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
