Midnight Guardians Read Online Free PDF Page A

day? Twice a week?”
    “Only once a week, on Fridays, I think,” Carmen said.
    “And does he go straight there after leaving your office?”
    “I don’t know. I tried to follow him once, but I couldn’t keep up.”
    “OK. What does your brother look like? How can I recognize him?”
    Now she hesitated. This had gone beyond making a whistle-blower complaint, and had taken on the feeling of a personal betrayal. This was where it always got them: a mother turning in a son’s drug use, a daughter confessing her father’s sexual abuse.
    I’d seen it a dozen times in my own home, tucked in a space at the top of the stairs when my father’s own friends, the blue brotherhood, would show up in uniform to answer a complaint from one of the neighbors. They’d always take my father outside first. Then a uniform would stand in the kitchen with my bruised and tearful mother.
    “This is the third complaint this year, Mrs. Freeman. Is he hitting you?”
    My mother knew that if she answered, her husband could lose his job. She knew her son would lose his father. She knew it would be the end of a family, the loss of a confidant, a shoulder, even if the shoulder was sometimes hard and often brutal. I never heard my mother answer. And the uniformed cop would never ask twice.
    “Please don’t let him get hurt, Mr. Freeman,” Carmen said, looking into my eyes. Her strong will couldn’t hold the tear drop this time.
    I stayed silent, waiting.
    “My height, my coloring,” she finally said. “He wears a Marlins baseball cap, turned backward. You know how they do. And he is driving an old Toyota, dusty white you know, from the sun.”
    “And how old is he?”
    “He is nineteen years old.”
    “So he’s not a juvenile.” It was a statement, not a question.
    “His date of birth is June fourteenth, nineteen-ninety,” she said looking hard into my eyes.
    “You know Mr. Manchester is a lawyer?”
    “Yes.”
    “We’ll look up your brother’s juvenile record.”
    “And you will find it,” she said, losing a bit of the bravado now. “I am very much trying to save him, Mr. Freeman.”
    She was back to staring at her fingers, the rubbing more severe now. And for some reason, I was thinking about the callus she’d built up on that fine delicate knuckle of hers. I was trying to think of something to say to assure her that things will be all right, when I knew they wouldn’t. And while both of us were avoiding eye contact, I began to hear the thrumming of an electronic heartbeat pulsing somewhere in the distance, and growing.
    When I looked up out from the shade of the tree, I saw a metallic green Chevrolet Monte Carlo swinging through the parking lot, its chrome wheels spinning the sunlight. The windows were illegal black. The driver didn’t seem to be in a hurry. At first, I thought it was “just kids.” But when I turned and looked back at Carmen, she was knitting her brow.
    “It’s OK, Ms. Carmen,” I said.
    But she was looking past my shoulder to the approaching car.
    Then I heard the bass pounding of the music suddenly go louder, as if a barrier had been lowered. When I glanced back, a rear window was rolling down.
    Bap, bap, bap.
    It wasn’t until the third round that I launched myself over the top of the picnic table and swept Luz Carmen off the bench with a flying tackle. I could hear the bullets in the tree leaves above us making the sound of ripping cloth.
    Bap, bap, baaaaaaap.
    Fucking automatic, I registered in my head. When I looked through the legs of the picnic table, I could see the muzzle flash coming out of the Monte Carlo’s back window just as the driver punched it and sent the ass end of the car slewing to the right. The scream of the friction between hot rubber and asphalt added a whining alto to the bass line. In seconds, they were gone.
    Now it was stone quiet—amplified silence after chaos. I rolled off Luz Carmen, whose entire body was trembling. I scanned her for any sign that she was hit.