Free A Killing Night by Jonathon King Page B

interview. I picked up the young Filipino down the street and around the corner from the hotel where he and the other injured workers were staying. The small man climbed into the passenger seat of my truck, pulling his right leg up after him.
    “Hey, Rodrigo,” I said. “Kumusta ka?”
    “Mabuti naman, Mr. Freeman, salamat,” he said.
    It was the extent of my Tagalog, but Rodrigo dipped his head at my effort. He was used to being spoken to in English on his job. He took my offered hand in greeting and then glanced nervously out the back window. When he turned I could see the wrinkled purple scar that covered the right side of his face. It was like a dark birthmark that spread from his now nonexistent eyebrow down over his cheek and disappeared into the collar of his shirt. Treatment of the burn from the escaping steam had left the skin the mottled color of a dark grape. Angry-looking stretch marks pulled at the corner of his mouth and eye when he smiled. I pulled away from the curb.
    As I drove to Billy’s office, Rodrigo watched the world roll by through his passenger window. Though he’d been a cruise ship worker for five years, his station as a maintenance-grade utility man kept him belowdecks most of the time. In the many ports of call, rarely did employees like him have the time to see the landscape. I asked if he’d heard from his wife in the Philippines. He nodded. Rodrigo and the others I’d interviewed through an interpreter said the company that signed workers up in Manila would pay for wives or husbands to visit, but only on the promise that they would both return home.
    “Yes. She is sick for me,” he said. “She is to come here, but has no money.”
    I pulled into a parking lot on Clematis Street and got a warm greeting from the operator who knew me. I took a ticket and we walked the four blocks through downtown West Palm Beach to Billy’s office building. I caught our reflection in the plate glass of a clothing store: a tall and tanned white guy dressed like a weekend boat captain and a five-foot Southeast Asian with a limp and a tic that caused him to turn his face from each person he passed. It was South Florida. No one blinked. But when we reached the lobby, a familiar security man stopped us.
    “Hello, Mr. Freeman,” he said, talking to me but looking at Rodrigo.
    “He’s OK, Rich. One of Mr. Manchester’s clients,” I said.
    “Sure, Mr. Freeman. But you’re still going to have to go through the metal detectors.”
    “Yeah, we understand,” I said.
    It was a new world in America. One where no one simply vouched for another.
    When we went through the security point, Rodrigo walked through without a beep but was still swept by a guard with a metal- detecting wand. It took me three passes, dumping everything I had in my pockets into a plastic box, until I finally found the offending foil chewing gum wrapper I’d stuck in my back pocket instead of tossing it out in the street. We rode the elevator to one of the top floors and entered a set of double doors that was unmarked. In the outer office we were greeted by Billy’s assistant, whose usual charm and social ease seemed oddly strained.
    “Hello, Mr. Freeman, so nice to see you.”
    “Allie,” I said. “This is Mr. Colon.”
    They shook hands and Allie looked directly into Rodrigo’s face without flinching or showing in any manner that she had noticed the burn pattern.
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Freeman. He’s running a bit late with an unexpected appointment,” she said, looking back over her shoulder at Billy’s closed door like she didn’t know what might come out of it.
    “I do have your coffee waiting, though,” she said and asked Rodrigo if he would join me.
    He declined and followed my lead and sat in one of the high- backed leather chairs, just on the front edge, his hands clasped in front of him as though he were afraid of getting something dirty. Allie brought the coffee and while I drank I watched Rodrigo cut his eyes at