Red Tide

by Jeff Lindsay

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s play this your way. When was the last time you saw Arthur Nagle?”

  I stared at him. The question told me they had a body somewhere, but it didn’t tell me anything else. I’d never heard the name in my life. “As far as I know,” I said, “I’ve never seen Arthur Nagle.”

  “You lying sack of shit,” Lorenzo said.

  “Lorenzo,” Porky warned him.

  “We got a dozen witnesses, fuckbag, so just drop that shit right there.”

  “That’s enough, Lorenzo.”

  “That fucking bartender said you were—”

  “¡Cállate!” barked out Porky, and this time he meant it. Lorenzo looked at him with surprise.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” Lorenzo said, looking hurt.

  “You already have,” Porky told him.

  And he had. I knew why I was here.

  The only bartender I had seen in the last few weeks was the one at The O. So he had called in and told them to come get me. They had come pretty fast, and that told me that Arthur Nagle was dead. And the fact that it was the bartender that dropped the dime on me told me one other thing, too: I knew who Arthur Nagle was.

  Bud.

  Bud was dead.

  It was a damned good excuse for not showing up to meet me.

  “Do you have an alias for Nagle?” I asked Porky.

  He glanced down at the file in front of him. “His friends called him Bud,” Porky admitted.

  “Okay,” I said. “I knew him.”

  “No shit,” Lorenzo snarled.

  “Some shit,” I said. “Most if it coming from you.”

  Lorenzo stood up again. He thought he was going to come down and swing at me, but Porky held up a hand. “Siéntense, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “You got it coming.” Lorenzo sat down and Porky swung his busted snout back to me. “What was the nature of your association with Nagle?”

  “I met him in the bar, The O,” I said. “We talked, had a few drinks.”

  “And when was the last time you saw him?”

  “Two nights ago, in The O. That was also the first time I saw him.”

  Porky and Lorenzo exchanged a look, then Porky came back to me. “So you meet the guy in a bar, never seen him before, and just start talking, is that it?”

  “Yeah. It happens.”

  “And what did you talk about?”

  “He said he was going to go look for a friend of his.”

  “Did his friend have a name?”

  “I don’t know the last name. First name was Otoniel, called Oto.”

  Lorenzo was on his feet again. “You son of a bitch—!” he yelled at me.

  “Lorenzo!” Porky yelled.

  “The son of a bitch did them both! He’s fucking with us!”

  Porky stood up and in two quick steps he was on Lorenzo. He grabbed his partner by the shoulders and whirred out some rapid Spanish. Lorenzo rattled back, pointing at me and looking like he wanted to spit. Porky had to hold him back from jumping at me.

  I barely noticed. I was too busy re-shuffling everything in my mind.

  I had been taking it for granted that Oto had killed Bud; maybe for money, maybe because Bud was talking about things Oto didn’t want to talk about, maybe just because scary guys turn into scary drunks.

  But if Oto was dead, too, then somebody had killed them both. It just couldn’t happen any other way. There’s such a thing as too much coincidence, too many bodies, even in Miami.

  And there was only one person who might have had a strong enough reason to kill two guys who didn’t do anything more than hang out in a bar and talk. I didn’t know his name, but I knew who he was.

  He was from The Black Freighter. If he wasn’t the captain, the captain had sent him. He had found out that somebody was asking Oto questions and he had stopped it quickly, brutally, finally. Just exactly the way he did his business out in the Gulf Stream.

  I wanted to think that this was different, that killing two American citizens in the heart of a major American city was not the same as killing Haitian citizens in the middle of the ocean. But I knew better. People get away with murder. Cops are overworked and a low profile death doesn’t get the attention it needs. When Porky and Lorenzo were convinced that I didn’t do it, this case would probably slip to the bottom of their pile. They’d already spent a whole shift on it, and that was too much time not to have any result.

  They weren’t going to catch this killer. It had to be me, and I wasn’t going to do it by sitting in jail.

