Midnight Guardians

by Jonathon King

  But Luz Carmen’s brother was dead, and I had not seen her shed a tear. She had not yet claimed his body. She might hide, but the reality was not going away.

  I stepped quietly up the stairs, and when I opened the door to the shack, my eyes went immediately to the sunlight sifting through the east window. Luz had figured out how to adjust the Bahama shutters and was raised up in the bottom bunk of the bed, reading. She met my look and nodded a good morning.

  “Coffee?” I said, moving to reload the stove with wood, and then start the fire.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Did you sleep?”

  “Did you?”

  I rinsed and then filled my tin coffeepot with water.

  “Some,” I said. “It was a little cool.”

  “The heat rises,” she said. And when I looked over, she was still looking at the book, her knees up, acting as a platform.

  I scooped coffee into the small, one-legged basket, and then lowered it into the pot. I washed the cover after removing the small glass percolator bubble, and then remounted it. I opened a lid on the stove top and set the pot over the open flame.

  “I can make some oatmeal,” I said, pulling a chair out from the table. From here, I could see that Luz Carmen was still fully dressed. She’d slept in her clothes, as had I.

  “I want to see my brother,” she said, finally letting the book slide down into her lap.

  “I know,” I said, and then recounted Billy’s morning message—that the dog had been killed by a gunman. “They’ll most likely want to do an autopsy now on your brother’s body. They’ll probably assign homicide now. They’ll start working it harder, faster.”

  Luz took in the information without reaction, staring ahead at some vision all her own. But the filtered sun caught the moisture on her cheeks and glistened. “I killed my own brother,” she said, the words coming out of her mouth even though I couldn’t even see that her lips had moved.

  “If you play along, and if you keep your mouth shut. If you simply work and keep your head down and see nothing, you live,” she said. Her voice was not whiny or complaining, but stilted and rote and without emotion. “My brother would be alive if not for me.”

  Billy and I have had this conversation deep into many nights on his balcony facing the sea: Is the man who sits by and ignores the criminality taking place in his sight as complicit as the man doing the crime? What about the Germans who watched the camp trains being loaded with Jews, or the Iraqi citizens who saw the roadside bomb being planted and turned the other way? Not to mention the Wall Street underlings who shook their heads and zipped their lips when they knew the bundled mortgages would never pass muster?

  I was not up for a debate with a grieving woman. I stayed silent for a long time.

  “I need to bury my brother,” Luz said.

  “You will,” I told her.

  BY EARLY AFTERNOON, I had replaced a rotting plank of wood on the port side of my dock, freed up a jammed window sash, fixed a hole in a screen that looked like it had been plucked open by an animal—rodent, bird, or reptile based on its size, the meticulous snipping, and random uselessness. I’d also finished the first quarter of Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, a Florida history lesson unparalleled.

  Luz Carmen staked out a spot down on the dock. Apparently, she’d finished the English-language version of Chronicle of a Death Foretold and was starting on my paperback copy of All Quiet on the Western Front, which she must have dug out of the back of the armoire while I was sleeping outside. Her choice of reading material while grieving over a dead brother was not mine to ponder, but I do have an innate problem with people who can read so damn fast. How do they do it without missing the subtleties, innuendo, and small word gems that authors sweat through and take days of writing and rewriting to achieve? It seems both cheating, and self-cheating.

  But I am a slow reader, and it’s probably just jealousy. I read slowly. I write slowly, and none too poetically considering that most of my experience has been filling out incident reports as a cop and now writing up surveillance narratives for Billy. When I stole glances at Luz, I noted that every once in a while she would look up from the book and stare out into the green of the river forest.

  What was in her mind’s eye was hers alone. I thought of the advice shrinks give, that people shouldn’t be alone at times of great loss. But who isn’t alone with their thoughts? You handle them your own way, and hopefully grow stronger. Closure is bullshit. In the absence of some kind of biological memory wipe, there is no such thing. Personal loss is always with us. We learn to live with it; we don’t make it go away.

