Free Red Tide by Jeff Lindsay Page B

slowly folded to the ground to sit helpless on the curb, she stood over me, looking down, then looking around for help, then folding her arms and just standing over me.
    And just as I thought I might be able to breathe again, she said, “And so when you can’t win argument you try for sympathy to kill your self with coughter.”
    It almost killed me. I think I laughed for several minutes, choking and fighting for breath.
    Anna watched me. She stood with a face like one of those Greek statues, towering above me as I crouched helpless below her. And after a few more moments she snickered. Then she made the same kind of snorting sound I had made. It caught her by surprise. She laughed. And pretty soon there were two of us rolling on the pavement choking with laughter.
    And just when we began to get it under control, catch our breath a little, an elderly gentlemen in a white suit walked by, trailed by an attentive elderly Filipino. White Suit stopped and stared at us with a look of the most complete disapproval I have ever seen.
    That set us off again, and as we rolled together, howling with laughter, the Filipino took White Suit by the elbow and led him away, turning once to glare at us.
    It was several hours and seven uncontrollable fits of laughter later that we ended up on the end of the long wooden dock at the end of Duval Street. When you laugh that long and that hard with somebody it gives you a feeling that you’ve known them a long time, and we were struggling to figure out what to do about this new-old friendship.
    A kind of funny tact came over us. Neither one of us wanted to say anything that would break the illusion. So we leaned on the rail side by side, talking of things that didn’t matter, listening for what was behind them.
    She liked dogs. But she found it impossible to turn down a cat. She thought there was nothing on American TV that wasn’t bad for you, except wrestling. She loved wrestling, because for her it was like a great theatre where Good battled Evil and myths were worked out.
    She had also become passionate about American peanut butter, but she thought of it as a dessert item.
    Pretty soon I became aware that the bars were closing all around us and the loud music had been silent for a while. And suddenly we were in the middle of that awkward moment that comes at the end of an evening when you know it has to end but you don’t want it to and the way it’s going to end hasn’t been worked out yet.
    As I walked her home it still wasn’t worked out. She lived in Old Town, in an alley off Eaton, in a guest cottage attached to one of the big old houses. She shared it with two Polish women who worked as maids at one of the hotels.
    “Thank you for most interesting evening,” she said in her wonderful accent, standing at the door of the small green house.
    “Maybe we could have another one some time,” I said.
    She looked at me for a very long time and I found myself moving closer a little at a time. Just before my face touched her she said, “Perhaps,” very softly, and slid away into her house.
    I watched the outside of the door for a while, but it didn’t tell me anything, so I walked home.

Chapter Ten
    The last time I’d been to a demonstration I’d been in uniform, standing in front of the Iranian consulate in L.A. I’d been to a couple more before that, all of them as a cop. So Nicky’s little get-together was a brand new experience for me.
    I don’t mind the idea of standing in the street and waving a sign while you chant cute rhymes, but I’d always looked on it as either work or a kind of spectator sport.
    So it still isn’t clear to me how I ended up in front of the Key West Court House carrying a sign that said GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR WHITE MASSES and shouting, “Haitians Are Humans.” The shouting part was sort of halfhearted on my part; in fact, really only when Anna was looking.
    I say it wasn’t clear how I ended up there, but of course it was. I was