Midnight Guardians mf-6 Read online

  Midnight Guardians

  ( Max Freeman - 6 )

  Jonathon King

  Midnight Guardians

  Jonathon King

  – 1 -

  You should have seen it coming-been smarter. Been quicker. Been wiser.

  But it always works like that, doesn’t it? It’s only after the fact that you start looking at it from that useless “what if” viewpoint. What if you’d seen the signs? What if you’d done things differently? What if you’d seen it coming and avoided having your legs sheared off by five thousand pounds of speeding metal?

  Why couldn’t you see it was all working backward that night? You always liked the night shift, the change in people, the way they walked different, talked different, and looked different: the way they eased up from their daytime drudgery and let loose a little bit. It was at night that people dropped the layer of inhibition that made them a bunch of boring civilians. Working the night shift was always better than punching the clock in the daytime world, with all its mind-numbing rules and procedures.

  The other upside is that nighttime is also when the street criminals come out. The same darkness and shadows that make regular folks feel a little more obscure also spike up the chance of shit hitting the fan. As a cop, you can have a little fun busting some asshole for breaking and entering, or holding up a Stop and Rob, or actually attempting a real rape down on the beachfront. But any patrol cop will also tell you that despite the so-called crime rate, real shit doesn’t happen nearly enough in one guy’s sector to keep the boredom from creeping up your spine and making you wiggle your ass in the seat of the car, or making you wanna just get out and run a few laps on the empty high school track under the security lights, or prop your toes up on the front bumper of the patrol car and do a hundred push-ups on the parking lot in front of Fire Engine Company No. 5. You know those pussies are inside watching you from their cushy break room, and that there’s no way they’re gonna come outside and get challenged on how many reps they can do.

  So you’re cool with the night shift. But that night, it was all goddamned backward. And you didn’t see it coming.

  Instead of covering your usual sector, you were gonna have to shift gears, because the local highway patrol division was short three troopers. The sergeant told you that you had to drive out of the neighborhoods and do a few runs down I-595, ‘cause there’d been some bullshit reporting of speed gunners doing hundred-mile-an-hour blow-downs from the tollbooth at the entrance of Alligator Alley; some poor civilian might freak out and get whammed in the contest. Yeah, whatever.

  Now instead of creeping the streets, you were doing the opposite, laying a speed trap on the interstate, cruising the inside lane at fifty-five m.p.h., and occasionally pulling off onto the shoulder with the lights off, waiting-being bored out of your fucking mind. No speeders. No high-speed chase-just the opposite. Nobody’s shooting more than five or ten m.h. over the posted limit, and what the hell, you ain’t wasting your time running them down. So you pop some super protein tabs and crank up the iPod, which is completely against the rules, and you’re listening to some good old classic AC/DC when there in the rearview is some driver whose got to be doing thirty-five m.h. in the middle lane, screwing everybody up.

  You’re watching, and it makes you cringe just to see how slow this idiot’s going. Then just as the car passes, you see the driver’s profile: one of those old white-hairs leaning toward the windshield, eyes squinting and nose nearly touching the steering wheel as though that extra six inches is going to allow her to see a hundred feet further down the road. And then you hear the horn of the guy coming up behind her, who has been fooled by the taillights of her old Lincoln Town Car. Unexpectedly, those lights come racing up into his face, he hits the horn as he swerves past the old lady, and there goes that yeeeeeowwww of sound that gets bent by the Doppler effect.

  Shit! Now you’ve got to do something, right? You are out here with the fucking mandate to stop accidents from happening, right?

  So you pull the iPod buds out of your ears, and on go your headlights. On go the spinning blues on the light bar, and out you pull onto the interstate to catch up to Miss Marple. Everything is backward. You’re not chasing some hopped-up nineteen-year-old flier; you’re stopping your grandmother for going too slow.

