Acts of Nature (7 page)

“Dumped but not dunked,” I said, trying to recover.

“You would have stayed with your ex if she hadn’t been moving up?” she finally said. Sherry knew my ex-wife was a former police sniper who was now a captain running the internal affairs division for the Philadelphia Police Department. We had met while working on the same SWAT team.

“Not once I realized she was just collecting the pelts of men on her way up the ranks.”

Sherry laughed out loud.

“Bitterness does not become you, Max,” she said, reaching over to run her fingertips over my brow. “Honestly, she was a better shot than you, right?”

“That’s probably true,” I said.

She had no comeback and instead went quiet again, to gather a recollection.

“Jimmy was a terrible marksman,” she said and I could tell from her eyes she was seeing her dead husband. “He was always asking for pointers, ways to pass the next qualifier without practicing. I don’t think he ever drew his weapon out on the streets in his entire career.”

I let her think her own thoughts for a second, knowing there was another beat just behind her lips.

“But?” I finally said.

“I always knew he would protect me,” she said, her eyes coming back to mine. “You know what I mean? Not just back- to-the-wall, guns drawn protection. But protect me. Then he died and I think I actually felt betrayed by that, like it was his fault. So I hardened up, Max. I decided I could take care of myself and say to hell with the rest of the world.”

She rolled over onto her back, her naked body completely exposed to the sky and the sun. I rolled to one elbow and stared at her, the bridge of her nose, the new sun freckles on her shoulder, and I found something missing. The necklace from her husband that she never took off was gone. I could have been presumptuous, could have hoped for the meaning of its absence. Instead I asked.

“Do you know your necklace is missing?”

Her eyes remained closed. She did not reach to her throat, or show surprise.

“Yes.”

I reached over to lace my fingers through hers and rolled to my back.

“You want me to protect you, Sherry?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Then I will.”

“And love me?”

“That,” I said, squeezing her fingers between mine, “goes without saying.”

I saw her smile from the corner of my eye.

“No, Max, it doesn’t go without saying. Not with me.”

I turned my head to look at her profile. Her smile stayed, like she’d caught me at something.

“I love you, Sherry,” I said.

This time she turned her head and looked into my face.

Again there were those brow lines like she wasn’t sure where the unusual words had come from. Then she smiled.

“You know something, Max?” she said. “I believe you do.”

For another couple of hours we lay there, she on her back, and I finally rolled over onto a towel and watched the western sky, studying the cloud pattern that was building out there on the horizon. It was not a typical Everglades weather construction. During the summer months the heat of the day causes millions of gallons of water from the surface of the exposed Glades to evaporate and rise and start to build a wall of towering cloud in the sky above it. But I could tell from the lessons of Billy Manchester—my attorney friend and his sometimes annoying habit of knowing everything—that the cloud I was watching in the distance was blowing in much too high for that weather pattern. These were the kind that came from elsewhere, pushed by forces that were not homegrown. But I was watching passively, assessing nothing. I was also listening to nothing, literally. Our surroundings had gone silent. No chirruping of the midday insects that fed in the heat. No bird call. In fact, the owl that had made it a practice to come out of its roof hole and had afforded us such viewing pleasure for the past two days seemed to be absent. I rolled onto my side again and looked out to the east where Wally the gator would normally have been sunning himself on the low mound of flattened sawgrass. He too was missing. I also made a mental note that I had not heard a distant engine of an airboat during the entire morning. But I only contemplated the absence of sound for a short few moments and then reminded myself how odd and luxurious such an occurrence was for people like us to enjoy. Sherry seemed to be asleep. We seemed totally alone.

EIGHT

Buck was sitting sideways on a bar stool at the Miccosukee Resort and Gaming casino, intermittently watching the storm coverage on television, his boys over near the blackjack tables having their fist-tapping jive finger-twisting bullshit conversation with their so-called contact, and the bright flicker-flash of the chrome bottle opener riding tight and warm in the slick leather back pocket of the bartender. The girl was most pleasing to him, but he couldn’t say for sure which one of his focal points might bring him the most trouble.

