Free Tropical Depression by Jeff Lindsay

him eat.
    He was one of those tiny people, clearly evolved from the ferret, who must eat twice their weight every day, and Nicky was not refined in his attack. He ate with both hands and a wide-open mouth, spraying crumbs in all directions. He had a lot to say on most subjects and could not sit without wanting to talk. That usually made for problems at the table. I spent most of my dining time with Nicky dodging crumbs, trying to keep them off my food as they flew out of his mouth and across the table, rocketing high in the air, bouncing off the saltshaker, careening everywhere.
    Still, there was an incredible charm to the man. I had seen women twice his size fall helplessly into those gigantic, luminous eyes and follow quietly, without struggle, as he led them off to his battered cottage next door. I didn’t think he could make an enemy if he wanted to.
    I put the fish into a large baking dish and squeezed some key lime juice onto it. I’d let it soak in for a minute before I put it under the broiler. I smeared on a couple of pats of margarine. As an afterthought I sprinkled some cumin on top, then sliced on my last onion.
    As I put the dish in the oven, the front door banged and Nicky was back with a paper bag under each arm. The bags looked bigger than Nicky. He roared into the kitchen and flung the bags onto my rickety kitchen table, already unloading them and opening two fresh beers before I could even open my mouth to speak. “Here we go. Not much to choose up there, bloody awful store, but thank you Jesus, they had two last six-packs of Foster’s. Not that Foster’s is my first choice, you understand, but it’s the best we can hope for in this benighted cultural backwater. Cheers, mate,” he said and drained off about half of the squat blue-labeled bottle. He slammed open the oven door, slammed it closed again. “Fish in? Lovely. Now piss off,” he finished, shoving me out of my kitchen. He had things flying out of the bags and into pots and pans before I even made it to my chair.
    I sat. I was suddenly exhausted, whether from Nicky’s unbelievable take-charge energy or from the letdown of my total screw-up with Roscoe, I couldn’t tell. I leaned back in my chair and held the beer bottle without drinking for a long moment. The racket from the kitchen was near the noise level of a Concorde taking off, plenty loud enough to bring complaints from the neighbors except that they, like me, were used to Nicky, totally charmed out of their natural hostility by his wide-eyed dazzling animation.
    I let my mind drift. I still felt bad about Roscoe. I knew I should have found him. This was my island and I knew pretty well where he might go. But my first two guesses had been bad and I no longer had the energy. I gave up. I never used to give up. Something had changed in me; the thing that used to drive me was no more than a torpid passenger now.
    Screw it, I thought, closing my eyes. I didn’t ask for this. Besides, I had just proved I was useless at this kind of thing. I couldn’t even find Roscoe. I was just not thinking like a cop anymore, and in a way that would have seemed lazy and cowardly a year ago, that seemed to me to justify turning down Roscoe, refusing to go back to my old world, refusing to look at all the memories of my old life again.
    I was not the guy I used to be. I hated Los Angeles and everything I could remember about it. I knew that going back there would bring back all the things I had worked so hard to forget. I could not go back there. I couldn’t.
    “Wake up, mate!” bellowed Nicky, standing about four inches from my ear. I didn’t quite hit the ceiling. “Grub’s on! Hop to!” And he was racing back to the kitchen with a manic cackle, a trail of rice already catapulting from his mouth. I wiped a few grains from my ear and followed him.
    “Oh, fishy fishy fish,” he beamed at me as I finally made it to the table. He cut the fish and served two-thirds to himself, one-third to me,