A Killing Night Read online

  I told Earl to stay inside for a while and the giant man either chuckled or belched and said: “Wasn’t plannin’ nothin’ but.”

  I went out on the sidewalk and took up a spot in the shadows just east of the restaurant where I could watch Hector’s stash house. The night was warm with the smell of alley trash mixed with exhaust fumes. If I smoked I would have lit a cigarette. I hated stakeouts. After twenty minutes my portable radio hummed with static and I stepped further back and answered.

  “Just passed your squad, Freeman. You on foot again?” It was my narcotics friends.

  “Affirmative.”

  “Switching to tack four,” he said. I switched the channel on the radio to a less congested frequency where half the district wouldn’t be listening in.

  “We’re calling in some patrol backup for a perimeter and we’ll be going in through the back. You’ll have some help when we go, Freeman. But you’ve got the front for now.”

  “I’m ten-thirteen.”

  A young couple came out of Mamma’s and got in their car. When they pulled out, I saw their headlights slide over a dark figure across the street who was moving down the east side alley, the word police stenciled onto his back in bold yellow letters. I walked back down to Mamma’s entrance where Earl was standing, watching his customers drive away.

  “Do me a favor, Earl,” I said. “Keep everybody inside for the next few minutes.”

  He nodded his head, but his eyes stayed level, focused on something over my shoulder. I turned and saw Hector coming out of the west side alley, just starting to pull his sweatshirt hood up over his head, and he looked into my face.

  “We’re going in,” the entry team’s leader spat out from the radio at my side and the crackle was like a starter’s pistol. Hector bolted.

  “I got a runner,” I barked into the radio and started sprinting.

  Most foot pursuits are useless. Belts and radios and handguns and batons flailing on your hips. And most cops won’t muster the kind of adrenaline it takes to outrun the fuel of fear that is jacking up the guy they’re chasing. But Hector had become a special case for me, and he wasn’t much of a track star. Within a block I was gaining on him. He made a stupid move no non-athlete should attempt by trying to hurdle and slide over the hood of a parked car to make the corner. He went down and I heard that ugly snap of leg bone when he hit the street. He’d gained one knee when I got a fistful of hood and hair and yanked him back down to the ground.

  The kid reacted to the pain by squirming, but I put my own knee into the middle of his back and pushed his face into the asphalt with one hand while using the other on my radio.

  “This is Freeman. My runner is in custody,” I said, then had to catch my breath and look around. “Uh, corner of South and Thirteenth.”

  Hector had smartened up and quit struggling when the headlights of a car caught us from the north and stopped. I squinted into the brightness and heard the car door slam.

  “Goddamn, Freeman. What kinda squirrelly animal you got there?”

  When the uniform and the face stepped up I recognized Patrolman O’Shea. He was too handsome to be a real cop, and every time I saw him he had a bemused look on his Irish face.

  “You on the perimeter, O’Shea?”

  “Yeah. Heard on the tack that you had something going, Freeman.”

  I clipped my radio and took my handcuffs off my belt. O’Shea leaned in.

  “Hey, it’s good ole Hector down there. How you doin’, boy?” he said, and then I felt and heard the patrolman kick the kid hard underneath me.

  “Nasty-looking angle on that leg bone, Hector,” O’Shea said. “Guess you won’t be running too much in the yard over at Greaterford.”

  Hector sucked at his teeth in pain and whispered something about someone’s madre. O’Shea cocked his boot.

  “Hey, I got him, O’Shea,” I said. “I got him under control here.”

  The words had barely cleared my mouth when the crack of gunfire sounded in the distance down South Street. O’Shea and I both looked up and stared out into the pools of shadow and light. Within seconds I caught a glimpse of spinning blue lights and heard the swell of sirens. I’d paid little attention to the movement of the kid below me and was just fumbling with the radio when I sensed O’Shea step forward and bark: “You little bastard!”

