“No you don’t.”
“But you know,” Anna said.
“That’s right. And it scares the hell out of me. And it would scare the hell out of you if you understood it.”
“So then Nicky and I, we do it without you.” She gently closed my jaw with a fingertip. “We will be fine, Billy. You may tell us how to do.”
I was back in the dream again, where nothing made sense but it was all whirling around me at a furious speed while I had grown into the floor.
“No,” I finally managed.
“Which part no?”
“All of it no.” I took a deep breath, wishing I could shut up, but knowing I was going to say it anyway. “You’ll wait here while I do it.”
Nicky went off like a rocket. “Not alone, mate! Not without me! It’s not fair!”
“No, Nicky. This guy is a bocor, a voodoo black wizard. He collects body parts and drinks Christian blood. Eats babies. No. No way in hell. You two are out of it.”
Nicky gulped, but looked stubborn. “Mate. Billy. Stands to reason, you need me all the more if he’s flinging around palo mayombe.”
“Palo what?”
“Palo mayombe. Black magic version of voodoo. What you said, right?” He shook his head. “Very bad stuff. Of course, it explains how he controls the crowds.”
“You know about this stuff?”
He looked insulted. “Mate. What is it you think I do all day in me little shop? This stuff is all cake to me. And if you’re going up against a houngan, you need me to counter him.” He winked. “Besides, I got my new weapon, Billy. You’ll need back-up.”
“If I need you and your weapon, we’ve already lost.” He looked hurt, but I was way past caring. “Here’s the deal. I will look into this thing, just skim the surface very quietly. Just to get enough detail so we can turn it over to the TV people, and then hope they put pressure on the cops. But if they do or don’t, that’s all we do. And then we are all out of it, whatever happens. Because I do not want this guy ever to know who we are. Deal?”
They both looked troubled and poked around at it for a few minutes, saying we had to be sure, but in the end we had reached an uneasy agreement. They would come along and stay in the background, just so they knew that everything possible had been done. And I would not involve them, no matter what, or do anything that might get us close enough to be dangerous. I insisted on that. This was not a crusade, just a quick, clean investigation from a distance and then home again.
It was an important point, and I really thought I might have gotten it across. But of course, I was wrong about a lot of things that rotten August.
Chapter Fifteen
Considering how much I hated driving between Miami and Key West, I was doing it way too often. And with the weight of what we were about to try, and Nicky singing his awful, tuneless Australian drinking songs in the back seat, it seemed to take a lot longer this time.
Anna didn’t say a whole lot. She sat in the front and watched the scenery. If she was disappointed, she didn’t let on. Every ten miles or so I would catch her looking at me. She would hold my eye for a moment and then look back out the window. I wondered what it meant.
But nothing lasts forever, no matter how much you don’t want it to. We finally hit the Turnpike and all the cars around us accelerated from sixty-five to over eighty like a school of sharks scenting blood. I moved us into the right lane and kept it at a stately seventy. Anna watched the traffic whiz past with gritted teeth. Once, when three cars tried to pass us in the same lane at the same time, I heard her say something under her breath that sounded like, “boga tee.” It was probably Ukranian profanity. I wished I knew some. I’d worn out all the English I knew.
I pulled off the Turnpike onto US 1 around Kendall. We drove in relative silence for a few miles and then turned into the parking lot of an anonymous motel in South Miami.
“All right,” I said. “Headquarters.”
Nicky blinked, looking at the bland, middle class building. “What the hell, mate,” he said. “I’m paying. We can go one better.”
“It’s out of the way,” I said. “And it’s right on a very busy street. Besides, it has a coffee shop. We could go to one of the fancy joints in the Grove or downtown, but I don’t want to attract attention.”
“And I don’t want to attract roaches,” Nicky muttered, but he jumped out of the car anyway and led us inside the lobby to register.
We got two rooms with a connecting door between them. Nicky threw his canvas bag onto the bed in one of them, the smaller room, and went racing off to fill the ice bucket and find some beer.
Anna stood in the middle of the room looking lost. Then she moved slowly over and sat on the edge of the bed. She sat so stiffly that her weight barely made a dent in the bed cover. “Is very funny,” she said.
I sat in the chair beside her. “What’s that?”
She gave a small huff. “Myself is funny. Because I am having more fears of staying in this room with you than of what we do with the killer.”
I sat still. “I don’t think it’s funny.”
“You have not European sense of humor,” she said. “In my country would be much laughter for this. The poor girl, afraid of man even when she is very much liking him, and not afraid of the bad killing man. Ha,” she said.
I moved carefully onto the bed, leaving a good space between us. I took her hand and just held it.
“How beautiful I now am,” she said. “With these, these—how do you call it, snowts?”
“I think you are beautiful,” I said. “But I don’t know what snowts are.”
She blew her nose again. “These are snowts,” she said. “From the nose.”
“You mean snot,” I said.
“Yes, of course, I am saying so. Snowts.”
“It’s not a real nice word.”
“So? What are you calling it then?”
“How about nose tears?”
