Chapter 9

Waiting for something to happen is the most difficult part of organized law enforcement, and it was one reason I was glad to be out of it. The feds in Diane’s office were ordering in more coffee. Billy was working his sources on the computer. Everyone in the room was waiting for one thing: the bleating of the phone and the call that would make some form of ransom demand for Diane’s life.

With the exception of a few nutcases out there, criminality is a simple, logical outgrowth of human need: greed, retribution, sexual gratification, power.

The odds were stacked against the possibility that three maniacs would mistakenly sweep a sitting judge off the streets in the middle of the day. The fact that they were smart enough to ditch her phone and credit cards and cash meant they weren’t run-of-the-mill idiots. They had another motivation, and the FBI glommed onto the answer that Diane’s involvement in the Escalante case was that motive. I shared their supposition, but I couldn’t just sit and wait for the next step to be dictated by the other side.

With Billy’s approval, I left the courthouse and went to the main branch of American in downtown West Palm Beach.

Inside the lobby, I asked for Mr. Armistead as Billy had instructed and was quickly met by a man in his late fifties with the kind of combed-back gray hair that was gelled into minute, perfect rows leading from a high forehead to the perfectly clipped back of his neck. He had a weak chin, which he tried to hide with one of those macho mustache-and-beard combinations they call door-knockers.

Still, he was wearing an expensive suit and had a ring on his right hand that probably indicated the graduating class of some Ivy League university. But after adjusting my handshake to avoid the ring’s bulk, I didn’t give it another thought.

“Mr. Freeman,” Armistead said, and with a come-this-way gesture he led me to a corner office, which I quickly surmised was not his private one but an open affair any bank officer could use on the fly.

The art on the wall was a Florida watercolor of swaying palms and white-capped ocean and taupe beaches. There were no personal photos on the immaculate desktop, and Armistead did not even give the computer screen a look when he sat down.

“Mr. Manchester has given us his instructions. And if you will only sign for this, Mr. Freeman, and please show me some form of ID, we can take care of this as quickly as he has urged.”

A photo ID: the guy was giving me a hundred thousand dollars in cash on an ID and a signature. I always admired Billy’s contacts. I didn’t want to be him, but I did admire his connections.

I showed my Florida driver’s license and signed. Mr. Armistead glanced at the ID. I was sure that he had already sized up the courier sitting before him: a tall, lean man whose specific age would be difficult to guess because of his athletic carriage and tanned and healthy complexion from extended periods of outdoor living. He might have been put off by my oxford shirt minus the tie, and my un-ironed khakis. And he may have noticed my scuffed leather boat shoes but probably hadn’t yet detected that I wasn’t wearing any socks.

It’s a look I’ve cultivated because it makes people think: Cop? Boat captain? Salesman? Tourist? It’s bland enough to cover a lot of bases and keeps me from sticking out. In my business, you don’t want to stick out.

Giving a hundred grand in cash to a guy who looked like an upscale deckhand or an aging Applebee’s waiter might not have been among Mr. Armistead’s usual banking duties, but again, Billy’s name smoothed all doubts. The man pulled a stuffed, softbound attaché case from under the desk and pushed it toward me as if it might be unlucky to hold on to it too long.

I didn’t bother opening the case, and the banker’s stone-faced look indicated that he certainly would not encourage it, even in the quasi-privacy of the office.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, and he only nodded.

I walked out of the bank with the attaché and went back to my car, which I’d parked deep in the corner of the lot in a Floridian’s favorite spot—under the shade of an old banyan tree. Shade, even in March, is coveted by those of us who know better than to put anything in the corrosive direct rays of a subtropical sun. You could bake bread on the front seat of a sedan parked on asphalt without shade in a couple of hours.

After working an eight-hour shift in summer, it’s every office worker’s wonder that the polymer plastic making up radio knobs and door handles and gearshifts isn’t melting and dripping onto the floor mats when they get to their cars.

I had also backed the Gran Fury into the spot up next to a ficus hedge to give me some cover when I popped the trunk and lay the attaché inside. I opened the case. I don’t care who you are or how rich you’ve become, seeing that much cash in twenty-dollar bills will make you blink your eyes and catch your breath. I took out six thousand three-packs in purple bindings and closed the case. Then I took my keys and reached far into the back of the trunk.

