When I got home, Sherry was still at the office. Soon after her rehabilitation, she’d gone back part-time, but now she was an 8-to-5 woman, working cases from inside the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s corporate palace. It was mostly phone work, case evaluation, and meeting on occasion with crime victims. It was not what she was meant to do. She was the kind of cop who worked best on the outside, moving, watching, evaluating from the streets and the crime scenes. A lot of cops make the transition; after years on the streets, they move into the command structure, and behind a desk. Sherry’s move was premature because of the leg, but she was pushing them on that.
The victim advocacy thing was a step. Several times, she’d gone out to meet with the victims and their families in her capacity as a detective. The guys who caught the case weren’t always happy with what they considered her horning in on their investigations, but she’d played it carefully: “Only here to help with the social stuff, fellas. I’m not taking anything from you, and any intel I get goes straight to your ears only.”
I knew it was a step back for her. She’d worked long and hard to get her detective’s shield, and hated the idea of playing second fiddle to the others. Every time I told her she’d get it back, she just nodded. “Yeah, I know, Max. I just have to work harder now, right?”
In the kitchen, I rooted through the refrigerator and came up with salami and provolone on wheat bread for lunch. I popped the top of the last beer and went out onto the patio and sat in one of the lounge chairs next to the pool. Under the big oak, there was enough shade to take off the heat of the day. While I stared at the pool water, I ran the trailer park scenario through my head again.
At the end of our picnic table discussion, Billy laid down the law to Andres, who assured him that the enforcers he’d told us about had no knowledge of his girlfriend’s home. Billy and I both knew that the criminal grapevine would lead there eventually. Some guy would ask some guy who would know Andres’s girlfriend, or a girlfriend who knew his girlfriend, and they would track the location down.
I offered to let Andres hide out at my shack in the Glades. My quick description of the place seemed to the scare the shit out of the kid, but Billy convinced me that ethically we didn’t want to get in the business of trying to hide him from the authorities.
Instead, Billy left him with orders: “Don’t use your car and stay put right here until I get in touch with you. That’s for your sake, and your sister’s.”
Luz Carmen was another matter. After leaving Andres, we took her home to pack up enough belongings to last a week. While the two of them were inside, I drove Billy’s car around the neighborhood, watching for any kind of surveillance by either the so-called enforcers or the now-alerted cops. We doubted whether the sheriff’s office would jump on an investigation so quickly, but Billy didn’t want to take a chance.
When Luz was packed and ready to go, we drove south to Deer-field Beach, where Billy had a safe house on the sand where he kept out-of-state clients or witnesses when trial dates were close. The Royal Flamingo Villas was a perfect, low-key, unobtrusive collection of one- and two-room bungalows that straddled either side of A1A. Billy’s place was given to him as payment by a client whose ass he’d saved in a lawsuit. The small stucco building sat directly on the oceanfront, out of sight to any traffic. Luz Carmen objected the entire trip to the house until she saw the accommodations, and then agreed: “Yes, this will work.”
When we got back to Billy’s, I told him that I would rent a car while my truck was being fixed so I could take the descriptions of the dealers Andres had given us, and do some tracking. Billy just winked at me as we pulled into the parking area of his building.
“Already t-taken care of,” he said. “I m-made a call while we were at Luz Carmen’s house.” He stopped his Lexus in the outside parking lot in front of a glossy black 1989 Plymouth Gran Fury and tossed me a key ring.
“It’s the p-police pursuit model,” he said. “The client who gave it to me p-put a 360, four-barrel engine in when he restored it. I’m told it is very fast, and very heavy, and can take quite a b-beating without doing damage to the occupant.”
I just looked at him in amazement, and then got out, walking around the Gran Fury like a kid seeing his first Hot Wheels. It was vintage, replete with the old police black-wall tires and small hubcaps. The spotlights were still mounted in front of the side windows, a handle and trigger on the inside. I opened the driver-side door and got in. The interior was pristine and had even been sprayed with that stuff that gave it the smell of new carpet and vinyl. I hit the ignition and felt the rumble as much as heard it when I gassed the motor. When I looked up, Billy had already gone-no doubt with a smile on his face.
