Red Tide (3 page)

“Sure,” he said. “Just—sure.”

It turned out he got the deep tan from ocean racing. It was a rich man’s sport, running the massive floating engines across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas and back at impossible speeds. I’d made one of those runs with a friend once, as a last minute substitute for a drunken navigator, and for a week afterwards I walked bent over, my back twisted and throbbing from the pounding waves give you at that speed.

Some people like that. Rick was one of them. His uncertainty dropped off when he talked about his boat, the way he positioned the big fuel tanks to improve the trim, a new way to get more from his carburetor.

After about forty-five minutes of ocean racing a guard appeared on the better side of the bars. “Richard Pearl?” he called.

Rick stood up, looking embarrassed again. “My dad’s got some pretty good lawyers,” he said.

“I guess so.”

He shifted his weight from foot to foot for a moment. “I’m sorry I can’t spring you,” he said. “But if there’s ever anything I can do—I mean, I definitely owe you one.”

“Forget it,” I said.

“No,” he told me, looking very serious. “I mean it. I owe you. You ever need anything, I owe you. Anything at all. Look me up.” He flashed a smile. “There’s only one Pearl in these waters,” he said, using the slogan from his dad’s store. “On Star Island.”

“Come on, Pearl,” the guard said, and Rick was gone, turning at the last minute to add, “I mean it.” Then he was gone down the hall with the guard.

I leaned back and closed my eyes again, sinking right back into thinking of the mess I’d made with Nancy.

The night seemed to last a lot longer than it was supposed to. My hand was throbbing along the knuckles, and I was cold without my shirt. I’d left it on the floor of the bar. I had known the holding cell would be air-conditioned to a frosty 68 degrees, but at the time, cold had seemed better than wearing a vomit-soaked shirt all night. Now I wasn’t so sure.

I was too cold to sleep so I sat and thought. After a while I got up and paced the cell, hoping the walking might keep me warm.

I thought about a big turtle I’d seen a week and a half ago. He’d come up just ahead of my boat and I’d almost lost my charter over the side when I turned fast to dodge him.

And I thought about Nancy, how things had turned bad and what I might be able to do to make them right again. I wondered if maybe she would be willing to consider all that had happened as meaningful dialogue. It didn’t seem likely. I wondered if I would ever see her again.

I remembered my trip to Los Angeles last year when I’d met her. I’d ended up in the drunk tank there, too. I’d been framed for drunk and disorderly by a corrupt cop, and as I sat in a much dirtier cell I had thought about Nancy then, too. It seemed to me I’d spent way too much time sitting in drunk tanks thinking about Nancy Hoffman. I wondered if it meant anything. It probably did. I thought about asking the bald captain but he was still asleep. But what the hell. If it did mean something I probably wouldn’t like it.

They let us out early the next day. The court appearance was a month away. We all promised we’d be there. I shook hands with the bald charter captain. Tiny was still trying to fit his belt back into his pants. I figured it would be a bad idea to offer to help. I left.

At this early hour of the morning Key West was deserted, almost as if a plague had swept through and taken away all the people, leaving only stray dogs and cats and the smell of stale beer. In the half hour it took me to walk home I saw nobody except a few joggers, and from the serious and strained looks on their faces as they jogged by, they might have been running from the plague.

Nancy was mad. I knew she was mad, but maybe what had happened to make her mad was good. Maybe it would give us a starting place to really talk out our differences. After all, the main reason I was hanging out in the Moonlight Room was that I was not happy with our relationship. Now that this had happened she would know that. We had something definite to talk about.

I wondered what I could say to Nancy to make it right. I remembered reading somewhere that every great disaster is actually a blessing in disguise. You just have to know how to look at it the right way, to turn your disadvantage into a strength. It might have been Sun Tzu, that wise old man who wrote
The Art of War
. Maybe I could do that with the bar fight, turn it into a new strength. Sun Tzu was always right about these things.

I got home. I walked across my small yard, part rock and part weed, and climbed up the three cement steps. I wasn’t inside long enough to sit when I heard a pounding on the door. It was a loud, frantic pounding, sounding like a gang of bikers trying to get into a room filled with beer and teenaged girls. I figured it had to be Nicky.

