Afraid of the Dark js-9

by James Grippando

  “Wait here for two minutes,” said Jack, “then find a place on the mall to hang out where you can watch me. If the guy turns out to be some kind of nut job, I want you close by.”

  “Got it, chief.”

  “And wish me luck,” said Jack as he started away.

  “Dude,” said Theo.

  Jack stopped and looked back.

  “That client of yours-Jamal what’s-his-name.”

  “What about him?”

  “He probably dreams about strapping on a vest and blowing up Lincoln Road Mall.”

  Jack paused. For a time, the one person who had seemed to shrug off Jack’s representation of a Gitmo detainee was Theo. But when push came to shove, even the kid from Liberty City-an innocent man pulled from the electric chair-had the same reservations as everyone else.

  Jack had them, too.

  “That’s the buzzkill,” Jack said. “But my money still says he didn’t kill McKenna Mays.”

  Jack headed up the sidewalk toward the mall, leaving Theo behind in the crowd.

  From a wooden bench near the illuminated public fountain, a man wearing a stylish Italian suit and hiding behind sunglasses watched with the intensity of a trained professional. It was a cool night, but he was sweating profusely. His eyes were tiring, and forcing himself to stay so focused was giving him a headache. Jet lag, he figured. Flying from Europe to the States was easier than going the other way, but with the plane change in Paris, it was still a fourteen-hour flight from Prague.

  Lincoln Road Mall is an outdoor collection of shops, cafes, and restaurants that stretch for several blocks of pedestrian traffic only. The Lincoln Theatre, home to the New World Symphony, is a historic art deco-style building at the east end of the mall. It’s a curvy restored jewel, right down to the original cinema marquee and floral relief on its coral pink facade. That night, against a dark purple sky and in the glow of soft evening light, it looked like the postcards commemorating one of the many movie premieres that defined the theater’s early years.

  The mall was buzzing with activity, and the man in the dark Italian suit was well aware that his target could have chosen any number of nearby cafes to sit and wait. Designer shades were stylish even after dark, but his were no fashion statement. His eyes revealed nothing as he watched Jack Swyteck take a table beside a potted palm directly across from the theater.

  Sweat gathered on his brow. His heart was racing. This wasn’t normal. He wasn’t even nervous. He removed his jacket and laid it on the bench beside him. He was still roasting. He hoped he wasn’t catching the flu.

  Damn airplanes are like a germ factory.

  The crowd flowed in both directions, two endless streams that checked each other out and occasionally swirled away into little eddies of conversation. Some were dressed to kill. Others were barely dressed. They were all under his surveillance, his eyes and mind working together and processing each passing image like the superfast, superpowered face-recognition software that never seemed to work for him the way it worked on television dramas. Reject after reject, his eyes darted left to right, east to west, and back again. Hundreds and hundreds of passersby without a match.

  His throat tightened. His left foot was starting to tingle. More like his entire left side. The foot-no, the leg all the way up to the knee-was actually numb. This was no mere adrenaline rush.

  What the hell is going on?

  He wanted to rise, but his body refused. With a wobbly push he forced himself up from the bench, and it gave him a head rush. The flow of pedestrians through the mall was starting to blur. The glow of streetlights, landscape illumination, and colored neon had blended into a ghostly fog. He removed his sunglasses and strained to focus. His gaze tightened, and for a split second things came clear to him. He’d seen them before, just an hour earlier-another pair of eyes hiding behind sunglasses after dark-and his mind replayed the brief and seemingly meaningless encounter. It wasn’t so much the face he remembered as that long, white mobility cane approaching at a surprisingly fast clip. It was a needlelike missile that had emerged from the crowd, guided by the hand without sight, and no matter which way he turned, he couldn’t get out of the way. He jerked one way, the stick followed, and in the ensuing head-on collision, that mobility stick had jabbed into his ankle like a jousting stick.

  I can’t feel my foot.