  It was time to play my trump card.

  I looked up. Porky had calmed Lorenzo down without using a club and he was settling back into his chair.

  “You were telling us about Otoniel,” Porky said with his patented tired smile.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have looked pretty good for this and you were hoping you got lucky. But I didn’t do Nagle, and I didn’t do Otoniel.”

  Porky nodded. “Okay, William,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know, it’s tough to swallow. But maybe I can come up with something that will help you believe it.”

  “We’d like to hear that, William,” he said.

  I tried hard not to smile as I said, “Do either of you guys know The Deacon?”

  Chapter Twenty

  It was close to two hours before The Deacon came to get me. Part of that time was spent persuading Porky that I really had Deacon’s private number and that he would want to know that I was in jail.

  The rest of the time, as I soon found out, The Deacon spent trying to calm down his wife.

  “Angel had a shit-fit,” he told me. “She wanted me to leave you here.”

  “I thought she liked me.”

  “She did. But she’s Cuban. She believes that anybody who’s in jail after midnight, when she’s trying to sleep, is guilty of something.” He winked. “She might go easier on you if you got married again.”

  The Deacon walked me through the paperwork and out to his car with amazing speed. It made me very happy to see that a little old-fashioned string-pulling still worked, even in The New Miami. The look on Porky’s face when he saw The Deacon come in was as close to hero-worship as you’ll ever see from a full-grown cop with a nose like a pig’s.

  The paper-shufflers up front were just as eager to please. It didn’t have anything to do with Deacon’s rank. He was a supervisor, which was not high enough to make anybody jump through a hoop. It was partly his reputation. Everybody knew The Deacon, and what they knew about him made them very anxious to make him happy.

  But he had something more. When he walked into a room, people stopped talking and looked up, even before they knew who he was. Several of the cops unconsciously dropped their hands near their holsters before they registered Deacon’s badge, hung on his jacket pocket.

  He had me out in near-record time and led me outside with one hand on my elbow.

  “How do you rate our jails?” he asked pleasantly as we walked to his car.

  “The ventilation isn’t good,” I said. “But I thought they’d be more crowded.”

  “Got lonely, did you?” He chuckled. “Boy, you broke some hearts in there. They thought they’d finally solved one. That’s why they kept you isolated. They were breaking you down.”

  “It probably would have worked,” I admitted, “If only I’d been guilty and had an IQ of less than 70.”

  “Franco and Lorenzo aren’t bad,” he said. “Just sort of basic. They’ve been working the River too long.”

  “What do they have?”

  Deacon shook his head. “Two bodies found together. You were seen talking to one of them, the older one.”

  “Bud Nagle,” I said.

  “And the next night he turns up killed.”

  “How?”

  Deacon chuckled. It was never a sound that brought a smile to my face. It was even colder now. “Hard to say, buddy. The coroner isn’t done yet, but they just can’t seem to figure whether they were crushed
first and then bled dry, or the other way around.”

  “Crushed?”

  “Until their eyeballs absolutely popped out of their heads,” Deacon said. “Three cops on the scene threw up, which is a new record for one Miami crime scene.” He shook his head. “Still no guess as to how it happened. I haven’t seen the file. But they were crushed. Big cable, maybe. Whatever it was, it wrapped around and squoze ’em so hard there wasn’t anything left inside ‘em.”

  “Bad way to go,” I said.

  “You know a good one?”

  We got to his car. It was parked cop-in-a-hurry style, angled in with one wheel on the sidewalk. I leaned on the roof while Deacon unlocked. There was a bare hint of a sunrise starting to show in the sky.

  I was tired. Not just from staying up all night, either. This whole thing had been dumb and dirty and this trip had never seemed more pointless than it did right now.

  Deacon popped open the passenger door of his metallic blue Chevy. I had to push some of the electronic clutter over a few inches in order to fit onto the seat. “Is one of these things a telephone?” I asked him.

