Jonathon King - A Killing Night

The moon was high and dusty white, mottled by its features, but still its reflected light put a pale sheen on the acres of Everglades sawgrass that lay out before me.

I was on the berm that formed the northern back of the L-10 canal. I'd come back to my shack and spent my time reading in silence and pretending to fish and paddling my river. I was still grinding the rocks of O'Shea's innocence, Richards's vendetta against him and the possibility of a stalker still working the bars. I was pissed that O'Shea refused to talk about the Faith Hamlin case, even while I was sticking my neck and Billy's out for him. What the hell was he hiding? He didn't owe those other three cops. Was I way off base on the bartender drug theory? Was there really someone stalking the girls, or were they just working the trade and then moving on while a drug pimp recruited his next one? Richards said she'd done backgrounds on all the girls without a sign of drug use or involvement. But if that was all it was, she was going to be kicking herself around worse than her superiors. I was turning the ideas in my head, trying to rub them smooth with logic and the sandpaper of "What if?" But I knew I was waiting for someone else to act, make a mistake, uncover a body, wound instead of kill. The anxious feeling that crawled just under the muscles in my back and shoulders had sent me out in my canoe paddling hard up the river in the middle of the night.

I'd pushed myself all the way to the culvert that the water management district had opened to divert canal water into the river. The natural slough of hundreds of wet acres that spread north and west had been the river's water source for thousands of years before men had started re-plumbing the Glades to fit their needs. Thirsty cities along the coast, a desire-no, a need-to lower the naturally high water table to create dry farmland for the sugarcane and winter vegetables and dry plots for yet more suburban housing. It was homo erectus in control of something as natural as the flow of rainwater.

At the berm I pulled the canoe up into a clump of marsh fern and climbed eight feet to the top. My night vision had returned to me after too long a dose of electric light in the city. In the moonlight I could even pick up the tiny white nodes of snail pods clinging to the razor-sharp strands of sawgrass like short strings of pearls. To the east I could see the false dawn of the city lights, but to the west only the shimmer of moving grass when the wind picked up and blew a pattern over the Glades. That's the direction I was facing when the chattering of my cell phone sounded in such a foreign way out here that it nearly made me duck. My reaction puzzled me and I let the phone ring again and then realized how on edge I had been waiting for someone else to pull the trigger on this case. On the third ring I punched the talk button.

"Yeah."

"Max."

"Billy. You're keeping late hours."

"Your Mr. O'Shea has just awakened me. He has been arrested at his apartment in Fort Lauderdale," Billy said. "As you predicted, Detective Richards has put together a probable cause statement charging him with the aggravated assault of Robert Hix.

"Mr. O'Shea informs that the primary evidence is a DNA match of a blood sample found on the boots that were obtained during the search of his residence."

Billy sounded professional, but not pleased.

"No surprise there," I said.

"He will be in magistrate's court at nine in the morning."

"You're still willing to do this?"

"I made you a promise, Max."

"I'll see you there, Billy," I said.

"Two other matters, Max."

"Yeah?"

"I am presently at the hospital in West Palm."

"What?"

"Rodrigo was beaten early this evening near the Cuban grill where he said you two have met on occasion."

"Jesus, Billy. Is he OK?"

"Cuts and abrasions. But nothing too serious," Billy said. He was using the clean, efficient diction he always fell into when pressed. Don't waste time on emotion or early supposition.

"It appears that the Hix brother you warned him about made a visit. Rodrigo tried to avoid him, but was cornered. The others backed away when Rodrigo was singled out."

"What was the message this time?" I said, trying to swallow back an anger that was souring the back of my throat. I could see David Hix's flat face in front of me. The sneer and the cocky way he'd wielded the bat.

"All he could make out was 'Go home' and an indication that he tell the others the same," Billy said. "He seemed to be blaming Rodrigo for costing him money."

"If Hix is working for cruise worker contractors and his handlers don't see progress, he doesn't get paid," I said.

Billy was silent on the other end of the phone for a moment.

"He may be in for a payday then, Max. Rodrigo is telling me no one will speak to us now. He's contacted his wife. He wants to leave and return to the Philippines."

This brother act was getting old, I thought.

"You said you had two other matters, Billy."

"When O'Shea called he also downloaded a photo of some man that appears to be sitting in a bar somewhere. He said you had asked him to take it."

"Yeah," I said. "Any felon that you recognize? Maybe of the drug distribution species?"

"No. I'll bring a copy with me in the morning," he said, and I could hear the question in his voice.

"It's just a hunch, Billy," I said. "I'll see you outside the courthouse at eight thirty."

I put the cell phone in my pocket and stood staring out over the Glades, the wind still moving the sawgrass, rippling through it like giant snakes below were bending the stalks in long curved patterns. I worked my way back down the berm, digging my heels into the soft dirt to fight against the angle. I was knee deep in the water when I got the canoe floated and then climbed over the gunwale and pushed out onto the river. I would have time to stop at the shack for a change of clothes and then get to the landing to clean up. I might get a nap in my truck if I got to the county jail in Fort Lauderdale early enough. It would be a long night but not as long as O'Shea's. He'd be in with a bunch of drunks and punks and scofflaws and perhaps even a few innocents who got swept up by a justice system that would take its time separating the merely tarnished from true bad boys.

The troubling stones I'd been grinding had, in the span of a phone call, taken on sharp new edges. I stroked the canoe downriver feeling their jagged rub, and the moon followed with me. At eight in the morning I was outside of the jail, sitting on a concrete bench, watching men moving on a construction site across the New River in the morning sun. They were working the kind of miracle that people like me unfamiliar with the building trades always find unfathomable.

Their project was already some thirty stories high. You could watch the damn thing go up day by day as an observer, from poured foundation to concrete columns to prefabricated steel floor stacks and still find yourself stunned at the end of a month to see what men could raise. As I sat sipping a large Styrofoam cup of coffee I'd watched the distant small figure of a tower crane operator climb hand-over-hand like an insect up a ladder enclosed in a tall column of crisscrossed steel. When he got to the glass box at the top, he disappeared inside. I was too far away to hear him start the electric motors that powered the crane, but I saw it begin to move, swinging its balanced, perpendicular arm to the west and silently dropping its hook three hundred feet to pluck yet another load of materials needed at the top. A project manager in Philly had once told me that a good tower crane operator controlled nearly everything that went on at such a site. He had a bird's-eye view of all that was below him and as the building went up he was the one bringing the world up to join him. At thirty bucks an hour he was the master each and every day. Not a bad feeling, I thought, for a working man to hold.