Jonathon King - Midnight Guardians

“Yeah, like I figured-the son, his girlfriend, and her boy.”

Sherry let the silence fill the earpiece for a few seconds. She was a career cop, too; three dead, she’d been there before.

“What about the sister? Is she with anyone?”

“Me,” I said. “I’m taking her to the shack where she’ll be safe.”

Until the words were out of my mouth, I didn’t think about how that would sound to Sherry. The last time she’d been to the shack, she’d ended up losing her leg.

I told her about the fire, how the investigators were leaning toward an accidental gas explosion; but that Billy had called in one of his connections, who discovered that the family pit bull had been killed with a shot to the head before the fire.

“So is Palm Beach putting their homicide people on it?” she said.

“They probably are now. And we may all be getting a bit paranoid, but Billy didn’t think his place in Deerfield was safe enough for Luz. I’m taking her to the shack until he can convince the feds to get a whistle-blower protection clearance for her.”

“So you’re going to stay there until that’s done,” Sherry said.

“Yeah, I’ll stop on the way to the river and get enough supplies for a couple of days and see how it goes. The woman’s pretty messed up, but she’s not freaking out or anything.”

“Does she have family? Do they know what’s happened?”

“Her friend said she and the brother left all their family in Bolivia and Carmen rarely talked about them. She’s got a cell phone with her. I’m trying not to push her,” I said, realizing that Sherry was thinking all of the personal things you do after a death in the family that I’d just glossed over in a rush to keep the woman safe.

“She’s going to need help, Max. Counseling help,” Sherry said. “You know that, right?”

There it was again, the stubborn one who couldn’t see herself in the mirror.

“Yeah, I know. If the feds get her into a safe house someplace, maybe they can set that up, but right now I…” Right now I didn’t know what the hell to do other than what we were doing.

“Well, that might not be long,” Sherry said. The lead-in was obvious in the tone of her voice.

“Why? What’s happening?” I said.

“The sheriff wasn’t as slow on the uptake as we figured he’d be on that warehouse, Max,” she said. “They put a team together and raided the place this morning, thinking they’d find the computer boys hard at work.”

“And?”

“The bad guys were ahead of us. When the team blew into the place, it had already been cleared out. There was a loading dock out the backside, and they must have trucked everything away in the middle of the night. There were a few computer cables, some empty boxes of printout paper, some generic office supplies, and a few empty desks.”

“Shit,” I said.

“But there was enough left behind to convince our guys to start a bigger pursuit. There’s plenty on the record of other operations in Dade and Palm Beach Counties, so they’re going to compare notes and do some interagency sharing. If they get a task force together, you know they’re going to want to talk to your friend Ms. Carmen.”

Good news-very good news. But I could tell from Sherry’s voice that there was more. Sometimes when she’s in an investigative mode, she holds back when she’s sharing her work with me, like a storyteller who is saving the punch line.

“What else?” I said, doing my part as audience.

“Well, maybe the guys clearing out the warehouse were only interested in the medical fraud and didn’t give a shit about the drugs, but they were sloppy,” Sherry said. “No one left drugs, but they did leave behind the boxes that Andres described to you.”

We’d done this a lot in the old days, before the accident, try to outguess each other on investigations others were running-speculating on what they would find, or how they should have worked their cases. It was classic one-upmanship. It was a bit of a game for us, one I realized I’d been missing for the last several months.

“Ahhh, OK,” I said, thinking. “Packaging, right?”

“Serial numbers, you big dope,” she said. “Lot numbers for the drugs. The task force might be able to use them to track where the drugs came from: the hospitals, pharmacies, doctors’ offices that originally purchased them.”

“And any idiot users who still have the original containers,” I said, trying to save face.

“Right,” Sherry said with a little triumphant lilt in her voice. “Your client’s brother, Andres, is speaking to us from the grave, Max. Maybe that will be some comfort to his sister down the line.”

“You could be right,” I said. “I’ll keep you updated, babe. I love you. Bye.”

I will be the first one to admit that terms of endearment don’t come naturally to me. For a moment, I wondered if this was something I’d been trying to teach myself since Sherry lost her leg, an almost unconscious realization that I could have lost her completely. After I slipped the cell phone back in my pocket, I saw that Luz was standing at the top of the stairs with a large ripstop nylon bag at her feet.

“I’m ready,” she said.

It’s an hour’s drive up I-95 and then west to the state park where I kept my canoe at a boat ramp on the river. Along the way, we stopped to pick up supplies at a Winn-Dixie. Luz went inside with me, now unwilling to be anywhere but at my side. Now that she’d had some time to put things in perspective, she was scared. By the time we arrived at the boat ramp, it was late afternoon.

When I pulled up into a spot near the park ranger’s Old Florida-style cabin, Dan Griggs came out to greet me. He was in a pair of khakis and had an old flannel shirt over his uniform. Ninety degrees and the old-timer looked like he was chilled. Or maybe he just didn’t like the show of epaulets and insignias. He wore a pair of old black galoshes on his feet, the kind with the thin metal clips, but they were splayed open and flapped when he walked.

“Hey, Mr. Freeman, how you doin’?”

“Dan.”

“I was startin’ to think maybe I ought to put a FOR SALE sign on your canoe there,” he said, subtle humor in his voice.

I smiled at the trust it showed. Old Florida country folks do not grant that trust easily to outsiders, and it had taken me some time to earn it from Dan. A few years ago when I was new to the river, I’d brought a tragedy with me. The longtime and locally beloved ranger had been killed by a criminal drawn to this place in part by me. I wasn’t complicit in his death, but I wasn’t blameless, either. And even though I would eventually get retribution for the loss of their friend, the locals did not forget easily.

“I hope you would have split the asking price with me, Dan,” I said while I unloaded. We shared the joke with complimentary smiles.

Dan was doing one of those “looky here” strolls around the polished Gran Fury and was about to utter some whooo-eee utterances when Luz Carmen stepped out of the passenger-side door. The ranger quickly took his hat off and said, “Ma’am.”

I introduced the two and told Dan that Ms. Carmen would be staying out in the shack for a few days “for some peace and quiet.” He nodded and grabbed one of the grocery bags and followed me to the stand of palmetto trees where I stored my canoe.

“Well, you’ll surely get that, ma’am. We do have quiet in abundance out here.”

I winced at the language. It always amazed me how so-called country folk can find sophisticated articulation when they want to. Dan’s predecessor, the Old Florida cracker who’d been killed, used this homey technique to his advantage, acting unworldly as a cover while he intensely studied and read everyone he met. I doubted that Dan’s intention was the same, but he’d learned from a master. He knew Sherry, knew we were a couple; the presence of an attractive Latin woman suddenly on the scene would have intrigued him.