Acts of Nature (16 page)

“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 bullshit in high school.”

I knew Sherry had grown up in Michigan, the daughter of blue-collar parents, working class in an area and in a time where working class 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, shit. 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 assembled. 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 hell 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 spaces 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 grasses, 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 scraped 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 assisting 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 sunglasses 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 passed out on some small table in the corner and have to pick up his head by a clutch of hair à 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 Bastard 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 pass 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.

“Shit,” 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 hell 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 Bastard. 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
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 bacchanal 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 assessment done. In his words: ‘Make sure it’s not exposed.’”

Squires gave him a questioning eye.

“Didn’t know we had
a facility
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 passing 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. Hell, 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. Fucker 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 sawgrass 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.