Category five, p.2
Category Five, page 2
“Six, yes.”
“I didn’t plan for a third person, but there should be something in this bag that fits you.” He shoved the navy blue duffel toward her. “When you’re done, crawl into the bunks, cover yourselves.”
He moved quickly to the front of the van, slid his weapon under the seat, and went through a routine he had rehearsed so many times he could do it in his sleep if he had to. Glove compartment: out came the electric razor, a pillowcase. He spread the pillowcase across his thighs, set the razor on the dashboard, reached under the passenger seat. Baseball cap, clean shirt. He folded his ponytail, hiding it under the cap, put on the shirt, brought out the glasses tucked in the pocket, slipped them on.
From between the seats, he brought out a bag of toys: Legos, stuffed animals, alphabet blocks, a couple of Dr. Seuss books—and dumped them in the passenger seat. He ran the razor over his face, shaving off his beard as he backed out of the space and started down the ramp. The hair fell onto the pillowcase and when he was finished, he would fold it up and stick it under the seat.
Franklin turned right out of the garage, away from the fire, the sirens, the stink, and headed west through downtown. Keep to the speed limit. You are water.You have been poured into a vessel called camper and family man.
He rubbed his hand over his face, feeling the unfamiliar smoothness. He folded the pillowcase and dropped it between the seats. The razor went back into the glove compartment. We’re going to make it.
And then, up ahead, he saw two police cruisers, lights spinning. “Shit. They’re cops up here. Get in the bunks. Fast.” “We’re in,” Crystal said.
CD player, a little music. I am water. I am a camper.
As he approached the cruisers, one of the cops stepped out into the road and motioned with a flashlight for him to pull over. A pulse hammered at his temple. The sticker, Jesus, the sticker is still on the windshield.
He started to peel it off, but was afraid to make any sudden movements. He pulled to the curb, stopped. “Don’t move,” he said under his breath.
The cop swaggered over to the van. “License and registration, sir,” he said, and shone the flashlight into Franklin’s face.
He squinted and handed the requested items to the cop, who examined them in the beam of his flashlight, shone the light on the toys and stuffed animals in the seat, then leaned a bit too far into the window and shone the light in the back. “And you’re headed where, Mr. Carver?”
“I was trying to get back to the campground and apparently took a wrong turn. My son developed a fever and I had to find some children’s Tylenol.”
“Just a minute, please.”
The cop walked back to the cruiser with Franklin’s phony ID. He would run it and find that Jerome Carver was a safe driver who lived in Titusville, Florida, and worked at Cape Canaveral as an engineer. Married, one child, no arrests. An ordinary citizen.
Unless something goes wrong.
Franklin waited. Beads of perspiration erupted on his forehead, his palms. How fast could he pull the weapon out from under the seat? Not fast enough. “Ladies, keep the guns close. If I say shoot, start shooting.”
Minutes ticked by. He heard more sirens, could see the glow of the flames in the side mirror. The inside of his mouth had gone bone dry.
Now the cop started toward the van. I am water. I am a camper.
“Here you go, Mr. Carver,” the cop said, and handed him the ID. “You need to go east four blocks, turn onto the Old Post Road, and head north to the preserve. Stay clear of Vine.”
“Will do. Thanks very much.”
The cop stepped back, Franklin turned the key, and pulled out onto the road, his hands shaking.
PART ONE
THE WATCH
“A hurricane watch issued for your part of the coast indicates the possibility that you could experience hurricane conditions within 36 hours. This watch should trigger your family disaster plan…”
National Hurricane Center
Tips from the FEMA Website for a Hurricane Watch:
- Listen to a battery-operated radio or television for hurricane progress reports.
- Check emergency supplies.
- Fuel car.
- Bring in outdoor objects such as lawn furniture, toys, and garden tools and anchor objects that cannot be brought inside.
- Secure buildings by closing and boarding up windows.
- Remove outside antennas.
- Turn refrigerator and freezer to coldest settings.
