Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,65

she motioned to her mouth with her fingers and the kid bent lower, nervous about pouring the water into this woman’s open lips. I stayed on one knee, watching, but still working the other bed’s legs. All I could see were the tops of both of their heads from behind and then the sudden, violent movement of Sherry’s hand, clawing at the boy’s throat.

“You thieving little bastard,” she suddenly shrieked in a voice I had never heard before.

The kid’s head started to snap back, but inexplicably stopped for a fraction of a moment, and then, suddenly loosed, reeled up away from her.

“You fucking little thief,” Sherry screamed again, the rough dryness of her throat making the words come out like a shovel blade stabbing gravel. “You picked the wrong cop to fuck with this time, you little shit.”

The kid’s eyes were wide as saucers, eyebrows dented by fear, like he’d seen a witch come alive in his face, and I jumped up wondering if he actually had.

“Jesus, Sherry!” I shouted, and stepped over the bed frame I was working on. “What the hell?”

She was up on her elbows now, her face turned a crimson color that was such a stark contrast to the paleness it replaced that it looked devilish. She was staring at the kid, her eyes focused and hateful. Without saying a word she opened the hand that I’d seen her go at the kid’s throat with. Two stones, one a diamond and the other an opal, tumbled from her palm on the end of a broken gold chain.

It didn’t take a second for me to recognize the necklace Sherry’s husband had given her, the one that she had finally removed before the last time we’d made love on a soft Everglades night that seemed impossibly far in the past now.

I stepped toward the kid, not even realizing that I’d stood up from our dismantling job with one of the wooden bed frame legs in my fist.

“Where the hell did you get that!” I started. But the words had barely left my lips when the cabin door burst open and Morris stepped in with a big .45 in his right hand, its big black nosehole pointed at me.

“Whoa now, folks,” the man said. “How about we just settle down some, OK?”

“They’re cops, Buck,” Wayne started shouting. “Goddamnit- all, they are cops.”

Morris, whose name had now turned into Buck, moved his eyes from me, to the boy, to the bed frame on the floor and finally to Sherry, who was still on one elbow, but otherwise prone on the cot.

“Now just calm it down there, boy,” he said and the kid seemed to snap his mouth shut like it was a command he was familiar with.

“Uh, Mr. Freeman, sir. Would you kindly lay that there chunk of lumber down, please, and move over that way?” Buck said to me, using the muzzle of the gun to indicate the direction. He stepped farther into the room and the other boy, whose eyes were now only slightly smaller than his friend’s, followed him, dropping a canvas sack holding something that clunked heavily onto the floorboards.

The fact that I now had two names, Wayne and Buck, wasn’t much of a trade-off for having a handgun pointed at my chest and a band of thieves as Sherry’s only chance of survival out of this hellhole. I laid the bedpost down.

“Now if you don’t mind, sir,” Buck said, “could you tell me just what the hell is goin’ on?”

I gathered myself. I now knew I was looking at a crew of looters. I have seen it before as a cop in Philadelphia and everyone with a television has seen it on the tube following major rioting or disaster in American cities coast to coast. In some instances it’s an “I’m gonna get mine” attitude. The storefront window is blown out, cops are busy helping others, I’ll go in and take what I can take. In the aftermath of Katrina it was sometimes people just taking something that floated, something to eat, something to live. In places like Miami and L.A., it was just brazen, crowd-incited criminality and greed. I knew the only way Wayne had gotten Sherry’s necklace was by rummaging through the ruins of the Snows’ cabin where she must have lost it. This group had been there and this place was their next target.

I wasn’t going to guess the motivation. Right now I was going to be the greedy one and try