After Billy had given me the Fury, I had a friend weld a steel drawer up above the space where a spare tire should go. You couldn’t see it if you just opened the trunk and looked in; you needed to know it by feel. I unlocked the drawer, retrieved a bundle wrapped in oilcloth, replaced it with the case full of money, and relocked it.

I closed the trunk, surveyed the landscape for interested or furtive eyes, and then got into the driver’s side. Once settled behind the wheel, I unwrapped the oilcloth to expose the sig sauer P226 Navy handgun I’d been given by Rob Maine, a Florida gun expert who’d become another new friend. He’d been aghast that I was still harboring my old 9-mm police-issue handgun. He knew I was living out on the edge of the Everglades, and said the moisture was going to turn the old 9 mm into a hunk of rust despite my regular care of the weapon.

“Use the SIG,” he said. “The SEALs do and it isn’t completely waterproof, but it’s phosphate-coated, and a hell of a lot better than that old thing you’ve got.”

I dropped in the fifteen-round magazine and checked the ammunition, thumbing the first two out, looking for rust. Maine had also “gifted” me a box of 9-mm rounds that he’d sealed around the primer area with a diluted mix of clear nail polish.

“Wouldn’t want you to snap a wet load when some gator’s got you by the balls out there.”

I worked the slide. Everything was clear.

I do not like guns. I don’t like the trouble they can lead to, or the aftereffects they can leave behind. But I was going somewhere with a wad of cash in my pocket to meet a guy who knew some guys who knew everything there was to know about drug dealing in this area of South Florida, and that combination demanded backup I wasn’t going to get. I slipped the gun under my seat and started the Fury.

Clarence Quarles—they called him CQ. And even though a cat can sometimes change some of his stripes, more often than not you’re still going to find him near the same litter box he grew up in.

Clarence was a tall, skinny, chocolate-skinned athlete who had the gift of some combination of bone density and fast-twitch muscle that could catapult his six-foot-seven-inch frame to heights you could only gawk at. His splayed fingers seemed to do magical things on a leather-covered ball, making it move and spin and float in the air, giving it a radarlike attraction to an orange hoop just twice its circumference. He could run, inexhaustible, like a gazelle, and had a shooting range that made NBA scouts drool and defensive players cry.

I had met him through a friend, a teacher in fact, who had a seemingly mystical effect over Clarence that had led the kid from a despicable neighborhood on Tamarind Avenue in West Palm Beach to a prep high school in New England to a scholarship at Boston University. There was something in CQ that had kept him from signing a pro contract as an undergrad, had kept him in school studying economics, and had kept him coming back to this place on spring break to see his family and shoot hoops like he’d never left.

If you ever asked him why, he’d stretch out those impossibly long arms, turn his pale white palms to the sky, and quote Popeye the Sailor Man: “What? I yam what I yam.”

It made people shake their heads. It made people wonder. It made me smile. Billy knew and loved the kid and would be appalled that I would bring him into this mess. But I knew CQ had connections. And I was going to use any and all means to find Diane.

I parked the Fury in the street fronting the Dunbar Village housing project within eyeball distance of the basketball court. I knew CQ hung there—a mama’s boy come back to the roost. His mother’s home was thirty feet away from the rusted gate entrance to the court. From her porch, she had watched her boy from the time he learned to walk. And CQ knew she was watching: that fact may have saved him.

When I closed the door of the Fury, the noise caused a dozen sets of eyes from the court to look over, while another untold number that I couldn’t see surely peeked out from gauzed curtains and dusty venetian blinds. A tall white man in an old-school police car didn’t just pull up to this neighborhood without being noticed.

Knowing this, I headed directly to Mrs. Quarles’s front porch instead of the court where I had already spotted Clarence sitting idle on a bench, surrounded by four or five other players. Before I reached his mama’s front yard, her son got up, picked up a basketball with one hand as if he were snatching an errant cantaloupe from the ground, and started shooting free throws at the far basket.

As usual, Clarence’s mother was sitting on her porch, a lap full of sewing in the folds of her day dress, her tapered and weathered fingers busy with close work.

“Good day, Mrs. Quarles.”

“Yessir, Mr. Freeman,” she answered, looking up at the sky. “I believe the Lord has done us right today.”

“How have you been, ma’am?”

