Midnight Guardians Read Free Page A

was thinking of, Max,” he said, his smiling dark eyes now holding mine.
    Billy has a profound stutter when he talks with anyone face-to-face. Behind a wall, on a phone, or simply out of sight, his speech is smooth, erudite, and flawless. But put a face in front of him, and a switch turns somewhere in his brain. Notice I do not say he
suffers
from a stuttering problem, because no one who is familiar with Billy and his abilities and success would call him a sufferer or victim.
    Billy and I are from the City of Brotherly Love, but the neighborhoods we grew up in were different worlds. I was a third-generation cop from South Philadelphia, a son who was spoon-fed on the ethnic soup of Italians and Poles and Greeks and any other white European immigrant society that could trace its American heritage back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yeah, Independence Hall harbored the breakaway English in 1776, but South Philly was home to the stevedores, brick masons, butchers, carpenters, and backbreaking, hard-drinking workers who made the whole new national machine churn.
    And yes, Billy’s family might well trace its roots back to the slave ships from Africa and the human marketplace where they were sold only a few blocks east and south of where the Liberty Bell once hung. But in our half of the twenty-first century, most blacks had migrated to the north and west sides of the city. And in Billy’s neighborhood near Twelfth and Indiana, all the scourges of poverty, drugs, unemployment, and crime were rampant in the 1970s and 1980s. Somehow our mothers met in a church, both of them fleeing religious tradition and abusive husbands. A friendship was born. Billy finally escaped by using his intelligence and drive to get a law degree at Temple University, and a business degree at Wharton. Then he pledged to never live out of the sunshine again.
    I fled my own past after my mother found the courage to do away with her husband, my father—our mutual devil. It was Billy’s mother who had shown her the way, provided the arsenic, given her the courage. I’d followed the family tradition and become an officer by then. I already knew that my father’s abuse was no secret among the fraternity of South Philly cops. The rules of the brotherhood in blue were both a curse and a blessing. No one had intervened during the years of beatings even if they were called to the scene.
Watch out for a brother
. But once it was done, no one let loose the autopsy report that showed the level of poison in my dead father’s blood.
Watch out for the family survivors.
    My mother finally succumbed a few years later, comfortable with her oppressor in the grave, and my father’s pension—but eaten away by Catholic guilt. I remained a cop until I was shot in the neck during a robbery gone bad. When I took a disability buyout and was determined to leave my past behind, I recalled my mother’s urgings to leave the city and look up her North Philly friend’s son, the successful lawyer in South Florida. For once, I followed her advice.
    Billy had become both my friend and partner. He is the intellectual lawyer with a million contacts, admirers, and grateful clients. I am the headstrong private investigator who despite years of grinding and isolation cannot get the streets, or the work of a beat cop, out of my head.
    I tipped my morning beer at Billy and took a long swallow as the sun glinted off the green glass. And my stuttering partner looked out at the gleaming horizon.
    “Does that mean you have something for me to do?” I said of his admission that he had been close to calling me before I called him.
    “Indeed, M-Max,” he said. “There is s-something turned ugly that I b-believe we should p-pursue.”
     
     
    “A WHISTLE-BLOWER?” I said, taking another hit of my beer.
    “Yes, wh-whistle-blower.”
    “So you’re doing this thing corporately?” I asked, again trying to get Billy to explain things to me in terms an old street cop could