Midnight Guardians (16 page)

“Who the fuck are you?”

While my hands were shoulder-high, palms facing outward, I explained who I was, and that I did not deserve to die on the rusted iron steps of a faded Florida house trailer. The woman, small-boned and too defiant for her size, finally backed up, but did not put the shotgun down. When I stepped up into the entry, the smell of onion-fried liver hit my nose, which might have been pleasant under other circumstances, but in the claustrophobic space—already ripe with a scent of its own—I felt my stomach twinge.

The teenage kid was still on the couch as if he hadn’t moved since the last time I was here. He cut his eyes to me for only long enough to assure his boredom, and then went back to the television screen running the same Grand Theft Auto game he’d been on before. He was about the same age as the girl out in the dark working on her studies. The juxtaposition made me feel sorry for him.

“Andrés,” the woman screeched down the hall. “Your boy is here.”

Your boy?

Andrés came out wearing a strap T-shirt that used to pass as white and the floppy blue scrub pants I presumed he wore at work.

“What’s up?”

The girlfriend stepped back next to him as if to present some kind of united front. She was wearing a stained waitress uniform and looked ridiculous holding the big shotgun. I tried to relax my shoulders and clasped my hands in front of me, one holding the other like a salesman during a formal presentation.

I was controlling my anger.

“What’s up? Is it that the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office found the guys who were trying to shoot you?” I said, watching the woman’s dirty-green eyes to see if she’d been brought up-to-date on her boyfriend’s escapades. She didn’t flinch.

“And put that gun down before you accidentally hurt somebody,” I added, now staring into the woman’s eyes.

Andrés put his palm out and touched the gun barrel gently.

“It’s OK, Cheryl,” he said.

She looked disappointed, but sat down on a nearby rocking chair and laid the gun across her lap like a hillbilly—which she very well could have been, given her posture and ashen skin.

“Yeah, my friend told me he heard they popped the last guy over near the projects. So that’s a good thing, right?” Andrés said. “They’re just a bunch of gang assholes, anyway.”

“Yeah, gang assholes,” I said. “The operative word being gang, which means they’re part of a bigger whole, along with others who share the same information, rumor, word on the street and all. You know—like the word that there’s a price on your head.

“But since you’ve already been out there talking to your friends, you probably already know that, too, right? And since you’ve been out chatting, your friends also know where you are. They’re probably out there yakking to others about that very fact.”

Now I was pissed.

The girlfriend made a show of picking up a cigarette pack, tamping it down on the surface of the table next to her, and then opening it. Andrés looked as if he were waiting on her to respond to me. The woman picked a cigarette out of the pack and fit it between her lips.

“We ain’t afraid of a bunch of gang punks,” she said, her voice a pathetic, almost humorous tough-guy growl, the cigarette bouncing with her words.

I shook my head and looked at Andrés. “Like I offered earlier,” I said. “I have a place you can go where they won’t find you. You could stay there a few days until the cops get things cooled down a bit. Mr. Manchester is trying to get the feds to talk with your sister, and if they start taking her seriously, they could come in to give both of you witness protection.”

Andrés looked away. The girlfriend rolled her eyes and lit the cigarette and whispered “Luz” with an edge of disgust.

I pulled a kitchen chair out from under the nearby table and put it in front of the woman. Then I sat down to indicate that I wasn’t leaving until I got an answer. The place was silent but for the sound of the boy on the couch clacking buttons on his handheld controller.

When I followed his eyes to the television screen, I saw a caricature of a stubble-faced guy holding a handgun. The figure had obviously just crashed his car into a police cruiser. On the ground in front of him was a uniformed caricature of an officer. Stubble-face was shooting the cop as he lay on the street. Each time the boy punched his thumb on the controller, the gun would fire and the cartoon body of the cop would actually jerk. The kid kept doing it over and over again.

I could feel my lips tighten into a hard line. I flexed my fingers to loosen them. When the girlfriend tipped her head back to take another long drag off the cigarette, I snuck a look at her other hand to make sure her finger wasn’t inside the trigger guard of the shotgun. It wasn’t.

