Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

When I was fourteen my parents divorced. I went to live with an uncle when the infighting got dirty. I had stayed for almost a year. My Uncle Mack had taught me about fishing, and every summer after that I spent in Uncle Mack’s battered Whaler, learning the waters and habits of the fish. When Uncle Mack died I knew enough people to get a job as a mate on one of the charter boats, and I’d put in enough time to make getting my captain’s ticket pretty easy if I ever wanted to.

Now I wanted to. Now I wanted to run to that forgiving sea and rock in the comfort of the slow salt waves. I wanted to wake up every morning in a place where I’d been happy once and fish with strangers, never seeing a face that might remind me of what had been.

In a frenzy of decision I got the house sold, held a massive garage sale to get rid of the furniture and household stuff, packed away a few things important enough to keep into a small self-storage box, and left. In a brand-new Ford Explorer I drove slowly across the country by back roads, stopping frequently, and arrived in Key West in late summer, a time when the town is taking a nap and the jacaranda trees are littering insanely bright flowers in the streets.

I found my little falling-down cottage and leased it for a year, with an option to buy. I bought my battered bicycle and nosed around for a few weeks until I found the Windshadow, a sixteen-foot guide skiff.

And here I was. I thought I was safe and sound and tucked away from all the crazy-making people and places. Free from memories, a new man.

Until Roscoe McAuley showed up and brought it all back, to fall on my unprotected head like a piano dropped from the fourteenth floor.

I didn’t want to go back there. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to do anything that would remind me of that terrible place. I wanted to stay here in the sun and worry about nothing more complicated than where my next charter was coming from. Maybe that wasn’t a whole lot to do with my life, but it worked for me. It had kept me from squeezing the trigger. I could still taste the barrel but I had not squeezed the trigger, and if I went back there, back where it happened, I might want another taste and this time I might not be as strong.

I realized I had been standing in the kitchen without moving for some time. I didn’t know how long, but the shadow slanting in the window was longer now. My first thought was of Roscoe, of how he had looked as he climbed into his rental car. Maybe he felt the same way now. Maybe the thought of going back to L.A. where somebody had killed his kid, too, froze him up and made him want to slump onto a shady bus bench and let it all pass by. Maybe he was thinking of me now, a little jealous that he didn’t have a place to hide like I did.

Except I wasn’t sure I had a hiding place anymore, either. Roscoe had found me, and he had brought ghosts with him.

The beer wasn’t appealing anymore. I took a shower.

Chapter Five

Mallory Square faces the sunset. A lot of places do, even in Key West. But through some loony magic you can only find here Mallory Square has become the capital of sunset.

It’s not much to look at in daylight. It’s no more than a parking lot with a deepwater dock on the far end. Cruise ships have started tying up there in the last few years. There are desiccated cigarette butts stomped flat and patches of ancient gum with all the sticky pounded out of them. There are oil stains and empty beer cans and weeds growing up in the corners.

The area closest to the water is concrete and slightly raised. Originally built as a wharf, it now provides a natural stage about twenty feet wide. Every night the stage fills with street performers and tourists and as the sun goes down they celebrate.

Maybe Key West, or what Key West has turned into lately, doesn’t need much excuse to celebrate. Maybe the party would happen even if the sun didn’t go down. It’s still called sunset and it’s still the biggest single draw in town. There are theaters, museums, shops, restaurants and bars, T-shirt emporiums, biplane rides, strip joints, and whorehouses on the island. People come to see the sunset.

Even in Los Angeles we’d heard of Sunset at Mallory. I thought maybe Roscoe would go there. He might want to see it since he’d come all this way anyhow. He might figure the place would be so full of people nobody would notice him. Anyway, it seemed like a good place to look for him.

