Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

I pulled my hand away. “I’m doing fine, Charlie. Just fine.”

He didn’t look completely convinced. “Uh-huh. What, you’re doing the, uh, the fishing boat?”

“That’s right, I’m a fishing guide. You come on down, I’ll give you a discount.”

He blinked for the half-second it took him to realize it was a joke. “Right, a discount, okay.” He paused for his gentle and vague smile. “Hey, you look great. I mean—really. Geez, lookit you.”

I was starting to get the idea that I looked great. Before Charlie could enter me in a beauty contest I fi

gured I should say something. “You have time for a cup of coffee, Charlie?”

He hesitated. Charlie was not the brightest guy alive, and it took him a minute to decide things. But his heart was good. He took some ribbing about his low IQ—cop humor tends to be basic—but he was well-liked. “Coffee, huh? Well—sure. Sure. Sure, I got a few minutes here. Come on.”

He led me out the front door to a place about a half-block away. A pencil-thin black man with a tiny mustache and a crisp white hat stood behind the counter in the cleanest apron I had ever seen. He nodded to Charlie. “Officer,” he said, very distinctly.

“Hey, Philbert, how are you today?”

They chattered for a few moments and I stood waiting. I was used to it. One of the disadvantages of being partnered with a guy like Charlie is that everything takes twice as long. He can’t go anywhere without seeing somebody he knows, and if he knows them he has to talk to them.

Eventually he got two cups of coffee out of Philbert. Charlie remembered how I liked my coffee, and we sat and sipped at a small round table in the front window.

There was really not a lot to say, but that was never a problem with Charlie. We spent close to half an hour just gossiping. Charlie told me Putz Pelham never did come down with AIDS, but the thought that he might had scared him badly and he was now Born again in the most self-righteous way possible.

There was other stuff, little things, mostly about buddies we shared, new things we wanted to mention. It was more like college roommates meeting by chance than two guys who had been cops together in one of the worst urban jungles in the country.

As I said goodbye and walked back to my car there was really only one thing that stuck in my mind from the whole talk, and I couldn’t even figure out why it was sticking until I was pulling out of the parking lot.

At one point Charlie had given his head a sad little shake and said something about maybe quitting, maybe going into business with his brother who was a plumbing contractor.

“You don’t mean that,” I told him. “Not really.”

He looked away, out the cluttered window. A bus went by. “Ahh. I don’t know,” he finally said. “Hasn’t been much fun lately. Maybe I really shouldn’t be a cop.”

“It’s not that bad, is it, Charlie? Come on.”

“Yeah, well. Since the riots. The riots were—you know, it was like nobody knew what to do and we were waiting for orders that just never came.” He crumpled his empty Styrofoam cup. “I really don’t like that feeling. Like the brass either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. I don’t like that.”

And as I pulled out of the lot into traffic I realized why I was replaying that small chunk of talk.

This was the third time I’d heard the same message: cops felt like the command structure had let them down during the riots. Roscoe had said it was “almost like deliberate sabotage.” And he had wanted an outsider, somebody he could trust—because he had a suspicion that somebody on the inside was guilty?

Ed had mentioned having the same feeling of mistrust, like the high command wasn’t quite right. “Like somebody tried to fuck us up on purpose,” he had said. And now Charlie—for Charlie to mention it at all it had to be something everybody was thinking about, even talking about.

And when I added all that to my notion that somebody with major clout had been leaning on the investigations into Hector’s and Roscoe’s murders, it started to add up to—

To what? Was the bump on my head making me stupid? Did I really think somebody in the command structure was behind Hector’s murder? And Roscoe’s? If it was bribery or nepotism, sure. No problem. Easy. That happened every day.

But murder? Cops killing cops? A cop on the roof with a sailboat? That wasn’t even farfetched. It was stupid.

It was just too whacko. I’d just been away too long. I wasn’t thinking like a cop anymore—I was thinking like Nicky, like one of his New Age conspiracy theories.

No, cops were still cops, even if they wore suits instead of blues. The idea was totally nuts. I let go of it and headed for the freeway.

Chapter Sixteen

Before I could buy into a whacked-out idea like cops killing cops, I had to chase down a few more obvious leads. The first one was the paper trail.

Roscoe was an administrator. His earliest training and his personal instincts for political survival would guarantee that he had left some kind of hint on paper somewhere. I was as sure of that as I could be. His first commandment was Thou Shalt Cover Thine Ass, and a political cop’s favorite ass-cover would be paper: memos, reports, briefings, summations, anything he could think of.