- Store drinking water in clean bathtubs, jugs, bottles, and cooking utensils.
- Store valuables and personal papers in a waterproof container on the highest level of your home.
- Review evacuation plan.
- Moor boat securely or move it to a designated safe place. Use rope or chain to secure boat to trailer.
- Have a family disaster plan.
Chapter 1
“Ready or not, I guess.”
Governor Lawton Chiles, in the hours before
Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida
Her eyes snapped open, air rushed from her lungs. Mira Morales bolted upright in bed and looked wildly around the bedroom, certain that her nightmare had sprung into waking life with her. Intruders in the house, people with guns, Annie in danger.… But even as she thought this, the images began to fade, her frantic heartbeat slowed, her fear bled away.
She remained as she was for a few moments, drawing in the familiarity of the house around her. The night noises comforted her—the soft whispering of cool air through the vents, the rhythmic click of the ceiling fan as it turned, Sheppard’s snores beside her. Farther up the hall, the old pipes clattered in the walls as someone—either Annie or Nadine—used the bathroom. Probably Annie, she decided. Now that school was out for the summer, her teenage daughter kept erratic hours. Besides, if it were Nadine, Mira would hear the wheelchair’s rubber tires squeaking against the tile floors. She doubted that Nadine would get up at all tonight.
Her grandmother had been as exhausted as Mira when they finally had returned from the ER around nine last night. They had spent ten hours in the emergency room yesterday, more than half of it waiting for a doctor to see Nadine. It had taken Sheppard’s arrival to get things moving and then only because he’d flashed his FBI badge and made a stink about keeping an eighty-two-year-old woman with a broken foot waiting in pain for so long.
After X-rays and consultations among various physicians, it was decided that Nadine’s foot didn’t require surgery and they had put on a cast. But her personal doctor, worried that she might have sustained a concussion when she’d tumbled off a ladder at the bookstore, had ordered a CAT scan. Nadine, who had no tolerance for hospitals or doctors, had told him to forget it, she was fine and intended to go home. Her physician, accustomed to her stubbornness, had refused to allow her to leave until she gave him her word that she would stay in bed for two days, except to use the bathroom, and that she would use a wheelchair for two weeks. And, oh yes, he’d added, if she felt dizzy or nauseated, she would come in immediately for the CAT scan.
Mira suspected that Nadine, like a small child, had crossed her fingers when she’d agreed. Given her druthers, Nadine would be at the store tomorrow, working the register and teaching her yoga classes from her wheelchair.
Mira stretched out again and shut her eyes, her foot seeking the warm comfort of Sheppard’s toes or the soles of his feet. Any physical connection would do. She felt his toes and pressed the sole of her foot against his. Occasionally when she did this, she tuned in on a dream he was having, a surreal experience and something that never had happened with anyone before, not even Tom, the man to whom she’d been married years ago. But now nothing came to her.
Mira pulled her leg back to her side of the mattress. It was a king-size bed she and Sheppard had bought two months ago, when he finally had moved into the house. Neither of them was accustomed yet to sharing a bed with another person. Although they had been lovers for more than five years, this living together stuff was a new chapter that required a whole new lexicon, the creation of new habits and grooves. She certainly hadn’t gotten the hang of it yet and knew that Sheppard hadn’t either. The habits one learned in marriage, she thought, were unique to that relationship. Tom had been dead for eleven years, Sheppard’s marriage had been over longer than that, and now here they were, a couple in their forties who had grown accustomed to sleeping alone in smaller beds.
Sleep didn’t come—and she knew it was because a part of her feared that if she fell asleep the nightmare would pick up where it had left off. The intruders. Mira tried to conjure their faces, more details of the nightmare, tried to determine if it was just a bad dream or a warning of some kind. But her efforts didn’t yield anything more than Sheppard’s foot had. Frustrated, she threw off the sheet and got out of bed. She was hungry.
