Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

But something about the way she said it, like it was a challenge, made me stay and look for a way to keep the conversation going.

So what I came out with was, “How did you meet Nicky?”

She turned cold blue eyes on me. “Who?”

“The dwarf who brought you over here.”

She turned briefly, looking through the party for Nicky. “He is called Nicky?” She said it Nyecky.

“Yeah.”

“Ah,” she said. “I am first meeting him just now. He is talking very hot about Haitian ruffo… rufo… How you are calling the ones who come on the boats?”

“Refugees.”

“Yes, refugees. And I say, well, we are taught when I am young America is not the land of the free if you are a black person. And he is very happy I say this. And after he talks for a minute more, he is looking around and seeing you. Then he takes my arm and say, come with me, dolly. Then he is dragging me here and poom—” She shrugged. Her shoulders rippled.

I caught myself noticing that her shoulders rippled. I tried to remind myself that I was still trying to get over Nancy and I really shouldn’t be noticing anything like that right now. It was the sign of a shallow man.

But I did notice. And I noticed the graceful line of her neck, the outline of collarbone, the sleek perfection of a figure that had started good and got better through hard work. And the clear light in her eyes, the light of intelligence, wonder, doubt, thought.

Okay, I was shallow.

“Now that you’re here,” I said with a deep breath, “can I get you something to drink?”

She blushed. “Thank you. But I—” She was going to say no; maybe out of habit or insecurity, but not out of indifference, I was sure. Instead, she looked at me out of the corner of her eye, hesitated, and gave me the most serious smile I had ever seen. “Perhaps one of those yellow sodas?”

I got her a Mountain Dew. She accepted it politely and drank about half in one swallow. I admired the way her throat muscles worked as she swallowed.

We talked. Anna loosened up a little with a soda in her hand. So did I. She was astonished to learn what I did for a living. “I think everybody in America is a rich lawyer,” she said. “And you say to be a poor fishermen? Feh.”

“Not exactly. I take other people fishing. It pays a little better than if I was fishing myself.”

She looked doubtful. “In my country, fishermen is a very poor job. Very smelly.”

“In your country, people won’t pay $450 a day to go fishing. But the fish smell the same.”

She said something with a lot of consonants. “So much! For a fish?”

“Welcome to capitalist imperialism. How did you end up in Mallory Square?”

She gave me a half-sour look. “First, is what I do now. But then—” She shrugged. Those beautiful neck muscles moved again. “When I am small, I train to do gymnastic. But by the time of 16 years, 17 years, this career is over, yes? I am too big.” She made hand gestures to show how fat she was. I didn’t believe it.

“So when—when I come here I work in the hotel as a maid, clean the rooms. And in this country they are making you feel to be an animal to do this work. I watch through the windows of all the rooms every day, and I see Mallory Square, and I think I can do this and not have to feel I am a dog.”

She slanted a long look at me through thick lashes. “They are saying this is black girl’s work, to clean rooms in a hotel. It is very hard for me to see that some things in this country are just as Putin says.”

“America has a race problem,” I said. “Always has. Maybe it always will. I didn’t used to think so, but—”

“Is this why they send these Haitians home, as Nicky is saying? Because they are black people?”

“Nicky is not well right now on the subject of Haitians. But that’s part of it.”

“Why is he not well? What do you mean?”

I told her about our sailboat trip, about finding the body. “It isn’t pretty. But this happens every day and the police tend to think it’s somebody else’s problem.”

“Whose problem?”