Acts Of Nature Part 7

"You say so, captain," Wayne said, and when Buck hit the ignition and the big engine caught and the noise ripped into the heavy air, the boys looked at each other and grinned and pa.s.sed the bottle between them. They'd already opened the Van Gogh vodka that they'd lifted from the kitchen and found they liked the espresso flavor.

SEVENTEEN.

I was in the water, waist deep, sloshing around at the edges of the raised cabin deck, one eye peeking up under the two-by- eight stringers for some sign of a trap door, the other watching for Wally.

I had climbed back up on top of the structure when it became apparent that there was no way I was getting into the mysterious room from the inside. I'd already dismantled part of the metal frame of the other bed next to Sherry, an old prison trick inmates pulled to salvage strong enough chunks of metal to shave sharp and make killer shivs out of. I used one of the unsharpened chunks as a pry tool but it had been useless against the frame of the security door and after I worked for an hour to peel back a piece of baseboard and then chopped at the low corner of the wall, I gave up.

Outside, I even climbed back up on the roof where I'd found access before and scoured the panels for a ceiling entry to the other room. I found a vent that might have been for recirculated air. And a damaged edge I was able to peek into, only to find a secondary sheath over the room, some kind of fiberboard or waterproof polymer that was too tough to gouge through.

"You look too frustrated, Max," Sherry had said when I gave up and rejoined her. The aspirin from the medical kit had brought her fever down some. Her eyes were more alert. I'd opened a can of sliced peaches I'd found warm in the small refrigerator and used my fingers to fish out individual pieces and feed them into her mouth. The sugar and solid food had helped.

"Those are just my normal age lines," I said, tightening my face to make the look more severe. "You certainly know that by now."

Again the light grin came to her face, accented by the glistening smear of peach juice on her lips.

"No. That look is you grinding on something. The other is frustration at something that's beating you."

"OK," I admitted. "There's got to be a way into that f.u.c.king room."

I told her what I'd found through the roof, the change in materials that seemed only to surround that half of the building.

"Why would someone build one part of the cabin one way and the other so much more fortified?"

"Fortified or waterproof?" Sherry said.

"Both," I said. I had traced the electrical fines from the small refrigerator and a waterline from the sink. Both went through the floorboards in the direction of the other room. I'd taken another trip outside in search of a generator room I might have missed. Nothing. The electrical supply was in the other room as well.

"High-tech lock, waterproofed and fortified. There's something valuable inside," she said.

"Out here, in the middle of nowhere?" I tossed it back to her.

"Drug drop. Distribution point?"

"Cop thinking," I said, with a cynical twinge.

"Duh, yeah."

I might have thought of it myself. But it had been a while since I'd worked narcotics and only in the streets of South Philadelphia, never in the swamp.

"OK. It's isolated enough for drop-offs, but the only way you distribute from here is by airboat," I said. "Only way quick enough."

"Too piecemeal and too expensive," she said and ate more of the peaches.

I stared off toward the end of the bed, like I was thinking, but really looking at her toes, for discoloration. Though her mind was sharper and her mood higher with the food and rest, we were going to have to get her out of here soon. The chances of someone coming by or looking for us were minimal. Even if Billy started looking for me, which he would, or if Sherry's supervisors got anxious, would there be anyone dispatched to my river shack? And when they found it, if it were still standing, would they make a jump in reasoning that I'd been stupid enough to take us somewhere by boat? It could be days and we sure as h.e.l.l didn't have days. I didn't see a way to patch my canoe with the materials we had. Whatever was in that room might be our savior if we were to have one.

"The Fisher Body plant in Lansing, Michigan," Sherry said. Her tone turned my head because she did not seem to be directing the odd and disconnected words to me but to the wall. She was looking off to a memory.

"I must have still been a teenager. It was one of those stories in the news that for the first time took my attention away from that bulls.h.i.t in high school."

I knew Sherry had grown up in Michigan, the daughter of blue-collar parents, working cla.s.s in an area and in a time where working cla.s.s was a prideful tide.

"I remember it because I was scared to death back then of being stuck somewhere without air. Maybe I'd been swimming somewhere in the lake and lost my breath or maybe my brothers had locked me in the closet or something when I was little. But I was always scared back then that I would be trapped somewhere without air."

I looked closely into her face, then straight into her eyes, checking for the dilation of her pupils. If she was going into some kind of hallucination from the trauma, I might have to just patch the canoe as best I could and make a run for it. I took her hand in mine.

"There's plenty of air, Sherry. We're OK. All right? You can breath here, baby."

