After my hand touched the skin flap of Sherry’s amputation, she’d quickly pulled up her suit and stroked over to the steps. On one leg, she hopped up and out of the water and grabbed a nearby towel, slung it around her waist, and made her way inside. I stayed in the water, rested the back of my head on the gutter, and closed my eyes, listening to the sound of night insects, taking in the odor of night-blooming jasmine.
Later I sat at the kitchen counter, drinking beer in the dark, feeling sorry for myself. There were techniques I’d taught myself to control my anger when I worked on the streets of Philadelphia as a foot patrolman: when a punk-assed kid mouthed off when I asked him not to loiter in front of the bistro on South Street, or when some dealer was lucky enough not to be carrying when I finally thought I’d outsmarted him and he just smirked and turned out his empty pockets.
Grain of sand, I’d tell myself, let it go. Form that omega sign with your ring finger and thumb, a reminder not to let the anger rule you. Get the small rubber pinkie ball out of your pocket and squeeze it in your palm-a hundred times, no, two hundred. I’m not sure any of them worked then; I wasn’t sure they’d do tonight.
I’d made love to Sherry hundreds of times, many of them joyful moments in that very pool. But I’d never made love to one-legged Sherry. It had been nearly a year; no matter how understanding I tried to be, knowing my needs were no match for what she was enduring, I was still failing. You’re insensitive, Max. You’re thinking with your dick, Max. Don’t be a Neanderthal, Max. Finally, I poured half the beer out in the sink and rinsed it. The third bottle of the night wasn’t helping; a fourth or fifth wouldn’t, either.
When I went to her room, the lights were still on. She was sitting up in bed, dressed now in one of my big Temple Owls T-shirts and a pair of sweatpants. She was on her side of the bed, the same side she’d had since our relationship started. But a long rectangular mirror was propped lengthwise against her inside hip and extended to the foot of the bed. From my viewpoint, it was a four-foot, framed length of particle board. The mirrored side faced her.
“Hurting?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah, a little bit,” she said without looking up. Her head was cocked to the side so she could stare into the mirror.
Within the first couple of months of her amputation, Sherry had developed a pain in her leg, the missing one. She began complaining that the missing leg was in such pain she couldn’t stand it. This is a woman with a pain threshold higher than anyone I’ve ever met. When I dragged her through the Everglades with a compound fracture, she’d refused to cry out. So my layman’s logic asked: How could something that’s not there anymore hurt? But I also knew that she was suffering.
The pain was in her brain, as it is in everyone’s, her doctors told her. Pain is a perceived thing. They explained cortical perception and told her she would have to change the feeling that it manifests. Sherry was skeptical. Hell, I was completely unbelieving. But after a series of different techniques, Sherry’s therapists found that mirror-imaging treatment worked for her. By positioning the long mirror beside her, she could see the reflected image of her healthy leg, lying right there, a replacement, at least in her brain, for the missing limb. Using this, the pain subsided.
I stripped off my clothes, put on a pair of workout shorts, and climbed into my side of the bed. I had always slept naked in the past. Sherry dimmed the lights but did not turn them off. I rolled onto my left shoulder, facing the opposite way, knowing she might spend hours gazing at the faux image of herself.
Finally, she reached out and laid her fingers lightly on my head.
“I’m sorry, Max.”
“It’s OK, baby,” I said, lying again.
“I thought I was ready,” she said. “I was trying.”
“I know, baby. It’s OK.”
The lying came off my tongue with such simplicity, with such martyrdom. I rolled over onto my back and took her hand in mine, interlacing our fingers.
“It’s going to take time,” she said.
“I know,” I said, and this time it was the truth. But the next lie came quickly, too. “I didn’t mean to pressure you.”
When I looked at her face, the familiar line of her nose and slant of her jaw, the way her blonde hair fell across her cheek, I also saw the framed piece of particle board, the barrier between us.
“Are you working for Billy tomorrow?” she said.
“No. Not till Friday.”
“Will you come with me to meet this guy at the gym?”
“Which guy?”
“The one I was telling you about-the deputy from the hit-and-run.”
