Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

“Franco and Lorenzo aren’t bad,” he said. “Just sort of basic. They’ve been working the River too long.”

“What do they have?”

Deacon shook his head. “Two bodies found together. You were seen talking to one of them, the older one.”

“Bud Nagle,” I said.

“And the next night he turns up killed.”

“How?”

Deacon chuckled. It was never a sound that brought a smile to my face. It was even colder now. “Hard to say, buddy. The coroner isn’t done yet, but they just can’t seem to figure whether they were crushed

first and then bled dry, or the other way around.”

“Crushed?”

“Until their eyeballs absolutely popped out of their heads,” Deacon said. “Three cops on the scene threw up, which is a new record for one Miami crime scene.” He shook his head. “Still no guess as to how it happened. I haven’t seen the file. But they were crushed. Big cable, maybe. Whatever it was, it wrapped around and squoze ’em so hard there wasn’t anything left inside ‘em.”

“Bad way to go,” I said.

“You know a good one?”

We got to his car. It was parked cop-in-a-hurry style, angled in with one wheel on the sidewalk. I leaned on the roof while Deacon unlocked. There was a bare hint of a sunrise starting to show in the sky.

I was tired. Not just from staying up all night, either. This whole thing had been dumb and dirty and this trip had never seemed more pointless than it did right now.

Deacon popped open the passenger door of his metallic blue Chevy. I had to push some of the electronic clutter over a few inches in order to fit onto the seat. “Is one of these things a telephone?” I asked him.

“Two of ’em,” he said. He reached over and picked one up. “Try this one.”

“Thanks.” I took it from him and dialed the motel. They had one of those automatic switching things where an obnoxious recorded voice tells you to punch in the room number. I did. It rang a long time. Nobody answered.

Anna had probably stepped out. Maybe to get something to eat. That was probably all it was. And Nicky was in the other room and couldn’t hear the phone ringing over the TV. There was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

I let it ring a little longer. I thought about all the time I had been in jail, and talking to the two detectives. I thought about somebody who had killed Bud and Otoniel at the smallest hint of a question. Crushed and bled dry.

I put down the phone.

“Deacon,” I said, “can you make this thing go fast?”

He put his foot down before I even finished speaking. The car jumped ahead. “That’s one of the things I’m best at,” he said.

There wasn’t much traffic at this hour. Deacon slid his big car through what little there was. One guy kept up with us for a while, just for practice, I guess. Then he saw the blue light on the dashboard and dropped back.

We were at the motel in five minutes and I was out of the car before it stopped moving. I ran up the stairs, fumbling for a room key.

I didn’t need it. The door was open about two inches. A blast of cold air from inside hit me and went right through me, chilling me to the bone.

I pushed the door open.

The first thing that hit me was how neat and empty the room looked. It felt dead, the way only an empty motel room can. There was no sign that anything at all had happened; no broken ashtrays, no overturned chairs, no license plate numbers scrawled on the wall in blood.

I pushed the door further open. It hit some resistance. I stopped pushing and slid through, looking to see what it was.

It was Nicky.

He was stretched on the floor behind the door. One arm was spread out in front of him, the other folded under his body. A bruise ran across the side of his face, another on his throat.