Acts of Nature Read online

  “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.

  “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.