Tropical Depression

by Jeff Lindsay

  “What I can’t understand is how we handled it so bad. You know the department, Billy. Good cops, most of ’em. Damned good.”

  “Tell that to Rodney King,” I told him, and took a long pull on my mineral water. It was a cheap shot, and Roscoe’s smile said as much.

  “You never work midnights, Billy? You never hear about the kind of pumped-up halfwits get dumped on that shift? All the losers and discipline problems the PBA and the ACLU won’t let us fire?”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew it as well as he did. A lot of cops who shouldn’t be cops were stuck on the late shift where they were out of sight and, in theory, out of harm’s way. A lot of good cops were on that shift, too. I’d worn the uniform long enough to know you couldn’t tell by watching thirty seconds of videotape whether the Rodney King beating was done by the bad cops or by good ones gone temporarily nuts. Sometimes I had trouble telling the difference anyway.

  “Get on with it,” I said.

  He nodded like he’d won the point. Maybe he had.

  “I know you wondering, whether you want to admit it or not. So I’ll tell you, I don’t have any idea how it got so bad so fast. Chain of command didn’t just break down—it was never in place. Almost like it was deliberately sabotaged.” He stopped and shook his head. He looked puzzled, a little hurt, like a man betrayed by something he cared about and was sure of.

  “Was it?” I asked him. He just looked at me for a moment and for the first time he was a cop looking at an outsider. I’d never been on the receiving end of that look before. It made me nervous. “Come on,” I said. “If it makes you happy I’ll say you’re right, okay? I am curious. I read about it and I don’t see how it could have happened like that. What went wrong?”

  “Billy,” he said, “I don’t know what happened. Far as I can tell, nobody knows what happened. But it makes no sense for somebody to try to fuck things up like that. Anyhow, they didn’t need to. Morale has been real bad, everybody keeping their heads real low. Maybe when we came up against something definite like that it should have snapped us out of it. You know, action instead of thinking. Maybe it should have brought us back onto our feet again. It didn’t. It knocked us on our asses. We folded, Billy. We just cut and run. The first few hours, when we might’ve turned it around, we were getting mixed signals or no signals. Nobody took charge. So we just kept pulling back and pulling back and all of a sudden we were back too far to get in again and do anything and we got four days of anything goes. This area about the size of Rhode Island, and it’s total anarchy.

  “But then something started happening in there.” He paused here and looked away toward US 1. There was a steady stream of traffic going by. There always was. A Conch Train turned the corner and went past. I sipped my water and waited for Roscoe to go on. The people on the Conch Train seemed to think they were having fun. I didn’t correct them.

  “I’m kinda proud of this part,” Roscoe said at last. Something about the way he said it jerked my head back around and I looked at him hard. But his face was still closed, except for that half-smile. “With no police presence in the area at all, and I mean none, you’d expect they’d all just go totally loco in there, burn everything, loot everything, shoot, rape, slash and shit on the kitchen table.”

  “Isn’t that what happened?” I said, and now he swiveled to look hard at me.

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “That ain’t what happened at all. That’s just what TV said happened. But nothing is TV-simple. They just gotta make it look like it is or they can’t explain it in thirty-second sound bites. What really happened was that the majority of people in the area started coming together. I mean, even in the worst areas of Watts, ninety-some percent of folks hate like hell what’s going on around them. You know that. But they never seem to realize they got the bad guys outnumbered. There’s always been something missing, some little spark or—you know, a little grain of sand for the pearl to grow on. They never had anything like that. Then this happened and there was this kid.

  “This kid. This sixteen-year-old black kid. He organizes this group so when there’s attacks, looters, shooters, whatever, he shows up with a group and does a nonviolent confrontation thing until the outlaws back down. Black kids like him, some Korean kids, some Chicanos. And they’re all working together. They out-policing the police. Making a difference in a way that looks like it’s going to last. You know, a new community coalition.

  “And then somebody shot him.”

