Another jet bringing more tourists and money into the Tampa-St. Pete area careened overhead, perfectly aligned with the lights at Tampa International. Being on the bay, out on the water like this, watching the planes come and go, was akin to watching a fireworks and laser display, thought Florida Marine Patrol Officer Ken Stallings. When he mentioned it to his partner, big Rob Manley, the other man grunted in his usual fashion and said, “Give me a boat any day.”
Viewed from the water, Tampa Bay on a Saturday night was surreal, the canals and waterways like a broad boulevard where riverfront restaurants and harbor lamps reflected multicolored lights off the inky surface of the bay. The waterways were lined with mega-yachts, utterly fantastic in size and scale in relation to the little Boston Whaler police boat patrolling here.
On the FMP boat, Officer Stallings shouted from behind the wheel down to his partner in the flatbed, “Problem with these yuk-yuk yacht guys… the bigger the damned boat, the longer they think their dicks extend, so the worse the attitude they give you.”
Rob Manley raised his black hand and waved knowingly, agreeing. “Big pricks and bad-ass attitudes is right; that’s what this place is full of, bad attitude.”
“ Can’t totally fault ‘em, though.”
“ The boaters? The weekend water warriors? The yachtsmen? And just why not?”
“ We board their boats out here, they see it as home invasion, which-”
“ You talkin’ invasion of privacy?”
“- which it is, kind of.”
“ That’s crap, Ken, and you know it,” Manley shot back. ‘ ‘They give up any right to privacy when they put another person’s life in jeopardy or run the lanes at full speed. They get boarded when they break the law; if they want to keep their boats sacro… sacro-”
“ Sacrosanct?”
“ Yeah, that. If they want to keep that, then they should observe the law. Simple as that. You do the crime, you pay the fine or the time as the case may be, and you lose that saccharine thing.”
Stallings laughed in response. “That’s why I like having you around, Rob. You intimidate these suckers out here, and you understand them at the same time.”
“ Don’t take much to understand stupidity and arrogance. Had a lifetime of that with my drunk-ass daddy.”
Manley had been on the job for seven years against Stal- lings’s eleven. They joked about that, calling themselves the 7-11 Team-unbeatable and unstoppable. Manley had once been a bouncer, and he still looked the part; Stallings had once been a prizefighter, lightweight division, and he still worked out and entered amateur contests. Each man was in top physical condition. They had to be for this job.
They waved as the blue strobes of another police boat passed by in the lane. There was a lot of police traffic here tonight, maybe too much. Every available officer was on alert that the creep they called the Night Crawler was possibly visiting all the way from Miami. Everyone had heard how this mooncalf demon freak who’d done all those girls could now be in the Tampa Bay area. Everybody was looking to score big.
Stallings and Manley were no exception.
They held the record for most stops on a normal night, and they could rack up more OUIs and registration violations than any of their counterparts out here, but Stallings and Manley had made a pact earlier: They were going hunting for larger fish tonight, and no OUIs or regs. violations were going to stand in the way of that covenant. Any other midnight Manley was flashing his light at every damned boat that dared go by, pulling them over for safety inspections-life jackets, flotation devices, dinghies intact; liquor cans at a minimum-all in Man- ley’s constant crusade to “make a damned strong impression: Wherever there’s water, there’s muthafuckiri water- cops!”
Tonight, however, Manley was flashing registration numbers using his power light, and Ken was checking every single one against the FMP computer net for previous violations. “July-Oscar-Niner-Six-Delta,” Stallings called off another “suspect” registration number. They were hoping to win the lottery, the prize being the Night Crawler. They were hoping to be like the now-famous cop who’d stopped Timothy McVeigh for a traffic violation after the bombing in Oklahoma City.
Their blue lights bounced around each marina, reflected off decks and shoreline establishments as they passed, a menacing warning to heavy drinkers and an annoyance to diners and dancers. The air here in the boat lane was crackling with electricity. The squeal of the Mako radio, emitting a nonstop barrage of police calls, mingled with the palpable rancor of boaters who just wanted all signs of law and order gone, out of their liquor-hairy faces.
Stallings and Manley were used to angry customers thinking FMP vehicles an interference in their holiday cruising. People on boats didn’t want to observe any rule that applied to land; they seemed to feel that open water meant open-ended morality, that familiar Mardi Gras attitude that said, “Anything goes.” Boaters didn’t want signs to mark their way, to tell them about slow wakes or manatee crossings or fish hatcheries. And they generally regarded watercops as arrogant, reckless nuisances with 225-hp motors, badges and guns. Still, whatever the public thought, the FMP units were equipped to outmaneuver and outrun the public at every turn.
“ Maybe we shouldn’t stray too far,” Stallings suggested to Manley, “seeing that we’ve got plenty o’ trouble brewing right here in the lanes.”
“ Hell, any overflow problems, the other guys can just send ‘em to the county sheriff’s patrol boat at the city marina. They can just line up there and wait their turn,” Man- ley replied, anxious to follow through with their earlier plans.
A huge yacht with horsepower to spare opened up in the slow wake area, whose limits were posted in plain view. “We gotta take that one,” Ken told Rob.
“ Damn fool bastard,” replied Manley, exasperated at the obvious speed violation. Stallings revved up their speedboat and hailed the yacht with siren blaring and lights flashing, followed by the bullhorn.
Cursing the yacht pilot under his breath the whole time, Manley targeted the bridge with his light, and lifting his bullhorn he ordered the yacht, a boat with the dubious name of Hellfire, to dock for a safety inspection now.
Once the yacht was secured to a nearby wharf, the inspection went in routine fashion, by the book, no problems on board except for the single lush sitting in a deck chair who kept saying, “You can’t be serious.”
“ Yes, sir… we’re quite serious,” Manley repeated each time the little guy opened his mouth. Stallings stifled a laugh.
“ You weren’t OUI here, were you, sir?” Manley finally asked the small man in the chair.
“ No, no, no! You saw me operating the boat, officer,” bellowed the pilot.
“ OUI?” asked the drunk. “Don’t you mean IOU?”
“ Operating under the influence, Tom,” explained the pilot, “and no, no no,” he pleadingly added for Manley’s sake, “no one here’s operating while intoxicated.”
Ken suggested into Rob Manley’s ear, “Send ‘em on their way.”
“ Watch your speeds through here, sir.” Manley tutored as he and Stallings returned to their patrol boat.
“ Damn nigger watercop…” muttered someone from behind them as they shoved off.
“ Any other night, I’d’ve found sixteen violations for those turkeys,” Manley assured his partner.
“ But this ain’t just any night,” Stallings agreed. “There’ll be eight, nine, maybe ten other units on the water tonight-our guys, the Coast Guard, Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, Pinellas and Manatee County Sheriff’s Offices, and the Tampa Police-they all wanna see action. Let them keep an eye on ol’ Hellfire.”
Tampa Bay, with adjoining Hillsborough Bay and the wide channel, skirted three counties, their boundaries clear only on the maps, smack in the water. There were also islands to the south and the Gulf side of St. Petersburg to consider, where the “Pete” Police would have a couple of units in the water. If what the FBI was saying had any validity to it at all, the damned ugly Crawler would be a fool to come into these waters. And from what Stallings had gathered, this creep would be most attracted by the St. Petersburg strip along Reddington Beach. So he now quietly suggested they cruise out into the Gulf and northward to have a look.