“He will be in magistrate’s court at nine in the morning.”
“You’re still willing to do this?”
“I made you a promise, Max.”
“I’ll see you there, Billy,” I said.
“Two other matters, Max.”
“Yeah?”
“I am presently at the hospital in West Palm.”
“What?”
“Rodrigo was beaten early this evening near the Cuban grill where he said you two have met on occasion.”
“Jesus, Billy. Is he OK?”
“Cuts and abrasions. But nothing too serious,” Billy said. He was using the clean, efficient diction he always fell into when pressed. Don’t waste time on emotion or early supposition.
“It appears that the Hix brother you warned him about made a visit. Rodrigo tried to avoid him, but was cornered. The others backed away when Rodrigo was singled out.”
“What was the message this time?” I said, trying to swallow back an anger that was souring the back of my throat. I could see David Hix’s flat face in front of me. The sneer and the cocky way he’d wielded the bat.
“All he could make out was ‘Go home’ and an indication that he tell the others the same,” Billy said. “He seemed to be blaming Rodrigo for costing him money.”
“If Hix is working for cruise worker contractors and his handlers don’t see progress, he doesn’t get paid,” I said.
Billy was silent on the other end of the phone for a moment.
“He may be in for a payday then, Max. Rodrigo is telling me no one will speak to us now. He’s contacted his wife. He wants to leave and return to the Philippines.”
This brother act was getting old, I thought.
“You said you had two other matters, Billy.”
“When O’Shea called he also downloaded a photo of some man that appears to be sitting in a bar somewhere. He said you had asked him to take it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Any felon that you recognize? Maybe of the drug distribution species?”
“No. I’ll bring a copy with me in the morning,” he said, and I could hear the question in his voice.
“It’s just a hunch, Billy,” I said. “I’ll see you outside the courthouse at eight thirty.”
I put the cell phone in my pocket and stood staring out over the Glades, the wind still moving the sawgrass, rippling through it like giant snakes below were bending the stalks in long curved patterns. I worked my way back down the berm, digging my heels into the soft dirt to fight against the angle. I was knee deep in the water when I got the canoe floated and then climbed over the gunwale and pushed out onto the river. I would have time to stop at the shack for a change of clothes and then get to the landing to clean up. I might get a nap in my truck if I got to the county jail in Fort Lauderdale early enough. It would be a long night but not as long as O’Shea’s. He’d be in with a bunch of drunks and punks and scofflaws and perhaps even a few innocents who got swept up by a justice system that would take its time separating the merely tarnished from true bad boys.
The troubling stones I’d been grinding had, in the span of a phone call, taken on sharp new edges. I stroked the canoe downriver feeling their jagged rub, and the moon followed with me.
At eight in the morning I was outside of the jail, sitting on a concrete bench, watching men moving on a construction site across the New River in the morning sun. They were working the kind of miracle that people like me unfamiliar with the building trades always find unfathomable.
Their project was already some thirty stories high. You could watch the damn thing go up day by day as an observer, from poured foundation to concrete columns to prefabricated steel floor stacks and still find yourself stunned at the end of a month to see what men could raise. As I sat sipping a large Styrofoam cup of coffee I’d watched the distant small figure of a tower crane operator climb hand-over-hand like an insect up a ladder enclosed in a tall column of crisscrossed steel. When he got to the glass box at the top, he disappeared inside. I was too far away to hear him start the electric motors that powered the crane, but I saw it begin to move, swinging its balanced, perpendicular arm to the west and silently dropping its hook three hundred feet to pluck yet another load