A Killing Night

by Jonathon King

  Christ, he thought, there’s your problem. If all your sports shows and media would just make a pact never to mention that asshole’s name again, he’d disappear into the fucking alleys or the prison yard where he belonged. Why do they let an animal like that use them?

  He tipped his empty at the bartender and then watched the reflection of the girl from the middle group walk behind him and load dollar bills into the jukebox in the corner. He took a drink of the fresh beer and tried to place the first tune, a thing from the past by Journey about a small-town girl livin’ in a lonely world and a city boy born in south Detroit. He thought about Amy. On those late- night dates and long intimate conversations she had confided in him. Her parents in Ohio. Her father a drunk. She’d come to Florida to start fresh, had a girlfriend that was supposedly coming to visit but who had never shown up. She probably told him more about herself than she had any of her coworkers. He was a good listener. Women liked that about him. Christ, if she’d only kept her place instead of trying to run him. Hell, he could have loved her. Shit, she hadn’t even raised her arm to ward him off when he’d shot her in the face.

  He hadn’t had to look around or wonder if anyone had heard the report of the .38. The Glades were like that, a few miles out and it was dark and alone. He’d taken a plastic yellow tarp from his trunk and rolled her body onto it and tossed her jeans and shoes on top. Then he’d pulled the load down through the trees and into the wet vegetation some forty yards from the dirt roadway. The moonlight had given him enough light to find a wet depression in the mangroves to leave her. He’d buried the first two and later he wondered why. All that forensics shit you saw on television was useless if they never find a body. And they never did. Other than that old woman running around with the posters of his second girlfriend, no one was even looking.

  Christ, had it been a month? Two? He’d stayed out of the bars for a while, especially Hammermills. But he started back, had missed the air, the mix of cigarette smoke and perfume, the subtle sexual electricity—not like one of those strip places where the women were plastic and may as well have sticker prices on their asses. A place like this had real people, girls you could appreciate, women that you could fall for. He’d been growing anxious again, bored with work. The compulsion had come on faster than last time and he didn’t fight it. He was lonely. He needed to own someone.

  The song ended and he watched in the mirrors while the bartender greeted a new girl. They were changing shifts. The older one was being managerial, introducing her around to the regulars. She did the foursome at the other end, some of them shook her hand. The new girl was small and seemed slightly self-conscious but had worn a short skirt on her first night. She had good legs. She’d be popular in this place, he thought.

  “And this is Lou and Tommy and Liz and, I’m sorry, Absolut on the rocks, what was your name again?” said the bartender, introducing the middle group now. The unknown customer reintroduced herself and actually reached out and kissed the new girl’s hand.

  “And down here at the end is Rolling Rock. Except when he’s serious and then he’s Maker’s Mark,” she said and smiled, pleased with herself.

  The new girl nodded and smiled. She had blue eyes and curly blonde hair that didn’t have to be streaked to be pretty but was. He gave her his polite smile and said hello. While the other bartender cashed out and gathered her tips he watched the new girl. She had two studs in her left ear. Three rings on her hands, one with a blue stone. Her breasts were not large, but on such a small frame they appeared voluptuous. After the other girl left, she busied herself with rinsing and wiping and setting things up her own way and motioned to the empty bottle in front of him. When she extended her hand, he noted that her nails were bitten to the quick.

  “Another one?” she said, and her smile seemed easier.

  “Yes, please,” he said. “And a shot of Maker’s Mark on the side.”

  I was up at the beach before sunrise and out on the edge of the Everglades by breakfast. Dan Griggs, the park ranger assigned to the five hundred acres designated by the state as a registered wild and scenic area at Thompson’s Point, was cooking eggs.

  “I think I got that lunker snook you’ve been trying to hook over to the west side down by the shade turn,” he was saying from the back room.

  “Like hell,” I answered. I was pouring coffee from the ranger’s electric maker in the office section of his dockside station.

