Midnight Guardians Read online

  “Nice rig,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Booker said, thumping the wheels with the heels of his hand. “Nothing but the best for a gimped-up cop; your county tax dollars at work.”

  But he quickly dumped the cynical tone and returned Sherry’s attempt to break the ice by assessing her own chair.

  “Yours ain’t bad, either. Built for speed, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Sherry said. “Lightweight alloy, it’s good for distances.”

  Booker nodded and looked down in his lap. “Never was one for the long run. More of a short blast kinda’ guy.”

  Sherry was silent, seemingly lost for words, an unusual predicament for her. I was starting to feel an uneasy creaking in my knees, like I needed to move and get out of the way. But then I sensed the movement of others in the room as a couple of the corner lifters inched their way over to us.

  “And hell, now he’s an even shorter blast,” said a voice from the group, a comical tone in his voice. “Just kidding…”

  Sherry pulled one wheel back, spinning her chair around.

  “Well, it’s you, Detective Sergeant Richards,” said a mutt-faced man dressed in a black stretch-fabric shirt, hemmed above the shoulders to show his bulky biceps, and tight at the waist. His matching black shorts were as loose as the shirt was tight, hanging down below his knees. He had one of those half-smiling faces on that tries to show he’s being friendly and funny, but smart-assed and dangerous at the same time. It probably worked on teenage girls looking for adventure. It only made me begin flexing and curling my fingers.

  “Never seen you in here before, Detective,” the man said with one of those glances back at his friends, to indicate he was speaking for all them. “Trying to get back in shape, ma’am?”

  Sherry cut a look at Booker to assess his reaction. I figured she was looking for something that might indicate friends or foes. When she got no sign, she turned back to mutt-face.

  “Did someone invite you over here, McKenzie?” she said to the guy. “Because we’re having a conversation that entails stringing nouns, verbs, and adjectives together, so I doubt that you have the capacity to participate.”

  I heard a couple of sniggers escape from someone’s mouth. Sherry was still staring at mutt-face, a.k.a. McKenzie, who, I’d guessed by now, was some sort of cop. Despite being verbally dinged in front of his buds, he kept the faked-up smile on his face in place.

  “Hey, you’re a stitch, Detective,” he said, gesturing to Sherry’s missing leg, “pardon the pun. But we were just wondering if maybe you were recruiting for some special unit with our buddy Booker here—a new gimp patrol or something.”

  I did not move. I’m about six feet three and a lean and ambling 215 pounds. I’m quicker than I look, and I knew my stamina was twice as good as anyone in the room other than Sherry. She on the other hand is as lean as a cheetah. Everyone here outmuscled us in bulk. It would be nasty if we had to get into it. But I’d learned over the years to let Sherry handle her own situations. To interfere is to hint that she can’t take care of herself, and that’s the last thing anyone in their right mind would want to do with Sherry.

  She just nodded at the gimp patrol comment and then gestured to McKenzie’s crotch, matching his cynical smile.

  “Why, McKenzie?” she said. “You have a recent amputation or something? You are looking a little light these days.”

  Now the sniggers turned to laughter, peppered with a few woofs.

  “Smart mouth for a girl in a wheelchair,” McKenzie said.

  I could see him flex the muscle in his abnormal-size neck, giving Sherry that shrug they must learn when they’re posing in front of the mirror. It’s not much different behavior from that of a cane toad that puffs itself up to appear bigger, in order to scare off an attacker.

  McKenzie was sizing me up. I had several inches on him, but we were probably the same weight. I’d have him on reach if it got physical, but you’d have to be careful not to let him get a hold of you.

  “Don’t look at him, dickless,” Sherry said, careful not to let anger seep into her voice, thereby letting the scenario spin out as locker room jibbing. “Challenge me, tough guy.” She waved her hand around the room, indicating the variety of workout machines.

  “Let’s see if you can make my short list,” she said, looking him up and down. “Excuse the pun.”

