The blue edge of midnight

Chapter 12

I am cold. In my dream I can hear water sluicing through concrete gutters. A swirling rain, caught in the wind that shears around the Wanamakers building, tunnels down Chestnut Street and whips against my face. Water is running black into the storm drains in center city Philadelphia and I am running, hard, my black Reeboks slapping the sheen of water on the sidewalk. I am breathing hard, gasping against the rainwater pelting my face and I keep looking up to see the corner at Thirteenth Street, but I’m confused. Am I getting closer? Or farther away? Am I running at it? Or running way from it? Suddenly my foot hits a spot. I skid, lose my balance, start to fall.
The scraping sound of stiff plastic on concrete jars me awake and my eyes pop open and I am gripping the arms of a chaise lounge. I am on Billy’s patio, sitting in the late-morning sun. I got to my feet and walked into the kitchen, trying to shake the dream out of my head. I cupped my hands under the faucet and splashed water into my face. I was back in the world.
Billy had gone to his office. He’d taken me out of the hospital two nights ago. With a few carefully folded fifty-dollar bills, he’d gotten help from hospital security to get me out a back entrance and avoid any lingering members of the media. He’d waited until after 9:00 P.M., after television’s main broadcast hour, when the reporters would be easing back from any live standups they might have done.
“I’m a-afraid you’ve 1-lost your anonymity,” he’d said.
Billy of course was right. After the plane crash, my name was in the accident reports. Gunther was going to recover. And since the Glades ranger was going on about how I’d dragged the pilot to the dock, the instant inclination of the press was to do a hero story. In my favor was the fact that I had no address for them to find and no phone to call. No sound bites, no quotes, no hero.
But I also knew reporters weren’t all slaves to the news cycle. Someone would have seen Hammonds and his team at the hospital and made a connection: What’s the lead investigator of the child killings doing interviewing a guy who crashed a plane in the Everglades? Television might not care, but the newspapers would question whether or not to make a hero out of a guy being questioned about serial killings. The media didn’t like stories that didn’t fit into pigeonholes. How do you portray a cop who gets shot in the line of duty but kills a twelve-year-old in the process? I knew the drill. They’d back off to see “what develops.” They might eventually move on. I hoped Hammonds would be smart enough to let them.
For a full, quiet day it had worked. I’d lain here, stretched out in the warm morning sun and then through the shady afternoon. Billy had mixed up some kind of hydrating mixture of watered-down fruit juice and vitamins. I’d been able to eat, bowls of brothy soup and then some thin pita bread. I drifted in and out of sleep with the ache in my ribs and the one in my dreams taking turns waking me.
This morning my body was stiff, but my head wasn’t going to let me rest any longer. I got up and went inside and poured myself a cup of coffee, washed down a prescription Percocet with it, and looked out through the wall of windows at the thin line of the horizon. The coffee cup shook when I tried to raise it and I needed both hands to steady it. I was still wobbling despite the sleep and the medication. My skin was dry as paper and my lips were still swollen and cracked. The hot coffee stung them but I couldn’t deny my habit. Diaz’s card lay on the counter and I picked up the phone.
“You have reached the desk of Detective Vince Diaz, if you would like to leave …”
I waited for the damned beep.
“Look, Diaz. This is Max Freeman. I’ve been able to locate your piece of electronics. If you want to pick it up, call me.” I left Billy’s cell phone number, even though I knew the detective bureau would have a caller I.D. readout and probably already had Billy’s private number. I looked at the digital clock on the stove. Diaz called back in eight minutes.
“Hey, Mr. Freeman, that’s great. I’d like to come up as soon as possible. Get moving on that particular thing, all right?”
I gave him the address and told him he could call from the lobby when he arrived.
“Yeah, you kind of surprised us leaving the hospital so soon.”
“About an hour?” I said.
“Yeah, sure, an hour.”
I punched him off and dialed again.
“Ranger Station twelve, Cleve Wilson.”
“Cleve. Max Freeman.”
“Good God, Max. Where the hell you been?”
It might have been a question, or a statement of wonder.
“I’ve been a little busy Cleve, I’ll fill you in when I get out there but I’m not sure when that will be.”