Her eyes reacted and she shifted them to me.

"Oh, s.h.i.t. No, I'm sorry, Max," she said. "I'm not flipping out on you. No. I was thinking of an old story, back in my hometown.

"There was this accident at the auto factory. There were these three workers, guys in the paint department on the line at Fisher Body where all the cars for GM were a.s.sembled. These guys were doing cleanup in one of these deep pits where they dipped the cars for rust-proofing or something. They were pits that were sealed and waterproof. Maybe it was some kind of maintenance that they had to go down in these things and clean up excess paint or something.

"But whatever they were using, maybe some new solvent or something to break down the paint, they got themselves surrounded in a cloud of the stuff. They couldn't breath and started choking and collapsed and when the supervisor realized what was happening, he went down the ladder to help them and he was overcome by the stuff too. By the time someone got an oxygen mask on to go down for them, they were all dead."

She was staring at the wall again, remembering. I gave her time. Sherry is not someone you ask too early what the h.e.l.l her point is.

"After that, the company installed trapdoors in all the sealed pits, a way to get out if something happened, a quick- release porthole in the floor that someone could get out of if they fell in or got caught down there."

Again, I got caught looking at her eyes, like I had many times since I'd met her, amazed.

"I'll go down under the room and check it out," I said. "Good idea," Sherry said and smiled, a real smile this time, and not just a grin.

I was in the water, waist deep, watching for Wally, looking for a seam, a handle, any indication of a trapdoor. I knew the stringers below were probably creosote-soaked timber. Out here the wood would rot in no time in the constant moisture even if it was up above water level. I found the timbers green and slick with algae. The odor was ripe in the way a compost pit would be if you stuck your nose into it. The fingers of my left hand were curled up over the edge of the deck and I was using the flashlight in my right to beam the s.p.a.ces between the stringers. My feet were squishing in muck and it took effort to pull each one up out of the suction and take a step down the line. My ears were tuned to any stirring in the nearby gra.s.ses, any grunt from a large predator with a bad eye. I worked my way all the way around three sides before the light caught a raised anomaly in the otherwise black-green underbelly of the cabin. Spotting down parallel stringers there was an edge, barely an inch difference, protruding from the flat board surface. It was about eight feet in from where I stood.

I had to let go of the deck and it felt peculiar to me to hesitate doing so. I also had to dip deeper into the water, to my chest, to get my head down under the first stringer, and I thought twice about that movement also. There was something spooking me about being deeper in the dark murk that had not been there before. I shook it off and, keeping the flashlight above water, reached for the next handhold while pulling my boot out of another sucking hole. From close up, the edge I'd spotted became a square, positioned between two stringers. I sc.r.a.ped at it with the edge of the flashlight. Metal. Again of the stainless variety to resist erosion or rust. In the shadow of the wood beam I found the handle, a lever really, of the kind you see in submarine movies or on oven kilns. There was no key entrance on the rounded end, an indication that it did not lock from this side. I twisted and it moved, slightly. I put some muscle into it and heard the internal cylinder slide. It would make sense of course that an escape hatch would not be locked to keep rescuers at bay, if that was indeed what it was for. When I heard the click of metal snapping loose of metal, I pressed up on the door. Stuck. I had to reposition my feet so I could get some leverage and tried again, this time with my forearm, and I heard the sucking noise of a seal being broken and the door finally gave way. Once open, the smell of sweet musty air poured down over my head and face, air that had not mingled with its outside brother in a very long time.

EIGHTEEN.

Harmon was thinking about some half-baked Hollywood movie scene of the dedicated hero searching for his drunkard partner when he parked behind the beachfront just west of A1A and started up the sidewalk to the infamous Elbo Room. He knew Squires would be there. He was always there when the weather got rough. The hurricane had left a feel of some dusty Mexican town in its wake. The cyclical wind had come off the ocean in the second half of the storm and sand from the beach was drifted up against the curbs and around the doorways and sheets of it were still swirling in the streets. Later the maintenance guys for the city would be shoveling it back up over the low retaining wall but now they were too busy shoving splintered trees off the roadways and a.s.sisting emergency power crews with downed utility poles. It had been a bit of an adventure driving through his neighborhood and then making the circuitous route all the way to Las Olas Boulevard and east to the ocean. He'd been redirected by roadblocks three times and twice had to use side streets to get there. Luckily, they'd closed the bridges over the Intracoastal Waterway in the down position, not that anyone was fool enough to move their boats, though you always heard of some idiot who was racing for the dock or had been torn off his anchorage during the blow.

