"What? And have his boys come over and slap him on the back and tell him to chill and take him out for a few beers and make sure nothing gets written up?"
There wasn't much I could say. I'd seen it work that way myself.
"No. I called his sergeant and then the captain. You start working up the chain of command and those guys aren't going to swallow a black mark on their own jacket for the sake of some dipshit patrol officer."
"Yeah, well, you hope not," I said, and that's when she finally looked into my eyes and seemed to click over to who she was talking to and the background my father's story brought with it.
"You hungry after all that, Freeman?" she said, changing her voice. I followed her through the gate and relocked it behind us. When we walked through the back French doors, she quietly put her gun into a kitchen drawer and slid it shut. There were a couple of lamps lit deep in the living room and sitting on the couch with her legs curled up under her, clutching a pillow to her chest, was a woman with long, strawberry-blond hair. I balked at the sight and the memory that jumped into my head. Richards crossed the room and sat down beside the woman, and they talked softly to each other. I stood at the kitchen counter letting the remnants of the driveway adrenaline leach away and eyeing the automatic coffeepot in the corner. There were several boxes of Chinese food lined up and untouched on the counter.
"Max."
I put on a pleasant face and walked out for introductions.
"Max, this is Kathleen Harris."
"A pleasure," I said, taking the woman's hand.
She stood and looked a bit taller than Richards, and bigger- boned, solid, like a basketball or lacrosse player. Her grip was surprisingly strong.
"Nice to meet you," she said, looking me directly in the face. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but she did not look away until she added, "I'm sorry about all that," nodding her head to indicate the driveway. She wasn't wearing any makeup, and there was a spray of freckles across her nose and cheekbones. Country girl, I thought.
"Nothing for you to be sorry about," I said, and left it alone.
Richards warmed up the Chinese and I squeezed past her and made the coffee. The three of us then sat at the low coffee table in the living room, and I told Harris the impersonal side of my life as a Philly cop. We all ended up swapping stories about academy training, rookie assignments, embarrassments on the job and the various criminal sideshows we'd run into over the years.
Richards told the story about the bank heist where the mastermind wrote the stickup note on the back of his own overdue electric bill and the cops were waiting at his house when he showed up with the loot. We were all shaking our heads over Harris's "ass-man" story, about the Middle Eastern guy who was using a home remedy for hemorrhoids during the anthrax scare. When he showed up at the E.R with a bottle of white powder lodged up his rectum, the yet- unknown concoction of powdered laxative, talcum and baking soda had a dozen cops, hazardous material firemen and federal agents scrambling for hours. Harris was a smart cop, an intelligent, driven, strong woman. She was attractive enough to have dealt with men in social situations. She was experienced enough to have run into plenty of jerks. She forced you to kick out the false stereotype of abused women as so weak, mousy and dependent that they'd put up with it just to hold on to a man, even if he was a shit. The "just leave him" solution does not factor in the unknowable ways of the heart and each person's understanding of love.
When we were done eating, they gathered up the leftovers and I went outside to get my bag out of the truck. I shut off the overhead light in the cab as I went through the bag, unwrapped my Glock and snapped a loaded clip into place. I checked the safety and slipped the gun back in under a fold of clean clothes. I closed and locked the truck and then stood in the darkness, listening, checking both ends of the street. Everyone in this house had seen people at their worst under stress. No one knew what McCrary might do if he felt his back was up against it, if his career and his future were threatened. A lot less can kick a guy over the edge. I was thinking worst-case scenario again. It was a bad habit I wished I could kick.
Back inside, Richards slid a videotape in and the three of us watched a movie called Meet Joe Black. Harris fell asleep on the couch at about the point where Anthony Hopkins's millionaire was explaining life to Brad Pitt, who was playing the role of Death, and Richards punched the TV off. We went outside onto the patio and sat in the hammock. There was no breeze, and the smell of night- blooming flowers hung in the thick humidity. I could hear traffic moving along the streets in the general stillness, but chose to ignore it. Richards's warm skin was against my own, and she was staring up into the night sky.
"You think I should have had him arrested, don't you?" she said.
"I suspect it wasn't just your decision."
"But you know what the brass will do."
"They'll make him go to counseling, if they're smart. Let the shrinks at him awhile, see if he can admit his control problem or whether he denies it."
"That's it?" she said, and I was surprised by the snap of anger in her voice.
"I said that's if they're smart. They could just fire his ass and put an angry guy with weapons training out on the street."
There was a sigh of concession from her.
"What if he threatens her, or comes back at her again?"
"Have him arrested, just like anyone else. He got his chance."
This time her long silence worried me. I lay back into the ropes and closed my eyes. Soon I felt her move and do the same. She curled against me, her hair smelling of shampoo.
"Have you ever hit a woman in anger? I mean your ex-wife or a girlfriend?"
I could tell the recent revelations about my father were still tumbling in her head.
"The children of abusers becoming abusers themselves is not a blanket sociological axiom," I said. "Sometimes it works the other way. The act is so repugnant that the witnesses to abuse grow up to loathe the very idea."
I felt her wiggle herself back tighter into me, and even without seeing her face I could tell she was grinning.
"OK, Professor Freeman," she said. "But you still haven't answered the question."
I put my arm over her waist and rested my wrist on her chest, the backs of my fingers against the soft skin of her neck.
"No," I said. "The answer is no, I never have."
We did not fall asleep for at least another hour.
CHAPTER
18
It would be two days before I heard from Nate Brown. The bartender from the Frontier Hotel called at noon.
"Mr. Brown says meet him at Dawkins's dock at eight tomorrow mornin'. You know that's over on Chokoloskee? Right?"
"Yeah, I know. And thanks."
"How much do y'all owe me now, Mr. Freeman?" she said with humor in her voice.
"I'll talk to you soon," I said, disappointed that she now had my cell number. I wasn't sure which I was concerned about more, the guys from PalmCo tracking my calls or the Loop Road barmaid getting friendly.
There was no trace yet of dawn in my rearview the next morning as I drove west. This time I used Alligator Alley, a straight concrete shot from the suburbs of far west Fort Lauderdale to their identical twins in Naples on the other side of the state. The Alley was the second gouge across the gut of the Everglades. It was constructed in the 1960s with better machinery, better technology, and supposedly better working conditions. It was the thirty-year span of intermittent carnage that gave the alley its reputation. Originally two lanes with nothing to break the hypnotic monotony of endless acres of sawgrass, head-on collisions were frequent and almost always fatal out here, where the sound of wrenching metal and screaming passengers was quickly lost in the silence. In the 1990s the state expanded the road. They doubled and separated the lanes, and acquiesced to the environmentalists by tunneling under the roadway to allow water and animals to pass through. Imagine the bonanza for the predators that would quickly figure out the migration flow of untold numbers of species forced to funnel through a ten-foot-wide passageway.