Midnight Guardians Read Free Page B

understand.
    “Actually it is b-both corporate and governmental. The w-woman works for a private rehabilitation center, b-but wh-what she suspects is that fake orders for wheelchairs and prosthesis are b-being billed to M-Medicare.”
    “So if it’s a government gig with the feds getting ripped off, why doesn’t she go to the state attorney’s office, or the GAO, or somebody who’s actually getting screwed here?” I said.
    Billy looked at me. He had already folded the newspaper two more times in his hand. Then he sat down in the patio chair, crossed his legs at the knee, and took on that lawyerly look of his.
    “You pay taxes, M-Max. I p-pay taxes. Medicare is funded by us and every other legitimate American,” Billy said. “The m-maid, the grocer, the sch-school teacher, the office manager—we are the ones getting ripped off. And if there isn’t anything left when we get old and need a wh-wheelchair, we’ll b-be the ones hurting.”
    Though Billy could be ruthlessly efficient in his practice as a financial and corporate consultant, he maintained a true social conscience born of walking the walk as a child of poverty. His own belief that if you made it, you were bound by responsibility to help those trying to do the same, often led him to take on cases that paid nothing—not that he would admit to it.
    I was used to his social rhetoric, but he recognized my flinch when he’d used the words
need a wheelchair
and stopped himself.
    “I am s-sorry, Max. I did not mean for that to s-sound so p-personal.”
    It was just the kind of thing Billy would say—an apology for being personal. He’s been my best friend for more than eight years. I’d walked into his office unannounced that first time, armed only with a description from my mother, knowing only that his own mother had been an accomplice in the death of my father. For that alone, I owed him a debt.
    Without hesitation, he had found me a place to live, a small shack on a river at the edge of the Everglades. It fit my stated needs perfectly. It was isolated, hard to get to, and quiet in a way only nature can be quiet; a place to grind the rocks in my head, a place to disappear and, yes, a place to hide. Having researched Billy’s background, I also entrusted him with my disability insurance payout from the Philadelphia Police Department. He ensured me that he could invest the amount and that I would, given my severely modest plans and lifestyle, never have to work again.
    I trusted him, not just because our mothers had trusted each other, despite the differences in their lives, but because I knew the odds he’d beaten, the climb he’d made out of the streets.
    Billy had known Sherry for as long as I had. He was the one I’d come to when Sherry was part of a sheriff’s team investigating the abduction and killing of children from the suburban communities edging their way out into the once-wild Glades. Because I’d been unlucky enough to discover the body of one child on my river, I had been deemed a suspect. Sherry hadn’t trusted me until I ultimately solved that case, rescuing one of the missing children in the process.
    Billy had admired Sherry’s investigative skills as a detective. And he had seen through her tough-minded way of looking at things without making prejudgments. He had, in fact, realized that before I did. When Sherry and I finally danced around our wariness of each other, and started dating, he’d been deeply pleased. With Billy’s wife, an attorney and then a candidate for a federal judgeship, he and Sherry and I were often a social foursome, dining together, or going to some show to which Billy inevitably obtained tickets.
    I waved him off his apology for using a reference to wheelchairs and its possible personal connection to Sherry. Her leg fracture and subsequent infection and amputation had occurred while she was officially off-duty. But the fact is that you are always a cop, 24/7. When confronted by a crime, which in our case