At the corner of A1A and Las Olas there were only a handful of people on this, one of the most historic gathering spots in South Florida. The ocean breeze was still kicking. A long piece of ripped canvas awning was flapping from its frame on the second floor somewhere. The neon that normally illuminated the bikini mannequins and beer sales posters and displays of cheap sungla.s.ses in the storefronts had gone dark. But as Harmon rounded the corner he could hear the strains of Stevie Ray Vaughan playing "Boot Hill" on the juke and he knew finding Squires was going to be a snap.

Unlike in the movie version, he did not expect the big man to be pa.s.sed out on some small table in the corner and have to pick up his head by a clutch of hair a la some Clint Eastwood spaghetti western. He was not disappointed. Squires was sitting at the bar, his back against the countertop, his feet propped up on a second stool, and a bottle of Arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.d Ale in his hand. From this familiar perch Squires could see the ocean and the sidewalks. On good days he could watch the sun dollop on the surf and the girls pa.s.s by. On bad ones he could spot the hustlers and bill collectors and trouble coming. He cut his eyes immediately to the south when Harmon stepped inside. He grunted and took another sip of beer, knowing what kind of day this was going to be.

"s.h.i.t," Squires said.

"Yeah," Harmon said, hitching his hip up onto the empty stool beside his partner. "You got that right."

"Nothing good brings you out on a beautiful day like this. Where the h.e.l.l we goin' now, boss, and don't tell me out into the Gulf, man."

"Would have called but all of the cell towers are down," Harmon said. "And I won't tell you the Gulf."

"Have a beer then," Squires said and raised two fingers to the bartender who had not made a move toward their end even though there was only one other patron in the place.

"Elma!" Squires said. "From my private stock, please."

The bartender, an elderly mainstay of the place named Elma Mclamb, put her crossword puzzle down and reached down under the counter to open the door of a small cooler and came out with two bottles of Arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.d. The beer came from a brewery in San Diego and was only distributed in a few of the western states but Squires had acquired a taste for its dark flavors while doing some work for the Marines and now had it shipped to the Elbo Room at his expense. If Harmon hadn't known the man better, he might have thought it was some kind of show-off status thing, but Squires was not a poseur. And he rarely shared the stuff.

The two men sipped from the bottles and looked out over the gray waters of the Atlantic to the horizon where the color of sky and ocean were so close one could hardly find the line that separated them. Harmon understood why his friend chose both this place and the view: neither changed. The Elbo Room had remained pretty much the same worn and welcoming place it had been since the 1960s when they filmed Where the Boys Are Where the Boys Are on this stretch of Fort Lauderdale beach. The two street-front walls of the tavern opened full to the sidewalks; the shutters that covered them were raised every morning at nine. Inside, the oval bar held the scars and chipped initials of three generations of teenagers emboldened with skittering hormones and the freedom of spring break. The city put a big damper on the annual craziness back in the 1990s when the yearly baccha.n.a.l got too big and rowdy for the changing times, but even the high-priced restaurants and the faux mall that sprouted up to replace the wet T-shirt bars and seaside novelty shops couldn't destroy the tradition. College kids still came. Locals looking to show off their cars and tans and energy still moved up and down the strand. The city couldn't change that any more than they could stop the tide from sliding up and down the beach. on this stretch of Fort Lauderdale beach. The two street-front walls of the tavern opened full to the sidewalks; the shutters that covered them were raised every morning at nine. Inside, the oval bar held the scars and chipped initials of three generations of teenagers emboldened with skittering hormones and the freedom of spring break. The city put a big damper on the annual craziness back in the 1990s when the yearly baccha.n.a.l got too big and rowdy for the changing times, but even the high-priced restaurants and the faux mall that sprouted up to replace the wet T-shirt bars and seaside novelty shops couldn't destroy the tradition. College kids still came. Locals looking to show off their cars and tans and energy still moved up and down the strand. The city couldn't change that any more than they could stop the tide from sliding up and down the beach.

Squires liked the constancy, in fact got surly when things changed.

"You ride out the storm here?" Harmon finally asked.

"Upstairs," said Squires. "They closed the shutters down here so we went up on the balcony. Better view anyway."

"You guys are nuts."

"Yeah. But it was cool. The only time these days when you can look out to the east and not see any freighter or container ship lights out there waiting to get into the port," Squires said. "And when the power went out, man, it was blackness all up and down the coast. Reminded me of jumping out the back of a C-one-thirty at twenty thousand feet over the desert. Very cool."

