Red Tide (12 page)

Anna. The look of her neck and clavicle. Her story of the soldiers coming, the murder of her family.

Nancy. What we had been through, what we had almost been.

The sailboat sliding through the water with Nicky belching on the bow.

The fight with Tiny, which seemed like it had happened to someone else a long time ago.

And pushing out all the other pictures was the image of bodies bobbing in the water, washing up on the beach. And a man with no face far out to sea, counting the money while the voodoo drums rolled.

I didn’t know what to do. I felt caught in a nightmare where everything else moves fast, with a purpose, and I was stuck in slow motion wearing lead sneakers. And I couldn’t even wake up and pound on the pillow.

It was dark when I got back to Key West. All I wanted to do was go to sleep, stop thinking, let my unconscious brain sort things out. But there was a light showing in my window, and when I pushed my front door open and stepped into the living room, Anna was sitting in my easy chair.

She was wearing a loose white silk shirt and white pants and she looked so beautiful that at first I thought she was another dream image. Except that Nicky was standing in front of her in the center of the room, a beer in each hand, telling her some outrageous something or other, and whatever else he was, Nicky was no dream.

“Billy!” he bellowed, and Anna smiled at me.

“Thanks for waiting up,” I said.

“No worries, mate,” Nicky said, and he held up one of my beers. “This stuff was going bad so we had to field test it.”

“I appreciate it,” I said, moving towards the kitchen. “Did any of it survive the field test?”

Nicky looked hurt. “Aw, man, think I’d take your last one?”

“Only if you were thirsty,” I said.

He giggled. “Too right. And I’m always thirsty. But I left you one any road.”

I opened the refrigerator and took the last beer. There had been a six-pack this morning. Five bottles gone. So I knew Nicky had been here waiting for at least ten minutes.

I took a long pull. I knew they were waiting for me to tell them what I had found out, but I didn’t know where to start, how to say it. “It’s bad,” I said.

“This is why we wait,” she said. “So you are not alone with the bad in the night.”

I looked at her. It was worth doing. “That’s right,” I said. “Except it’s worse than you thought.”

“I 
knew
 it,” Nicky said softly.

“Somebody has killed some people, just dumped them alive into the Gulf Stream and let them drown. As far as I can find out, no American law enforcement agency is looking into it.”

“How the bloody hell can they not?” Nicky wanted to know.

“It’s in international waters, Nicky. The Australian Coast Guard isn’t looking into it either.”

“That’s eyewash, Billy, and you know it. What’s the real reason?”

I shrugged. “It’s politics,” I said.

“Just so,” Anna said softly.

“Bloody savages,” Nicky said.

I finished my beer. “They’re not bad guys, mostly. They’d just rather not have the hassle. They figure they got enough crime here at home, and they’re not allowed to solve those, so why go looking for trouble? It’s not really their problem.”

“Then who?” Anna demanded, still with a soft, knowing tone. “Who is this problem of?”

“Right,” said Nicky. “It’s up to us, then.”

“The hell it is,” I said.

“Mate—”

“No, Nicky, listen to me for a second. This is a very bad guy, whoever he is. He’s killed a couple hundred people. What is it you think we can do?”

“Stop him,” Nicky said stubbornly.

“Okay, stop him, great. How?” He was quiet and I went on. “Because first you have to find him. We don’t even know it’s 
him
—it could be her. Or them, or it. Where do we look? Rent a helicopter and hover over the Gulf Stream until we see bodies, then follow them back to the source?”

“You know how to find somebody, Billy. You were a cop.”

“Sure. You want to know how a cop would do it? Put it out on the wire to all the other cops. Wait for a clue. Hope somebody sees something. Wait some more. Dig through the files and try to find somebody with a past history of similar crimes. Tell the newspapers, set up an anonymous tip line. And then wait, for one of the thousands of other cops or citizens to call with a hint. We can’t do any of that.”

“All right, Billy.”

“And then, let’s just suppose a miracle happens and we find him anyway. Then what?”

“What do you mean, then what? We stop him, mate! We make sure he never does it again!”

“How?”

