“Please don’t let him get hurt, Mr. Freeman,” Carmen said, looking into my eyes. Her strong will couldn’t hold the tear drop this time.
I stayed silent, waiting.
“My height, my coloring,” she finally said. “He wears a Marlins baseball cap, turned backward. You know how they do. And he is driving an old Toyota, dusty white you know, from the sun.”
“And how old is he?”
“He is nineteen years old.”
“So he’s not a juvenile.” It was a statement, not a question.
“His date of birth is June fourteenth, nineteen-ninety,” she said looking hard into my eyes.
“You know Mr. Manchester is a lawyer?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll look up your brother’s juvenile record.”
“And you will find it,” she said, losing a bit of the bravado now. “I am very much trying to save him, Mr. Freeman.”
She was back to staring at her fingers, the rubbing more severe now. And for some reason, I was thinking about the callus she’d built up on that fine delicate knuckle of hers. I was trying to think of something to say to assure her that things will be all right, when I knew they wouldn’t. And while both of us were avoiding eye contact, I began to hear the thrumming of an electronic heartbeat pulsing somewhere in the distance, and growing.
When I looked up out from the shade of the tree, I saw a metallic green Chevrolet Monte Carlo swinging through the parking lot, its chrome wheels spinning the sunlight. The windows were illegal black. The driver didn’t seem to be in a hurry. At first, I thought it was “just kids.” But when I turned and looked back at Carmen, she was knitting her brow.
“It’s OK, Ms. Carmen,” I said.
But she was looking past my shoulder to the approaching car.
Then I heard the bass pounding of the music suddenly go louder, as if a barrier had been lowered. When I glanced back, a rear window was rolling down.
Bap, bap, bap.
It wasn’t until the third round that I launched myself over the top of the picnic table and swept Luz Carmen off the bench with a flying tackle. I could hear the bullets in the tree leaves above us making the sound of ripping cloth.
Bap, bap, baaaaaaap.
Fucking automatic, I registered in my head. When I looked through the legs of the picnic table, I could see the muzzle flash coming out of the Monte Carlo’s back window just as the driver punched it and sent the ass end of the car slewing to the right. The scream of the friction between hot rubber and asphalt added a whining alto to the bass line. In seconds, they were gone.
Now it was stone quiet-amplified silence after chaos. I rolled off Luz Carmen, whose entire body was trembling. I scanned her for any sign that she was hit. When I got to her eyes, they were wide and locked on something in the distance, instead of squeezed shut like most people’s eyes would be under the circumstances.
“You OK?” I said.
No reaction. I pushed up to my knees. “Ms. Carmen, are you all right?”
She was still wide-eyed and stiff.
“Ms. Carmen,” I said, not sure why I was asking a question of someone in shock. “Please don’t tell me that was your brother.”
– 5 -
“Jesus, Max.”
As I said, Billy is not often taken to swearing. So when he starts out that way, it’s a warning that you’ve probably crossed one of his lines, and he is not pleased.
“Your new client can be very convincing,” I said, trying that tactic where you bring in the fact that your boss was the one who sent you out there to begin with, hoping you might spread the blame.
“Max, you left the scene of a crime.”
“Well, technically, yes.”
“Well, technically it was an assault with a deadly weapon. Nontechnically, it was a drive-by shooting, during which you were able to identify the car involved-and if I know you, the caliber of the gun, and possibly the license plate number.”
“No. They were smart enough to remove that ahead of time,” I said, realizing that I was getting defensive now. I knew that any good law enforcement agency in the area would have a pretty good file on a metallic green, jacked-up Monte Carlo with blacked-out windows, even with no numbers.
“No one was injured, Billy,” I repeated. “Once your Ms. Carmen was calm, she was adamant that we return to her office. She said if she came in late after lunch it would only raise suspicions among her bosses. She said she didn’t want to break any of her normal routine, because all eyes were going to be on her if you should get someone from the feds to raid the place.”
I took a long breath, listening to silence on the other end of the cell phone.
“See,” I finally said. “She’s pretty damned convincing.”
“So you’re in the parking lot now?” Billy said, moving past it, like the good lawyer he is. What’s done is done; you move on and tackle the problems that you can.
“Yeah,” I said. “She said she always leaves work at five fifteen. I’m going to follow her home, just to make sure.”
I figured that the least I could do was keep an eye out for the woman, even if our little lunchtime surprise was just a carload of idiot punks getting a kick out of scaring people in the park. Of course, I didn’t believe that. Coincidence is crap in this business. And besides, since leaving the Philadelphia Police Department after getting shot, I’d had the luxury of time. I also had an off-the-clock burden of responsibility.
If something happened to Ms. Carmen after I blew off the incident as an urban prank, wrote up a report, and forgot it after shift change, I’d be right back where I’d often been as a cop: cynical, depressed, and complicit.
“OK, Max,” Billy said, perhaps forgiving. “That sounds prudent.”
Prudent started with a pr that would have taken him three attempts to get off his tongue if we’d been speaking face-to-face.
“What can you give me over the phone?”
I told him about Ms. Carmen’s brother, gave him the name and the DOB, knowing he’d be punching the information into one of his array of computer databases as we spoke.
“All right, Max, that’s a start. I’ll work on this and review it with you later,” Billy said. As a bit of a techno-wizard, he didn’t even like using cell phones to discuss business. Anyone with money could put together the kind of listening devices and triangulation tracking governments use surreptitiously these days. Billy is no Big Brother phobe, but you only have to read the newspaper to know the capabilities of these systems. And as every law enforcement officer in the world knows, if we have the equipment, the bad guys are usually a step ahead of us.
After hanging up with Billy, I sat. Surveillance is the armpit duty of every private investigator, police detective, security officer, tinker, tailor, spy who ever worked it. You sit and turn your head on a swivel, running through the checklist, thinking about possibilities and scenarios for as long as you can stand it-about fifteen minutes. Then you get bored as hell and fight to stay awake.
A former Philly partner of mine didn’t even pretend. He’d straightaway start snoring, with his wristwatch alarm set to go off every thirty minutes his only show of loyalty to the job. Another acquaintance, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent, busied himself writing novels while he was on watch. After an hour’s time sitting in the South Florida heat at midday, I moved my truck. I’d been eyeballing the only spot of shade in the lot while people, some obviously medical personnel, others looking like everyday patients, came and went. When the shady spot opened up, I stole it.
With my windows rolled down and a blessed breeze flowing through, it was tolerable as I ran the shooting through my head for the umpteenth time. Metallic green ghetto car-obviously amateurs to be driving such a recognizable and easily tracked auto. Loud bass music: So they were also not concerned with anyone hearing them coming.