Even with the television sound off Buck could tell what was going on with the storm. Some guy at the other end of the bar had asked the girl to change the channel from some meaningless Marlins baseball game. Her manager would be pissed when and if he noticed. It probably wasn’t good policy to bring reality into a casino, especially the kind that would tell some folks to go home and start buying plywood instead of gambling chips. The meteorologists had given the storm a name a few days ago and it was some sort of rule this year that it had to be female so they dubbed her Simone. The weather guys had been tossing around a bunch of “Sloppy Simone” jokes until she formed up in strength and purpose and killed three people on Grand Cayman Island coming through the passage south of Cuba. Now she was turning into a real bitch. She was a category three with a hundred-twenty-mile-an- hour winds and they had one of those electronic tracking maps up on the screen now and the weather girl with the tight sweater and bleached blond hair was waving her delicate fingers like she was on some kind of game show. She was pointing at the red spots where the storm had been at midnight, six this morning, and now close to three in the afternoon. Simone had wiggled around off the Yucatán coast but then took a sudden right turn to the north and started huffing. They put one of those “cone of probability” graphics up there that put the landfall possibilities anywhere from Galveston to the Big Bend of central Florida, and Buck whispered to himself: “Shit, them guys over on the roulette table got better odds than that, eh?” The screen flashed a huge banner—“Storm Alert, Tracking Simone”—and then went to some commercial selling gas- powered generators. Buck got the bartender’s attention and then stared at her breasts while he ordered a double bourbon with a beer chaser.

“Looks like weather comin’,” he said to the girl’s eyes this time when she came back with his drinks, see if he could get her to stay down here. She was cute in a pale, thin kinda way.

“Can’t be any worse than last year,” she said. “Uh, Mr. Hall.”

Buck tensed up, just a notch. The bartender had used the name on the credit card Buck had passed to her for the first round and he was caught by surprise that she’d memorized it. Maybe that was company policy too. It had only been twenty minutes since he’d scrummed up against some older guy in a bar upstairs and lifted his wallet out of his polyester sport coat pocket. Buck had gone straight to the men’s room and locked himself inside a stall and lifted out fifty-three dollars in cash and two credit cards. The American Express card had the name Richard Hall stamped on it. Member since 1982. He’d dumped the wallet in the chrome trash receptacle and come downstairs.

“We’ll worry about her when she gets to Naples, sweetheart,” he said to the bartender, recovering. She gave him a nondescript tip of her chin and turned away. Fucking snowbird, he thought.

Buck’s parents and their parents before them had watched such storms approach for a century. Like most people born and raised in southwest Florida, they didn’t need some long- range predictions. Hell, these national weather forecast guys could track a fart coming off the African coast and watch it meander for three weeks across the Atlantic. Buck’s father had taught him to watch the weather on the horizon, note the slope of the Gulf water swells, pay attention to the birds and the lack of feeding fish.

“The animals know what the world is doing long before we do, son.”

Like most native Gladesmen, his daddy knew how to button down, tie off his boat, and strap down anything else that might fly off in a hundred-mile-an-hour gust or float away on an eight-foot storm tide and then just see what came. They’d dig out after. It was the way it was. Shit, look at New Orleans. Doppler weather my ass. If you could run, you ran. If you stayed, for whatever reason, you did the best you could and started again with whatever the storm left you. Survivors survived. The dead didn’t.

It had been the same way in prison. You fought if you could, scammed if you could, joined up if you could, took what you could. Buck had taken the fight route just because he could. He’d chosen brass knuckles instead of becoming someone’s hump. A broken eye socket, a few busted ribs, a couple of teeth in his bloody spit. He’d suffer the same any day. They ought to make a commercial: “Prison love—a beating only hurts for a while, being someone’s bitch lasts forever.”

