I was standing where Dan said he’d been when he saw the man messing with the Gran Fury. I was trying to re-create the smoky light of predawn in my head; how good a look could the ranger have managed? The distance was maybe thirty yards. There is little ambient light out here at night. But when Dan showed me the big Inova T3 flashlight he used for spotting poachers and night fishermen, and for checking the occasional snarl of a bobcat, I had to figure he got a decent look. The high-intensity beam can throw 150 lumens at someone 300 feet away. No wonder the ranger saw flecks of dry grass on the prowler’s back.
My own truck, newly washed and polished, was parked in front of the car, but I kept my focus on the Gran Fury, as if it were a suspect.
First I got my truck keys from Dan and carefully backed the F-150 away. Only then did I approach the Gran Fury to begin an inspection, searching the grass around it first, looking for any kind of obvious disturbance. Then without touching the car, I peered in all the windows, carefully looking at the door handles and what I could see of the steering column, to determine whether the visitor had actually been inside before Dan lit him up. The hood was locked down with no sign of tampering. The doors were tight-nothing.
I got down on the ground from the side of the car opposite from the ranger station, figuring the guy would have done the same, using the car body as a shield. I used Dan’s light to illuminate the undercarriage, starting from the front-no out-of-place wires. No signs of unusual connections to the engine. I moved the light back a bit. The front wheels and brake lines looked undisturbed. Back further, there was no indication the bottom edges of the front doors were scratched, and there was nothing like a pressure switch attached to them. I ran the light over the oil pan and the driveshaft and then to the back wheels. On the nearest rocker arm, I found it. The sight of the gray-colored package made me blanch. I think I actually held the light on it for a full minute, frozen, no panic, but frozen.
If you’d expect to find several red sticks of dynamite strapped together with an alarm clock taped to it, you’d be disappointed. Instead, I was staring at an innocuous form about the size of a one-pound box of Arm amp; Hammer Pure Baking Soda. It was wrapped in some kind of thin cellophane like Saran Wrap and attached to the axle near the gas tank with several turns of duct tape. I didn’t slide away. I didn’t breathe.
After some time, I actually had a fleeting thought about the heat from the light that I couldn’t seem to move off the object. Don’t be stupid, I thought: Heat doesn’t set off explosives; electricity or a fuse does. That made me focus. I searched the brick of plastic for some form of detonator. If someone wanted to kill me with a remote detonator, wouldn’t he have done it by now while my head was under the car? Nice logic, Max. Feel better? No.
I squirmed and shifted my body to get a look at the other side of the package. It wasn’t wired as far as I could tell. Only then did I worm my way back out. I stood and took a deep breath-was that the first breath I’d taken since I saw the block of explosive? Then I walked back to the ranger station where I’d asked Luz Carmen to stay.
“We need to get you under federal protection,” I said.
She just nodded, as if had asked her to go to the corner grocery for bread. Dan was looking at the side of my face when I turned to him.
“You need to call the sheriff and tell them to get a bomb squad out here,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Somebody strapped the car with an explosive, but it doesn’t look like they had the chance to put a detonator on it. But we can’t take a chance.”
If there was a bomber still waiting out there for Luz to get into the vicinity of the car, he wasn’t going to get much satisfaction. Maybe Dan had scared the guy off before he had the chance to finish rigging the thing. The way the explosive was taped to the rocker arm, it wouldn’t have been a matter of just grabbing the thing and running when the flashlight beam hit him. So he left it behind and ran. But an attempt had been made. It might even be an easy task to simply remove the package, but I wasn’t going to do it.
Dan turned to the phone on his desk without hesitation. But after dialing the number, I caught him looking at me with wide eyes as he tried to process what I’d just told him so he could reword it to the dispatcher. Bomb. Explosive. This was not a skill set he’d learned in park ranger school. While he was waiting for the connection, I went out onto the porch and called Billy.
“I’ll call the bomb squad immediately,” was Billy’s first response.