Waiting for Sherry to come home, I had the same stupid smile on my face, as I imagined her seeing the Gran Fury sitting in her driveway.
While I sat poolside, I sipped a beer and took out my copy of the list of names and descriptions of the men Andres had met, and the menu of drugs he’d seen at the warehouse. When I’d asked him who the man was who greeted him outside the warehouse before our chase began, Andres told me, “That was Carlyle. They call him Brown.”
“Carlyle” was the real name of the Brown Man. A few years back, he’d been running a lucrative drug corner in Northwest Fort Lauderdale. I’d run into him trying to find the notorious Eddie the Junkman, the ghostly but all too real serial killer Sherry had saved me from by putting a bullet in his head. Eddie was a mentally challenged drug user who roamed the neighborhood in the guise of being homeless. He had needs, the most prevalent being sex and drugs. Prostitutes and young women in his hunting area had learned to turn down his sexual advances after he shared his crack cocaine with them. But Eddie had learned, too.
A huge and thickly muscled man, he entrapped the women with his bulk, then put a broad hand over their mouths while he satisfied his sexual needs. The fact that the women suffocated in the process did not bother him. During Billy’s and my investigation of elderly women being similarly suffocated in a life insurance scam gone ugly, I’d swung a deal with the Brown Man. He’d given up Eddie for the exchange of his own business survival. It was time I revisited Carlyle.
Considering the foot dragging of any governmental agency like the sheriff’s office, Hammonds’s investigators would move slowly on the warehouse address. I might get a chance at the Brown Man before they spooked him.
The other names Andres had given us were probably a.k.a.’s as well. There were two guys known as the Marlin brothers, who may or may not be brothers at all; a so-called supervisor known as Anthony Monroe; and a computer tech everyone called Joey “the code writer” Porter. According to Andres, Carlyle was the man who did most of the drug movement, a line of products considered a sideline by the others, who seemed to tolerate it, but kept their hands off unless there was some reason to party- like when some big government check came in, and everyone was flush.
When asked to list the drugs, Andres had written down mostly prescription drugs like painkillers: oxycodone and Percocet, over-the-counter amphetamines like Dexedrine and Adderall, and opiates like buprenophine, as well as boxes of Xanax and anabolic steroids.
Though the kid’s spelling was atrocious, Billy had been impressed by Andres’s recall of the supply. The kid simply said, “I keep my eyes down when I’m in there, like I don’t want to know nothing, or I’m afraid to look them in the eye. Instead I’m looking at the boxes, you know, the labels and stuff. They pay me to do what I do, not to know what I know.”
I’d asked him if he knew where the drugs went after they left the warehouse. “I don’t do drugs. I don’t know nothing about them, man,” he said, lifting his chin, as if this was a point of pride for him. “My money ain’t drug money.”
Billy’s face had tightened as he’d read through the list of drugs. He knew that every one of them had been on the A-list of adolescent abused prescription drugs for years. “Feeding the children,” he’d simply said, staring into Andres’s eyes.
Andres put his head down, eyes again on the tabletop. “I don’t use them, you know.”
It was the mantra of every low-level drug runner I’d ever arrested or known: Take the money and don’t get involved. Get what you can, do what you’re told, and don’t be ambitious.
It’s ambition that gets the runners and couriers and corner boys shot, left for dead in an alley after they’d try to skim or short, or peddle a little on their own. Andres probably wasn’t ambitious. He probably never put his fingers on the real money in an operation like this. But his sister’s dreams for him had put him in someone’s gun sights now.
The list of drugs somehow made sense: The Medicare scam had to touch the medical community-doctors’ offices, pharmacies, nursing homes-at least on the edges. Hell, Billy had pulled up a story that showed how a hospital in California had been running a similar billing scam, bringing in “patients” off the street, and then billing for expensive equipment and testing that was never used or done. It would not be too slippery a slope to find out that someone also had their fingers in the prescription drug till.
I was running the possibilities through my head when I heard the jiggling of the gate door leading in from the drive. After a few seconds, I heard the door clack shut, the familiar sound of Sherry returning from a day at the office. She rolled in dressed in her business attire: a conservative short-sleeved blouse and a dark skirt. She had adamantly stated while still in rehab that she would never wear a “pinned-up pair of pants” in public. If she wanted to show her incredibly taut and muscled single leg, she would.
