Midnight Guardians (15 page)

I was still sipping my first bowl of coffee—the sixteen-ounce porcelain one with the faded blue stripe around the rim—and taking my time to respond to Sherry’s bomb of a theory.

“Maybe the car wreck wasn’t an accident. Maybe somebody tried to kill him.”

“OK,” I said, swallowing, and running the statement through my head while the warm caffeine was hitting my brain. “Where the hell did that possibility come from?”

“The guy opened up to me a little,” Sherry said, her fingers pushing a napkin around on the table in front of her. We sat in a booth in the far corner of the dining area. Sherry had pulled alongside, and then slid herself into the opposite side to face me, the side that would allow her words to be absorbed by the wall behind me.

“This on the second time you’ve had lunch with a legless man who wouldn’t talk to any of his professional therapists and shrinks?”

“Yeah,” she said, putting that little smile on the corner of her mouth. “I’m pretty good.”

“I agree with half of that statement,” I said. “You are pretty.”

She smirked.

“You’ve always been a jealous man, Max.”

“Agreed,” I said, and took another sip of coffee. “So lay out the theory, Detective. I mean, I’m guessing it isn’t an official case yet, right?”

She looked up at me as if she thought I was being smart-assed about the statement, but I wasn’t.

“Booker says that the group at the gym was pretty much into the whole steroid thing. They’d started it just wanting to see what it could do, and then it blossomed on them—some sort of competitive thing he couldn’t really enunciate.”

“Yeah, well, the steroids were pretty apparent by the acne all over that McKenzie guy’s neck and shoulders,” I said.

Sherry chuckled. “And you didn’t even see the way his face turned purple when he was trying to beat me at the dips—definite high blood pressure syndrome. Anyway, they started out small-time. But pretty soon, everybody in the core group was on board.”

The waitress came to our booth, cracked her gum, and refilled my cup with the glass orb of coffee that seemed to be locked into the hand of every server in the place. I ordered the meat loaf and Sherry got chopped salad, uh, without the ham, please, and can you take the yolk out of the boiled egg, uh, and no onions and just oil and vinegar dressing, thanks.

The waitress smiled a perturbed smile. Sherry gave her that fake “too bad I’m the customer and you’re not” look. I shook my head and kept my mouth shut as the she gathered the menus and left.

“Booker told you all this?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I think he trusts me. I told him I had nothing to do with IA, and that it was the behavioral unit that asked me to meet him. I told him they never said anything about a drug use problem. And anyway, I wasn’t the one who brought it up to begin with.”

“He offered to talk about drugs?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Well, I did say that I’d done some digging on his case. I told him the stuff about the clean car, the wiped-down clean car, and how weird that seemed.”

“And?”

“He agreed. That’s what they told him every time he tried to check on the status of the investigation of the hit-and-run driver who pinned him. They always told him they didn’t have any leads. Even he was smart enough to wonder what the hell was going on.”

“And the drugs?” I said, looking directly into Sherry’s eyes.

“Well, that brought me to the blood tox report that I’d seen off the record—which led to the steroid discussion.”

“That’s not sort of,” I said.

Sherry just shrugged.

“So he didn’t have much of a chance to deny the steroids after you told him IA already had that,” I said, and took another full swallow of coffee.

“He actually seemed contrite,” Sherry said. “It was like he didn’t want me to think badly of him. He tells me the stuff about the gym group and then says he was trying to distance himself anyway, trying to cut back on his use. He talked about getting older and more mature and how it’s a young man’s game out there—all that shit.”

I was happy to hear her use that little invective at the end. She was making the guy out to be not such an asshole. Maybe I was feeling jealous.

“So he spills about the group doing the drugs, how does that tie into him being crushed on purpose?” I said, trying to stay on track.

“It’s just speculation, Max. Don’t look at me like that,” Sherry said. Her oddly defensive position was rescued by the arrival of our food. I knew she’d continue when she was ready, not before.