She looked at me for a long moment, then shook her head. “You are also a poet. This is a beautiful thought, very nice.” She held up the soggy tissue. “But I think this is not beautiful. And not tears.” She threw it across the room and into the small brass trashcan. “Snowts.”
“Whatever you say.”
She moved closer to me. “I say, it would be very nice if you will hold me for a few minutes. If you do not object to the snowts.”
“Nose tears,” I said. “I don’t mind.” I put my arms around her.
We were still sitting like that, just holding each other and breathing, when Nicky smashed the door open and roared back into the room with a sound like the Spanish Armada breaking up on the cliffs of Dover.
“Hello-hello-hello,” he yelled at us. His arms were full of paper bags and before Anna and I could even straighten up he had spread the contents of several of them across the bed.
Nicky had found beer, two six packs of Samuel Adams, and a sixteen ounce bottle of Mountain Dew for Anna. He’d also found a Chinese restaurant, and there were spring rolls with lots of hot Chinese mustard, shrimp fried rice, sweet and sour pork, and kung pao chicken.
“Gung hee fat choy!” Nicky shouted, throwing chop sticks to Anna and then to me.
“It’s not New Years, Nicky,” I reminded him.
“Hell’s peppers, mate, celebration is celebration. Besides,” he said, ripping the lid off a container of rice and shoving a good handful into his mouth, “I can’t say another bloody word in Chinese. Eat up, love, it’s getting cold,” he told Anna.
She continued to watch him with something between amusement and horror as he polished off a good half of the food with a kind of suicidal carelessness that left rice stuck to the ceiling above him and small pieces of shrimp fastened to the bedspread.
When we were done eating Nicky belched happily. “Ahhh,” he said. “Hits the old spot, eh? Well then, Billy, what’s next, beddy-bye? Do we need an early start?”
“Very early,” I said. “How about fifteen minutes?”
; He blinked. “What. Fifteen minutes from now?”
“That’s right.”
“Ohhh,” he said, and for the first time since this whole thing had started he looked a little uneasy.
“What’s the matter? A little worried about going out there into the Miami night?”
“No, no,” he said. “It’s not that.”
“Maybe you think we should wait for daylight to track down a voodoo bocor.”
“Since you bring it up, Billy—”
“Good,” I said, standing up and brushing off a few crumbs of food. “You can stay here with Anna.”
“Anna does not stay here,” she said.
“Yes, she does.”
“We have an agree that I am to come.”
“Where I want to go tonight is not dangerous—if I go alone. But if I take a beautiful woman—and an astrologer with a loud sense of impulse—it can get dangerous.”
She frowned. “What kind of place this is, I am making danger?”
“It’s just a joint. A bar for sailors.”
“A bar!?” Nicky bellowed. “Mate, think what you’re saying. You’re going to a bar—and you’re leaving me?”
“That’s right,” I said. “It’s a sort of specialized bar. You wouldn’t fit in.”
“I’ve never seen the bar where I wouldn’t fit in,” Nicky said.
“Why should this place be a danger for me?” Anna added.
“A bar’s a bar, Billy. Home away from home.”
“Do you think I do a sex dance with the juke box, hah?”
I had a full-scale revolt on my hands.
My plan had been to slip quietly into a few of the dives along the river and ask questions. Just one or two innocent questions in each of three places I knew about, so nobody would get suspicious about a whole bunch of significant talk. They were the kind of places that don’t appreciate outsiders. I thought I could pass muster; I had the deep-water tan, I knew the dialect, and if it came to swapping knuckles in good clean fun I could hold my own.
It looked like that plan wasn’t going to get past The Committee.
“Listen,” I said, trying one last time. “We agreed that the reason I’m doing this is because I know how. And one of the things I know is that there is no way in hell I can go into one of these places with you two and not attract attention.”
“What’s wrong with a little attention, eh?” Nicky demanded. “Best way to find somebody is to let them find you.” And he looked really happy with himself for coming up with something that smart.
“Do you really want to be found,” I asked carefully, “by someone who’s making a lot of money killing people and might not want you to stop him from doing it a while longer?”
Nicky opened his mouth, and then closed it again.
“Although I must say,” Anna said solemnly, “one person alone is in more danger. And is very good dus… dusko… How you are calling it when you make to look like something which you are not?”
“Disguise,” I said.
“Just so. A disguise. Three people, one of them woman. Who would think of harm from such?”
“She’s right, Billy. Can’t go in without someone to watch your back, mate.”
“My back will be fine. Especially if I’m not worried about watching your backs, too.”
But he shook his head. “Sorry. I reckon it’s settled.”
“No.”
“Yes,” Anna said.
I held the door for her anyway. Probably it was the cute way she said it, with the accent and everything.
Chapter Sixteen
The Miami River isn’t really a river anymore. It’s been turned into a canal that cuts the city in half and then dumps into Biscayne Bay. It has tides and brackish water and it is a kind of second-class port for the smaller freighters.
But of the many things it is, the most important is that it’s a strange, self-contained sub-culture. It’s a little world of its own along the banks of the large canal. When people in Miami say “Miami River,” they usually mean this minor sprawl of marinas and dry docks and bars. It sits a few miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean and several layers of evolution away from the horrors of South Beach.