It is unusual for her to ask me along. In the past, we’d worked some cases together because the circumstances demanded it. But Sherry is the kind of detective who likes her independence, even when carrying out quasi-official duties.
“OK, sure,” I said. “If you don’t think I’ll be in the way.”
She squeezed my hand and grinned. “Just stay in the background. And don’t knock anything over.”
I smiled back, right before she moved her eyes to the mirror again. I stared up at the ceiling, and at some point rolled back onto my shoulder.
A bond between us is fraying, I thought, but we are both trying not to let the fibers go loose.
At 11:00 the next morning, I loaded Sherry’s wheelchair into the bed of my truck and we took a drive up to A1A in Fort Lauderdale. I had the windows down, which I try to do whenever the temperature falls below eighty degrees. Out at my river shack at the edge of the Everglades, it never gets as hot as it does in the city. Out there, I am constantly shaded by towering water oaks and cypress trees that are hundreds of years old. And my shack sits up on stilts that are speared down into waist-deep water. You cannot get to my place without a canoe or flat-bottomed boat. The shade and the water eliminate two of the heat sources that plague South Florida: dominating sunshine and thermal-absorbing concrete. An eighty-five-degree day in downtown West Palm Beach or Miami is a seventy-five-degree one at my shady spot on the river.
What I don’t have out there is the ocean breeze and the smell of fresh salt air. When we hit A1A at the Las Olas Boulevard intersection, I took a deep and appreciative lungful and looked out over the vast blueness of the ocean. I thought, If I could move my shade trees and my cool river water to the shore, I might live here forever. But the only way to do that would be to eliminate 120 years of urban development. Forget it, Max; this isn’t the Florida of the 1890s.
When the driver behind me blew his horn, I realized I’d been sitting at a green light and moved on. A few blocks later, Sherry directed me to turn into a city parking lot. While I unloaded her chair, I surveyed the area. There was some sort of high-rise construction site to the south, the International Hall of Fame Pool behind us to the west, and an older, 1970s-style retail complex to the north. The north building was a two-story sun-washed stucco box. The first floor featured a liquor store, a sandwich shop, and a beachwear boutique. Upstairs was a place called the Iron Pump, which had a neon sign and floor-to-ceiling windows.
I already doubted that there would be an elevator in the place as Sherry climbed out of the truck and into her wheelchair. But as we approached the entrance to the building, we got a heads-up from a skinny guy sitting on a stool just inside the shade. When he nodded, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth nodded with him.
“You goin’ upstairs, they’s a freight elevator in the back there,” he said, hooking his thumb down the hall. The man’s arms were covered in tattoos from his wrists to his bony shoulders, and he was holding a small miniature poodle in his lap. His eyes were as yellow as the dog’s.
Though both Sherry and I were casually dressed in shorts and shirts, they weren’t the kind that would indicate we were going for a workout. Our natural cop wariness must have shown.
“They’s another chair dude up there now,” the man said, again with the nod. “Tol’ me to give y’all directions.”
“Thanks,” I said, matching his head movement, minus the cigarette.
The freight elevator was clunky and smelled of stale booze and sweat, which only served as a hint of odors to come. Sherry was silent. I knew she was anticipating the scene, steeling herself for the introduction to come, working out a dialogue ahead of time. I had already decided to make myself as unassuming as possible.
When we got off the freight elevator, we entered a corridor open to the outside at either end. Along the hallway, there were two doors to the east, two to the west. On the west side, I could hear music. And it took a couple of measures before I tagged it as “Hell Patrol” by Judas Priest. I was guessing that if I put my fingertips on the cinderblock wall next to me, I would feel the bass vibration. But given the looks of the flaked and mildewed paint job, I kept my hands in my pockets.
Sherry rolled down to a glass door and started to open it herself before I could get there; so I stood back after grabbing the handle to hold it. Anyone inside would see her glide in unassisted, with me following.
Inside the music wasn’t as loud as I’d anticipated, and the clanking of metal was off the beat. There was one big room before us, spread out and planted with chromed-up exercise stations, as in some metallic cyber garden: iron stalks of pipes and steel cable, stacks of heavy black plates, and small cushioned red pads attached at seemingly impromptu places. The odor was of stale sweat and close heat and ripe testosterone.