  “Two of ’em,” he said. He reached over and picked one up. “Try this one.”

  “Thanks.” I took it from him and dialed the motel. They had one of those automatic switching things where an obnoxious recorded voice tells you to punch in the room number. I did. It rang a long time. Nobody answered.

  Anna had probably stepped out. Maybe to get something to eat. That was probably all it was. And Nicky was in the other room and couldn’t hear the phone ringing over the TV. There was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

  I let it ring a little longer. I thought about all the time I had been in jail, and talking to the two detectives. I thought about somebody who had killed Bud and Otoniel at the smallest hint of a question. Crushed and bled dry.

  I put down the phone.

  “Deacon,” I said, “can you make this thing go fast?”

  He put his foot down before I even finished speaking. The car jumped ahead. “That’s one of the things I’m best at,” he said.

  There wasn’t much traffic at this hour. Deacon slid his big car through what little there was. One guy kept up with us for a while, just for practice, I guess. Then he saw the blue light on the dashboard and dropped back.

  We were at the motel in five minutes and I was out of the car before it stopped moving. I ran up the stairs, fumbling for a room key.

  I didn’t need it. The door was open about two inches. A blast of cold air from inside hit me and went right through me, chilling me to the bone.

  I pushed the door open.

  The first thing that hit me was how neat and empty the room looked. It felt dead, the way only an empty motel room can. There was no sign that anything at all had happened; no broken ashtrays, no overturned chairs, no license plate numbers scrawled on the wall in blood.

  I pushed the door further open. It hit some resistance. I stopped pushing and slid through, looking to see what it was.

  It was Nicky.

  He was stretched on the floor behind the door. One arm was spread out in front of him, the other folded under his body. A bruise ran across the side of his face, another on his throat.

  I went down onto one knee and felt for a pulse. It was there, slow and steady. I heard something behind me and looked up. Deacon was there with a radio in one hand, already calling it in.

  “He’s alive,” I said.

  I went quickly through the room, the bathroom, the connecting door to Nicky’s room, the bathroom in there. I knew what I would find, and I found it.

  Nothing.

  Anna was gone.

  I went back into the other room with a dead lump forming in me. It felt like something huge and hot was sinking down my throat to my feet.

  Deacon was bent over Nicky, the radio wedged between his shoulder and ear. He looked up at me. “I think we got lucky,” he said. “This one isn’t too bad.”

  “Not so lucky,” I said. “There’s one missing.”

  He looked at me for a long beat and then said a word I didn’t think he knew. “Give me a description,” he said.

  I told Deacon what she looked like. Each detail hurt me. I could see her so clearly, almost feel the smoothness of her skin. Some small scent of her remained in the room.

  An ambulance came. I stood in the shadows made by the blinking light and watched as they got Nicky inside. They moved him quickly, without seeming to hurry. I guess they had a lot of practice. It was less than three minutes before they slammed the doors and took off for Jackson Memorial Hospital.

  I rode along behind with Deacon. We didn’t say much; he tried to cheer me up by complaining about the paperwork I was causing him, but when I didn’t say anything back he fell quiet.

  They wouldn’t let me see Nicky at the hospital. It was against policy. They shuttled me off to a waiting room that smelled only a little better than the jail cell I’d been in a few hours earlier. They said it might take some time.

  I spent the time doing some thinking. With all that was going on between my ears it wasn’t easy. It was like trying to hear somebody whispering in a room full of people shrieking at the top of their lungs.

  Anna. God knows what was happening to her, but it wouldn’t be good. I had to find her. I had to get her back from them, before it was too late. She’d come so far from what had happened to her, and now this.

  I had to find her.

  But to figure out how to get Anna back, I had to know why they—or he—had taken her. The three main reasons I came up with were that she’d been taken as a warning, as punishment, or for profit.

  If they took her for profit they would get in touch with me. So I didn’t need to think about that one yet.

