Jonathon King - A Killing Night

She was shaking her head at the memory.

"Hey, hard to pull that on a good cop. And the guy was a good cop when I knew him," I said.

She seemed to gather herself.

"But not when you didn't know him, Max. His department file showed three reprimands for undue use of force during arrests. He lost time while he was in an employee health services program, which probably meant he was drying out someplace even before the Faith Hamlin case."

The waitress came by. I nodded my head to another refill and took a long sip. I'd hate to see what my own department file would show. It had already made me a suspect once in South Florida.

I looked up at her and maybe she could see the doubt in my face, or maybe she thought she needed to put an exclamation on her motivation.

"His wife filed a domestic abuse charge against him, Max," she said, and her mouth went tight into a line. "He's not without some bit of a warm-up."

I let the words sit. I knew where her head was at, and there wasn't anything to say.

"You want me to talk to him," I said, more statement than question.

"Look, Max. God knows you don't owe me anything. But you've got a past with this guy. And you're good at reading people. Anything you could get might help."

I leaned forward.

"You got an address and number for my old comrade in blue?"

She pulled a business card and pen from her purse and wrote on the back. "He's been showing up at Archie's on Oakland Park on Thursday nights," she said.

I pinched the card between my fingers. She reached over and touched my hand with her fingertips as she slid out of the seat and then put two one-dollar bills on the table.

"It was great seeing you, Max. Thanks."

I sat and watched her walk away. This was a woman I'd swum naked with in the turquoise water of her backyard pool, who I'd made love to, with difficulty, in a rope hammock until dawn. Now I had no idea where we stood. No, I thought, maybe I'm not so good at reading people. I was back at the Flamingo, tying on my running shoes. I was grinding at a case that wasn't mine, wasn't Billy's and that I wasn't sure I needed to be sticking my fingers in to begin with. My former fellow cop's face was becoming clearer to me every minute that I worried at the rough-edged stone of memory rolling around in my head. I wasn't sure I wanted to know his secrets.

I pulled on an old gray T-shirt and walked out to the beach to stretch out on the bulkhead. It was past noon, an insane time to run in the heat of an early September. The summertime highs of the low nineties wouldn't break for at least another few weeks. The sun was high and white and the only savior was the ocean breeze that had come up in the night and stayed, blowing the smell of salt and sargasso grass in from the southeast. I breathed deep while propping my heel up on the handrail to the wooden stairs. When my hamstrings stopped stinging, I walked the soft sand down to the lifeguard stand where a tall brown-skinned city employee name of Amsler was looking after a smattering of bathers. Weeks ago I'd introduced myself after spotting a setup under his stand where he had rigged a seven-foot-high chinning bar. I knew he saw me coming, but he never shifted his sunglasses from the sea.

"Hey, Bob," I said in greeting.

"Knock yourself out, Max," he said without turning.

I did twenty-five chin-ups with my palms turned in, blew out my breath, shook out my shoulders and did eighteen more with my palms out, touching the back of my neck on the bar until I failed at nineteen. I gave Amsler a wave off the bill of my cap and started jogging south against the wind.

I started slow, letting muscle and bone warm to the task. My knees had taken a pounding over the years and tissue had to swell a bit to cushion their ache. Real or imagined, I always felt a lump of pain high in my right thigh where a bullet had burrowed to the bone a couple of years ago. I rolled my head from side to side, stretching the tendons in my neck and picking up the twinge of long-term damage caused by another wound, a through-and-through in muscle near my throat that led me to take a disability payout and quit the Philadelphia department after ten years. I'd lived a violent life, had followed in my father's footsteps. The inevitability of it haunted and clung to me like an odor.

The sweat and swell and pulse of blood let me open up after a half a mile and I got into a rhythm. I worked a line down on the hard pack, trying to stay just above the surf wash, but still smacking through an occasional shallow film of water. I kept my eyes on the old lighthouse at the Hillsboro inlet and tried to convince myself I was twenty-five again. Though the more dedicated runners I've met say they try to get themselves into a mind-clearing state akin to yoga when they do long distance, I can never get that wall up and shut out my internal rambling. I've also never been in good enough shape to just run on endorphins and euphoria. It hurts too much. I checked my watch and at the twenty-five-minute mark I turned, waded in to my calves and scooped two hands full of ocean up and over my face and shoulders, and started back.

They tell you not to push so hard you can't carry on a conversation with a partner during a training run. By minute forty, I couldn't have had a grunting dialogue with a caveman. My lungs were burning and the blood was thumping in my ears. The wind was behind me but I could feel the push. Instead its direction only made the air I was trying to pull in taste warm and thick. I did the last half mile on guts and pulled up short of the lifeguard stand by a hundred yards. I walked the rest of the way, fingers laced on the top of my head like a prisoner on a forced march. As I passed his perch, my lifeguard buddy called out, "You're a glutton, Max," and he didn't have to say for what.

I stood under the outside shower for at least five minutes until a young boy whose parents must have been renting one of the bungalows came up with a bucket in hand and stared at me long enough to shame me into letting him have the spigot. I went inside, toweled off and made an overdue call to Billy's office. His assistant, Allie, answered on the second ring-a modern-day rarity in the new business world-and was her usual cheerful and professional self.

"Hi, Mr. Freeman. Mr. Manchester is back in town and left a request that you have dinner with him and Ms. McIntyre at the apartment this evening."

"Great. How was their trip?"

"They were both smiling this morning despite the jet lag," she said. "But Venice, who wouldn't," she said.

I went to the kitchen, used the microwave to cook bacon, and put together two huge BLTs. I hooked a cold beer out of the fridge and had lunch on the porch in a chaise longue. Out on the horizon huge anvils of cloud were anchored several miles out, their flat bottoms a soot gray and tops bunched up like thick rolls of white smoke. There was weather out there, but I didn't know enough about the pattern to say what. I took a long pull of the beer and lay back, grinding on Richards's words, trying to pull her face into focus but instead coming up with Colin O'Shea's on the streets of Philly years ago.

I was out of my patrol car, walking the west end of my South Street beat like I'd been told not to do. The action on South was down by the riverfront where the street had recently taken on this hip revival. Artists and musicians and slackers pretending to be cre- atives had first moved in to low-rent apartments and storefronts that had been long ignored. And sure enough, the buzz that something different was happening brought more. People showed up to check it out. Capitalism followed the people. Now it was shops and clubs and restaurants and suburbanites with money and time on Saturday night. It wasn't a new phenomenon. People cluster together, commerce breaks out. The same thing had happened up on Market Street back in the 1680s when the city was first founded and look what came of it.