“Being done.”
“And Ms. Carmen?”
“Sitting right here. Quiet.”
“I’m calling the feds as soon as we hang up,” Billy said with anger in his voice, which is rare but was becoming more prevalent. He is not a man who likes to be put off; yet he usually reacts by requesting higher-ups, and then dropping the names of prominent executives, judges, and politicians. Though Billy isn’t the type to get mad, he does get things done.
After we hung up, I stood looking out onto the wide river in front of me, the flat water ruffled by an eastern breeze. You could tell by the subtle brush back of the ripples that the bulk of the water was moving one way, while the opposing wind nipped at it in futility. The tide was going out. We were close enough now to the ocean that the pull of gravity was working its wonder. Nature does not give up her pull, despite what piddling man, even Al Gore himself, does. We will not destroy the world. The world will go on even after we’ve destroyed ourselves.
People won’t stop doing what they do, either. It’s inside us. Someone out there housed a predator inside, and it was leaking out. He wasn’t a pro. But this time, his work wasn’t going to look like an accident, as it had at the mobile home. The signature of explosive would be distinctive, if that was indeed what was in the package. Our assassin was running out of ideas, or was just plain getting anxious and sloppy.
Who was he-an amateur? A wannabe-an ambitious young one? But who gives the ambitious amateur the targets? Motivation is all, Max. Who wants to kill you or Luz Carmen, or both?
From a distance, I heard the sound of sirens, then the distinctive deep honk! honk! of a rescue or fire vehicle coming from the direction of the park entrance to the north. I knew there wasn’t much use for the display, but when the bomb squad gets a call out, the bells and whistles come with it.
A sheriff’s car was the first one into the parking lot, followed by the bomb squad’s utility truck, and sure enough, a fire engine-and lastly, a paramedic unit. People who question what they see as an overreaction would also be the first ones to bitch and second-guess if there wasn’t enough backup to handle their own emergency.
Dan and Luz Carmen joined me on the porch. The deputy from the cop car went straight to Dan, given that he was the guy in the ranger uniform. Dan explained the situation again, a bit better now that he’d had time to edit himself. When he used the phrase Mr. Freeman’s car, he nodded at me. Now I drew the spotlight and the scrutiny.
Since we were looking at the Gran Fury from a distance as we spoke, the officer in charge of bomb unit figured it out pretty quickly and began unloading equipment. After spelling out for the deputy that I’d been told someone suspicious was seen near the car in early darkness, I explained that I’d carefully checked out the periphery of the car without touching it and had indeed looked underneath and observed the package, but no obvious triggering device.
The deputy wasn’t stupid. When he caught me using the words periphery and observed, he interjected.
“Are you in law enforcement, Mr. Freeman?”
“Was.”
He looked into my eyes, waiting.
“I was a cop in Philadelphia. I’m a PI now, working for an attorney in West Palm Beach.”
“I see,” he said, not bothering to elaborate on what exactly he was now thinking. “And you, ma’am?”
Luz Carmen looked at him with the blank expression that both legal and illegal aliens have honed to perfection in South Florida.
“She is a client,” I said. “You might want to get in touch with a Sergeant Lynch concerning a trailer fire two days ago. I think this could all tie in together.”
The deputy nodded. “One thing at a time, Mr. Freeman,” he said, and then turned to the bomb squad sergeant who had joined our group. “Can you explain again, in as much detail as possible, what you’ve already observed around and under the car to Sergeant Peters here? I’ll make some calls.”
I did my best for the sergeant and two of his men, and then watched as the entire gang got together, working out their plan of approach. The fire engine was repositioned, its hoses placed at the ready. The paramedics turned their ambulance around, either to have the back doors ready for any emergency admission, or to haul ass if something went boom. Then everyone on the four-man bomb and arson unit pulled on the ubiquitous surgical gloves and began to circle around the Gran Fury. They started some fifteen yards out, and in time I could see them tightening the grid.