  He glanced back at the cafe table by the potted palm across from the theater. Swyteck had no idea who he was even looking for-no reason to know what was happening to the man he was supposed to meet.

  His gaze shifted back toward the white walking stick in the crowd, but it was gone. Or maybe it was still there and the image wasn’t registering.

  I can’t see-can’t… breathe!

  He wanted to scream. No voice. He tried to run, but he felt nothing from the chest down. His arms, too, failed him, refusing to break the fall. He felt only the wind on his face as he dropped to the sidewalk. His chin slammed against the concrete, and as darkness took over, he noticed that he couldn’t taste the blood.

  Then the silence turned black.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A woman screamed, and Jack jumped to his feet.

  Just a few doors down, a crowd was gathering near the illuminated fountain. Through the growing forest of onlookers, Jack saw a man lying flat on the pavers with people around him speaking in short bursts of panic and waving their arms in frantic gestures. He threw a ten-dollar bill on the table to cover his sparkling water and sprinted toward the commotion. By the time Jack got there, an older gentleman had already rolled the fallen man onto his back, ripped open his shirt, and started chest compressions. An elderly woman was shouting into her cell phone.

  “My husband’s a retired physician and is trying CPR,” she said, “but the man’s not breathing, and there’s no pulse!”

  Another woman came forward, opened her purse, and said, “I have an aspirin.”

  “Can’t,” said the doctor, waving her off. “He’s unconscious.”

  “Looks more dead than unconscious,” said one of the onlookers.

  “Did anyone see him collapse?” asked the doctor.

  A waiter spoke up. “I did.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Five minutes or so.”

  “Be exact.”

  The waiter checked his watch. “I’d say more like seven.”

  “Tell them they’ve got sixty seconds!” the doctor shouted to his wife.

  She repeated the message to the 911 operator, but Jack heard no approaching ambulances in the neighborhood. The doctor kept at his work, a hundred compressions per minute, desperately trying to revive him. He looked exhausted. Jack stepped in to relieve him.

  “I got it,” said the doctor. “I need an automated external defibrillator. Check the theater.”

  The symphony drew an older crowd-apart from the cocaine addicts, they were South Beach’s most likely demographic for cardiac arrest. Good call, Doc.

  Jack ran. The doors were open, and Jack burst into the lobby. It took him ten seconds to shout out his needs to the woman at the will-call window. It took her an ungodly long time to bring him the emergency kit. Jack grabbed it and raced back to the mall. Paramedics were finally on the scene. They had already administered the three stacked shocks that Jack had seen a hundred times on television dramas-200, 300, 360-and an IV was in place. One of the EMTs was struggling to intubate, but he couldn’t force the airway.

  “Forget it, let’s roll!” he shouted.

  The man looked utterly lifeless as the team lifted him onto the gurney. The crowd parted as paramedics whisked him down the mall to the ambulance at the corner. Jack took it as a bad sign that they didn’t even bother to turn on the sirens as the ambulance pulled away.

  “He’s not going to make it, is he,” said Jack.

  The doctor was standing beside his wife, his shirt soaked with sweat.

  “Completely asystolic. Poor guy was at least twelve minutes into cardiac arrest by the time emergency arrived.
Almost twenty by the time they pulled away. Once you get beyond six, at most eight minutes

  …” His voice trailed away, as if he were too tired to verbalize the obvious. His wife squeezed his hand and assured him he’d done the best he could.

  Two police officers were on the scene to secure the area around the fountain with yellow police tape.

  “Please, folks, step back,” said the cop.

  Jack noticed a third officer near the bench. The man’s suit jacket had been left behind, and the cop was fishing out a wallet, presumably for a driver’s license-something to reveal the identity of this well-dressed man who’d apparently come alone to the mall. Or come to meet someone.

  Jack was suddenly thinking again of his scheduled meeting with his informant.

  “Is this being treated as a crime scene?” Jack asked him.

