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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.