It was a probe-and-poke routine, not unlike what I had done myself two hours ago. At one point, a member raised his hand. He was about ten yards from the car, waist-high in grasses. When he called out something, the sergeant joined him. They were behind the Gran Fury, in the direction Dan had told them the prowler had fled. They bent and disappeared under my sightline.
When he finally stood, the sergeant called out an order I couldn’t hear, and the entire team moved in on the car, this time less tactically, more aggressively. Within thirty minutes, Sergeant Peters came back to the porch, the loosened package of explosive in one gloved hand. In the other, he carefully held what looked like a dismantled garage door opener; his thumb tip at one corner, his index finger at the other.
He did not look me in the face when he said: “I’m not sure it would have worked, but there’s no reason why not. But it seems our bomber didn’t have the time to plant the detonator and use this as a remote switch.” He held up the garage door opener. “All you need is a current to pass between two contacts.”
Then he looked up. “You were still damn lucky, Mr. Freeman.”
I agreed without saying so.
“If you don’t mind my asking, Sergeant,” I said, “what kind of expertise does it take to hook up something like this?”
“Tough part is getting the explosives. They’re still near impossible to get even on the black market. But the firing device can be anything: cell phones, pagers, toy car remotes. Hell, I was in Iraq for eight months with my National Guard unit; children over there know how to rig these things.”
Again I thought of the propane tank at the end of the mobile home: a thimble of C-4; a toy car remote, for Christ’s sake.
“If you have your keys, sir, my guys will take a look inside,” he said. “You all should probably still stay here though, just in case.”
I handed over the keys, and while his squad did their thing, the sergeant went to his van and returned with a cardboard box. He was still holding the garage door opener carefully between his fingers.
Again, he addressed Dan as the person in charge. “May we use your office, Ranger? I need an electrical plug.”
“Yeah, sure,” Dan said, and opened the door. He followed, intrigued as much as I was. We all went inside.
The sergeant put the box on Dan’s desk and traced the lamp cord down to a wall socket. He took a simple coffee cup warmer out of the box, set it on the edge of the desk, and plugged it in.
I knew what was coming, but watched anyway.
“One of the problems with collecting evidence is that a lot of departments say they don’t have equipment and lab time,” the sergeant said, taking a grocery store roll of aluminum foil out of the box and a small tube of what I soon figured out was superglue.
The sergeant set the coffee cup warmer in one corner of the now-empty box. Then he took a piece of aluminum foil and formed it into a kind of ashtray, setting it on top of the coffee warmer where the cup would usually go. After opening the tube of superglue, he put a glob about the size of a nickel on the aluminum foil.
Dan was narrowing his eyebrows and looking over at me when the sergeant asked for a cup of hot coffee.
“Uh, yeah,” he said. “I just started a fresh pot this morning?”
The sergeant took a full cup from Dan and set it inside the box.
“It adds some humidity to the air,” he said. Dan just stared.
The sergeant then placed the garage door opener inside the box, carefully leaning it into a corner on its edges so that every flat surface was exposed. He then ripped off another piece of aluminum foil. We watched while he rubbed his finger on the side of his nose and pressed it to the small piece of foil, and then leaned it against a wall inside the box.
“A control standard,” I said.
The sergeant looked up. “You really were a cop, Mr. Freeman.”
I just shrugged.
He closed the top flaps of the box and said, “Be about ten minutes. If we get some good prints, we’ll send them off to the lab. I’ve just seen too many guys put these things in a plastic evidence bag and mess them up in transport.”
“You’re a careful man, Sergeant,” I said, and he stared at me with a “duh, yeah?” look on his face. He defuses bombs for a living, Freeman, whatta ya think?
Back outside, Luz Carmen was sitting in an old wooden straight-backed chair on the porch, staring out at the river, seemingly paying no attention to the bomb techs who had now opened all four doors of the Gran Fury, and appeared to be searching the interior. I went down on one knee next to her.