  Roscoe took a deep breath. It sounded a little bit ragged. I looked hard at him but could see nothing behind the deep hurt in his eyes.

  “It was an assassination, Billy. With a high-powered rifle from a rooftop. Somebody went to big trouble to get a shot and they shot down this kid. And I can’t find out why.”

  “Why not?”

  Funny smile again. “Not much evidence for starters. And this isn’t exactly what I do, you know. But mostly the pressure’s coming down from upstairs not to stir things up, for political reasons. The city is getting back to normal, they say—like that was good. They say the kid was just another looter at worst, or at best somebody in the wrong place at the wrong time who got popped by a nervous Korean shopkeeper.”

  There was something that sounded almost like pain in his voice now, and he started talking faster, more deliberately, like a lawyer who thinks he’s already lost the case but has to pull out all the stops for the jury anyway.

  “I say no way. No way in hell, Billy. They shot him too good, and with the wrong kind of weapon. Koreans mostly have assault rifles or shotguns—they don’t know what they’re doing with these weapons. They just want something that sprays lead. This boy was dropped with one clean shot from a hunting rifle. This was murder, Billy. Somebody didn’t like what this kid was doing, and they hunted him down and they killed him. Somebody murdered this kid and I want them.” He must have heard his own voice shaking and stopped for a moment, taking a breath and giving me an apologetic smile before he went on.

  “But they won’t even let me go after it. Not even me…And they won’t put anybody good on it. They’re trying to sweep it under the rug, make it go away, make sure nobody remembers, that nobody sees clearly who that boy was and what he tried to do, and that’s—”

  He stopped here, like asking me the real question was too hard. He’d come three thousand miles to ask me a favor and now he couldn’t do it. Pride kicks in at funny times.

  So he was quiet for a long time. So was I. I figured there had to be more to it than that. But there was no more. Roscoe stayed quiet. When I looked at him again he just gave me that strange half-smile. It looked bitter now.

  My bottle of mineral water wasn’t quite empty, but the half inch on the bottom was warmer than spit and suddenly less appealing. I put the bottle on top of the ice machine.

  “Why, Roscoe?” I asked him, trying to look at him hard enough to get behind the mask his face had become. “Why did you come all this way? Why not just write this one off like every cop in the world writes off a couple every day? Why me?”

  “The politics on this one are bad, man. Nobody in the department is allowed to touch it. They don’t want nothing stirred up. But it’s important, and it’ll take a good cop to hang it on somebody. You still a good cop under there, Billy. You don’t quit,” he said, and he said it so seriously, so completely straight, that for a minute I believed him, believed he was talking about some other Billy Knight who never quit and always got his man. That’s how good Roscoe was, even when he wasn’t working at it.

  I shook my head. “There’s lots of good cops in L.A. Some of ’em are black, and they can go where I can’t on something like this. I’m not that good.”

  “Yes, you are,” he said. “You were that good. You were about the best street cop I ever saw. ’Sides, I need somebody on the outside who knows what the inside looks like and can’t be waved off by the chairwarmers.”

  “Roscoe, you are a chairwarmer.”

  “Billy, I know you are the man
to do this like I know my own name.”

  He was using that smooth management technique on me again. It made me mad.

  “Why didn’t you save yourself all this trouble and just call me, Roscoe?”

  “Guess I was afraid you’d hang up on me.”

  “I’m hanging up anyway,” I said. I half-turned away, but there was nothing to look at. After a minute I turned back and looked at Roscoe. He was just watching me with those sad brown eyes. He looked like a teacher whose favorite student had just let him down in a big way.

  “You have changed, Billy. Gone inside and closed the door. I guess maybe you’re not the man I needed you to be.”

  “You got that right. I’m not a cop anymore. I’m not. I’m not a private detective. I’m not a Wackenhut or a school crossing guard. I’m a fishing guide. You’re not interested in fishing, just leave me the hell alone. You want to go fishing, great, give me a call. I get four hundred fifty dollars a day. Bring your kid.”

