Red Tide: A Billy Knight Thriller Read online

  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?”

  “It’s a little early,” I said.

  She wiped a river of sweat off her forehead. “So?”

  She had a point. “Sure. Thanks.”

  Betty went down the hatch and I followed. It was even hotter below with no air moving through it and after the bright glare of the sun it seemed dark. Betty took two bottles of Molson’s Ice from a small refrigerator under a counter and handed me one, angling her head at the small table. “Sit,” she said. I sat, taking an experimental pull on the beer. It tasted okay, even this early. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was because I was about to crash and burn.

  “What’s up, Betty?”

  She turned on a small fan and sat down across from me and took a long pull on her beer. “I need a hand,” she said.

  I stared at her in astonishment.

  “I can pay,” she added quickly. “You’re not doing any fishing and I thought you could maybe use some extra money.” She looked so defensive I didn’t know what to say. “Besides, Nancy can’t miss you if you’re hanging around.”

  I’ve never known how the marina grapevine worked so quickly. But every now and then I got my nose rubbed in the fact that it did. The guy on the next boat probably knew more about your wife’s feelings for you than you did. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But I need to talk to her first.”

  She turned her head and looked at me, really looked me over the way only a woman can look—thoroughly, disinterestedly, and without missing anything.

  She shook her head. “Your problem is you want to suffocate a woman. You get into a relationship and you think everything is settled.”

  “I thought it was.”

  “It’s never settled, Billy. Nothing’s ever settled. A relationship is alive. It needs to breathe, to grow and change.”

  “And end?”

  She shrugged. “If that’s what happens.”

  “I thought Nancy wanted something steady. I thought that’s what most women wanted.”

  “Sure—if it’s on their terms. But if it’s coming from you she’ll feel crowded, trapped, pushed into something that isn’t to her advantage. A woman has to feel liberated now, and that means free to choose, and that means the traditional options are all suspect.”

  I took a long pull from the beer and set the bottle down empty. “Pretty deep.”

  “You mean for a leathery old broad who lives on a boat? Yeah, I know. But I studied it. Right after Howie-the-son-of-a-bitch left me I went to the community college. I don’t know what I was thinking, just kill some God damned time. Maybe learn to paint or something. Instead, I ran into this woman teaching the Women’s St
udies classes. We had coffee. She seemed nice. I took her classes. I started thinking about that kind of thing. Women’s issues.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.”

  The small fan on the wall behind her was turning back and forth, blowing a steady stream of hot air that hit me in the face and made me blink every twelve seconds. I blinked again. I didn’t know what to say. Betty had asked me to stop by and suddenly we were talking about me. It was not something I was good at.

  “You said you needed a hand,” I said finally.

  Now she blinked. “That’s right. I’ve got a couple of sailboats over at Dinner Key in Miami. Salvage jobs from Andrew. I need to bring ’em down.” She raised her bottle in an ironic toast to herself. “My new charter fleet.”

  “I’m not a great sailor, Betty.”

  She waved that off. “You’re a great boater. These boats have engines. You want to motor the whole way that’s fine.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fifty bucks a day, plus expenses.”

  “If I can do it, I’ll do it for free.”

  “Fifty bucks a day, Billy, that’s final.”

  “I don’t need the money.”

  “You’ll take the damn money.”

  “God damn it, I won’t.”

  “Then I will find somebody who will!”

  Betty’s face was flushing to a dark red. So was mine. She slammed down her bottle. The sound was very loud in the small cabin.

  “Betty, for Christ’s sake, it’s not about money.”

  “Then take the fucking money!”

  “God damn it, can’t I just do you a favor?”

  “No! I don’t need your favors! Not from you, not from anybody!”

  I opened my mouth—and then, for once that miserable August, I did something smart. I closed it again. I took a long pull on my beer. I took a deep breath. “I need a favor from you.”

  She glared at me suspiciously. “What’s that?”

  “Key West is closing in on me. Everybody’s mad at me and I can’t concentrate. I need to get out of town for a few days.”

  “Billy—”

  “The thing is, I have to get away, think things through with no distractions. If there was any way in the world you could let me have a sailboat for a few days it would save my life.”

  “God damn it, Billy—”

  “I’ll pay whatever you think is fair.”

  “You son of a bitch—”

  In the end we settled on Betty paying expenses.

  Chapter Four

  Early Monday morning we were at the gate of a big marina in Dinner Key, the small bay front area of Miami’s Coconut Grove. Yes—we. To my surprise, I had brought Nicky along; partly because I couldn’t pry him loose, and partly because I discovered I genuinely wanted company.

  When I invited him, he’d screeched out an “EE-hah!”, his version of what cowboys, the only real Americans, sounded like.

  “Nicky, we’ll be gone three or four days, maybe more if the weather turns bad on us.”

  “Perfect, mate. Ab-so-fuckin’-lutely perfect!”

  He almost levitated with excitement. I couldn’t figure it out. “I didn’t think you’d be so happy to leave town,” I said.

  “Billy, old-sock-me-lad, I couldn’t be happier. The shop will run itself for a few days, and I am off to sea with a hearty yo-ho!”

  I looked at him, suddenly regretting the invitation. “Listen, if you’re going to turn all nautical on me—”

  He shook his head, winked. “No worries, chum. No Nelson at Trafalgar imitations. Just three days of cold beer, gentle breezes and working on a world class tan. Half a mo’ while I pack!”

  And he raced around his house and grabbed a canvas sport bag, a black plastic box, and two cases of beer.

  We took the bus up to Miami and got a cab for the hop to Dinner Key, Nicky wide-eyed at the scenery. I was looking a little hard at Miami myself. I hadn’t been there for a few years and there had been some changes.