“Ms. Carmen,” I said. “I need you to call your friend, the woman at the beach house. Do you remember her saying that she noticed a black man out in front of the Royal Flamingo Villas, a man who scared her?”
Luz Carmen nodded.
“I need to ask her if she can describe him in more detail,” I said. “I need you to ask her if the man was limping when she saw him.”
I handed her my cell phone and stood up. I was now thinking about Dan’s description of the man he spooked while the guy was rigging an explosive to blow us both to hell. I had no doubt that the bomb squad sergeant would turn up a viable print on the garage door opener if the guy had been stupid enough to handle the trigger with his bare hands. But now I was wondering how the hell he would have found us. Had he followed us from the Royal Flamingo Villas? If so, I was pissed I’d allowed that to happen.
While Luz talked in Spanish on the cell phone, I watched as the bomb squad began to abandon the car, closing the doors roughly, an indication, I figured, that all was clear.
One of the squad members walked up to me holding a small black object the size of a beeper.
“The car is absolutely clean, Mr. Freeman,” he said, handing over my keys. “But we did find this under the passenger seat.”
He held up the object between two fingers, just as the sergeant had with the garage opener. “It’s a GPS tracker, the kind they use on delivery truck fleets to track where the vehicle is at all times. Mean anything to you?”
I was looking at the tracker, thinking about the Gran Fury. Had it ever been parked unlocked where someone would have had access? Sure, they could have popped the old locks without leaving an obvious sign, but had anyone been inside other than me? Who the hell had put a GPS in it, and why? Then I remembered the admirer, saw the vision of a child running his fingertips over the chrome; I recalled inviting the kid to go ahead, climb inside. I’d actually given him permission.
“It means I’m an idiot,” I said, and the officer raised his eyebrows. “You’d better go in and give it to your sergeant to process, but I’m pretty sure he’s not going to find a ten-year-old’s prints on file to match them.”
After the tech took the evidence inside the ranger’s office, I stood on the porch, trying to retrace all of my steps ever since I’d talked to the Brown Man and his son in their Fort Lauderdale neighborhood. Luz Carmen stepped up to hand back my cell phone.
“Yes, she thinks she remembers a man,” she said. “He was black, and maybe twenty years old, very carefully dressed. She noticed because he didn’t look like he belonged at the beach. And when she looked back to see if he would follow her, he was walking away with a limp.”
Same as Dan’s daybreak suspect, our bomber, our tracker. He didn’t have to follow because he knew exactly where we were going and where we’d been: northwest Fort Lauderdale, the trailer park, the Royal Flamingo Villas, right here at the boat ramp, and Sherry’s home. Jesus, Sherry’s-he’d tracked me to a cop’s house.
I thought of my gun-still in the shack, wrapped up in oilcloth. Even if I took Dan’s Boston Whaler, it would take more than an hour to get out there and back.
“I gotta go,” I told Luz. “Stay here until Mr. Manchester gets here. Stay here with these officers.” I went for the Gran Fury instead of my truck. The Gran Fury would be faster; the spotlights might help clear the way.
The firefighters and paramedics just watched as I fired up the Gran Fury and sped past them, spitting dust and gravel. They looked at one another and at the door to the shack, probably wondering why the cops were letting me drive the car away. I might have heard someone holler “Hey!” when I looked in the rearview and saw the sergeant standing on the porch, watching my bumper.
– 23 -
I WAS DRIVING like an idiot for the second time in a week. This time, I was avoiding rear-end collisions instead of perpetuating them. The only saving grace was that the evening rush hour on I-95 was ebbing. I had both spotlights aimed forward and glaring. My headlights were on bright, and I used the horn only when I needed to zoom around someone who wouldn’t get over.
I stayed at eighty m.h. most of the way through Palm Beach County until the inevitable snags off West Palm, and then gunned it up again in Broward, with slow downs off Deerfield and Pompano Beaches. I kept dialing Sherry’s cell and kept getting the recorded message. She’d ditched the house phone years ago.
