Midnight Guardians by Jonathon King Read Free Book Online

my layman’s logic asked: How could something that’s not there anymore hurt? But I also knew that she was suffering.
    The pain was in her brain, as it is in everyone’s, her doctors told her. Pain is a perceived thing. They explained cortical perception and told her she would have to change the feeling that it manifests. Sherry was skeptical. Hell, I was completely unbelieving. But after a series of different techniques, Sherry’s therapists found that mirror-imaging treatment worked for her. By positioning the long mirror beside her, she could see the reflected image of her healthy leg, lying right there, a replacement, at least in her brain, for the missing limb. Using this, the pain subsided.
    I stripped off my clothes, put on a pair of workout shorts, and climbed into my side of the bed. I had always slept naked in the past. Sherry dimmed the lights but did not turn them off. I rolled onto my left shoulder, facing the opposite way, knowing she might spend hours gazing at the faux image of herself.
    Finally, she reached out and laid her fingers lightly on my head.
    “I’m sorry, Max.”
    “It’s OK, baby,” I said, lying again.
    “I thought I was ready,” she said. “I was trying.”
    “I know, baby. It’s OK.”
    The lying came off my tongue with such simplicity, with such martyrdom. I rolled over onto my back and took her hand in mine, interlacing our fingers.
    “It’s going to take time,” she said.
    “I know,” I said, and this time it was the truth. But the next lie came quickly, too. “I didn’t mean to pressure you.”
    When I looked at her face, the familiar line of her nose and slant of her jaw, the way her blonde hair fell across her cheek, I also saw the framed piece of particle board, the barrier between us.
    “Are you working for Billy tomorrow?” she said.
    “No. Not till Friday.”
    “Will you come with me to meet this guy at the gym?”
    “Which guy?”
    “The one I was telling you about—the deputy from the hit-and-run.”
    It is unusual for her to ask me along. In the past, we’d worked some cases together because the circumstances demanded it. But Sherry is the kind of detective who likes her independence, even when carrying out quasi-official duties.
    “OK, sure,” I said. “If you don’t think I’ll be in the way.”
    She squeezed my hand and grinned. “Just stay in the background. And don’t knock anything over.”
    I smiled back, right before she moved her eyes to the mirror again. I stared up at the ceiling, and at some point rolled back onto my shoulder.
    A bond between us is fraying, I thought, but we are both trying not to let the fibers go loose.
     
     
    A T 11:00 THE next morning, I loaded Sherry’s wheelchair into the bed of my truck and we took a drive up to A1A in Fort Lauderdale. I had the windows down, which I try to do whenever the temperature falls below eighty degrees. Out at my river shack at the edge of the Everglades, it never gets as hot as it does in the city. Out there, I am constantly shaded by towering water oaks and cypress trees that are hundreds of years old. And my shack sits up on stilts that are speared down into waist-deep water. You cannot get to my place without a canoe or flat-bottomed boat. The shade and the water eliminate two of the heat sources that plague South Florida: dominating sunshine and thermal-absorbing concrete. An eighty-five-degree day in downtown West Palm Beach or Miami is a seventy-five-degree one at my shady spot on the river.
    What I don’t have out there is the ocean breeze and the smell of fresh salt air. When we hit A1A at the Las Olas Boulevard intersection, I took a deep and appreciative lungful and looked out over the vast blueness of the ocean. I thought, If I could move my shade trees and my cool river water to the shore, I might live here forever. But the only way to do that would be to eliminate 120 years of urban development. Forget it, Max; this isn’t the Florida of the 1890s.
    When the driver