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 the year her company operated, she was able to bill Medicare more than a million dollars…”