Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

“No trouble, Art.”

“Thirty-five years in this goddamn town,” he told me. “Think I can’t smell trouble?”

“There’s no trouble, for Christ’s sake, Art,” I yelled at him. The sound of my voice was too high and much too loud, so I gave him a big, loopy smile so he could see for himself there was no trouble. “I’m going home.” I turned for the door, staggering slightly as some trick of the cold locked my knee up for half a step. I shook it off and made it to the door.

“Dickhead,” I heard Art mumble behind me.

Outside, I walked to the other side of the shack, where my bicycle was chained to a piling. I undid the lock, flung the chain into the battered basket, and headed out onto the street and across US 1. I had a car, but I hadn’t started it up for six months. I wasn’t even sure it would still start.

There’s a special word for anybody who drives a car in Key West: tourist. Real Conchs have battered bicycles with large, American seats and those high handlebars that every kid in the country lusted after in 1966. With the high handlebars it’s a lot easier to stay upright under Key West conditions.

Most of the bikes have a half-smashed basket on the front, and generally a half-smashed rider holding onto the handlebars. But even if you’re sober, the way you ride a Conch bike is the same, easy enough for any drunk. You lean half-forward, drape one forearm over the handlebars, and slouch over in a kind of boneless way while your legs move on the pedals as if you were going downhill and you’re just keeping up with the spinning wheel; you’re not really pedalling at all, just letting gravity pull you along.

It works out pretty well on an island that’s completely flat and only a few miles long and a few miles across. Gas is expensive, and unless you’re hauling lumber, cars are a waste of t

ime and money and take up too much room. Besides, nobody is really in a hurry here. Tourists are here for a break from the hectic rodent marathon. Residents generally don’t have anything too pressing; at worst, they’re keeping a tourist waiting a few minutes—which is actually one of the real pleasures of living here, so nobody minds.

I generally managed to get across US 1 without serious injury, but it always amazed me. If the road wasn’t so straight nobody would make it all the way to Duval Street. Nobody is really driving as they come through here. They’re hanging onto the wheel often enough, but they are either wrestling kids or gaping out the window. In a lot of ways people feel like they’ve come to a foreign country, so I guess they assume a red light means something else here.

I was as bad as any tourist right now. I couldn’t get that last picture of Roscoe out of my mind, as he tried that pained half-smile one last time and turned for his rental car. So I ended up partway across the street before I realized I was in traffic, going against the light. I made it back to the curb without losing a wheel or a leg, but just barely. A thoughtful guy with a blonde crewcut leaned out the window and very loudly told me what my head was full of and what he figured I liked to put in my mouth. It wasn’t very original; I barely heard him.

When the light finally changed I missed it and had to wait through another cycle. I felt trapped. Roscoe had found me and in just a half-hour stripped away all my carefully built-up defenses. He was right; I was still a cop underneath. I still cared.

A red convertible filled with college kids went by. The horn honked and a beer bottle spun from the backseat and smashed at my feet. Small pellets of glass pattered off my hat, and one stung my cheek. My left leg was wet with warm beer that smelled like the urinal at Sloppy Joe’s. It woke me up, and when the light changed a few seconds later I wheeled across and headed for home.

My home that year was about halfway across the island, across the street from a small canal that emptied into the marsh above Houseboat Row. The house was a small, squat cinderblock cottage built in the 1960s. The yard was overgrown when I moved in and hadn’t gotten any better.

Inside the low coral rock wall around the lot there were enormously tall patches of weeds sharing space with the blotches of hardscrabble dirt where nothing could ever grow. A huge key lime tree leaned over the back door and dropped fruit on the cat who lived in the crawl space under the house.

The house had once been painted Florida pink, a strange bastard color halfway between tan and the hot blush of a Puerto Rican whore’s toreador stretch pants. The paint was fading now. Chunks of it had flaked off to show a pastel green undercoat. I dropped my bike on the poured-cement front step and kicked the front door open.

The house had two small bedrooms, a living-dining room, a bathroom about the size of a coat closet, and the kitchen. At the moment the house was dim, and hot enough to melt plastic. I switched on the big Friedrich window unit and a throaty roar of arctic air pushed me towards the kitchen.

