“Are you OK, Max?” she said and the concern sounded real.
“Uh, yeah, there’s already an officer here at the scene,” I said, and Cardona was now looking into my face.
“What scene are you talking about?” Richards said, now letting worry creep into her voice. I ran through what I figured had happened, that Rodrigo had been tracked by David Hix, who saw his chance to impress his ugliness on the little man and scare him out of the country. I talked loud enough for both Richards and the cop next to me to hear. He looked skeptical.
“Here, I’ll let, uh, Deputy Cardona explain,” I said and handed the officer his own phone. He turned away and I looked out at the whitecaps, hoping the concern I’d heard in Richards’s voice meant she wasn’t so pissed at me that she would leave me swinging. After a minute, Cardona snapped the phone shut.
“The lieutenant says she wants you down at your prearranged meeting place, asap, Mr. Freeman.”
“I think this will go much better this way,” I said to him, and without another word I went inside to change my clothes.
CHAPTER 29
On the drive to the Galleria in Fort Lauderdale I called Billy on the cell and told him about Rodrigo.
“How is he?” was his first question.
“Broken leg and maybe the same for his arm,” I said. “Probably with the baseball bat.”
“Hix?”
“No doubt on the loose,” I said.
“Max, how did they find him? How did Hix know about the Flamingo?”
It was the more difficult question. There was no way bat man was sophisticated enough to be extrapolating cell phone signals. It took expensive equipment to pull that off and he and his brother just didn’t come off with that kind of juice. Since Billy had been the one who picked Rodrigo from his last hospital visit in West Palm and drove him to the beach house, the only guess I had was that he’d been followed. He was an attorney, not a street investigator. He could have led the Hix brothers straight to the place where he thought Rodrigo would be safe. But I wasn’t going to put it on him.
“I’m not sure, Billy. But he’s in North Broward Hospital now, and I doubt he’ll be going anywhere soon.”
“So you’re there with him?”
“Ah, not right now,” I said, the admission sticking in my throat. Billy had put me on the cruise worker case. He expected certain things from me. I was letting him down by chasing after Morrison and O’Shea.
“I’m driving down to meet with Richards now,” I said. “She took a report from the deputy at the Flamingo and I’ll ask that they put a guard on Rodrigo’s door. He’s been the victim of the same attacker twice now, it’s gotta pull some protection.”
My excuse sounded lame. Billy let it sit there in my mouth, forcing me to taste it by not answering.
“OK, Max,” he finally said. “I hope, my friend, you know what you’re doing.”
Me too, I thought and punched off the cell.
When I met Richards in the parking garage, I wasn’t in the mood for any more questions or some pissing match over O’Shea. She said he’d called her, after all this time trying to avoid all contact with “the bitch.” The last time I talked to him he said he wanted to help me find the truth about Morrison before any internal investigators got in on the rape charge, a charge that Richards would want to file as soon as she found out.
When I pulled up to her unmarked car she got out and walked around to stand at my door. She was in jeans and a collared blouse with a cotton jersey underneath. Her detective’s shield was clipped to her belt and her 9mm was in a holster on the other hip.
“We going on a raid?” I said in greeting.
“I’m not sure what we’re going to, Max.”
I got out and leaned back against my closed door. She crossed her arms. The ball was in her court.
“O’Shea called me at the office,” she started. “It was nearly midnight but he talked dispatch into giving me his cell number by telling them he had information about the missing girls I was tracking.”
I nodded my head. At midnight O’Shea would have been on the stakeout of Marci’s apartment for several hours. Long enough to do some thinking.
“When I reached him he was cryptic as hell. Told me he thought you were getting in deep chasing down