My mother used to ring the house phone in our old South Philly home at night when we were away. “I only let it ring a couple of times, and then hang up,” she’d explain. “That way the burglars think someone’s home and is picking up.”
My drunk father thought she was nuts. “Buy a fucking dog,” he’d say.
“They shoot dogs, don’t they?” she’d respond.
“So arm him.”
This was a typical exchange: family life at the Freemans’.
But Sherry would be armed; she’s a cop. Still, the MO of the guy who was making my stomach churn and my head grind was not the kind that had standoffs and faced up to those he intended to kill. He was the kind that set off a propane tank explosion while you were asleep. He was the kind that put a bomb under your car, waiting in the weeds to blow you to hell with a garage opener. He was the kind that might work for a notorious drug dealer who was trying to get rid of all wit nesses and connections to his “expanded” operations in Medicare fraud and the prescription drug trade.
The only person who I could recall having access to my Gran Fury to plant the tracking device was the Brown Man’s son, the fascinated kid I let climb into the passenger seat while I was trying to rattle his father’s cage. If the former street dealer had set one of his other proteges on to Andres and Luz Carmen, and by extension to me, then we were being stalked. And considering the methods of the stalker and clues he’d left in his wake, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.
But a wannabe hit man can be as dangerous as the barely believable Hollywood types you see in movies. And as Baghdad’s bombers taught us all, they don’t give a damn about collateral damage to innocents.
When I got through to Billy on his cell, I told him I’d left Luz at the ranger’s station with a dozen cops and firefighters. He said he was already en route with a federal witness protection agent. I gave him an abbreviated rundown on the bombing attempt, while I whooshed around three minivans pulling some sort of convoy in the inside lane. I wished I had the old Whelen rumbler police siren that came with the original Gran Fury to rattle their windows.
“Any idea who this guy is?” Billy asked.
“The sheriff’s office will know as soon as they run that print, but I’m not waiting around,” I said. “If he’s stupid enough to be blowing up witnesses, he’s stupid enough to try and set up something at Sherry’s.”
I tossed the cell in the passenger seat just as I came up on the Broward Boulevard exit and passed the waiting lines in the side lane. Then I cut everyone off with a wide and illegal turn east. I knew this was the fastest route and would also take me past the Fort Lauderdale Police Headquarters. If I was lucky, doing twice the speed limit in front of the cops would get me a tail, and I’d lead them all to Sherry’s house and explain later.
It didn’t work that way. When I rolled into the neighborhood, I was alone, and doused my headlights. Sherry’s car appeared to be untouched and covered. The house windows were dark. I parked one driveway up the street and got out. It was just past twilight, and Victoria Park was the essence of a quaint and quiet place, inhabited by working folks, some singles, some families who got in when real estate was low, and then held on when the property taxes started climbing.
There was a car parked on the street a block north. Most people who were home were in their own driveways, so the Jeep Cherokee stuck out. I memorized the plate number and then thought: paranoid Max. But still, I went around the house, not using any of the usual entrances, the gate to the backyard, or the front door. I stopped at the side fence, and listened.
First thing wrong: The pool motor was off. Not just the motor that creates the hard current for Sherry to swim against, but the regular skimmer motor that ran constantly. The underwater lights were on. I could see the aqua glow reflecting high in the oak tree. I eased down the property line to the back where Sherry had installed just a thigh-high wire fence that blended into the ficus hedge. Through the leaves I could see the raised deck, the French doors to her bedroom, the sliders that led into the kitchen-nothing.
I was starting to embarrass myself, casing my own girlfriend’s house, when I picked up the movement at the pool-side motor stand. Something black slipping out of the shadow-the hump of a man’s back and the movement of arms.
The motor stand is about the size of a small doghouse, and my visitor was on the far side, bent where the electrical circuit box opens, seemingly preoccupied. I slipped off my shoes, and then moved barefooted as quietly as I could along the backside of the hedge. The neighbors had recently mowed their Saint Augustine lawn, giving me a cushion of spiky grass that poked at the bottoms of my feet, but muted any noise. At the corner, where the hedge meets the opposite fence, I stopped and evaluated. I was maybe eight yards away from the motor stand, as close as possible without coming out into the open.