When she relaxed to savor the smoke in her lungs, I grabbed the barrel of the shotgun and ripped it from her in one quick motion. She started to yelp, but when I banged the end of the barrel down into the floor, she jumped, coughed out a belch of smoke, and remained silent.

Andrés wasn’t moving. I looked over at the kid, his eyes gone big.

“Turn that thing off before I put this gun butt through the screen,” I said, pointing the shotgun stock in the direction of both the television and the hallway. “Go crawl into the place where you sleep.”

The kid looked at his mom, who turned away. Andrés stepped back to clear a path for the boy. The kid sneered at me, but turned off his game, got up, and left sullenly, taking his time—the only thing left to do to show his tail wasn’t between his legs.

“Sit down,” I said to Andrés, motioning him to the empty couch. With the butt of the gun as a visual aide, I directed the girlfriend, “Join him.”

She copied the same slow motion as her son, but moved. I planted the muzzle of the gun onto the floor between my feet. When I felt I had Andrés’s attention, I started.

“I talked with the guy you call the Brown Man today,” I said. Andrés looked up at me without moving his chin. “He’s a drug dealer who used to sell crack on the street to junk men and whores.

“He’s probably doing the same thing now, but his clientele has changed and he’s moved up off the corners and into your warehouse. Tell me what you know about him.”

The girlfriend had stopped at the hallway corner and snuck a look at Andrés, who kept his head down, his eyes seemingly on the video game controller the boy had dropped on the floor.

“They said he’s a bad dude and not to fuck with him,” Andrés said. “Nobody but the guy who runs the place and the IT dude ever say anything to him. But he’s OK to me. He says hello to me when he sees me.”

“Like one of his punk runners,” the girlfriend said with a little snort in her voice.

I was losing my patience. “Shut up or leave,” I said, staring at her. She would not meet my eyes, but slouched against the wall.

I turned back to Andrés. “Is the Brown Man there all the time?”

“No. I only see him once in a while. But when he’s there, everybody gets nervous, you know—uptight. Even the IT guy gets nervous, and all he does is the computer work. He don’t have nothin’ to do with the drugs.”

“So the Brown Man’s like the enforcer or something?”

“No. He ain’t carryin’ or nothin’ like that. But they all straighten up when he’s there, even the guy who’s like the manager,” Andrés said. “It’s like he’s got the juice, man, and everybody knows it.”

It sounded like Carlyle had a trigger somewhere—the threat of exposure, of violence, of start-up money the operation was beholden to.

“Has he ever brought anyone else into the warehouse—someone like a partner?”

“Uh, uh, not like a partner. But he was with a dude once who I know was a Monroe Heights Posse.”

“Gang member?”

“Yeah. They were looking at the product, you know, the drugs and shit.”

“Same as the guys who were chasing you?”

“Nah, different crew, but from the same area in Riviera Beach, you know.”

“No, I don’t know,” I said.

What I did know was that Carlyle, if he was even close to the businessman and investor he said he was, would have some pretty extensive contacts in the criminal world. And he wouldn’t give up those contacts even as he supposedly rose beyond selling crack to prostitutes on the corner. If he’d somehow bled his old world into the new world of medical and prescription fraud, he wouldn’t necessarily leave all his violent tactics of coercion and control behind, either.

I could go hash this all out with Billy, or I could sit here in a filthy trailer with a couple of brass-balled neophytes who weren’t going to listen to an ex-cop anyway. I stood up and pushed the kitchen chair back behind me with my foot.

“I’m offering you a place to hide out one last time,” I said. Neither of them moved.

I went to the door, turned the knob, and then let the shotgun fall to the floor. I’d had enough.

“Good luck then,” I said, and left.

W
HEN I GOT back to the Gran Fury, I climbed in and called Billy. Even though it was 1:00 A.M., he answered before the second ring.

“The kid won’t move,” I said. “His girlfriend has him under her thumb, and he isn’t going to do anything that makes him look weak in her eyes.”

“Machismo,” Billy said.

“Comes with the territory.”

