home park only twenty minutes away in Wilton Manors, was typed in next to the number. Nick checked his watch: eleven o’clock. He was not pressed for time. No other stories were breaking. He’d made a dozen of these calls before. After the ones in which he was the first person to tell a relative that a son or wife or brother was dead, it always left a soured lump of guilt in his gut. He hung up the phone and logged off his computer.
“We’re still waiting on the identification of that shooting victim at the jail,” he said to the assistant city editor as he walked by. “I’m going out. But I’m on my cell.”
Nick made sure the editor had heard him and waved the phone and got a nod from the guy.
You tell somebody his brother is dead face to face if you can, Nick thought as he rode the elevator down.
Chapter 4
Don’t hesitate, he told himself, sitting in his car outside David Ferris’s double-wide, watching the curtains in the window just to the right of the louvered front door. Nick had driven up Federal Highway, practicing the words he’d use when the brother of the dead man answered the door: Excuse me, Mr. Ferris, I hate to bother you. I don’t know if you remember me, Nick Mullins from the Daily News. I did some stories about your brother a few years back?
Liar, Nick thought. You don’t hate to bother him when there’s a good chance that his brother has just been shot dead. You’re after a story. You need a comment.
Hello, Mr. Ferris. Nick Mullins from the Daily News. I’d like to verify if you’ve heard from the Sheriff’s Office concerning your brother.
The straight-out-in-their-face technique was at least honest.
Oh, and by the way, if you have heard, could you please spill your guts to me on how you feel about this news for two hundred thousand strangers to read in tomorrow’s editions?
When he’d arrived in the correct block, Nick pulled into the entrance of the Palms Mobile Park and checked the address on his pad. But after the first left turn, his memory served him. He eased down the narrow street past Flamingo Trail, Ponce de Leon Court and Anhinga Way. Speed bumps between each block jounced him, and palm trees, all with too-thin trunks and browned fronds, leaned precariously at each corner. Nick once noted that trees did not like to thrive in trailer parks. Maybe it was the cramped space that wouldn’t let the roots spread. Maybe the cheap owner associations refused the expense of fertilizers and care. Maybe, as with the natural instincts of animals, they somehow knew better than to grow in places that always seemed to be magnets for tornadoes and hurricanes.
Nick had turned onto Bougainvillea Drive, gone all the way to the end and parked in front of the dusty turquoise-and-white trailer. He then turned off the ignition and made the mistake of letting the quiet form around his ears. When he was a rookie reporter in Trenton, two weeks on the job, the Marine barracks in Beirut had been bombed. Every reporter on the metro desk was given a list of six names, families who had lost sons and husbands and daughters. All had to be interviewed within two days. He had done the same thing years later after 9/11. And he still hadn’t learned to avoid hesitating.
He finally picked up the pad from the passenger seat and opened the door. Before stepping out, he took off his sunglasses. You don’t ask a man if he knows his brother is dead and not have the balls to show your eyes. He put the pad in his back pocket.
There were no other cars in the drive. The carport, little more than a sheet of tin supported by poles and tacked to the roof of the trailer, was filled with a full-sized washer and dryer, rusted at their edges. A chaise lounge was missing two plastic straps. And water-stained cardboard boxes containing God knows what were stacked alongside the front of a sheet-metal utility shack. Nick kept checking the curtains, waiting for a movement that would tell him someone was inside who didn’t want to talk to him.
A woman opened the door just a crack before he could step up onto the metal grated stairway. Nick lowered his eyes, just for a moment, and then looked into the light-colored eyes that peered out.
“Good morning, ma’am. I’m looking for David Ferris. Is