Again, he addressed Dan as the person in charge. “May we use your office, Ranger? I need an electrical plug.”
“Yeah, sure,” Dan said, and opened the door. He followed, intrigued as much as I was. We all went inside.
The sergeant put the box on Dan’s desk and traced the lamp cord down to a wall socket. He took a simple coffee cup warmer out of the box, set it on the edge of the desk, and plugged it in.
I knew what was coming, but watched anyway.
“One of the problems with collecting evidence is that a lot of departments say they don’t have equipment and lab time,” the sergeant said, taking a grocery store roll of aluminum foil out of the box and a small tube of what I soon figured out was superglue.
The sergeant set the coffee cup warmer in one corner of the now-empty box. Then he took a piece of aluminum foil and formed it into a kind of ashtray, setting it on top of the coffee warmer where the cup would usually go. After opening the tube of superglue, he put a glob about the size of a nickel on the aluminum foil.
Dan was narrowing his eyebrows and looking over at me when the sergeant asked for a cup of hot coffee.
“Uh, yeah,” he said. “I just started a fresh pot this morning?”
The sergeant took a full cup from Dan and set it inside the box.
“It adds some humidity to the air,” he said. Dan just stared.
The sergeant then placed the garage door opener inside the box, carefully leaning it into a corner on its edges so that every flat surface was exposed. He then ripped off another piece of aluminum foil. We watched while he rubbed his finger on the side of his nose and pressed it to the small piece of foil, and then leaned it against a wall inside the box.
“A control standard,” I said.
The sergeant looked up. “You really were a cop, Mr. Freeman.”
I just shrugged.
He closed the top flaps of the box and said, “Be about ten minutes. If we get some good prints, we’ll send them off to the lab. I’ve just seen too many guys put these things in a plastic evidence bag and mess them up in transport.”
“You’re a careful man, Sergeant,” I said, and he stared at me with a “duh, yeah?” look on his face. He defuses bombs for a living, Freeman, whatta ya think?
Back outside, Luz Carmen was sitting in an old wooden straight-backed chair on the porch, staring out at the river, seemingly paying no attention to the bomb techs who had now opened all four doors of the Gran Fury, and appeared to be searching the interior. I went down on one knee next to her.
“Ms. Carmen,” I said. “I need you to call your friend, the woman at the beach house. Do you remember her saying that she noticed a black man out in front of the Royal Flamingo Villas, a man who scared her?”
Luz Carmen nodded.
“I need to ask her if she can describe him in more detail,” I said. “I need you to ask her if the man was limping when she saw him.”
I handed her my cell phone and stood up. I was now thinking about Dan’s description of the man he spooked while the guy was rigging an explosive to blow us both to hell. I had no doubt that the bomb squad sergeant would turn up a viable print on the garage door opener if the guy had been stupid enough to handle the trigger with his bare hands. But now I was wondering how the hell he would have found us. Had he followed us from the Royal Flamingo Villas? If so, I was pissed I’d allowed that to happen.
While Luz talked in Spanish on the cell phone, I watched as the bomb squad began to abandon the car, closing the doors roughly, an indication, I figured, that all was clear.
One of the squad members walked up to me holding a small black object the size of a beeper.
“The car is absolutely clean, Mr. Freeman,” he said, handing over my keys. “But we did find this under the passenger seat.”
He held up the object between two fingers, just as the sergeant had with the garage opener. “It’s a GPS tracker, the kind they use on delivery truck fleets to track where the vehicle is at all times. Mean anything to you?”
I was looking at the tracker, thinking about the Gran Fury. Had it ever been parked unlocked where someone would have had access? Sure, they could have popped the old locks without leaving an obvious sign, but had anyone been inside other than me? Who the hell had put a GPS in it, and why? Then I remembered the admirer, saw the vision of a child running his fingertips over the chrome; I recalled inviting the kid to go ahead, climb inside. I’d actually given him permission.
