Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

I thought about what I knew. It didn’t seem like much: the hunting rifle, the brummel hook. A white supremacist staking out Doyle’s house.

Maybe the visits to Sergeant Whitt and Sergeant Brandon or the little chat with Moss had triggered small alarms. Had Doyle started to feel the hounds sniffing at the edge of his grove? Would something else make him feel like they were at the foot of his tree? He would feel the noose getting tighter around his neck. So the one thing that would tip him over would be—

What? Something that happened while I was with Nancy, which didn’t make any sense. Not at all.

Unless—

I called Ed at home.

“You just can’t take a hint, can you, boy?”

“One quick question, Ed.”

“It have to be quick, I’m in the middle of cooking my famous Arkansas flannel cakes.”

“Does Doyle keep a boat at Marina del Rey?”

He chuckled around a mouthful of smoke. “Oh, yass. He got a boat all right. Big sleek motherfucker. He’s one of them old-timey ocean racers, they all go out every year and try to kill themselves going to Hawaii or some damn thing. That’s a big thing with him, have to prove himself with all kinds of wild shit. He keep another boat in Texas just so he can get a shot at dying in either ocean.”

“You know the name of the boat he keeps here, Ed? Is it the Warrior?”

“That’s two questions, Billy. But I think that’s the name. The Warrior.” He chuckled, a throaty, smoke-filled sound. “Only a honky would name a boat something like that.”

“You’re probably right,” I told him. “Thanks.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

It was one more small, circumstantial link to Doyle. I had stood on the dock by his boat. The two goons had taken my picture. And sometime that night Doyle had seen the picture, figured out who I was, and put out the word. It all added up; there was not the slightest doubt in the world, and there was even less proof that a prosecutor would buy.

It’s a classic cop dilemma. I thought I had left it behind when I turned in my badge, but here it was again. I knew exactly who was guilty and where they were; and I couldn’t prove anything. All I had was circumstantial soup.

I could show a really flimsy connection from Doyle to one deranged neo-Nazi. I could extend that connection to ownership of a sailboat. They might provide motive and means, and they might be nothing. Might didn’t seem like enough.

I needed more, and that’s part of the cop dilemma, too. But Doyle was a very public figure, and I couldn’t dig around him without tripping on roots.

My choices were limited. Anything I did was going to alert Doyle, one way or another. And then he woul

d take action of another sort. If he wasn’t afraid to kill a well-connected, serving police officer like Roscoe, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me either.

And that thought brought me up short, too. Roscoe had been an administrator. He had no street-smarts at all, and even less idea of how to investigate something as tricky as this. Yet Roscoe had found something, and it must have been something solid, because Roscoe had died.

What could Roscoe have found that I couldn’t?

The idea chewed at me. I was a competent investigator; Roscoe was a chair-warmer. I was at a dead end, and Roscoe had found something important enough to get him killed.

What had he found?

The answer didn’t come in one big, bright lump. In fact, I pushed away pieces of it a couple of times, irritated at the shape it took. Finally, when I had been grinding my teeth for a half-hour and had nothing else to think about, I sat down with it, looked it over.

Roscoe was good at only one thing. So whatever he had found to implicate Hector’s killer had to be political or administrative. Somewhere there were faint vapor-trail markings in the upper echelon of command that only an expert like Roscoe could read. I would never have been able to find it. But he had followed the trail, found the trail-maker, and wound up headless in the gutter.

And that led back to the same place. Only a high-ranking cop could leave the kind of trail that Roscoe could find. The only high-ranking cop who had left any kind of footprint at all here was Doyle. That left me at the same dead end.

I got dressed slowly and went down to the coffee shop. I tried to find a safe choice on the menu while I turned the Doyle problem over in my mind.

Because my mind was churning furiously, I ordered blueberry pancakes. They were terrible, with a strong taste of lard and pesticide.

I ate them anyway, and maybe they were to blame for what I decided to do. After watching so many killers laugh their way out of hard time with defenses like eating junk food and watching TV, maybe it’s only fair to say it was the pancakes, Your Honor. They clouded my judgment.