Red Tide

by Jeff Lindsay

  “A friend of mine found a body in the Gulf Stream,” I said. “A Haitian refugee.”

  “The Black Freighter,” Honore said.

  I looked at Deacon. “I told you he’d know, buddy,” Deacon said.

  “What’s the Black Freighter?” I asked Honore.

  “First, it is my time to question. Are you investigating this also, Deacon?”

  Deacon shook his head. “I’m sorry, Honore. I’m not allowed to get in on this. Officially, I’m just on my lunch break right now. And Billy is just a private citizen, asking a few questions.”

  He studied me for a moment. “How much do you know about my country?” he asked me.

  “It’s half an island. It doesn’t have any topsoil. The world’s first black republic. Um, Toussaint L’Overture. Papa Doc. Voodoo. I like the music.”

  “Very good,” Honore said, making a face like he’d bitten something sour. “Few people know so much.” He waved a long, thin arm. “And yet this is almost nothing.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “The history of my people is a dictionary of new ways to suffer. We have a genius for it,” he said. “This new thing should be no surprise. And even so.” He looked away, took a sip from his water glass, folded his hands in front of him. “You mention voodoo, my friend. Do you know what is a bocor?”

  “No.”

  “In voodoo, there is good magic and there is bad magic. The good, it is like church, yes? A regular service, with a regular congregation, the rituals and offerings and prayers. This is done by a papa-loa. A voodoo priest. Most of the time he will not throw a curse for you for money. Because he worries to keep in, ah, what is the word. In balance. He must balance all the things of this world and the next, you see? A curse will upset this balance and the papa-loa will not do it. For this you must see a bocor. How is it called, a man-witch. A warlock? A sorcerer?”

  “Sorcerer works for me,” I said.

  “Just so. And this man, the bocor, he does the dark things for money. Help you steal a man’s wife with a love spell. Make your enemy sick. Make a rival to be a zombie. Do not laugh,” he said, raising a long bony finger. “I have seen them. It is not a funny thing, not pretty. It is not a thing for your movies, with the arms out, so—” And he did a pretty good imitation of a Hollywood zombie.

  “The bocor can make a powder,” Honore said. “If you eat this powder, or breathe it, or so much as touch it, you are like a dead man but still alive. Then it wears off and you are stupid for a while. He gives you more powder, controls you. You are his slave, like an animal.”

  “And this guy on the Black Freighter is doing this?” I asked him.

  “He is a bocor. One of the worst. This we know. If he does this, what might be his name—” Honore shrugged. It was a close cousin to his first shrug, saying thirty or forty different things at once. “No one knows his name, or the name of his ship.”

  “Then how do you know he’s a bocor?”

  Honore gave me a look of great pity. “Who else could do this thing?” he said. “There are so many who speak of it that one day—pfft—it is a fact and everybody knows it. You may say rumor if you like.” The shrug again. “This is another of the small things that separate our worlds. In my world, a rumor reaches a certain moment where it is so persistent that it becomes true. And all the rumors of the Black Freighter say the captain is a bocor.”

  “All right,” I said. “Tell me what you know about this guy and his Black Freighter.”

  “There are many stories,” Honore said slowly, as if sorting it out while he spoke. “Some of them—it is how mothers frighten their children to be good, yes? Get a good grade or the Black Freighter comes for you.”

  “And the rest?”

  He smiled. “The rest of the stories say, there is a freighter who takes refugees to America. He takes their money, loads them onto his ship, and no one ever sees them again. He sails away full of people and comes back empty. Perhaps this is just a rumor.” He spread his hands to show it was possible, but he didn’t look convinced.

  “What do you think?”

  Honore raised his eyebrows. “Me? I think there is a very bad man, a bocor, throwing people into the ocean and taking their money. I think he says, I take you to Miami, to America, but he only takes them half way. Such a one, he would have to enjoy the killing. Perhaps more than the money, who can say. And I think he will go on doing this, until someone stops him, or my country runs out of people who want to come here so much they do not care about the stories of the Black Freighter.”

  I looked at Deacon. He was pushing a small piece of bread around his plate with a knife. I looked back at Honore. He was looking at me the same way Deacon was looking at the bread.

  “All right,” I said. “If you were going to look for the Black Freighter, where would you start?”

  “Here,” Honore said, jabbing his finger down onto the table. The silverware rattled. “Right here, in Miami. He comes here after he dumps the people. He takes back stolen bicycles, old televisions.” He shrugged.

  “Miami River?” I asked Deacon.

  He looked up from his bread. “Be my guess,” he said. “A small, independent freighter, that’s where he’d have to be.”

  “You know anything else that might be helpful?” I asked Honore.

  He showed two rows of perfect teeth. “Voodoo comes from an old African word,” he said. “It means snake.”

