Hurricane Fever (2 page)

But the phone.

He thought about it for a second, and then shook his head. The young man moved from nervous anticipation to careful anger.

Roo’d spent over a week getting the new phone set up. A lot of tweaks and software to make sure he remained as invisible in a networked world as he could possibly imagine.

Most people who lost a phone, they could just redownload their settings when they logged in.

But Roo wasn’t most people. The exotic software that he preferred to use kept him safe, and it ran locally. And even then, every month he purchased a new phone. Started from scratch.

He’d just gotten it set up.

It was a pain in the ass to do it every month. He wasn’t going to do it again this week. Particularly not with a storm bearing down on him.

No. He shook his head again. “No. You can have everything but the phone.”

The mugger glanced left, then right, judged that shooting Roo would not be the smartest thing to do right away, then raised the gun to smack him with it.

He probably thought he would knock the phone out of him.

Instead, Roo walked forward.

There was no sweet ballet of moves, but a split second’s worth of damage. A knee to the groin, elbow to the nose, and a quick flip that put the youth on the ground, groaning.

Roo examined the gun he’d taken at the same time.

It was too light. No ammo.

He checked it to confirm his suspicion. Then bent over the young man. Roo tugged at the graphene paracord bracelet on his left hand. A few seconds and he could tie the kid up, leave the gun next to him, and send him right back to the place he’d probably just gotten out of. Toughen him up. Give him more chances to meet the real dangerous criminals there.

So Roo just picked up his wallet. The young man, hardly more than a kid, would come out of jail more of a menace than he’d go in. Roo knew that well enough.

He retrieved his groceries and wheeled them past the mugger, who now groaned and snorted blood over the concrete parking lot.

Roo grimaced and then stopped. Squatted next to him again.

“Hey, rudeboy?” Bloodshot eyes flickered open, scared. “Take a vacation,” Roo told him softly, and held all the bills in his wallet up in front of his face.

The eyes widened. Big bills. Roo liked having escape money on him. Always.

Roo pressed ten thousand in cash against the boy’s chest. “I have a price, though. You willing to hear me?”

His mugger nodded.

Roo let go of the cash. “I see you doing this again, I won’t be gentle. You’ll be an old man with a limp, understand?”

A few minutes later, with a lighter wallet and a faint frown on his face, Roo threw the empty gun into the ocean while standing at a marina dock just down the road. He shoved his hands in a tattered old jacket with an MV
Tellus
patch on it and stood silently for a moment.

A single, foreboding streak of dark clouds had crept onto the horizon over the green and gray hills of St. John, the next island east of St. Thomas and just a few miles across the sea. The glimmering white sand beaches were visible from here. But if Roo turned around and looked back, this side of St. Thomas would bristle with high rises and commercial activity. People weren’t on vacation here, they were living.

Time to get back to the boat, he thought, eyeing the clumpy slash of dark in the sky. Time to batten down.

*   *   *

At the Sand Dollar, an obnoxiously nautically themed bar attached to a waterfront hotel just by a set of docks, Roo eased his way down into a leathery Islay whiskey. He’d spent half the day storing stuff and checking over the catamaran one last time. From the corner of the polished wooden bar he squinted out over the muddy water of the harbor.

“You staying here for Makila?” Seneca asked, checking his glass as she moved past with a couple beers in hand. The short blond bartender was a bit of a feature attraction for half the regulars growing roots on the creaky wooden stools here. She had a touch of sunburn on her cheeks today. Probably spent the weekend on a beach in St. John with her roommates. She was halfway through college somewhere up in the U.S. and working here in the summer, still in the honeymoon period of living here when she spent every spare moment she could on a beach.

“Just waiting for Delroy to get out of school. Then we head down to Flamingo Bay.” She didn’t know where that was, he saw, and added, “It’s on the western tip of Water Island. Lots of mangroves in the inside part. We can tie up. It’s not a full hurricane, we should be okay.”

Seneca shook her head. “I can’t imagine living on a boat. Let alone staying on board for a storm.”

Roo shrugged, and she moved on.

“She likes you,” Tinker growled. A large Viking of a man in grease-resistant overalls and a giant black beard, he nudged Roo hard in the shoulder with an elbow.

