Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

Many of the heaps were still there a year later. It was startling to see the prow of a 45-foot trawler married to a 50-foot sailboat, or a small Donzi speedboat with a mast coming up through the hatch.

Half a giant cabin cruiser, Italian built, lay on one side. The other half was completely gone, whirled away to Texas by the storm. All around it lay a tangle of cable, cleats, deck chairs, coolers, marine toilets, cushions, bent engine parts, mangled fishing gear, half a fire extinguisher—all the imaginable chunks of every kind of boat, all smashed, twisted, bent double or shattered, laying in their piles as if it was a maniac’s hardware store.

“Holy shit, mate,” Nicky breathed. Australians don’t like to let on that they’re impressed, but the sight of this billion-dollar trash heap was too much for Nicky.

“And then some,” I told him. I moved past the luxury dump and out into the boatyard. Nicky followed, his head swiveling among the busted miracles.

We went through the gate and found Betty’s boat, Sligo, a French-built 42-footer, over beside the lift. The storm had picked her up and shoved a dock piling through her side, just behind the forward cabin. She had been a total write-off, tossed on one of the impossibly high heaps of broken toys. A stringy, indignant man named Bert had rescued her.

“Sons-a-bitches just left her,” he fumed at me. “Little hole like that, and they don’t give a shit. Take the insurance money and get a new one, and the sons-a-bitches’ll fuck that one up, too, and take the insurance money and get another one. God damn sons-a-bitches.”

Nicky leaned in and laid a hand on the smooth side of the repaired boat. “You’d think the insurance would catch on, eh? Why don’t they just refuse to pay?”

Bert cocked his head and stepped back, looking at Nicky through one squinted eye. “Not from here, are you,” he said.

Nicky shook his head. “Key West,” he said.

Bert spat. “Insurance company sent a fella out to look at my boat.” He spat again. “Man was from Iowa. Never seen anything more complicated than a rowboat on a duck pond. Flew him in to help out ’cause there was too much work for the regular adjusters.” He nodded at the boat I would be taking home. “Same with that one. Dumb sons-a-bitches.”

Bert took a step back and turned to look at Sligo. She rested in a wooden cradle and Bert led us around the side to admire his work. “Go ahead,” he smirked at me. “Find the patch.”

We walked slowly around the boat one time. I could see nothing. Nicky gave up and wandered over to the fence, staring out again at the landscape of the marine Apocalypse.

I went around the boat again. I ran my hand along the side. One small area forward felt smoother than the rest. I paused and looked at it carefully.

“Shit,” said Bert behind me. “Done it too good.” He stepped in and put his hand where mine had been. “I sanded a little better than they do in the factory. I do it by hand. Can’t help it. Hate to see a sloppy job. Hey, Ramon!”

A stocky muscular kid wearing a black back brace swaggered by, combing his hair. Bert jerked his head at the Sligo, and five minutes later the boat was lowered into the water and tied to the small wooden dock.

Bert showed us where everything was, all the various switches and compartments, always hidden and always different on a boat. Then he hopped up onto the dock, cast off my bow and stern lines, and as I motored slowly out the channel he stood there on the dock watching, head cocked and eye squinted at me, watchful of the boat he had saved.

“Keep to the channel!” he yelled just before we were out of range. “You draw four feet!”

Nicky looked up at me, suddenly anxious. “Is that good, Billy? Drawing four feet?”

“Not in Florida Bay,” I said. “Average depth some places is closer to three.”

“Oh,?

? he said, looking thoughtful. “So, uh, what. We like, hit the bottom? Get stuck?”

“That’s about right.”

“What happens then?”

I smiled. “We walk home.”

He nodded and popped a beer open. “Good to know, mate,” he said. “Good to know.”

I steered us straight down the channel, past the half-ruined docks of the marina and beyond a small island still littered with chunks of boat. A few people looked to be living on the islands, tarpaulins stretched between the smashed boat hulls.

The Dinner Key Channel runs a good mile out into Biscayne Bay. I kept to the middle, except for six or seven times when large motorboats came straight at us at full throttle. Then I moved to the right side, but twice they still came close enough that I could have leaned out and touched them.

Miami has this problem with its boaters. Some of them are still sane, rational, careful people—perhaps as many as three or four out of every ten thousand of them. The rest act like they escaped from the asylum, drank a bottle of vodka, snorted an ounce of coke, ate 25 or 30 downers and decided to go for a spin. Homicidal, sociopathic maniacs, wildly out of control, with not a clue that other people are actually alive, and interested in keeping it that way. To them, other boats are targets. They get in the boat knowing only two speeds: fast and blast-off.

I mentioned a few of these things to the boats that tried to kill me. I don’t think they could hear me over the engine roar. One of the boats had four giant outboard motors clamped on the back; 250 horsepower each, all going at full throttle no more than six inches from Sligo. If I had put the boom out I would have beheaded the boat’s driver. He might not have noticed.

“To get a driver’s license,” I said to Nicky through gritted teeth, “you have to be sixteen, take a test, and demonstrate minimal skill behind the wheel.”