Night Tide - Hardboiled Detective Story - Readers Theater

MARLOWE: When it started, the tide was high on the San Pedro waterfront, and a hot-tempered kid had murder on his mind. But there was a knife at my throat, a beating under the piers, and a corpse on the beach before the tide went out again, and the kid was finally stopped. It all happened in San Pedro, the harbor of Los Angeles. The lights on the ships were fuzzy through the wet mist that creeps up out of the ocean every night, and I drove slowly, looking for the establishment of Mike Basso, my new client. One side of the crooked street was nothing but the smell and the sound of oily salt water sloshing through the pilings beneath the piers. And the other side was a tangle of warped dingy buildings equipped to satisfy the thirsts of reckless men who never get beyond the waterfront of any port. The foghorn out on the breakwater began to bellow as I parked near a U-shaped pier labeled Basso Docks, Private, and walked past the line of moored fishing boats to a squat two-story office. The bottom floor was dark, but the second floor had lights on. So I started up the steep wooden stairs and was halfway to the top when I caught the voices. One I'd already heard over the phone when I was hired. It was my client, Mike Basso.