James Grippando: When Darkness Falls

There was silence, each officer thinking it through. Finally, the chief said, “I suppose we could promise to give him what he wants.”

“You mean let him talk to the mayor’s daughter?” said Vince.

“No, I said promise it. That’s his only demand, right?”

“Bad move,” said Vince. “A negotiator never promises anything he can’t deliver. Or that he has no intention of delivering.”

“For once I agree with Paulo,” said Chavez. “But I think-”

Vince waited for him to finish, but Chavez seemed to have lost his train of thought. “You think what?” said Vince.

“I think it doesn’t matter what we think. The mayor’s daughter is here.”

“What?”

“I can see her through the windshield right now.”

Vince picked up the sound of approaching footsteps outside the van. The side door slid open, and he could feel her presence. “Hello, Vince,” she said.

Alicia Mendoza was not merely the mayor’s beautiful twenty-seven-year-old daughter. She was a cop, too, so it was no surprise that she had gotten through the police barricade. Still, the sound of her voice hit Vince like a five iron. Instinctively, he began searching for the memory of her visage-the dark, almond-shaped eyes, the full lips, the flawless olive skin-but he didn’t want to go there. “What are you doing here, Alicia?”

“I hear Falcon wants to talk to me,” she said. “So I came.”

Vince’s sense of hearing was just fine, but his brain was suddenly incapable of decoding her words. That familiar, soft voice triggered only raw emotion. Many months had passed since he’d last heard her speak. It was sometime after he became a hero, after the doctors removed the bandages-following the horrific realization that he would never again see her smile, never look into those eyes as her heart pounded against his chest, never see the expression on her face when she was happy or sad or just plain bored. The last thing he’d heard her say was, “You’re wrong, Vince, you’re so wrong.” That was the same day he’d told her it would be best to stop seeing each other, and the unintended pun had made them both cry.

“I want to help,” she said as she gently touched Vince on the wrist.

Then go away, he thought. I’m so much better now. If you really want to help, Alicia, then please-just go away.

M iami criminal defense lawyer Jack Swyteck wasn’t looking for a new client, at least not one who was homeless. Granted, many of his past clients hailed from an address that even the pushiest real estate agent would have to admit was undesirable-death row, to be specific. Jack’s first job out of law school was with the Freedom Institute, a ragtag group of idealists who defended “the worst of the worst,” which was a nice euphemism for some very scary and guilty-as-hell sons of bitches. Only one had actually been innocent, but one was enough to keep Jack going. He spent four years at the institute. Nearly a decade had passed since his last capital case, however, and it had been just as long since he’d defended the likes of a Falcon.

“So, your real name is what?” said Jack. His client was seated on the opposite side of the table, dressed in the familiar orange prison garb. The fluorescent light overhead cast a sickly yellow pall over his weathered skin. His hair was a thinning, tangled mess of salt and pepper, and his scraggly beard was mostly gray. An open sore festered on the back of his left hand, and two larger ones were on his forehead, just above the bushy right eyebrow. His eyes were black, hollow pools. Jack was reminded of those photographs of Saddam Hussein after he crawled out of his hole in the ground.

“My name’s Falcon,” he said, mumbling.

“Falcon what?”

The man rubbed his nose with the palm of his hand. It was a big, fleshy nose. “Just Falcon.”

“What, like Cher or Madonna?”

“No. Like Falcon, fuckhead.”

Jack wrote “Falcon Fuckhead” in his notes. He knew the man’s real name, of course. It was in the case file: Pablo Garcia. He was just trying to start a dialogue with his new client.

Jack was a trial lawyer who specialized in criminal defense work, though he was open to just about anything if it interested him. By the same token, he turned away cases that he didn’t find interesting, the upshot being that he liked what he did but didn’t make a ton of money doing it. Profit had never been his goal, which was precisely the reason that Neil Goderich, his old boss at the Freedom Institute, referred Falcon’s case to him. Neil was now the Miami-Dade public defender. Falcon flatly refused to be represented by a PD-anyone on the government’s payroll was part of “the conspiracy”-but he desperately needed a lawyer. The dramatic live news coverage on the bridge, coupled with Falcon’s apparent fascination with the mayor’s daughter, gave the case a high profile. Falcon took a swing at the first PD assigned to the case, so Neil pitched it to Jack. Falcon was happy, if only because it could be fun to mess with the son of Florida’s former governor. Jack had been happy, too. He made it a practice to do two or three freebies a year for people who couldn’t pay, and he was reasonably confident that his old buddy Neil wouldn’t toss him a lemon.

Jack, however, was beginning to have second thoughts.

“How old are you, Falcon?”

“It’s in the file.”

“I’m sure it is. But talk to me, okay?”

“How old do I look?”

Jack studied his face. “A hundred and fifty-seven. Give or take a decade.”

“I’m fifty-two.”

“That makes you a little old for the mayor’s daughter, don’t you think?”

“I need a lawyer, not a smartass.”

“You get what you pay for.” Sometimes a little wisecracking loosened these guys up, or at least allowed you to keep your own sanity. Falcon was stone-faced. It must be decades since this one cracked a smile. “You’re Latin, right?”

“What of it?”

“Where you from originally?”

“None of your damn business.”

Jack checked the file. “Says here you became a U.S. citizen in nineteen eighty-two. Born in Cuba. My mother was from Cuba.”

“Yeah. She was great, but I ain’t your daddy.”

Jack let it go. “How did you get here?”

“A leaky raft and a boatload of luck. How’d you get here?”

“Just luck, I was born here. Where do you live now?”

“Miami.”

“Where in Miami?”

“It’s a little place along the Miami River. Right before the Twelfth Avenue Bridge.”

“Is it a house or an apartment?”

“It’s actually a car.”

“You live in a car?”

“Yeah. I mean, it used to be a car. It’s been stripped a hundred times over. Doesn’t run or anything. No tires, no engine. But it’s a roof over my head.”

“Who owns the property?”

“Hell if I know. There’s this old Puerto Rican guy named Manny who comes around every so often. I guess he owns the place. I don’t bother him, he don’t bother me. Know what I mean?”

“Sure. My dad and I had the same arrangement when I was in high school. So, let me ask you this: How long have you been homeless?”

“I ain’t homeless. I told you, I live in the car.”

“Okay. How long have you lived in this car?”

“Few years, I guess. I moved in sometime while Clinton was still president.”

“What did you do before then?”

“I was the ambassador to France. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

Jack laid his notepad on the table. “Tell me something, Falcon. How is it that you’ve lived on the street all these years, and the only time you seem to get into trouble is when you climb up on a bridge and threaten to kill yourself?”