“You know those detectives were back out here with a warrant. I had to show them to your place,” he said and this time I could hear the apology in his voice. “But I went in with them, you know, just to watch if they messed things up.”
“It’s all right, Cleve. I appreciate it.”
“And boy, they do not miss anything, if you know what I mean.”
Cleve was a pro at understatement.
“Anything interest them in particular?”
“Well, they did perk up a bit when they found that nine millimeter of yours in the bottom of your duffel.”
I had forgotten about the gun and sat there in Billy’s kitchen wondering how I’d been able to let it slip far enough into the back of my mind as to finally let go of its memory, the feel and smell and sound of it echoing off the brick and glass of Thirteenth Street.
“But they didn’t take it,” Cleve said quickly, breaking the silence. “I heard one of them wondering if it was your old service issue. Then they put it back.”
“Yeah? Well, thanks, Cleve. Like I said, I’ll see you when I get back out there. I was actually calling to check on my truck.”
“It’s sitting here. The boy come back with it and since the scratch was gone and it was all shined up, I figured he was telling the truth about you letting him use it. But I’ve got the keys back in my desk.”
“Thanks, Cleve.”
I punched the phone off and finished my coffee while I watched the beginning of an afternoon rainstorm drive the sunbathers off the beach below.

I met Diaz in the lobby. I was carrying a small gym bag and a traveler’s cup of coffee. I’d taken a shower and dressed in a pair of light cotton trousers and the loosest long-sleeved shirt I had. My skin was still tight and had started to flake off my forearms, either from the salve for the mosquito bites or from the dryness of dehydration. The Percocet had taken the edge off the ache in my bruised ribs.
Diaz was waiting under the watchful presence of the tower manager to whom he’d presented his I.D. before having me called. The manager bowed slightly when I thanked him, but continued his careful vigil as we drifted to a sitting area in an anteroom off the main entrance hall.
“Nice place,” Diaz said, sitting down on the edge of a wingback chair while looking up at the vaulted ceiling.
I took a seat on the adjoining couch and put the bag between my feet on the marble tiled floor.
“That for me?” he said.
“Look. I’ll be straight with you. I don’t want any of this coming back on Billy Manchester. I’ve got this and it’s going straight to you. No one else in the middle or with knowledge,” I said. Diaz was looking at his hands.
I’d been too paranoid and a hell of a lot more distrustful of the investigators to give up the GPS before. It was perfect evidence for a case against me, even if I was the one who handed it over. Now they were scraping, and more people, including me, were in the target zone. But I didn’t want concealing evidence coming back on a man of Billy’s position.
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. No one seemed to know your attorney around the shop, but when we started asking around the law world, everybody seemed to know him. Connected and smart were the words that kept coming back. And I think this is smart too,” he added, looking up into my face.
I reached into the bag and brought out the GPS unit. It was rewrapped in plastic, and I told him how I’d found it, the cut mattress and the filmy footprint I’d found in my shack.
“All the locations of the bodies are logged into it,” I said, passing the machine to Diaz. “That’s how you found them, right?”
The detective looked up and I could tell he was turning a corner, and doing it behind Hammonds’ back.
“You know what this is like. I saw your file out of Philly,” he started. “This guy’s been playing us and we’re scratching at anything we can. It got to the point we were left waiting for a break, a mistake. And when you came paddling up out of the river we figured, hoped, you were the mistake.”
I knew he was holding my eyes to see how I might react.
“Maybe we won’t get anything off this by tracking the supplier and seller. Maybe it comes up empty again. But it’s better than sitting around waiting for another kid to disappear.”
“And maybe he’s through with that,” I said. “Maybe he’s got a new target.”
Diaz let the thought sit for a few empty seconds.
“Yeah, well. No offense, but if that’s true, if he’s after you instead of another kid, a lot of folks aren’t necessarily going to see that as a step back.”
I was still holding on to the straps of the gym bag, hesitating. When Diaz started to get up I reached in and took out a baggie containing the bent aluminum tag from my canoe and handed it to him.
“I think it’s more true than you guys are willing to admit,” I said, reaching into the bag for my second bit of concealed evidence.

Thirty minutes later we were in Diaz’s unmarked sedan heading for the river. He’d been pissed when I told him what the tag was. It was the first time I’d seen him angry and he let some Spanish slip into his voice.