“She likes everyone,” Roo muttered. “It’s her job. You get your engine fixed? We gonna see you down at Honeymoon?” Tinker was, in theory, a mechanic. He did odd jobs around the harbor for trade. Food, parts, whatever. He owned an ancient diesel-powered Grand Banks motor yacht. It was a behemoth; seventy feet long and powered by two fuel-hungry, notoriously grumpy motors, it would have been a palatial ship to a prior generation.

Nowadays, who the hell could afford the fuel to run the damn thing?

Not Tinker. He’d gotten a deal on the motorboat and gotten it to Red Hook. Limping in on faulty machinery and fumes from the Bahamas. He’d anchored the damn thing, and it’d been sitting in the harbor through two hurricane seasons. And Tinker had become a fixture at the bar. Another piece of human driftwood tossed up here in St. Thomas.

Tinker was working on converting the engines to take leftover oil from fryers. He had tanks of the shit fastened to his decks, collected from restaurants all around Red Hook. Every once in a while the engines would chug and belch out the smell of grease and fried food all over the harbor. And then they’d fall silent.

“No,” Tinker looked down. “Not this storm.” He’d have to shelter on land at a friend’s, wondering yet again if his home would be there in the morning. Or whether he’d find it dashed up against the shore somewhere.

“Sorry to hear it,” Roo said, genuinely. He nodded at Seneca. “Tinker’s next; on my tab, yeah?”

She nodded.

“Thanks, Roo. Another beer, Seneca.” Tinker tapped the counter. “Storm shouldn’t be too bad, right? Sixty-five miles an hour, they’re saying. Was thinking I might ride it out.”

Roo looked at the harbor, open to the ocean. St. John’s hills in the distance. A green ferry cut through the rolling waves, chugging its way over to the other island with a load of cars and people. “You don’t want to do that, Tinker.”

Tinker shrugged. “Got a lot of chain laid down for my anchor.”

“Let the ship ride by herself,” Roo counseled.

“Maybe,” Tinker said. “And afterwards, I’m going to try and get south for the season. Maybe I’ll see you in the Grenadines for once.”

Roo smiled at Tinker’s perennial optimism. “I’ll buy you drinks for a full week if I see you in Bequia,” he said with a smile, knowing full well he was never going to have to pay out on that bet.

Tinker raised his beer happily, Roo raised his glass, and they tinked them together.

“How’s Delroy?” Tinker asked. “He putting you in the bar today?”

Roo shook his head. “Just a long day prepping my boat. Delroy’s okay.” He glanced at the wooden-rimmed clock over the multicolored bottles in the back of the bar. Okay, but late again.

It would be tempting to go walk toward school to find him. But Roo killed that impulse. Delroy was almost ready to graduate. Nothing much he could do if the boy was ready for trouble.

And he’d kept out of trouble the last couple years well enough.

Roo had drifted away from the islands. Been recruited away from them and into to a different life. He’d had nothing to hold him down back then. No one but a brother who, understandably to Roo now, didn’t want to have anything to do with him.

When Roo came back to the Virgin Islands, he found not only the buildings changed, the people he’d known gone or moved on to other things, but found his brother had died. His wife as well.

Roo found his nephew Delroy stuck with a foster family doing their best. But Delroy was twisted up with anger and loneliness that they couldn’t handle. He’d been throwing in with a crowd as angry as he was, looking to define himself with trouble.

So Roo picked him up.

There wasn’t much trouble Delroy could imagine or cause that Roo hadn’t seen. And Roo needed a hobby in his new retirement.

He had made Delroy his hobby.

New school, new life. New family.

Delroy didn’t turn into a scholar. But he calmed down.

Roo set his empty glass on the bar. “Tinker, you give Delroy a ride out when he gets here? He let his cell phone go dead again. Or left it in his room again.”

“Yeah, man.”

*   *   *

Roo soaked up the sun as he hopped into a fifteen-foot-long semirigid inflatable dinghy. He untied from a cleat with a quick half flip of a wrist and tossed the painter down into the fiberglass bottom, then flicked the electric engine on.

Most of the boats with people living aboard them here in the harbor had already fled. Either south for the summer, to hide from hurricanes, or to hurricane holes—places naturally still and fetid, which meant very little storm surge. Tie your boat up in a spiderweb of ropes to mangroves and with anchors out on all points, and you would ride the storm just fine.