  I turned and started away. Before I got three steps away, two things stopped me dead. The first was a sudden sick feeling that I knew what Roscoe was about to say.

  The second thing was when he said it.

  “I can’t bring my boy, Billy,” he said. “That kid we were talking about—?”

  “No,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but it was all I could think of.

  “Yeah,” he said, in that terrible soft voice again. “My Hector was the boy. The one got shot. He’s dead, Billy,” said Roscoe, going on long past what was necessary. “My Hector is dead.”

  I turned slowly and watched that sad little half-smile trying to work its way onto his face one last time. It didn’t make it. Roscoe turned away and walked off down the dock. I tried to think of something to say. I tried to make my feet move, either toward Roscoe or back to my boat. I failed at both things. Instead I just stood there in the terrible five o’clock heat and watched Roscoe walk to a metallic blue rental car, get in, and drive away.

  Chapter Two

  I don’t know exactly how long I stood there beside the ice machine. I finally heard Art tapping on the window and I jerked my head around. He was peering through the glass, moving his mouth at me. I realized I had been standing there too long, that I didn’t look right just standing there.

  I noticed my reflection. Billy Knight, living ghost. Nobody would ever call me handsome. Intriguing maybe, with my slightly lopsided face, the faint trace of a scar down the left side, eyes blue and the right eye slightly bigger, sun-bleached dark blonde hair, broad, heavy shoulders, standing just under six feet tall. I could see hollows in my cheeks and under my eyes that didn’t used to be there.

  But beyond that, beyond the superficialities of how a cop might describe me on an APB, there was something wrong with the way I looked. There was some haunted thing looking out from just behind my eyes, and Roscoe had brought it out of its cave. It had been watching me for months now, slowly settling back inside, and I had been stupid enough to think it was going away forever. Now I knew better; it was just hibernating. When Roscoe pushed the right buttons, it rolled over in its sleep and said Spring is here, and poked its nose out again.

  And there it was, looking out at me from inside, looking at my reflection and seeing only bones, worm food, a tiny chuckle in the great, dirty, shaggy dog story of life. That’s how it attacks; it gives you Real Perspective. It makes you realize that the only real purpose we have in this world is to provide fertilizer for plants. Everything leading up to getting dropped into a hole in the ground is just another routine step in manufacturing the world’s best self-replicating plant food.

  Oh, I had Real Perspective, all right. At three A.M. on any of those hundreds of sleepless nights it kicked in and gave me a patronizing peek at how things were. It patted my shoulder with a friendly, manly touch and whispered suggestions about my gun, and the only defense I had found against it was to pretend. Just pretend everything was normal and that to continue to walk around every day served a purpose. What purpose? We’ll get to that later. For now, just pretend the purpose is there and maybe you can fool that thing behind your eyes into going back to sleep. Just act normal.

  Except I didn’t even know what normal was anymore.

  It was something I’d been conscious of a lot the last year, for the first time in my life. Maybe most people never think about it, and from the time I was a kid until last year I didn’t either. I always assumed that whatever I was doing, however I looked doing it, that was normal, and that was it.

  Things had changed. Since that day eighteen months ago I felt like an imposter, somebody hiding in my own body. I’d been very careful not to stick out, not to act in any way that would make me look different, not to give people any reason to ask me any questions. One thing I liked about taking strangers fishing was that the talk tended to be pretty specifically about fish. It left personal things out of it. If somebody got too curious about me I could always just point to a fish.

  That’s how I wanted it. It had taken a lot of work to get functional again, and I didn’t want to risk losing the careful equilibrium I had built up. I wasn’t sure I could do it again.

  For the first few months I’d watched a lot of TV. I’d even managed to sit through parts of a couple of talk shows—sometimes as much as five minutes at a time. According to most of the talk shows it wasn’t good to avoid my feelings. It was healthy and natural and honest to talk things out. It was self-destructive to bottle things up. What the hell: It wasn’t quite as self-destructive as swallowing a 9-millimeter steel-jacketed slug, and that ought to count for something.

