Sherry and I sat next to each other in the dark on her deck. She’d come in with the second wave of cops through the back gate after I had already pulled the electrical breaker feeding the pool and pump and porch lights, just to be safe. She had wheeled herself up onto the deck and watched as officers scoured her home and yard, considering it a crime scene and-after a quick rundown from me-an attempted attack on one of their own.
After officers hauled the would-be assassin away, the sergeant on duty asked me to sit and wait while he went through the evidence left behind. The intruder’s satchel near the pump stand held a small metal toolbox containing splicing pliers, waterproof electrical tape, wire crimpers, and bolt cutters. Lying on top of the bag was a Beretta 92FS loaded with fifteen rounds of 147-grain ammunition. The factory barrel was threaded and a suppressor was screwed onto the end.
The serial numbers on the gun had been melted off with acid, but I told the sergeant that my attorney had a slug obtained during a necropsy of a pit bull at a mobile home firebombing scene in Palm Beach County. I added that the slug would most likely match up with the ballistics on the Beretta he now had in his hand. The sergeant looked at me, turned to Sherry, and without emotion said, “Shit, this isn’t going to be a simple breaking and entering, is it?”
Then I answered questions for more than an hour while Fort Lauderdale Police crime scene officers went over the pool, the pump stand, and the back fence. Their quick conclusion was that whoever the supposed assassin was, he’d been trying to rig the electrical feed to the pump with a spliced wire that he’d intended to route into the water, thus setting up an electrocution of anyone diving into the pool for a daily swim. It might have worked, they said. Or it just might have shorted out the whole system as soon as anyone turned on the pump.
“Would the suspect know anything about your swimming habits?” the sergeant taking notes asked us. I looked at Sherry and even in the dim light of the houselights could see that flicker of green in her eyes that always means she’s pissed.
“Was some asshole doing surveillance on me, Max?”
I’d started to respond, and then thought better of it. Instead, I raised a finger indicating “wait a minute.” Women like Sherry do not like fingers raised in their faces-hell, I don’t like fingers raised in my face. But she waited.
The sergeant looked at Sherry, then at me, and flipped his notebook closed.
“You did say you’d be following up on this with the sheriff’s office and Chief Hammonds, right, Detective?” he said. Sherry nodded.
“This may very well dovetail into an investigation under the chief’s purview, Sergeant,” she said. The sergeant tried unconvincingly not to roll his eyes.
“Very well, then. This is all most likely above my pay grade,” he said, copying Sherry’s official vernacular, a cant that is often used in law enforcement circles when someone is trying to cover his or her ass. “I’ll be sure that a copy of my report is forwarded to the chief’s attention. Good night, Detective.”
The cops gathered their evidence and left us alone. It was time for me to atone for my raised finger. “I didn’t mean to cut you off,” I started.
“Yes you did.”
“OK,” I said. “I did.”
I let that sit. Medicine, my mother used to say; take it.
“What I wanted to say, but only to you, was that we found a tracking device on my car, the Gran Fury, I mean. We think this guy has been tracking my movements, following wherever I went. A witness saw him at Billy’s beach bungalow where we were keeping Luz Carmen.
“We think he planted a bomb under my car at the ranger station by the shack. And the gun they just took off of him was probably the gun that killed a pit bull at the firebombing of the trailer that killed Carmen’s brother and girlfriend and her teenage son.”
Only part of Sherry’s face was illuminated in the light from the house. She was a tough woman, but not unforgiving.
“So you came racing down here to protect me.” She didn’t voice the awww that might come with such a statement-that particular expression was not in Sherry’s vocabulary. But I knew what she meant.
“I tried to call,” I said. “I left messages. I couldn’t reach you.”
“Did you call 911? Did you tell dispatch that a potential assassin might be at an officer’s home?”
“No.”
“Had to do it yourself, right, Max? Knight in shining armor stuff.”
I looked straight out into the darkness. OK, the woman knew me- no wiggling out of it.
“But I did try to call…”
“I was out with Marty Booker,” she said.
I turned to look at her face, the one that has never lied to me.
“He admitted the steroid drug use to me, Max. And he gave me the boxes that the stuff came in. I took the lot numbers to the guys who raided the warehouse and matched them up with the stuff they removed from the place. Booker and his friends were pipelined into the same operation. The Brown Man was supplying the drugs. When Booker got sick of it and told the rest of them he was getting out, that’s when they turned the cold shoulder on him.”
“And how long after that did he end up getting squashed in the accident on the I-595?” I said.
She was running the possible permutations in her head. I was doing them out loud.
“The Brown Man hired an assassin to clean up anyone who could lead back to him,” I said. “He put the asshole onto everyone, including Booker. The collision that crippled him was done by the same idiot they just hauled out of here.”
Sherry was staring at me. Even in the dim light, I could see incredulity on her face, and Sherry does not do incredulity often. “Big supposition, Max.”
I looked out on the pool water, the dark surface reflecting some of the ambient light, the small ripples from a breeze catching glints of it.
“He admitted it.”
“The hit man?”
“Yeah. He named the Brown Man. He said Carlyle named the targets, and then paid him when it was done.”
“Jesus, Max, how’d you get him to give that up?”
“Persuasion.” I couldn’t look up at her.
“The kind that causes unconsciousness and a knot on the back of the head?” she said.
“And probably a little chlorine in the lungs,” I said, still looking away from Sherry’s eyes.
Again, there was silence, but there wasn’t a question in it, more a weighing of justice deserved or denied.
“They won’t be able to use that in court,” she finally said.
“They can flip him,” I said. “A good prosecutor can use the attempted murder of a law enforcement officer to make that kid sing like an American Idol.”
“That would be one legal way to do it,” Sherry said, and the implication was clear.
“I’m not a cop; I’m a PI,” I said, justifying.
She let that excuse sit for several beats, and then reached out and put her hand on top of mine.
“You’re a good man, Max.”
I waited as long as she had before answering.
“Sometimes,” I said.