  “Yeah, I hate to say it. That crafty bastard been teasing you more’n a year now, right?”

  He would not meet my eyes when he carried the pan of eggs in and pushed them onto two paper plates at his desk.

  “Wasn’t my fish,” I said, setting his coffee in front of him and taking one plate. “He’s too damn wise for you, Danny.”

  The ranger leaned back in his metal office chair and propped his heels on the corner of his state-issued desk. He was lean and blond and smiling when he dragged the plate of eggs onto his lap.

  “He had to be twelve pounds.”

  “Liar.”

  He grinned and just looked at me over the rim of his cup.

  “Catch and release?” I finally said.

  “Of course, Mr. Freeman. I gotta leave you something to aspire to.”

  Griggs and I had gotten off to a shaky start when he’d taken the job several months ago. He was replacing an old and long-revered ranger who had been killed by a man whose presence on the river had been in part my responsibility. People who knew the story blamed me, and I had not argued the point. Then, government forces had been trying to evict me from the old research shack for which Billy had a ninety-nine-year lease. He was still in a paper fight with them by e-mail and Federal Express at my request. When someone tried to burn me out of the place I had put Griggs at the top of my suspect list, but the young man had spun my suspicion by helping to repair the damage with carpentry skills I sorely lacked. The camaraderie of the project and the guy’s obvious love of the Florida wilds had led to a friendship and an admiration. That, and he liked a cold beer on occasion.

  “Been pretty slow. Must be September,” Griggs said, looking up at the clock. He didn’t see me furrow my brow at the odd gesture.

  “Some kayakers up your way last few days. A few fishermen out here on the wide. I suppose you’ve been in the city.”

  It had long been a practice of mine not to answer rhetorical questions so I stayed quiet at first. He knew that I did P.I. work for a living and romanticized it.

  “I stayed at the beach,” I finally said, giving in.

  “Pretty girls?”

  “Some.”

  We both were quiet for a few moments.

  “Man. A vacation place at the beach and a residence in the swamp,” he said. “You’re a regular mogul, Mr. Freeman.”

  “Yeah, and I’ve got to get out to the mansion,” I said and got up. “Thanks for breakfast, son.”

  Down at the dock I flipped my Voyager canoe and wiped out the webs that a golden-silk spider had put up between the struts. I loaded in containers of fresh water and a canvas bag of clean clothes and then floated the bow. Planting my left foot in the middle of the hull and gripping the gunnels on either side in a well practiced move, I pushed out onto the flat river water and glided out. When I’d settled into the stern seat with my paddle in hand, I turned to wave at Griggs, who was standing on the dock with his thumbs in his belt loops, and I knew he was jealous.

  The sun was high and white and flickering off the water and I took my first few strokes north and drifted. I moved my weight around on the seat to find the right balance and then put some shoulder into the paddling. The river was wide here and moved strong to the sea when the outgoing tide pulled at it. I kept my course close to the sand banks so I wouldn’t have to fight the middle current, and found a rhythm.

  The fumbling city boy who’d come here without a clue for the feel of the water and natural wind and wilderness had morphed into a competent riverman. The hours of hard paddling had earned me technique. I c
ould dig into a purchase of water, pull through a stroke and kick the blade out at the end to send a spiral of water like a spinning teacup out behind me. And I could do it at sixty strokes a minute if I put my back into it. For a mile and a half I worked my way up past the sand pine terrain and then the low mangroves took over. The river narrowed and moved north and west for another mile until finally entering a cypress forest and tunneling into a shady greenness that was truly prehistoric.

  My T-shirt was soaked through with sweat by the time I slid in under the canopy of trees. It was several degrees cooler here and I shivered with the change. I let the canoe drift in while I peeled off the shirt and pulled a dry one from my bag. The quiet here never failed to amaze, as if the lack of noise itself was something you could touch. Each time back from the city I could feel it cup over my ears like a changing of air pressure. I let the canoe come to a stop and listened for a full ten minutes before finally dipping the paddle and following the clearing water, which was now leading back to the South.

