Jonathon King - Midnight Guardians

“He was still tracing the gas p-piping to the outside tank but hadn’t reached an end point. He’s going to have to f-find the outside f-fixture and then determine if it was tampered with. He said it’s p-possible it could have rusted loose or simply fallen apart. The salt in the ocean air down here p-plays havoc on anything whether it’s copper or aluminum or even wood.”

“So at least they’re looking at the possibility that someone blew up the place,” I said.

“Yes. Jim Fisher, please,” Billy said into the phone. Then to me, “I’m not s-sure how hard they’ll look. But yes, they are entertaining the p-possibility.”

“So what did he tell you that he didn’t want to tell you?” I asked.

But Billy was back on the phone. Usually, I find this kind of cell phone etiquette rude, but Billy can get focused. And after all, he’s my friend, not some dork talking to his girlfriend while having a conversation with me.

“Yes, Jim. Fine, how are you? Yes, well, I’ve got a bit of a job for you. Right up your alley, my friend. There was a trailer home fire out in Lantana, and the remains of a dog have been left at the scene.

“No, actually, the known family are all dead. The authorities have no interest in dead dogs, but I do.

“Yes, you will have permission to remove the remains. Are you able to do that?

“No. I need the results of the necropsy as soon as possible. Yes. Yes. I’m sending you a text with the address right now. Thank you, Jimmy.”

Billy folded the phone and looked out at the tree line, thinking.

“The dog?” I said.

“Did you m-miss that gang of flies buzzing the corner of the fence line? That’s unlike you,” Billy said.

I shrugged, and looked stupidly back toward the fire scene, even though it was impossible to see it from here.

“Can you imagine that p-pit bull letting someone crawl in and uncouple a gas line and set a fuse or light a candle or whatever under that trailer w-without taking a bite out of said someone?”

“No,” I said, remembering the eyes of the beast. “No, I can’t.”

I don’t do sympathy well. I know this.

As a cop, I was useless at consolation when family would arrive at a shooting scene. I could not watch relatives wail at fatal accident scenes. “I’m sorry for your loss” seems rudely inadequate in the face of death.

I know I made improvements in this lack of empathy after Sherry’s surgery when I spent hours at her bedside, mostly just watching her sleep, watching helplessly as every twitch and mild groan worked at my insides. I was at fault for her pain, and helpless.

I was sure she saw through my reassuring smiles when she awakened. My inane, happy talk ramblings sounded insincere even to my own ears. My kisses hello and good-bye seemed dry and perfunctory. One day when her strength was up, Sherry finally told me to get lost. She said she’d call me when they released her to go home. But I was in the bedside chair the next morning when she awoke.

“I am sorry for your loss,” I said to Luz Carmen as I stood uncomfortably before her in the living room of Billy’s seaside hideaway in Deerfield Beach. She did not look up. One of her woman friends, whom Billy had brought to comfort her, had an arm around Carmen’s shoulders, and looked up into my eyes as she subtly shook her head.

I went back outside and stared at the breaking waves on the ocean, silently thanking this woman for my dismissal.

At the fire scene, Billy said he would wait for his man to come and collect the remains of the pit bull. He also wanted to get on his cell to badger the federal authorities to take steps to protect Luz Carmen as a criminal enterprise whistle-blower.

In the meantime, he dispatched me to his seaside getaway to watch over her. Early this morning, Billy had convinced Luz Carmen to avoid the fire scene until authorities determined when she could see her brother’s body. After witnessing the molten ash of the trailer, I doubted that event was ever going to take place. There would not be much left of Andres Carmen, and certainly there could be no comfort in viewing his charred remains.

For the entire drive from the fire, I’d been rolling the facts of what we knew around in my head, grinding away at what didn’t fit, the coincidences that left gouges in any known pattern. I sat down on a retaining wall just outside the villa, put my feet on the beach sand, and watched nature do the same thing, the in and out of the tide smoothing each piece of shell, coral, and stone down to a grain.

Like a good investigator, Billy had put himself inside the head of the killer, if there indeed was a killer. While I was foolishly tossing around thoughts of how a group of gangbangers would throw a Molotov cocktail into the trailer, he was thinking how a quiet assassin would sneak onto the lot, crack the gas line, and then set some sort of fuse that would grant him clear distance before the place exploded. In that scenario, the guy would have had to get past the dog. How did he silence the beast?

While I chastised myself, I sensed movement behind me and turned to see Luz Carmen’s friend slip out the door of the villa. She approached me across the patio. “Perdoname,” she said, then caught herself and reworked her statement in broken English.

“Ms. Luz should try to eat, sir. It is no good to lose strength.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. The friend was older than Carmen and had a more distinctly Latin look. She was small, her hair was shot with gray, and her hands were those of a workwoman, coarse and wrinkled.

“There is a restaurant called the Bru’s Room down the way,” I said, fishing my car keys and some twenties out of my wallet. “Ask for Patti and tell her it is for Mr. Freeman. She knows me. Get whatever you think is best.”

The woman took the money, looking hesitant, but repeating the name of both the restaurant and Patti.

“I would go myself,” I said, feeling a need to explain. “But I can’t leave Ms. Carmen again.”

The woman nodded and moved off, again repeating the restaurant name and that of the bartender I knew there. After she’d gone, I pulled a patio chair closer to the door of the bungalow. Within a few minutes, Billy called me on the cell phone.

“Are you with Luz Carmen?” he said without any preamble, unusual for the almost painfully well-mannered Billy.

“Yeah, she’s right here. Her friend went for lunch,” I said, matching his curtness. “What’d you find out?”

“The dog was shot, Max, once in the head with a 147-grain round. My man who did the necropsy says the shooter put the muzzle of the gun right up to the animal’s head and fired.”

The cop at the fire scene hadn’t said anything about neighbors hearing a gunshot in the night, or anything other than the explosion that rocked them out of their beds.

“Silencer?” I said, thinking out loud.

“No way to know for sure,” Billy said. “He’s a veterinarian, not a ballistics guy. It was lucky he had a scale to weigh the slug.”

“It still ought to put the accidental fire theory on the shelf,” I said.

“Someone came after Andres and tried to make it look like an accident. Whoever it was didn’t know about the dog. It surprised him at some point, and he had to kill it so he could set the fire.”

“However it happened, it makes me even more concerned for Luz’s safety,” Billy said, showing a bit more emotion now. “The fed’s bureaucratic response is going to be slow, Max.”

“I’ll take her out to the shack. We should have done that to begin with,” I said, thinking of the brother. The only saving grace was that it a gas flash fire. They may have died quickly, maybe without ever awakening from their sleep. It was something, but not much.