I opened the door. Nicky Cameron roared past me, nearly five feet of non-stop energy. “Bloody fucking hell, Billy! Where have you been, eh?” He spun and fixed me with his gigantic eyes.

“Hello, Nicky,” I said. “What’s up?”

Even as I spoke he was cocking his head to one side and then, almost faster than I could follow with my tired eyes, he circled around me, sniffing. “Well, well,” he said. “Well well well well well. Lumbered again, eh Billy? What’d they cop you for this time, mate? Loitering?”

“Drunk and disorderly. How did you guess?”

He stood squarely in front of me, hands on his hips and feet planted wide. “Guess. 
Guess
!? Is that what you think, Billy? That this is 
guess
work I do? Oh, mate, you bloody fucking wrong me.” He tapped his nose with a finger. “The Beak knows all, Billy.”

I shook my head, tired and cranky but intrigued. “You’re saying you smelled it on me.”

He winked. “That and your chart. You see, mate, your rising sign right now is on a cusp. This means change, trouble with authority—there’s lots of water in there too, mate, travel and conflict over water. And a snake. I haven’t figured that bit out yet.”

“I’m sure you will, Nicky.”

“’Course I will, mate. I’m working a new chart for you now. That’s not the point—”

“So there’s a point to this?”

“Too right there’s a point. I came by last night to warn you. Soon as I started your chart and saw—oh.” He stopped suddenly as something else occurred to him and looked thoughtful. I didn’t feel like hearing his thoughts. I was suddenly too tired, too fed up with everything, and all I wanted was a shower. I pushed past him.

“Billy, lad, slow down, hang on a bit.” He grabbed my arm. “Nancy was here last night.”

I blinked. “Okay.”

“She went in empty-handed and came out with a couple of bags of stuff. I didn’t figure she was absconding with the silver or I’d have stopped her.”

“You were probably right. Her silver’s better than mine. What did the bags look like?”

He shrugged. “One of ’em was that bright red fishing tournament thing. You know.”

I knew. I remembered the bag well. I had given it to Nancy and she had used it to carry some personal stuff over to my house. It had been in my closet for six months. If she took it now, then—

I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall, exhausted and feeling slightly sick. It was over. Nancy had moved her stuff out. She was slamming the door shut on any chance I had of working things out with her.

Sun Tzu was wrong.

The next few days were hard. Nancy would not see me. She didn’t answer her phone and she wasn’t home when I went over. Just before I went out to the hospital to lie down in front of her car, something pulled me back and I decided to let her alone for a while. Let her cool down, think things out, get over her anger.

But the waiting, the not knowing, took its toll on me. I stayed up late and watched too much television. I let my personal routines slide. And eventually the Key West New Age Emotional Rescue Committee kicked into high gear to rescue me from myself.

The K.W.N.A.E.R.C. consists of one person: Nicky Cameron. He’s the Executive Administrative Board as well as the Chief Field Operative. He monitored carefully, and when my aura finally drooped into an unhealthy color he swooped in.

Nicky, just a bottle cap taller than five feet, looks at the world through a pair of enormous, pale brown eyes. They are set under a rapidly retreating hairline, above a large hooked nose and a receding chin.

Taken one feature at a time he was a lost cause. But there was so much energy pouring out of those eyes that nobody ever noticed he was an ugly dwarf. I have seen fashion models well over six feet tall fall helplessly into Nicky’s eyes and follow him around with a soft and devoted look. He ran the New Age store in town and was probably the Keys’ greatest expert on aroma therapy, past life regression, channeling, crystal healing, and astrology, although I was never sure he really believed all that stuff.

He was also the Keys’ greatest expert on beer. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him without at least one in his hand.

Nicky found things for me to do. He took me to parties where I drank too much and, too often, found myself goggling at odd-looking strangers from a corner where the light was too harsh and all the angles seemed slightly off.

I became his summer project. And at the end of that first week, it worked. I got so sick of his non-stop cheerfulness that I snuck away and pedaled over to check on my boat.

I chained my bike to a sign and went into the dockmaster’s shack. Art kept it about forty degrees colder than the outside temperature and stepping inside was like dropping into suspended animation. You could almost hear the bones in your forehead grating as they contracted, and your chest hurt if you breathed too deeply.