“It means I’m an idiot,” I said, and the officer raised his eyebrows. “You’d better go in and give it to your sergeant to process, but I’m pretty sure he’s not going to find a ten-year-old’s prints on file to match them.”
After the tech took the evidence inside the ranger’s office, I stood on the porch, trying to retrace all of my steps ever since I’d talked to the Brown Man and his son in their Fort Lauderdale neighborhood. Luz Carmen stepped up to hand back my cell phone.
“Yes, she thinks she remembers a man,” she said. “He was black, and maybe twenty years old, very carefully dressed. She noticed because he didn’t look like he belonged at the beach. And when she looked back to see if he would follow her, he was walking away with a limp.”
Same as Dan’s daybreak suspect, our bomber, our tracker. He didn’t have to follow because he knew exactly where we were going and where we’d been: northwest Fort Lauderdale, the trailer park, the Royal Flamingo Villas, right here at the boat ramp, and Sherry’s home. Jesus, Sherry’s-he’d tracked me to a cop’s house.
I thought of my gun-still in the shack, wrapped up in oilcloth. Even if I took Dan’s Boston Whaler, it would take more than an hour to get out there and back.
“I gotta go,” I told Luz. “Stay here until Mr. Manchester gets here. Stay here with these officers.” I went for the Gran Fury instead of my truck. The Gran Fury would be faster; the spotlights might help clear the way.
The firefighters and paramedics just watched as I fired up the Gran Fury and sped past them, spitting dust and gravel. They looked at one another and at the door to the shack, probably wondering why the cops were letting me drive the car away. I might have heard someone holler “Hey!” when I looked in the rearview and saw the sergeant standing on the porch, watching my bumper.
– 23 -
I WAS DRIVING like an idiot for the second time in a week. This time, I was avoiding rear-end collisions instead of perpetuating them. The only saving grace was that the evening rush hour on I-95 was ebbing. I had both spotlights aimed forward and glaring. My headlights were on bright, and I used the horn only when I needed to zoom around someone who wouldn’t get over.
I stayed at eighty m.h. most of the way through Palm Beach County until the inevitable snags off West Palm, and then gunned it up again in Broward, with slow downs off Deerfield and Pompano Beaches. I kept dialing Sherry’s cell and kept getting the recorded message. She’d ditched the house phone years ago.
My mother used to ring the house phone in our old South Philly home at night when we were away. “I only let it ring a couple of times, and then hang up,” she’d explain. “That way the burglars think someone’s home and is picking up.”
My drunk father thought she was nuts. “Buy a fucking dog,” he’d say.
“They shoot dogs, don’t they?” she’d respond.
“So arm him.”
This was a typical exchange: family life at the Freemans’.
But Sherry would be armed; she’s a cop. Still, the MO of the guy who was making my stomach churn and my head grind was not the kind that had standoffs and faced up to those he intended to kill. He was the kind that set off a propane tank explosion while you were asleep. He was the kind that put a bomb under your car, waiting in the weeds to blow you to hell with a garage opener. He was the kind that might work for a notorious drug dealer who was trying to get rid of all wit nesses and connections to his “expanded” operations in Medicare fraud and the prescription drug trade.
The only person who I could recall havin
g access to my Gran Fury to plant the tracking device was the Brown Man’s son, the fascinated kid I let climb into the passenger seat while I was trying to rattle his father’s cage. If the former street dealer had set one of his other proteges on to Andres and Luz Carmen, and by extension to me, then we were being stalked. And considering the methods of the stalker and clues he’d left in his wake, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.
But a wannabe hit man can be as dangerous as the barely believable Hollywood types you see in movies. And as Baghdad’s bombers taught us all, they don’t give a damn about collateral damage to innocents.
When I got through to Billy on his cell, I told him I’d left Luz at the ranger’s station with a dozen cops and firefighters. He said he was already en route with a federal witness protection agent. I gave him an abbreviated rundown on the bombing attempt, while I whooshed around three minivans pulling some sort of convoy in the inside lane. I wished I had the old Whelen rumbler police siren that came with the original Gran Fury to rattle their windows.
