Acts of Nature (6 page)

“Guns?” Buck asked. Just the vision of them made him nervous. He could well remember the tower guards at Avon Park, always looking down on the inmates in the yard, their faces dark in shadow but the long muzzles of their rifles in clear sight, intimidating, just daring someone to screw up big enough.

“Yeah,” Wayne stammered on. “Says one day he’s out there workin’ on a roof when the owner comes out with some friend and they got some new shotguns and they ask this guy does he want to take a look. Guy says sure and takes a break and the owner shows him this brand new sixteen-gauge over- an’under. He’s tellin’ ’em about shootin’ curlew back in the olden days and then these two, the owner an’ his friend, take turns firing out at some squawk that come flyin’ overhead. Guy says they can’t shoot for shit but them guns is real nice and he never seen ’em pack them back to the city when they leave for the next week or two.”

Buck moved forward, setting the front legs of the chair down with a
thunk.
He reached down and brought up another beer, opened it and pushed it across to Marcus. Now all three drank together. Guns, Buck thought. Bobby the Fence had just asked him last night if he’d had any guns to turn over. Much as Buck hated them, they were cash money these days.

“So does this friend of yours know where these fishing camps are?” he said, raising his eyebrows, being conspiratorial with them, which he knew got them going.

Wayne crossed his arms in front of him, turned his head in a playful way, like he was holding good cards in a game and wanted to savor the feeling for as long as he could without pissing Buck off.

“He got a map,” he finally said. “The boy ain’t got the balls to do a job himself. But he’ll sell us the map with all the locations. GPS and everything.”

At that moment a wind came up and pressed against Buck’s stilt house and a shutter rattled and swung open on the kitchen window. He got up without a word and went to the sink and looked out. He’d heard some of the boat captains talking about a ’cane stirrin’ up things south near Mexico. He’d have to check the forecast later. Right now he was concentrating on a possible score. The boys’ eyes followed him and Marcus gave Wayne a “what the fuck you doin’” look. Finally Buck came back and looped his leg over the back of the chair and sat back down.

“Tell it to me again, son.”

SIX

They sat in the office at noon, Harmon at his desk in the middle of the room, alternately watching the unlighted incoming lines on the phone and the TV mounted high in the front corner. He used the same cynical and disdainful eye for both. Squires was at the other desk behind him, against the back wall, his short-cropped, blond-gray hair poking out on occasion from behind his computer monitor. When Harmon cut his eyes to the left, he could see his partner’s hand cupped over the mouse on his desk like it was a cigarette you didn’t want to expose or a clump of something you spilled on your mother’s table linen and didn’t want her to see. Squires’s finger twitched and Harmon could hear the constant click of the machine but he knew the guy was just acting like he was working.

“Black eight on the red nine,” Harmon said over his shoulder.

Squires hesitated, clicked once and then said: “Fuck you, Harmon.”

Harmon grinned, knew the guy was playing solitaire back there and then reached across the desktop for yet another toothpick, and looked up over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses at the Weather Channel.

“This drag-ass hurricane is going to kick Cancún’s butt and then shoot right up the middle of the Gulf,” he said. The sound on the television was muted and the bubble-headed bleach blonde had obviously just finished her spiel and was silently staring at the black guy sharing afternoon anchor duties with her like she was paying attention to him. Harmon was waiting for the blonde to get up and go to the wall map to point out the various “computer forecast tracks” for this new storm, Hurricane Simone.

“You just watch. Crandall’s going to yank those rig monkeys off the platforms in Section C-seven and C-eight and we’ll be out there three days later going through their lockers and the rig bosses’ files trying to figure out what they’ve been screwing with for the last ten weeks,” Harmon said, glancing again at the phone like his boss was going to call the orders in any minute.

“Better they’re on leave than having those greasy Cajun fuckers on the deck giving you the voodoo eye while we’re doing inspections,” Squires said from behind his monitor. Harmon grinned. He was listening.

“You’re a racist, Squires. Admit it,” he said, just for something to do, poking at the man.