  • • •

  Deacon drove me back to the parking lot where I had left my car. The late afternoon shadows were slanting across the tightly packed rows. It made the crummy shopping center look like some romantic old picture.

  Deacon nosed into an empty spot. We looked straight ahead. Twenty feet away on the sidewalk a couple of kids came out of a store, stared at Deacon’s car, and went back in the store again. One of the eight radios on the front seat crackled. Another one answered it.

  “You look into this, I got to tell you, I can’t help you.”

  “Yeah, I figured that.”

  “They might even send me after you, to stop you from doing anything that might cause them some political embarrassment.”

  “Are you telling me to go home and forget about this?”

  “Hell no, buddy. I’m just telling you the way things are.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Well how important is this to you? Why are you doing it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if I am doing it. I just said I’d look into it a little.”

  “And now you have. You can go back and tell your friends they were right, there’s a bad guy in the Gulf Stream doing some murders. Then what?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t have any idea then what. I wasn’t a cop anymore. This wasn’t any of my business.

  On the other hand, “Not My Job” seemed to be a popular song right now. Nobody wanted this. Nobody wanted to hear it, but somebody was getting away with murder, and they would keep getting away with it, just because they’d found a little crack in the political set-up where nobody wanted to look. And damn it, somebody ought to care.

  “This purely bothers the hell out of you, doesn’t it?” Deacon said.

  “Yeah. It does.”

  “Not scared of that bad magic?”

  “I’ll get some holy water.”

  He was quiet for a minute. Maybe the crack about holy water bothered him. I knew he was serious enough about his religion that he probably gargled with the stuff.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said finally. “Or even if I should do anything.”

  “Sure you do. You got a little voice inside you telling you what you should do. I know that, I got the same thing. Now, I can’t listen to it for you. But I know it’s there, and so do you. And we both know what it’s saying.” He held up a thumb and forefinger and dropped the thumb, pow. “It’s got you. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it, and not
a thing I can do to help you. All I can do is bust you if you listen to it.” He gave me his best smile, which would have scared the hell out of me if we weren’t on the same side. “On the other hand, there’s worse things than a few days in the pokey.”

  “Like being thrown into the Gulf Stream alive and drowning?”

  “That’s one thing, buddy.”

  When Deacon had left, I drove around the Miami streets for a while. I found myself down by the Miami River. There’s a big shanty town there, maybe thousands of people living in elaborate huts built from packing cases, refrigerator boxes, palm fronds—anything to keep off the rain and the hot Miami sun.

  Many of the people living there were Haitian—dangerously thin black people. This was paradise to them. Back home it was impossible to find a box that nice to live in. They were willing to do anything, risk everything to get here. Just to live in a box under the highway. Drink Coca-Cola and send their kids to school.

  I drove on, along the river, past a few of the rusty old hulks tied up by the warehouses. In the old days they called them tramp steamers. I wondered what they were called now. Tramp diesels didn’t have the same good ring to it.

  One of the ships was getting ready to leave. Black smoke trickled from the smoke stack. The deck was piled high with cargo and the ship rode low in the water. Several hundred bicycles were lashed to the outside of the crates on deck. That probably meant they were going to Haiti. There was a very good trade in used bicycles between Miami and Haiti, no questions asked. If your twelve-speed mountain bike vanished from the light post where you had chained it, it probably got re-painted overnight and you could find it on the deck of one of these ships.

  Maybe this was the killer ship. The Black Freighter. Maybe they took down a cargo of bicycles and loaded in refugees. Just like the old triangular trade; unload the cargo, collect the cash. Load in the people, collect the cash.

  And take the people halfway, dump them in the Gulf Stream. Big savings, less risk. You almost had to admire the cold-blooded efficiency of it. Miami in the 1980s and ’90s had perfected this kind of MBA crime, where human life was simply a small marker on the board. If killing somebody was the best way to increase profits, nobody hesitated anymore. People were killed for their car keys. Hell, people were killed for their shoes. Why not for a few thousand dollars?

  And the only question was, what the hell should I do about it?

  Chapter Fourteen

  The drive from Miami to Key West took almost as long going the other way. There was only one difference. On the way up, I had been kicking myself for taking seriously the brainless idea that somebody was getting away with wholesale murder in the Gulf Stream. On the way back, I was trying to figure out what to do about it.

  I wondered how all this had happened. And why it was happening to me. A few weeks ago I was sweating, worrying about how slow business was, wondering when I was going to hit Tiny or make up with Nancy.

  Now I was trying on armor, looking for a white charger. And trying to please the princess and Nicky the Wizard. Whoever said life was funny was a sadistic bastard.

  It might have been all the driving, the rhythm of the tires on the road and the miles rolling past with the sun going down. But as it got darker I started to feel like I was dreaming. Everything that had happened in the last few weeks pushed back into my mind. It was all gumming up together, turning into one glob of pain and uncertainty.

  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 jus
t 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.