  McKenzie huffed and looked back at his buddies. And when no help was offered, he turned around to Sherry. “You choose, little girl,” he said.

  Sherry looked around like she was deciding, but I knew exactly where she was going.

  “Dips, rockhead,” she said, pointing at two matching iron towers that included pronged handles at about chest height. She wheeled over and McKenzie and his gang followed. When she unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it off to reveal a workout bra underneath, I instantly wondered if she’d had this scenario in mind all along. Her arms and shoulders rippled with finely cut muscles, slim and corded, devoid of any softness that might indicate fat of any kind.

  McKenzie stepped up and peeled off his shirt to go naked from the waist. He flexed his pectorals, which jumped like trained gerbils on his chest, and then tried to stretch his huge biceps, which because of their size seemed to bend his arms at a permanent angle.

  An older man in khakis and a polo shirt with the gym’s logo stitched on the breast appeared from behind the half-wall office and sauntered over. When he caught my eye and recognized me as a stranger, I gave him a shrug, as if I had no idea what was going on. He stood next to me and folded his arms, watching.

  After locking the wheels on her chair, Sherry pushed herself to a standing position. On one leg, she hopped over to the machine on the right and positioned herself between the handles that flanked her shoulders. She put her palms on the two grips, with her elbows cocked behind her shoulders. The fabric of her bra stretched tight across her breasts. McKenzie followed suit on the machine next to her, his smile intact.

  “Count out your own reps, McKenzie,” Sherry said. “Unless you need help from your boys here if you get past ten.”

  She took a small hop and pressed herself up into a locked elbow position, and then lowered herself to the start. Then she pressed her entire body weight up again. McKenzie jumped up on his tower to match her.

  “One, two, three…”

  The music in the place had changed over to “Down ‘n’ Dirty” by Steelheart. I took the gym manager by the elbow and urged him toward his office.

  “Maybe you could show me what kind of contract you have for a membership,” I said.

  — 7 —

  I KNEW THE outcome of Sherry’s little “challenge” without watching or listening. But the manager couldn’t keep himself from peering around the corner of his cubicle for the first sixty seconds of our impromptu meeting.

  Sherry has been doing those dips ever since I’ve known her. She’s been knocking them out on the curved stainless handles of the ladder into her pool for years. Even back then, she could do thirty reps without breathing hard. After her amputation, and the consequent loss of 20 percent of her body weight, I’d seen her do fifty before giving up, seemingly out of boredom. Mutt-faced McKenzie had maxed out at twenty-three. He was, of course, pressing an enormous muscle mass, which weighs even more than fat.

  After Sherry had kicked his ass in front of his other lifter friends, she invited Booker to lunch quietly. I thanked the gym manager for a brochure and followed them out, depositing the printed materials in a trash can outside. On the sidewalk, Sherry and Booker wheeled over to a café on A1A. But I begged off, opting to go sit on the beachfront retaining wall with my feet in the sand and watch a trio of kite surfers fly off the waves and swells of the ocean in the shimmering sunlight.

  Less than an hour later, I heard Sherry’s wheels crunching on the sandy sidewalk behind me. I let her pull up beside me, without turning. She said nothing, and I hoped she was enjoying the same sight I was. She knew, of course, that I was aware of her presence. It’s a g
ift that couples gain over time.

  Finally, she broke the silence.

  “Want to go swimming?”

  When I turned to see if she was serious, the mischievous smile on her face answered the question. Then she stood up, put her palms on the three-foot-tall wall, and swung her torso and leg over it like a gymnast on a pommel horse. I leaned across and folded her chair before hoisting it over and laying it down in the sand for minimal safekeeping. While still sitting, we both took off our shirts and shoes, and then I looked at her with a question I didn’t want to ask. How did she want to get down to the water? Hop across the sand in front of two dozen sunbathers, or have me carry her?

