Red Tide

by Jeff Lindsay

  “What?” I said. “What did you say?”

  “I say,” she said, trying hard to meet my eye, “perhaps we are knowing better if we try to be together with nothing else, and so can you get from your friend for a little while a sailboat?”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  November brought cool winds down from Canada and the awful heat of August was finally gone. People started to remember why they lived in Florida. It was a time of long and mild days, spectacular sunsets and crystal clear evenings cool enough for a light blanket, a real luxury after the sweaty misery of the summer.

  We left Miami in another of Bert’s rebuilt sailboats, a 36-foot Hunter this time. The first days were just for relaxing. We didn’t push it. We both had some serious sorting-out to do, and this was the first chance we’d had to do it. I was still troubled by a few short spells where I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do. I’d look down and see a rope in my hand and be filled with terrible anxiety. The feeling would fade after a few minutes, but it was bad while it lasted. The doctor had said it would probably go away, but he wouldn’t say when.

  So we sailed, we ate simple meals, we slept side by side without touching in the big double bunk, and we tried as hard as we could to wake up from the nightmares we had come through, wake up to each other in the small separate world of a sailboat.

  Our fourth day out was beautiful, but this was Florida. By noon a smudge of black clouds had appeared low on the horizon. By 1:30, the wind had gone from a pleasant ten knots to thirty, gusting higher, and the buffed green surface of the water had turned choppy grey, carpeted with white caps. We dropped the jib sail. The clouds blew closer, and soon we heeled far over under the surge of wind known as a squall breeze, which was just Nature’s way of saying, “Here I come.”

  Within moments we felt the first stinging drops of rain, and then abruptly everything forward of the mast disappeared into a sheet of rain. We were leaning at a dangerous angle and taking on water from the rain and the waves. I shouted at Anna to take the tiller and jumped to the mast to double-reef the mainsail, something Betty had explained to me but I had never done before. It left us with only half the sail area for the wind to hit. We slowed a bit and lost the worst edge of our heel-over almost immediately.

  For the next hour we fought the squall and couldn’t have seen the Queen Mary if it was lashed to the mast. According to the chart we had plenty of open water and good depth, so I wasn’t worried—until a quick break in the squall opened the sheet of water pouring down on us and I saw a sandy beach straight ahead.

  Trying hard not to scream, I put the boat about and ran parallel to where I thought I’d seen the island. The storm tore at us, and even with our tiny scrap of sail we flew across the water like a foam cup. I saw breakers flash off to the right, put her over again, and suddenly the water was calm and the wind was about half the strength it had been. I turned our nose into the wind, ran up to the bow, and dropped the anchor.

  I let the line play out fast, trying to gauge the depth; between ten and fifteen feet. I gave us enough scope, set the hook with a hard yank, and looked around, straightening my creaking back and taking my first breath of the last two hours.

  We were lying in a lagoon sheltered by two fingers of sandy beach, each with a row of pine trees stretching back from the shore. The squall still blew furiously, lashing the waves with stinging rain, but inside our lagoon I would have felt safe riding out a hurricane.

  The storm didn’t last very long. Another fifteen minutes and it had blown itself out, moved on to hassle Cuba. I went below with Anna and pulled on a dry shirt and waited it out. When the sun broke through we went up on deck to look over our harbor.

  It was a small island, just big enough for a game of catch. There was a good sand beach, trees to block the wind, and a line of shrubbery and weeds leading into the interior. Off to our left a spit of beach curved around to form the sheltering arm of the little harbor. I couldn’t see any litter on the beach; no soda or beer cans, no broken coolers, old T-shirts, oil containers, pizza boxes, plastic bags, coffee cups, six-pack holders, candy wrappers—nothing.

  “Paradise,” I said.

  “Hmmp,” said Anna. “And if so where is ice machine?”

  That night we made a driftwood fire on the beach and as it died to the embers we watched the sky, counting six falling stars and one moving light we couldn’t identify. We talked, sitting close but not touching, passing a bottle of wine back and forth between sentences. We hit an easy tone and just rambled, saying whatever popped into our heads, playing out mock debates about things that didn’t matter, just for the pleasure of hearing each other.

  And with the gentle breeze, the dying fire, and the enormous Florida sky above us, everything that had happened on the Black Freighter started to seem like last summer’s blockbuster movie. When we finally rowed the small inflatable dinghy back to the boat Anna was giggling and I felt my face stretching into a smile for the first time since August.