The glass door on their office said Martindale Security, stenciled on with some cheap paint by some cheap sign painter they’d found in the Hollywood, Florida, yellow pages. Martin Crandall, their biggest, hell, their only client these days, had ordered them to rent the space and label it up like a legitimate business. Probably had something to do with a tax write-off for the oil company but Harmon had liked the old days when he and Squires simply worked out of their homes or apartments, got a call from some contact, set up a meet at an obscure diner somewhere, and went over a plan. The only advantage now was the way things like the shooting in Venezuela seemed to disappear. When you do work for the corporations, matters like a few dead paramilitary smudges in the outback can disappear under the heap of more “important” and income-producing affairs. Harmon had rented this place because it was cheap and he could pocket the rest of the expense like he’d done with the extra forty grand he’d split with Squires from their latest trip. He knew Crandall would never ask for verification. It was a corner space in an old-style strip shopping center. The east wall was theirs alone. The west wall they shared with a Chinese restaurant and take-out place. Every time the Chang Emporium brought an exterminator in to spray, the cockroaches and monster-sized palmetto bugs would migrate through the cracks to Harmon’s side of the wall. The infestation had scared away two receptionists already but Harmon didn’t care. He just went ahead and pocketed her salary as well and never bothered with a replacement. It wasn’t as if they were busy.

“I ain’t racist. I like the black folk just fine,” Squires grumbled from the back. “Least they ain’t so stupid to bring a knife to a gunfight.”

Last time they’d been sent out to do a security check on one of GULFLO’s Gulf rigs he and Squires were doing a routine search of the worker’s lockers, pawing through their personal stuff, knowing from years of experience what to look for. These guys were never too creative when it came to hiding their dope—the meth that kept them going at the dangerous and boring-as-hell jobs they held, the coke that gave them something to dream about, and the downers to keep them level enough not to lose an arm in the drill works. One day Squires came up with a handful of some kind of animal teeth the size of a tiger’s all strung out on a leather cord.

“Pop the tops!” he’d told the big Cajun rigger whose foot- locker he was searching.

“Don’t know what you askin’, me?” the old roughneck said, staring into Squires’s eyes like a dare.

Squires had seen all manner of hiding places for the worker’s chemical stashes including the one like this where they hollowed out the bones they used as jewelry, filled them with cocaine, and then capped them with a silver attachment that looped onto a chain or cord to form a kind of necklace.

“You carrying a little nose powder here, boy?” he said to the pair of unblinking, swamp green eyes.

The man just spat a string of tobacco juice to the side but when Squires selected the largest tooth on the string and started twisting at the clasp, the dark-skinned rigger raised his right hand as if to wipe the spittle from his chin and then in a blur of movement and a spin of elbow so quick it caught Harmon flat-footed, the man had stepped chest to chest with Squires and had a blade to his neck.

“You don’t touch a man’s prayer beads, you, less you preparin’ to bleed,” the rigger said through his clenched teeth, and Harmon was amazed to see the bundle of teeth back in its owner’s possession.

But there was no hint of fear in Squires’s face, even as the knife edge pressed hard against his jugular. The Cajun seemed only mildly baffled by the security man’s stoic response until everyone in the silent bunkhouse heard the muffled snick of a gun hammer being cocked and the rigger must have felt the hollowed pipe of an HK Mk23 special ops handgun muzzle being pressed up into the rounded notch at the bottom of his breastbone. During the man’s pirouette, Squires had come up with his own practiced sleight of hand.

“You might cut me, boy. But I’ll blow your heart through a hole out your back before you see a drop of my blood hit the floor,” Squires whispered.

They stood eye to eye for three seconds and an eternity before the rigger finally backed off.

“Ain’t no powder in these,” he said, holding the teeth out. “You look yourself. I ain’t no doper, me.”

Now Harmon was shaking his head at the memory, looking across the office at the back of Squires’s computer. They’d found plenty of stash that trip but not in the tiger teeth. Squires had been wrong on that one account, but almost before the incident was over it was if he’d already forgotten it. That was the beauty of the guy. No memory, no conscience.

Blessed are the forgetful, some old philosopher once said, for they get the better even of their blunders. It was a way of living that suited warriors and lawyers, and Harmon could never understand it.