  Again she read my mind. And without hesitation, she stood up on one leg, and then leaned over to lock her arms around my neck, shifting her weight onto my back.

  “Giddy-up, hoss,” she said, and I could feel the infectious smile behind my neck. I grinned and stood, adjusted her weight on my back, and then we half jogged across thirty yards of sand and into the white foam of low breakers.

  We swam with the noncompetitive purpose of pleasure alone, for a while breaststroking, our faces popping up from the surface in slow rhythm, eyes blinking away salt water with each breath, and then letting the coolness wash over our faces again as we dipped our heads below. Then, at a distance from shore, we rolled over on our backs and floated, with our views of the sky the same: a cloudless canvas of blue like a porcelain cup covering our limited horizons. I could feel the movement of the sea, the rise and fall of deep waves.

  As I sneaked a look over at Sherry, I saw that her eyes were open, but relaxed. I knew she was coming down from her earlier shot of adrenaline in the showdown with McKenzie. It was a rare pleasure to see her this way; I closed my eyes and enjoyed it.

  Let her tell me what she wants to tell me, I thought. It might have been thirty minutes, it might have been an hour, but broken snatches of her voice finally brought me out of a trance.

  “You know… kind of like… tell but didn’t.”

  “What?” I said, rolling over and bringing my head and ears out of the water.

  Sherry made the same maneuver and looked at me.

  “Sorry. I was just talking out loud, I guess.”

  “Couldn’t hear you, babe.”

  “The meet with Booker,” she said. “Very odd.”

  We were now treading water next to each other about fifty yards from shore. We both turned toward land and did a kind of head-out-of-water stroke, slowly heading in.

  “First, he tried to apologize for McKenzie and the other assholes, saying they didn’t mean anything by it, and they weren’t really such bad guys.”

  If it were possible to shake one’s head in a bobbing sea, I shook my head.

  “Then he said something about them being the kind of animals that see a weakness in their prey and go after it.”

  “What the hell was that about?” I said.

  “Well, he tried to cover then by saying it was good police tactics, knowing the street, knowing the opponent.”

  “So the rest of those guys were cops?”

  “I only recognized three or four of them. Mostly District Three, the area they call the danger zone,” she said.

  “And that’s where Booker worked?”

  “Yeah, it’s been like some competitive club atmosphere out there for years—lots of macho shit. The captain in charge tries to keep a lid on it, but he also likes the image of being rough and ready. So he lets a lot go.”

  I kept stroking. Everybody knows that kind of culture exists in policing. It’s natural, and sometimes even essential. You wouldn’t want a bunch of schoolteachers trying to control a riot. You can’t have a crew of desk jockeys running into a burning high-rise to carrying people down the smoking staircase. There’s going to be a macho element in every department. You cook up a blend of testosterone, a heightened sense of authority, an emphasis on physical conditioning, and pepper it up with a dash of gun oil, and you can’t avoid it. Good police management keeps it in check. I’d seen it in Philadelphia. I’d seen it fail in Philadelphia.

  After a few minutes of silent swimming, I could see the sand below us. I stopped and stood. Sherry did the same on one leg, and then continued talking.

  “The scuttlebutt has always been that a pack of these lifter cops are into steroids and uppers, but internal affairs can’t—or won’t—get involved. I sure wasn’t going to get into that with Booker. So I changed the subject and asked him if he’d tried to do his physical therapy at the hospital rehab center. I told him it would be a lot more effective, that the specialists there know a lot more about range of motion and balance, instead of just muscle building.”

  “And?”

  “It pissed him off. He said, ‘Yeah, I could see how your range of motion helped you out back in the gym.’”

  “So what are you going to report to your boss?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. The guy’s got some rage, which is understandable. But he isn’t doing the ‘poor me’ gig, or the self-loathing. He is however, pulling himself under for some reason. There’s some kind of struggle going on inside, but who the hell knows what?”