  “Back away, please. Let us do our job.”

  The crowd began to disperse, people returning to their cafe tables to find melted ice cream or cold plates of linguine with clam sauce.

  Jack turned his attention back toward the police. The yellow plastic tape was in place, but two men and a woman ducked under it. The crime scene investigation team had its job to do, which was the protocol for an unwitnessed death in a public place. But for an apparent heart attack, it seemed to Jack that they’d arrived in quite the hurry. Jack walked around to the other side of the fountain and approached the doctor again.

  “Excuse me, but did anything about this seem suspicious to you?” Jack asked him.

  The doctor shrugged. “Not really. Other than the fact that he was in his late twenties, maybe thirty. Pretty young to have a heart attack. I’d be surprised if the toxicology report doesn’t show something.”

  Jack thought back to the earlier phone conversation in his grandfather’s bathroom. The voice on the line had definitely not been an older man’s.

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “Something.”

  Jack checked his watch: 8:10 P.M. The meeting time was to have been eight o’clock. Jack took one more look at the busy crime scene, then walked away and returned to his table at the cafe. The fizz had gone out of his sparkling water, but it couldn’t hurt to sit and wait a little longer. Deep down, however, he knew that his informant would be a no-show.

  A quick glance at the napkin confirmed it, and Jack felt chills.

  On the white paper napkin beneath his water glass was a handwritten note-and Jack was certain that it hadn’t been there before. With a CSI team nearby, Jack had the presence of mind not to touch the napkin or the glass. Condensation from the melted ice had blurred one of the words, and the penmanship wasn’t that good to begin with, but he was still able to read the entire message:

  Are you afraid of The Dark?

  “Is everything okay?” asked the waiter.

  Jack was still staring at the napkin, absorbing the final two words of warning: Back off.

  “Sir? Is everything okay?”

  Jack glanced toward the crime scene, then back at the waiter. “Did you see anyone come by this table while I was away?”

  “No, but to be honest, I was off watching the paramedics, just like everyone else.”

  “Almost everyone else,” said Jack, his gaze returning to the napkin. Part of him wanted to get up and scour the mall for clues, but he would make it his job to protect this message from contamination until it could be properly collected and checked for fingerprints and forensic analysis.

  “Do me a favor,” he told the waiter. “Ask one of those cops to come over here. And tell him to bring an evidence bag.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Vincent Paulo hated Sunday nights. Always had. It was the thought of Monday morning that dragged him down. Tonight, however, the culprit was Saturday night-the fallout from what had happened yesterday evening at Lincoln Road Mall, to be exact.

  “Are you coming to bed?” asked Alicia.

  It was almost eleven, and he was seated in a rocking chair on the screened-in porch, facing their backyard. Crickets made their music in the bushes. Water gurgled from the fountain in the garden. Vince was on his third beer since the Miami Heat had fallen hopelessly behind in the third quarter of the LeBron James show.

  “In a little while,” he said.

  His wife waited, and he sensed her concern. Finally, her footsteps trailed away to the kitchen, and Vince returned to his thoughts.

  Actually, when Vince was a little boy, it wasn’t just Sunday nights that he’d hated. Bedtime in general was a problem. Vince was afraid of the dark. He would lay awake for the longest time-for hours, it seemed, the covers pulled over his head, too scared to make a move. “Just close your eyes and go to sleep,” his mother would say. But Vince couldn’t do it. The Scooby-Doo night-light was of some comfort. But closing his eyes would have meant total darkness, and it was in that black, empty world that monsters prowled.

  Ironic, he thought, that he now lived in that world-and that it was indeed a monster who had put him there.

  Over the past three years Vince had tried not to think about the day he’d lost his sight, or at least not to dwell on it. Hindsight could eat you up, even on the small stuff. Going blind was definitely not small stuff. How many people could say, If only I hadn’t opened that door, I would never have lost my eyesight? Of those, how many could actually live with the result-truly live with it, as in live a happy life. Vince was determined to be one of those people.

