Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,50
storm. That’s when Buck stepped in and said he was laying down “ground rules.” We only take shit we can sell: jewelry, real nice pieces of electronics like handheld GPS or shortwave radio stuff, or maybe portable TVs. Only take the sealed booze. Check the drawers and stuff for real money and don’t ever pass on some tin container that might have a stash in it. “These city assholes come out here to party like there’s no rules. There’s a lot of pot and coke and stuff they keep out in these places, so use your eyes, boys.”
Yeah, they’d use their eyes. And if they found any drugs, they were going straight into their pockets and he wasn’t going to know any different. Wayne winked at his bud. After about an hour of sorting through the place, Buck called them in.
“Can’t spend too much time in one place, boys,” he said. “Not that we’re worried about anybody coming by that we won’t hear ahead of time, but if it ain’t a rich site, we’re gonna move on. There’s bound to be a mother lode out here someplace.”
It was the flicker of excitement in his eyes that got the boys motivated. It wasn’t often Buck got jazzed by anything. Even when they did the jobs in the suburbs when shit would get hinky or that time they found that coin collection that they’d sold for eight grand, Buck was still level, moving ahead, but never jumping, never showing emotion. But there was something different in the guy’s eyes this time. He was liking this shit. They loaded up the airboat with a few things and got her started again. Buck had decided they’d go well north and east to one of the high spots on the map and then work their way down toward home “just in case we find something heavy.”
This new place had some definite possibilities. But it was weird. Marcus again went to the middle of the big room and did a three-sixty, scanning the walls, where some of the shelves and cabinetry appeared absolutely untouched. But like the kitchen pots and pans that were jumbled on the floor about fifteen feet away from where they should have been, so too were some couch throw pillows and a lamp and a DVD player about fifteen feet from the den area where they matched. A bookcase on the eastern wall was empty, the books fifteen feet away, piled up against the refrigerator and kitchen island. And in the middle Marcus was standing on a pristine, pearl gray carpet. His eyes moved up the walls to the second floor, to the sheared-away beams that had once supported a cathedral ceiling, until he was staring straight up into the clouds passing high above. It was like a tiny tornado, spinning within the chaos of the hurricane, had peeled away the entire roof and then dipped its finger straight down into the building and did a little twirl and then left.
It was disconcerting to Marcus, and he stood there thinking of the time when he was very young, maybe about the time his father had left. His mom had decided to make changes in their lives to forget the past and she’d completely redone his room; moved his bed to another wall; the dresser, the bedside lamp, even the posters, all shifted. He remembered now how it had confused and scared him when he would awake in the middle of the night and have that overwhelming feeling that he didn’t know where he was. That fear came over him now, that he was someplace so foreign and unsafe that there was nothing familiar to hold on to.
“Marcus!”
Buck was leaning over a spiral, wrought-iron staircase that gave access to the bedroom upstairs.
“Marcus? What the fuck, son. You gonna help or just watch, boy? Get your ass up here and go through this other bedroom.”
“I got it, Buck,” Wayne said, then turned to Marcus. “Why don’t you see if you can pack up that player with something waterproof, man.”
He nudged Marcus with the satchel he’d filled with CDs and had slung over his shoulder and on the way past whispered, “Got us some booty here, brother.”
Wayne was sounding giddy too. “Both you guys are fucking lost,” Marcus said.
Buck was filling the gas tank of the airboat when a hot, dangerous urge came into his head and he stopped to wonder where the hell it came from. He could suddenly see himself: the red five-gallon