Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

The two comedians were gone from outside the store when I got out on the sidewalk. The girl was standing on the curb, looking into the street at a point about eight feet out into traffic.

“There,” she said, nodding at the spot. “He was standing right there.” I looked. It was just another patch of asphalt. The girl was looking at it like she saw something else.

“What’s your name?” I asked her. Her head jerked around, the first thing I’d seen her do that was not entirely graceful. She looked at me for a long beat before she answered.

“My name is Lin,” she said. “Lin Park.”

I held out a hand. “Billy Knight,” I said. She looked at my hand carefully, then touched it very softly. Her hand felt amazingly soft, warm and alive. She took her hand away.

“Lin, did you see the shooting?”

She bit her lip fractionally. “Yes,” she said.

“What happened, exactly? Do you remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, quietly. “I remember.”

“Hector was standing there?” She nodded. “What was he doing?”

She laughed a little. It wasn’t a very funny laugh. “He heard they were going to torch my father’s store and he came to stop them. That’s why my father is so mad—because he owes something to a black boy who is dead. And because—” It was all tumbling out, but she caught herself and stopped talking just before the real revelation, which was no revelation at all at this point. Anybody could have figured out by now that there was something between Lin and Hector.

I pretended I didn’t know. “Who were they?” She looked at me with eyes that were seeing something else, something that wasn’t there anymore. “Who was trying to torch the store?”

She blinked. I had never seen eyelashes like that before, like two great, graceful silk fans waving at me. “Just—you know. A bunch of bangers, I guess.”

“Gang members? How do you know they were?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what everybody was saying.”

“Okay. So this bunch of gangbangers comes up to the front of the store?”

She shook back her hair. I held my breath. “No,” she said.

“No? Who did show up?”

“Hector. With his posse,” she said proudly. “He had this group of kids like him, they were trying to like stop the violence and stuff. And they found out these bangers were going to like torch my father’s store. And they showed up to stop them.”

Something was slightly off and at first I couldn’t figure out what, but it bothered me. I chewed my lip for a minute. Then I got it. “You said he found out the bangers were coming here?”

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

“How did he find out?”

She shrugged. She made it look like an elegant gesture. “I don’t know. Somebody told him, or one of his posse or something, I guess.” She shrugged again.

“Lin, I wasn’t here for this thing. But was the looting and burning and all that, was that usually planned ahead of time?”

She frowned, gave her head a half-shake. Her hair rippled. “What do you mean?”

“Didn’t people just sort of get mad and then burn and loot whatever was handy?”

She rolled her eyes at me. “Well, sure, I mean they weren’t like planning crimes or anything. They just did it, you know.”

“But somebody told Hector this was going to happen, and when. And then nobody showed up.” She didn’t say anything. I let it sink in for a moment. “How did it happen?”

She looked at me again. There was a new look in her eyes now, almost like she was seeing me for the first time, as she chewed on what I’d just helped her figure out. “How did it happen?” I repeated.

She was a little more careful with her answer this time. “Hector was standing there with his posse. He was like, waiting for the ban