Sunlight was pouring through the windows onto a row of treadmills and stationary bicycles. But at mid-morning, there was only one person jogging there with his iPod strapped to his arm. I spotted an office cubicle carved out with a half wall of fabric at the far front corner. But the action was obviously in the back, where I could see the free weight stacks flanking the bench press and squatting rack, where eight big guys were milling in front of the wall of mirrors, looking at themselves. A couple of others were spotting for a man pumping a load on the bench press, his high-pitched hissing cutting through the music. No one looked directly our way, but I got that same feeling I did when entering a neighborhood bar where I was new: No one missed the entrance of strangers.
While I was still taking in the scene, Sherry rolled off toward the back corner. She had spotted her appointment, a guy in a sleeveless sweatshirt with bulky shoulders and no legs. He was sitting in a wheelchair and pumping a set of iron dumbbells with both arms. When we approached, I saw that his eyes were closed. Despite the fact that he was facing a wall of mirrors, he was not looking at his image. Sherry stopped a few feet away.
“Marty Booker?” she said in greeting.
The man did not stop his methodical curling; left, right, left, right. His biceps were bulging with the effort, blood pumping through engorged veins that looked like fat blue worms crawling just under the skin. He also did not open his eyes.
“How’d you guess, Detective?” he said, the words leaking out between clenched teeth.
“Familiar hair color,” Sherry said.
There was a twitch of a smile at the corner of the guy’s mouth as he tightened his lips to finish the repetitions, and then dropped the weights to the floor beside him. Booker took a towel that was draped across one of his wheels and wiped his hands. He finally looked Sherry in the eye and offered his hand, which she shook, and then nodded up at me.
“This is my friend Max Freeman.”
The man’s handshake was hard, the skin almost hot to the touch. I could feel the callus on his inside palm. He looked me in the face.
“You’re the dude who helped out with the junk man a few years back, right? The serial killer doing druggies in the northwest.”
“It was Sherry’s case,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, turning a smile back at Sherry. “She blew the guy’s face off, if I remember.”
It was, in fact, a case I’d been pulled into by Billy. One result was that I had surprised the serial killer in his own lair only to have him get the drop on me. He was about to finish me off when Sherry saved my ass by putting a 9 mm into the man’s brain.
Sherry said nothing, and kept any recognition of the incident from showing in her eyes. Instead, she looked down at Booker’s wheelchair.
“Nice rig,” she said.
“Yeah,” Booker said, thumping the wheels with the heels of his hand. “Nothing but the best for a gimped-up cop; your county tax dollars at work.”
But he quickly dumped the cynical tone and returned Sherry’s attempt to break the ice by assessing her own chair.
“Yours ain’t bad, either. Built for speed, eh?”
“Yeah,” Sherry said. “Lightweight alloy, it’s good for distances.”
Booker nodded and looked down in his lap. “Never was one for the long run. More of a short blast kinda’ guy.”
Sherry was silent, seemingly lost for words, an unusual predicament for her. I was starting to feel an uneasy creaking in my knees, like I needed to move and get out of the way. But then I sensed the movement of others in the room as a couple of the corner lifters inched their way over to us.
“And hell, now he’s an even shorter blast,” said a voice from the group, a comical tone in his voice. “Just kidding…”
Sherry pulled one wheel back, spinning her chair around.
“Well, it’s you, Detective Sergeant Richards,” said a mutt-faced man dressed in a black stretch-fabric shirt, hemmed above the shoulders to show his bulky biceps, and tight at the waist. His matching black shorts were as loose as the shirt was tight, hanging down below his knees. He had one of those half-smiling faces on that tries to show he’s being friendly and funny, but smart-assed and dangerous at the same time. It probably worked on teenage girls looking for adventure. It only made me begin flexing and curling my fingers.
“Never seen you in here before, Detective,” the man said with one of those glances back at his friends, to indicate he was speaking for all them. “Trying to get back in shape, ma’am?”
Sherry cut a look at Booker to assess his reaction. I figured she was looking for something that might indicate friends or foes. When she got no sign, she turned back to mutt-face.
