Midnight Guardians (26 page)

“The wheels of justice grind slowly, M-Max,” Billy finally said.

“Hah!” I sputtered. “Some things never change, eh?”

But Billy’s eyes went over to his wife, the judge.

A hush fell over the room as I got up to fetch another beer. When I asked Sherry if she’d share it, she declined. So I opened a bottle from Billy’s big stainless fridge and eased outside onto the patio.

“Can I get you anything, Ms. Carmen?”

Luz Carmen was quiet. I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. I thought she might have fallen asleep. But then she said, “The ocean tides, they change every day, but then, they never really change year after year, do they, Mr. Freeman?

I stepped forward and put a hand on the railing. It was dark to the east, but if you listened carefully, you could hear the soft surf below.

The feds never did show up at the ranger station to put Luz in protective custody. Billy had instead taken her to his place. When I called him after the arrest of our “assassin” at Sherry’s, the threat was deemed to have been minimized. After we found out about the murder of the Brown Man and suicide of Deputy Booker, we had to reluctantly agree.

Two days later, Luz arranged a cremation of her brother’s remains, held a simple service, and prayed, I supposed, to her own private god. Afterward, she told Billy that she would be returning to Bolivia.

I didn’t know how to respond to her rumination on the human lack of change.

She was emotionally wounded, unsure what direction to take, beaten down by the turns her life had taken. It was familiar territory for me. I’d been there a few years ago when I chose to pick up and leave Philadelphia for South Florida.

“But you know, the tides also go in and out, Ms. Carmen. They rise and fall, just like life.”

“Ah, the philosopher Mr. Freeman,” she said, a hint of amusement in her voice for the first time since I’d met her.

“No,” I said. “The realist.”

She let that sit for a moment. “Fair enough,” she finally said. “I will be returning to my true home.”

“Bolivia?”

“Yes, to Rurrenabaque,” she said. “The short time out in your Everglades has convinced me that I might find peace there. I may have relatives who will help. I may be able to teach there—maybe English to the children.”

Only one side of her face was illuminated in the darkness. She was again looking out at something I could not see.

“The place of the pink dolphins?” I said, and this time she actually smiled.

“Yes. It is the one place where I remember my brother being a true child, an innocent.”

If all she had left were memories, I wasn’t going to deny her that respite. I did not respond and drifted quietly back into the apartment. Two steps in, I looked up and was instantly aware of a thickness of anticipation.

Sherry turned to me, smiling as if she’d been missing me for days. Billy was looking askance, as if some joke had gone awry. But his wife was glowing, her eyes bright, and her complexion somewhere between an embarrassed flush and deep pride. They had all frozen with my entrance, as if they’d popped a bottle of champagne, and were waiting for the cork to hit something.

“Diane and Billy are having a baby!” Sherry said.

I suffered the instant of silence such a statement deserves, and blurted out something like, “What? How?”

Sherry waved her fingers at me the way she does when I make a bad joke, and then performed an impressive, one-legged stand-up to meet Diane in a hug.

I strode across to Billy and took his extended hand. “Congratulations, Counselor,” I said, hoping the tone in my voice did not reveal the question that next rang in my head: Is this something you really want?

The ensuing gush of conversation was of due dates and maternity time and the clearing out of an extra bedroom, and then a belated, in my opinion, call for real champagne. Crystal flutes appeared and a chilled bottle, and whether in deference to Luz Carmen, or simply because Billy’s particular taste doesn’t not call for exploding corks, the wine was carefully opened and poured.

Diane accepted half a glass. “For celebration only,” she said. “I’ll have to get used to giving this up.”

After the toast, the ritualistic separation of the genders occurred. The women huddled together in their particular sharing of stories and questions, and the men drifted off under the confident gaze of the Moorish guard mounted on the wall.

“This is what’s been bugging you lately?” I said, not bothering to list the times Billy had shown uncharacteristic anger during the last few days, and the profound disappointment on his face when the circumstances of young people, children, had been revealed.

“It is a difficult w-world today, Max,” Billy said. “I would not tr-try to deceive you b-by pretending that I haven’t given thought to bringing a child into it. Children who grow up without direction, children who grow up without any worthy role models; worse, children who are actually taught the kind of selfishness and manipulation, and outright lawlessness by the ones they depend on most.”

I could not argue with him. Billy had grown up without a father. I had grown up in the shadow of domestic violence. But somehow we made it out, hadn’t we? Still, it was a different time.

“I have heard the argument, my friend, that if people like you and Diane, smart and carrying people of high morals and strong ethics don’t bring children into this world, then we are all lost,” I said.

I raised the edge of my glass to his and lightly touched them together. “At this moment in time, Billy, I think we need you.”

T
HE RIDE HOME was quiet, as you might expect after the resolution of a case, the Manchesters’ announcement of a child on the way, and the simmering non-resolution of something that still stood in the way of my relationship with Sherry.

“Isn’t that great about Billy and Diane?”

“Yeah, great.”

“What? You’re not happy for them?”

“Sure, I’m happy. If that’s what they want—and they know what they’re getting into with all the time and attention and dedication involved in raising a kid—which I’m sure they do. Then it’s great.”

