The Blue Edge of Midnight (2 page)

In seconds I fall into the stroke. Efficient, full, with a swift lift at the end. Same power, same pull, same finish. I glide through the wet forest, backpaddling only to make the quick corners, swing stroking only to pull around the rounder ones. In minutes I am running with sweat but don’t even try to wipe it from my eyes, just whip the droplets with a head snap and keep digging. I know the route by memory and in forty minutes the river widens out and starts its curve east toward the ocean. The canopy of cypress opens up and then falls behind me. The moon is following. I ignore the burn building in my back and shoulders and keep my eyes focused on the next dark silhouette of mangroves bulling out in the water that indicates a bend in the river, and cut straight for it. Moving point to point, I just keep working it.

What I had wanted when I came down here was something mindless and physically daunting and simple. I’d bought this specially made Voyager canoe, a classic wood design that was modern but made in the old-fashioned style with its ribs and wood rails. I’d plunked it down in this river and paddled the hell out of it. I had heard athletes, long-distance runners and swimmers, say they could get into a zone where they could work without thought. Just settle into a pace and tune out the world.

But I couldn’t do it. I found out soon into my isolation that it wasn’t going to work that way for me. Rhythm or no rhythm. Quiet or no quiet. I’m a grinder. And the rocks that went into my head after I shot a kid in front of a late-night convenience store were going to tumble and tumble and I wasn’t going to forget. Maybe I’d wear the sharp edges off after time. Maybe I’d round off the corners. But I wasn’t going to forget.

The last thing I recalled that night in Philadelphia was Casamir’s words, “You are shot.” Then I mimicked his own hand going to his neck and found my own was wet and sticky with a soup of sweat and blood. I swabbed at the muscle below my ear with my fingertips and felt nothing until my index finger slipped into a hole that didn’t belong there. I either blacked out or just plain fainted.

When I woke up at Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson Hospital, I started grinding. I knew they must have had me loaded up with a morphine drip and all the other procedural narcotics, but I didn’t come out groggy, I came out analyzing.

My first thought was paralysis and I was afraid to move because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I stared up at the ceiling and then started working my eyes to the white corners and down to a light fixture and then to a television screen mounted high on the opposite wall and then to my left on the curtain rod and to the right a mirror that I couldn’t look into.

I concentrated on what I could feel and picked up the cool stiffness of the sheet against my legs and chest and was encouraged enough to move my right hand. “Thank Him for small miracles.” I could hear my mother’s old mantra and my hand went across to the left side of my neck and felt the bandage, thick and gauzy and wrapped all the way around. When I tried to move my head, pain shot straight into my temples and I knew from the tingle that my vertebra were probably intact.

I was taking an accounting of fingers and toes when District Chief Osborne walked into my room, followed by my father’s brother-in-law, Sergeant Keith O’Brien, and someone in a dark suit that should have had “Beancounter” written up and down one of the legs like they do on sweatsuits from the universities that say “Hurricanes” or “Quakers.”

“Freeman. Good to see you awake, man.”

I’d never met the district chief in the dozen years I’d been on the force and was sure he’d never known my name until early this morning when a dispatcher woke him out of a warm sleep in his home in comfortable East Falls. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders and the belly, and was wearing some kind of paisley button-down shirt and had tossed on a navy sport coat to look both official and hurried. He had gray-flecked hair and a bulbous nose that was starting to show the spider web of reddish veins from too much whiskey for too many years.

“Surgeons tell us you’re one lucky officer, Freeman,” he said. “They say a couple inches the other way could have been fatal.”

Of course a few inches the other way and I wouldn’t have been hit at all, but being such a lucky officer, I decided to hold on to that charm and not respond, even if I could. I hadn’t yet attempted to speak. My throat felt thick and swollen as if I’d been to the dentist and the guy had pumped me full of novocaine all the way down to my collarbone.

I swung my eyes over to my uncle, who’d taken a deferential step back from the chief. Since he was studying either the end of the bed or the top of his shoes, I took a clue.