“Did someone invite you over here, McKenzie?” she said to the guy. “Because we’re having a conversation that entails stringing nouns, verbs, and adjectives together, so I doubt that you have the capacity to participate.”
I heard a couple of sniggers escape from someone’s mouth. Sherry was still staring at mutt-face, a.k.a. McKenzie, who, I’d guessed by now, was some sort of cop. Despite being verbally dinged in front of his buds, he kept the faked-up smile on his face in place.
“Hey, you’re a stitch, Detective,” he said, gesturing to Sherry’s missing leg, “pardon the pun. But we were just wondering if maybe you were recruiting for some special unit with our buddy Booker here-a new gimp patrol or something.”
I did not move. I’m about six feet three and a lean and ambling 215 pounds. I’m quicker than I look, and I knew my stamina was twice as good as anyone in the room other than Sherry. She on the other hand is as lean as a cheetah. Everyone here outmuscled us in bulk. It would be nasty if we had to get into it. But I’d learned over the years to let Sherry handle her own situations. To interfere is to hint that she can’t take care of herself, and that’s the last thing anyone in their right mind would want to do with Sherry.
She just nodded at the gimp patrol comment and then gestured to McKenzie’s crotch, matching his cynical smile.
“Why, McKenzie?” she said. “You have a recent amputation or something? You are looking a little light these days.”
Now the sniggers turned to laughter, peppered with a few woofs.
“Smart mouth for a girl in a wheelchair,” McKenzie said.
I could see him flex the muscle in his abnormal-size neck, giving Sherry that shrug they must learn when they’re posing in front of the mirror. It’s not much different behavior from that of a cane toad that puffs itself up to appear bigger, in order to scare off an attacker.
McKenzie was sizing me up. I had several inches on him, but we were probably the same weight. I’d have him on reach if it got physical, but you’d have to be careful not to let him get a hold of you.
“Don’t look at him, dickless,” Sherry said, careful not to let anger seep into her voice, thereby letting the scenario spin out as locker room jibbing. “Challenge me, tough guy.” She waved her hand around the room, indicating the variety of workout machines.
“Let’s see if you can make my short list,” she said, looking him up and down. “Excuse the pun.”
McKenzie huffed and looked back at his buddies. And when no help was offered, he turned around to Sherry. “You choose, little girl,” he said.
Sherry looked around like she was deciding, but I knew exactly where she was going.
“Dips, rockhead,” she said, pointing at two matching iron towers that included pronged handles at about chest height. She wheeled over and McKenzie and his gang followed. When she unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it off to reveal a workout bra underneath, I instantly wondered if she’d had this scenario in mind all along. Her arms and shoulders rippled with finely cut muscles, slim and corded, devoid of any softness that might indicate fat of any kind.
McKenzie stepped up and peeled off his shirt to go naked from the waist. He flexed his pectorals, which jumped like trained gerbils on his chest, and then tried to stretch his huge biceps, which because of their size seemed to bend his arms at a permanent angle.
An older man in khakis and a polo shirt with the gym’s logo stitched on the breast appeared from behind the half-wall office and sauntered over. When he caught my eye and recognized me as a stranger, I gave him a shrug, as if I had no idea what was going on. He stood next to me and folded his arms, watching.
After locking the wheels on her chair, Sherry pushed herself to a standing position. On one leg, she hopped over to the machine on the right and positioned herself between the handles that flanked her shoulders. She put her palms on the two grips, with her elbows cocked behind her shoulders. The fabric of her bra stretched tight across her breasts. McKenzie followed suit on the machine next to her, his smile intact.
“Count out your own reps, McKenzie,” Sherry said. “Unless you need help from your boys here if you get past ten.”
She took a small hop and pressed herself up into a locked elbow position, and then lowered herself to the start. Then she pressed her entire body weight up again. McKenzie jumped up on his tower to match her.
“One, two, three…”
The music in the place had changed over to “Down ‘n’ Dirty” by Steelheart. I took the gym manager by the elbow and urged him toward his office.
“Maybe you could show me what kind of contract you have for a membership,” I said.