Midnight Guardians (20 page)

When everything was put away, I rekindled the fire in the potbellied stove, scooped out coffee from a three-pound can into my old metal pot, and waited for the boil. Luz had taken a seat in one of two straight-backed chairs that flanked the table and was seemingly watching the flame of the kerosene lantern that I’d set in front of her. The shadows played on her face, creating an even deeper sense of sadness, if that were possible after losing a brother and blaming yourself for his death.

I sat down on the opposite side of the table and determined that I would not say “so how are you holding up” or some other inane comment.

Outside the night buzz had begun, with myriad insects, lizards, and bats doing the whole nocturnal dance of “eat and be eaten.” When I first moved out here from Philadelphia, I thought the sounds would drive me crazy. My urban ear was in tune, or able to tune out, the constant sound of cars and horns, yelps and sirens, late-night television through an open window and predawn garbage trucks in nearby alleys. I thought I could sleep through anything. But the sound of nature in its nighttime chaos was so unsettling it took me months to rejigger my brain.

“You get used to it,” I said, making a passing comment on what I was listening to without thought of what Luz was tragically carrying in her own head. She cut her eyes up into mine. And if she’d said “fuck you” to my face, she would have been justified. “The night sounds, I mean,” I said quickly, trying to cover.

Her face relaxed, but only a bit.

“I have heard it before, when I was a girl. We would visit with my aunt in Rurrenabaque, where the jungles are thick and the animal life is abundant.”

“In Bolivia?”

“Yes. My parents lived just outside La Paz. But my mother’s people came from the area to the north on the Río Beni, which is very junglelike.”

“And that’s where you learned to use a canoe paddle?” I said, grateful that she was even speaking.

“Yes, in dugouts. My many cousins taught me. It was the way they traveled to most places. And they fished at night, spearing the
ranas
, uh, frogs.”

“Ahh, frogs’ legs,” I said with an honest appreciation of the delicacy I had out in the Glades with my old friend Nate Brown after a night of spotting them with bright lights, and then spearing them with barbed spears. Maybe Luz saw my own slight smile; a pleasant twitch played at the corner of her mouth, remembering.

“Yes. We would cook them over the open fire in the night with the sparks flying up into the stars.” She was staring into the flame now, seeing her past.

“And gator tail?” I said, trying to string some conversation together.

“No. No alligator,” she said. “I saw your alligator on the way in, a small one, up on the bank.”

She had a sharp eye. I had missed seeing any of the many gators that live along the river.

“We have caimans in Rurrenabaque—dark and nasty. We were always afraid of them as children. They were much too ugly and dangerous, or so we thought. But we have freshwater dolphins there. When they are young, they have very pink skin—very pretty, prettier than your gray ones.”

She was reaching for more pleasant memories, a good sign, I thought.

“Did you and your brother see them together? The pink dolphins, I mean?”

“A few times, when he was young; then our parents moved closer to the city and worked all the time. But the neighborhoods in La Paz are not that different from parts of Miami. I went to school and Andrés went to the streets, to his friends and their street ways. It was after I came here and had a job that I brought him to live in America.”

To save him, I thought, but didn’t go there.

“So is your family still in Bolivia?” I said instead, thinking family connection in a time of grief.

“Some distant relatives—but our parents are gone.”

Nice try, Max. I pushed away from the table and went to my so-called kitchen.

“Are you hungry? I can heat something up. Soup, maybe?”

“No thank you,” Luz said.

I busied myself, finding a saucepan and going through my cupboard. It may be ironic in this place of water and so close to the sea, but my favorite soup is still the canned Bookbinder’s lobster bisque from Philadelphia, which I buy a case at a time in a market in Fort Lauderdale and leave here. Billy would disown me if I asked for it at his place. Sherry only wrinkles her nose at any mention of the stuff; when I’m here, I indulge. You have to thicken the bisque by adding milk, so I always like to eat it the first day I come out, when I’ve just brought fresh milk for the cooler.