“Any idea who this guy is?” Billy asked.
“The sheriff’s office will know as soon as they run that print, but I’m not waiting around,” I said. “If he’s stupid enough to be blowing up witnesses, he’s stupid enough to try and set up something at Sherry’s.”
I tossed the cell in the passenger seat just as I came up on the Broward Boulevard exit and passed the waiting lines in the side lane. Then I cut everyone off with a wide and illegal turn east. I knew this was the fastest route and would also take me past the Fort Lauderdale Police Headquarters. If I was lucky, doing twice the speed limit in front of the cops would get me a tail, and I’d lead them all to Sherry’s house and explain later.
It didn’t work that way. When I rolled into the neighborhood, I was alone, and doused my headlights. Sherry’s car appeared to be untouched and covered. The house windows were dark. I parked one driveway up the street and got out. It was just past twilight, and Victoria Park was the essence of a quaint and quiet place, inhabited by working folks, some singles, some families who got in when real estate was low, and then held on when the property taxes started climbing.
There was a car parked on the street a block north. Most people who were home were in their own driveways, so the Jeep Cherokee stuck out. I memorized the plate number and then thought: paranoid Max. But still, I went around the house, not using any of the usual entrances, the gate to the backyard, or the front door. I stopped at the side fence, and listened.
First thing wrong: The pool motor was off. Not just the motor that creates the hard current for Sherry to swim against, but the regular skimmer motor that ran constantly. The underwater lights were on. I could see the aqua glow reflecting high in the oak tree. I eased down the property line to the back where Sherry had installed just a thigh-high wire fence that blended into the ficus hedge. Through the leaves I could see the raised deck, the French doors to her bedroom, the sliders that led into the kitchen-nothing.
I was starting to embarrass myself, casing my own girlfriend’s house, when I picked up the movement at the pool-side motor stand. Something black slipping out of the shadow-the hump of a man’s back and the movement of arms.
The motor stand is about the size of a small doghouse, and my visitor was on the far side, bent where the electrical circuit box opens, seemingly preoccupied. I slipped off my shoes, and then moved barefooted as quietly as I could along the backside of the hedge. The neighbors had recently mowed their Saint Augustine lawn, giving me a cushion of spiky grass that poked at the bottoms of my feet, but muted any noise. At the corner, where the hedge meets the opposite fence, I stopped and evaluated. I was maybe eight yards away from the motor stand, as close as possible without coming out into the open.
I watched and listened, my night sight gaining efficiency. My hearing focused. I heard the scrape of metal on metal, and the slight echoing clink of something being dropped into, what, a pan?
A maintenance guy? Not at 7:00 P.M. And there was no truck out front. The regular pool guy drives a pickup with one of those little trailers in back that holds vacuum hoses and yellow bottles of chlorine. As I watched, a figure appear over the stand, the aqua light illuminated only the underside of his chin, shadowed his eyes. He was black, with a thin build. It looked like he was wearing a watch cap-in Florida, eighty degrees, and humid? He was no maintenance guy.
He came around the pump stand, staying low, moved to my side, and crouched again. I could see that he was dragging his right leg, and now had to extend it behind him to bend and reach down into the water above one of the submerged pool lights. A dog bite will do that to a hamstring.
I felt the adrenaline hit me again. I was pissed, but had to fight the anger. This asshole was trying to booby-trap my girl’s pool. I took three deep silent breaths and did the scenario in my head: over the thigh-high fence, through a weak spot in the ficus, eight yards to the crouched figure. If he’s armed, he’ll hear me coming and shoot me before I make five yards. He took the dog out with a silenced pistol. I breathed again, felt around me with my palms.
On the ground were a gaggle of hard half-inch berries. The back neighbor had planted a wild olive tree in the corner. Maybe he thought he was going to use them in his martini, but down here, the berries fall when they’re still hard. I needed a diversion, and the old ways are often the best simply because they work.