Quiet. The spaced lights along I-95 set up an almost metronome quality as they strobed through the truck at sixty-five m.h., whisking over the hood, onto the dashboard, the quick glow on both our faces, and then gone until the next one.

“It’s not always just about the commitment and the dedication and the responsibility, Max,” Sherry said.

I nodded.

“It’s also about the love.”

Sherry unbuckled her seat belt, rolled on one hip, and rested her head on my shoulder.

“You know that’s illegal, Detective?” I said, moving the back of my fingers to her cheek.

“So arrest me.”

When we got to her house, the street was once again staid, neat, dark, and quiet. Wind ruffled the trees. The scent of night-blooming jasmine tickled the air. Sherry didn’t wait for me to unload the wheel chair. On occasion, she acquiesced to using her aluminum forearm crutches for short distances.

“Meet me out back,” she said over her shoulder, and went inside.

I took out the wheelchair and went through the side gate and pulled the contraption backward up onto the deck. The pool lights were on. We’d had an electrician come to repair and recheck all the lines. There was something about that blue-green glow that I’d missed when it wasn’t there, and I’d actually wondered why complete darkness never bothered me out at the shack, but I avoided it here.

I went inside to the kitchen and took a couple of beers out of the fridge. Sherry was still in the back somewhere, so I opened the Rolling Rocks and returned to the deck. Sitting at the patio table, I watched the lights dance off the oak leaves and the tile around the pool, and then— almost unconsciously—off the chrome of the wheelchair.

Without examining my thought process, I got up and moved the chair, rolling it back behind Sherry’s hammock in the corner, where it was out of sight. I had just settled back into my chair when the pool lights went out.

“It’s OK, Max,” Sherry said from the French doors of her bedroom, before I had a chance to jump. The still, burning light behind her showed her in silhouette. She was moving across the patio with the forearm crutches, and when she passed me, I felt the bare skin of her hip touch my shoulder. The scent of jasmine was replaced by a perfume I had not smelled for more than a year.

I heard the ruffle of water as Sherry lowered herself into the pool, and I hesitated for only a second. My heart was thumping when I stepped naked into the water and found her in the dark.

There is something about water, its movement, its cocoon of film over skin, its ability to mimic weightlessness: Some call it limbic; some call it internal; some call it healing. We used no words at all.

Later, when I carried Sherry to her bedroom and lay her down on the bed, I noticed that the mirror she had depended on for so long was gone. She had moved it from its regular space, stored it away perhaps for good.

We lay in each other’s arms for hours that night, neither sleeping, nor dreaming.

“Thank you, Max,” Sherry finally said.

“For?” I whispered.

“For saving me.”

I used my fingertips to move a strand of her hair behind her ear and watched her profile against the glow from the pool.

“Then I thank you, for the same reason, babe,” I said.

She turned to meet my eyes and whispered a phrase for the ages before meeting my lips with hers:

“Saving each other, Max—isn’t that what people are supposed to do?”

I wish to thank my agent, Philip Spitzer, who got me this gig; all the people at Open Road Media bravely jumping into this new era of publishing; and the truly dedicated prosecutors and members of law enforcement working to end rampant fraud and close the pill mills in my beloved state of Florida.

Jonathon King is the Edgar Award-winning author of the Max Freeman mystery series, which is set in south Florida, as well as a thriller and a historical novel.

Born in Lansing, Michigan, in the 1950s, King worked as a police and court reporter for twenty-four years, first in Philadelphia until the mid-1980s and then in Fort Lauderdale. His time at the
Philadelphia Daily News
and Fort Lauderdale’s
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
greatly influenced the creation of Max Freeman, a hardened former Philadelphia police officer who relocates to south Florida to escape his dark past. King began writing novels in 2000, when he used all the vacation days he accrued as a reporter to spend two months alone in a North Carolina cabin. During this time, he wrote
The Blue Edge of Midnight
(2002), the first title in the Max Freeman series. The novel became a national bestseller and won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author.
A Visible Darkness
(2004), the series’ second installment, highlights Max’s mission to identify a dark serial killer stalking an impoverished community.
Shadow Men
(2004), the third in the series, revolves around Max’s investigation of an eighty-year-old triple homicide, and
A Killing Night
(2005) tells the story of a murder investigation in which the prime suspect is Max’s former mentor. After finishing
A Killing Night
, his fourth book, King left journalism to become a full-time novelist.

Since 2005, King has published his fifth and sixth Max Freeman novels,
Acts of Nature
(2007), about a hurricane that puts Max and his girlfriend at the mercy of some of the Everglades’ most menacing criminals, and
Midnight Guardians
(2010), which features the dangerous reemergence of a drug kingpin from Max’s past. He has also published the stand-alone thriller
Eye of Vengeance
(2007), about a military-trained sniper who targets the criminals that a particular journalist has covered as a crime reporter. In 2009, King published the historical novel
The Styx
, which tells the story of a Palm Beach hotel at the turn of the twentieth century and the nearby community’s black hotel employees whose homes were burned to the ground amid the violent racism of the time.

King currently lives in southeast Florida, where he writes, canoes, and explores the Everglades regularly.