"If you say so, big man," Harmon said.

Squires took another long pull on his beer.

"So where we goin'?"

"Local job," Harmon answered. "Boss wants us to catch a helicopter ride out over the Everglades. Says they've got some kind of a research facility out there that needs a storm a.s.sessment done. In his words: 'Make sure it's not exposed.'"

Squires gave him a questioning eye.

"Didn't know we had a facility a facility out in the Glades." out in the Glades."

"Me neither. But the man seemed pretty concerned, you know, that tick in his voice that means somebody higher up the ladder is the one asking."

"Yeah. Everybody's got someone up the line," Squires said, finishing the beer. "So when we going?"

"The pilot says he's got to get his ship back out of the hangar after they broke it down and secured it for the storm. We're looking at tomorrow morning, earliest," Harmon said. "It's out at the regular site at Executive Airport. You can get out there all right?"

Squires nodded.

"We taking anything special?"

"This place is supposed to be empty. So just pack your standard inspection gear. Shouldn't take us more than a few hours. You'll be back for happy hour."

"Sounds like a good day to me," Squires said and again raised his hand. "Elma!"

NINETEEN.

By the time they got to their next target, the boys were drunk.

They'd been sitting up behind Buck in the wind and noise of the airboat pa.s.sing the Van Gogh vodka back and forth and giggling. Buck had his earplugs in and never bothered looking around. He was focused on the GPS coordinates and planning out in his head how he was going to unload the guns they'd stolen from the last place. It was a nice haul overall, but instead of maybe calling it a day and figuring they'd done well for themselves, Buck just kept pushing on, a little giddy himself over how well this idea was all coming out. They hadn't seen another boater or even an airplane since they'd left the docks. It was like one of those neutron bombs had gone off, killing everything and leaving the world just for their picking. h.e.l.l, they had two or three thousand dollars worth of stuff on board already. The guns themselves should go for two if that greaser Bobby didn't try to rip him off. Buck knew that the middleman had the advantage of knowing how much he hated dealing with firearms. f.u.c.ker would lowball him and Buck would end up taking less than he should just to get rid of the stuff. The guns made him nervous just thinking about them stacked below. But the tenseness wasn't strong enough to throw him off his euphoria. Christ, if they picked up another score like the last one, maybe he'd be on his way to Hendry County in a couple of weeks.

When they'd gotten within a mile of the next fishing camp, Buck spotted the hard edges of a building out on the gray horizon and pointed to it with one hand, not knowing that his crew behind him was more interested in the vodka and its effect on their fuddled equilibrium than on his navigation. He wove his way through some low sawgra.s.s and stayed out on the gaps of open water as best he could while maintaining a fairly straight trajectory toward the camp. As before, he started running a scenario through his head just in case they pulled up to some owner or even a local checking out the damages. Rescuers, he'd decided. We're just out here looking to see if anyone needed help, was possibly stranded or hurt. Good Samaritans was what they were.

But as he steered closer, coming in now from the northwest, Buck could see that no cover story was going to be necessary. The hard angles he'd seen from a distance were now forming up to be one single wall, the only one that remained standing. The rest of the place was trashed. The neutron bomb. No survivors.

Buck pulled back the throttle and turned around, catching his a.s.sistants playing some kind of preteen thumb-wrestling game and smiling like a couple of idiots out at the forensics unit for the criminally insane at Raiford. I got a real criminal enterprise going here, Buck thought, my own crew of Luca Brasi. "Don Corleone, I come to you on this da day of your daughter's wedding..."

He thought about the G.o.dfather's leg man, his eyes popping out of his head with a garrote around his neck. He could squeeze these punks. But then who's gonna do the heavy lifting? He swung the airboat up to the partial dock and cut the engines, and the cessation of movement gained the attention of the boys, who, it was now obvious, were drunk as skunks. Buck reached between them and snagged the near-empty vodka bottle and flipped it over his shoulder into the water.

"Find what you can find and let's get out of here," he said and the boys turned their faces away like eight-year-olds who got caught jerking off. Buck jumped down onto the deck and headed for the smashed outbuildings and leaving the useless pantry and kitchen wall to the boys.

"f.u.c.k him," said Marcus, only loud enough for Wayne to hear. "Guy could ruin a good wet dream, know what I mean?"

Wayne looked at him with a blank stare.

"No, I guess you wouldn't, Stumpy," Marcus said and stepped away quickly, laughing, but also avoiding Wayne's reach.