The residents of this world, known as River Rats, are the real boat people of Miami. These are not guys who take the speedboat out on Sunday after church to see if they can make it to Elliot Key in under ten minutes. They don’t spend a lot of time looking at the BOAT US catalogue.
But they are likely to know where you can buy a World War II surplus landing craft, who might have a reconditioned engine for a tanker, or who’s been making some extra cash on the run from Colombia.
They range in age from very young to very old, but most of them have that no-age look of men who have always been old but are still spry enough to bend a Buick’s bumper with their teeth.
There aren’t that many of them, not anymore, and they are at sea whenever they can arrange it. But it’s a dying lifestyle, like most of the other interesting ones, and there are fewer berths available every year as the computers take over the ships. So there are always a few dozen River Rats on shore.
Those few only have a couple of places where they hang out. What those places have in common is cheap drinks and a view of the River. My plan had been to slip into some of those places, have a few quiet beers, ask a couple of questions. My modified plan was to lead the parade of Nicky and Anna into a couple of places and try to keep us all from being pounded into the ground.
The first place we went was called The 0. From the outside it looked like it had fallen down a few years ago. Once you saw the inside you were willing to pay for the bulldozers to make sure.
As we pushed through the crooked doorway I felt like we were in a bad Western. A sudden quiet fell over the room when they saw Anna. Even the jukebox stopped and I felt twenty-three hungry eyes on us.
“Christ on a bun,” Nicky muttered, looking into the dimness where a dozen battered and scarred faces were looking back.
Then somebody dropped a glass, the music started up, and they all turned away again. They weren’t being polite; it was just that anything that wasn’t a boat could only hold their interest for so long.
I could see that Nicky and Anna were both re-thinking their attitude of fearless confrontation. But I managed to steer us to a table in the corner without either of them trying to surrender.
Anna’s eyes had gotten very big when I opened the door, and walking across the room to the table didn’t shrink them at all. Now she sat with her hands clasped on the table in front of her, trying not to see too much.
“Are you sure this is still America?” she whispered to me. “Never have I seen such a place.”
“I have,” Nicky muttered. “Ever see Star Wars?”
“Just don’t order a wine spritzer,” I said. “Or milk.”
“Is beer all right,” Nicky asked, “or do I need to eat a broken glass?”
We sat quietly for a while, nursing our drinks. I tried to size up the River Rats in the room without being too obvious, and finally narrowed it down to one.
The guy I picked had been sitting over at the far end of the bar. He looked to be older than most of the others, and everybody who came in nodded to him. Every now and then somebody would go over to him and lean their head in close, talk for a minute, and then walk away.
He was thin and looked to be over six feet tall, though it was hard to be sure with the way he had folded himself onto his stool. He had a worn, deeply tanned face, colorless hair, and wore clothes that looked like they were nice once, but he’d worn them to overhaul the engines one time too many.
In a community like the River, where people come and go, there are usually a couple of people who are the bulletin boards. They stay put and keep track of things. My guy looked like the man who knew everything that was going on and everybody who was doing it.
I waited until he was alone, with only about a half inch left in his glass, and pushed my chair back. “Just stay here and k
eep quiet,” I told Nicky and Anna. They nodded.
I walked over to him at the end of the bar. “Buy you a drink?”
He looked up at me. He didn’t look friendly, but he didn’t look hostile, either. He was just waiting. If there was a password, I hadn’t said it yet.
“Name’s Billy,” I said. I jerked my head back at my table. “Some friends are looking for a boat.”
He nodded.
“Thought you might know where they can find one,” I said.
“I’ll take a whiskey and water,” he told me.
I called the bartender over and got him his drink. He didn’t say another word until I had paid and the new glass was in front of him. Then, he picked up the last of the old drink and tossed it down.
“My name is Bud,” he said. “Thanks for the drink.”
He didn’t put his hand out, so I didn’t either. “Bud, I got two people over there looking for a small freighter to hire.”
“Uh-huh,” he said.
He watched me without making any sign that he knew what I wanted or why I was asking him.
“It would be pretty good money,” I said.
“That a fact?” he said.
“I wondered if you knew anybody might be interested.”
He still didn’t show any emotion beyond barely polite interest. Now he raised one eyebrow, looking at me out of distant blue eyes that weren’t saying anything. “Everybody’s interested in pretty good money,” he said.
“Well, that guy over there,” I nodded at Nicky and tried out the story we’d agreed on, “he’s a South African. He’s looking for a way to get his money out of the country. And, uh—anyway there’s a lot of it.”
“And he figured that the best way to do that was by investing in an independent maritime cargo hauler,” Bud said, eyebrow still up in the air.
“Well, actually I think he’s got a pretty specific cargo in mind.”
“Oh, uh-huh,” he said. “Thinking of making the Colombia run, is he?”
“Something like that,” I said.
He blinked at me for a minute. Then he gave his head a half-shake, and he gave me a half smile. It reminded me of an alligator looking at something tender a few minutes after he’s already eaten his fill.