“They say you’re out of the woods now. So don’t you worry. But as soon as you’re ready, we’ll need a statement,” said Osborne, tipping his head to the beancounter as part of the “we” but not introducing him.

There was an awkward silence. You can’t have an interview with a mute man. You can’t say congratulations to a shot cop. You can’t say “good job” to an officer who just killed a child.

“We’ll check back, Freeman,” Osborne finally said, reaching out until he realized my hand wasn’t going to move, and then issuing what seemed to be a consolation pat on the side of the bed instead. The chief and the guy I would later dance with in his role as human resource director walked to the door, had a few short sentences with Sergeant O’Brien and left.

My uncle Keith came to the bedside, making eye contact for the first time. Giving me the Irish twinkle and waiting a good safe period before flashing his more consistent fire.

“Assholes,” he said, not elaborating on who he was giving the title to and letting it sit wide ranging. “How’re ya, boy?” he finally said.

When I tried to answer, I couldn’t get even a croak through the novocaine-like block. My right hand went again to the left side of my neck, a movement that was already imprinted in my postsurgical psyche.

“A through and through,” he said, nodding his head to the right.

“Punk kid threw a .22 at you before you got off the knockdown. The EMS guys said the slug went straight through muscle, missed the windpipe and the carotid artery.”

He told me how the slug had passed through my neck leaving an entrance wound as clean as a paper punch. The exit wound was twice as large and raggedy. The lead had then pucked into the brick façade of the Thirteenth Street Cleaners, chunking out a thimble-sized hole with spatters of Max Freeman’s blood around it.

“Fuckin’ kid was a real sharpshooter,” he said before catching the look in my eye. Keith was like the majority of cops in Philadelphia and on every department in the country. In twenty-five years he had never pulled his gun in the line of duty. If the department hadn’t instituted a mandatory range qualification a few years back, the rounds in his old-style revolver would still be rusted in the chamber. But he had seen the results of shootings. He’d known officers who had killed and seen them change. Nobody took it without changing.

“Both of ’em DOS,” he said. “Crime scene guys bagged them right on the sidewalk.”

He hesitated, looking away.

“Twelve and sixteen years old. Both from North Philly. Down doing Center City for the night.”

He went on how the newspapers and radio talk shows were already howling about their new discovery this month that kids were carrying guns. He said a witness across the street on Chestnut was screaming that I took the first shot, cut the kid down without a warning. He said Internal Affairs had my gun and would be all over the shooting investigation, but being wounded and all, I didn’t have to worry.

He was talking, but I had only been hearing, not listening. My eyes had gone to the ceiling again, my right hand to the bandage on my neck.

I must have been forty strokes shy of the landing at Thompson’s Point when the spotlight beams hit me full in the face. I had covered the last mile and a half in nearly thirty minutes and had kept a consistent seventy strokes a minute the entire time. My gray T-shirt was black with sweat and I had worked through a stitch in my side that had started stabbing me after the first fifteen minutes.

I kept cranking into the light when a voice called out and two more cones of light swung onto me. I never slowed, just kept the rhythm until I felt the bottom of my canoe hit the boat ramp gravel.

“Shoot fire, Max! Slow down, boy!”

Cleve Wilson’s was the first face I could make out as he walked down the ramp to greet me.

“We was just about to head up your way,” he said with an uncharacteristic hitch in his voice and cutting his eyes to either side of the dock.

Shaking the sweat out of my eyes I brought the rest of the five-person ramp party into focus. There were four men and a woman. Two of the men were thick in the chest and waist and were dressed in the brown uniform of the Florida Highway Patrol. The other two seemed thin, and both were dressed in canvas pants and oxford shirts rolled up at the sleeves. The younger one cursed in Spanish when the river water lapped up onto his loafers.

The woman was as tall as the other four and I picked up the glint of blond hair in the flashlight beam, but averted my eyes. The night was already full of too much memory. I didn’t want to think about the rattle that that wisp of hair put into my heart.

I looked back at Cleve and registered the hesitation in his face. I was already trying to figure out how they’d already heard about the child’s body when he started in.