“Billy!” came the phlegmy roar as Art saw me. “The hell, brother.”

“Hey, Art.”

He sat behind an incredible clutter of merchandise. There was so much stuff hanging and stacked that it was almost possible to miss seeing Art. That was quite a trick, since he weighed over 300 pounds and looked like a cross between a pink Dalmatian and Jabba the Hutt.

Art had ridden his Harley into town one day maybe thirty years back and never left, but there was still a little bit of the biker to him. He was still big, but most of it had gone soft and hung off him in gently wobbling waves. His skin was mottled from a life in the outdoors, with dozens of bright pink patches marking the skin cancers he’d already had burned off.

He looked up at my face like he was looking for pimples. After a minute he nodded and grunted.

“Am I okay?”

He grunted again. “Heard about your dust-up at the Moonlight. Wanted to see if that shitweasel Tiny got a mark on you.”

“You’re kidding.”

He gave me a sour look and shook his head. His three extra chins swirled like a tide pool. “You’re losing it, brother. Been losing it for a couple months now. Maybe you pull out, maybe you crash and burn.”

He leaned a huge, soft knuckle on the counter and shoved his face at me, suddenly roaring. “But if you let a butt-sucker like Tiny put a fist on you, you’ve gone way too fucking far and I’m coming outta here and kicking your little pink ass!” He glared at me and slapped his arm on the counter for emphasis. It sounded like water balloons hitting the kitchen floor.

“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Any calls?”

Art glared at me for a minute, making sure his warning sank in. Then he leaned back and shook his head, sending three or four chins crashing into each other. “Nothin’. Not even the fuckbags who say they’re gonna call back. It’s D-E-D-D dead, brother.”

“All right,” I turned to go.

“Oh,” Art grunted. “That old dyke was in here. Wants to see you.”

‘That old dyke’ was Art’s name for Betty Fleming. She was only forty-five, and she wasn’t a dyke, but Art didn’t like women messing around with boats. And Betty was single, strong, self-reliant, and smart, making her life and her living with sailboats. I think Art secretly realized Betty was a lot tougher than he was, and it made him nervous.

“She say what she wanted?”

Art waved an arm. A wall of blubber the size of the Sunday 
Times
 swung back and forth from his triceps. “Aw, shit, Billy, you know what she’s like. Mean, cranky, stubborn old bitch. Like she got a permanent period.”

“I’ll go see her,” I said, and hit the door.

“Who the fuck cares. Butthead old dyke,” Art muttered behind me as I left.

I paused for a second on the dock outside, trying desperately to adjust from the Arctic air inside the shack to the steam bath outside. Spring-loaded sweat shot out of my pores. A drop splattered onto the dock and I thought I heard it hiss.

Betty’s sailboat was in a slip opposite mine, on the far side of the marina. I walked around, wondering what she wanted from me. She wasn’t exactly a social butterfly, and her disastrous marriage had turned her into someone who hated like hell to ask anybody for help, for anything. We had a comfortable, half-distant friendship; I’d given her some fish once or twice, she’d repaid on the spot with a few cold beers.

When I got to her boat, a 40-foot sloop-rigged sailboat, Betty was below in the engine compartment. A stream of profanity came up through the hatch. I wished Art had been there to hear it; he would have liked her a little better.

“Hey, Betty,” I called down the hatch. A moment later she stuck her head up.

She had that permanent leathery tan the live-aboards have. Her hair, an almost colorless blonde, was pulled back into a tight ponytail. She wore a dark blue bikini top, a pair of loose cotton shorts, a wide smear of grease, and enough sweat to float a small dinghy.

“God damn all diesels anyway,” she greeted me.

“Stick with outboards,” I said. “When they break down they’re easier to throw overboard.”

She pulled herself out of the hatch and onto the deck. “Come on aboard,” she said.

I stepped across onto the deck. It was scrubbed clean, as it always was. A red metal toolbox stood beside the engine hatch and a small circle of engine parts was spread around it.

I nodded towards the engine. “What’s the trouble?”

She waved it off, refusing to meet my eye. “I’ll fix it later,” she said, and I was pretty sure she would. In any case, I knew she’d rather get out and push her boat than ask for help in fixing the engine. “Beer?”