Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

Ray Hall got out first. He was Deacon’s friend in Customs, an out-sized good ol’ boy who had played tackle for the Gators and come home to South Florida to fight crime.

Whatever else people may say about the Good Ol’ Boy Network, if you’re inside it, it works for you. And Deacon was definitely inside it. Ray had been happy to pull a couple of spot inspections for his ol’ buddy Deacon. Customs does them all the time anyhow, randomly picking ships from a master list of everything in the harbor. Having Deacon suggest a couple of ships was no problem.

Ray had looked a little dubious about bringing us along, but when Deacon explained why he had shrugged it off. “Just you all try to look the part,” he’d said.

“What part, mate?” Nicky asked him.

Ray looked thoughtful when he heard Nicky’s accent. “We take other law enforcement personnel along with us all the time? So nobody’s gonna give two tick’s off a dog’s ass if I got a couple more with me. Just you look serious, like you know a lot more than you’re saying, and maybe I can make them fools think you’re from Australian Customs, come to learn how to do it right.”

Ray led the way up the gangway and we followed, Nicky stretching his face into the grim look of a man who’s learning to stop beer smuggling.

The mate stood waiting for us at the top, blocking our way onto the ship, arms folded, a look of passive hostility on his face.

“Customs,” Ray told him, showing his ID. “We need to see your paperwork and check your holds.”

The mate didn’t budge. “¿Qué?” he said.

Ray switched to perfect Spanish, with no accent I could catch, and repeated himself. The mate stared at him for a minute, then shrugged and turned away to get the papers.

When he disappeared into the superstructure, Ray turned back to us. “I’ll keep him busy,” he said. “Y’all go ahead and poke around. Just don’t get too messy.” And he wandered after the mate.

We searched the ship. From the mate’s attitude of half-dead hostility I was already sure it was the wrong one but we searched anyway. We went through the holds, the moldy living area, the engine room. A small, ferret-like guy with no shirt sat on a folding chair in the engine room. He looked up at us when we came in, but he didn’t move and he didn’t say a word.

Other than that there was no trace of life on board, aside from a few rats, and some things that were growing on the walls in the galley.

No sign of Anna. No sign of anyplace where they might have tucked her away.

We met up with Ray in the wheelhouse. He was flipping through a large stack of papers, firing questions at the mate in rapid Spanish. Ray looked up when we came in; Deacon shook his head slightly, and Ray rifled once through the papers and then handed them back to the mate.

“All right,” Ray said. “Anything else?”

Deacon raised an eyebrow at me.

“Ask him if he remembers a guy named Otoniel Varela,” I said. “He worked on board a while back.”

The mate had lift

ed his head up when I said Oto’s name. As Ray asked him the question he was already nodding. Before he answered the mate spat out the wheelhouse door. Then he raced through a couple of minutes of furious talking mixed with hand signals, grunts and groans, and at one point a long, shrill scream.

He talked fast and without consonants and although I speak a little Spanish, I couldn’t follow it. My ears were used to the slower, more careful, Mexican Spanish and the Caribbean variety left me far behind.

But one word I could pick out, because he used it several times, and even moaned it once right after the scream, was “sueño.” Dream.

And right around the scream, the mate moaned something that sounded like, “las loooooozes,” which I puzzled over for a while and couldn’t get.

When the mate had finished, Ray nodded and handed back the papers. “Bueno,” he said, and then added something almost as fast as the mate’s speech. Then he turned for the door and we followed, down the stairs, across the deck and down the gangway. By the time we got to the car, the mate was already sitting again, staring at his cigar.

“Quite a story,” Ray said as we settled into the car. He was behind the wheel with Deacon beside him and Nicky and I were in the back.

“He remembered Oto,” I said.

“Be a job of work to forget that boy,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re interested in Oto, but Oto like to be some major shit for somebody pretty soon.”

“Too late,” I said. “He’s dead.”

“Uh-huh. Well that ought to help the sleep problem.”

“The what?” Deacon asked.