She moved her gaze from the azure sky over to the courts where the players had gone back to more important things than assessing the stranger who’d put a wrinkle in their day.

“I got my boy home. And I rose for yet another day on this earth, Mr. Freeman,” she said and turned a smile on me. “So I’m on the plus side, sir.”

“Indeed you are, Mrs. Quarles,” I responded, taking my time, knowing the ritual. Since her son’s tremendous athletic skills had turned him into a commodity in high school, no coach, no recruiter, no so-called adult fan, was allowed to address or approach him without the permission of his mother. If you broke that rule, you automatically lost access. That’s how it was and it was upheld by CQ and thus by everyone else.

“That’s some kind o’ old-time vehicle you got there, Mr. Freeman,” the elderly woman said, again without looking at the subject of her sentence. “Reminds me of bad times.”

Her tone was conversational, carrying no other meaning than a simple statement. But the message was there.

“Yes, ma’am. She’s an old classic. Billy gave it to me as a present.”

“Is that right? And how is Mr. Manchester? We don’t see him as much as we would like to.” The mention of Billy improved her demeanor. A hint of a smile came to her face. “He still livin’ on top of that big ol’ palace down on the beach?”

“Yes, ma’am, he is. And although he is in good health, Mrs. Quarles, he is working very hard. In fact, I came by today to see if Clarence might be able to help Mr. Manchester with something.”

The elderly woman looked at me, studied my face in the way I was sure she had studied the eyes of every recruiter or coach or vice principal of a private school or any other man who came to her porch bearing propositions for her son.

“If it’s for Mr. Manchester, I’m sure Clarence will want to help,” she said, now looking past me toward the court, indicating I was allowed to speak to her son. I took my foot off the first step and my elbow off her banister.

“ ’Cause I know Mr. Manchester would never put my boy in a bad situation,” she said. The inflection was a mix of question and command.

“No, ma’am,” I said before turning away. “He wouldn’t.”

I slipped inside the fence of the basketball court and walked toward the far end. The players, all African Americans ranging from elementary school children to prematurely gray, yellow-eyed men, lowered their chins but raised their eyes, cutting looks at yet another white dude in search of CQ.

“Yo, Coach,” someone yelled from the deep corner of the court. “I gotta sweet jumper, too, like to light up yo’ field house like a star.”

The comment elicited a number of guffaws from the other players.

“Hey, man. I take CQ a dozen times one-on-one. He ain’t that good,” the young caller said.

More sneers from the others and then from a group on the bench: “Shut up, nigger. You can’t take CQ’s mama with that raggedy-­ass game a’ yours.”

“Why don’t you come out here, nigger, an’ I sho’ you what’s raggedy-ass?”

I kept walking, though I felt a grin pulling at the side of my mouth. If a white man had used such a racial epithet on the playground, or anywhere else for that matter, words or fists would be flying. Here it was ritual. I did note that when the braggart commented that he’d beaten CQ in one-on-one games in the past, CQ himself had never turned from his concentration on his own basket. I saw him simply shake his head and shoot another free throw.

As I approached, I watched him bounce the ball twice, then position it delicately in the web of his elongated fingers. With a fluid motion like the slow whip of a willow tree limb in the wind, he shot the ball in a parabola that I knew was too high for a standard free throw. Yet the orb rose with an exaggerated backspin, pierced the hoop without touching any part of the rim, and because of the spin, struck the macadam and bounced back perfectly to CQ, who had not moved from his spot at the free-throw line.

I was three steps behind him, and he had not turned his head.

“That the way Pistol Pete Maravich did it, Mr. Freeman?” he said, still not turning, but again positioning the ball on the tips of his fingers and letting go another shot, exactly the same, with the same rotation and result.

“So I’ve heard, CQ,” I said. “He didn’t have anyone to rebound for him when he was a kid, so he developed that backspin so he wouldn’t have to chase the ball.”

CQ shook his head.

“Ol’ school, man. But you do what you have to do, right, Mr. Freeman?”

This time, he turned, cradled the ball in one hand, and reached out the other, offering it. The young man’s palm swallowed my entire hand like I’d slipped it into a manila envelope. And I do not have small hands. “Maravich was a legend,” I said, looking into CQ’s strikingly black eyes, the corneas so dark it was impossible to detect the color there. They made you stare into them a bit longer than was naturally polite.