As she entered the kitchen, all three cats joined her, winding between her legs, meowing to be fed, let out, petted. Whiskers, the alpha male, a black and white tuxedo cat, belonged to Nadine. Powder, a white cat with spooky blue eyes, belonged to Sheppard, and the tabby, Tigerlily, was hers. Now here came Annie’s animal, Ricki, a gorgeous golden retriever with reddish gold fur who wagged her tail at the sight of the cats, her extended family. Mira fed everyone, fixed herself a plate of chilled papaya, slices of ice-cold mango, half of a toasted English muffin slathered in real butter, and cut up some sharp cheddar cheese to go on top.
Nadine, a vegetarian for sixty-some-odd years, disliked even the sight of cheese and eggs in the fridge, and nearly had a fit every time she saw the fish or chicken that Sheppard had bought. Both Annie and Mira had started eating fish again when Sheppard had moved in, one more grievance in the long list of things that Nadine held against him. But what the hell, Mira thought. Her vegan diet never had been a religion. She doubted she would ever go so far as to eat chicken, but after years of consuming vegetables, fruits, and soy, now cheese, eggs, and fish were a welcome change.
Mira carried her plate of goodies outside, sat down at the edge of the pool, and lowered her feet into the deliciously warm water. Stars were strewn across the glorious summer sky, but here and there, they vanished behind swiftly moving clouds. Down here on earth, that swiftness translated into a pleasantly warm and humid breeze that occasionally picked up, but not enough to blame it on Hurricane Danielle. In fact, until just this moment, she’d forgotten all about the hurricane.
The last she’d heard around five yesterday afternoon was that it had taken aim at southern Cuba and would miss the Keys and South Florida entirely. Good thing. She had enough to worry about without a hurricane too.
Her immediate concern was that one of the three authors scheduled to sign books tonight during the store’s solstice celebration had canceled due to a family emergency. She hoped to find a local author who could fill in on short notice, but wasn’t counting on it. She also had to cancel Nadine’s yoga classes for the next six to eight weeks—or find a substitute. But a substitute would cost twenty-five bucks an hour, two hundred a week, eight hundred a month, and that would be on top of Nadine’s regular salary. She just didn’t have the money now. Yet, without a sub, she would have to teach the classes herself and that meant she would have to make one of her part-time employees full-time or get Annie to fill in while she was doing the teaching.
Mira moved her feet through the warm water, set her empty plate on the worn brick that surrounded the pool. The water beckoned. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, slipped off her gym shorts and panties, and eased her body into the water. She swam two laps underwater, her eyes open, luxuriating in the silken feel of the warm water against her bare skin. Only one of the pool’s underwater lights was on and it cast intriguing shapes against the bottom of the pool. Now and then, the bubbles of her expelled breath floated upward, disturbing the symmetry of shadows and texture.
As she surfaced again at the shallow end, she was shocked to see Wayne Sheppard standing there, all six feet four of him buck naked. He was grinning. “Now this looks like a fine idea,” he said, and came down the steps and vanished into the water.
Mira watched him, his strokes as smooth and effortless as that of an Olympic swimmer, then she sank beneath the water and swam after him. They met up at the deep end, where a ledge jutted out, and sat there under the stars.
“You think Nadine has a concussion?” he asked.
He was asking for her psychic opinion, not her medical one. Sheppard knew that she was empathic, but apparently didn’t connect that with hospitals. He couldn’t imagine what it was like for her to open herself psychically in a place where pain was the standard by which everything else was judged.
When Nadine had broken her hip more than five years ago, Mira had tried to read her in the ER while they had been waiting to see a doctor and she’d been assaulted by the symptoms of everyone around her. Aches, sniffles, coughs, fever, then pain and agony. The man in the cubicle next to Nadine that night had had pneumonia and it was those symptoms Mira ultimately had taken on, the fever, a horrid rattling in her chest, a terrible lethargy in her limbs. The symptoms had been real enough so that she too nearly had ended up in the ER as a patient.
