Shit. You don’t even know why. You fucked up again, got into it, and could have gotten out, but didn’t. You made the exchange and had been making them ever since, buying up the steroids, and then turning the other way when the other shit started showing up in the box as well.
And you told all of it to her-told Sherry Richards the whole deal. I ratted them out to a pretty, one-legged detective, and you know what? Fuck ‘em. It felt good.
– 21 -
In the morning, I was sitting outside on my small dock at water level when Billy called. The sun was still rising, and low beams were working their way through the veil of green.
After my conversation last night with Sherry, I’d rejoined Luz Carmen at the table and silently finished my coffee. Then I gathered a sleeping bag from my armoire and told my guest that I’d be sleeping down on the dock. It wasn’t the first time I’d spent the night there. At certain times of the year, the mosquitoes are dormant and the temperature pleasant. I like the openness of the air. I like to stare up at the tree canopy and watch stars slip in and out of the foliage. That wasn’t my motivation last night. With a woman client upstairs, I told myself I was being a professional. Maybe sometime in the future, I’d tell Sherry the same thing.
Billy’s call had come while I’d still been dozing.
“My ballistics guy says it probably came from a pistol with a suppressor attached. He based that on the lack of extensive powder burns on the animal’s scalp,” Billy said.
“You have a ballistics guy?”
“I took photos of the bullet removed during the necropsy and passed them on to an expert, Max.”
“And the original went to the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office?”
“Of course,” Billy said. “We are cooperating one hundred percent with the authorities.”
“They could trace it with a comparison,” I said. “Maybe get lucky.”
“Yes. If they expedite it, they might come up with something in a year or two.”
Again, that cynicism in Billy’s voice-that’s usually my way of talking. But we both know how swamped and understaffed crime labs are. No one in the business watches the popular TV shows without scoffing at how they depict results that magically pop up instantaneously.
“Anything else with the dog?” I said.
“Like?”
“Well, maybe it had a wallet in its mouth along with a chunk of butt flesh?”
“No such luck, Max. But that breed is known to clamp down and never let go. I wouldn’t doubt if Fido got in a bite. You saw how silent and sneaky the beast was. We can turn the dog’s remains over to the sheriff along with our theory. They might take some blood samples from its mouth, but again…”
“Yeah, by next year,” I said.
As we spoke, I became aware of a subtle movement to my right. I did not turn my head, and looked only by cutting my eyes in that direction. A tricolored heron about two feet tall was just yards away, stalking the shallow water for baitfish. The eye on my side of its head wandered, but I can never tell what direction a bird is looking. This one’s bill was long and tapered, like an old woman’s knitting needle, and its wings, neck, and head were slate blue. A white line ran the length of its throat. It raised one orange-colored foot and then froze, like a dancer, balanced for a strike or for a sudden leap in the choreography. Billy’s and my conversation had stopped, and the silence seemed to have frozen us all.
“How is Ms. Carmen?” Billy finally asked.
“Upstairs,” I answered. Suddenly, as if I had been directing the bird alone, there was a flutter and then a big whoosh of wing and air and the utterance of a harsh GAWK as the heron rose and pirouetted gracefully through an opening in the trees, and vanished.
“She’s fine,” I said, looking up through the now empty hole in the canopy. “Safe.”
“Can she stand it for a couple of days while I keep pushing the feds for some protective custody? This proof that someone shot the dog and that same someone probably set off the explosion should crank up the pressure.”
I turned my head to the doorway up the stairs above me. “I don’t know, Billy. I’ll have to ask her.”
“Be convincing, Max.”
Convincing someone to stay isolated in the middle of nowhere is mostly determined by whether that someone has an affinity for being alone. I discovered the ability in myself by crawling into books when I was young, disappearing into worlds I’d never seen, reading conversations between people I would never meet, absorbing life lessons through characters overcoming odds I would most likely never face. I used the ability as a refuge, taking a book and a flashlight under my covers as a kid while my drunk and violent father bounced my mother off the walls downstairs in the middle of the night. I wiped tears from my eyes and read the pages, trying to escape with Huck Finn or walk a new beach on Treasure Island while the muffled gasps and sharp curses ricocheted up the stairwell.
But Luz Carmen’s brother was dead, and I had not seen her shed a tear. She had not yet claimed his body. She might hide, but the reality was not going away.
I stepped quietly up the stairs, and when I opened the door to the shack, my eyes went immediately to the sunlight sifting through the east window. Luz had figured out how to adjust the Bahama shutters and was raised up in the bottom bunk of the bed, reading. She met my look and nodded a good morning.
“Coffee?” I said, moving to reload the stove with wood, and then start the fire.
“Yes, please.”
“Did you sleep?”
“Did you?”
I rinsed and then filled my tin coffeepot with water.
“Some,” I said. “It was a little cool.”
“The heat rises,” she said. And when I looked over, she was still looking at the book, her knees up, acting as a platform.
I scooped coffee into the small, one-legged basket, and then lowered it into the pot. I washed the cover after removing the small glass percolator bubble, and then remounted it. I opened a lid on the stove top and set the pot over the open flame.
“I can make some oatmeal,” I said, pulling a chair out from the table. From here, I could see that Luz Carmen was still fully dressed. She’d slept in her clothes, as had I.
“I want to see my brother,” she said, finally letting the book slide down into her lap.
“I know,” I said, and then recounted Billy’s morning message-that the dog had been killed by a gunman. “They’ll most likely want to do an autopsy now on your brother’s body. They’ll probably assign homicide now. They’ll start working it harder, faster.”
Luz took in the information without reaction, staring ahead at some vision all her own. But the filtered sun caught the moisture on her cheeks and glistened. “I killed my own brother,” she said, the words coming out of her mouth even though I couldn’t even see that her lips had moved.
“If you play along, and if you keep your mouth shut. If you simply work and keep your head down and see nothing, you live,” she said. Her voice was not whiny or complaining, but stilted and rote and without emotion. “My brother would be alive if not for me.”
Billy and I have had this conversation deep into many nights on his balcony facing the sea: Is the man who sits by and ignores the criminality taking place in his sight as complicit as the man doing the crime? What about the Germans who watched the camp trains being loaded with Jews, or the Iraqi citizens who saw the roadside bomb being planted and turned the other way? Not to mention the Wall Street underlings who shook their heads and zipped their lips when they knew the bundled mortgages would never pass muster?
I was not up for a debate with a grieving woman. I stayed silent for a long time.
“I need to bury my brother,” Luz said.
“You will,” I told her.
By early afternoon, I had replaced a rotting plank of wood on the port side of my dock, freed up a jammed