  I was about to interrupt Luz for a late lunch when my cell phone rang.

  “Mr. Freeman, this is Dan, over at the ranger station.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I just wanted to give you a heads-up that Joey finished with your truck and dropped it by here. So it’s in the parking lot.”

  “Great, Dan. Thanks. I appreciate it,” I said, wondering what the hell the real reason for the call was. Dan had been around long enough to know that when I was at the shack I often didn’t make contact with him or anyone else for days or weeks at a time. He wouldn’t call with something as minor as my truck being dropped off.

  “What else, Dan?”

  “Uh, well, I wanted to let you know there was somebody messing around near your Gran Fury early this morning, just around daybreak. I was up, and I keep an eye out. When I saw the guy, I scared him off with my big beam flashlight.” The ranger had started out with reticence, as if he didn’t want to be the one giving me bad news. Now his words were running as fast as he could get them out.

  “He scrambled the hell out of there fast. I looked over the car this morning; it doesn’t look like he got it open or anything like that—no scratches or nothing. Probably just some kid, you know, looking for an unlocked car to steal change and stuff out of.”

  I let him stumble through the whole explanation, do his duck and cover before responding. I went inside the shack out of hearing range of Luz Carmen and closed the door.

  “OK, Dan, did you get any kind of look at this guy—race, size, clothing, or distinguishing tattoos?” I said, tossing the tattoo thing in there to goose him a little and remind him that I was, after all, an ex-cop.

  “Uh, yeah, well, black guy in dark, maybe black clothes, with long sleeves. He was uh, probably under, like, five ten. Kinda skinny.”

  “Carrying anything, Dan?” I said, moving him along step by step. Witnesses don’t always get their memory pictures focused until you put a frame around them. “When he scrambled away, do you recall him carrying anything?”

  “Yeah, you know, he was carrying some kind of package under his arm. But I checked the car, Mr. Freeman, and I don’t think he got inside. It was still all locked up, and there was no damage, you know?”

  I was walking circles around the table, setting up the scene in my own head.

  “And he was kinda limping.”

  “What?”

  “When I told you he was scrambling away, it was more like he was crab walking. I remember thinking he wasn’t like, sprinting or anything, when I got the light on him. He was more like trying to stay low, but pulling a leg behind.”

  “OK, Dan, that’s good—that’s the kind of thing I need. Did he have a hat on? Was something covering his head, his hair?”

  “Uh, no. But he was dirty.”

  “Explain.”

  “The light picked up the grass and stuff on his back—like maybe he was under the car, hot-wiring it or something.”

  You don’t hot-wire a car from underneath. From underneath, you’re either changing the oil, or sabotaging the damn thing.

  “And you said this all happened early this morning?” I asked.

  “Yeah, at daybreak.”

  “And you’re calling me now, at two P.M., to tell me my truck was delivered?”

  I was trying not to get angry with the guy, and ask what the hell took him so long. After all, h
e had no idea what I was into, the safekeeping of Luz Carmen or the threats. I never tell the innocent people on the periphery of my life about what I do. People get crazy enough with all the out of proportion crime news they see on television. It’s that contextual half-truth that hurts them, not the real stuff they’ll never know about.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Freeman. You know, I just thought if you had a lady friend out there, you wouldn’t want to be disturbed.”

  A lady friend…

  “It’s all right, Dan. Thanks for calling. I’ll be in soon,” I said, and punched off the cell.

  I recalled a quote I picked up somewhere: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

  Was I being talked about? Hell with it, I didn’t give a shit. I stepped outside and called down to Luz Carmen.

  “Pack up. We gotta go.”

