Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

“Can’t shoot this one. Just have to live through it to the other side.”

“Well then, why’re you taking up my time? I got bad guys to catch.”

“I’ve got a little problem some friends asked me to look into,” I told him. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Uh-huh.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off me yet. “You wouldn’t be doing a little investigating without a license, would you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, good,” he said, looking pleased. “God put you here to be a street cop and fight bad guys, same as me. You know that in your heart.”

“Maybe so.”

“No maybe, son. How long you in town?”

“Just until I get a couple of answers.”

“Well, get in, let’s see what we can come up with.”

I went around to the other side and climbed into the car. There wasn’t a lot of room. Deacon had eight radios and two cellular phones crowded into the

front seat, plus a stack of forms on three different clipboards.

“They’re keeping you busy?” I said with a nod at the heap of hardware.

“I’m heading up a new task force called SCAT,” he said. “Street Crime Attack Team. I got to coordinate the troopers, the Sheriff, Metro and my boys. Everybody on a different frequency. No wonder the bad guys are winning.” He shook his head. “We know damn well when somebody’s done a crime, and we know how to catch ’em, how to stop ’em from doing it again—and the suits won’t let us. Instead, they keep coming up with cute new acronyms so they can justify their budgets. When all it would take would be a couple of good street cops with a free hand. But hell, Billy,” he said with a sigh, “that’s my problem. What’s yours?”

I told him and he listened. He was a good listener. He didn’t take his eyes off me for even a second, and I don’t think he blinked. Just stared straight at me with those gun-fighter’s eyes. If I wasn’t sure he liked me I would have been ready to confess whatever he wanted confessed. I laid out the three or four facts I had and threw in a couple of guesses.

“That all you got?” he asked me when I was done.

I nodded. “Yeah. It’s not much, I know. Like I say, there’s probably nothing to it.”

“Oh, there’s something to it,” he said. “No doubt about that.”

I looked at Deacon. He was smiling, but he wasn’t kidding. “Somebody is killing boat loads of people?”

“Don’t look so shocked, buddy. There’s a lot of money in refugees.”

“If you don’t get caught.”

“Uh-huh. And most people get caught on this end, when they’re unloading. That’s the hard part. Nobody stops you loading ’em in back in Haiti. Nobody boards your ship in the Gulf Stream and makes you turn around and take ’em back.”

“So if somebody loads them in and then just dumps them—”

“Then they got a low-risk money machine.”

“How much money?”

He shook his head. “In Haiti, ten bucks is a big deal, a month’s wages. So I don’t know how they do it, but those people scrape together two or three thousand dollars for a trip across to America.”

“Two or three thousand each?”

“That’s right. And figure between fifty and two hundred head per trip. It looks like somebody’s figured a pretty good way to maximize his profit.”

I worked up the numbers and shook my head. It was a lot of money. “All right,” I said. “Who’s working on it, and what have they got?”

He gave a soundless little cop laugh. “It’s not quite that simple, buddy,” he said. “I guess you’ve been a fishing guide so long you forgot how things are.”