I watched and listened, my night sight gaining efficiency. My hearing focused. I heard the scrape of metal on metal, and the slight echoing clink of something being dropped into, what, a pan?
A maintenance guy? Not at 7:00 P.M. And there was no truck out front. The regular pool guy drives a pickup with one of those little trailers in back that holds vacuum hoses and yellow bottles of chlorine. As I watched, a figure appear over the stand, the aqua light illuminated only the underside of his chin, shadowed his eyes. He was black, with a thin build. It looked like he was wearing a watch cap-in Florida, eighty degrees, and humid? He was no maintenance guy.
He came around the pump stand, staying low, moved to my side, and crouched again. I could see that he was dragging his right leg, and now had to extend it behind him to bend and reach down into the water above one of the submerged pool lights. A dog bite will do that to a hamstring.
I felt the adrenaline hit me again. I was pissed, but had to fight the anger. This asshole was trying to booby-trap my girl’s pool. I took three deep silent breaths and did the scenario in my head: over the thigh-high fence, through a weak spot in the ficus, eight yards to the crouched figure. If he’s armed, he’ll hear me coming and shoot me before I make five yards. He took the dog out with a silenced pistol. I breathed again, felt around me with my palms.
On the ground were a gaggle of hard half-inch berries. The back neighbor had planted a wild olive tree in the corner. Maybe he thought he was going to use them in his martini, but down here, the berries fall when they’re still hard. I needed a diversion, and the old ways are often the best simply because they work.
I grabbed up a handful of berries, then carefully raised one foot to gain purchase on the top crossbar of the fence. My true target was half-lying on the apron of the pool, both hands doing something in the water. I leaned back, and like a WWII infantryman lobbing a grenade, I looped a handful of the berries into the air over the hedge, hoping the arc would carry them to Sherry’s deck. While they were still airborne, I mounted the fence. When the fusillade of berries rattled down on the wooden planks of the deck, I exploded through the leaves.
The man only made it to one knee, his head turning first to the deck noise, then to me as I burst through the ficus. I made two long strides and launched myself, head first like a spear, arms spread wide like a linebacker, and met him shoulder high.
My momentum carried us both into the water, where my fingers went straight for the guy’s face. Go for the eyes, make him panic.
We twisted together, slower in the water than we would have been on land, soaked clothes pulling us down and deterring any quick blows. The heel of the man’s hand came up under my chin, a classic defensive move, but the slickness of water made it easy to dislodge. He tried kicking with his feet, shoes dragging, bereft of velocity. I couldn’t get my fingers in his eye sockets and went for the head. The watch cap was long gone. I got a handful of hair and yanked back and down.
I was a good swimmer. Sherry had always been amazed how long I could hold my breath when we used to go reef snorkeling. With a fistful of hair, I took the guy to the bottom with me. He tried to punch me in the throat, but again the movement was slowed by the water. This wasn’t the street, or a karate dojo. I kicked my bare feet, got behind him, and rode his back toward the bottom. In the deep end, Sherry’s pool was only eight feet. I’d gone down several times to clear the bottom suction drain of big oak leaves. Sometimes I’d empty my lungs of air and just sit down here, looking up at the sun rippling at the surface. On those occasions, I felt I could stay down here for days.
My adversary was not made of the same stuff. I could feel his struggle weakening, his arms going limp. I could actually hear the bubbles of oxygen leaving his throat. Maybe he was screaming, or begging. I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t opened my eyes since diving forward off the fence.