  — 22 —

  I WAS STANDING where Dan said he’d been when he saw the man messing with the Gran Fury. I was trying to re-create the smoky light of predawn in my head; how good a look could the ranger have managed? The distance was maybe thirty yards. There is little ambient light out here at night. But when Dan showed me the big Inova T3 flashlight he used for spotting poachers and night fishermen, and for checking the occasional snarl of a bobcat, I had to figure he got a decent look. The high-intensity beam can throw 150 lumens at someone 300 feet away. No wonder the ranger saw flecks of dry grass on the prowler’s back.

  My own truck, newly washed and polished, was parked in front of the car, but I kept my focus on the Gran Fury, as if it were a suspect.

  First I got my truck keys from Dan and carefully backed the F-150 away. Only then did I approach the Gran Fury to begin an inspection, searching the grass around it first, looking for any kind of obvious disturbance. Then without touching the car, I peered in all the windows, carefully looking at the door handles and what I could see of the steering column, to determine whether the visitor had actually been inside before Dan lit him up. The hood was locked down with no sign of tampering. The doors were tight—nothing.

  I got down on the ground from the side of the car opposite from the ranger station, figuring the guy would have done the same, using the car body as a shield. I used Dan’s light to illuminate the undercarriage, starting from the front—no out-of-place wires. No signs of unusual connections to the engine. I moved the light back a bit. The front wheels and brake lines looked undisturbed. Back further, there was no indication the bottom edges of the front doors were scratched, and there was nothing like a pressure switch attached to them. I ran the light over the oil pan and the driveshaft and then to the back wheels. On the nearest rocker arm, I found it. The sight of the gray-colored package made me blanch. I think I actually held the light on it for a full minute, frozen, no panic, but frozen.

  If you’d expect to find several red sticks of dynamite strapped together with an alarm clock taped to it, you’d be disappointed. Instead, I was staring at an innocuous form about the size of a one-pound box of Arm & Hammer Pure Baking Soda. It was wrapped in some kind of thin cellophane like Saran Wrap and attached to the axle near the gas tank with several turns of duct tape. I didn’t slide away. I didn’t breathe.

  After some time, I actually had a fleeting thought about the heat from the light that I couldn’t seem to move off the object. Don’t be stupid, I thought: Heat doesn’t set off explosives; electricity or a fuse does. That made me focus. I searched the brick of plastic for some form of detonator. If someone wanted to kill me with a remote detonator, wouldn’t he have done it by now while my head was under the car? Nice logic, Max. Feel better? No.

  I squirmed and shifted my body to get a look at the other side of the package. It wasn’t wired as far as I could tell. Only then did I worm my way back out. I stood and took a deep breath—was that the first breath I’d taken since I saw the block of explosive? Then I walked back to the ranger station where I’d asked Luz Carmen to stay.

  “We need to get you under federal protection,” I said.

  She just nodded, as if had asked her to go to the corner grocery for bread. Dan was looking at the side of my face when I turned to him.

  “You need to call the sheriff and tell them to get a bomb squad out here,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Somebody strapped the car with an explosive, but it doesn’t look like they had the chance to put a detonator on it. But we can’t take a chance.”

  If there was a bomber still waiting out there for Luz to get into the vicinity of the car, he wasn’t going to get much satisfaction. Maybe Dan had scared the guy off before he had the chance to finish rigging the thing. The way the explosive was taped to the rocker arm, it wouldn’t have been a matter of just grabbing the thing and running when the flashlight beam hit him. So he left it behind and ran. But an attempt had been made. It might even be an easy task to simply remove the package, but I wasn’t going to do it.

  Dan turned to the phone on his desk without hesitation. But after dialing the number, I caught him looking at me with wide eyes as he tried to process what I’d just told him so he could reword it to the dispatcher. Bomb. Explosive. This was not a skill set he’d learned in park ranger school. While he was waiting for the connection, I went out onto the porch and called Billy.

  “I’ll call the bomb squad immediately,” was Billy’s first response.

  “Being done.”

  “And Ms. Carmen?”

  “Sitting right here. Quiet.”