I pushed a few more pieces of dry pine into the stove to get the heat up and then opened the can, mixed it in the pan, and set it to simmer. Fortunately, the shack is built in the style of Old Florida dwellings. The inside ceiling is no ceiling at all. The roof slants up in four planes like a pyramid, the triangles coming together twenty feet above and meeting at a cupola that’s vented at the top. The heat inside the cabin rises to the top and vents, thus creating a vacuum. And because the entire structure is raised above the water on stilts, the cool shaded air beneath is drawn up—natural air-conditioning. I have never felt overwhelmed by heat out here.

“There are some books in the armoire on the left,” I said to Luz, letting an apologetic tone invade my voice. “I read a lot out here, and even if Mr. Manchester is constantly warning me that the hardbacks are going to rot in the humidity, I still keep a few at hand.”

She looked up from the table at me, and I felt I had to prompt her and nodded my head at the stand-up wardrobe.

“Help yourself.”

I couldn’t stand the thought of watching her stare at the lantern frame all night.

She rose and went to the armoire and began browsing the piles of books on the high shelf as I kept stirring my soup. You can ruin it if you let it scald. I kept cutting looks at Luz as she carefully fingered each volume, sliding them out of their tight space, studying the covers, sometimes pulling one down and perusing the flap copy to get a sense of the story. A lot of what I kept here was Florida history, books on the wildlife of the southern United States, and travel books by Jonathan Raban, Peter Matthiessen, and Paul Theroux. I have some fiction, mostly southern stuff by Tom Franklin and some collections of Harry Crews. I was only a bit surprised when she returned to the table with a copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s
Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

“Do you like the magical realism, Mr. Freeman?” she said as I brought my warm bowl of soup to the table along with a cold Rolling Rock from the cooler.

“I liked
One Hundred Years of Solitude
,” I said, recalling another García Márquez novel.

“It is better in its original Spanish,” Luz said, flipping through the early pages of the novel in her hands. “But I can see how you would enjoy Mr. García’s themes of solitude.”

I took a long sip from the neck of the beer. Yeah, pretty obvious, I thought.

“You are not a religious man, Mr. Freeman,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “You are a practical man.”

I nodded, an action I was using a lot lately.

“And your woman—is she practical as well?”

“My woman?” I did not recall bring Sherry’s name up during any conversation with Luz Carmen.

“You told her you loved her on the phone while we were in my house.”

“Yes,” I said, remembering the conversation. “She is a practical person.”

Luz was quiet again, looking at the pages of the novel, but not reading them.

“It’s a good thing to love someone. But it is hard to do in solitude,” she finally said. “You should call your woman and tell her again that you love her.”

This comment was made while Luz was seemingly concentrating on reading the opening pages of the book she’d selected. I said nothing in return and finished my soup. Then I washed off the dishes at my old iron slop sink, using the old-time hand pump that drew water from below. I pulled out another beer, took my cell phone outside, and went down the steps to the small dock platform, far enough away, I thought, to keep Luz Carmen from listening in.

“Hey, how you doin’?”

“Just finished swimming. What’s up?”

“I’m out at the shack.”

“Yeah? Dark out there by now.”

Sherry was right. This far out there is little ambient light at night, though if you know which direction to look in, you can still detect the glow of the urban world rising and then reflecting off the cloud cover. And on clear nights, if there is a moon, you can actually navigate the river in that natural luminescence.

“I’m with the client,” I said.

“You think that’s a good move?”

“For right now, anyway,” I said, studying Sherry’s question, her voice. She doesn’t usually question smart tactics.

“You and a woman out in the Glades?”

Sherry is not a jealous woman. The statement caught me unawares. I was stumbling with a response and she read the hesitation.

“I’m kidding, Max.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, waiting for her to continue the so-called joke by warning me not to permanently disfigure the girl while I was out here. But I said nothing.

“So I got a call from Mr. Booker,” she said, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

“Yeah?”

“He wants to meet with me again.”

“Progress,” I said.

“Well, actually, he invited me to meet him at his home. He wants to show me some sort of classic car he’s been rebuilding. Says he’s thinking of adding a hand system for the accelerator and brakes; he thinks if he started driving, things might open up for him.”