  • • •

  In the night the snake came for me again and rattled my bones, bearing down on me with its huge rubbery grin. I tried to fly away but it ate my wings and as I smoldered and fell it moved closer, smiling, smiling—

  “Billy!” Anna said. She slapped me and I blinked awake. She moved to slap me again.

  “I’m okay,” I said, but she hit me anyway.

  “Of all damn-ness,” she said. “Wake now!” And she moved her hand back to hit me again.

  I grabbed her wrist and held it. “I’m okay,” I said again.

  “Is not okay, to make such a noises,” she said. She sounded mad. “You are jumping this way, then that way, then you are saying no no no, then making such a noise as—Gikk-gahhhkk.” She made a face of strangling. “And the entire you is going flap, flap, all over.”

  I closed my eyes again. The entire me felt battered, thrashed with steel rods and dipped in glue. “Bad dream,” I said.

  “The snake,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She was quiet for a long minute. “I also have this dream,” she said. “Perhaps both we will always have it.” She pulled her hand away from mine and dropped it onto my chest.

  “No,” I said. “Not always. But it takes time.”

  She made no answer and I became aware of the weight and heat of her hand against me. After a moment it was all I could think about.

  Then a small wet drop hit me beside Anna’s hand. I looked up at her face. A quiet tear slid out of her eye. Then some inner wall broke down and the tears came in a flood, along with great, ratchety sobs that shook her whole body. I held her for a long time, until the shaking stopped, and the sobs had slowed to huge, ratcheting breaths. And gradually the rough breathing smoothed and slowed, and soon she was asleep in my arms.

  I held her, not wanting to move for fear of waking her. And at some point the sound of the wind, the slap of water against the hull and the easy rocking of the boat did their job. I fell asleep under the soft warm weight of her.

  When I woke up her weight had shifted, and so had her breathing. Her head was nestled against my neck and her hand was now on my face, softly stroking it. And as I blinked awake I realized one other change.

  Anna’s shirt was off.

  Her bare breasts pressed against me, the nipples hard. My hand moved up to cup her as if it had a life of its own, and she trembled. I hesitated, but this time the trembling was not fear, or old dreams coming back. It was eagerness.

  It had been a long wait for both of us and we made love with a fire hotter than any I could remember. It was not enough and we drove ourselves further, and further still, moving up on deck to be under the bright Florida stars, and further still, until the sun came up on two exhausted and happy people stretched out together on the cushions in the cockpit of the sailboat.

  The breeze stayed out of the north for three days, which meant it would have been just a little too much work to push our boat back to Key West. Besides, we weren’t in any hurry. The ancho
rage we had found was a good one, in the lee of an island that wasn’t even on the charts. But it protected us from the wind. No other boat had found our spot so far, and that made us a little bit lazy about things like clothing.

  There was a reef to explore within easy reach of the dinghy, and a small cut nearby stocked with uneducated mangrove snapper. They grilled beautifully, painted with lime juice and a few grains of salt and pepper.

  And so there were days of sun, swimming, fishing, long lazy naps, and exploring the reef and the nearby island; and there were nights of strange rum drinks made with no ice and whatever supplies we had left; star-gazing, quiet contentment, and other explorations. My ribs and arm were still sore, and every now and then I would have to think a little too hard to remember a word like “potato,” but that didn’t seem important. There was the sun and the healing water and above all there was Anna, and it was as near a perfect time as I could remember.

  We made that good time last as long as we could. All too soon we would have to go back, back to the everyday pain and hassle of the real world. I didn’t want to. Neither did Anna. Maybe we were afraid that what we had worked so hard to find with each other, what we had finally found only by being here, away from everything but each other—maybe that couldn’t live anywhere else. It was so new, special, delicate—maybe it couldn’t live in a place like Key West.

  So we stayed there, anchored in the lee of our little island. We swam, snorkeled, and fished. We built bonfires on the beach until we ran out of driftwood, and then we just sat under the stars and held hands like a couple of kids. We stayed, and we were down to a box of crackers and a quart of grapefruit juice when we finally pulled up the anchor and headed south to Key West. We would have stayed longer if we could. You don’t find perfection very often. You don’t let go of it if you have a choice. But there never is a choice. Something disguised as need always pries it out of your fingers, and tells you it’s time, you had your piece of wonderful, and anyway, nothing lasts forever. Especially perfection.

