Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,28
we can see. Those owners are gonna be busy in their regular homes for days. Their fishing camps will be the last thing on their minds. We got all the time in the world to loot through. Might be some damage, but there won’t be anybody figuring what’s gone until we’ve already sold it and have the money in our pockets.
“You got that? Right, Wayne?”
“Yes, sir,” Wayne said, like he’d been put down by some teacher at the front of the class again. “I got it.”
Buck heard the twitch of humiliation, or was that anger, in the boy’s voice. He knew he had to keep his merry little band together.
“You did good with getting those locations, Wayne. But this storm helps us, right? Hell, it’s almost legal. Like a salvage operation. We could find something that’ll make our day out there and simply walk away.”
“I’ll call you,” Marcus suddenly said, like he hadn’t heard a word of what the others had been talking about. He laid down three queens and looked up at Buck, grinning.
Buck took a long draft off the beer, nearly half of it gone in one swallow and then, one at a time, lay down a ten high straight. Marcus shoved his chair back, disgusted, and went for another beer as Buck raked in the pile. A high-pitched gust of wind rattled the wooden shutters that had been nailed shut over the kitchen window.
“Mr. Brown all tightened down out there?” Buck asked Wayne.
“Tight like a tick,” Wayne said. “Even got some sandbags piled up at the back of his boathouse. Old fart must be expecting a big one.”
Buck snapped his eyes up. Both boys turned their heads at the silent change of pressure in the room. Even with their stunted powers of recollection, they’d realized the mistake that had been made.
“Old what?” Buck said, quiet like, almost a hiss, as if his voice was under pressure. Both boys were looking down into the pile of money on the table, neither willing to look up and meet Buck’s gaze. The air stayed silent for a full minute.
“Sorry,” Wayne finally said, no twitch of smartass in it, no possibility of even a flicker of grin at the corners of either boy’s mouth.
“Goddamn right you’re sorry.”
Nate Brown was a second generation denizen of the Ten Thousand Islands. He was born on a feather-stuffed mattress in his parents’ bed in their tar-paper shack in Chokoloskee somewhere between eighty and one hundred years ago. No one knew the exact year. In his time as the son of one of the original white families that moved to southwest Florida in the late 1800s, he had taken on a nearly mystical aura. He’d practically been born with a rifle in his hands. He knew every turn and twist and mangrove-covered trail from the middle keys to Lake Okeechobee. He was a gator hunter, a stone crabber, a net and hook fisherman beyond compare, a whiskey still operator, and a pot runner. He’d been to Germany in World War II, had worked behind the lines as a mountain soldier, and had a Medal of Honor to prove it. He’d gone to prison when he was sixty years old with the rest of the men in town rather than say a word about the infamous marijuana smuggling ring. Buck’s father had told a thousand legendary stories of the old man and how he’d taught the younger generation of Gladesmen how to sear spit-fired curlew birds and hand- caught mullet, how to kill and skin a ten-foot gator in minutes under cover from the game warden’s eye, how to outrun the high-powered Coast Guard patrols in a simple outboard flat-boat by using the sandbars and switchback water trails. How to survive in a place called the Everglades where few people chose to survive any longer.
The man was practically a god to the old timers, and to Buck. And you don’t call a man’s god an “old fart” to his face. It wasn’t until Buck finally raised his beer to his mouth and drained it that Wayne saw an opportunity to move without putting himself in danger and got up and fetched the man a new Budweiser. Outside, the wind kept up a low, steady bellow, like a fat man blowing across the mouth of a big clay jug. On occasion the tone would rise with the velocity of a gust. But mostly it hummed, still some distance away, out at sea, warming up to the task, preparing