  “I’m calling the feds as soon as we hang up,” Billy said with anger in his voice, which is rare but was becoming more prevalent. He is not a man who likes to be put off; yet he usually reacts by requesting higher-ups, and then dropping the names of prominent executives, judges, and politicians. Though Billy isn’t the type to get mad, he does get things done.

  After we hung up, I stood looking out onto the wide river in front of me, the flat water ruffled by an eastern breeze. You could tell by the subtle brush back of the ripples that the bulk of the water was moving one way, while the opposing wind nipped at it in futility. The tide was going out. We were close enough now to the ocean that the pull of gravity was working its wonder. Nature does not give up her pull, despite what piddling man, even Al Gore himself, does. We will not destroy the world. The world will go on even after we’ve destroyed ourselves.

  People won’t stop doing what they do, either. It’s inside us. Someone out there housed a predator inside, and it was leaking out. He wasn’t a pro. But this time, his work wasn’t going to look like an accident, as it had at the mobile home. The signature of explosive would be distinctive, if that was indeed what was in the package. Our assassin was running out of ideas, or was just plain getting anxious and sloppy.

  Who was he—an amateur? A wannabe—an ambitious young one? But who gives the ambitious amateur the targets? Motivation is all, Max. Who wants to kill you or Luz Carmen, or both?

  From a distance, I heard the sound of sirens, then the distinctive deep honk! honk! of a rescue or fire vehicle coming from the direction of the park entrance to the north. I knew there wasn’t much use for the display, but when the bomb squad gets a call out, the bells and whistles come with it.

  A sheriff’s car was the first one into the parking lot, followed by the bomb squad’s utility truck, and sure enough, a fire engine—and lastly, a paramedic unit. People who question what they see as an overreaction would also be the first ones to bitch and second-guess if there wasn’t enough backup to handle their own emergency.

  Dan and Luz Carmen joined me on the porch. The deputy from the cop car went straight to Dan, given that he was the guy in the ranger uniform. Dan explained the situation again, a bit better now that he’d had time to edit himself. When he used the phrase Mr. Freeman’s car, he nodded at me. Now I drew the spotlight and the scrutiny.

  Since we were looking at the Gran Fury from a distance as we spoke, the officer in charge of bomb unit figured it out pretty quickly and began unloading equipment. After spelling out fo
r the deputy that I’d been told someone suspicious was seen near the car in early darkness, I explained that I’d carefully checked out the periphery of the car without touching it and had indeed looked underneath and observed the package, but no obvious triggering device.

  The deputy wasn’t stupid. When he caught me using the words periphery and observed, he interjected.

  “Are you in law enforcement, Mr. Freeman?”

  “Was.”

  He looked into my eyes, waiting.

  “I was a cop in Philadelphia. I’m a PI now, working for an attorney in West Palm Beach.”

  “I see,” he said, not bothering to elaborate on what exactly he was now thinking. “And you, ma’am?”

  Luz Carmen looked at him with the blank expression that both legal and illegal aliens have honed to perfection in South Florida.

  “She is a client,” I said. “You might want to get in touch with a Sergeant Lynch concerning a trailer fire two days ago. I think this could all tie in together.”

  The deputy nodded. “One thing at a time, Mr. Freeman,” he said, and then turned to the bomb squad sergeant who had joined our group. “Can you explain again, in as much detail as possible, what you’ve already observed around and under the car to Sergeant Peters here? I’ll make some calls.”

  I did my best for the sergeant and two of his men, and then watched as the entire gang got together, working out their plan of approach. The fire engine was repositioned, its hoses placed at the ready. The paramedics turned their ambulance around, either to have the back doors ready for any emergency admission, or to haul ass if something went boom. Then everyone on the four-man bomb and arson unit pulled on the ubiquitous surgical gloves and began to circle around the Gran Fury. They started some fifteen yards out, and in time I could see them tightening the grid.