  For starters, there were still signs of hurricane damage. Last season, a big one had whipped through the Dinner Key boat basin with a 16-foot tidal surge. It had taken thousands of boats moored there and dumped them inland in great untidy heaps.

  Many of the heaps were still there a year later. It was startling to see the prow of a 45-foot trawler married to a 50-foot sailboat, or a small Donzi speedboat with a mast coming up through the hatch.

  Half a giant cabin cruiser, Italian built, lay on one side. The other half was completely gone, whirled away to Texas by the storm. All around it lay a tangle of cable, cleats, deck chairs, coolers, marine toilets, cushions, bent engine parts, mangled fishing gear, half a fire extinguisher—all the imaginable chunks of every kind of boat, all smashed, twisted, bent double or shattered, laying in their piles as if it was a maniac’s hardware store.

  “Holy shit, mate,” Nicky breathed. Australians don’t like to let on that they’re impressed, but the sight of this billion-dollar trash heap was too much for Nicky.

  “And then some,” I told him. I moved past the luxury dump and out into the boatyard. Nicky followed, his head swiveling among the busted miracles.

  We went through the gate and found Betty’s boat, Sligo, a French-built 42-footer, over beside the lift. The storm had picked her up and shoved a dock piling through her side, just behind the forward cabin. She had been a total write-off, tossed on one of the impossibly high heaps of broken toys. A stringy, indignant man named Bert had rescued her.

  “Sons-a-bitches just left her,” he fumed at me. “Little hole like that, and they don’t give a shit. Take the insurance money and get a new one, and the sons-a-bitches’ll fuck that one up, too, and take the insurance money and get another one. God damn sons-a-bitches.”

  Nicky leaned in and laid a hand on the smooth side of the repaired boat. “You’d think the insurance would catch on, eh? Why don’t they just refuse to pay?”

  Bert cocked his head and stepped back, looking at Nicky through one squinted eye. “Not from here, are you,” he said.

  Nicky shook his head. “Key West,” he said.

  Bert spat. “Insurance company sent a fella out to look at my boat.” He spat again. “Man was from Iowa. Never seen anything more complicated than a rowboat on a duck pond. Flew him in to help out ’cause there was too much work for the regular adjusters.” He nodded at the boat I would be taking home. “Same with that one. Dumb sons-a-bitches.”

  Bert took a step back and turned to look at Sligo. She rested in a wooden cradle and Bert led us around the side to admire his work. “Go ahead,” he smirked at me. “Find the patch.”

  We walked slowly around the boat one time. I could see nothing. Nicky gave up and wandered over to the fence, staring out again at the landscape of the marine Apocalypse.

  I went around the boat again. I ran my hand along the side. One small area forward felt smoother than the rest. I paused and looked at it carefully.

  “Shit,” said Bert behind me. “Done it too good.” He stepped in and put his hand where mine had been. “I sanded a little better than they do in the factory. I do it by hand. Can’t help it. Hate to see a sloppy job. Hey, Ramon!”

  A stocky muscular kid wearing a black back brace swaggered by, combing his hair. Bert jerked his head at the Sligo, and five minutes later the boat was lowered into the water and tied to the small wooden dock.

  Bert showed us where everything was, all the various switches and compartments, always hidden and always different on a boat. Then he hopped up onto the dock, cast off my bow and stern lines, and as I motored slowly out the channel he stood there on the dock watching, head cocked and eye squinted at me, watchful of the boat he had saved.

  “Keep to the channel!” he yelled just before we were out of range. “You draw four feet!”

  Nicky looked up at me, suddenly anxious. “Is that good, Billy? Drawing four feet?”

  “Not in Florida Bay,” I said. “Average depth some places is closer to three.”
r />   “Oh,” he said, looking thoughtful. “So, uh, what. We like, hit the bottom? Get stuck?”

  “That’s about right.”

  “What happens then?”

  I smiled. “We walk home.”

  He nodded and popped a beer open. “Good to know, mate,” he said. “Good to know.”

  I steered us straight down the channel, past the half-ruined docks of the marina and beyond a small island still littered with chunks of boat. A few people looked to be living on the islands, tarpaulins stretched between the smashed boat hulls.

  The Dinner Key Channel runs a good mile out into Biscayne Bay. I kept to the middle, except for six or seven times when large motorboats came straight at us at full throttle. Then I moved to the right side, but twice they still came close enough that I could have leaned out and touched them.

  Miami has this problem with its boaters. Some of them are still sane, rational, careful people—perhaps as many as three or four out of every ten thousand of them. The rest act like they escaped from the asylum, drank a bottle of vodka, snorted an ounce of coke, ate 25 or 30 downers and decided to go for a spin. Homicidal, sociopathic maniacs, wildly out of control, with not a clue that other people are actually alive, and interested in keeping it that way. To them, other boats are targets. They get in the boat knowing only two speeds: fast and blast-off.

  I mentioned a few of these things to the boats that tried to kill me. I don’t think they could hear me over the engine roar. One of the boats had four giant outboard motors clamped on the back; 250 horsepower each, all going at full throttle no more than six inches from Sligo. If I had put the boom out I would have beheaded the boat’s driver. He might not have noticed.

  “To get a driver’s license,” I said to Nicky through gritted teeth, “you have to be sixteen, take a test, and demonstrate minimal skill behind the wheel.”

  Nicky was busy fumbling on a bright orange life jacket, fingers trembling, and swearing under his breath.

  “To drive a boat—which is just as fast, bigger, and in conditions just as crowded and usually more hazardous—you have to be able to start the motor. That’s all. Just start the motor. There’s something wrong with this picture, Nicky.”