:00 in the morning.

Billy had tracked the license plates of the Mercedes and the big SUV on his computers. A company name came up as the owner of the Mercedes, and Billy was running it further. But the Escalade was registered to a Charles Coombs in northwest Fort Lauderdale.

By doing a comparison search of previous arrest records on Carlyle Carter, a.k.a. the Brown Man, the name
Coombs
also appeared. Coombs was listed as both an associate and as a defense witness on an aggravated assault charge filed against Carlyle that never made it to court. He might be a cousin or just a neighborhood friend of the Brown Man, but a better guess was they were running buddies who swapped identities and registered properties.

Putting things you owned in someone else’s name was a way of getting around seizures and liens, and making claims of indigence when you got caught in the system. But you better trust the one whose name you use. When Carlyle “the Brown Man” Carter came out of the warehouse at 1:00 P.M. and climbed into the driver’s seat of the Escalade, it didn’t matter whose name was on the papers: He was mine.

Again the tail led me south on State Road 7. When I recognized two or three intersections I’d barreled through just two days ago, the recollection made my hands involuntarily tighten on the steering wheel. But I was riding in a different style today, rolling in the classic Gran Fury, the old-time suspension feeling softer than that in my pickup, but the engine sounding more powerful and quietly strong. I thought about the pit bull at Andrés’s hideout. When I pressed the accelerator, it was like walking a dangerous dog with a heavy leash; the engine pulled at you to let it run, and you could feel the muscle behind it.

Easy boy, I whispered. I realized there was a macho pride in driving such a machine, but the lack of recognition or even a second look by the daytime traffic around me tempered the thought. No one in this day and age gave a shit.

The Brown Man took me all the way south through Lauderhill before turning east. I watched for addresses. He was heading straight to the house listed as belonging to Mr. Coombs. The fact that Carlyle was taking a direct route was both curious and unsettling. He didn’t seem to give a damn if anyone followed him despite the hit attempt on one of his minions, or even a fellow employee—whichever Andrés was. Carlyle seemed unconcerned, which would mean he either ordered it, or knew nothing about it.

Still, I kept a block and a half back as he turned into a neighborhood of single-story stucco homes, most of which looked like they came out of a 1960s cookie-cutter mold in the days when South Florida sprawl was rolling west as fast as man and machine could drain the swamp and slap down concrete slabs for people to live on. Carlyle was driving slowly—no hurry and seemingly no worry.

The homes on the street were a mishmash of living styles, if not architecture. Three houses in a row had dirt for yards, old-time jalousie windows, and carports stacked with old boxes and furniture and assorted junk. Then, all of a sudden, an immaculately kept residence with a green manicured lawn, freshly painted shutters, and flowerbeds overflowing with bright-colored bougainvillea would appear. There was a place with a chain-link fence surrounding every inch of some owner’s property. Then another rattrap, then a modest but clean home next door. No one was on the street at midday. This was not where drugs would be sold on the corner, not a hangout for yellow-eyed men to slump in their despair. The homes here stood quietly and said “working class.”