Jonathon King - Midnight Guardians

“Your brother makes these deliveries when, at the end of the day? Twice a week?”

“Only once a week, on Fridays, I think,” Carmen said.

“And does he go straight there after leaving your office?”

“I don’t know. I tried to follow him once, but I couldn’t keep up.”

“OK. What does your brother look like? How can I recognize him?”

Now she hesitated. This had gone beyond making a whistle-blower complaint, and had taken on the feeling of a personal betrayal. This was where it always got them: a mother turning in a son’s drug use, a daughter confessing her father’s sexual abuse.

I’d seen it a dozen times in my own home, tucked in a space at the top of the stairs when my father’s own friends, the blue brotherhood, would show up in uniform to answer a complaint from one of the neighbors. They’d always take my father outside first. Then a uniform would stand in the kitchen with my bruised and tearful mother.

“This is the third complaint this year, Mrs. Freeman. Is he hitting you?”

My mother knew that if she answered, her husband could lose his job. She knew her son would lose his father. She knew it would be the end of a family, the loss of a confidant, a shoulder, even if the shoulder was sometimes hard and often brutal. I never heard my mother answer. And the uniformed cop would never ask twice.

“Please don’t let him get hurt, Mr. Freeman,” Carmen said, looking into my eyes. Her strong will couldn’t hold the tear drop this time.

I stayed silent, waiting.

“My height, my coloring,” she finally said. “He wears a Marlins baseball cap, turned backward. You know how they do. And he is driving an old Toyota, dusty white you know, from the sun.”

“And how old is he?”

“He is nineteen years old.”

“So he’s not a juvenile.” It was a statement, not a question.

“His date of birth is June fourteenth, nineteen-ninety,” she said looking hard into my eyes.

“You know Mr. Manchester is a lawyer?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll look up your brother’s juvenile record.”

“And you will find it,” she said, losing a bit of the bravado now. “I am very much trying to save him, Mr. Freeman.”

She was back to staring at her fingers, the rubbing more severe now. And for some reason, I was thinking about the callus she’d built up on that fine delicate knuckle of hers. I was trying to think of something to say to assure her that things will be all right, when I knew they wouldn’t. And while both of us were avoiding eye contact, I began to hear the thrumming of an electronic heartbeat pulsing somewhere in the distance, and growing.

When I looked up out from the shade of the tree, I saw a metallic green Chevrolet Monte Carlo swinging through the parking lot, its chrome wheels spinning the sunlight. The windows were illegal black. The driver didn’t seem to be in a hurry. At first, I thought it was “just kids.” But when I turned and looked back at Carmen, she was knitting her brow.

“It’s OK, Ms. Carmen,” I said.

But she was looking past my shoulder to the approaching car.

Then I heard the bass pounding of the music suddenly go louder, as if a barrier had been lowered. When I glanced back, a rear window was rolling down.

Bap, bap, bap.

It wasn’t until the third round that I launched myself over the top of the picnic table and swept Luz Carmen off the bench with a flying tackle. I could hear the bullets in the tree leaves above us making the sound of ripping cloth.

Bap, bap, baaaaaaap.

Fucking automatic, I registered in my head. When I looked through the legs of the picnic table, I could see the muzzle flash coming out of the Monte Carlo’s back window just as the driver punched it and sent the ass end of the car slewing to the right. The scream of the friction between hot rubber and asphalt added a whining alto to the bass line. In seconds, they were gone.

Now it was stone quiet-amplified silence after chaos. I rolled off Luz Carmen, whose entire body was trembling. I scanned her for any sign that she was hit. When I got to her eyes, they were wide and locked on something in the distance, instead of squeezed shut like most people’s eyes would be under the circumstances.

“You OK?” I said.

No reaction. I pushed up to my knees. “Ms. Carmen, are you all right?”

She was still wide-eyed and stiff.

“Ms. Carmen,” I said, not sure why I was asking a question of someone in shock. “Please don’t tell me that was your brother.”

“Jesus, Max.”

As I said, Billy is not often taken to swearing. So when he starts out that way, it’s a warning that you’ve probably crossed one of his lines, and he is not pleased.

“Your new client can be very convincing,” I said, trying that tactic where you bring in the fact that your boss was the one who sent you out there to begin with, hoping you might spread the blame.

“Max, you left the scene of a crime.”

“Well, technically, yes.”

“Well, technically it was an assault with a deadly weapon. Nontechnically, it was a drive-by shooting, during which you were able to identify the car involved-and if I know you, the caliber of the gun, and possibly the license plate number.”

“No. They were smart enough to remove that ahead of time,” I said, realizing that I was getting defensive now. I knew that any good law enforcement agency in the area would have a pretty good file on a metallic green, jacked-up Monte Carlo with blacked-out windows, even with no numbers.

“No one was injured, Billy,” I repeated. “Once your Ms. Carmen was calm, she was adamant that we return to her office. She said if she came in late after lunch it would only raise suspicions among her bosses. She said she didn’t want to break any of her normal routine, because all eyes were going to be on her if you should get someone from the feds to raid the place.”

I took a long breath, listening to silence on the other end of the cell phone.

“See,” I finally said. “She’s pretty damned convincing.”

“So you’re in the parking lot now?” Billy said, moving past it, like the good lawyer he is. What’s done is done; you move on and tackle the problems that you can.

“Yeah,” I said. “She said she always leaves work at five fifteen. I’m going to follow her home, just to make sure.”

I figured that the least I could do was keep an eye out for the woman, even if our little lunchtime surprise was just a carload of idiot punks getting a kick out of scaring people in the park. Of course, I didn’t believe that. Coincidence is crap in this business. And besides, since leaving the Philadelphia Police Department after getting shot, I’d had the luxury of time. I also had an off-the-clock burden of responsibility.

If something happened to Ms. Carmen after I blew off the incident as an urban prank, wrote up a report, and forgot it after shift change, I’d be right back where I’d often been as a cop: cynical, depressed, and complicit.

“OK, Max,” Billy said, perhaps forgiving. “That sounds prudent.”

Prudent started with a pr that would have taken him three attempts to get off his tongue if we’d been speaking face-to-face.

“What can you give me over the phone?”

I told him about Ms. Carmen’s brother, gave him the name and the DOB, knowing he’d be punching the information into one of his array of computer databases as we spoke.

“All right, Max, that’s a start. I’ll work on this and review it with you later,” Billy said. As a bit of a techno-wizard, he didn’t even like using cell phones to discuss business. Anyone with money could put together the kind of listening devices and triangulation tracking governments use surreptitiously these days. Billy is no Big Brother phobe, but you only have to read the newspaper to know the capabilities of these systems. And as every law enforcement officer in the world knows, if we have the equipment, the bad guys are usually a step ahead of us.