Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

Porky stood up and in two quick steps he was on Lorenzo. He grabbed his partner by the shoulders and whirred out some rapid Spanish. Lorenzo rattled back, pointing at me and looking like he wanted to spit. Porky had to hold him back from jumping at me.

I barely noticed. I was too busy re-shuffling everything in my mind.

I had been taking it for granted that Oto had killed Bud; maybe for money, maybe because Bud was talking about things Oto didn’t want to talk about, maybe just because scary guys turn into scary drunks.

But if Oto was dead, too, then somebody had killed them both. It just couldn’t happen any other way. There’s such a thing as too much coincidence, too many bodies, even in Miami.

And there was only one person who might have had a strong enough reason to kill two guys who didn’t do anything more than hang out in a bar and talk. I didn’t know his name, but I knew who he was.

He was from The Black Freighter. If he wasn’t the captain, the captain had sent him. He had found out that somebody was asking Oto questions and he had stopped it quickly, brutally, finally. Just exactly the way he did his business out in the Gulf Stream.

I wanted to think that this was different, that killing two American citizens in the heart of a major American city was not the same as killing Haitian citizens in the middle of the ocean. But I knew better. People get away with murder. Cops are overworked and a low profile death doesn’t get the attention it needs. When Porky and Lorenzo were convinced that I didn’t do it, this case would probably slip to the bottom of their pile. They’d already spent a whole shift on it, and that was too much time not to have any result.

They weren’t going to catch this killer. It had to be me, and I wasn’t going to do it by sitting in jail.

It was time to play my trump card.

I looked up. Porky had calmed Lorenzo down without using a club and he was settling back into his chair.

“You were telling us about Otoniel,” Porky said with his patented tired smile.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have looked pretty good for this and you were hoping you got lucky. But I didn’t do Nagle, and I didn’t do Otoniel.”

Porky nodded. “Okay, William,” he said.

“Yeah, I know, it’s tough to swallow. But maybe I can come up with something that will help you believe it.”

“We’d like to hear that, William,” he said.

I tried hard not to smile as I said, “Do either of you guys know The Deacon?”

Chapter Twenty

It was close to two hours before The Deacon came to get me. Part of that time was spent persuading Porky that I really had Deacon’s private number and that he would want to know that I was in jail.

The rest of the time, as I soon found out, The Deacon spent trying to calm down his wife.

“Angel had a shit-fit,” he told me. “She wanted me to leave you here.”

“I thought she liked me.”

“She did. But she’s Cuban. She believes that anybody who’s in jail after midnight, when she’s trying to sleep, is guilty of something.” He winked. “She might go easier on you if you got married again.”

The Deacon walked me through the paperwork and out to his car with amazing speed. It made me very happy to see that a little old-fashioned string-pulling still worked, even in The New Miami. The look on Porky’s face when he saw The Deacon come in was as close to hero-worship as you’ll ever see from a full-grown cop with a nose like a pig’s.

The paper-shufflers up front were just as eager to please. It didn’t have anything to do with Deacon’s rank. He was a supervisor, which was not high enough to make anybody jump through a hoop. It was partly his reputation. Everybody knew The Deacon, and what they knew about him made them very anxious to make him happy.

But he had something more. When he walked into a room, people stopped talking and looked up, even before they knew who he was. Several of the cops unconsciously dropped their hands near their holsters before they registered Deacon’s badge, hung on his jacket pocket.

He had me out in near-record time and led me outside with one hand on my elbow.

“How do you rate our jails?” he asked pleasantly as we walked to his car.

“The ventilation isn’t good,” I said. “But I thought they’d be more crowded.”

“Got lonely, did you?” He chuckled. “Boy, you broke some hearts in there. They thought they’d finally solved one. That’s why they kept you isolated. They were breaking you down.”

“It probably would have worked,” I admitted, “If only I’d been guilty and had an IQ of less than 70.”