Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

Now she looked up at me. She combed my face for a sign that I was lying. I didn’t think I was, and after a minute I guess she didn’t think so either.

“We will see,” she said at last.

“Yes,” I told her. “We will.”

Chapter Eleven

We did see. Over the next week I saw Anna every night, and every night I said goodnight to her outside her door. It was easy. All it took was a strong will, the memory of her story, and an ice cold shower every fifteen minutes.

I guess it could have gone on like that for the rest of that awful August and no one would have noticed that anything was wrong. But nature doesn’t work that way. Wherever things are locked into existing one way, there’s something chewing at the corner of the picture, trying to change it. And the change is almost never for the good.

Nicky came to my place on a Friday afternoon as I was stepping out of my third cold shower of the day and into a pair of shorts.

“Well, mate,” he said. “I guess you’ve seen it.”

I pulled on a shirt. “Seen what?”

He threw a copy of the morning paper at my head and I snatched it out of the air. “Page seven,” he said.

I folded the paper open to page seven and found, halfway down, a headline that had been circled in red ink.

BODIES FOUND. I looked up at Nicky.

“Read the story, Billy,” he said. “Read it.”

It wasn’t much of a story. Just a couple of paragraphs saying that on two different occasions, the Coast Guard had brought in three bodies. Some fishing boats had found them in the Gulf Stream off the lower Keys. All three were thought to be Haitian nationals.

I looked up at Nicky. “Haitian nationals,” he said significantly.

I threw the paper back at him. “Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry for the Haitian nationals. I wish these three weren’t dead. But it happens a lot, Nicky. It doesn’t mean anything.”

He pulled out one of those charts of the Keys they give to tourists and opened it in front of my face. “This does,” he said. “Look here. We found our man on a Thursday, right here.” He pointed to where he had written in a big red one on the chart. “Right here, on a Friday, off Marathon, the next two. And here, right close to number one, a Thursday again.”

He jammed his elbow into my ribs. “Eh? Well?”

“Well what?”

He blinked at me as if he couldn’t believe anybody was so slow. “It’s a schedule, Billy. Somebody is keeping an exact schedule, killing these people by the clock.” He pointed to one and three on the chart. “Thursday, Thursday. And Marathon is one day’s sail North.”

I shook my head. “Nicky—”

“There’s more, mate. All four of ’em had empty pockets, no ID, no money, nothing. Highly unusual, mate, you said so yourself.”

“You’ve been hassling the cops again.”

He looked indignant. “’Course I have. They’re not doing bloody fuck-all about this. ’Course I’m hassling the bloody cops.”

Nicky hadn’t said a word about Haitians or murder for a week and I had been dumb enough to think it meant he had let the whole thing slip away into his New Age Conspiracy network. But he had obviously been spending the time building his case instead.

“Why?”

He blinked. “Eh?”

“Why hassle the cops? Why hassle me?”

He looked at me with real pity. “Somebody’s gettin’ away with wholesale murder. Isn’t that the sort of thing we’re all supposed to try and stop?”

“There’s no evidence of murder.”