When Darkness Falls

chapter 2

M iami criminal defense lawyer Jack Swyteck wasn’t looking for a new client, at least not one who was homeless. Granted, many of his past clients hailed from an address that even the pushiest real estate agent would have to admit was undesirable-death row, to be specific. Jack’s first job out of law school was with the Freedom Institute, a ragtag group of idealists who defended “the worst of the worst,” which was a nice euphemism for some very scary and guilty-as-hell sons of bitches. Only one had actually been innocent, but one was enough to keep Jack going. He spent four years at the institute. Nearly a decade had passed since his last capital case, however, and it had been just as long since he’d defended the likes of a Falcon.

“So, your real name is what?” said Jack. His client was seated on the opposite side of the table, dressed in the familiar orange prison garb. The fluorescent light overhead cast a sickly yellow pall over his weathered skin. His hair was a thinning, tangled mess of salt and pepper, and his scraggly beard was mostly gray. An open sore festered on the back of his left hand, and two larger ones were on his forehead, just above the bushy right eyebrow. His eyes were black, hollow pools. Jack was reminded of those photographs of Saddam Hussein after he crawled out of his hole in the ground.

“My name’s Falcon,” he said, mumbling.

“Falcon what?”

The man rubbed his nose with the palm of his hand. It was a big, fleshy nose. “Just Falcon.”

“What, like Cher or Madonna?”

“No. Like Falcon, fuckhead.”

Jack wrote “Falcon Fuckhead” in his notes. He knew the man’s real name, of course. It was in the case file: Pablo Garcia. He was just trying to start a dialogue with his new client.

Jack was a trial lawyer who specialized in criminal defense work, though he was open to just about anything if it interested him. By the same token, he turned away cases that he didn’t find interesting, the upshot being that he liked what he did but didn’t make a ton of money doing it. Profit had never been his goal, which was precisely the reason that Neil Goderich, his old boss at the Freedom Institute, referred Falcon’s case to him. Neil was now the Miami-Dade public defender. Falcon flatly refused to be represented by a PD-anyone on the government’s payroll was part of “the conspiracy”-but he desperately needed a lawyer. The dramatic live news coverage on the bridge, coupled with Falcon’s apparent fascination with the mayor’s daughter, gave the case a high profile. Falcon took a swing at the first PD assigned to the case, so Neil pitched it to Jack. Falcon was happy, if only because it could be fun to mess with the son of Florida’s former governor. Jack had been happy, too. He made it a practice to do two or three freebies a year for people who couldn’t pay, and he was reasonably confident that his old buddy Neil wouldn’t toss him a lemon.

Jack, however, was beginning to have second thoughts.

“How old are you, Falcon?”

“It’s in the file.”

“I’m sure it is. But talk to me, okay?”

“How old do I look?”

Jack studied his face. “A hundred and fifty-seven. Give or take a decade.”

“I’m fifty-two.”

“That makes you a little old for the mayor’s daughter, don’t you think?”

“I need a lawyer, not a smartass.”

“You get what you pay for.” Sometimes a little wisecracking loosened these guys up, or at least allowed you to keep your own sanity. Falcon was stone-faced. It must be decades since this one cracked a smile. “You’re Latin, right?”

“What of it?”

“Where you from originally?”

“None of your damn business.”

Jack checked the file. “Says here you became a U.S. citizen in nineteen eighty-two. Born in Cuba. My mother was from Cuba.”

“Yeah. She was great, but I ain’t your daddy.”

Jack let it go. “How did you get here?”

“A leaky raft and a boatload of luck. How’d you get here?”

“Just luck, I was born here. Where do you live now?”

“Miami.”

“Where in Miami?”

“It’s a little place along the Miami River. Right before the Twelfth Avenue Bridge.”

“Is it a house or an apartment?”

“It’s actually a car.”

“You live in a car?”

“Yeah. I mean, it used to be a car. It’s been stripped a hundred times over. Doesn’t run or anything. No tires, no engine. But it’s a roof over my head.”

“Who owns the property?”

“Hell if I know. There’s this old Puerto Rican guy named Manny who comes around every so often. I guess he owns the place. I don’t bother him, he don’t bother me. Know what I mean?”

“Sure. My dad and I had the same arrangement when I was in high school. So, let me ask you this: How long have you been homeless?”

“I ain’t homeless. I told you, I live in the car.”

“Okay. How long have you lived in this car?”

“Few years, I guess. I moved in sometime while Clinton was still president.”

“What did you do before then?”

“I was the ambassador to France. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

Jack laid his notepad on the table. “Tell me something, Falcon. How is it that you’ve lived on the street all these years, and the only time you seem to get into trouble is when you climb up on a bridge and threaten to kill yourself?”

“I’m a smart guy. Keep my nose clean.”

