Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

“No you don’t.”

“But you know,” Anna said.

“That’s right. And it scares the hell out of me. And it would scare the hell out of you if you understood it.”

“So then Nicky and I, we do it without you.” She gently closed my jaw with a fingertip. “We will be fine, Billy. You may tell us how to do.”

I was back in the dream again, where nothing made sense but it was all whirling around me at a furious speed while I had grown into the floor.

“No,” I finally managed.

“Which part no?”

“All of it no.” I took a deep breath, wishing I could shut up, but knowing I was going to say it anyway. “You’ll wait here while I do it.”

Nicky went off like a rocket. “Not alone, mate! Not without me! It’s not fair!”

“No, Nicky. This guy is a bocor, a voodoo black wizard. He collects body parts and drinks Christian blood. Eats babies. No. No way in hell. You two are out of it.”

Nicky gulped, but looked stubborn. “Mate. Billy. Stands to reason, you need me all the more if he’s flinging around palo mayombe.”

“Palo what?”

“Palo mayombe. Black magic version of voodoo. What you said, right?” He shook his head. “Very bad stuff. Of course, it explains how he controls the crowds.”

“You know about this stuff?”

He looked insulted. “Mate. What is it you think I do all day in me little shop? This stuff is all cake to me. And if you’re going up against a houngan, you need me to counter him.” He winked. “Besides, I got my new weapon, Billy. You’ll need back-up.”

“If I need you and your weapon, we’ve already lost.” He looked hurt, but I was way past caring. “Here’s the deal. I will look into this thing, just skim the surface very quietly. Just to get enough detail so we can turn it over to the TV people, and then hope they put pressure on the cops. But if they do or don’t, that’s all we do. And then we are all out of it, whatever happens. Because I do not want this guy ever to know who we are. Deal?”

They both looked troubled and poked around at it for a few minutes, saying we had to be sure, but in the end we had reached an uneasy agreement. They would come along and stay in the background, just so they knew that everything possible had been done. And I would not involve them, no matter what, or do anything that might get us close enough to be dangerous. I insisted on that. This was not a crusade, just a quick, clean investigation from a distance and then home again.

It was an important point, and I really thought I might have gotten it across. But of course, I was wrong about a lot of things that rotten August.

Chapter Fifteen

Considering how much I hated driving between Miami and Key West, I was doing it way too often. And with the weight of what we were about to try, and Nicky singing his awful, tuneless Australian drinking songs in the back seat, it seemed to take a lot longer this time.

Anna didn’t say a whole lot. She sat in the front and watched the scenery. If she was disappointed, she didn’t let on. Every ten miles or so I would catch her looking at me. She would hold my eye for a moment and then look back out the window. I wondered what it meant.

But nothing lasts forever, no matter how much you don’t want it to. We finally hit the Turnpike and all the cars around us accelerated from sixty-five to over eighty like a school of sharks scenting blood. I moved us into the right lane and kept it at a stately seventy. Anna watched the traffic whiz past with gritted teeth. Once, when three cars tried to pass us in the same lane at the same time, I heard her say something under her breath that sounded like, “boga tee.” It was probably Ukranian profanity. I wished I knew some. I’d worn out all the English I knew.

I pulled off the Turnpike onto US 1 around Kendall. We drove in relative silence for a few miles and then turned into the parking lot of an anonymous motel in South Miami.

“All right,” I said. “Headquarters.”

Nicky blinked, looking at the bland, middle class building. “What the hell, mate,” he said. “I’m paying. We can go one better.”

“It’s out of the way,” I said. “And it’s right on a very busy street. Besides, it has a coffee shop. We could go to one of the fancy joints in the Grove or downtown, but I don’t want to attract attention.”

“And I don’t want to attract roaches,” Nicky muttered, but he jumped out of the car anyway and led us inside the lobby to register.

We got two rooms with a connecting door between them. Nicky threw his canvas bag onto the bed in one of them, the smaller room, and went racing off to fill the ice bucket and find some beer.

Anna stood in the middle of the room looking lost. Then she moved slowly over and sat on the edge of the bed. She sat so stiffly that her weight barely made a dent in the bed cover. “Is very funny,” she said.

I sat in the chair beside her. “What’s that?”