  There had been major adjustments, to be sure. For a time, he’d given up active duty completely to teach hostage negotiation at the police academy. Of all the skills that made a talented negotiator, sight was not chief among them. He was still a good listener, with sharp instincts, common sense, and street smarts. He could still intuit things from a hostage taker’s tone of voice over the phone, or from a mere pause in the conversation. In fact, losing his sight had seemed to strengthen those other, more important skills. Proof of that had come just a few months after his return to work, when, in his first job as a blind negotiator, he’d talked down a homeless guy from a bridge. That feat paled in comparison to the subsequent crisis that had put him in the national spotlight. A delusional and well-armed gunman took four people hostage in a motel and demanded to speak with the mayor’s daughter. One of those hostages was Theo Knight-Jack Swyteck’s best friend. And now Swyteck was returning the favor by defending Jamal Wakefield.

  You’re welcome, asshole.

  Alicia came up behind him and slid her arms around his shoulders. “Why are you so quiet tonight?”

  He took a long pull from his beer bottle, as if to tell her that he was in no mood to talk.

  “Mind if I join you?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

  “I’ll get a couple more beers,” she said.

  “I’m good,” he said.

  “Then I’ll get one for myself,” she said as she started toward the kitchen.

  It was hard for Vince to imagine life without Alicia, even if he had broken off their relationship after the accident. They’d reunited and then married only after Vince was convinced that there was no pity in those beautiful eyes he could no longer look into. At the first sign that she had stood by him out of sympathy, he would relieve her of that obligation and move on with his life. And he would be happy. That was a solid place to be, emotionally, and it had taken him many months-years-to get there.

  The apprehension of Jamal Wakefield had sent him tumbling back to square one.

  “I brought you a frosted mug,” she said.

  “I said I was good,” he told her.

  He heard Alicia put the mug on the coffee table and settle into the rocking chair beside him. “Knock the Biggest Loser-sized chip off your shoulder, Vince.”

  She was right, and he knew it. “Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted.”

  Somewhere in the yard, bullfrogs croaked in the night. A cool breeze through the screen felt good on his face. Alicia reached over and touched his hand, which felt even better.

  “Are you going to make
me drag it out of you,” she said, “or are you going to tell me how your meeting went with Detective Lopez?”

  Lopez was the unit supervisor of the Crime Scene Squad at Miami Beach Police Department, and he was working the suspicious death on Lincoln Road Mall. Vince’s meeting with him had lasted almost an hour that morning, while Alicia was in church.

  “Dead guy’s name is Ethan Chang,” said Vince. “A twenty-nine-year-old ex-pat who was living in Prague.”

  “What was he doing over there?”

  “No idea. Probably chasing Czech fashion models.”

  “Probably the same reason he went to Miami Beach last night.”

  “Only if he works fast. He flew into MIA yesterday and was ticketed on a return flight to Prague tonight.”

  As if on cue, the rumble of a jet at thirty thousand feet cut through the night sky. Vince waited for the distant noise to fade away completely, then said, “He had pictures of Jamal Wakefield with him.”

  “Pictures?”

  “He had a cell phone, too. Jack Swyteck’s number was in the call history.”

  “He talked to Swyteck before he died?”

  “Turns out Swyteck was at a sidewalk cafe about fifty feet away when the guy dropped dead on Lincoln Road Mall. Detective Lopez took his statement last night.”

  “Is Swyteck a suspect?”

  “No. His story is that an anonymous informant called him yesterday and told him to meet at eight o’clock on the mall. The guy promised to bring Swyteck some photographs to support Jamal Wakefield’s alibi.”

  “What alibi?”

  Vince told her, and he took the long pause as a sign of her incredulity. Finally, Alicia said, “So the photographs show that Wakefield was held in some kind of a detention facility in Prague when McKenna was murdered?”