Category five, p.6
Category Five, page 6
“I blink. I… yeah, it was that fast. I blinked, Billy, and suddenly the dyke’s on the ground, shrieking, and Tia’s coming toward me, grinning like it’s all been a big fat joke, and she says, ‘You are one stupid white girl, getting yourself into a mess like this. C’mon, girl, I need to talk to you about what’s what around here.’ And that night, I hear the dyke is in the clinic, with bums on her hand.”
“From what?”
“From the shank. It was metal. I heard it got so hot that it burned the dyke.”
Franklin felt certain that he’d missed something here. Or that Crystal had. “How’d it get hot?”
“I don’t know.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Did she have matches? A lighter? Something flammable?”
“I don’t know. But anyway, after that, no one bothered me. Word got around that I was under Tia Lopez’s protection. She was in for a bunch of homicides and everyone knew it and even the dykes didn’t fuck with her. Then, in late January, Tia’s trial got switched to Tango and they transferred her out. A month later, I went, too.”
“Because?”
“I thought it was because they were renovating the jail. But Tia said she’d heard there’d been a payoff somewhere up the line.”
Franklin smiled to himself. Yes, indeed. A hefty payoff. But he wasn’t ready to tell her about any of that yet. When you were water, he thought, other people had to step into you to find out what you knew.
“When I got to Tango, there were a bunch of women in the jail, they were short on cells, so Tia and I became cell mates. After the other women left, we had cells right next to each other. We had it pretty good there. Granny Moses treated us well, brought us home-cooked food, makeup, free-world shampoo. Once a week, she’d bring in movies and we’d have a Hollywood fest in the main room. I… I couldn’t kick her out of the Hummer, Billy. I owe her a lot.”
Spoken like a true water person, he thought. “And who’d she kill?”
“Some guys who were beating up on their women.” “Where’d she learn to shoot?”
“I don’t know. But she’s good, isn’t she?”
She said this with a kind of enthusiastic admiration that worried Franklin. The last thing he needed was a third party tagging along. “She can’t stay here indefinitely, babe. I planned for enough food and supplies for the two of us for a month. A third person will cut that time too drastically. We’d have to leave Tango before it’s safe.”
“I think she knows that.”
Assume nothing: it was one of his rules. “I’ll give her some money, clothes, a disguise, whatever she needs. There’s also a Harley in the storage unit out back that she can have.”
“A Harley? Since when do you drive Harleys?”
“It was here when I bought this place. This property is old, really old. It dates back to the Civil War. I bought it from the last descendant of the slave who inherited it from the master who freed him. There’s even a tunnel that runs from the cellar into the storage unit. They used it to hide slaves and then ship them off the island.”
“Cool.”
Cool? What the hell kind of response was that? The history of the place wasn’t just cool, it awed Franklin.
“How long have you owned it?”
“Nearly six months.”
“And how much did it set us back?
“All total, the price for the cabin, springing you, supplies, all the rest of it came to about two million.” And that included payoffs, he thought, but didn’t say it.
“Two mil?” She bolted upright, her expression horrified. “But… but that leaves us just three million out of our take, Billy, and where the hell are we going to live? We’re going to have to buy another place? And how’re we going to sell this place? We killed… I don’t know how many people today and everyone’s going to be looking for us. Jesus, Jesus, I had no idea, no—”
“Hey, calm down.” He touched his hand to her bare back. “I’ve planned it out. I’ve got us a little place in the mountains in North Carolina. We can live a very long time on three million, babe. We’re doing fine. Really. But not if we have to pull a third person around with us. Come light, our pictures are going to be everywhere and no matter how you dress up your Amazon pal, she’s tough to miss because she’s so tall. If she stays, we’d have to split up and all of us go solo just to get off the island.”
She stabbed her fingers into her hair, shook her head, flopped back down. “I… I’ll say something to her. But we need to know about the hurricane first. What it’s doing, where it’s—”
“We’ll check the updates when we get up. Just make sure that she’s clear on the ground rules. A couple of days, then we give her cash and whatever else she needs. Okay? We agreed?”
“Yeah. Sure. Of course. But suppose the storm hits? What then?”
“She rides out the storm with us, then splits.”
“Does this place have hurricane shutters?”
“We’ll be fine.”
“Fine how? Are there shutters?”
This was something new, he thought. In the past, Crystal never had questioned him when he’d said something was fine, that he’d take care of it. She had trusted him. Did this mean she was no longer water?
“There’s a cellar, fully stocked.”
“They have cellars on this island? Wow.”
“The hills make it possible.”
“But a cellar might flood during a hurricane.”
“Doubtful. It’s in the garage.”
“My God, you’ve thought of everything.” And with that, Crystal rolled on top of him, covering his face with quick, soft kisses. Even though his body responded, a niggling doubt had crept into the back of his mind. Is she still water? Of course she was. Crystal would be water forever.
But what’s it mean if she isn’t?
Tia Lopez lay on a very long couch, on sweet-smelling free-world sheets, with a deliciously soft, free-world pillow under her head, and she was so deliriously happy she didn’t know if she could sleep. It had been nearly a year since she’d slept on anything except hard jail cots, in cells where the air was either too hot or too cold and it was either too noisy or too silent. In jail, the air always stank of something—sweat, bleach, puke, violent emotions.
