Midnight Guardians Read Free

silent thing again.
Whoosh
, glide.
Whoosh
, glide.
Whoosh
, glide. Not a word. Over the last few months, I’d thought I’d learned to deal with this.
    Sherry had always been independent, and proud of it. But she wasn’t selfish. She’d once taken in a friend being abused by a cop husband. She was always first to jump into a homicide case, to do the extra work others hadn’t thought of. Before she shared her thoughts on cases with me, even though I wasn’t officially a part of the law enforcement family anymore, it was usually the ethical quandaries she wanted to talk about.
    Now she would go someplace in silence, in her own thoughts, seeing images only she could watch in her head, to a place that I could only speculate about: Was it anger over the loss of her leg, or a loathing of her own body? Was it self-pity that someone of her character would naturally fight against? A submerged hatred of me, given what my decisions had brought upon her?
    I took this new flicker of thought, this idea that she felt a responsibility to reach out to someone else, as a good thing.
    While we took a long bend in the trail, I accepted her silence and focused instead on a dark blip in the saw grass ahead. As we got closer, I could make out the green-black body of an alligator halfway out of the lake, up on the shore with its snout up in the air as if it were smelling the breeze. Twenty yards closer, and I could see that it was huge, a fifteen-footer at least. And it had something in its jaws. Twenty more yards, and I could see that wedged in the gator’s mouth was a Florida soft-shell turtle, the size of one of those big picnic salad bowls.
    “Whoa,” I said, and slowed down. The gator concentrated on its catch. Sherry whizzed by on the trail thirty feet away without once turning her head.
    I stopped and watched. The gator paid me no mind and continued to work its jaws, applying pressure. I could hear the turtle’s shell crackling as the teeth split its plastron: It was still alive, kicking its feet, stretching out its neck in a futile attempt to escape.
     
     
     

— 3 —
     
     
    B ILLY MANCHESTER WAS outside—well, his version of outside. He was standing at the railing of the outdoor patio of his penthouse apartment overlooking the island of Palm Beach and the Atlantic beyond. It was the kind of South Florida morning that’s lured people to this part of the country for more than a hundred years: sky clear and azure blue, air that’s clean and crisp and unsullied by pollution, carrying with it a salt scent of ocean water. The sun warm on the skin, containing an intensity that makes every color pop with a brightness you just don’t find in northern climes.
    Billy had a folded
Wall Street Journal
in his hand. He was dressed in an immaculately pressed white oxford shirt and tailored trousers despite his stated intention not to visit his law offices today. His nose was in the air, as if scanning the far horizon. And the profile of his coffee-colored skin outlined against the sky gave the impression of some Nubian prince, or at least some
GQ
cover boy.
    “I am sometimes astounded by your nearly prescient ability to call on me, Max, just at the simultaneous moment that I am considering calling you,” Billy said. “What is it they say about such psychic phenomenon?”
    I was still inside his apartment, rooting around in his huge stainless-steel refrigerator, searching for a bottle of Rolling Rock despite the hour and my own stated objective to get back to work. I was dressed in faded jeans and an off-white T-shirt, off-white because of age and a lack of a decent bleaching, not because the color was fashionable. I had on a pair of beat-up deck shoes and no socks. In fact, I had not worn socks since I moved to Florida from Philadelphia some seven years ago.
    “Brothers from another mother?” I suggested in response to the question, then opened the beer and walked out to stand with him on the patio.
    “That w-wasn’t the phrase I