  For a half mile I steered through the cypress knees that broke the surface and around fallen red maples. The hard sun was gone and the shafts that made it through the canopy speckled the ferns and pond apple leaves like luminescent streaks and drops of paint. Two bald cypress trees marked the entrance to my place and I paddled in on a shallow water spur off the main river. Fifty yards into the green my stilted shack stood hidden. I lashed the canoe to a small dock, gathered my things and after carefully checking for any footprints on the moist risers, I climbed the wooden stairs to, as Griggs had called it, my permanent residence.

  Inside I stowed my supplies and started a pot of coffee with the fresh water on a small propane stove. The room held a mingled odor of mildew, still swamp air and fresh-cut wood from Griggs’s and my repair work. The northeast corner showed the new honey-colored planks where we’d stopped and the blackened, soot-marked pine that was still structurally sound. Nothing inside was painted, so I’d left the scar. Along the opposite wall hung a row of mismatched cabinets above a butcher-block counter and a stainless slop sink. An old hand pump that might have been installed when the first owner built the place in the early 1900s as a hunting lodge still worked, with the help of some new rubber washers. With a half dozen pumps of the handle I raised water directly from the swamp below and rinsed out my coffee cup.

  While the coffeepot burbled, I went to one of the two worn armoires that stood against another wall and searched the bottom drawer. I had not carried much to South Florida that would remind me of my Philadelphia days. There had already been plenty in my head. But I had a small, gray-metal lock box that I now pulled out and put on the big oak table that took up the middle space of the room. I poured a cup of coffee and sat in one of the two straight-backed chairs and slipped a key into the lock. Inside was an oilskin cloth wrapped tightly around my 9 mm handgun. I held the weight of the package in my hands and then set it aside. Underneath I’d tucked important papers: birth certificate, passport, a life insurance policy and three letters I had written to my ex-wife but had never sent.

  Under them was an old photograph of my mother, taken when she was a shy Catholic nursing student. With it were her rosaries, which she asked me to keep as she lay on her deathbed. Snapped inside a plastic case was a medal of distinction from the Philadelphia P.D., awarded to my father back when both he and it were yet untarnished. I kept digging until I found the yellowed tearsheet from an old neighborhood tabloid.

  It was a photograph of two dozen men, standing in uniform and looking self-conscious. My graduating class from the police academy. I was in the back row, among the tallest, face stern, hair short and swept to the side. I scanned the other rows but finally had to refer to the list printed in small letters below to find Colin O’Shea. He was in the second row, his hair curly and dark and seeming too long for standard requirements. His face was pale, his head slightly tilted as though he were about to whisper something out of the side of his mouth to the man next to him. The paper was faded, yet I thought I could detect a smirk on O’Shea’s face. I took a sip of coffee and twenty-year-old memories came back.

  He’d been good in class. One of the smart ones who would sit back and listen, watch the others offer up wrong or incomplete answers, and then just when he could tell the instructor was going to give in and enlighten us all, O’Shea’s hand would fly up and he would have the answer down pat. He was a good athlete. Finished high in P.T. In team drills he would give a hand and encouragement to the stumblers and overweight guys, the ones who were no threat to him. But when it came to competition he would hang back just off the leaders, drafting, and then try to surprise and outsprint them at the end. It wasn’t cheating. It was calculating. The better guys would still beat him, but he would still seem pleased with himself, like he’d pulled something off, had changed the finish and in his way won. I watched him, like I watched all the others, but stayed clear of his game. When he tried to use our connection to the South Philly neighborhood to buddy up, I just acknowledged him and moved away and stayed on my own path, whatever the hell I thought that path might have been.