  Hector cried out and I looked back to see a polished boot crushing the kid’s hand into a small .38 caliber pistol he’d pulled from somewhere. I dug my knee harder into his back and heard the bones in his hand crack like a crab shell as O’Shea put all of his weight into it. He then reached down and I could smell the Dentyne on his breath as he wrestled the cheap gun from under the kid’s hand and chucked it into the nearby gutter. He stood up with that smile and looked down at me.

  “Now you’re in control, Freeman,” he said. “Now you’re in control.”

  CHAPTER 5

  When I woke up in the chaise, a pair of small blue eyes was staring into my face, topped by a mop of blond hair. I blinked and focused and when I raised my hand to wipe away whatever look I was holding on my face, the boy from the shower turned and ran.

  I took a couple of minutes to orient myself, caught some bits of the dream still behind my eyes and then checked my watch. I’d been asleep two hours. I needed to get on to Billy’s. I shaved and showered, dressed in khakis and a white un-ironed oxford shirt and slipped on my Docksides. The cab of my pickup truck still held the heat of the day so I kicked the A.C. up and pulled out, heading north on A1A. Though the trip to Billy’s apartment building would be faster on I-95, I tried to avoid that craziness of high-speed tailgaters and opted for an occasional glimpse of ocean between the mansions and condos, even at the expense of hitting dozens of traffic lights.

  When I got to the twelve-story Atlantic Towers, I pulled directly into the front visitor’s lot. Twenty-four spaces, all of them filled. As I inched down the row, the burp in the pattern of parked Acuras, Lexuses and high-end SUVs was a sedan that had backed into a spot. The driver was sitting behind the wheel. I stopped my truck and looked at the man, wondering if he was getting ready to leave. He pulled down his sunshade and waved me on. I could tell only that he was white, from the hands and thin arms. Maybe middle-aged, with a stubble-darkened chin. There was a long black telephoto lens attached to a camera body wedged on the dash and he turned his face away, searching the passenger seat for something, maybe a snack. I hated surveillance, too, I thought. By habit I filed a quick description of the car into my cop’s head and moved on. I found a spot around the corner where the maintenance people parked and where my F-150 would not seem out of place.

  The lobby of the Atlantic Towers was all polished marble and brass and the concierge/manager with the fake English accent was like part of the furnishing. He took a slight, barely perceptible bow when I approached his desk.

  “Mr. Freeman.”

  I nodded.

  “I shall call Mr. Manchester and announce you, sir.” The phone was already in his hand. I again nodded and turned to the brushed stainless door of the elevator without comment. I didn’t like the guy. Too damn frumpy. Plus, I knew he’d been born in Brooklyn and the accent was a put-on.

  The inside of the elevator was paneled dark wood and the light on the penthouse button was already on. Seconds later the doors opened onto a private alcove with a handsome set of double oak doors at one end. I raised my knuckles to knock but a turn of the European-style brass handle beat me.

  “Max, how wonderful to see you. Come in, come in,” said Diane McIntyre, swinging open the door and then reaching up on her toes to kiss my cheek.

  Billy’s attorney friend, and now fiancée, was radiant. Her hair was a glossy and subtle auburn. She was dressed in a loose silk blouse oddly paired with sky blue sweatpants and was padding around in bare feet with a glass of wine in her hand. There was a smile on her pale but slightly flushed face. She was a happy woman.

  Billy was on the other side of the huge single room, behind the kitc
hen counter, working some new magic at the stove.

  “M-Max,” he said, over his shoulder and then broke away from the steaming pot. “Y-You are l-looking healthy.”

  We shook hands and then he pulled me to him in an uncharacteristic embrace. “G-Good to see you.”

  While he got me a beer I sat on one of the stools at the counter and surveyed. I was familiar with Billy’s penthouse, had lived here my first few weeks in Florida before getting settled into the river shack. I’d come and gone often as Billy slowly pulled me into his cases as his investigator. The big, fan-shaped living area was plush with thick carpeting and wide leather sofas. Billy’s eclectic art collection adorned the textured walls and topped the blond wood tables. But I picked up some new, more colorful additions; a delicate ballerina sculpture, a large painting of a field of flowers. A woman’s touch, I thought, as Diane pulled out the stool next to me, sat and took a sip of wine.