“You gonna get that, boss,” Squires said, snapping Harmon out of his flashback. “Line two?”

Harmon looked down at the blinking light on the phone. They’d disabled the chirping noise of incoming calls the day the last receptionist left. Only the boss ever called on line two. It had to be Crandall. He would be alerting them to get ready to travel after the storm passed. But Harmon knew from experience the man wouldn’t say where until the day they left. He picked up the phone and swiveled his chair away from Squires.

“Harmon,” he answered. “Yeah. Sure. Yeah. We’ll be ready. Have we ever not been ready?”

SEVEN

“What are we going to do, Max?”

I hear the question, but with only half of my attention. I thought Sherry had been reading, her back settled in the bow of the canoe, ankles crossed on top of the cooler, which held the last of the beer, a book of Ted Kooser’s poems I’d lent her in front of her face. I was at the other end, a hand line dropped over the side, daydreaming. Like the gentleman that I am, I’d kept the eastern sun to Sherry’s back and pulled down the brim of my baseball cap, the one stitched across the front with the reversed script letters that perplexed most people unless they figured out that it was simply “FOCUS” spelled mirror backward. After three days my eyes were getting used to the starburst glitter of sun off the slow-moving water.

“Huh?” I said, full of elocution.

“What are we going to do about us? When we get back, I mean, to civilization?”

It hadn’t all been small talk since we started this odd vacation, but tackling the future and the meaning of our relationship was not something we’d poked at. I’d decided the reason was because we were both, fundamentally, cops. We’d been trained, I suppose, to be more reticent than most people. Trained also, I believed, to be more careful with the people we met, be they citizens or suspects or potential trouble or all three at once. If you ever sat down in a diner with a few of us you would immediately feel it as an outsider. We’re trained to evaluate you, give nothing up until we’ve got some kind of take on where you’re coming from. It’s a broad ripple effect of the way we’re taught to approach a driver during a car stop when we’re all rookies: search the mirrors, look for hand movement, assess with your gut and let it tell you if you should have your own hand on the butt of your sidearm.

I had been on the force in Philadelphia for more than a decade. I’d grown up with the cop rules and what they brought home with them and had seen it turn my parents’ relationship ugly and violent. But I had also known my grandparents to be a loving and respectful couple despite the lifestyle.

Sherry and I had been dancing for a couple of years now. Granted, some of it had been very close dancing, but like the school chaperone, an emotional hand had always been measuring a space between us.

“Hike you, Max.”

It wasn’t the words that got my attention. Sherry’s eyes always had this ability to subtly change color depending on her mood—a green when she was loose and happy, but decidedly gray when she was being fierce and suspicious. I was trying to see them now, in the shade of midmorning sun.

“I think you might have said that last night, when it was my turn to look at the stars,” I said, stalling.

I could see her narrow those eyes, but still couldn’t pick up the color.

“I want you to move in with me, into the house in Fort Lauderdale. But I don’t want to ask.”

It was a statement. Clear and matter-of-fact, but I knew how much it had taken for her to let the words out of her mouth. I was trying not to overthink what my response should be. It has always been my burden, rolling questions and answers around in my head, probing them, searching for the rough edges, grinding the sharp spots, the dangerous possibilities, and trying to smooth them. Maybe she sensed my hesitation because I could see her face begin to change, like she was going to take back the invitation. Before she could say anything I leaned forward and gripped either side of the canoe gunwales and rocked forward and stepped to her. Now her look turned to a wary smile but before she could come out with anything I led with my mouth and kissed her fully on the lips, holding my body weight above her like doing a push-up.

“Oh, is that an answer, Max?” she said. “Because it’s very nice, but…” I know she did it. Because it sure as hell wasn’t me who suddenly threw my weight to the starboard side of the canoe causing gravity to take hold and barrel-rolling the whole boat and flipping us both into the water.

Later we spread out our soaked clothes on the Snows’ isolated deck and lay in the sun naked.

“I’ve never been dunked by a woman before,” I said into the sky and then immediately wondered where the words had come from. Sherry cut a look at me, a slight wrinkle in her brow. She too was caught by the oddity of the revelation.