  As Sherry spoke, I watched her eyes. She was being more psychologically analytical with this guy Booker than I’d ever heard her be about her own situation. I caught myself thinking this might be a good thing for both her and him.

  “Was he willing to talk with you again?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” she answered, and then turned back to the east, watching the roll of the sea, bouncing lightly on her foot and waving her palms underwater to stay balanced.

  I moved in behind her and pushed my chest against her back and wrapped my arms around her.

  “This is nice, eh?”

  “Yeah,” she said, relaxing against me, moving with the motion of the sea. “And I’m sorry about last night, Max.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  — 8 —

  ON FRIDAY, I ended up at Billy’s, doing the kind of investigative research he always likes to foist on me.

  “They say the criminal element will always be one step ahead of law enforcement, Max. But that’s only because law enforcement spends so much time reacting instead of being proactive.

  “By the time the DEA figured out that smugglers were sending cocaine inside hollowed-out railroad ties, they’d already moved on to molding the coke to look like plaster columns and sending it in as construction material.

  “By the time the feds were warning people about identity fraud and keeping their social security numbers safe in their pockets, the hackers were already infiltrating the big data storage companies and pulling out millions of numbers for their own use.”

  I nodded, and let Billy go on in the kitchen while I sat out on the patio reading a sheaf of U.S. attorney and media reports he’d given me.

  “… the crime began when an employee at the Cleveland Clinic stole fifteen hundred Medicare patients’ numbers and sold them to companies that billed the government about eight million in bogus health care claims…”

  And another.

  “‘… while we know these numbers are being used by criminals… the criminals can use them again and again,’” said the U.S. attorney. “‘That is a fundamental problem…’”

  A newspaper clipping:

  “…six Miami-Dade medical equipment suppliers are charged with submitting eight million in bogus Medicare bills to insurance companies for services and equipment that were never provided to the patients. In turn, the Medicare system paid them about two and a half million…”

  And yet another:

  “… in sworn testimony before the Senate Committee on Finance, a witness explained how she was able to set up a sham company with three thousand dollars and obtain a Medicare billing number, even though she had no prior experience, expertise, or discernable resources for providing durable medical equipment items or services. In th
e year her company operated, she was able to bill Medicare more than a million dollars…”

  I had already closed the file by the time Billy came out onto the patio with a tall glass of vegetable juice in his hand and a smug look on his face, the kind you got from instructors or your parents when they were proud of teaching you something you didn’t know.

  “So, M-Max—what do you th-think? Motive?”

  “A million bucks for shifting around a bunch of numbers?” I said. “Sure—goes on every day at the casinos, down at the track, and on Wall Street.”

  Billy looked askance, lifting his eyebrow. I knew he was a big-time investor, played the stock market on a daily basis. It was one of the things we differed on: He would argue that those who got in the financial game knew the rules and the nature of the beast, and thus took personal responsibility for their losses and gains. I would counter that the financial guys also knew the ways around those rules, not unlike the criminals who can crack safes and avoid surveillance cameras to get what they wanted. It was a subject we stayed away from.

  “I m-meant do you think it would be m-motive enough to put Luz Carmen in physical danger, if she were tr-trying to expose such a scam and they f-found out?”

  Now it was my turn to raise the eyebrow.

  “Greed, Billy?”

  We didn’t need another symposium on how greed, sex, and power form the motivations for almost all the nasty thing humans do to one another.

  “OK,” he said. “Then I w-would suggest you go ahead with the surveillance of Ms. Carmen’s br-brother, while I tr-try to track down some p-people I know with the FBI’s white-collar crime pr-program in Miami.”

  “All right, boys,” a woman’s lilting voice came from inside. “I heard the phrase FBI, which means you’re talking shop. I have not yet left for work—beware.”

  “Good morning, Judge,” I said as Billy’s wife, Diane, rattled around in the kitchen. “I didn’t know you were still here.”