Category five, p.8
Category Five, page 8
She and Ricki trotted after the others and fell into step alongside Sheppard. “You did great,” he whispered, and gave her a quick hug.
“He spoiled it,” she replied.
She spoke a bit too loudly and Dillard heard it and gave her a dirty look. He jabbed his finger at her and mouthed, Shep, keep the kid in line.
Annie’s eyes locked with Dillard’s and her third finger slid up her cheek. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. She knew he saw it, but he looked quickly away.
Chapter 6
Whether your roof comes off in a hurricane,
exposing your home, might come down to a three-cent nail.
Palm Beach Post
Mira’s awareness split like an atom. A part of her was conscious of Annie at her side, of the others behind her, and another part of her could still see the cons’ van in her mind’s eye.
The driver turned right, so did she. The driver picked up speed, so did she. The energy of the woman whose earring Mira held pulled her into the van’s psychic slipstream, along the early morning street, and into an alley several blocks later.
Then Dillard moved closer to her—and his energy distracted her, teased her, drew her in. She didn’t have any desire to read the man, so she shut down completely. Be clear about your parameters, Nadine had told her. Spell out the boundaries. She hadn’t done that.
She stopped, spun, snapped, “You can’t do that, Leo.”
He drew back, startled by the savagery in her voice. “Do what?”
“You can’t come up behind me like that when I’m reading a scene.”
“Oh. Okay. Sorry. I, uh, thought maybe I should go get the car so that we can drive the route you’re seeing.”
“I have to walk. I can’t do it from inside a car.” Walking helped to ground her, to connect her with the solidity of the real world. She didn’t bother explaining any of that. But because she would be able to read more deeply if he wasn’t anywhere near her, she quickly added, “You can follow in the car if you want.”
“I’ll go get it,” Emison offered, and extended his plump hand for the keys.
Dillard dropped the keys into his palm and he waddled off. Mira, disappointed that Dillard hadn’t left, now established rules, parameters, boundaries. “If you have a question about what I’m doing, ask Annie or Sheppard. You can’t ask me. It interrupts the flow. If I say something, please don’t ask me to repeat it because I probably won’t remember what I say. I’ll read until the vein dries up, and after it runs dry, don’t press me for more answers.”
“Reading the scene. Interrupting the flow. The vein.” He nodded as he repeated what she’d said, then tried to make light of it by laughing. “You speak another language, Mira.”
“The last time I checked, it was English. If you have problems with English, Leo, then I’ll do it in pig Latin.”
Color rushed up into his neck. She had embarrassed him, but Christ, he deserved it. He raised his hands and patted the air as though he were dealing with a wild, unpredictable Doberman. For some reason, she noticed that he bit his nails, a rather odd habit for a grown man. “Okay, continue. I’ll shut up.”
Sheppard and Goot stood silently behind Dillard, suppressing their amusement that Dillard had been put in his place.
“You should be back there with them.” Mira gestured toward Sheppard and Goot. “Stay back at least ten feet so I don’t pick up anything on you.”
She turned again, walked quickly forward, Annie and the dog keeping pace with her. Her focus had been compromised and she had to will herself back into the flow using the techniques that Nadine had taught her years ago: alternate nostril breathing, rolling her eyes upward toward the middle of her forehead, deep diaphragmatic breaths, bringing her focus into the center of her solar plexus. Gradually, she felt an inner shift and was able to enter the slipstream again.
A block later, she stopped, pointed off to her left. “He got stopped by a cop.”
“Here?” Dillard came up close to her, but not too close. “Right here?”
“Yes.”
“The black van.”
“Isn’t that what I’ve been talking about?”
Her irritability sailed right past Dillard. “Jesus, this is great, Mira. This is perfect.”