Lots of people talk about personal responsibility. When idiots do stupid things that turn out badly, those same people still cry that someone else should have stepped in and saved them. There are times I get sick of it. Billy rarely does. He sees the good in people, despite the world that has unfolded in front of him since he was a skinny projects kid toughing it out in Northwest Philly.

“I say we turn him in, Max. We give the trailer location to the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office and let them arrest him on the outstanding warrant from the chase. At least in lockup he’ll be safe,” Billy said.

“Your call, Counselor,” I said. “I’m going home.”

A
T 7:00 A.M., I was lying next to Sherry when my cell rang. It felt like I’d been in bed for ten minutes. The last vision in my head before falling asleep was of a young girl sitting in the dark, an opened textbook in front of her, her face illuminated by a white flame.

I reached out and flipped open the phone.

“I just got a call from my contact in the sheriff’s office,” Billy announced, his voice stoic and businesslike. “Andrés Carmen’s trailer caught fire at four this morning. They found three bodies. I have to go tell Luz that her brother is dead.”

“Jesus, Billy! When did you call in the loca—” But before I could finish, he hung up. I sat straight up, staring at the rippled light against the bedroom wall.

“What is it?” Sherry said. Her voice was sleepy, but as a cop she was always on alert for calls in the night.

“I’ve got to go,” I said, swinging my feet out of the bed. “I think we lost some people we shouldn’t have.”

Sherry rolled up on one elbow.

“The Carmen family?”

The woman didn’t miss much.

“The brother,” I said, standing up and grabbing for my pants, which still seemed warm. “His girlfriend, and probably her teenage son.”

Sherry was silent while I got dressed.

“You saved him once, Max,” she said just before I left, a last-minute attempt to salve my soul.

I
PARKED IN the same place I had just eight hours ago. When I opened the door to the Gran Fury, I could smell the place once again, this time differently. The odors of animal feces, cooked fish, and dry garbage were now overwhelmed by that of acidic smoke, melted plastic, and charred wood. My route was less circuitous this time. I didn’t circle and watch. Instead, I walked straight to the spot where Andrés Carmen’s trailer once stood, or as closely as the cops would allow.

A couple of community service aides were keeping onlookers at a fifty-foot distance, back behind the two fire engines that were still on the scene, spinning their red lights through the thick morning air. There was one sheriff’s office patrol car parked where the driveway to the burned trailer used to be. The absence of a medical examiner’s vehicle told me the bodies had already been removed. Residents stood in small clusters, some still dressed in housecoats or hurriedly tossed-on sweatshirts and sneakers. They watched the firefighters rooting through the ashes with crowbars and shovels, turning up clumps of curled aluminum and still smoking wood, as if some survivor were going to rise from the blackness to their astonishment and applause.

I noted a uniformed official standing at the center of the mass, about where I’d stood talking with Andrés and his girlfriend, Cheryl. The officer was videotaping the scene. The fire marshal, designated by his stenciled windbreaker, was at the north end, taking close-up photographs of something at his feet.

I stood and surveyed the area with my hands in my pockets. You didn’t have to be an expert to see that there had been a sizable explosion. The burn pattern radiated out in streaks, and there was charring in the trees too high and away from where flames would have risen straight up from a normal fire. Soot flash covered the facing walls of both adjacent trailers, but there was no extensive fire damage. The picnic table where Billy, Andrés, and I sat two days earlier was flipped on its face, the wooden legs smoldering, but still intact. If I was guessing, ground zero would have been at the north end of the trailer where the bedrooms had been, and where the fire marshal was now. The trailer was obliterated there. What was left of the rest of the structure was peeled back like an enormous charred cigar that had been loaded with a stupid exploding tip.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a tiny knot of people off to the side. A tall, thin man dressed in black trousers and an oxford shirt and tie was bent over like a piece of angle iron, listening to a young girl. He turned his head and looked my way while the child averted her eyes and spoke quietly. I recognized her as the homework girl from my nighttime visit.

The angular man stood, nodded some sort of thank-you to the parents of the girl, and walked my way. As he approached, he took out a cell phone, made a quick call, and loosened his tie, like a guy who might have to run after something. I stood my ground even when, no, especially when, I saw the detective’s shield clipped to his belt.