Buck looked back over at the boys who were now feeding off each other’s enthusiasm for posturing and starting to look like some video off MTV. Marcus was doing his hand thing, fingers splayed out like they were unnaturally twisted or spastic and then turning his wrists and elbows to point with his index and little digits—at what? Who knew. He was dressed in that equally perplexing style with the oversized jeans that billowed out and hung down, but mysteriously only came to his mid-calf. He had on a Hawaiian shirt that actually didn’t look too bad to Buck even though it was too big and flying open to expose a T-shirt underneath with some bullshit rap message about “gettin’ drizzed, yo.”

Wayne was similarly outfitted but his shirt was some impossibly long T-shirt thing that came past his knees and nearly met the low cuffs of his goofy pants. Their friend who had joined them, and was supposedly a contact for the real dude with the information and locations of the Glades camps, was in the same getup except his long shirt was a Miami Heat jersey that Shaquille O’Neal himself could have worn, but it looked like a drape on this kid. All three of them were wearing stiff-brimmed baseball hats that had never been touched by the fingertips of baseball players. The contact had his lopped over to one side like he was hiding a deformed ear. The three of them were flicking their fingers and bopping around on the balls of their feet and blatantly staring at any female who walked past them and probably doing that
ppssst, ppsst
sound that caused some of the younger girls to turn their heads to them but made at least one woman flip them the finger. Buck figured the costuming was just another version of kids trying to belong, cliquing up with one another in an effort to be in with something instead of having to realize we’re really out here all alone in the world. He’d seen the same thing in prison, mostly split along racial lines. Buck had learned quickly that the world inside was no different than the world outside. No one else was going to jump in to save you when your ship went down. You the alone, boys.

Buck downed the rest of his drink and was about to go over to his misfits and find out what the deal was. He was fronting this operation with two hundred dollars and all he was getting was some punk floor show. He slid off the stool but froze when a guy in a casino uniform approached the group. It made him nervous and he eased back onto the bar stool and turned his face half away but kept his peripheral vision honed on them. It took him a second to notice the dustpan in the uniformed guy’s hand, a broom in the other. Minimum-wage sweeper boy. He tapped fists all around and then motioned the group back under an overhang. Smart, Buck thought. Kid probably knows where all the cameras are and knows that most of them are focused on the gaming tables and you don’t want to end up on some videotape upstairs. The uniform took something from his pocket and passed it to Wayne, who gave him a small roll of bills in return. A tap of the fists again and they went their separate ways. Wayne, who had been so instructed, looked over at Buck, put one finger to the side of his nose and flicked it. Jesus, Buck thought. Was that the kid’s idea of a high sign? Fucking scene from
The Sting.
Hell, that film was older than the kid was. Buck signaled the bartender for his check, signed it with Mr. Hall’s scribble, and headed for the parking lot.

“You cool?”

Wayne and Marcus looked at each other, shrugging their shoulders like they were afraid to offer up the wrong answer to Buck’s simple question.

“Uh, yeah,” Wayne finally said and both of them nodded their heads as they climbed into the pickup truck. Marcus took the backseat of the club cab.

Buck got behind the wheel dunking: Jesus H. I know these two haven’t been smoking pot for at least a couple of hours. How did two human minds get so dense? He let it go.

“He gave us six possibles,” Wayne said, taking a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolding it for Buck to see. “Here’s the GPS coordinates for each one so we could use that handheld unit and he said you can get out to the first one in a couple of hours.”

Buck started the truck engine and looked over at the paper. It was the lined type you used in school, the kind with the three-ring binder holes in it. The numbers made no sense to anyone unaware of global positioning systems, but most of the people in the Glades had been using the GPS to mark fishing grounds and crab trap placements for the last fifteen years. Out on the Gulf waters it had become almost essential, a quick and easy way to find your way on a sea of nothing but bare horizon once you were out beyond sight of land. Then they started miniaturizing the technology so everyone and their grandmother were using the thing now. They even started building them into high-priced cars and even cell phones so you could be a halfwit and still find your way around. It was the way of the world now, Buck thought. Easier and softer. Same with the people. That’s what made them such simple prey. They got fat and comfortable. Might as well have been asking for it.