Jonathon King - A Killing Night

"No. As Diane would s-say: You beat them by joining them."

"The woman's got smarts," I said.

"We shall see."

Billy picked up a file and opened it in his lap. He was done explaining himself.

"OK, M-Max. While you were away, I ran the t-two individuals who attacked you in the alley," he said, clipped and businesslike. "A David and Robert Hix. S-Small-time thugs and n-not very g-good at being criminals."

"Brothers?" I said.

"Yes. David just g-got out of Glades Correctional on a r- robbery jolt that looks like it was probably a drug rip-off. He's on six years p-probation after d-doing three. Brother Robert has done c-county time in b-both Palm Beach and Broward. Check k-kiting, burglary and identity theft. W-with all these cross references, it l-looks like they travel as a t-team, but Davey does the h-heavier work."

Billy passed me the folder and I scanned the booking photos that he had downloaded off the Department of Corrections Web site.

"Did you show these to Rodrigo yet?"

"I've called him twice. B-Both times he's been short, almost whispering and asked for you. He says he's all right, but I could hear the fear in his voice," Billy said. "Hard to see how a Filipino middleman gets these two as leg breakers."

"It's a global village, Billy. We learned the hard way that the criminals have cell phones and Internet sites, too. If their job recruiter in Manila gets squeezed because his people are making noise about legal representation on work problems, he makes a call to a fellow shit-heel in Miami, who farms it out," I said. "I'll talk to Rodrigo. Can I take these mug shots?"

Billy flipped the backs of his fingers and stood up.

"While I w-was asking around, I also t-talked with a prosecutor friend in Broward about your Mr. O'Shea."

He walked over to the wall of windows and looked out toward the ocean. Though we were twelve stories up, he never looked down over the edge and into the streets. Billy never looked down.

"He tells me he's had to t-turn Sherry down on filing a probable cause on O'Shea t-twice. He t-told her all she has is circumstantial evidence, even with the Philadelphia incident. No b-body. No forensics. Just a couple of witnesses willing to say they saw him with two women who m-may be missing."

"As far as I know, he's right," I said.

"She's also all alone on th-this according to him. Her p-pursuit of these cases in general and O'Shea in p-particular is causing hard feelings with her b-bosses and at the state attorney's office."

"Your friend say what they're going to do?"

"G-give her some slack for now b-because of her past record. Nobody's telling her she's wrong. They all know the kind of investigator she is. B-But she needs some substance."

"I wish I could help her."

"Nothing fr-from Philadelphia?"

"Nothing of substance," I said, thinking of the portrait of Faith Hamlin on the wall of the store, of tears in O'Shea's ex-wife's eyes, the smell of whiskey and the guffaw of old cops and their younger, too confident brethren. "I doubt you'd like the changes, or the lack of them."

"I have n-no intention of ever experiencing them, my friend."

Billy looked at his watch.

"I need to m-meet Diane."

"Good luck with the Romans," I said.

"Et tu, b-brother," Billy said. "Et tu." I spent most of the next day on the beach, letting the sun seep into my bones where the twenty-three-degree Philadelphia gray had chilled the marrow. Your blood does get thinner down here. It has to be a proven, scientific fact. Somewhere there's a university study working on a government grant to tell us all a fact that we all know.

I ate breakfast in the bungalow and then called Richards. When I got her answering machine I hung up before the beep. I spent an hour out on the sand and then stretched out and took an easy two- mile run. The sun was hard and white in a blue sky. The salt cream of big breakers caught my shoes. The wind was still blowing out of the east and the tallest palms along the shore leaned into it, their fronds blown back like the long hair of women with their faces into the breeze.

Back at my chair, with my heart still thrumming, I pulled off my running shoes and shirt and hurdled into the waves. When I was thigh deep I dove into and under an oncoming crest, dug my fingers into the ocean floor and then pulled while bringing my feet up under me, and then drove forward and up. With my arms spread in a butterfly stroke I burst to the surface, grabbed a lungful of air and immediately dove forward and down to the bottom to repeat the motion. It was a technique I'd learned from the summer lifeguards in Ocean City, New Jersey, where we escaped as teenagers from the hot asphalt streets of South Philly. It was called dolphining and it was exhausting but twice as fast as swimming to get through the shallow surf. Once out past the breakers I turned inland and bodysurfed a wave to the beach, and then dolphined back out. After five trips I was done, arms heavy and lungs aching from gulping and holding air. I sat heavily down into my beach chair. When my breathing returned to normal I reached into my small cooler and uncapped a bottle of Rock, took a long drink and turned my face into the sun.

I came awake when a shadow changed the light on the back of my eyelids and I fluttered them open. In front of me was the passive round face of the same small boy who had caught me unawares on my porch. Again he was staring down at the longneck bottle I'd unconsciously wedged in my lap and the notion flashed into my head that I was breaking the law by consuming alcohol on the beach. Maybe a look of consternation came into my face because the boy looked into my eyes, turned and ran. When I turned to see who the kid would run to, to report me, my cell phone rang.

"Yeah?"

"Freeman?"

"Hey, Sherry," I said, not quite out of the blur of sleep. "What's up?"

"You tell me."

Ahh. The beauty of caller ID. Even if I hadn't left a message on her machine, the detective's calls would all be digitally recorded, giving her the option to at least know who had tried to reach her.

"I thought we could get together again on this O'Shea deal," I said. "I took a side trip to Philly, maybe something you should hear."

I heard her hesitate and wasn't sure how she was going to take the word of my nosing around in Philadelphia without her knowing.

"Is this information that's going to help me, or hurt my investigation, Max? Because right now I've got another girl missing and I'm about this close to locking up your friend."

"Another one?"

"Susan Martin, Suzy. The missing persons unit is funneling anything they get with earmarks of my guy's M.O. to me. I have another frantic mother who's been everywhere, talked to a dozen friends of her daughter's, the girl's landlord down here and nobody's helping."

"Bartender?"

"Yes."

"When did she quit showing up?"

"Six weeks ago."

"Knew O'Shea?"

"I don't know yet. I'm going to question the bar manager now."

"I'll meet you," I said, taking a chance.

"Kim's Alley Bar during the eight o'clock shift change. You know where it is?"

"Yeah," I said. "I've been there before." Kim's is an oddity in the present-day city of Fort Lauderdale. It's a neighborhood bar tucked in one corner of a landmark shopping center. The land was once occupied by Clyde Beatty's Jungle Zoo. In the 1930s the site was a training and birthing facility for the big cats of the circus; lions and tigers, predators all.

The present-day center holds restaurants and antique stores, a funky bookstore and a Laundromat. Across the street to the west is the Gateway Theatre which in 1960 held the premiere of Where the Boys Are and changed the atmosphere of Fort Lauderdale for the next twenty years.

But only half of Kim's changed since it was established in 1948. Once a true alley bar with a small entrance obscured in the shadows, it was later split into two separate rooms by its layout. On one side is a modern place with pool and Ping-Pong tables and dartboards and a small uninspired bar top. But down a narrow, dim hallway, on the parking lot side of the shopping center, is a treasure. In this room is an ancient bar-back crafted in rich African mahogany by artisans from a different century who knew intricate scrollwork and woodcraft. The cabinetry is old school, built in Baltimore in 1820 and then dismantled and moved to New Orleans. Kim's owner purchased it there and moved it to Fort Lauderdale in 1952. Without knowing its final destination, the proud head of a lion had been carved high in the center of the scrollwork, somehow a testament to the land's history. I had been inside a few times and never once drank a drop in the gamer's side.