“This is different.”
She shrugged. “Is always different. And so is always the same.”
I picked up a rock and threw it. It went further than Anna’s. That was one thing I could feel good about. “Yes, but—” I started, and then I stopped again. I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t hurt. “This isn’t like what happened to you,” I said.
“And how can you say so?”
“Because there are no armies and no cities. There are Haitians every day who try to cross to America. In tiny boats, inner tubes, anything that floats. Some of them don’t make it. And there’s nothing to say that these bodies were any different. There’s no sign of violence. There’s not even any footprints. Only a few bodies and a big ocean.”
“And so you do not even try?”
“Let me finish. Just say for a minute that you and Nicky are right, that somebody is routinely killing Haitian refugees.”
“Yes, we are right.”
“Fine. Exactly what is it you want me to do?”
She shook her head at me like I was stupid. I was beginning to feel like I was. “You will find them and stop them,” she said.
“Find ’em and stop ’em. Sure, that sounds easy.”
She spun on me, very fast, and threw a punch. She did not hit like a girl. I rubbed my arm and looked at her. “If was it easy, Nicky would doing it. Jesus shit, you are the one who is knowing this things, why do you behave so? To fail at this, okay, too bad, I am sorry but something was done about it. But to not try because is looking too difficult, when people are being killed and no one is caring—feh!”
“To fail at this, I will be killed,” I said.
“Then you must not fail,” she said. “I will not let you.”
“I’ll take a look,” I said. “No promises, no hero stuff. Just a few questions to see what’s going on.”
She frowned, then nodded. “Good,” she said. “That will be good.”
Chapter Twelve
The trip up to Miami is a long one by car, but I like it that way. The harder it is for the idiots to get down to Key West, the fewer of them we’ll have roaming Duval Street.
Of course, nowadays they come by air, and by water, and even by bicycle, and there are more of them every year. Soon our small island will sink into the ocean from the weight of so many people. And in a few hundred years, divers will still be poking through the sunken wreckage and bringing up T-shirts and beer mugs.
But for now, the road from Key West to Miami was mostly only one lane each way, and if you timed it right the traffic wasn’t too bad. Except that I usually ended up behind a long line of RVs, breathing thick exhaust and plodding along at thirty-five miles an hour. But it was better than the Santa Monica Freeway. And the long trip gave me time to think.
What I mostly thought was that I was on a fool’s errand. A dumb, pointless quest to save a maiden from an imaginary dragon. And why? So Anna would sleep at night? Maybe with me?
But Anna was right about one thing. Checking this out wouldn’t be that hard for me. At least I had a place to start. If any U.S. law enforcement organization was looking into this, from the Coast Guard to the Cub Scouts, they would be doing it out of Miami. And if anybody in Miami knew anything about it, the Deacon would know, too.
He was called Deacon because he was a lay minister and the only thing he was more serious about was stopping crime. Deacon was a supervisor in the F.D.L.E., the Florida state equivalent of the FBI. The bureaucrats kept trying to promote him out of harm’s way, since he had a habit of getting into gunfights. Always justifiable, and he always won. But the new breed of law enforcement administrators preferred quieter law enforcement and tried to maneuver him into a chair in the office.
So far he had dodged it. Deacon had turned down promotions a couple of times so he could stay on the street. His life was a kind of constant struggle, stuck between the bad guys on the street and the suits in the office. He stayed out of the office as much as possible.
I knew Deacon’s mobile phone number and as soon as I got into Miami I called him. We arranged to meet in the parking lot of a shopping center on the edge of Liberty City, and I hadn’t been there more than ten minutes before he pulled in.
“Hey, buddy,” he called out the window of his big blue Chevrolet. He was about 5’9” tall and had a shaved head. One ear was pierced, with a small diamond stud in it. He wore a neat beard and he was the toughest man I had ever met. He looked at me now with the same eyes you see in the old pictures of the great frontier lawmen. Cold blue eyes that have seen everything, eyes that look at life down the barrel of a gun.
I walked over and leaned on his car. “Hi, Deacon.”
He shook my hand, looking at me hard while he did. “You don’t look good, Billy,” he said. “Run into some tough tarpon down there?”
“It’s been a rough summer.”
“Lot of that going around, buddy. You want me to straighten it all out for you?”