“Let them use their imagination,” she’d said. “I don’t give a shit.”
I greeted her as she made it up the ramp.
“Hi.”
“Hey,” she said. “I thought you were going to be with Billy all day.”
“Didn’t take that long,” I said. “We found the sister and her brother. Made sure the sister was safe, and Billy’s going to see if he can put some leverage together to get the feds in on busting the Medicare scam and get her into a protection program while they do it.”
I gave her a quick rundown on the case. Sherry and I tried not to get too deep into the ongoing investigations in which each of us was involved. It could get dicey sometimes.
“And was that car sitting in my driveway any kind of recompense for making a deal with the brother,” she said, a playful look in her eyes, one that I rarely saw these days.
“Uh, nope, that would be the loaner that Billy gave me while the truck is being fixed,” I said, unable to keep from matching her smile.
“Nice. Reminds me of my daddy’s old prowl car,” she said and rolled up next to me in the wheelchair. “I like the side lights. I used to hear old stories of the boys spotlighting deer along the roadside with those things up in Apopka.”
Sherry rarely talked about her family. Her father had been an old-time sheriff up in Central Florida. She called herself an original Florida cracker, born and raised in an area that thirty years ago was more open field and cattle range than the Disney World spillover it now represents.
“Those old spotlights would catch the deer right in the eyes, and they’d freeze up like statues-easy killing.”
“Cheating,” I said. Spotting game was illegal throughout most of the country. Some considered it an unfair advantage. But then the same folks thought nothing of feeding deer for eleven months out of the year under a tree stand. Then on the first legal day of hunting season, they’ll sit up there with a high-powered rifle and blast away-fish in a barrel. I could never see the challenge in it.
“You didn’t personally know any of these spotters?” I said.
“Considering who my daddy was, I probably kissed one every night after the family dinner,” she said, looking out into the light of the pool. “The law gets interpreted in different ways, even by lawmen.”
There was something on her mind and it didn’t have anything to do with deer hunting. She finally looked over at me and asked, “Could you get me a beer?”
“Sure,” I said, getting up and kissing her on the forehead as I headed for the kitchen.
When I got back with two cold beers, Sherry had gotten out of her wheelchair and moved to the side of the pool. Her foot was in the water, lazily kicking up a soft boil. Her stump was on the edge. It looked uncomfortable, but I suppressed the urge to ask if she wanted a cushion or pillow to put underneath. If she wanted that, she’d ask.
I sat down on the deck behind her, looking in the opposite direction, and matched up my back to hers, and leaned into it. I felt her give her weight back into mine, and we adjusted the balance until it was just so.
“So what did you find out?” I asked.
“About?” was her answer.
“Booker.”
I felt her head turn just a bit.
“Did I tell you I was going to look into him?”
“No. But you did.”
“You know me too well, Max.”
“I try.”
I heard the plop of her foot when she brought it up and let it splash back into the water. I felt a chuckle in her chest ripple and vibrate into my own. I liked the feel of her laughter.
“I pulled the files on his accident, both the initial reports, and the investigative sheets afterward.” Her voice was careful. I knew her well enough to know that this was an effort to be unbiased. Just the fact that she’d started out using that voice let me know it would soon change.
“The woman he was pulling over was a seventy-eight-year-old retiree from Sunrise. When the car rear-ended her, she suffered a whiplash, broken nose, and lacerations from her face ramming the steering wheel on the rebound. She was nearly unconscious when the paramedics got there. She never saw a thing.”
“OK,” I said, letting her start wherever she wanted.
“Her ID and ownership of the car all checked out. She told the investigators she was going to pick up her granddaughter at the airport. That checked out, too.
“The car that hit them was stolen. The owner, some old fiberglass marine worker from Sailboat Bend in Fort Lauderdale, didn’t even know the car had been stolen until the deputies got to his place and woke him up at eight the next morning. He was sleeping with his sixty-three-year-old girlfriend, who said they’d been in bed together all night.
“The guy volunteered to take a blood test for alcohol or drugs or whatever they wanted. The deputies noted that he seemed to be legitimately saddened when they told him what had happened. He didn’t even ask about the car. They checked out his story anyway, and found out he’d worked for the same yacht builder on the New River for more than thirty years, and did old-time car restoration on the side.”