“I don’t know. I didn’t try to read her.”
He nodded, but she didn’t know if that meant that he understood why she hadn’t tried or if the nod was merely a polite response. Pearls of water dripped from his khaki-colored beard, from the tips of his eyelashes. “So read me,” he said, and slipped his arms around her and nuzzled her ear.
He planted soft, cool kisses against her neck, the curve of her chin, her eyelids, her mouth. He was the only man she’d ever known who regularly kissed her eyelids, sometimes with his mouth, sometimes with his eyelashes—the butterfly kiss, he called it. Mira relaxed in his arms, her mouth opening against his, her blood quickening with desire despite her fatigue, despite the events of the day, despite everything.
And suddenly they were groping at each other in the water, on the jutting ledge. Her hunger for him often crashed over her at strange, inopportune times—in the car, the garage, the garden behind her house, in her bookstore, the grocery store, and in places like this, a private space where, any moment now, Annie might step out the porch door and see them.
His hand slipped between her thighs and Mira moved her hips against the delicious pressure. “Annie may walk out here,” she murmured, her mouth against his neck, her hips moving, sliding.
“She’s asleep. I checked.”
His left hand came up under her chin, touching it, tilting her head back, exposing her neck to his mouth. Good thing they weren’t standing. Shameless groping was so much easier in the pool, where his height and gravity weren’t issues. Mira suddenly longed for their bed, that privacy, but she couldn’t stop herself, couldn’t stop the movement of her hips as his mouth devoured hers.
The heat. The exquisite pleasure. The sensation of the water surrounding them, licking at their bodies. Her fingers flexed against his back, nails digging into his skin. She groaned and arched her back, begging him for more, more.
She heard the noises that she made, the groans, the murmurings, the animal sounds, but all of this seemed distant and unconnected to her. Then her body convulsed and he was inside her, impaling her against the edge of the swimming pool, moving fast and hard, to his own completion.
And when it was over, they clung to each other, the water holding and sustaining them, their breathing like that of marathon runners. Mira felt a rush of gratitude. He understood that Nadine was Mira’s last link to who she had become and an injury to Nadine was an injury to Mira, a reminder of just how deeply this woman had shaped her life, her abilities, the core of who she was. In the last ten or twelve hours, she had shut down emotionally and psychically, turned off, gone away, and Sheppard had understood that and brought her back.
Never mind that he was also one of the horniest men she’d ever known, that he could screw anywhere, any time, any place. Never mind that. This one, she knew, was about her, and her connection to Nadine. He had forced her to feel again.
Ricki popped out through the swinging animal door on the porch and stalked the edges of the pool, tail wagging. The dog figured it was all some sort of wonderful game, Mira and Sheppard in the swimming pool while the stars were out. The dog’s emotions instantly drew Mira in, a psychic trail that shadowed her and wasn’t so different from the trail that shadowed humans. And in this trail, Mira saw her daughter earlier in the evening, feeding Ricki dinner, then training her with too many dog treats. Do this, do that, jump through hoops for me and you get a big fat treat. No wonder Ricki had gained weight since she’d joined the family six months ago.
“You read Ricki,” Sheppard exclaimed, watching her. “Actually, I was reading Annie through her.”
“So what’d Annie do tonight while we were at the hospital?”
“Fed Ricki treats and talked to her buddies online and on the phone.”
“Mira, you’re the ultimate voyeur.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“That’s what it is.”
“You’re so full of shit, Shep.” She laughed when she said it and they looked at each other and laughed again, and swam together to the shallow end of the pool.
He got out first and offered Mira a towel. She wrapped it around herself, one of the huge beach towels that Sheppard had bought at a shop in downtown Tango, and then he wrapped a second towel around himself. “So what do you call it?” he asked as they settled into chairs at the side of the pool.
“Infringement.”
“On?”
“My consciousness. I didn’t go looking for information from a dog, Shep. It was just there.”
