A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,13

time the morning was old enough to call Billy. I had tried him several times during the evening but knew that by seven he would be up and sitting on the ocean- front patio of his high-rise apartment going through the Wall Street Journal.

“Counselor.”

“Max. Just taking a look at some of these tech stocks that I got you out of two years ago. It may be an opportune time to sneak back in on some of the safe ones to keep things moving in your portfolio. No more of this holding your own and getting savings account level returns. Even we conservatives have to get in the water again.”

“Who ever called you a conservative, Billy?”

“Only those who can’t figure out how I stay ahead, my friend.”

“OK. Then let’s move ahead, Mr. Greenspan. What’s your plan with this McCane guy, and what do you want me to do that you or he haven’t already done?”

I watched an early heron slide its snake-like neck into a patch of water hyacinth while Billy shifted gears. “I don’t know how serious McCane and his company are. Maybe no more than the police or the prosecutor’s office. Maybe he’s just here on the company dime, soaking up the sun and pretending to be working.”

“I don’t see a whole lot of enthusiasm,” I said. Billy hesitated.

“You know I don’t ask you into this easily, Max. I thought I could get to it, track it down from the outside.”

He listened to my silence.

“My feeling is the answers are in the street, and I admit I won’t go there anymore, Max. It doesn’t work for me.”

My friend had made his escape. I wondered if he knew something I didn’t, if he knew I couldn’t make mine. Maybe he was right.

I told him I wanted to start in the neighborhood, with the daughter who had first called him in.

“Logical,” he said, his voice losing its tension. “McCane has already been over there and wasn’t too subtle.”

I could imagine the stone-cold looks and the long-ago images of “the man” that would run through most of the minds in such a place when McCane came banging on the door.

“No doubt,” I said. “I’m sure that loosened things up nicely for me.”

“I’ll talk to Ms. Jackson’s daughter about you.”

When I let the statement sit quiet for a few seconds, he added, “Thanks, Max.”

“You are my attorney,” I said. “And by the way, as such, what the hell is going on with this petition to kick me out of my place?”

I could hear him on the other end, could picture him taking a long draw on one of those fruit and vitamin drinks he had every morning. “How hard do you want me to fight it?” he asked.

Billy thought my isolation on the river was therapeutic when I first came south. The ghost with a dead boy’s face, my bullet in his chest, was lodged hard in my head. The river was a cloak against it. Every night I had tried to grind the vision out with late night paddlings up and down the river that were almost manic with effort. But the sweat and pounding of blood in my ears had not saved me. Obviously my friend thought it was time for me to come out and rejoin the world. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“Fight it,” I finally said. “I still need some time to work on my casting technique.”

6

By 10:00 A.M. I was back in my truck, sitting at a four-way stop in an old, unincorporated section of Broward County, Ms. Jackson’s address in my hand. The streets were numbered in progression to the west. The neighborhood was several blocks north of Sistrunk Boulevard, which was considered the main commercial strip in the community. It was here that the black merchants built thriving businesses at a time when separation was still a way of life in the Old South. The street had eventually been named after Dr. James Franklin Sistrunk, one of the first African-American doctors in the county, who practiced when blacks were still banned from being treated in white hospitals on the east side.

I eased the truck onto Northwest Seventeenth Avenue and started looking for numbers. The asphalt street was a dull gray in the high morning sun. There were no sidewalks, and the graveled swale that ran along both sides was a dusty white in the glare. Small, single-story block houses sat back off the roadway. The front lawns were dry and bare. There was a distinct