He immediately got on his cell phone and barked orders to Emison and Mira stood there, wide open, the Baggie with the earring inside still pressed between her palms. Why was it in a Baggie? It wasn’t evidence. They knew who it belonged to and she needed to feel the metal earring against her bare skin. Metal was an excellent conductor of emotional energy, but with a layer of plastic between her and the metal it was like trying to feel the warmth of a vine tomato while wearing winter gloves. She tore open the baggie and plucked out the earring.
It heated up almost instantly and just as she began to pick up images, Dillard rushed over and touched her arm…
… And she sees him in a bank a casino, arguing with a woman, speaking in hushed tones on his cell phone, meeting someone on a dark street… money passes hands…
…Now Dillard and a man in a military uniform survey a ruin strewn with bodies and speak in urgent, terrified tones… he’s arguing with his wife… with his kids…
The images shoot toward her so fast and furiously she can’t draw air into her lungs…
Mira wrenched back, startling herself as much as she did Dillard, who stammered, “What? What is it?”
“You can’t touch me while I’m doing this!” she screamed at him, her reaction so completely out of proportion to what he’d done that she instantly felt ashamed of herself. She rubbed her eyes and when she spoke again, her voice was lower, but as tight and tense as a newly strung guitar. “When I’m wide open like that, Leo, and someone touches me… that energy is what I see.” Her hands moved instinctively to the center of her chest again, rubbing at a lingering ache there. “You had pneumonia recently.” She hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t tagged it consciously yet, but the words spilled out. “You got sick after you and your wife had a major blowout and…” She stopped. Shit, shit, shut up.
“How…?” He paused. “When I touched you?”
She nodded and looked quickly away from him, certain that he was about to ask her what else he’d seen. That your life is a fucking mess, Leo, and you’re in debt up to your eyeballs. And what’s with the strewn bodies? Where was that?
Mira dropped the earring back into the Baggie, shoved it at Dillard. Her fingers stroked the stone around her neck that Nadine had insisted she wear. She felt a tingling in her fingertips, like a mild electrical current, and suddenly a block of information fell into place.
“He’s not using his real name. Not for the van, not for the sticker…. His last name rhymes with something…” She cocked her head, listening to an inner whispering, but couldn’t hear it all. “It’s like Carter, Jimmy Carter, but that’s not it. It’s close, though.”
Dillard’s eyes glistened like stars. “Anything else?”
“No. I’m done here. I can’t do anything more, Leo.”
She walked swiftly away from him, wanting only to put distance between them as fast as her legs would carry her. The sun was fully up now and everywhere she looked, she saw signs that people were taking the hurricane watch seriously. Trucks loaded with plywood made their way up the street, into driveways. People were out putting up shutters, trimming back trees and shrubs. While she had been zoned out, the world had moved into a new day fraught with uncertainty.
She felt a sudden urgency to get back to the bookstore and begin loading her stock into the delivery van, putting up shutters, bringing in the patio furniture. Her unease was too acute to ignore.
Annie broke the silence first. “If we’re walking back to the bookstore, it’s kinda far, Mom.”
“You get a ride with them if you want. I can’t bear to be near him.”
“What’d you see about him?”
Mira didn’t want Dillard to overhear her. She thought a moment and in their secret language, said: “He’s got gambling debts. It’s wrecking his marriage. His house is mortgaged to the hilt. And I think that if he brings in this bank robber guy…”
“Franklin,” Annie said, then told her that Dillard had moved out of hearing range.
She switched to English. “Yeah, him. If Leo brings in Franklin, he’s getting a payoff from someone. Or he’ll benefit somehow financially.” There was more, a deeper layer here about Dillard and this whole business that she couldn’t reach. “I’m not sure of the specifics.”
“Where’re the cons?”
“They’re still on the island. Other than that, I don’t know. Hey, can you get us a weather update on your phone?”
“Sure.” She whipped out the iPhone Sheppard had given her for her birthday. “If the service is working. Sometimes it’s tricky.” Annie leaned against a tree and played the phone with the ease of a pianist.
