Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

“Yes,” Anna said.

I held the door for her anyway. Probably it was the cute way she said it, with the accent and everything.

Chapter Sixteen

The Miami River isn’t really a river anymore. It’s been turned into a canal that cuts the city in half and then dumps into Biscayne Bay. It has tides and brackish water and it is a kind of second-class port for the smaller freighters.

But of the many things it is, the most important is that it’s a strange, self-contained sub-culture. It’s a little world of its own along the banks of the large canal. When people in Miami say “Miami River,” they usually mean this minor sprawl of marinas and dry docks and bars. It sits a few miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean and several layers of evolution away from the horrors of South Beach.

The residents of this world, known as River Rats, are the real boat people of Miami. These are not guys who take the speedboat out on Sunday after church to see if they can make it to Elliot Key in under ten minutes. They don’t spend a lot of time looking at the BOAT US catalogue.

But they are likely to know where you can buy a World War II surplus landing craft, who might have a reconditioned engine for a tanker, or who’s been making some extra cash on the run from Colombia.

They range in age from very young to very old, but most of them have that no-age look of men who have always been old but are still spry enough to bend a Buick’s bumper with their teeth.

There aren’t that many of them, not anymore, and they are at sea whenever they can arrange it. But it’s a dying lifestyle, like most of the other interesting ones, and there are fewer berths available every year as the computers take over the ships. So there are always a few dozen River Rats on shore.

Those few only have a couple of places where they hang out. What those places have in common is cheap drinks and a view of the River. My plan had been to slip into some of those places, have a few quiet beers, ask a couple of questions. My modified plan was to lead the parade of Nicky and Anna into a couple of places and try to keep us all from being pounded into the ground.

The first place we went was called The 0. From the outside it looked like it had fallen down a few years ago. Once you saw the inside you were willing to pay for the bulldozers to make sure.

As we pushed through the crooked doorway I felt like we were in a bad Western. A sudden quiet fell over the room when they saw Anna. Even the jukebox stopped and I felt twenty-three hungry eyes on us.

“Christ on a bun,” Nicky muttered, looking into the dimness where a dozen battered and scarred faces were looking back.

Then somebody dropped a glass, the music started up, and they all turned away again. They weren’t being polite; it was just that anything that wasn’t a boat could only hold their interest for so long.

I could see that Nicky and Anna were both re-thinking their attitude of fearless confrontation. But I managed to steer us to a table in the corner without either of them trying to surrender.

Anna’s eyes had gotten very big when I opened the door, and walking across the room to the table didn’t shrink them at all. Now she sat with her hands clasped on the table in front of her, trying not to see too much.

“Are you sure this is still America?” she whispered to me. “Never have I seen such a place.”

“I have,” Nicky muttered. “Ever see Star Wars?”

“Just don’t order a wine spritzer,” I said. “Or milk.”

“Is beer all right,” Nicky asked, “or do I need to eat a broken glass?”

We sat quietly for a while, nursing our drinks. I tried to size up the River Rats in the room without being too obvious, and finally narrowed it down to one.

The guy I picked had been sitting over at the far end of the bar. He looked to be older than most of the others, and everybody who came in nodded to him. Every now and then somebody would go over to him and lean their head in close, talk for a minute, and then walk away.

He was thin and looked to be over six feet tall, though it was hard to be sure with the way he had folded himself onto his stool. He had a worn, deeply tanned face, colorless hair, and wore clothes that looked like they were nice once, but he’d worn them to overhaul the engines one time too many.

In a community like the River, where people come and go, there are usually a couple of people who are the bulletin boards. They stay put and keep track of things. My guy looked like the man who knew everything that was going on and everybody who was doing it.

I waited until he was alone, with only about a half inch left in his glass, and pushed my chair back. “Just stay here and keep quiet,” I told Nicky and Anna. They nodded.

I walked over to him a

t the end of the bar. “Buy you a drink?”

He looked up at me. He didn’t look friendly, but he didn’t look hostile, either. He was just waiting. If there was a password, I hadn’t said it yet.

“Name’s Billy,” I said. I jerked my head back at my table. “Some friends are looking for a boat.”

He nodded.