“We was just heading up to the dam,” he said. “These folks got some sort of tip that there might be some kind of clue to an investigation they got going.”

Cleve was putting on his old Florida Cracker voice, the one he’d used with me for the first month I knew him. It was his way of gathering intelligence, by hiding his own and letting others mistakenly try to send things over his head. He was about to make introductions when the oxford shirts did it on their own.

Detectives Mark Hammonds and Vincente Diaz, county sheriff’s investigators on a joint task force with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. When Hammonds stepped up he used the practiced firm handshake of a businessman and the old interviewer’s trick of staring straight into your eyes like he could see the truth hanging back in there where you couldn’t hide it. I’d used the look myself many times. I held his gaze until he flinched, then I took half a step back. Hammonds was the kind who made sure you knew he was in charge without using the words. He was a thin man in his fifties, tired around the eyes, but he squared his shoulders and like so many in his position seemed to will himself to appear bigger.

Diaz was quicker with the handshake. He was a clean-cut, young-looking Hispanic and couldn’t help himself from being amiable. If cops had junior executives, he would be it. Eager to learn, eager to please. He had big, white, square teeth and even though he tried, he couldn’t keep from smiling a little bit.

The woman refused to step closer to the riverbank and when Hammonds introduced her as a Detective Richards from Fort Lauderdale, I too kept my ground. We nodded our acquaintance. She stood with her arms folded as if she were cold, even on a night when the air was hanging warm and gauzy at the water’s edge. Her perfume drifted by on a swirl of river wind and seemed distinctly out of place. When I turned to talk to the others I could feel her eyes on my back.

“So somebody already called this in?” I finally said, directing the question to Cleve while I bent to pull my canoe higher up on the ramp.

“Called what in?” Hammonds said.

“You’ve got a crime scene out there,” I said but I could tell immediately that even though it wasn’t unexpected news, it still caught all of them hard. Hammonds’ lips went tight together and Diaz winced. I felt the woman take an instinctive step closer.

“What kind of scene, Mr. Freeman?” Hammonds said.

“A dead child. Wrapped up. Just above the dam.”

Cleve was the only one in the group that registered any true shock.

“Jesus, Max,” he said, looking at the faces around him.

“Let’s get a team out here,” Hammonds said to no one in particular as he looked out over the water, his block chin tipped up into the air.

CHAPTER 3

W
ithin an hour they knew what I knew and I was left guessing. That’s the way conversations go with good investigators. Even in supposedly friendly interviews. You answer their questions, offer your observations, try to be cooperative. They nod their heads, encourage the dialogue, make nice, and give you squat. By the time you walk away you feel like your pockets are empty and you just made a really bad deal with a door-to-door salesman. No wonder lawyers tell you to just say no and close the door.

The only line I’d been able to read between their questioning was that this wasn’t the first kid they’d found. There had been others. I couldn’t tell how many or where. I also knew I was a suspect. The first person who comes across the body in a homicide always is. I didn’t have to be told not to leave the state.

In two hours a crime scene truck was parked on the boat ramp and Cleve was loading up his park service Boston Whaler. Hammonds had decided not to wait for daylight. Cleve had tied a spare canoe to the stern cleat. In this high water, and with his knowledge of the river, he could get them up to the dam. From there they would have to take the other boat up to the body. Hammonds, Diaz and two others climbed into the Whaler and Cleve started it up with a rumble, got the men to cast off his lines and then chunked it into gear and slowly motored out onto the river.

The woman detective stayed at the ramp, talking to two crime scene technicians and into a cell phone at the same time. When she finally snapped the portable shut and took a step toward me, I stood up from my interview spot on the dock and gave her my back.

“I’m going home,” I said over my shoulder, waiting for an objection that never came.

I dragged my canoe into the water. Out to the west I could see Cleve’s portable spotlight flickering in the mangroves.
I’d
be far behind. As I pushed out and settled in for a first stroke, I stole a look over my shoulder and saw the woman standing back, four feet from the water line, arms crossed over her chest, following me with her eyes.