The kitchen had a pass-through about five feet wide with one louvred shutter on the left side. The other shutter, for the right side, had been gone when I moved in. I stood in the kitchen doorway, with the pass-through on my left, and looked at the refrigerator. It was older than me and streaked with rust.

I thought about Roscoe and what he had said. I thought about getting out one of the bottles of St. Pauli Girl beer. Then I thought maybe I should take a shower first. I couldn’t decide and felt my shoulder muscles getting tighter as I just stood there, unable to make a simple decision.

What I should do, I knew, was just grab a beer. It was right there, ten feet away. Just step over, open the door, grab a beer. But then—I couldn’t really take a beer into the shower. Maybe I should take a shower first. Get clean, sit down, then have the beer. Except then the beer wouldn’t taste as good. So have the beer first. Except—

It was too much. Both decisions suddenly seemed to have enormous consequences. I just had to choose, one way or the other, and I couldn’t. I could feel the tension in my shoulders spreading, the muscles starting to knot, and before I knew it I was shaking from the strain. It was all coming back to me. Roscoe’s visit had brought it all back.

Chapter Three

March 18. It was not a date I was likely to forget. The day had started badly. The freeways were full of mean drunks and Type A personalities with too much engine in their car and not enough sense of their own mortality.

The air that day was a solid yellow-brown, a poisonous, barely breathable ooze unlike anything I’ve ever seen anywhere else. Sure, other cities have pollution. New York has a dark brown cloud cover that can rip out your throat when the wind is right; Mexico City has a vicious fog so thick you can feel the weight of it and watch it peel the paint off your car. But L.A. has something special. It clings to your clothes, drifts gently into your pores in that dry desert air, and gives you blinding pains in your throat and head that make you want to drive up onto the Santa Monica Freeway and look for somebody to run off the road. The pollution in L.A. is special. After you’ve lived there awhile you realize that the gauzy, yellow-brown air really stands for the whole city in a unique way. Like everything else about L.A., the smog is often pretty to look at, completely intangible, and ultimately poisonous. But hey—it sure makes for great sunsets, huh?

Great sunsets and lousy mornings. On my way in to roll call that yellow morning it was already over ninety and the smog was pounding its way in and making my temples throb. My eyes were stinging, there was a sharp rasp in my chest, and jolts of pain shot around my skull if I tried to use my head for anything except pointing my eyes.

I had plenty to think about and it all hurt. Jennifer and I had just finished another of our early-morning screaming matches. She had this nutty idea that just because she married me she ought to see me every now and then. She said I had this two-year-old daughter who thought the mailman was her daddy.

A cliché like Cops and Divorce can be a tremendous pain in the ass when you’re living through it. You can’t find much comfort in the fact that you’re falling in with the statistical norm. I was fighting it with both hands, but we were edging closer and closer to divorce. It seemed like every morning when I left for work and every night when I came home there was another yelling session. Each time we shouted we said things we shouldn’t. Each awful thing we said was a little worse than the one before, a little harder to gloss over, apologize for, rationalize. I felt like we were both passengers on some kind of wild amusement-park ride. The guy running it was drunk, the ride was spinning out of control, and nobody could do any more than ride it out and hope we all landed okay.

Except lately it was looking like we weren’t going to land at all.

We’d said some truly hurtful things this morning. Most of them centered on my shortcomings as a father and a human being. It was getting tougher to explain myself—even to me. I loved my wife and my daughter, loved them so much it hurt sometimes. But I worked long hours. I had to. I was a cop. I had been a cop for a long time before I got married, and I expected to be a cop for a long time to come. It was the only way I had been able to work things out for myself, to balance what I believed with who I was and how I lived. It worked for me.

And on the darker side, I loved the faintly queasy thrill of it, of never knowing when a bullet or a knife might be aimed at my back. I loved waiting for danger, meeting it, beating it. I loved the high-stakes crap game of putting my life on the line, gambling it to keep the rest of the world safe.