Now Sherry’s voice was picking up, in both emotion and volume.
“When the crime scene guys had the car towed in, they went over the thing with a fine-tooth comb. Found nothing useful-pristine inside. All surfaces wiped clean, no inconsistent fibers: There was nothing inside that didn’t belong to the owner. Clean.”
“Too clean,” I said.
“Way too clean,” Sherry said, and I felt her back shift again.
“So the crime scene guys didn’t find a laundry ticket on the floor belonging to an ex-con car thief, or a soda can in the cup holder with his DNA spit on the side, or a lock of blonde hair with a one-of-a-kind conditioner sold at only one salon in the country?”
I felt Sherry’s head shake back and forth. She knew my predisposition to bitch about the public’s expectation that criminal investigations actually mirror the bullshit they see on television. But I agreed: This wasn’t the time or place.
“Sorry,” I said. She took a minute and a long swallow of beer before continuing.
“I can see a party-time car thief racing down I-595 and rear-ending a parked car; but what kind of guy sees that he’s pinched a cop off at the knees, and then takes the time to carefully wipe down the inside of the car before he books on foot?”
“Someone who isn’t just partying; someone who is very cool in an emergency,” I said. “A pro who does the car thing for a living-a guy who knows how to handle himself when shit goes wrong.”
“That’s some cool customer to be thinking of that while a cop is a hood ornament, screaming and squirting blood all over your car.”
“Jesus,” I said, the vision actually making me shudder. She must have felt it through her back.
“Sorry,” she said.
We took a sip of beer at the same time, our heads lightly thumping together as we both went back to swallow. The slight collision made us both laugh.
“Hard head,” she said.
“Pot calling the kettle,” I said, and then added, “so what did you get when you went to internal affairs?”
This time I felt her turn, and knew she was looking at the side of my face.
“You’re starting to scare me, Max,” she said with a hint of fun, but also a bit of seriousness in her voice.
“Well, if you start to entertain the thought that Booker might have been the target of a pro, you have to find out why some ruthless son of a bitch would do such a thing, right?”
“IA wouldn’t give me anything,” Sherry said. “They wouldn’t say whether somebody he’d busted had a grudge for Booker, or that he’d gotten any threatening messages-nothing. They stonewalled me completely. So I had to go over their heads to a source.”
This was the line in our respective work that didn’t get crossed. I wasn’t going to ask who she used as a source in the department. But I knew that a law enforcement organization is no different that any other office enterprise. People talk. It’s a human trait you don’t give up just because you’re told to. Civilization demands it. Societal living depends on it. It is why I do not believe in government conspiracies. Someone always spills eventually.
“So?”
Sherry waited, assessing whether she was talking out of school.
“The skeleton is in their closet,” she finally said. “The word is that Booker had steroids in his blood system, and that they found elevated levels of caffeine during a tox screen at the hospital. They kept it out of the media and off the books so he could get the maximum coverage for his disability payout.”
“A lifter doing Red Bull,” I said.
“The guy was hurt enough losing his legs, Max. They didn’t want to hurt him more by putting an illegal-steroid-use sheet in his file, and having that put his health coverage in jeopardy.”
The guy was hurt enough? Even if she was talking about someone else, it would be the first time Sherry admitted that losing a leg was a devastating thing. I thought about a Robert Frost quote: “Tell other people’s stories as if they happened to you, and tell your own as if they happened to other people.”
We sat in silence awhile. Was burying the steroid use an act of compassion by the sheriff’s office? Did you let an infraction of the steroid ban screw up Booker’s life more than it already was?
“So does he feel beholden to the department, or to his buddies?” I finally said, talking out loud more than anything else. It didn’t take a genius to figure that if Booker was doing steroids, then his buddies at the gym either knew it, or where into it themselves.
I heard Sherry’s foot plop a few more times in the pool, could feel her hip working against mine.
“Not sure,” she said. “But I’m going to have lunch with him again tomorrow. I know there’s a lot in his head he’s not giving up. Maybe he needs a release.”
As do you, my love, I thought, but didn’t say it out loud.