“Yes,” she said, but her dark eyes were smiling. “He has come to me a couple of times with questions about a man, who I assume is you, and he wants something cylindrical and green that he thinks is somehow used to dig in the sand.”
I knitted my brow, thinking of my previous encounters with the kid, and put it together.
“Rolling Rock,” I finally said.
“Ahhh,” she answered. “One of my favorites.”
We both went quiet and watched the boy.
“Do you live here?” she asked, scooping up a handful of sand and letting it sift through her fingers.
“Yes, uh, on and off,” I said.
“I noticed your housekeeping skills.” She tossed her head back toward the bungalow.
I smiled. She was talking to me, but watching closely every movement of the child and I realized I was, too.
“Do you have family?” she said, and I did not answer at first.
I looked south down the sand to the edge of the water where two women were approaching. The taller one had long, tightly muscled legs like a cyclist’s. The younger one was carrying a new sunburn. In the bar that night Sherry and Marci had found a connection. A woman’s need to mother. A young lady’s need of comfort. Over the past few weeks they’d spent hours talking and running the beach together and even when I was not invited I somehow felt part of it. As they came near, Marci leaned into Richards and flipped her ponytail onto her shoulder and put her arm around her waist and said something that made them both laugh.
“Maybe I do,” I said, watching them. “Maybe I do.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Marie and John Cusano for letting me into their lives and that of their daughter, Cindy, and to Women in Distress, the South Florida shelter and center for victims of domestic violence. Thanks also to Lieutenant Sherry Schlueter of the Broward Sheriff’s Office for her dedication to the most vulnerable and for her inspiration; Laurrie Pood, the finest bartender in South Florida; Erika Kahn for her patience and reading; and Anne Newgarden for catching my many errors.
A continuing debt of gratitude is owed to Marlene and Russ Parks for affording me “The Cabin” where the foundations are written.
Deepest thanks to my agent, Philip Spitzer, and to my editor, Mitch Hoffman, whose discerning eye made this one better.
A BIOGRAPHY OF JONATHON KING
Jonathon King is the Edgar Award–winning author of the Max Freeman mystery series, which is set in south Florida, as well as a thriller and a historical novel.
Born in Lansing, Michigan, in the 1950s, King worked as a police and court reporter for twenty-four years, first in Philadelphia until the mid-1980s and then in Fort Lauderdale. His time at the Philadelphia Daily News and Fort Lauderdale’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel greatly influenced the creation of Max Freeman, a hardened former Philadelphia police officer who relocates to south Florida to escape his dark past. King began writing novels in 2000, when he used all the vacation days he accrued as a reporter to spend two months alone in a North Carolina cabin. During this time, he wrote The Blue Edge of Midnight (2002), the first title in the Max Freeman series. The novel became a national bestseller and won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author. A Visible Darkness (2004), the series’ second installment, highlights Max’s mission to identify a dark serial killer stalking an impoverished community. Shadow Men (2004), the third in the series, revolves around Max’s investigation of an eighty-year-old triple homicide, and A Killing Night (2005) tells the story of a murder investigation in which the prime suspect is Max’s former mentor. After finishing A Killing Night, his fourth book, King left journalism to become a full-time novelist.
Since 2005, King has published his fifth and sixth Max Freeman novels, Acts of Nature (2007), about a hurricane that puts Max and his girlfriend at the mercy of some of the Everglades’ most menacing criminals, and Midnight Guardians (2010), which features the dangerous reemergence of a drug kingpin from Max’s past. He has also published the stand-alone thriller Eye of Vengeance (2007), about a military-trained sniper who targets the criminals that a particular journalist has covered as a crime reporter. In 2009, King published the historical novel The Styx, which tells the story of a Palm Beach hotel at the turn of the twentieth century and the nearby community’s black hotel employees whose homes were burned to the ground amid the violent racism of the time.
King currently lives in southeast Florida, where he writes, canoes, and explores the Everglades regularly.
Jonathon King playing basketball for his high school team, the Waverly Warriors, in Lansing, Michigan, in 1972.
King’s yearbook photo from his senior year of high school in 1972.
For seven summers, from 1974 to 1980, King was a lifeguard in Ocean City, New Jersey. He’s shown here in 1974 or 1975 with his best friend and fellow lifeguard, Scott Erb.
In 1976, King worked as part of a crew hired by boat owners to deliver sailboats from New Jersey to Florida at the end of the summer. He’s shown here sailing a forty-foot vessel down the coast.
King’s children, Jessica and Adam, at ages ten and eight, respectively, with the mascot of the University of Florida in Gainesville in 2003.
A handwritten manuscript page from King’s debut novel, The Blue Edge of Midnight. Worried that his years as a reporter would make it difficult to write thoughtfully using a keyboard, King wrote his first two books with pencil on legal pads to avoid sounding like a journalist.
King’s Edgar Award for the Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author, which he won in 2002 for The Blue Edge of Midnight, the debut book in the Max Freeman series. The Edgars, which are given annually by the Mystery Writers of America, are considered the most prestigious awards in the mystery genre.
King stands inside of Kim’s Alley Bar, one of the oldest taverns in Ft. Lauderdale. Several scenes in the Max Freeman series take place here, particularly in A Killing Night, in which Max investigates the abductions of several bartenders. An actual bartender from Kim’s Alley even made an appearance in the book.
King at an isolated fishing camp in the middle of the Florida Everglades.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2005 by Jonathon King
cover deisgn by ORIM
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9994-4
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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