  I finally shoved the photo aside, got up and selected a book from the shuffled stack on the top rack of my bunk bed. They were mostly history and travel books—Billy’s contribution to my derelict education. I spent the rest of the daylight reading a collection of stories by Ernie Pyle called Home Country out on the staircase landing, my back against the door. Between pages I looked out into the canopy when a quiver of leaves shook under the weight of a green heron. While Pyle described the Drought Bowl of 1936 in the Dakotas, my ears listened to the low croak of a wood stork working the shallows to scissor a snake or baby gator in its long, drooping bill. After dark I warmed soup on the propane stove and ate it with the fresh bread I’d brought back from the coast. Later I sat in the pool of light from my kerosene lamp and listened to rain gather in the trees and then patter down on my tin roof. The irregular beat was not unpleasant. Finally I undressed and lay down on my bunk. It was just cool enough to use a thin cotton sheet as a cover. I left the lamp burning on the table. For some reason, lately, I did not want to sleep in the dark.

  On Thursday I went back into the city. Billy and I had talked about work now that he was back. I knew from experience that his high energy level had him fidgeting to get plugged back in. I was bringing Rodrigo Colon into the office for a joint interview. I picked up the young Filipino down the street and around the corner from the hotel where he and the other injured workers were staying. The small man climbed into the passenger seat of my truck, pulling his right leg up after him.

  “Hey, Rodrigo,” I said. “Kumusta ka?”

  “Mabuti naman, Mr. Freeman, salamat,” he said.

  It was the extent of my Tagalog, but Rodrigo dipped his head at my effort. He was used to being spoken to in English on his job. He took my offered hand in greeting and then glanced nervously out the back window. When he turned I could see the wrinkled purple scar that covered the right side of his face. It was like a dark birthmark that spread from his now nonexistent eyebrow down over his cheek and disappeared into the collar of his shirt. Treatment of the burn from the escaping steam had left the skin the mottled color of a dark grape. Angry-looking stretch marks pulled at the corner of his mouth and eye when he smiled. I pulled away from the curb.

  As I drove to Billy’s office, Rodrigo watched the world roll by through his passenger window. Though he’d been a cruise ship worker for five years, his station as a maintenance-grade utility man kept him belowdecks most of the time. In the many ports of call, rarely did employees like him have the time to see the landscape. I asked if he’d heard from his wife in the Philippines. He nodded. Rodrigo and the others I’d interviewed through an interpreter said the company that signed workers up in Manila would pay for wives or husbands to visit, but only on the promise that they would both return home.

  “Yes. She is sick for me,” he said. “She is to come here, but has no money.”

  I pulled into
a parking lot on Clematis Street and got a warm greeting from the operator who knew me. I took a ticket and we walked the four blocks through downtown West Palm Beach to Billy’s office building. I caught our reflection in the plate glass of a clothing store: a tall and tanned white guy dressed like a weekend boat captain and a five-foot Southeast Asian with a limp and a tic that caused him to turn his face from each person he passed. It was South Florida. No one blinked. But when we reached the lobby, a familiar security man stopped us.

  “Hello, Mr. Freeman,” he said, talking to me but looking at Rodrigo.

  “He’s OK, Rich. One of Mr. Manchester’s clients,” I said.

  “Sure, Mr. Freeman. But you’re still going to have to go through the metal detectors.”

  “Yeah, we understand,” I said.

  It was a new world in America. One where no one simply vouched for another.

  When we went through the security point, Rodrigo walked through without a beep but was still swept by a guard with a metal- detecting wand. It took me three passes, dumping everything I had in my pockets into a plastic box, until I finally found the offending foil chewing gum wrapper I’d stuck in my back pocket instead of tossing it out in the street. We rode the elevator to one of the top floors and entered a set of double doors that was unmarked. In the outer office we were greeted by Billy’s assistant, whose usual charm and social ease seemed oddly strained.

  “Hello, Mr. Freeman, so nice to see you.”

  “Allie,” I said. “This is Mr. Colon.”