Jonathon King - Midnight Guardians

“Uh, yeah, well, black guy in dark, maybe black clothes, with long sleeves. He was uh, probably under, like, five ten. Kinda skinny.”

“Carrying anything, Dan?” I said, moving him along step by step. Witnesses don’t always get their memory pictures focused until you put a frame around them. “When he scrambled away, do you recall him carrying anything?”

“Yeah, you know, he was carrying some kind of package under his arm. But I checked the car, Mr. Freeman, and I don’t think he got inside. It was still all locked up, and there was no damage, you know?”

I was walking circles around the table, setting up the scene in my own head.

“And he was kinda limping.”

“What?”

“When I told you he was scrambling away, it was more like he was crab walking. I remember thinking he wasn’t like, sprinting or anything, when I got the light on him. He was more like trying to stay low, but pulling a leg behind.”

“OK, Dan, that’s good-that’s the kind of thing I need. Did he have a hat on? Was something covering his head, his hair?”

“Uh, no. But he was dirty.”

“Explain.”

“The light picked up the grass and stuff on his back-like maybe he was under the car, hot-wiring it or something.”

You don’t hot-wire a car from underneath. From underneath, you’re either changing the oil, or sabotaging the damn thing.

“And you said this all happened early this morning?” I asked.

“Yeah, at daybreak.”

“And you’re calling me now, at two P.M., to tell me my truck was delivered?”

I was trying not to get angry with the guy, and ask what the hell took him so long. After all, he had no idea what I was into, the safekeeping of Luz Carmen or the threats. I never tell the innocent people on the periphery of my life about what I do. People get crazy enough with all the out of proportion crime news they see on television. It’s that contextual half-truth that hurts them, not the real stuff they’ll never know about.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Freeman. You know, I just thought if you had a lady friend out there, you wouldn’t want to be disturbed.”

A lady friend…

“It’s all right, Dan. Thanks for calling. I’ll be in soon,” I said, and punched off the cell.

I recalled a quote I picked up somewhere: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

Was I being talked about? Hell with it, I didn’t give a shit. I stepped outside and called down to Luz Carmen.

“Pack up. We gotta go.”

I was standing where Dan said he’d been when he saw the man messing with the Gran Fury. I was trying to re-create the smoky light of predawn in my head; how good a look could the ranger have managed? The distance was maybe thirty yards. There is little ambient light out here at night. But when Dan showed me the big Inova T3 flashlight he used for spotting poachers and night fishermen, and for checking the occasional snarl of a bobcat, I had to figure he got a decent look. The high-intensity beam can throw 150 lumens at someone 300 feet away. No wonder the ranger saw flecks of dry grass on the prowler’s back.

My own truck, newly washed and polished, was parked in front of the car, but I kept my focus on the Gran Fury, as if it were a suspect.

First I got my truck keys from Dan and carefully backed the F-150 away. Only then did I approach the Gran Fury to begin an inspection, searching the grass around it first, looking for any kind of obvious disturbance. Then without touching the car, I peered in all the windows, carefully looking at the door handles and what I could see of the steering column, to determine whether the visitor had actually been inside before Dan lit him up. The hood was locked down with no sign of tampering. The doors were tight-nothing.

I got down on the ground from the side of the car opposite from the ranger station, figuring the guy would have done the same, using the car body as a shield. I used Dan’s light to illuminate the undercarriage, starting from the front-no out-of-place wires. No signs of unusual connections to the engine. I moved the light back a bit. The front wheels and brake lines looked undisturbed. Back further, there was no indication the bottom edges of the front doors were scratched, and there was nothing like a pressure switch attached to them. I ran the light over the oil pan and the driveshaft and then to the back wheels. On the nearest rocker arm, I found it. The sight of the gray-colored package made me blanch. I think I actually held the light on it for a full minute, frozen, no panic, but frozen.

If you’d expect to find several red sticks of dynamite strapped together with an alarm clock taped to it, you’d be disappointed. Instead, I was staring at an innocuous form about the size of a one-pound box of Arm amp; Hammer Pure Baking Soda. It was wrapped in some kind of thin cellophane like Saran Wrap and attached to the axle near the gas tank with several turns of duct tape. I didn’t slide away. I didn’t breathe.

After some time, I actually had a fleeting thought about the heat from the light that I couldn’t seem to move off the object. Don’t be stupid, I thought: Heat doesn’t set off explosives; electricity or a fuse does. That made me focus. I searched the brick of plastic for some form of detonator. If someone wanted to kill me with a remote detonator, wouldn’t he have done it by now while my head was under the car? Nice logic, Max. Feel better? No.

I squirmed and shifted my body to get a look at the other side of the package. It wasn’t wired as far as I could tell. Only then did I worm my way back out. I stood and took a deep breath-was that the first breath I’d taken since I saw the block of explosive? Then I walked back to the ranger station where I’d asked Luz Carmen to stay.

“We need to get you under federal protection,” I said.

She just nodded, as if had asked her to go to the corner grocery for bread. Dan was looking at the side of my face when I turned to him.

“You need to call the sheriff and tell them to get a bomb squad out here,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Somebody strapped the car with an explosive, but it doesn’t look like they had the chance to put a detonator on it. But we can’t take a chance.”

If there was a bomber still waiting out there for Luz to get into the vicinity of the car, he wasn’t going to get much satisfaction. Maybe Dan had scared the guy off before he had the chance to finish rigging the thing. The way the explosive was taped to the rocker arm, it wouldn’t have been a matter of just grabbing the thing and running when the flashlight beam hit him. So he left it behind and ran. But an attempt had been made. It might even be an easy task to simply remove the package, but I wasn’t going to do it.

Dan turned to the phone on his desk without hesitation. But after dialing the number, I caught him looking at me with wide eyes as he tried to process what I’d just told him so he could reword it to the dispatcher. Bomb. Explosive. This was not a skill set he’d learned in park ranger school. While he was waiting for the connection, I went out onto the porch and called Billy.

“I’ll call the bomb squad immediately,” was Billy’s first response.

“Being done.”

“And Ms. Carmen?”

“Sitting right here. Quiet.”

“I’m calling the feds as soon as we hang up,” Billy said with anger in his voice, which is rare but was becoming more prevalent. He is not a man who likes to be put off; yet he usually reacts by requesting higher-ups, and then dropping the names of prominent executives, judges, and politicians. Though Billy isn’t the type to get mad, he does get things done.

After we hung up, I stood looking out onto the wide river in front of me, the flat water ruffled by an eastern breeze. You could tell by the subtle brush back of the ripples that the bulk of the water was moving one way, while the opposing wind nipped at it in futility. The tide was going out. We were close enough now to the ocean that the pull of gravity was working its wonder. Nature does not give up her pull, despite what piddling man, even Al Gore himself, does. We will not destroy the world. The world will go on even after we’ve destroyed ourselves.