Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

“Are you telling me to go home and forget about this?”

“Hell no, buddy. I’m just telling you the way things are.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“That’s your problem.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Well how important is this to you? Why are you doing it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I am doing it. I just said I’d look into it a little.”

“And now you have. You can go back and tell your friends they were right, there’s a bad guy in the Gulf Stream doing some murders. Then what?”

I shook my head. I didn’t have any idea then what. I wasn’t a cop anymore. This wasn’t any of my business.

On the other hand, “Not My Job” seemed to be a popular song right now. Nobody wanted this. Nobody wanted to hear it, but somebody was getting away with murder, and they would keep getting away with it, just because they’d found a little crack in the political set-up where nobody wanted to look. And damn it, somebody ought to care.

“This purely bothers the hell out of you, doesn’t it?” Deacon said.

“Yeah. It does.”

“Not scared of that bad magic?”

“I’ll get some holy water.”

He was quiet for a minute. Maybe the crack about holy water bothered him. I knew he was serious enough about his religion that he probably gargled with the stuff.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said finally. “Or even if I should do anything.”

“Sure you do. You got a little voice inside you telling you what you should do. I know that, I got the same thing. Now, I can’t listen to it for you. But I know it’s there, and so do you. And we both know what it’s saying.” He held up a thumb and forefinger and dropped the thumb, pow. “It’s got you. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it, and not

a thing I can do to help you. All I can do is bust you if you listen to it.” He gave me his best smile, which would have scared the hell out of me if we weren’t on the same side. “On the other hand, there’s worse things than a few days in the pokey.”

“Like being thrown into the Gulf Stream alive and drowning?”

“That’s one thing, buddy.”

When Deacon had left, I drove around the Miami streets for a while. I found myself down by the Miami River. There’s a big shanty town there, maybe thousands of people living in elaborate huts built from packing cases, refrigerator boxes, palm fronds—anything to keep off the rain and the hot Miami sun.

Many of the people living there were Haitian—dangerously thin black people. This was paradise to them. Back home it was impossible to find a box that nice to live in. They were willing to do anything, risk everything to get here. Just to live in a box under the highway. Drink Coca-Cola and send their kids to school.

I drove on, along the river, past a few of the rusty old hulks tied up by the warehouses. In the old days they called them tramp steamers. I wondered what they were called now. Tramp diesels didn’t have the same good ring to it.

One of the ships was getting ready to leave. Black smoke trickled from the smoke stack. The deck was piled high with cargo and the ship rode low in the water. Several hundred bicycles were lashed to the outside of the crates on deck. That probably meant they were going to Haiti. There was a very good trade in used bicycles between Miami and Haiti, no questions asked. If your twelve-speed mountain bike vanished from the light post where you had chained it, it probably got re-painted overnight and you could find it on the deck of one of these ships.

Maybe this was the killer ship. The Black Freighter. Maybe they took down a cargo of bicycles and loaded in refugees. Just like the old triangular trade; unload the cargo, collect the cash. Load in the people, collect the cash.

And take the people halfway, dump them in the Gulf Stream. Big savings, less risk. You almost had to admire the cold-blooded efficiency of it. Miami in the 1980s and ’90s had perfected this kind of MBA crime, where human life was simply a small marker on the board. If killing somebody was the best way to increase profits, nobody hesitated anymore. People were killed for their car keys. Hell, people were killed for their shoes. Why not for a few thousand dollars?

And the only question was, what the hell should I do about it?

Chapter Fourteen

The drive from Miami to Key West took almost as long going the other way. There was only one difference. On the way up, I had been kicking myself for taking seriously the brainless idea that somebody was getting away with wholesale murder in the Gulf Stream. On the way back, I was trying to figure out what to do about it.

I wondered how all this had happened. And why it was happening to me. A few weeks ago I was sweating, worrying about how slow business was, wondering when I was going to hit Tiny or make up with Nancy.