Jonathon King - A Killing Night

"Excuse me, sir."

I stood near the shower and waited.

"Excuse me, I'm Deputy Cardona. You are the rescuer?"

He was a young man with a tight Spanish accent but his English pronunciations were careful.

"Sure," I said, offering nothing more and looking down at my soaked pants, now covered with a crust of sand from sitting wet on the beach.

"The ladies there," he said, tipping his pen back toward the group, which had not moved. "They say they were calling for help when they saw the gentleman in trouble and then you came flying in from nowhere and into the water."

"Yeah, a real Superman," I said, not really meaning to be a smart-ass but coming off that way while I was trying to piece together the sight of the smashed bungalow, Rodrigo's broken bones and whether I wanted to talk about any of it with this cop.

"OK. First of all, I will require a name, sir," the officer said and raised his pen to his pad.

"Max. Max Freeman. Look, do you mind if I shower this stuff off?" I said, dropping my fingers to my pants and nodding at the shower. He said, "Not at all, please," and stepped back to the windward side and let me turn on the water.

I let the stream run over my head and kept my eyes closed while I thought of what I was going to say to the guy. I rinsed the sand off my pants as best I could and when I couldn't stall any longer I cranked the valve shut. The cop stood patiently by, looking out to sea and then to the bulkhead, and if he was perceptive enough he would pick up the deep impressions that my landing on the beach had made and then follow my running footsteps leading back to the bungalow. The door was still wide open.

When I stepped away from the shower one of the ladies was there with a towel.

"Thank you," I said, caught off guard.

"You were marvelous," she said. "That man owes you his life."

I started to say something but she held up a palm and then walked away to join her friends. I turned back to the cop, raised my eyebrows and then motioned to the chickee hut nearby.

"Can we sit?"

I picked up the shirt I'd tossed on the ground when I'd bolted for the ocean and pulled it over my head. I ducked under the dried fronds that formed the roof of the open shelter and took a chair facing my bungalow so that the officer's back would be to it. It didn't help. He was perceptive.

"You live here, Mr. Freeman?" he said, pointing the pen over his shoulder.

"Actually, it belongs to a friend. I was just borrowing it for a while."

"Was the drowning man your friend?"

It figured that I'd get one of the bright ones.

"Why do you ask?" I said. It was one of those sophomore techniques; answer a question with a question. He checked his notebook.

"One of the ladies, she says she saw the drowning man limping down to the beach and saw him go into the water with his clothes on."

No question had been asked, so I didn't respond. I used the towel to dry my hair and avoid eye contact.

"She also says a larger man who appeared to be chasing him came down these steps with anger and with a baseball bat in his hands."

David, of the infamous Hix brothers, I thought. I could picture him in the bungalow, taking down the dining room light with a single swing.

"The limping man appeared to escape into the water because the other refused to follow."

I draped the towel around my neck and then stretched out one leg and reached into my pants pocket. The cop did not tense. He had already seen me without a shirt and knew I wasn't carrying.

"Do you mind if I make a call?" I said and pulled a dripping cell phone from my pocket but then looked dumbly at it when I saw that the power button brought no light or noise.

Cardona seemed patiently amused. He reached into his own shirt pocket and took out an even smaller cell phone and handed it to me.

"I will take it that the call is local?" he said.

I nodded my assent and dialed a number while he watched.

"Lieutenant Sherry Richards?" I said for the cop's benefit when she picked up on the other end.

"You stood me up, Max," she answered.

"No. I've had an unexpected emergency up here, Lieutenant," I said, loud enough for the deputy to hear.

"Are you OK, Max?" she said and the concern sounded real.

"Uh, yeah, there's already an officer here at the scene," I said, and Cardona was now looking into my face.

"What scene are you talking about?" Richards said, now letting worry creep into her voice. I ran through what I figured had happened, that Rodrigo had been tracked by David Hix, who saw his chance to impress his ugliness on the little man and scare him out of the country. I talked loud enough for both Richards and the cop next to me to hear. He looked skeptical.

"Here, I'll let, uh, Deputy Cardona explain," I said and handed the officer his own phone. He turned away and I looked out at the whitecaps, hoping the concern I'd heard in Richards's voice meant she wasn't so pissed at me that she would leave me swinging. After a minute, Cardona snapped the phone shut.

"The lieutenant says she wants you down at your prearranged meeting place, asap, Mr. Freeman."

"I think this will go much better this way," I said to him, and without another word I went inside to change my clothes.

On the drive to the Galleria in Fort Lauderdale I called Billy on the cell and told him about Rodrigo.

"How is he?" was his first question.

"Broken leg and maybe the same for his arm," I said. "Probably with the baseball bat."

"Hix?"

"No doubt on the loose," I said.

"Max, how did they find him? How did Hix know about the Flamingo?"

It was the more difficult question. There was no way bat man was sophisticated enough to be extrapolating cell phone signals. It took expensive equipment to pull that off and he and his brother just didn't come off with that kind of juice. Since Billy had been the one who picked Rodrigo from his last hospital visit in West Palm and drove him to the beach house, the only guess I had was that he'd been followed. He was an attorney, not a street investigator. He could have led the Hix brothers straight to the place where he thought Rodrigo would be safe. But I wasn't going to put it on him.

"I'm not sure, Billy. But he's in North Broward Hospital now, and I doubt he'll be going anywhere soon."

"So you're there with him?"

"Ah, not right now," I said, the admission sticking in my throat. Billy had put me on the cruise worker case. He expected certain things from me. I was letting him down by chasing after Morrison and O'Shea.

"I'm driving down to meet with Richards now," I said. "She took a report from the deputy at the Flamingo and I'll ask that they put a guard on Rodrigo's door. He's been the victim of the same attacker twice now, it's gotta pull some protection."

My excuse sounded lame. Billy let it sit there in my mouth, forcing me to taste it by not answering.

"OK, Max," he finally said. "I hope, my friend, you know what you're doing."

Me too, I thought and punched off the cell.

When I met Richards in the parking garage, I wasn't in the mood for any more questions or some pissing match over O'Shea. She said he'd called her, after all this time trying to avoid all contact with "the bitch." The last time I talked to him he said he wanted to help me find the truth about Morrison before any internal investigators got in on the rape charge, a charge that Richards would want to file as soon as she found out.

When I pulled up to her unmarked car she got out and walked around to stand at my door. She was in jeans and a collared blouse with a cotton jersey underneath. Her detective's shield was clipped to her belt and her 9mm was in a holster on the other hip.

"We going on a raid?" I said in greeting.