  I just hoped we were taking some of it back with us. I hoped it would be enough. Here at the end of that hot summer of death and nightmares, I hoped Anna and I had found just enough in our time together, and that it would turn into something we could hold onto together as much as we shared the bad dreams.

  When we came in to Key West at last, even the crackers were gone and the only thing left of the grapefruit juice was the awful bitter aftertaste. It didn’t matter. We could have dropped the sails and motored home a lot quicker. We didn’t. We made it last. We kept the sail up until we had the dock in sight, and then I motored on in at dead slow. Neither one of us wanted this trip to end. We both knew that coming back to Key West would change things. Would it kill what we had? There was no way to know, except by stepping onto the dock and finding out what happened next. A big part of me didn’t want to risk that, a nasty, dark-edged little voice that came at me from the shadows, that deep and powerful place where the drums still played and the snake writhed and reached for me with smiling coils.

  I told myself it was only fear, and I’d lived with that same fear since Nicky woke me up in the broom closet on the Petit Fleur. But the closer I got to the dock, the stronger it became, and this time, it was based on something real.

  What had we really found together, Anna and me? Was it real? Or just something that had happened because we were on a boat all alone and we both needed something to hold onto until the nightmares rolled away? I didn’t know. I only knew that whatever it was, I didn’t want to lose it.

  I looked at Anna. There was a slight frown on her face, a face now nearly as tanned as mine. I knew the feel of that face—its texture, its taste, and I wanted to keep knowing it for a good long time. I wanted to see it when I went to sleep at night, and when I woke up in the morning, and as often as possible in between.

  Anna must have felt me staring. She turned her head, and for just a second there was nothing in the world but the endless deep blue of her eyes. And then her small frown fell away, replaced by a smile, and not just any smile. It was the smile she wore after lovemaking, the smile that had been on her face each night as the motion of the waves rocked us to sleep, still holding onto each other. It was a smile that stopped time and nearly made me turn the boat back around and head for that little island again. I was willing to live on sand and salt water if I could keep looking at that smile.

  Anna put her hand on top of mine, where it rested on the sailboat’s tiller, and she gave it a little squeeze.

  I looked away from her, back to the dock, now only twenty-five feet away. I still didn’t know what we had or how long it would last, but I knew we were both in it, together, until we found out. That was enough for now. Nothing is ever guaranteed in this life except that sooner or later it ends. Until then, you have to live like it matters, and hold on as tight as you can to the people that make it seem like it does. No guarantees. In the end, you can only try, and if you can manage it, try together, with somebody that matters. Maybe it works, and maybe it doesn’t, but you try. Anna and I were going to try. It might last fifty years and it might be over by lunch tomorrow. But we were through the hard part, and the time for those bad dreams was over, too. They might come back now and then, but we would deal with that when it happened.

  I thought about that word: we. It had a brand new feeling to it, and a kind of strength that made me think it just might be enough to see us through. I might turn out to be wrong about that. I didn’t think so.

  I took Anna’s hand and held it as I brought us in to the dock. Only time would tell. But for now, I didn’t mind the wait.

  More Billy Knight Thrillers

  Tropical Depression

  Before there was Dexter, there was Billy Knight.

  New York Times bestselling author Jeff Lindsay mastered suspense with his wildly addictive Dexter series. Before that, however, there was former cop and current burnout Billy Knight. When a hostage situation turns deadly, Billy loses everything—his wife, his daughter, and his career. Devastated, he heads to Key West to put down his gun and pick up a rod and reel as a fishing boat captain. But former co-worker Roscoe McAuley isn't ready to let Billy rest.

  When Roscoe tells Billy that someone murdered his son, Billy sends him away. When Roscoe himself turns up dead a few weeks later, however, Billy can't keep from getting sucked back into Los Angeles, and the streets that took so much from him.

  Billy's investigations into the death of a former cop, and his son, will take him up to the highest echelons of the LAPD, finding corruption at every level. It puts him on a collision course with the law, with his past, with his former fellow officers, and with the dark aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. Jeff Lindsay's considerable storytelling gifts are on full display, drawing the reader in with a mesmerizing style and a case with more dangerous blind curves than Mulholland Drive.

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