“Crime scene, man! Mierda, you know evidence and crime scene protocol!”
Now he’d calmed down as we headed for the access park where I’d left my canoe the night I ducked the warrant, and where the killer must have pulled the tag.
By then we’d agreed the chance of finding fingerprints on anything were remote and tracing the courier who delivered the tag was probably a dead end too.
“That’s the way he sent the first set of GPS coordinates,” Diaz said. “Straight to the sheriff’s office.”
Since then he’d altered his methods, even e-mailing the GPS numbers in from a computer terminal at a downtown Radio Shack. It didn’t take an FBI profiler to figure out this wasn’t some swamp rat survivalist taking shots at the encroaching city dwellers.
“He knows the Glades. He knows how to get in and out of these damn neighborhoods without being seen. He knows enough about the gadgets to use them. And he sure as hell knows how to play on everybody’s fears,” Diaz said. “Hell, we don’t even know if it is only one damn guy.”
The detective went quiet as we drove west. He’d already overstepped his bounds talking about the investigation. Seeing his frustration, I doubted they’d found anything to help them. But he was right about the crime scene protocol. They at least deserved to take a look.
I told Diaz where to make the turn off Seminole Drive and we curved out toward a line of cypress trees and then down the entrance road to the park. A warm drizzle was spattering the windshield and Diaz looked up through the glass, hesitating. But when I got out and started toward the river, he followed.
Ham Mathis was hovering around his canoe concession office, emptying out the ice water from the cooler where he kept cold drinks for his rental customers. He peeked out from under the hood of his yellow rain slicker and spat a brown string of tobacco juice into the wet grass when he saw me coming.
“Hey, Ham. How’s it going?”
The old Georgian set the cooler down and looked up.
“Hey, Max,” he answered, sneaking a look at Diaz coming up behind me. “I truly am sorry about your boat.”
He let another string of juice fly and then led us around to the back of his trailer. There lay the carcass of my canoe.
“I pulled her ’round so’s the customers wouldn’t see her,” he explained.
The boat was flipped on its gunwales like I’d left it, but someone had stomped her. Gaping holes in the center of the hull yawned like twisted black mouths in the rain. Each rib had been methodically snapped. It had taken a malicious effort to do that kind of damage to its tough outer skin.
I went around to the bow and checked the port side where the tag had been. The pulled rivets had left four small jagged holes behind.
All three of us just stared at the broken shell for several long minutes.
“That’s how she was the other mornin’ when I come in,” Mathis finally said. “I ain’t never had no vandalism out here before.”
“Anything else damaged?” Diaz asked.
“’Cept your paddle,” Mathis answered, looking at me. “Snapped it like a twig and tossed it down the bank.”
I showed Diaz where I’d set the canoe five nights before. We agreed there wasn’t much of a chance of picking up any footprints or latents off the canoe skin. Mathis had called the county sheriff’s office the morning he’d found the mess and a patrol deputy had come by and written up a report. When Diaz went into the small trailer with Mathis to get a reference number, I walked down to the river. The water had turned dark green in the fading light and was pocked with raindrops. Large circles grew in the spots under the cypress boughs where heavier drops fell from the branches. The air smelled thick and green, an odor I had never known until I came here from the city. A heron sat perched on a log on the opposite shore, searching the water for a meal. Suddenly it raised its head, then croaked its distinctive keyow and flew off as if something in the shadow behind had scared it. I stared into the dark patches but if something had flushed the bird, I couldn’t pick it up.
“Angry?”
Diaz’s voice startled me. He’d come down from the trailer and was standing behind me, fingers in his pockets and shoulders hunched against the drizzle.
“Guy that smashed that canoe didn’t just want to let you know he was following. He was pissed,” Diaz said.
“Yeah,” I said, turning back to the river and looking into the shadows. “But not enough to show himself.”
As we stood there Diaz’s beeper went off and he retreated to his car to use his phone. A minute later he flashed his headlights and punched the horn. I yelled to Mathis that I’d come back later with my truck and he waved me off. When I climbed into Diaz’s car he put the sedan in gear before I could close the door.
“That was dispatch,” he said, setting his lips in a hard line. “They got another missing kid.”