"Ain't nothing worth a s.h.i.t in this mess anyway, 'less you're looking for a nice fish trophy," he said, bending to pick up a fibergla.s.s bonefish that lay crippled with a broken tail on the floor, its long wooden mantel missing.

Wayne poked around in the stuffing and swirl of ripped curtains and cracked debris, kicking at the piles with little interest and stumbling a bit from both the effect of the alcohol and the odd sense of still being on a boat. The missing walls caused the edges of the plank foundation to meld with the water and the open horizon and he was caught by the feeling he might step off the edge of the world if he wasn't careful. He tried to focus on something close and thought it was way weird that the refrigerator and the kitchen wall were still standing. It was like old lady Morrison's house when the wrecking crew came to sc.r.a.pe it off the plot where they built the new marina in Chokoloskee. They were kids and watched in fascination as the big-clawed backhoe chewed through the roof and pulled down the walls of a place they'd pa.s.sed on their bikes a thousand times. No one their age had ever lived there, only the old woman whose husband had died years before. Then one day the ambulance came and they carted Ms. Morrison out on a stretcher and the place stood dark and empty for years. They might have gotten a glimpse inside when they went trick-or- treating or something as children, but when the place was laid bare by the machinery, they watched in fascination as the pink-papered walls and the porcelain sinks and even an old four-poster bed got sc.r.a.ped into a pile and then loaded into a dump truck. When the claw scooped up the toilet all the kids laughed but only for a second, then they rode on, down to the docks where they could fish and skip stones out onto the bay and do the dumba.s.s things you did when you were young without a thought about your own house being sc.r.a.ped off the face of the earth by a storm or by a f.u.c.king backhoe.

"Hey, dude! Check this out."

Wayne stepped over a window frame of shattered gla.s.s and then nearly stepped into a hole that had been busted through the floorboards. He joined Marcus and looked down into a pile of rags.

"Blood, man," Marcus said, pointing down at a crumpled sheet. They'd done enough hunting to recognize the dark, red-brown stain. Wayne picked up a corner, sniffed the copper smell of blood and dropped it.

"d.a.m.n, dude. Don't have to be some bloodhound," Marcus said, pinching his face in disgust at first and then raising his eyebrows in that stupid grin. "Dawg."

"Somebody was here, man. And it wasn't that long ago neither," Wayne said. "Look at the empty water bottles and stuff." He pointed at the trash around the sheet and then opened the refrigerator door, found it empty. He bent down, sat on his heels, and with a slat of broken siding began poking at the pile. "You better go tell Buck to come look at this."

After Marcus turned away Wayne reached down and hooked the corner of a Velcro strap he'd spotted and pulled out a blue f.a.n.n.y pack, the kind runners and maybe a few fishermen might use on a flats boat. He'd waited for Marcus to go so he'd have a chance to scope it out for himself. He zipped open the pouch and inside rummaged through a wad of soggy tissue paper, a tube of lip balm, and a pair of slim sungla.s.ses. He raised the open pack to his nose and drew in its odor. A woman's. He liked the smell, and even the faintest aroma of perfume or body lotion, the thought of where it had been, aroused him. He breathed it again and opened his eyes and saw the glimmer of gold deep in the corner of the pouch. He reached in with his left hand and pinched it between his fingers and came out with the necklace. Even the dull sunlight picked up a facet in the stones and his eye picked up the spark. He untangled the gold chain and then draped the jewelry over his other hand, like he'd once seen a clerk in a store in Miami do. The two jewels, an opal and a diamond, lay against his palm, one reflecting, the other glowing, next to the folded skin flap where his thumb used to be. Wayne did not notice the juxtaposition of beauty and scar. He was caught instead by the thought of where those stones had last been lying, against white, smooth skin, perhaps nestled in a perfect cleavage. When he heard the steps of the others, he quickly palmed the necklace and shoved the f.a.n.n.y pack back under some debris.

"We were just going through stuff and found it laying there and figured, you know, you ought to see it," Marcus was saying.

Buck leaned down and took up the bloodied sheet in his hand, unfolded it and held it by two corners, examining one rough edge. He too brought it to his nose and breathed.

"You're right," he said to Marcus, who nodded as if it was a foregone conclusion. "Somebody probably out here in the storm and got injured. Looks like they sopped up some blood and then went and tore some strips off this, maybe for a bandage." He looked out on the site with a new eye.

"I found some gas cans under some other s.h.i.t in the outbuilding. It's high-test, which means airboat fuel."

"How do you know it ain't just regular boat motor gas?" Marcus said. "Or generator fuel."