But here, God, the living room windows were open and the summer breeze carried the scents of pine, jasmine, gardenias, melaleuca, the richness of wilderness. The complex sounds of darkness created the most perfect music. She wasn’t sure where, exactly, they were, but her senses told her it was deep in the wilderness preserve. On the Tango map in her head, the preserve was marked with a large red X. It was one of several spots she had selected as a possible sanctuary. She hadn’t figured that her escape would come about because of someone else, but now that it had, she needed a plan for what would happen next.
She couldn’t stay here. She liked Crystal well enough and it was because of her she was here at all. But in the end, she was a stupid white girl who’d gotten taken in by a good-looking prick with a slick line. Tia knew all about women like Crystal. Hell, she used to be one of them. She also knew a lot about men like Franklin, a guy with a reckless bravado borne of some deep insecurity that he didn’t measure up. Dipshits like him usually had major childhood issues that they never got rid of. They weren’t introspective. They couldn’t look far enough inside themselves to ask the questions that would free them. So they repeated the same dumb patterns over and over until the pattern crippled or killed them.
Her husband had been that kind of dipshit. And his pattern was abuse—mostly toward her. And for months, she had taken it, tolerated it, lived with it because she believed that she had incited it, had done or said something that had triggered it. But in the end, she had broken her pattern by smothering the bastard while he slept off a drunken stupor.
Franklin’s pattern, she thought, wasn’t abuse. It was power. When she’d seen that monster Hummer come crashing through the cell wall decked out in all its armor, she’d thought the island had been invaded by terrorists or by the U.S. military. That kind of power. Franklin was toxic. He was like sarin or anthrax, a shock-and-awe sort of guy.
Tia pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and told herself to sleep. She needed to sleep. Her body begged for it, her brain demanded it. But she had to find answers about tomorrow, the next day, the day after, about whether Danielle would hit or miss, about how she would get off this island. On the mainland, she had money, her books, people who would help her. On the mainland, she had made preparations for when she would no longer be Tia Lopez and would become someone else.
Now she struggled to remember what those preparations were, but a sweet, seductive darkness swam through her—and took her away.
The hums and songs of the wind chimes filled the air with a haunting, almost ethereal music that was, Mira thought, like listening to a spiritual rendition of something by Chopin or Mozart. Accompanying these glorious sounds was the song of the wind clicking branches and strumming leaves, an orchestra’s equivalent of oboes, small drums, castanets, tambourines.
Annie heard it, too, and they both paused on the sidewalk at the bookstore’s front door, and listened. Even Ricki, pursuing some stray scent along the ground, stopped as if understanding that something extraordinary was happening out in the yard. The music was as layered and complex as a language, yet held a simplicity that startled Mira.
“I’ve never heard the wind chimes quite like this,” Mira remarked.
“Me neither.” Annie took Mira’s hand. “Can you read the bookstore, Mom? To find out how it will do during the hurricane if we have to stay?”
She could try, yes, but if she saw the bookstore collapsing or flooding… well, what could she do to prevent it? The store had good hurricane shutters—but lay in a flood zone. Concrete block fared better than any wooden structure in a hurricane, but what good would concrete be if her stock got ruined by water? The store lay several blocks from the Tango pier on the flattest part of the island, which surely would suffer a storm surge if Danielle hit. Even though her deep beliefs prompted her to trust that her world would be safe during the hurricane if it struck, her left brain threw up countless wild, dire scenarios that marched through her with impunity as she unlocked the front door.
One World occupied a corner lot three blocks north of the Tango pier, an unassuming concrete block building with decorative blue wooden shutters on the front windows, a wonderful wooden porch that wrapped around three sides of the structure, and a front yard filled with gracious old trees.
The gumbo-limbos had endured fifty years or more of weather; the banyans were at least as old. The mango and grapefruit trees were younger, had shallow root systems, and probably wouldn’t make it through the storm. She didn’t expect the white picket fence or the porch to make it, either. But porches and fences could be rebuilt, trees could be replanted, yards could be replenished. The building would endure, she felt certain of that but could it survive a storm surge of fifteen or eighteen feet if Danielle made a direct hit?
And what about the restaurant next door? Mangrove Mama’s was strictly an island place—laid-back, colorful inside and out, and looked as if it might blow away on even a marginally windy day. Yet, it had stood here for years—as had its twin on Sugarloaf Key. She noticed that the owners weren’t up and about right now, they weren’t worrying about flooding, wind damage, or losing everything. They were genuine Tango Fritters, never worried about hurricane watches and took a wait-and-see attitude about hurricane warnings.
Nonetheless, here she was, Mira Morales, Consummate Worrier. She had insisted on meeting Leo Dillard at the bookstore rather than at the jail because she had to come here first. Before she could take preventive and protective measures, she needed a clear sense of what she could do to mitigate a worst-case scenario. She needed to walk through the aisles and touch the shelves, the books, allowing her intuition to speak to her. And she needed to do this before Dillard and his crime scene came into the picture, before his energy tainted hers, before, before.