There were usually maybe fifty boats that had people living on board them anchored here. The other fifty or so were hobbyists. People who used boats like most people used boats: for fun, on weekends.

Halfway out to the
Spitfire II
Roo’s phone buzzed.

He ignored it for a second. Focused on weaving the dinghy around boats at anchor. The electric motor wasn’t as fast as the old gas-powered fifteen-horsepower motor that he used to roar around with. But he could get this one charged up via the ship’s solar power. Slow for cheap was good.

The phone buzzed again.

If that was Delroy, he was going to have to figure out how to hitch that ride with Tinker, as he had many times already. Or swim.

Roo had made Delroy do that once.

But they needed to get moving soon. Roo slowed the dinghy down and pulled out the phone. It was an incoming call. But with a blocked number.

That … was next to impossible. Not with the setup Roo had.

He licked his lips, suddenly nervous. Flicked at the screen to answer and put the phone up to his ear, trying to shield it from the occasional spray of saltwater.

“Hey old friend, it’s Zee,” said an utterly familiar voice. Roo smiled for a second at the blast from the past. He started to reply, but the voice continued quickly. “And if you’re getting this message from me, it means I’m dead.”

Roo killed the throttle. The dinghy stopped surging forward and just pointed into the waves, bobbing slowly.

“Listen, I’m sorry to lay some heavy shit on you, but I kinda need a favor,” the voice on the phone continued.

3

When Delroy clambered onto the back steps of the
Spitfire
’s left hull, backpack slung artfully under one arm, he looked suitably abashed. Tinker waved from his creaky wooden dinghy, kicked the motor into reverse, and headed back for shore to root back down at the Sand Dollar. His beard kicked about in the wind.

“I was…” Delroy started to excuse himself.

“Don’t matter,” Roo said. “Toss your bag in your cabin. We leaving.”

The
Spitfire II
had a traditional European catamaran look: a large organic cabin straddled the space between the two thin and rakish hulls. Large oval windows, tinted black, gave it its not-from-Earth look. It also created sunny open spaces in the main cabin, which had a dining table and comfortable settee. The galley, up against the side of the main cabin, featured granite-topped counters and a two-burner stove.

Roo walked from the rear cockpit’s semi-open area where he had greeted Delroy back into the main cabin. He crossed the galley and through a sliding door forward into a tiny second cockpit in the front of the catamaran.

The forward decks of the two hulls were accessible from here, as was the netting spread between them. Roo bounced across the netting with a practiced moon-walking step to the motorized windlass on the right hull.

He leaned against the stainless steel railing with a hand and kicked the manual brake on the motor off. He checked the anchor chain running through it, making sure the windlass’s wheels could catch the links and engage the chain.

Then he walked back through the main cabin to the rear cockpit. Delroy looked up from pulling his shoes off.

“I know, I know, you in a hurry to get to Honeymoon Bay,” Delroy said, still trying to apologize. “I promised I’d be back in time. But…”

It might have been that girl he was seeing. Or a friend. Or trouble. Roo didn’t care. He moved to climb up into a slightly raised area on the right of the cockpit where the wheel was mounted. He tapped one of the clear windows looking out over the top of the main cabin.

This was the nerve center of the thirty-seven-foot-long catamaran. The sheets from the sails all led into the tiny, raised control center. The sails were all roller furlinged; a press of a button unrolled the sails out. From here Roo could adjust the sails, steer, and power the catamaran.

The clear window booted up. Navigation equipment, weather reports, GPS, speed indicators, autopilot, and sail controls all flickered on.

Roo glanced at weather predictions, thinking, and then noticed Delroy staring at him. His nephew knew, by now, that something was up.

“Ain’t Honeymoon Bay we going for just yet,” Roo told Delroy.

The teenager frowned. “Where we going?”

“Tortola.”

Roo tapped the screen and the motorized anchor winch whined as it began to pull the anchor chain up.

“Tortola?” Delroy was confused. Three days of tracking Makila, planning for Makila, getting ready. Now Roo had changed it all up. Roo knew his nephew was wondering if his uncle had gone mad.