  “So Max, let me tell you about our trip to Venice,” she said, smiling and anxious like a little kid who can’t hold an exciting tale any longer. I could see Billy grin and then while he cooked an incredible pan-seared snapper, we both listened, Billy only interrupting when he felt it was safe.

  She was halfway through a description of a stroll through the Piazza San Marco when Billy said: “I w-was trying to f-find the similarities with Fort Lauderdale, the Venice of America, b-but just the water in the canals d-didn’t do it.”

  Diane gave him a “get real” expression while he winked at me.

  Billy is a supremely confident man. He is GQ handsome, athletically built, although I have never seen him do anything physically strenuous short of captaining his forty-two-foot sailboat. He is a brilliant attorney and had proven to me personally that he could manhandle the markets by investing my police disability buyout and making me comfortable if not rich. His only flaw is the stutter that embedded itself during childhood and has remained. On the phone or even from the other room his speech is flawless. But face-to-face he cannot control the staccato that jams his tongue. The stigma kept him out of the courtroom as a trial attorney, but sharpened his abilities to research and absorb through every other method of communication. And it hadn’t seemed to slow him down when it came to beautiful women.

  What Billy may have lacked in loquaciousness, Diane McIntyre made up for. The woman could talk. But I was always impressed by the intelligence and lack of bullshit that accompanied her discourse. She eschewed the typical small talk. Rarely gave opinions on something she wasn’t knowledgeable about. And knowing that, you crossed her at your own peril.

  Once, while working a stock fraud case for Billy, I’d been in the county courthouse when she was trying an elderly-abuse case. I’d ducked into the gallery seats just as she was ripping the skin off a state administrator in cross-examination. With a controlled passion she laid out damning statistics, entered photos of bedsores on her client, documented the phone logs from the seventy-eight-year-old woman’s daughter showing calls to the administrator and the abuse hotline and recited, without notes, the state’s own rules on oversight of their licensed nursing homes and how they’d broken them. Within minutes everyone in the courtroom, including the judge, was looking at the administrator, who could do little but hang his head. I still remembered her final line: “Would you put your own mother in such a place, Mr. Silas?”

  She and Billy had been engaged since last spring. He had fallen hard, and it wasn’t just because she was gorgeous.

  Diane took us all the way through dinner and coffee with descriptions of the Basilica of Saint Mark and the Correr Museum and 2:00 A.M. wine tasting at L’Incontro. When the dishes were cleared, I thought she might continue but she gracefully excused herself with: “I’ll leave you both to business while I go make some phone calls.” Billy and I exchanged looks and took our coffee to the patio.

  The dominating feature of Billy’s apartment were the floor-to- ceiling glass doors that made up the entire eastern wall and opened onto the ocean. I stood at the railing and looked to the horizon where there was still a hint of blue.

  “Anything n-new on Harris?”

  “I’ve been watching him, but the press coverage must have pushed him under his rock for a while,” I said.

  Harris was a physician who’d been writing tons of prescriptions for pain pills to Medicare patients in return for kickbacks. Billy had been working the guy for a class action suit by a group of cancer victims. I was logging his movements and interviewing poor patients who had been or still were seeing him. We were doing well until a high-profile conservative radio talk-show personality got busted for feeding his pain pill addiction with illegal prescriptions. In the media frenzy Harris had significantly cut back his operation. But Billy had done his work and we probably had the guy nailed already. One of the radio host’s lawyers had called Billy through the attorney grapevine, but Billy had refused to share any information.

  “I’m more worried about the cruise ship guys,” I said. “Rodrigo has been real twitchy the last couple of times I went up to talk with him. He’s worried about his job and I think the others in his crew are telling him to back off getting any kind of legal representation because they’ll all get blackballed from working.”