  If they took her to say, watch what you do; We have your girl and we can hurt her if you try to hurt us, then she was alive and well and all I had to do was find her before that changed.

  But if they took her as punishment, to show the world what would happen to anybody dumb enough to mess with them—

  I didn’t want to think about it. Anna had been through hell one time already. This time wouldn’t have the same happy ending.

  It was possible that she was already dead, or so mutilated that death would be a blessing. I tried to shove that out of my mind. I tried to make myself believe that it made more sense for them to keep her alive so they had a hold on me, a way to keep me off them.

  It all came down to the same thing anyway. I had to find her as fast as I could.

  I blinked and found that there was a large blonde woman in a white coat standing in front of me, looking at me expectantly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you say something?”

  She shook her head. “Only a couple of paragraphs. It’s your friend.”

  I felt a sick lurch in my gut. I’d watched this scene as a cop too many times. And now I was playing a big part in it, as the guy who let it happen. “Nicky? Is he—?”

  The woman looked amused. “He’s fine, if the intern doesn’t kill him. He’d like to see you.”

  “Nicky? Nicky’s awake?”

  She smiled. “Apparently he regained consciousness in the ambulance. He’s got quite a hard head.”

  I followed her down a hall to the room where they had Nicky. He was in a hospital gown and propped up on a couple of pillows. A young intern, a pale guy with straw-colored hair and a bad complexion, was seated on the edge of the bed, taking his pulse.

  I realized Nicky was taking the intern’s pulse. He had a grip on the guy’s arm and was probing with the stiffened fingers of his left hand.

  “—here, and here. No, here, mate. There’s seven levels of the pulse. You got to listen for it. Listen with the inner ear. The Chinese have been at this for 3,000 years, and they—” He looked up and saw me. “Billy!” he shouted, sounding only a little hoarse, and not at all weak. “Tell these wonks to give me back my clothes.”

  The intern wonk had jumped to his feet looki
ng guilty. He cleared his throat and looked at the large blonde woman. “Ahem. Actually,” he said, “we’d like to keep you overnight for observation.”

  Nicky made a rude noise and the intern looked indignant, turning to me for moral support. “He sustained quite a severe shock to the side of the skull and I can’t rule out the possibility of a concussion, and even a small leak in the blood vessels of the brain that could—”

  Nicky made a farting sound again. “Pull the other one,” he said. “I’m fit as a fiddle. Think I wouldn’t know if I was about to pop off?”

  The intern frowned. A light flush came to his cheeks. “Actually, it’s possible that a problem wouldn’t show itself for quite some time. That’s why we keep people. For observation.”

  “Aw, mate, I’ve just been telling you. The third level of pulse would show it. I’ve got no concussion, no cerebral hematoma, nothing.” He threw off the sheet. “Where’s me pants, there’s a good lad.”

  The intern shrugged and clenched his fists. “We can’t let you leave,” he said.

  “You can’t stop me,” Nicky told him cheerfully. “I don’t actually need the pants.”

  “This is against medical advice.”

  “Not mine.”

  The blonde woman cleared her throat like she was trying hard not to laugh. The intern took a couple of deep breaths and flushed a darker red. Nicky reached back and started to untie his hospital gown.

  “All right,” the intern said, “just a minute.” He dashed over to a cupboard and came back with Nicky’s clothes. “You really shouldn’t,” he said.

  Nicky winked at him. “No worries,” he said. “If I die, I can’t sue, eh?”

  The blonde woman pulled a curtain around the bed and in a few seconds Nicky burst out through the screen, buttoning his pants. “All right, Billy, off we go,” he said, rushing out the door and into the hall. He turned in the hall, looking both ways and waiting for me to catch up. “Where have they got Anna? How is she?”

  The door closed behind me. I looked at him. He didn’t have any idea. He was cheerful, confident and ready to go, like a small dog about to go for a walk.