“Sure. A hobby—something to get back into,” I said. Sherry’s idea of a hobby after her amputation was physically beating herself into exhaustion on Loop Road or in the pool. “What does the sheriff’s office counselor think of that?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t reported in yet,” Sherry said. “But I think something else is up.”

“Like he’s making a move on you?” I said, trying to make it light, like a joke for a joke, but then regretting it instantly.

“Max.”

“Sorry, babe.”

“Let’s not joust, OK?” she said. “I think the guy is busting to tell me something that he’s holding out on.”

“Like?”

“Like something to do with the accident that he’s unwilling to tell anybody else. You saw the alienation going on in that gym. He’s not going to spill anywhere near those meatheads. We always learned that if you get an interviewee in a place where he’s comfortable, the better chance of him opening up, right?”

It was interview technique 101, but rarely happened in police work. You get them at the scene. You get them in an enclosed room downtown. You get them in a cell. But you don’t often interview anyone sitting on their couch at home or out back in on their patio overlooking the garden, or in their shop tinkering with a favorite engine.

“What do you think he’s holding out on?” I said. “He’s been pushing the investigators on the hit-and-run, right? Wouldn’t he have given them everything to help get the guy who chopped him in half?”

Again I was ruing the words the instant they left my lips, but Sherry never hesitated.

“I don’t know, Max. But that’s why they wanted me to work the guy, to get into his head.”

“Unless they’re playing you to get to the boys in the gym through him,” I said, finally just tossing it out there, an angle both of us had to play since seeing McKenzie and the steroid pimples popping up on the gang in the muscle factory.

“God, that’s pretty despicable.”

“Which rules it out?”

“Not in the least,” Sherry said.

J
UST LISTEN TO that rumble, to that jacked-up purr, burring into your chest, vibrating your ribs. Nice, eh? That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Just looking at her makes me proud. The Mach 1 body style, Ram Air version; the spoiler on the back to keep that back rubber to the road; the shaker hood scoop sucking up the air to feed that sweet 428 Cobra Jet; the whole package black on red.

Yeah, you can still feel her rippling the air around you. And here you sit, in a wheelchair, poking a fucking screwdriver into the accelerator armature just to rev her. Fucking garage, man. No open road, no Alligator Alley to speed-shift her at 2:00 A.M. The car you love, and all you can do is listen to her. You are screwed, brother—all you are, is screwed.

OK, OK, maybe you shouldn’t have been doing the negative vibe thing when the blonde detective came over. I mean, you did invite her, right? You called her. That was a step right there, wasn’t it? Maybe you shouldn’t have put it out there like you were needy, but holdin’ all this shit inside is killing you. And you gotta admit it, Marty, she listened good, and knew something about where you were coming from.

So you call her and she says yes, she’ll come over, but you can’t take the wait, too nervous, too hyper, and too stupid for doing this in the first place. So you go where you always go now to calm down. You listen to the Mustang, chill, feel the rumble, feel a little bit alive. But it still wasn’t working.

Then you saw her from inside the garage, the cab pulling up outside your place. The driver gets out and pulls her chair out of his trunk and wheels it around to the passenger-side door. You had to smile when she kind of slapped the driver’s hand away from helping her. She’ll do it herself, dude. This girl has her shit together; don’t baby her.

You were watching from up high, your own chair rolled up onto the lifts you used to use to raise up the front end of the car to change the oil. She couldn’t see you yet; the sun outside too bright, making the inside of the garage dark. She was checking out your house, the neighborhood—the whole two-bedroom middle-class thing going on here. Yeah, she probably noticed the lawn hadn’t been cut for weeks, and that the front windows were carrying a film of dust, and that the hedges had gone fucking wild without a trim.

But what the hell—I’m a legless man. What do you want? So you gave the accelerator one last jack before shutting the engine down, rattling the raised garage door a little. Her head snapped around. Nice hair, catching the sun and those blue-green eyes, piercing when she looked at the place. That alone was enough for you to lose some anger. She rolled up the driveway, and you rolled down the lifts to meet her. Not exactly the Hollywood scene of the guy and girl running in the meadow to meet in some corny slow-motion embrace, but you take what you can get, right?