When we made the surface, I heard a gasp. It was mine. I opened my throat and my eyes at the same time and started stroking to the shallow end, dragging a shirt collar in my hand. The man had gone full limp, and when I got to the point I could stand, I drew him near. He was faceup in the water. I pushed my fingers into the side of his cheeks, pried open his jaws, and pulled his head back so his throat was in a straight line. As soon as his airway was open, a huge gurgling intake of breath went into the vacuum and then came back out sputtering.
“What the fuck, man? What the…”
Consciousness came back when the air started going in and out. I was still jacked up with adrenaline. I pulled back hard again on his hair. “Ah, ah, ah,” he yelled.
I took an arm up behind his back, putting some pressure on the shoulder joint when I felt muscle function coming back to him. I determined the guy was in his mid-twenties, maybe 150, 160 pounds. I had him in bulk and height, a distinct advantage now that I had my feet solidly on the bottom of the pool in chest-deep water.
“Who are you, and why the fuck are you here?” I growled into the guy’s ear, turning his head a bit with the twist of hair in my fist.
“I ain’t nobody, man, nobody.”
“That’s good. We start with the truth,” I said, using the arm bar and the hank of hair, plunging his head back into the water. He shook and reached back to claw me with his free hand to no avail. I let him bubble for a few second, just to remind the memory cells of oxygen depravation, and then brought him back up.
“Again-who are you, and why are you here?”
Phlegm was now drooling out of the guy’s mouth. He was back to spitting and coughing. He truly did not like the water. “OK, man, OK. It’s just a job, man.”
“A job? What the hell do you mean, a job?” I said, and could feel the astonishment in my own voice. “You came to fuck with my girlfriend’s home as a job?” I could feel my hand twisting tighter in the guy’s hair, pulling some of it out. I could feel my forearm ratcheting up his elbow; tendons would start popping soon.
“What? You’ve got a contract or something out on her? You do the same thing to the kids in the mobile home, kill them on contract? You set up the kid before that, try to gun him down with your gangbanger buddies? You try to blow me up in my car and take out a woman witness as well?”
The guy was twisting his head a different way now, a way to indicate an answer rather than trying to get free. “I don’t run with no bangers. I work alone, man,” he said, taking deep breaths, but getting the words out clear, almost taking time to be prideful of what he was saying.
“What, you’re some kind of assassin, some kind of contract killer?”
He waited before answering, just long enough to make my fingers flex again and my muscles tense for another dunking. “I’m a professional, man. I don’t do no drive-by shit. That’s for punks.”
“Oh, a professional,” I said, the sarcasm legitimate. “That’s why I’m here to drown your sorry ass because you professionally fucked up your little bomb trick. That’s why you’re trying to mess with a woman cop who has nothing to do with any of the rest of them, because you’re such a professional?”
Letting anger get the best of me, I plunged the guy’s head back down into the water and put my knee in the middle of his back. The bubbles rose. The squirming became violent. I considered, twice, drowning him. It wasn’t exactly water boarding, but it was on the same level.
This time when he came up, his eyes were wide and his mouth was like a gasping fish. “OK, man,” he coughed. “I didn’t know she was a cop. I didn’t know. I knew the other one was a cop, but not this one, man.”
I was concentrating on the phrase I knew the other one was a cop, but not this one when I saw blue-and-red lights filtering through the low tree bows and bushes. They were coming without sirens. Someone had called.
“What other one?” I yelled into the man’s ear. “What other cop?”
“The dude on the highway, Mr. Muscle Man sheriff’s deputy. Carlyle said that one had to go like an accident and that’s my thing, you know. I make it look like an accident ‘cause I’m a professional.”
I stared into the water, deciphering what I’d just heard. The guy was actually giving his damn resume.
“Pinched that motherfucker off, man,” he said, somehow putting braggadocio into his wet voice. “Made him scream like a girl.”
I punched the guy in the back of the head just as the first officer came through Sherry’s back gate. My knuckles snapped and mister pro fessional asshole went out like a light. I dragged him unconscious to the stairs and up onto the pool apron as the officer on scene was holstering his gun.
The wannabe assassin was still breathing, though. I don’t know why I let him.