  Cussing, you push the patrol car to fifty m.h. to catch up. For now, you stay off the siren, not wanting to scare the shit out of the old lady. You slow up just behind her and slide just to her outside mirror so she can’t miss the spinning lights now flashing into her car’s interior and making everything pulsate in blue, even her white hair. Sure enough, she doesn’t slow down a bit. Other cars around and behind you are slowing because they can see the damn lights. And like most drivers in the world, their natural tendency is to slow down when they see a cop, because God forbid they did something wrong, or were running ten miles over the limit themselves. So they all slow down for thirty seconds. But once they see it’s somebody else getting yanked, they all jack it back up to seventy.

  You know this is true because you’re a cop and you know the paranoia you invoke. And you’re kind of proud of it. But what the hell is wrong with this old biddy, who’s not stopping or even slowing down but instead sticking to thirty-five m.h. like her life depended on it.

  Then you think: God, I hope this isn’t one of those Chicken Little, the sky is falling, dipshits who’s heard the story of the fake officer who pulls people over with a red light on their dash, and then rapes and robs them. OK, you’ve heard it, too, but never with any detail as to what jurisdiction and exactly what was threatened, or specifically what was stolen. You’re not sure it isn’t just one of those urban legends, like the alligators in the sewer and the boa constrictor in the toilet plumbing. But shit, this broad ain’t reacting at all.

  So against all rules of procedure, you finally get frustrated, flick on the siren, and pull around in front of the Town Car and slow down yourself, using this maneuver to make her stop behind you. See what I mean? Backward-just fucking backward.

  Now you get out. And against the shine of her headlights, you shade your eyes and walk back to her vehicle. You’re absolutely second-guessing why the hell you even decided to do this, thinking you should have just let her get rear-ended and not wasted your time. But you do, without malice or forethought, just by habit, have your right hand resting on the butt of your 9 mm. Maybe that’s why the old girl is already crying, with her hands raised up into the fabric ceiling of the Town Car, pleading in a high hysterical voice, “Please, Officer, please don’t shoot me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was just trying to get to the airport to pick up my daughter. I didn’t mean to be unlawful. I’m sorry! Please don’t shoot me!”

  “It’s OK, ma’am. It’s OK,” you’re saying, now showing her the palms of both of your hands and spreading your fingers and flapping them down with that international sign language to just calm the fuck down.

  “Take it easy,” you say. “I’m just trying to help you, ma’am. Please.”

  As you bend to show your face in her window, you see the watery blue eyes and the tension in the wrinkled forehead and the flaccid muscles of her arms shaking with the effort to keep her hands up.

  “Please, ma’am. You can put your hands down, please. Just let me see your driver’s license and registration, please,” you say, now falling back into procedural mode and realizing that you haven’t done due diligence by calling in the tag number before making the stop. Now you have to rectify your own miscue.

  “I was only concerned, ma’am, that you might be having trouble negotiating the freeway. It is dark, ma’am, and traffic moves fairly briskly along this stretch of road. I was afraid you were traveling at a dangerously slow rate, uh, Mrs.
Mitchell,” you say, now looking at the license, which is a renewal she’s probably received through the mail for the last forty years without having to take an eye or reflex test. Her date of birth, you can now see, is 1936.

  So after telling her to please stay in the car, you walk around to the back of her vehicle. Backward, right? What the fuck were you thinking? No cop in his right mind makes a traffic stop with his lights spinning in front of the vehicle he’s pulled over. But you stand there behind her Town Car, jotting down the license tag number, and then you hear something that registers ever so slightly in the synapses of your brain. The sound of upcoming traffic has changed. And the spray of light from the headlights behind you also changes. Suddenly, the ambient light has instantly decreased by one degree.

  You hear the upcoming whine of engine before you see the car. Out of your peripheral vision, the front of an older model grill, the big chromed-up steel ones they used when cars were still solid and heavy, is rushing up in the pull-over lane. The car’s headlights are off. You perceive only a winking reflection in the old grillwork, and you have just a millisecond to turn to face the onrushing steel. Since you’re an excellent athlete, your instant reaction is to try and jump.