I speared off chunks of the thick meat loaf, dipped them into the mashed potatoes and gravy, and then forked the whole mess into my mouth. I knew she was watching. She hated when I did that. But I had an ex-wife in Philly who’d been as controlling as anyone I’d met besides my father. The woman had gone on to climb the police administration ladder while I’d stuck with patrol—one of the reasons for our divorce. I’d sworn never to try to change myself again to please someone else’s vision. Sherry accepted that, but maybe I pushed my “I’m gonna do it the way I want to do it” thing a little too far.

“Anyway,” she started in again, “Booker says that in the early days he was the one designated to take delivery of the steroids, supposedly because he was on the night shift, and they could make the exchange in the dark, and no one would question it.”

I nodded, my mouth full. At least I wasn’t that uncouth.

“Obviously, he counts the stuff out, makes sure the payment is right,” Sherry said.

“OK.”

“After a while, additional stuff starts getting tossed in with the ‘roids, painkillers, and the prescription shit,” she said. “Booker says he started bitching about being a mule, and told the others he wasn’t comfortable doing the gig anymore.”

I left my green beans untouched and pushed my plate away.

I didn’t have to say anything to Sherry about the confluence of what Booker was talking about, and the stuff Andrés Carmen had detailed from his visits to the Medicare scam warehouse. But neither one of us was going to make the leap to connect the two. As Billy said, the prescription drug market was expanding all of the time, and here in South Florida, anything that was happening across the nation was happening at an accelerated rate in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and the Keys.

We had the perfect storm of unadulterated glitz and high living, historical black markets that went back a hundred years to the rum-running days, rampant drug crime fueled over the last fifty years by smugglers from nearby South American growers, and an international culture of backroom bargaining and payoffs. If the illegal buying-and-selling of prescription drugs was the newest game in town, there’d be plenty of it going on here, with multitudes of players sticking their fingers in it.

Neither of us was going to bring up the possible coincidence that the group Billy and I had stumbled onto was a supplier to a group of steroid-using cops. At least, not yet. We are detectives. We don’t do coincidence.

“So let me guess,” I said. “When Booker starts getting cold feet over the whole drug thing, they don’t just let him walk away.”

“He doesn’t ask to,” Sherry said. “It’s his group, Max, his identity. He said he was giving up the drugs, but according to him, that’s when the others started losing trust in him. He says they definitely got nervous, started treating him differently.”

“So you think the group got so paranoid that they decided to hit one of their own to keep him from ratting them out?” The tone of my voice must have been incredulous enough to piss her off.

“I didn’t come up with it, Max. Booker did. He’s the one who threw the possibility out there. He says that the guys started moving away from him, finding different machines to work when he was in the gym, stopped inviting him along to Dolphins games, and didn’t have him over to their homes for parties like before.”

“And this was before the accident?”

“Yeah, and now they’ve shut him out completely.”

The waitress came and cleared the table and filled my cup.

“So let me guess which of these lifters was taking the orders and handling the money before it went over to Booker,” I finally said, already guessing at the answer.

“You got it,” Sherry shook her head. “McKenzie. Why is it that the mouthiest, yappiest dog in the kennel is the one they put in charge?”

“Every gang has its lead mutt,” I said. “The rest like to come in after it takes the first bite.”

I looked over the rim of my cup and noticed that Sherry was shifting in her seat, subtly rocking her weight from hip to hip. She was anxious and fidgety.

“Are you going to check McKenzie’s IA file?” I said, taking a stab at what she might be thinking.

“I could do that. But it would have to be handled carefully,” she said, catching me watching her. “For some reason, I don’t want to blow this guy’s trust.”

“Booker?”

“Yeah, he’s obviously coming out. Telling me all this is a big step for him, Max. If he thinks I’m just using him for some internal steroid investigation bullshit, he’ll shut down again, and never trust anyone.”

I just nodded, tried not to see the questions that started popping up in my head. Sherry was concerned about some stranger shutting down, when she herself had never completely opened up about her own feelings about her amputation. Maybe this guy Booker was the mirror she’d refused to look into. Maybe if I just let it go, she’d see her own reflection in there, and we could all move on.