Sheppard caught up with them, his expression unreadable. Mira couldn’t tell if he was feeling happy, remorseful, or somewhere in between, and she wasn’t about to try to read him. Right now, she didn’t think she could read her big toe if she had to. “Don’t you want a ride?” he asked.
“With Dillard in the car? No, thanks.”
Sheppard jammed his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and kicked at a pebble or a twig on the sidewalk. She sensed that he was choosing his words—and his timing—carefully, deliberately. “Half a dozen dark vans were stopped in this vicinity since the jailbreak. The names are being run now. You gave us a key piece of the puzzle, Mira.”
“But the name’s phony,” she said.
“It will give us a place to start. We’re pretty sure it’s Billy Joe Franklin, but once we have the name he’s using, we’ll be able to check for bank and property records under that name. We…” His hands came out of his back pockets and he crossed his arms on his chest. “Hey, don’t be pissed at me, Mira. Dillard wanted me to run interference with you, to get you down to the station. I think that’s the only reason he called me. So I told him to call you himself.”
“If he ever asks again, just tell him flat-out no, Shep. Don’t put me in this situation again.”
Sheppard’s jaw went rigid, his expression shut down, and a terrible silence flooded his eyes. “No one put you in any goddamn position. You could’ve just told him no when he called.”
Never mind that he had given Dillard her number or had dialed the number for him. Never mind that. She knew he had a good point. She’d been seduced by Dillard’s fee and the silly notion that she might be serving a higher purpose. Yeah, right. “We’re out in the middle of the street, Shep. I don’t want to have this conversation here.”
“I don’t want to have this conversation at all.” Terse, blunt.
She hated it when they reached an impasse like this. It would take them hours to get back to a normal level, she thought, so it was a good thing that they would be going their separate ways now. She gestured toward the police van coming up the street. “Here comes your ride.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“I need help putting up the shutters.”
“I know. I’ll call.”
“Uh, hey, wait.” Annie hurried over, her face flushed with fear, excitement, both. “Look at this.”
She thrust the iPhone at Mira and Sheppard, forcing them to move closer to each other so they could see the screen. And what Mira saw was a sentient but alien being with a perfectly formed ubiquitous eye, churning less than four hundred miles off the South Florida coast. According to the stats at the bottom of the screen, it was moving swiftly, had top winds of 135, and was southwest of the Keys. Most of South Florida fell in the dreaded cone of uncertainty, but a red line streaked up the coast, indicating the probable path from Tango Key to northern Palm Beach County. A hurricane warning for this stretch of the coast was expected to be implemented at eight AM, ten minutes from now.
A near panic hurled open Mira’s inner floodgates. Adrenaline poured through her, her muscles twitched and shrieked to flee or fight. Confronted with the real possibility of winds strong enough to shear bark from trees, everything else paled in comparison.
She instantly imagined the chaos on the single highway out of the Keys, as some thirty or forty thousand residents all took to the two-lane road at once only to join three or four times that many drivers in Dade County and more tens of thousands fleeing from Broward County. She began imagining millions evacuating all at once.
There were three main arteries north out of South Florida-1-95, the Florida Turnpike, and 1-75. Those roads would take you into Georgia, assuming you could even get out of Monroe or Dade Counties, she thought. The other roads like US. 1, Dixie Highway, and A-1-A would be jammed with local traffic as residents ordered to evacuate low-lying beach areas tried to move inland to shelters.
Madness. And right then and there, she decided she would stay. She would stay in her house, with her family and animals and as much of her bookstore stock as she could cram into the delivery truck and the garage. She would make her home and her business as secure as possible and ride out the bitch in a house that had withstood hurricanes for forty years. She would do it because the alternative—being stuck on a highway as winds of 135 miles an hour or higher whipped your car to dust—was unthinkable.
Mira struggled to do the math in her head, but she was so drained her brain refused to work. “How long?” she murmured. “How long do we have?”
Annie already had done the math. “At her present speed, the eye will make landfall in about fifteen hours. But we’ll be feeling it a long time before then. The outer bands are filled with violent weather.”
