Jonathon King - Midnight Guardians

“Actually it is b-both corporate and governmental. The w-woman works for a private rehabilitation center, b-but wh-what she suspects is that fake orders for wheelchairs and prosthesis are b-being billed to M-Medicare.”

“So if it’s a government gig with the feds getting ripped off, why doesn’t she go to the state attorney’s office, or the GAO, or somebody who’s actually getting screwed here?” I said.

Billy looked at me. He had already folded the newspaper two more times in his hand. Then he sat down in the patio chair, crossed his legs at the knee, and took on that lawyerly look of his.

“You pay taxes, M-Max. I p-pay taxes. Medicare is funded by us and every other legitimate American,” Billy said. “The m-maid, the grocer, the sch-school teacher, the office manager-we are the ones getting ripped off. And if there isn’t anything left when we get old and need a wh-wheelchair, we’ll b-be the ones hurting.”

Though Billy could be ruthlessly efficient in his practice as a financial and corporate consultant, he maintained a true social conscience born of walking the walk as a child of poverty. His own belief that if you made it, you were bound by responsibility to help those trying to do the same, often led him to take on cases that paid nothing-not that he would admit to it.

I was used to his social rhetoric, but he recognized my flinch when he’d used the words need a wheelchair and stopped himself.

“I am s-sorry, Max. I did not mean for that to s-sound so p-personal.”

It was just the kind of thing Billy would say-an apology for being personal. He’s been my best friend for more than eight years. I’d walked into his office unannounced that first time, armed only with a description from my mother, knowing only that his own mother had been an accomplice in the death of my father. For that alone, I owed him a debt.

Without hesitation, he had found me a place to live, a small shack on a river at the edge of the Everglades. It fit my stated needs perfectly. It was isolated, hard to get to, and quiet in a way only nature can be quiet; a place to grind the rocks in my head, a place to disappear and, yes, a place to hide. Having researched Billy’s background, I also entrusted him with my disability insurance payout from the Philadelphia Police Department. He ensured me that he could invest the amount and that I would, given my severely modest plans and lifestyle, never have to work again.

I trusted him, not just because our mothers had trusted each other, despite the differences in their lives, but because I knew the odds he’d beaten, the climb he’d made out of the streets.

Billy had known Sherry for as long as I had. He was the one I’d come to when Sherry was part of a sheriff’s team investigating the abduction and killing of children from the suburban communities edging their way out into the once-wild Glades. Because I’d been unlucky enough to discover the body of one child on my river, I had been deemed a suspect. Sherry hadn’t trusted me until I ultimately solved that case, rescuing one of the missing children in the process.

Billy had admired Sherry’s investigative skills as a detective. And he had seen through her tough-minded way of looking at things without making prejudgments. He had, in fact, realized that before I did. When Sherry and I finally danced around our wariness of each other, and started dating, he’d been deeply pleased. With Billy’s wife, an attorney and then a candidate for a federal judgeship, he and Sherry and I were often a social foursome, dining together, or going to some show to which Billy inevitably obtained tickets.

I waved him off his apology for using a reference to wheelchairs and its possible personal connection to Sherry. Her leg fracture and subsequent infection and amputation had occurred while she was officially off-duty. But the fact is that you are always a cop, 24/7. When confronted by a crime, which in our case had been a robbery and abduction leading to multiple shooting deaths in the Glades, she was covered by her sheriff’s office insurance. She was taken care of, with her medical bills paid in full by the job. But I had stayed with her, in her Fort Lauderdale house, working, I thought, on the mental rehab I thought she needed.

“Not a problem, Billy. She’s actually getting used to it,” I said. “You know Sherry, nothing keeps her down.”

“B-Bullshit, Max.”

You would have to know how infrequently Billy’s language goes to the street to realize how strong the statement was. I stared into his face, feeling something rise up into my throat that I have rarely tasted in Billy’s presence.

“Sh-She will never g-get used to it, Max. She will adjust. She will f-fight. But you n-never get used to such things.”

I cut my eyes away from his, looked out over the lakefront, higher over the barrel tiled roofs of Palm Beach, and even higher to the horizon where the sky touched the ocean.

“OK. When do I meet this whistle-blower?” I asked, and drained the rest of my beer.

At 12:25 P.M., I was sitting in the parking lot of the West Boca Medical Complex waiting for Luz Carmen. Billy had given me the address and the whistle-blower’s name. He’d actually made the appointment before I’d arrived at his penthouse, knowing I would accept the assignment, and knowing I would be available for the rest of the day. Within a year of our meeting, I had become Billy’s full-time investigator. He had given up going into the streets a long time ago, admitting without chagrin that after what he’d witnessed in his childhood, he would never get his hands dirty again. On the quite literally grimy other hand, I could not stay out of the alleys and shadows and points of danger I’d learned to operate in. Billy and I developed a team, one that often worked well.

I parked two rows back from the entrance to the building, a spread-out affair that looked like they’d borrowed the site plan of the Pentagon but only needed one story. In this part of South Florida-the western cities and suburbs far inland from the ocean-there was no concern for the amount of cheap land developers used. Drain the Everglades by lowering the water table with gouged-out lakes or by dredging funneling canals to the ocean, and then fill and build. It had been going on for a century. Pave paradise, put up a parking lot; apologies to Joni Mitchell.

At 12:30 P.M. exactly, I got a call on my cell. The readout displayed the number Billy had given me.

“Max Freeman,” I answered.

“Yes, this is Luz Carmen, may I help you?”

“Uh, you called me, Ms. Carmen.”

“Yes, that’s possible, sir,” said a moderately young woman’s voice on the other end of the conversation, if you wanted to call it that. “Yes, sir, I am on my way this very moment, sir.”

“Uh, OK, Ms. Carmen, I’m out in the parking lot in a royal blue Ford F-150 pickup truck, two rows back from the sidewalk in the middle,” I said, getting the picture. It always makes me shake my head when people hear the title private investigator and instantly act like they’re in a Jason Bourne spy movie.

Less than two minutes later, I watched a woman whose age matched the telephone voice step outside, sweep the area as if she were worried about being followed, and then make a beeline to my truck.

She was short and slim, maybe five feet two and a hundred pounds. She had long black hair that was either so fine or so meticulously brushed, that even the mild breeze swept it off her shoulders and ruffled it as she approached. She was in heels, skirt just above the knees, and was wearing a white lab coat, like a nurse or doctor.

I started to get out of the truck to greet her when she pierced the windshield with an admonishing look and raised a hand, palm side out. The gesture said: Stay put, please!