“True,” CQ said. “But can you imagine a guy playing in the NBA today with the nickname ‘Pistol’? Man, the press would crucify that dude.”

I was still looking into the kid’s eyes, but felt myself smiling at his grasp of the world around him. “Probably true,” was all I said.

Clarence bounced the ball a couple of times and let an awkward silence sit for three beats. “Y’all didn’t come to play, did you, Mr. Freeman?” he said with a smile of his own.

“No. I came to ask a favor, CQ, for me and for Mr. Manchester.”

The statement caused the young man’s lips to seal and his eyes to avert for the first time.

“OK,” he said, stepping toward the empty benches at courtside. “Let’s talk.”

So what did I need from him? CQ asked. I just had to name it. Mr. Manchester was his friend. He’d been supportive from a distance, not like the others who wanted to be close just for the sake of prestige or spin-off money or any residual self-gain they could get from “knowing” CQ.

“He’s cool. And I met his lady once and she was cool, too. What do you think I can do to help?”

I gave CQ the facts in low tones on the courtside bench. The other players had left us alone. I explained the kidnapping of Billy’s wife and the instant speculation that her case dealing with the extradition of a Colombian drug supplier had in all probability been the motivation.

“We think they’ll keep her close, hiding her until they think they can use her in some sort of trade to keep their man from going to court here in the States.”

CQ had followed the logic. He was a college-educated twenty-one-year-old. In fact, he was smarter than a typical college kid because he knew both sides of the street: the campus and classrooms where he was learning macroeconomics, and the local corner where a more visceral form of business theory held sway.

“So you’re looking for Mrs. Manchester and because you think there are drugs involved, you figure I might have access to relevant information, being that I have such wide connections within the drug underworld?”

Crafting his synopsis, CQ had discarded all hints of ghetto cant in his voice and diction. The metamorphosis was impressive, but I wasn’t sure if he was employing it because he was pissed at me for making assumptions, or to show that he understood exactly what I was asking him to do.

“Y’all need a CI. Right?” he said, instantly switching up the lingua franca. “Somebody who know everybody in the ’hood and got an ear for the street scut.”

“Right,” I said—no use hiding my intentions.

He stared out over the empty half-court for a minute, spinning the ball in his huge hands, letting it slide over his skin. With each revolution, there was a hissing sound.

“Are you providing incentive, Mr. Freeman?” he finally said, cutting his eyes at me.

“I am. I’ve got two grand in my pocket and more if the information pans out. Unmarked cash. You pass out the first taste, and then I’ll personally deliver the follow-up if your source has more.”

Again, CQ spun the ball.

“That ain’t the way the cops do it.”

“I’m not the cops.”

The ball stopped. CQ looked me directly in the eye, the way he’d been taught by his mother, the way that meant he understood what was being asked of him and that he was promising to do what he said he would.

“For Mr. Manchester and his wife, yes,” he said.

He reached out a hand. I reached into my pocket first and then gave him a handshake containing a disposable cell phone and a packet of a hundred twenties.

“You make the call to me and then ditch the phone, CQ. No blowback on you. We’re not putting you in jeopardy.”

He looked past me, staring first at the ground and then raising his eyes past me in the direction of the porch where his mother still sat.

“Yeah, you are, Mr. Freeman. But it’s cool. I know the game, and I’m better at playing it than you are.”

I thanked the young man, knowing he was correct, but justifying my actions as I walked off the court.

“Yo, Coach. Yo, check it out, Coach,” yelled another player who fired a twenty-five-foot air ball that again elicited hoots from the others.

As I moved past CQ’s front porch, I cut my eyes to Mrs. Quarles, who was still in her chair, watching me with a relaxed but suspicious look on her aged and mottled face. She returned my nod, but not with full approval.

The Gran Fury was untouched under her protective eye, and I climbed in and keyed the ignition, rumbling the 420 V-8 to life, the noise helping me keep at bay the ethical argument that I knew was going to haunt my thoughts. But I had other stops to make, including one to a lawyer Billy would be loath to contact on his own, even though it was an obvious connection to the Escalante empire.

When I’d pulled away from CQ’s neighborhood under the baleful look of his mother, I knew I was running without rules. And in the world of both the good and the bad guys, someone running without rules can be dangerous.