“Hey, you all need a ride?” Dillard called.
Mira thought about it for about five seconds, then hurried toward the van.
Fifteen hours.
She would have to make every minute count.
Chapter 7
The word “hurricane” comes from “Huracan,” the god of violent storms and thunderbolts among the Yucatan Carib Indians.
The wind woke her, two strong gusts that rattled the windows like ghosts in chains. Tia Lopez bolted upright from the couch, body braced for imminent disaster, eyes pinned to the windows. Daylight. She couldn’t see anything except trees—green piled upon green.
She threw off the black cotton sheet and swung her long legs over the edge of the couch. Her bare toes curled and uncurled against the smooth wood floors. Real wood, not the laminate shit. She liked that and hadn’t noticed it earlier this morning when it had been dark. Her eyes moved slowly around the room, drinking in the details.
It wasn’t a huge room, but when you’d spent months in a seven-foot cell, this space seemed as vast as Russia. The pine furnishings wouldn’t win any Good Housekeeping awards, but she liked what she saw. Pine, lots of color in the throw rugs, colorful pillows here on the black couch, a couple of afghans tossed over the backs of chairs. One beautiful wooden rocker looked to be old.
Photographs of weather systems covered the walls. Tia remembered that Crystal had told her Franklin had been a meteorologist, but these photos indicated an obsession with storms—dust storms, whirlwinds, tornados, summer rainstorms, snowstorms, hail storms, solar storms, space storms, ice storms, desert storms—and satellite photos of hurricanes. The pictures pulled at her in a visceral way, with a compulsion that could make her panic.
Tia dropped to the floor and did seventy-five push-ups, forcing her attention away from the photos. Whenever panic threatened her, she channeled it into something physical. It occurred to her that near panic must be her daily condition since every day for nearly a year she had been doing pushups, sit-ups, yoga, and lifting weights when weight had been available. She was probably in better physical shape than she had ever been in her life—thanks to all the screaming banshees locked behind a door in her head.
Tia went over to the window. The woods looked dense, thick, deliciously primitive. No utilities strung up out here, she thought, and wondered how the place was powered. Solar panels? Wind? Generators? After months of studying the layout of Tango, its topography and geological anomalies, Tia knew that the preserve covered several thousand acres and was as wild and untouched as it got anywhere in the Florida Keys. So if they were in the preserve, how far into it had they gone?
Even more to the point, how long had she been sleeping? What time was it? And where’s the hurricane?
Her chest tightened at the thought. Not yet. Don’t think about that yet.
She quickly patted her back pocket—and felt an immediate relief. Her fat little spiral journal was still there. Granny Moses had given them out to all the cons who had passed through her jail and told them they should write in it daily, even if it were just a sentence or a paragraph. She seemed to consider it a form of therapy or rehab. Most cons didn’t bother—Crystal never had—but Tia had discovered a friend in the journal. Through writing, it was easy to swim back through the chaos of her life and order it. Now the journal represented the center of herself, her true heart.
She turned, looking for her weapon, the one Franklin had tossed her when they’d escaped. Gone. Okay. Franklin had taken back his gun. He was the boss, the Man. Yeah, fine. She got the message.
Tia went into the kitchen, a long room with a window behind the sink that looked out into more trees. It had both a fridge and a floor freezer and they were jammed to capacity. It looked as though he’d intended to stay here for a long while. You break your chiquita out of jail and instead of fleeing the island, you lie low in a predetermined hiding place. Smart. He now had points in her book.
She started a pot of coffee and whipped up a feast for herself—omelet, buttered toast, slices of crisp bacon. God, oh God, free-world food, in a free-world kitchen, on her first day as a free-world woman. After nine months, one week, and three days in jail, the experience of selecting and cooking her own food, of drinking real coffee, and of standing here at a kitchen window in such blissful silence filled her with awe and wonder and profoundly humbled her. Never again would she sit in a jail. Never. She would die first.
