Red Tide Read Online Free

didn’t seem likely. I wondered if I would ever see her again.
    I remembered my trip to Los Angeles last year when I’d met her. I’d ended up in the drunk tank there, too. I’d been framed for drunk and disorderly by a corrupt cop, and as I sat in a much dirtier cell I had thought about Nancy then, too. It seemed to me I’d spent way too much time sitting in drunk tanks thinking about Nancy Hoffman. I wondered if it meant anything. It probably did. I thought about asking the bald captain but he was still asleep. But what the hell. If it did mean something I probably wouldn’t like it.
    They let us out early the next day. The court appearance was a month away. We all promised we’d be there. I shook hands with the bald charter captain. Tiny was still trying to fit his belt back into his pants. I figured it would be a bad idea to offer to help. I left.
    At this early hour of the morning Key West was deserted, almost as if a plague had swept through and taken away all the people, leaving only stray dogs and cats and the smell of stale beer. In the half hour it took me to walk home I saw nobody except a few joggers, and from the serious and strained looks on their faces as they jogged by, they might have been running from the plague.
    Nancy was mad. I knew she was mad, but maybe what had happened to make her mad was good. Maybe it would give us a starting place to really talk out our differences. After all, the main reason I was hanging out in the Moonlight Room was that I was not happy with our relationship. Now that this had happened she would know that. We had something definite to talk about.
    I wondered what I could say to Nancy to make it right. I remembered reading somewhere that every great disaster is actually a blessing in disguise. You just have to know how to look at it the right way, to turn your disadvantage into a strength. It might have been Sun Tzu, that wise old man who wrote The Art of War . Maybe I could do that with the bar fight, turn it into a new strength. Sun Tzu was always right about these things.
    I got home. I walked across my small yard, part rock and part weed, and climbed up the three cement steps. I wasn’t inside long enough to sit when I heard a pounding on the door. It was a loud, frantic pounding, sounding like a gang of bikers trying to get into a room filled with beer and teenaged girls. I figured it had to be Nicky.
    I opened the door. Nicky Cameron roared past me, nearly five feet of non-stop energy. “Bloody fucking hell, Billy! Where have you been, eh?” He spun and fixed me with his gigantic eyes.
    “Hello, Nicky,” I said. “What’s up?”
    Even as I spoke he was cocking his head to one side and then, almost faster than I could follow with my tired eyes, he circled around me, sniffing. “Well, well,” he said. “Well well well well well. Lumbered again, eh Billy? What’d they cop you for this time, mate? Loitering?”
    “Drunk and disorderly. How did you guess?”
    He stood squarely in front of me, hands on his hips and feet planted wide. “Guess.  Guess !? Is that what you think, Billy? That this is  guess work I do? Oh, mate, you bloody fucking wrong me.” He tapped his nose with a finger. “The Beak knows all, Billy.”
    I shook my head, tired and cranky but intrigued. “You’re saying you smelled it on me.”
    He winked. “That and your chart. You see, mate, your rising sign right now is on a cusp. This means change, trouble with authority—there’s lots of water in there too, mate, travel and conflict over water. And a snake. I haven’t figured that bit out yet.”
    “I’m sure you will, Nicky.”
    “’Course I will, mate. I’m working a new chart for you now. That’s not the point—”
    “So there’s a point to this?”
    “Too right there’s a point. I came by last night to warn you. Soon as I started your chart and saw—oh.” He stopped suddenly as something else occurred to him and looked thoughtful. I didn’t feel like hearing his