By the time I got to Mallory the carnival was going full blast. Considering the savage mood all that carefully packaged gaiety was putting me in, I couldn’t imagine what it was doing to Roscoe. If Roscoe was here—I only had a half-hunch to go on, a little rabbit of an idea that poked its head up and then disappeared. Since there was nothing else to tell me where Roscoe might be, I followed the rabbit. Sometimes these ideas are right, for whatever subconscious reason.

Sometimes they’re wrong, too. I let the crowd push me all the way through the open-air nuthouse one time; past the fire-eater, the jugglers, and the cookie lady, all the way down to the far end of the dock where a guy in a kilt stood torturing a bagpipe. Then I worked my way back again, back towards the big stucco wall that keeps the peasants away from the pool at the Ocean Key House. I saw no sign of Roscoe. There was no reason I should have, just this feeling I’d had as I stood there in the shower and realized I had to try to find him.

Finding somebody in Key West isn’t easy. There are to

o many hotels and they aren’t generally crazy about giving out too much information. By the time I could call around to the likely ones Roscoe might be gone. Other than that, I wasn’t sure where to look. If you can spare the time, the best way to find somebody is probably to stand on the corner in front of Sloppy Joe’s, and sooner or later whoever you’re looking for will pass by.

I didn’t have the time. I didn’t really know why, but I was in a hurry. Somehow I felt like my problem was linked to Roscoe’s. There were two dead kids, his and mine. I was feeling an urgent need to find Roscoe fast, almost as if finding him might bring the kids back from death. It wasn’t rational, I know, but it had gotten hold of me. I could feel my hands quiver with the need to find Roscoe and talk to him.

I still didn’t have any idea what I would say if I found him. All I had was a bad taste in my mouth at the way our talk had ended. I wanted to make him see that I’d help him if I could but there was nothing I could do. No hard feelings.

But mostly the encounter had left me on the edge of paralysis again, on the shore of that dark sea where I’d floated for seven months, and the thought of swimming there again filled me with a nervous energy that was almost desperate. I couldn’t go back there. I’d never get out a second time. Maybe if I could find Roscoe, talk to him, I could get rid of this feeling of dread that was rising up in my throat.

Just to be sure, I worked my way back through the crowd one last time. I saw a busload of fat Germans taking pictures of a guy balancing a loaded shopping cart on his nose. I saw another busload of Japanese tourists taking pictures of each other. I saw the leathery old woman I’d seen getting off the head boat this afternoon. She was eating a cookie the size of her head and watching the slack wire act with a grim expression.

I didn’t see Roscoe. I ended up back at the dark end of the dock, beside the bagpiper again. Suddenly, just as inexplicably as it took me over, the sense of urgency drained out of me. I sat on the seawall and looked out to Tank Island, hanging my feet over and just listening to the piper’s psychotic squeal. I felt so bad he started to sound good to me. I sat there and listened to him shriek through his four standard tunes a dozen times.

There were not a lot of donations dropped into his hat, but maybe money wasn’t the main reason he did this every night. Maybe he felt some kind of deep pride in his heritage or his music and felt that it had to be heard. Maybe just standing there night after night and watching the sunset while he made his blood-curdling din was enough reward and he didn’t even think about money.

And maybe if I clapped my hands three times Tinkerbell would be okay and the national budget would balance.

I sat there for a long time. The sun went down, just like it always does. The people cheered, flung their money at the entertainment, and everybody went away happy. It got dark.

Most of the tourists would take their bulging billfolds up Duval Street, stopping at random intervals to spend money. Judging from the stores along Duval, everybody who came here went home with at least two hundred new T-shirts and one king-sized hangover.

A lot of the hangovers would get started in Sloppy Joe’s. Nobody cared that the drinks cost too much, the floor was sticky, it was so crowded you couldn’t squeeze in without exhaling and there was no air-conditioning. It was loud, it was centrally located, it was famous. So the Germans and Japanese and Scandinavians, the schoolteachers from Jersey and the seed dealers from Iowa, all stopped for a drink, bought a T-shirt, and moved on.