“You ever had any contact with the outreach people from Citrus Health Network, or any of the folks over at the mental health clinic at Jackson?”

“There’s this woman named Shirley who used to come visit me. Kept trying to get me to come with her back to the hospital and get some meds.”

“Did you go?”

“No.”

“Did Shirley ever tell you what kind of a condition you might have?”

“In her opinion I showed signs of paranoia, but she thought I was well compensated.”

“What did you say to that?”

“I said thank you very much, it sure sucks to be crazy, but it’s nice to have a big dick.”

Jack ignored it. “Have the police ever come to take you by force to a crisis center for a few hours, or maybe even a day or two? Has anything like that ever happened to you?”

“You mean have I ever been Baker-Acted?”

It didn’t surprise Jack that he knew the terminology. He was definitely well compensated, psychologically speaking. “Yeah, that’s what I’m asking.”

“If I was crazy, they’d have me over in the A Wing.”

The A Wing at Miami-Dade county jail was for psychiatric patients. “No one’s saying you’re crazy,” said Jack.

“You people are the crazies. You’re the ones who walk around pretending that guys like me are invisible.”

Jack didn’t disagree. Still, he jotted “possible anasognosia” in his notes, a medical term he’d picked up while working death cases. It meant the inability to recognize your own illness.

“We’ll talk more about that later,” said Jack. “Right now, let me explain what’s going to happen today. You’re charged with a variety of things. Obstructing a bridge, obstructing a highway, creating a public nuisance, indecent exposure-”

“I had to piss.”

“You probably should have come down from the lamppost to do it. But hey, hindsight’s twenty-twenty.” Jack continued with the list: “Resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer-”

“That’s a total joke. Paulo told me that if I came down, I could talk to the mayor’s daughter. The minute my feet hit the ground, three SWAT guys were all over me. Of course I resisted.”

“I’m just reciting the charges, I’m not the one bringing them.”

“What kind of a country is this anyway? A guy wants to jump off a bridge, why should it be illegal?”

“Well, if they made it legal, then you’d have everybody wanting to do it. Kind of like gay marriage.”

“The only reason they’re going after me like this is because I asked to talk to the mayor’s daughter.”

“Now that you bring it up, exactly what did you want to say to her?”

“That’s between me and her.”

“I have to correct you there, pal. If I’m going to be your lawyer, let’s get something straight from the get-go: There’s nothing between you and Alicia Mendoza.”

A worm of a smile crept across Falcon’s lips, a kind of satisfied smirk that Jack had seen before-but only on death row. “You’re wrong,” said Falcon. “Dead wrong. I know she wants to talk to me. She wants to talk to me real bad.”

“How do you know that?”

“I saw her standing by that police van. I’m sure it was Alicia. I asked her to come, and she came. They just wouldn’t let her talk to me.”

“That’s probably because they didn’t want to do anything to encourage the obsession.”

“I’m not stalking her,” he said sharply. “I just want to talk to her.”

“Mayor Mendoza probably doesn’t appreciate the distinction. Most people wouldn’t.”

“Then why didn’t they bring any stalker charges against me?”

“You only contacted her once, so trying to prove stalking would needlessly complicate the case. You gave the government a much easier way to put you away for a good long time. It’s called possession of narcotics. That’s also on the list, and it’s a felony, my friend.”

“I didn’t have no crack.”

“It was in your coat pocket.”

“I didn’t put it there.”

“Uh, yeah,” said Jack. “Save it for another day. All we have to do this morning is enter a plea of not guilty, no explanation needed. The judge will hear briefly from me on the issue of bail. I’ll argue this, that, and the other thing. The prosecutor will say it’s this way, that way, and the other way. After everyone’s had their say, the judge will stop counting the number of tiles in the ceiling and set bail at ten thousand dollars, which is pretty standard in a possession case like this one.”

“How soon do they need it?”

“Need what?”

“The ten thousand dollars?”

Jack was amused by the question. “As soon as you can get it, you’re out of jail. Or we can post a bond. You’d have to come up with ten percent-a thousand dollars-which is nonrefundable. And you’d have to pledge sufficient collateral for the balance. All this is academic, I’m sure, since you obviously don’t have ten cents, let alone-”

“Not a problem. I got the ten grand.”

“What?”

“I don’t need to post no bond. I can pay the ten thousand dollars.”

“You can’t even pay me,” said Jack, scoffing.

“I can pay you, and I can make bail.”

“You live in an abandoned automobile. Where are you going to get your hands on that kind of cash?”

Falcon reached across the table and laid his hand, palm down, flat atop Jack’s notepad. The fingernails were deformed and discolored from a fungus of some kind, and that open sore on the back of his hand was oozing white pus. For the first time, however, Jack detected a sparkle-some sign of life-in those cold, dark eyes. “Take notes,” he said in a low, serious tone. “I’ll tell you exactly where to find it.”