Leaving a hefty tip and a wink to the waitress, we left for the parking lot. The old Gran Fury had a big enough trunk to easily fit Sherry’s wheelchair. I was just hitting the ignition when my cell rang.

“Max, I apologize for the lateness of the call,” Billy said.

“Yes?”

“I’ve been notified by a source in the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office that they have arrested the last of the gunmen who chased you and Andrés Carmen. Deputies from Broward have been called to come and question them tomorrow.”

“That’s a good thing, Billy,” I said, reading the slight anxiety in his voice.

“True. But my information is that they belong to a well-documented gang up here, one that numbers some two dozen members.”

“Right,” I said. Sometimes Billy has the lawyer’s way of circumlocution.

“The newest arrestee already admitted that there was some kind of Wild West-style bounty out on Andrés Carmen. I fear that just because they failed in their attempt doesn’t mean the next level in their gang won’t take the hit money offer.”

“You need me to go up and get Andrés out of his girlfriend’s trailer?”

“I would be remiss if I didn’t at least try,” he said.

“I’m on my way.”

I
T WAS LIKE being back walking a summer beat behind South Street in Philadelphia: middle of the night, sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades and settling in my waistband, eyes trying to adjust to the dark while searching every shadowed corner and parked vehicle with a clear shot at the trailer in which Andrés Carmen was still staying.

It was like sniffing out the drug runners and their hidey holes in the city. As a foot patrolman, I’d known most of the dealers who fed the appetites of the South Street crowd in the 1990s. It was always a game to actually catch them with product in their possession. Sometimes I’d win; sometimes not. But back when I was creeping the alleys, I had a badge and a gun. Tonight, even though I might find some gangbangers waiting to hit our friend Andrés, I was sneaking around with nothing but a PI business card in my pocket.

I’d parked the Gran Fury two blocks away and put on my old blue-black windbreaker just to give me some cover. The night was quiet and warm. And as I did a perimeter around the trailer, I tried not to underestimate the shooters who had fired first at me and Luz Carmen, and then had tried to chase down Andrés. Yes, you could write them off as idiot street criminals hard up for money now that the drug trade had moved to a more businesslike, hand-to-hand market. But these guys had been armed with automatic weapons. And they were brazen enough to stage a wild-ass car chase in the middle of the day. So would they not just storm Andrés’s girlfriend’s place if they knew he was there, and kill him the way same they tried to in the cul-de-sac?

Sure, that was an option. But I was hoping that wasn’t going to happen while I was inside talking Andrés into leaving. Maybe my little surveillance here had more to do with self-preservation than trying to save the kid again.

As I tightened the circle around the trailer, I took in the sounds and smells of the beaten-down trailer park: the distinctive odor of overused kitty litter dumped behind one place; the leftovers from a recent fish-fry, stashed in an old-style metal garbage can, some procrastinating resident leaving it in the alley instead of at the pickup spot on the street. The overloud blabbing of a television sitcom spilled from a window screen along with canned laughter.

Closing in from the north, I spotted a misplaced light. Closer still, I finally made out some sort of battery-powered candle set on a picnic table. A young girl, middle-school age, was huddled over what looked like a fat textbook, with a pencil in hand, scratching at a notebook. From the trailer beside her came the noise of an argument between two adults. Something crashed inside, and the raw sound of flesh slapping flesh stung the air.

I watched the girl put her forehead down onto the open pages of the book. Though I tried to move away quietly, she looked up at the sound of my footfall, and we made eye contact. I raised my index finger to my lips.
Shssss.

She rolled her eyes at me—whatever—and went back to her homework.

Finally, I stepped up to the door of Andrés’s and looked first to the spot where Billy and I had seen the pit bull in the light of day. There appeared to be nothing there, though I was half-expecting a glowing pair of evil eyes. Taking one more glance behind me, I rapped on the door. It opened slowly, making that gum rubber sound of a seal being pried.

When I stepped into the light, I was greeted by the black-eyed barrel of an over-under shotgun. At the other end was the scrunched face of a blonde woman, her eyes narrowed to slits, her forehead furrowed beyond her age.