  You do not hear the impact. Your brain shuts down-all black. All silent, an automatic response by the organism, they tell you later, a response to what your animal system tells you is instant death.

  – 2 -

  “Jesus,” I said, and not in the cynical way I usually take the Lord’s name in vain, but with a true amount of awe and sympathy. “He was pinned?”

  “When the first highway patrol troopers got there, they could see him in their headlights,” Sherry said. “His torso was still straight up, not slumped over the hood or anything. They said his head was back and his mouth wide open, like he was yelling to the sky. But he wasn’t making a sound.”

  “Jesus,” I said again, putting the image in my head, and then having a hard time shaking it out. Maybe Sherry could sense my discomfort, or maybe she just went back to concentrating on the macadam roadway, because she went silent for a while. She hadn’t even gotten to the point of why she was telling me the tale.

  All that came out of her now was that rhythmic breathing and the almost imperceptible grunt of effort each time she pushed the wheels of her wheelchair, spinning them forward, her wrists feathering up like a rower does when he’s finishing a stroke in a skull. Her chair would glide for a second while she exhaled, re-cocking her arms and preparing to spin again.

  I was riding next to her, peddling in a middle gear on a ten-speed touring bike. When we’d first started coming out here to Shark Valley in the southern Everglades, I actually jogged next to her while she rode the chair. She wouldn’t let me push her-never had. Even the day she left the hospital, only a week after having her leg amputated, she refused to let anyone push her wheelchair.

  Then after two days at home, she decided to take herself down the ramp I’d built off her back porch. She figured out a way to open the wooden gate herself, and was rolling down the street “to breathe some fresh air, for God’s sake, Max,” she’d snapped when I’d asked what the hell she thought she was doing. “That room, the house, the walls. It’s like being in a freaking cell up at Raiford.”

  I’d started to say something about her not knowing what being in a Florida State Prison cell was truly like, even though she’d sent more than a few convicts up the line as a detective with the Broward Sheriff’s Office. But I’d learned to keep my mouth shut at such times. Sherry had lost her leg during a camping trip I’d taken her on in the Glades. I’d been ignorant of a churning hurricane in the lower gulf. Then I’d soaked our only cell phone in a stupid move to dunk her playfully.

  After her leg was shattered in the storm, I was the one who’d led us into a spider’s nest of criminal assholes, putting both of us in jeopardy. The fishing shack we’d gone to wasn’t what it appeared to be-not to us, or to the idiots who were looting camps after the storm. When armed muscle for the real owners showed up, we got caught in the crossfire. The result was the loss of Sherry’s limb. I would never forgive myself.

  So what Sherry Richards wanted to do these days, we did. If she wanted to get out of the house, I brought her here, a peaceful six-mile loop of macadam off the old Tamiami Trail on which folks could ride through a true Everglades meadow. To me, it was breathtaking: green-gold saw grass spread out to the horizon and lit by a rising sun in the morning, standing lakes of shallow water in the rainy season rippling in the wind and alive at times with hovering dragonflies and darters and the occasional bream that scooped up the insects from below. When I’d point out these marvels of nature to Sherry as we cruised along, I got mostly an uninterested nod. Such observances were not her idea of breathtaking anymore.

  The first time we came out here, I’d walked alongside her, both of us breathing the humid, earth-cleaned air. I watched her carefully to make sure she didn’t overheat in the South Florida sun. I carried lots of water and kept my cell phone in my pocket, ready at all times. I’d had to jog to keep up with her and drank most of the water myself. The next trip, I ran the entire six-mile loop; she was waiting for me at the end. Finally, I rented a bike, and we’d been doing it that way ever since. Sherry was a triathlete before her amputation. Now she was a driven, disabled triathlete with a chip on her shoulder.

