The kid looked at his mom, who turned away. Andres stepped back to clear a path for the boy. The kid sneered at me, but turned off his game, got up, and left sullenly, taking his time-the only thing left to do to show his tail wasn’t between his legs.
“Sit down,” I said to Andres, motioning him to the empty couch. With the butt of the gun as a visual aide, I directed the girlfriend, “Join him.”
She copied the same slow motion as her son, but moved. I planted the muzzle of the gun onto the floor between my feet. When I felt I had Andres’s attention, I started.
“I talked with the guy you call the Brown Man today,” I said. Andres looked up at me without moving his chin. “He’s a drug dealer who used to sell crack on the street to junk men and whores.
“He’s probably doing the same thing now, but his clientele has changed and he’s moved up off the corners and into your warehouse. Tell me what you know about him.”
The girlfriend had stopped at the hallway corner and snuck a look at Andres, who kept his head down, his eyes seemingly on the video game controller the boy had dropped on the floor.
“They said he’s a bad dude and not to fuck with him,” Andres said. “Nobody but the guy who runs the place and the IT dude ever say anything to him. But he’s OK to me. He says hello to me when he sees me.”
“Like one of his punk runners,” the girlfriend said with a little snort in her voice.
I was losing my patience. “Shut up or leave,” I said, staring at her. She would not meet my eyes, but slouched against the wall.
I turned back to Andres. “Is the Brown Man there all the time?”
“No. I only see him once in a while. But when he’s there, everybody gets nervous, you know-uptight. Even the IT guy gets nervous, and all he does is the computer work. He don’t have nothin’ to do with the drugs.”
“So the Brown Man’s like the enforcer or something?”
“No. He ain’t carryin’ or nothin’ like that. But they all straighten up when he’s there, even the guy who’s like the manager,” Andres said. “It’s like he’s got the juice, man, and everybody knows it.”
It sounded like Carlyle had a trigger somewhere-the threat of exposure, of violence, of start-up money the operation was beholden to.
“Has he ever brought anyone else into the warehouse-someone like a partner?”
“Uh, uh, not like a partner. But he was with a dude once who I know was a Monroe Heights Posse.”
“Gang member?”
“Yeah. They were looking at the product, you know, the drugs and shit.”
“Same as the guys who were chasing you?”
“Nah, different crew, but from the same area in Riviera Beach, you know.”
“No, I don’t know,” I said.
What I did know was that Carlyle, if he was even close to the businessman and investor he said he was, would have some pretty extensive contacts in the criminal world. And he wouldn’t give up those contacts even as he supposedly rose beyond selling crack to prostitutes on the corner. If he’d somehow bled his old world into the new world of medical and prescription fraud, he wouldn’t necessarily leave all his violent tactics of coercion and control behind, either.
I could go hash this all out with Billy, or I could sit here in a filthy trailer with a couple of brass-balled neophytes who weren’t going to listen to an ex-cop anyway. I stood up and pushed the kitchen chair back behind me with my foot.
“I’m offering you a place to hide out one last time,” I said. Neither of them moved.
I went to the door, turned the knob, and then let the shotgun fall to the floor. I’d had enough.
“Good luck then,” I said, and left.
W HEN I GOT back to the Gran Fury, I climbed in and called Billy. Even though it was 1:00 A.M., he answered before the second ring.
“The kid won’t move,” I said. “His girlfriend has him under her thumb, and he isn’t going to do anything that makes him look weak in her eyes.”
“Machismo,” Billy said.
“Comes with the territory.”
Lots of people talk about personal responsibility. When idiots do stupid things that turn out badly, those same people still cry that someone else should have stepped in and saved them. There are times I get sick of it. Billy rarely does. He sees the good in people, despite the world that has unfolded in front of him since he was a skinny projects kid toughing it out in Northwest Philly.
“I say we turn him in, Max. We give the trailer location to the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office and let them arrest him on the outstanding warrant from the chase. At least in lockup he’ll be safe,” Billy said.
“Your call, Counselor,” I said. “I’m going home.”
– 17 -
A T 7:00 A.M., I was lying next to Sherry when my cell rang. It felt like I’d been in bed for ten minutes. The last vision in my head before falling asleep was of a young girl sitting in the dark, an opened textbook in front of her, her face illuminated by a white flame.
I reached out and flipped open the phone.
“I just got a call from my contact in the sheriff’s office,” Billy announced, his voice stoic and businesslike. “Andres Carmen’s trailer caught fire at four this morning. They found three bodies. I have to go tell Luz that her brother is dead.”
“Jesus, Billy! When did you call in the loca-” But before I could finish, he hung up. I sat straight up, staring at the rippled light against the bedroom wall.
“What is it?” Sherry said. Her voice was sleepy, but as a cop she was always on alert for calls in the night.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, swinging my feet out of the bed. “I think we lost some people we shouldn’t have.”
Sherry rolled up on one elbow.
“The Carmen family?”
The woman didn’t miss much.
“The brother,” I said, standing up and grabbing for my pants, which still seemed warm. “His girlfriend, and probably her teenage son.”
Sherry was silent while I got dressed.
“You saved him once, Max,” she said just before I left, a last-minute attempt to salve my soul.
I parked in the same place I had just eight hours ago. When I opened the door to the Gran Fury, I could smell the place once again, this time differently. The odors of animal feces, cooked fish, and dry garbage were now overwhelmed by that of acidic smoke, melted plastic, and charred wood. My route was less circuitous this time. I didn’t circle and watch. Instead, I walked straight to the spot where Andres Carmen’s trailer once stood, or as closely as the cops would allow.
A couple of community service aides were keeping onlookers at a fifty-foot distance, back behind the two fire engines that were still on the scene, spinning their red lights through the thick morning air. There was one sheriff’s office patrol car parked where the driveway to the burned trailer used to be. The absence of a medical examiner’s vehicle told me the bodies had already been removed. Residents stood in small clusters, some still dressed in housecoats or hurriedly tossed-on sweatshirts and sneakers. They watched the firefighters rooting through the ashes with crowbars and shovels, turning up clumps of curled aluminum and still smoking wood, as if some survivor were going to rise from the blackness to their astonishment and applause.
I noted a uniformed official standing at the center of the mass, about where I’d stood talking with Andres and his girlfriend, Cheryl. The officer was videotaping the scene. The fire marshal, designated by his stenciled windbreaker, was at the north end, taking close-up photographs of something at his feet.
I stood and surveyed the area with my hands in my pockets. You didn’t have to be an expert to see that there had been a sizable explosion. The burn pattern radiated out in streaks, and there was charring in the trees too high and away from where flames would have risen straight up from a normal fire. Soot flash covered the facing walls of both adjacent trailers, but there was no extensive fire damage. The picnic table where Billy, Andres, and I sat two days earlier was flipped on its face, the wooden legs smoldering, but still intact. If I was guessing, ground zero would have been at the north end of the trailer where the bedrooms had been, and where the fire marshal was now. The trailer was obliterated there. What was left of the rest of the structure was peeled back like an enormous charred cigar that had been loaded with a stupid exploding tip.