Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

It didn’t seem possible. If Nicky’s timetable was right, we should be in the middle of the Gulf Stream. And even Cappy wouldn’t hold a voodoo service with 100 illegal aliens this close to the Port of Miami.

But there it was. The skyline was there, and the crowd recognized it as easily as I did. It was their dream. Some of them had been saving up and dodging death for ten years to see those lights.

And now Cappy had brought them here. He shouted something again, blew the conch shell, and shouted, “Ay bobo!” and the people began to crowd over to the rail.

The crewmen with cattle prods were waiting for them. Each person who came to the rail was searched, everything removed from his or her pockets. Then the guards “helped” them over and into the water.

And still the crowd pushed to get there, to jump in and swim the short distance to a new life.

I had thought the scene before was hellish. This was worse. They were pouring over the side and into the water in family groups, in handholding twos and threes, mothers holding children and jumping.

And for those few who hung back, unsure or unwilling, there were Cappy’s crew to encourage them forward with cattle prods.

A small piece of the puzzle clicked into place. I had wondered how a small crew could force such a large crowd into the water. It was a simple and, in its ugly way, elegant solution: don’t force them. Make them want to go over the side.

But how could we be this close to Miami? Unless—

I leaned out as far as I could and looked at the skyline dead astern. Something was not quite right about it. Something about the lights—

I got it pretty quickly, which might mean I was recovering. The lights of Miami’s skyline are many colors, many shapes and sizes. These lights were all the same size and shape.

The last piece clicked into place.

I remembered the strange chunk of plywood on pontoons I had stumbled over. I remembered the rings on it, like it had been meant to be towed, and the batteries.

And I remembered what the mate on the Chinea had said: “They all jump in the water. They think they’re in Miami…”

Nicky’s estimate of time was right. We were still in the middle of the Gulf Stream. But we were towing a plywood silhouette of Miami, hung with cheap Christmas lights. And the people, a little unbalanced from a few hours of drinking and dancing, were going over the rail. They thought they were swimming the half mile to freedom. Instead they were dropping into the big deep.

They see the lights. And everybody jumps in the water.

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Cappy blew a final long blast on his conch shell. He put it down and picked up something else; a knife. Looking serious, even solemn, he raised the knife high over his head.

And turned to Anna.

I jumped forward. I heard a kind of dumb animal howl and realized it was me. The fifty feet between Cappy and me seemed like nightmare distance. I moved forward with lead feet and the distance stayed the same.

Most of the crowd, still on deck, whirled around in my way. A man jumped on my back, yammering syllables that sounded like, “Ya-laylee loto lulu!” I threw him off. A woman leaped at my face with a maniac smile and poured rum on my head. I pushed her away. Two happy men grabbed my arms and tried to pull me into a ring of dancers. I yanked my arms free and stumbled forward, leaning on the ship’s gunwale for a second to get my balance.

But one of the crew had spotted me. He ran forward, holding his cattle prod like a baseball bat. He swung for the fences. I was not quite quick enough to duck. I caught it on my arm and felt the force and the shock travel all the way up the arm and through my whole body.

For a second I couldn’t move at all. The crewman raised the prod for another swing at my head and I stumbled at him. I didn’t have full use of my arms, so I rammed him with my shoulder. He fell back, into the gunwale, and I scooped him up and over, into the ocean.

I ran for Anna, trying to shake the feeling back into my arm. I got some back, and it wasn’t good. The spot where I had blocked the cattle prod felt broken.

Well, if I lived I could get a cast.

The crowd spun past. I stumbled, shoved and battered my way through to the altar.

I was close enough now to pick out details; the patterns carved on the wooden bowls around Anna, a bad spot on one of the mangoes. I could see that Anna was still alive. The bad news—

Cappy had slashed Anna’s arm at the bicep, where a doctor takes a blood sample. The blood was running into a silver bowl and the snake was slowly untwining itself from the tree above the altar and moving down toward the bowl, toward Anna, tongue flickering.

And Cappy himself had turned to wait for me, smiling, the sacrificial knife hanging loosely by his side.

He looked so cool, so superior, and so damned happy. And I felt like I was cobbled together out of backyard mud by clumsy six-year olds. Everything hurt. Anything that worked was slow, filled with sludge and rust. I couldn’t keep a clear idea of what to do, except that I had to save Anna and smash Cappy, flatten his head, crush his skull—