City of Sins. Daniel Blake

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      Daniel Blake

      City of Sins

      Dedication

      To Jenie and Jeremy Wyatt,

       top drawer parents-in-law

      Contents

      Title page

      Dedication

      Prologue

      

      Khao Lak, Thailand

      New Orleans, LA

      Interlude

      Part One July

      Friday, July 1st

      Monday, July 4th

      Tuesday, July 5th

      Wednesday, July 6th

      Thursday, July 7th

      Friday, July 8th

      Saturday, July 9th

      Sunday, July 10th

      Monday, July 11th

      Tuesday, July 12th

      Wednesday, July 13th

      Thursday, July 14th

      Friday, July 15th

      Saturday, July 16th

      Sunday, July 17th

      Monday, July 18th

      Tuesday, July 19th

      Wednesday, July 20th

      Thursday, July 21st

      Friday, July 22nd

      Saturday, July 23rd

      Sunday, July 24th

      Monday, July 25th

      Interlude

      Part Two August

      Friday, August 19th

      Saturday, August 20th

      Sunday, August 21st

      Monday, August 22nd

      Tuesday, August 23rd

      Wednesday, August 24th

      Thursday, August 25th

      Friday, August 26th

      Saturday, August 27th

      Sunday, August 28th

      Monday, August 29th

      Tuesday, August 30th

      

      Epilogue

      Thursday, November 24th

      

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Other books by Daniel Blake

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      Prologue

      December 26th

      Khao Lak, Thailand

      The sea ran back down the beach.

      Franco Patrese felt the warm sand between his toes and smiled. There might be better places to be in the world right now, but none sprang to mind. It was sunny and hot, he’d spent the last six nights with an English girl who had the dirtiest laugh and nicest smell of anyone he’d ever met, and the most strenuous task he faced today was sorting out the precise sequence of swimming, sunbathing, lunch, beer and sex.

      Exactly two weeks ago, Patrese had sat in a Pittsburgh hospital room and listened to a murderer’s confession. It had been the culmination of a case which had consumed him for months and taken with it much of his faith in human nature. Exhausted and traumatized, he’d searched online for last-minute holidays, and ended up among the palm trees here in Khao Lak.

      The first week had been an open-water diving course – a refresher course, in Patrese’s case, as he’d done a lot of diving in his youth but hadn’t been for a few years now. It was there that he’d met Katie, the English girl currently asleep in his beachfront hotel room. They’d dived to reefs and wrecks, swum with Technicolor rainbows of marine life: cube boxfish dotted in yellow and black, nudibranches of solar orange, shrimp banded in Old Glory red and white.

      Now Patrese had another week in which to do the square root of nothing. For the first time in months, perhaps longer, he felt – well, not exactly happy, given everything which had happened back in Pittsburgh, but certainly carefree. Tension was leaching like toxins from his body with every day that passed.

      He kept walking toward the sea, waiting for the next wave to roll up the sand and lap round his ankles like the licking of an eager puppy.

      The water continued to retreat, almost as though it were playing a game with him. Through one wave cycle, then another, and still it receded.

      Patrese’s brain was so firmly in neutral that it took him a few moments to realize how unusual this was.

      In the shallows, swimmers laughed in amazement as the water drained around them. Tourist canoes were left stranded on ropes suddenly slack; beach vendors picked up fish writhing on the sand. Patrese heard questioning voices, saw shoulders shrugged. No one had ever seen such a thing, it seemed.

      He had.

      A Discovery Channel program, he thought, or maybe National Geographic. They’d reconstructed a historic earthquake – Lisbon, that was it, sometime in the eighteenth century – with CGI effects, talking heads, and a narrator whose voice had been set firmly to ‘doom’. The program had shown many of Lisbon’s residents fleeing to the waterfront to escape fires and falling debris in the city center. From the docks, they’d seen the sea recede so far and fast that it had exposed all the cargo lost and wrecks forgotten over the centuries.

      And after that …

      ‘Tsunami!’ Patrese shouted. ‘Tsunami!’

      A couple of people looked curiously at him. Perhaps they thought he was calling for a lost dog. A lobster-colored Englishman in a black-and-white soccer shirt clapped and began to sing, ‘Toon Army! Toon Army!’

      A posse of Germans were twenty yards away. Patrese ran over to them.

      ‘Move! You’ve got to move!’

      ‘Hey!’ One of the Germans clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Chill out, man.’

      ‘There’s a tsunami coming!’

      ‘Tsunami?’

      ‘Tidal wave.’

      The Germans looked out at the ocean. The water was a carpet of azure as far as they could see.

      ‘I don’t see no tidal wave,’ said the shoulder clapper.

      They all looked at Patrese with a sort of benevolent wariness, clearly bracketing him as slightly demented but probably harmless.

      ‘It’s coming, I tell you,’ Patrese insisted.

      ‘Whatever you’re on, man, can you give me some?’

      ‘Please leave us alone now,’ said one of the German women.

      Patrese opened his mouth to say something else, but the Germans were already turning away from him. He kept moving, telling everyone he could find: leave the beach, go inland, get somewhere high. Some people packed up their stuff without a word and did what he said. Some ignored him or feigned incomprehension. Some, the smart ones, took off to other parts of the beach and began to spread the word.

      A