  Art was knocking on the window again. I realized how worried he must be to get up off his seat and come all the way across the room.

  I made myself step back into the vicious freezing cold of Art’s shack.

  “The hell’s the matter, Billy? Been standing there like that for—Christ, I dunno. Hell’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, Art. I was just thinking.”

  He shook his massive head. Three chins crashed into each other. “Fucking cop, huh. Told you he ’uz trouble. Smelt it on him.” He put a finger the size of a kielbasa up beside his nose. “This don’t miss much. Could tell he ’uz trouble.”

  “No trouble, Art.”

  “Thirty-five years in this goddamn town,” he told me. “Think I can’t smell trouble?”

  “There’s no trouble, for Christ’s sake, Art,” I yelled at him. The sound of my voice was too high and much too loud, so I gave him a big, loopy smile so he could see for himself there was no trouble. “I’m going home.” I turned for the door, staggering slightly as some trick of the cold locked my knee up for half a step. I shook it off and made it to the door.

  “Dickhead,” I heard Art mumble behind me.

  Outside, I walked to the other side of the shack, where my bicycle was chained to a piling. I undid the lock, flung the chain into the battered basket, and headed out onto the street and across US 1. I had a car, but I hadn’t started it up for six months. I wasn’t even sure it would still start.

  There’s a special word for anybody who drives a car in Key West: tourist. Real Conchs have battered bicycles with large, American seats and those high handlebars that every kid in the country lusted after in 1966. With the high handlebars it’s a lot easier to stay upright under Key West conditions.

  Most of the bikes have a half-smashed basket on the front, and generally a half-smashed rider holding onto the handlebars. But even if you’re sober, the way you ride a Conch bike is the same, easy enough for any drunk. You lean half-forward, drape one forearm over the handlebars, and slouch over in a kind of boneless way while your legs move on the pedals as if you were going downhill and you’re just keeping up with the spinning wheel; you’re not really pedalling at all, just letting gravity pull you along.

  It works out pretty well on an island that’s completely flat and only a few miles long and a few miles across. Gas is expensive, and unless you’re hauling lumber, cars are a waste of t
ime and money and take up too much room. Besides, nobody is really in a hurry here. Tourists are here for a break from the hectic rodent marathon. Residents generally don’t have anything too pressing; at worst, they’re keeping a tourist waiting a few minutes—which is actually one of the real pleasures of living here, so nobody minds.

  I generally managed to get across US 1 without serious injury, but it always amazed me. If the road wasn’t so straight nobody would make it all the way to Duval Street. Nobody is really driving as they come through here. They’re hanging onto the wheel often enough, but they are either wrestling kids or gaping out the window. In a lot of ways people feel like they’ve come to a foreign country, so I guess they assume a red light means something else here.

  I was as bad as any tourist right now. I couldn’t get that last picture of Roscoe out of my mind, as he tried that pained half-smile one last time and turned for his rental car. So I ended up partway across the street before I realized I was in traffic, going against the light. I made it back to the curb without losing a wheel or a leg, but just barely. A thoughtful guy with a blonde crewcut leaned out the window and very loudly told me what my head was full of and what he figured I liked to put in my mouth. It wasn’t very original; I barely heard him.

  When the light finally changed I missed it and had to wait through another cycle. I felt trapped. Roscoe had found me and in just a half-hour stripped away all my carefully built-up defenses. He was right; I was still a cop underneath. I still cared.

  A red convertible filled with college kids went by. The horn honked and a beer bottle spun from the backseat and smashed at my feet. Small pellets of glass pattered off my hat, and one stung my cheek. My left leg was wet with warm beer that smelled like the urinal at Sloppy Joe’s. It woke me up, and when the light changed a few seconds later I wheeled across and headed for home.

  My home that year was about halfway across the island, across the street from a small canal that emptied into the marsh above Houseboat Row. The house was a small, squat cinderblock cottage built in the 1960s. The yard was overgrown when I moved in and hadn’t gotten any better.