Mira turned on the lights and she and Annie stood just inside, taking it all in. Right now, her stock was close to forty thousand volumes, the highest since she and Nadine had opened the place five years ago. And she couldn’t move everything. That would take days and require more space than she had. At the very most, she could move the stock on the lowest shelves to higher spots and box up the stock that sold the best—romance, suspense, some young adult fiction, nonfiction political best sellers, some self-help and health/ diet titles.
For her own peace of mind, she also would move certain metaphysical titles that meant a lot to her—and immediately felt panicked by what that would entail. Where to start? The tarot, yoga, the I Ching, runes, astrology, and palmistry to mythology, quantum physics, reincarnation, and anything byTerrence McKenna Louise Hay, Caroline Myss, and Mona Lisa Schultz, to… oh, Christ, too many books and not enough time.
“Mom, we need boxes,” Annie said.
“In my office closet. There’re plenty of boxes.” They had received a large shipment earlier this week and she hadn’t had time yet to flatten the boxes and put them in the Dumpster. “Masking tape is in there, too. We’re going to need a lot of that.”
Annie looked dismayed. “Where should I start?”
“With the books on the lowest shelves and with your personal favorites. Pretend you’re living in Fahrenheit 451. Where would you start?”
“Harry Potter. The Golden Compass, well, that whole trilogy. And John Edwards’s books.”
“Really? John Edwards? The TV medium? Why him?” “I like his stuff. Also…” And now she grinned. “He’s hot.”
“We’ve got room for genuine. We do not have room for hot.”
Annie laughed. “Where should I put the boxes?”
“Start stacking them on one of the dollies.”
Annie hurried off and Mira moved farther into the store. In addition to books, she carried music and made an immediate decision to pack away as many of the CDs as she could. No telling how many boxes that would require.
Over three thousand square feet and at least a third of that belonged to the aerobics area and to the coffee shop. The only items she would move from those areas were the espresso machine, which had cost her a small fortune, and the computers.
“Mira?” called a man at the front of the store.
It took her a moment to recognize the voice, and when she did, she hurried through the aisles. Ace stood near the counter, a tall, sinewy black man with hair as tight and wiry as a Brillo pad that was turning white at the sides. He wore psychedelic board shorts and a blazing red T-shirt with the words Sunset Performer screaming across the front of it in brilliant yellow.
“Ace. I thought you never got up before noon.”
“Only for you, sweet thing.” And he threw his arms around her, hugging her hello as though he hadn’t seen her in years when, in fact, he’d been in last week for a reading. “I saw the lights on. I hope it’s okay that I came in.”
“For you, Ace, always. What’s going on?” She touched his elbow. “C’mon, walk with me. I’m taking inventory.”
He didn’t walk; he bopped along next to her, his gangly body loose, rubbery. His sandals slapped against his heels. “Is she going to hit?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what’re you doing here?”
Good question. “Fear, paranoia, maybe it’ll hit.” She shrugged. “What’re you doing here?”
“Luke thinks the storm’s going to hit big time and wants to evacuate. I told him I’m not getting stuck on the road outta here. We compromised and decided to ask you.”
Luke was Ace’s long-time partner. Every evening, about an hour before the sun sank, Ace and Luke joined dozens of other performance artists on the Tango pier and entertained tourists, locals, and whoever else was around—Ace as an escape artist and Luke as a tightrope walker. They’d started their acts twenty years ago on the Key West pier and had moved to the Tango pier seven years ago, when they’d bought a bungalow in the Tango hills, at the edge of the wilderness preserve.
“I can’t tell you what to do, Ace. But right now, no one’s evacuating. The bridge is closed.” She explained about the jailbreak. “And frankly, I think it’s going to be a nightmare out there on the roads with thousands of people headed north, and running into more thousands in Dade and Broward.”
“Uh-huh, just like I told him. We’ve got shutters, food and supplies, a shortwave, a generator, and our place sure isn’t going to go the way of Noah’s ark. We’re fifty feet above sea level.”
“Then you should stay.” Mira reached the metaphysics section and began pulling books off the lower shelves and stacking them on the floor to be boxed later.
“That’s your psychic opinion? I can tell Luke that?”
“It’s just my, uh, regular opinion.”
Ace thrust his long arms forward, palms turned upward, as if he were about to take something into them. “Read me, Mira. I gotta tell Luke your psychic opinion. I don’t need a full reading, just your take on this.”
Mira’s gaze went reluctantly to Ace’s slender, beautiful hands. She didn’t want to read anyone right now. Bad enough that she would have to read a crime scene when Dillard and Sheppard arrived.
“I—”
“Please?”
The supplicating look in his eyes elicited a reluctant nod from Mira. She brought her smaller, whiter hands to his callused palms, and felt a tingling that seemed almost electrical. As soon as she shut her eyes, two paths opened up in her head. One was lined by gnarled trees that created dark, spooky tunnels of wet leaves and branches that appeared to angle deeply into a thick, black wooded area. She didn’t know whether the image was a metaphor or an actual scene. The other path crossed a bridge and she understood this to be the path to evacuation.