  I’d told myself a thousand times in the last six months to let it go, let her work it out, let her master it; then she’ll return to who she was. Neither one of us is going to be twenty-five again, but neither wanted to give up a workout, either. She’d made two concessions so far: She agreed to wear a big, floppy hat to shade her blonde head, and she took her trainer’s advice not to push so hard that she couldn’t carry on a conversation while wheeling.

  She chose the Marty Booker story. Booker was a fellow sheriff’s officer who’d lost both legs during a routine traffic stop on I-595. And why she was telling me the story? She’d been asked to meet with Booker, to talk with him, to counsel him. I was just happy not to have been the one giving her that assignment.

  “The captain and one of the department psychs thought it would be a good idea. It’s the old ‘brothers-in-arms’ drill: You’ve been through what he’s going to have to go through. You’ll have a reference point. Maybe you can help him,” Sherry finally went on.

  “I didn’t see anybody helping you,” I said, trying to be on her side, even though I knew the only reason she hadn’t had a counselor or therapist or shrink to lean on when she was rehabbing, was that she was stubbornly adamant that she’d didn’t need help.

  “Yeah, well, they’re saying he’s having a hard time adjusting. Way too distracted and quiet and internal. He’s not opening up at all, even to family. So they’re thinking one crip cop to another, maybe we can connect.”

  “And you agreed,” I said, maybe letting a tinge of surprise sneak into my voice: Sherry as therapist and a sounding board? Not her style.

  “I heard stories about the guy before he got hit. He was too wild, too into himself, too much of that ‘cop as soldier’ stuff. Who needs that in their squad?” Sherry said. “But now, you know, he’s a wheelie like me. I’m thinking maybe it’s not a bad idea to talk to him.”

  That said, she exhaled and did the silent thing again. Whoosh, glide. Whoosh, glide. Whoosh, glide. Not a word. Over the last few months, I’d thought I’d learned to deal with this.

  Sherry had always been independent, and proud of it. But she wasn’t selfish. She’d once taken in a friend being abused by a cop husband. She was always first to jump into a homicide case, to do the extra work others hadn’t thought of. Before she shared her thoughts on cases with me, even though I wasn’t officially a part of the law enforcement family anymore, it was usually the ethical quandaries she wanted to talk about.

  Now she would go someplace in silence, in her own thoughts, seeing images only she could watch in her head, to a place that I could only speculate about: Was it anger over the loss of her l
eg, or a loathing of her own body? Was it self-pity that someone of her character would naturally fight against? A submerged hatred of me, given what my decisions had brought upon her?

  I took this new flicker of thought, this idea that she felt a responsibility to reach out to someone else, as a good thing.

  While we took a long bend in the trail, I accepted her silence and focused instead on a dark blip in the saw grass ahead. As we got closer, I could make out the green-black body of an alligator halfway out of the lake, up on the shore with its snout up in the air as if it were smelling the breeze. Twenty yards closer, and I could see that it was huge, a fifteen-footer at least. And it had something in its jaws. Twenty more yards, and I could see that wedged in the gator’s mouth was a Florida soft-shell turtle, the size of one of those big picnic salad bowls.

  “Whoa,” I said, and slowed down. The gator concentrated on its catch. Sherry whizzed by on the trail thirty feet away without once turning her head.

  I stopped and watched. The gator paid me no mind and continued to work its jaws, applying pressure. I could hear the turtle’s shell crackling as the teeth split its plastron: It was still alive, kicking its feet, stretching out its neck in a futile attempt to escape.

  – 3 -

  Billy Manchester was outside-well, his version of outside. He was standing at the railing of the outdoor patio of his penthouse apartment overlooking the island of Palm Beach and the Atlantic beyond. It was the kind of South Florida morning that’s lured people to this part of the country for more than a hundred years: sky clear and azure blue, air that’s clean and crisp and unsullied by pollution, carrying with it a salt scent of ocean water. The sun warm on the skin, containing an intensity that makes every color pop with a brightness you just don’t find in northern climes.