Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

“Billy, I know you are the man

to do this like I know my own name.”

He was using that smooth management technique on me again. It made me mad.

“Why didn’t you save yourself all this trouble and just call me, Roscoe?”

“Guess I was afraid you’d hang up on me.”

“I’m hanging up anyway,” I said. I half-turned away, but there was nothing to look at. After a minute I turned back and looked at Roscoe. He was just watching me with those sad brown eyes. He looked like a teacher whose favorite student had just let him down in a big way.

“You have changed, Billy. Gone inside and closed the door. I guess maybe you’re not the man I needed you to be.”

“You got that right. I’m not a cop anymore. I’m not. I’m not a private detective. I’m not a Wackenhut or a school crossing guard. I’m a fishing guide. You’re not interested in fishing, just leave me the hell alone. You want to go fishing, great, give me a call. I get four hundred fifty dollars a day. Bring your kid.”

I turned and started away. Before I got three steps away, two things stopped me dead. The first was a sudden sick feeling that I knew what Roscoe was about to say.

The second thing was when he said it.

“I can’t bring my boy, Billy,” he said. “That kid we were talking about—?”

“No,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but it was all I could think of.

“Yeah,” he said, in that terrible soft voice again. “My Hector was the boy. The one got shot. He’s dead, Billy,” said Roscoe, going on long past what was necessary. “My Hector is dead.”

I turned slowly and watched that sad little half-smile trying to work its way onto his face one last time. It didn’t make it. Roscoe turned away and walked off down the dock. I tried to think of something to say. I tried to make my feet move, either toward Roscoe or back to my boat. I failed at both things. Instead I just stood there in the terrible five o’clock heat and watched Roscoe walk to a metallic blue rental car, get in, and drive away.

Chapter Two

I don’t know exactly how long I stood there beside the ice machine. I finally heard Art tapping on the window and I jerked my head around. He was peering through the glass, moving his mouth at me. I realized I had been standing there too long, that I didn’t look right just standing there.

I noticed my reflection. Billy Knight, living ghost. Nobody would ever call me handsome. Intriguing maybe, with my slightly lopsided face, the faint trace of a scar down the left side, eyes blue and the right eye slightly bigger, sun-bleached dark blonde hair, broad, heavy shoulders, standing just under six feet tall. I could see hollows in my cheeks and under my eyes that didn’t used to be there.

But beyond that, beyond the superficialities of how a cop might describe me on an APB, there was something wrong with the way I looked. There was some haunted thing looking out from just behind my eyes, and Roscoe had brought it out of its cave. It had been watching me for months now, slowly settling back inside, and I had been stupid enough to think it was going away forever. Now I knew better; it was just hibernating. When Roscoe pushed the right buttons, it rolled over in its sleep and said Spring is here, and poked its nose out again.

And there it was, looking out at me from inside, looking at my reflection and seeing only bones, worm food, a tiny chuckle in the great, dirty, shaggy dog story of life. That’s how it attacks; it gives you Real Perspective. It makes you realize that the only real purpose we have in this world is to provide fertilizer for plants. Everything leading up to getting dropped into a hole in the ground is just another routine step in manufacturing the world’s best self-replicating plant food.

Oh, I had Real Perspective, all right. At three A.M. on any of those hundreds of sleepless nights it kicked in and gave me a patronizing peek at how things were. It patted my shoulder with a friendly, manly touch and whispered suggestions about my gun, and the only defense I had found against it was to pretend. Just pretend everything was normal and that to continue to walk around every day served a purpose. What purpose? We’ll get to that later. For now, just pretend the purpose is there and maybe you can fool that thing behind your eyes into going back to sleep. Just act normal.

Except I didn’t even know what normal was anymore.

It was something I’d been conscious of a lot the last year, for the first time in my life. Maybe most people never think about it, and from the time I was a kid until last year I didn’t either. I always assumed that whatever I was doing, however I looked doing it, that was normal, and that was it.

Things had changed. Since that day eighteen months ago I felt like an imposter, somebody hiding in my own body. I’d been very careful not to stick out, not to act in any way that would make me look different, not to give people any reason to ask me any questions. One thing I liked about taking strangers fishing was that the talk tended to be pretty specifically about fish. It left personal things out of it. If somebody got too curious about me I could always just point to a fish.

That’s how I wanted it. It had taken a lot of work to get functional again, and I didn’t want to risk losing the careful equilibrium I had built up. I wasn’t sure I could do it again.

For the first few months I’d watched a lot of TV. I’d even managed to sit through parts of a couple of talk shows—sometimes as much as five minutes at a time. According to most of the talk shows it wasn’t good to avoid my feelings. It was healthy and natural and honest to talk things out. It was self-destructive to bottle things up. What the hell: It wasn’t quite as self-destructive as swallowing a 9-millimeter steel-jacketed slug, and that ought to count for something.

Art was knocking on the window again. I realized how worried he must be to get up off his seat and come all the way across the room.

I made myself step back into the vicious freezing cold of Art’s shack.

“The hell’s the matter, Billy? Been standing there like that for—Christ, I dunno. Hell’s the matter?”

“Nothing, Art. I was just thinking.”

He shook his massive head. Three chins crashed into each other. “Fucking cop, huh. Told you he ’uz trouble. Smelt it on him.” He put a finger the size of a kielbasa up beside his nose. “This don’t miss much. Could tell he ’uz trouble.”