I grabbed up a handful of berries, then carefully raised one foot to gain purchase on the top crossbar of the fence. My true target was half-lying on the apron of the pool, both hands doing something in the water. I leaned back, and like a WWII infantryman lobbing a grenade, I looped a handful of the berries into the air over the hedge, hoping the arc would carry them to Sherry’s deck. While they were still airborne, I mounted the fence. When the fusillade of berries rattled down on the wooden planks of the deck, I exploded through the leaves.
The man only made it to one knee, his head turning first to the deck noise, then to me as I burst through the ficus. I made two long strides and launched myself, head first like a spear, arms spread wide like a linebacker, and met him shoulder high.
My momentum carried us both into the water, where my fingers went straight for the guy’s face. Go for the eyes, make him panic.
We twisted together, slower in the water than we would have been on land, soaked clothes pulling us down and deterring any quick blows. The heel of the man’s hand came up under my chin, a classic defensive move, but the slickness of water made it easy to dislodge. He tried kicking with his feet, shoes dragging, bereft of velocity. I couldn’t get my fingers in his eye sockets and went for the head. The watch cap was long gone. I got a handful of hair and yanked back and down.
I was a good swimmer. Sherry had always been amazed how long I could hold my breath when we used to go reef snorkeling. With a fistful of hair, I took the guy to the bottom with me. He tried to punch me in the throat, but again the movement was slowed by the water. This wasn’t the street, or a karate dojo. I kicked my bare feet, got behind him, and rode his back toward the bottom. In the deep end, Sherry’s pool was only eight feet. I’d gone down several times to clear the bottom suction drain of big oak leaves. Sometimes I’d empty my lungs of air and just sit down here, looking up at the sun rippling at the surface. On those occasions, I felt I could stay down here for days.
My adversary was not made of the same stuff. I could feel his struggle weakening, his arms going limp. I could actually hear the bubbles of oxygen leaving his throat. Maybe he was screaming, or begging. I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t opened my eyes since diving forward off the fence.
When we made the surface, I heard a gasp. It was mine. I opened my throat and my eyes at the same time and started stroking to the shallow end, dragging a shirt collar in my hand. The man had gone full limp, and when I got to the point I could stand, I drew him near. He was faceup in the water. I pushed my fingers into the side of his cheeks, pried open his jaws, and pulled his head back so his throat was in a stra
ight line. As soon as his airway was open, a huge gurgling intake of breath went into the vacuum and then came back out sputtering.
“What the fuck, man? What the…”
Consciousness came back when the air started going in and out. I was still jacked up with adrenaline. I pulled back hard again on his hair. “Ah, ah, ah,” he yelled.
I took an arm up behind his back, putting some pressure on the shoulder joint when I felt muscle function coming back to him. I determined the guy was in his mid-twenties, maybe 150, 160 pounds. I had him in bulk and height, a distinct advantage now that I had my feet solidly on the bottom of the pool in chest-deep water.
“Who are you, and why the fuck are you here?” I growled into the guy’s ear, turning his head a bit with the twist of hair in my fist.
“I ain’t nobody, man, nobody.”
“That’s good. We start with the truth,” I said, using the arm bar and the hank of hair, plunging his head back into the water. He shook and reached back to claw me with his free hand to no avail. I let him bubble for a few second, just to remind the memory cells of oxygen depravation, and then brought him back up.
“Again-who are you, and why are you here?”
Phlegm was now drooling out of the guy’s mouth. He was back to spitting and coughing. He truly did not like the water. “OK, man, OK. It’s just a job, man.”
“A job? What the hell do you mean, a job?” I said, and could feel the astonishment in my own voice. “You came to fuck with my girlfriend’s home as a job?” I could feel my hand twisting tighter in the guy’s hair, pulling some of it out. I could feel my forearm ratcheting up his elbow; tendons would start popping soon.
“What? You’ve got a contract or something out on her? You do the same thing to the kids in the mobile home, kill them on contract? You set up the kid before that, try to gun him down with your gangbanger buddies? You try to blow me up in my car and take out a woman witness as well?”
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