Nicky opened his mouth, then closed it again. He looked like the silence hurt. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

“Good. I do know. There’s only two ways to stop him. First, we could set him up to get caught by the cops. Have you had any luck getting the cops interested?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“Well, we can’t just grab him, tie him up and hand him over. Because then we’re guilty of piracy, kidnapping and who knows what. We’ll go to jail and he’ll go back to business as usual.”

“All right, mate, you made your point. What’s the other way to do him?”

“The other way is to kill him.”

There was a long silence.

“And if you’re not ready in your heart to look him in the eye and kill him dead there’s no point in even trying to find him. Which we can’t do anyway. Because sure as hell, he’ll kill us without blinking.”

I felt the pressure of Anna’s hand on me. “There is other way,” she said. I looked at her. She had been quiet while Nicky and I slugged it out, but she hadn’t quit on the idea of justice.

“In this country,” she said slowly, carefully, “are the people controlled by the television. If we are making the television interested, then are the police coming so as not to look bad, yes?”

 “It’s not that easy,” I said.

“But what is easy to do with this? Is necessary. You are saying other way is impossible, so not easy is an improve, yes?”

“Fair is fair,” Nicky said. “Let’s have a go.”

“You two still don’t get it,” I said. “This isn’t some kind of Johnny Quest adventure. This is the big game. For keeps.”

“I think so too,” Anna said. “No one is saying to these dead people, ‘Get up, game is over.’”

“We know what we’re about, mate,” Nicky added.

“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.

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?”

She gave a small huff. “Myself is funny. Because I am having more fears of staying in this room with you than of what we do with the killer.”

I sat still. “I don’t think it’s funny.”

“You have not European sense of humor,” she said. “In my country would be much laughter for this. The poor girl, afraid of man even when she is very much liking him, and not afraid of the bad killing man. Ha,” she said.

I moved carefully onto the bed, leaving a good space between us. I took her hand and just held it.

“How beautiful I now am,” she said. “With these, these—how do you call it, snowts?”

“I think you are beautiful,” I said. “But I don’t know what snowts are.”

She blew her nose again. “These are snowts,” she said. “From the nose.”

“You mean snot,” I said.

“Yes, of course, I am saying so. Snowts.”

“It’s not a real nice word.”

“So? What are you calling it then?”

“How about nose tears?”

She looked at me for a long moment, then shook her head. “You are also a poet. This is a beautiful thought, very nice.” She held up the soggy tissue. “But I think this is not beautiful. And not tears.” She threw it across the room and into the small brass trashcan. “Snowts.”

“Whatever you say.”

She moved closer to me. “I say, it would be very nice if you will hold me for a few minutes. If you do not object to the snowts.”

“Nose tears,” I said. “I don’t mind.” I put my arms around her.

We were still sitting like that, just holding each other and breathing, when Nicky smashed the door open and roared back into the room with a sound like the Spanish Armada breaking up on the cliffs of Dover.

“Hello-hello-hello,” he yelled at us. His arms were full of paper bags and before Anna and I could even straighten up he had spread the contents of several of them across the bed.

Nicky had found beer, two six packs of Samuel Adams, and a sixteen ounce bottle of Mountain Dew for Anna. He’d also found a Chinese restaurant, and there were spring rolls with lots of hot Chinese mustard, shrimp fried rice, sweet and sour pork, and kung pao chicken.

“Gung hee fat choy!” Nicky shouted, throwing chop sticks to Anna and then to me.

“It’s not New Years, Nicky,” I reminded him.

“Hell’s peppers, mate, celebration is celebration. Besides,” he said, ripping the lid off a container of rice and shoving a good handful into his mouth, “I can’t say another bloody word in Chinese. Eat up, love, it’s getting cold,” he told Anna.

She continued to watch him with something between amusement and horror as he polished off a good half of the food with a kind of suicidal carelessness that left rice stuck to the ceiling above him and small pieces of shrimp fastened to the bedspread.

When we were done eating Nicky belched happily. “Ahhh,” he said. “Hits the old spot, eh? Well then, Billy, what’s next, beddy-bye? Do we need an early start?”