  Billy had me working a line on a dozen cruise ship workers who had been injured in a boiler explosion as their ship was coming in to the port of Palm Beach. The cruise ship business was huge in South Florida with tens of thousands of tourists packing the floating cities for luxury trips to the Caribbean. But the unknown population was the thousands of workers, almost every one a foreigner, who cleaned and catered and served and smiled for those vacationers for wages that those same Americans wouldn’t let their teenagers work for. But the explosion had cast a light on their world belowdecks and Billy had been contacted to represent men who had been mangled and bloodied and burned during the accident. Rodrigo Colon was one of the burn victims willing to talk.

  The cruise ship company had paid for their initial medical treatment and was putting them up at a second-rate hotel, but the workers all knew that once they left the U.S., any claims to treat their injuries or compensate them for their ruined bodies would be lost. Their contracts would be ripped up and they would lose all future opportunity to work in the industry. Billy knew he couldn’t change the economics of the world, but he did think he could push the rich American cruise industry to do the right thing for those who had been disfigured and disabled in the explosion.

  “It’s w-worth it to k-keep trying, Max.”

  “Yeah, I’m bringing Rodrigo in to see you,” I said. “Maybe you can convince him to recruit the others.”

  I was watching the blackening ocean. An uneven cloud cover blocked any early stars. Billy was waiting me out.

  “Anything else g-going on out there?” he finally said.

  I took a long sip of coffee and blew the heat out of my mouth into the sea air and told him about Richards’s call and her request of me to interrogate an old Philly cop I’d worked with.

  “That’s w-what she said? Interrogate?”

  “Maybe not that specific,” I said. “She asked me to talk to him. Gave me the option. Didn’t want me to think I owed her.”

  I was thinking of the dream, of O’Shea digging the gun out of Hector the Collector’s hand. Did I owe him, too? Billy let the silence hang between us. It was not uncomfortable, but I could feel his eyes on the side of my face.

  “I thought you t-two were through.”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “I thought she was through with me.”

  Later I turned down the invitation to spend the night in the guest room. Things had changed in Billy’s house. Diane came out of the den to kiss me good night and I was at the door when I stopped.

  “Speaking of surveillance,” I said, trying to be amusing, something I should have given up long ago, “I suspect you’ve got some paparazzi in the parking lot shooting film of your fellow residents or their guests.”

  They both looked at each other. Billy was fi
rst to shrug his shoulders. It was unlike him not to ask for details, but no questions were forthcoming. I backed out.

  “Just be careful not to wear anything trashy out front,” I said to Diane, pointing my finger from the blouse to the sweatpants.

  “Good night, Max,” she said and smiled, and I turned to the elevator and heard the oak doors lock behind me.

  CHAPTER 6

  He walked in, let his eyes adjust to the low light, and was pleased to see two open stools at the end of the bar—one for himself and the other for quiet. He’d been here before, a neighborhood place the way he liked. A single, twenty-foot real wood bar spanned one wall, its lacquered surface redone enough times to make the deep grain look like it was floating just below the surface. The lights rarely went to half strength, even during happy hour. Tonight there were two groups of drinkers along the bar: Three guys and a girl in the middle, all friendly and chatty. Three more men at the other end by the windows with shot glasses in front of them and colored liquor on ice at the side.

  He sat on the stool at the other end and hooked a heel on the rung of the empty one next to him, staking claim on the space. He knew the bartender who was working the shift alone. She was in her mid-thirties and had lost her figure to the years but her face was still pretty. She came his way and stopped at the thigh-high cooler under the bar and pulled out a Rolling Rock, and uncapped it on her way.

  “Hi, how are you tonight?” she said with a pleasant smile and put the bottle on a napkin in front of him. Her eyes were brown and clear and he’d determined when he’d met her before that he didn’t like the intelligence he saw inside them.

  “Fine, thanks,” he answered, being pleasant himself. He took a long drink and looked into the mirror behind the liquor bottles on the shelves behind her. When he focused he could use the reflection of another wall of mirrors on the opposite side of the room and watch the drinkers all down the line. He liked that aspect of the place, being able to watch without being noticed. A television tuned to ESPN hung in the corner above him. The sound was off and one of the wry announcers was moving his mouth around while photos of boxer Mike Tyson flashed behind him.