Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

“It’s down at Crenshaw,” he said. “I told them it might be connected to Roscoe, which is on my turf. So I’m sending an expert to take a look. That’s you, you understand.” He gave me his new smile, the mean one.

“I got that.”

He scribbled on a pad and tore off the top sheet. “Get on down there. Sergeant Whitt waiting for you.” He handed me the slip of paper. It said SGT. WHITT in Ed’s small, precise handwriting. “Let me know about it, huh, Billy?”

I said I would. I tried hard not to notice how important it was to him.

Crenshaw bureau is not the worst in the city. But that might just be because of the competition. The station is not as pretty as the one in Hollywood. It has the look of something blunt and functional, like a hammer. In a way, it is.

Sergeant Whitt was waiting for me in a room in the basement. There was a cage around the room, and a small window was the only access.

Whitt was almost a cartoon cop. He must have been close to retirement; his belly looked like it had taken at least twenty-five years of hard work, punishing doughnuts, arresting chili dogs, and sending whole pizzas away for the big fall. If potatoes were bright red, somebody would have baked his nose by mistake a long time ago.

He sat at a desk about fifteen feet inside the shelf-lined room and glanced up at me when I appeared at the window and leaned on the sill. “What do you want?” he grunted.

“Detective Beasley sent me,” I said. I managed not to add, “Ho, ho, ho.” After all, the guy didn’t even have a beard.

He grunted again. “McAuley case,” he said. “Don’t know if I can find it.” He still hadn’t moved. He looked away again, down at his desk, where a hoagie, fries, a Coke, and two jelly doughnuts were sitting in a small cardboard box.

I straightened up. “Okay,” I said, with a cheerful smile. “Where’s the captain’s office? He’ll want to know you’ve lost some evidence from an open case file.” I very helpfully showed him all my teeth.

Sergeant Whitt grunted and stared hard at me for a good thirty seconds. He took a huge bite of the hoagie. A normal human being could not fit half of a sandwich that size into his mouth, but Sergeant Whitt did. He chewed twice and swallowed. Then he shoved his chair back explosively from the desk and barreled across the room on his wheeled chair. He must have hit forty-five or fifty miles an hour before sticking out a foot and stopping at a shelf. It was startling to see an old fat curmudgeon move that fast. But at least he didn’t grunt again.

He grabbed at something and rolled over to the window. He plopped a sealed bag onto the counter, staring at me with mean, hard little eyes. “You’re not a cop, are you?” he said.

“I’m an expert,” I told him. “Just ask anybody.”

He nodded without taking his eyes off me. “I didn’t think you were a cop,” he said, and he sat there and watched me as I took the hardware out of its bag.

It was a flat chunk of stainless steel about the size of a pocket knife. The tag was hanging from a hole in one end of it. The other end had a similar hole, except that there was a small grooved slot in the side of the second hole. I turned it over in my hand a couple of times, but I didn’t really need much of a look. I knew what it was.

I had seen one only a few weeks ago, back home in Key West. My charter had been for only a half-day, and while I was cleaning up my boat I had heard an impressive amount of swearing coming from a sailboat moored at a dock across the channel from my slip.

I had walked around and over to the slip where I found Betty Fleming, a leathery forty-five-year-old sailing woman, trying to rerig the spreaders on the mast of her forty-two-foot sloop. She resented needing help, never needed help from anybody, but eventually she let me haul on a rope and send her up the mast on her bosun’s chair. She’d even given me a beer afterwards.

The piece of metal Sergeant Whitt was guarding so carefully was identical to part of the rig of Betty’s bosun’s chair. Betty, with much amused swearing, had said it was called a brummel hook. “Nobody much uses ’em nowadays,” she had said. “Just old-fashioned assholes like me.”

So the lump of stainless steel in my hand now was familiar—but it just added to the dream feeling with which I’d started the day. This was a pretty uncommon piece of hardware. Why would somebody have anything nautical on a rooftop in an inner-city neighborhood in L.A.? It was one hell of a place to sail off into the sunset.

Anyway, it was easier to understand why none of the detectives knew what it was. Of course, that didn’t make it easier to understand why they hadn’t tried to find out.

I snapped out of thinking about it to see that Sergeant Whitt was still staring at me.

I stared back. “Do you ever blink? Or do you have one of those inner eyelids like a frog?”

I don’t believe he thought it was very funny. In fact, I couldn’t tell if he thought anything. He just stared. Finally he grunted. “You all done?”

I gave up. The man could outstare a rock. Even if the rock was smarter, and better looking. I dropped the brummel hook on the counter. “Yeah, I’m all done. Thanks for your time, Sergeant.”

He grunted.

I climbed up the stairs and out of Sergeant Whitt’s dungeon, and as I turned for the door a hand came down on my shoulder from behind. “Billy,” a soft voice said. “Hey, well—Billy Knight.”

I turned into the big grin of Charlie Shea, the friend who had talked me down that bad morning so many months ago.

I shook his hand, happy to see him. He looked me over with the interest of a guy who has saved your life and now feels responsible for you.

“Geez, Billy Knight. Man, you look great. Look at that tan. You look great. You really look great.” He sounded like that made him happy and he held onto my hand a moment too long, peering into my face. “How you doing, Billy?”