Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,74
Buck’s scenario hadn’t included a couple of law enforcement officers, one near death and one tied up in the corner, the two of them would have high-fived each other.
Still I didn’t react. I had to give Buck some credit. If I hadn’t already been inside the computer room next door, seen the digital readouts and odd collection of cables and wiring, the tale he was spinning might have made perfect sense to me too.
“So whataya say, Officer Freeman? Am I right? You and your partner there doing a little recon work and got stuck in the storm?”
This time I kept my eyes focused on the dark circles where Buck’s eyes could still not be seen in the shadow, but I knew he could see mine.
“No. You’re one hundred percent wrong,” I said. It was an easy line to say convincingly because it was the truth.
That childish hissing noise came from one of the boys behind him.
“Yeah, right.”
“Well, it don’t matter what you say now, officer. I’m thinking we got a big payday coming and when daybreak comes so we can find a way into that room, that’s what we’re gonna do come hell or high water,” he said and tossed Marcus the roll of tape.
“Tape his hands back up,” he said to the boy.
Marcus came over, swaggering a little now, and gave me a little chin nod, and I reacted instantly by crossing my wrists and offering them up to him.
“So you ain’t such big shit after all, Mr. Law,” Marcus said, wrapping the tape around while I again flexed my tendons to keep the binding as loose as possible. But I had already won my battle. The kid had either been too cocky or was just plain stupid. Because I had submissively raised my hands to him, he’d taken the easy offer and bound them in front of me instead of making me roll over and taping them behind my back.
“An’ Wayne!” Buck said, snapping orders to the other one and reaching down to pick up a package sheathed in oilskin that they’d brought in with the cooler. He unwrapped a gleaming over-and-under shotgun and tossed it three feet into Wayne’s surprised hands. “You got first watch.”
TWENTY-FOUR
When the traffic lights are lying on the ground, you consider the intersections as four-way stops, and then steer around the dented and broken yellow thing in the road, and then avoid the power lines still attached to it if possible. It’s one of those rules you learn in South Florida if you’ve been here for a few hurricanes.
As Harmon made his way to the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport at dawn, he wondered why folks couldn’t figure that out. Do all transplanted New Yorkers just figure, “What the fuck, I’ll just plow right on through and everybody else can look out for me because only the rude and pushy survive in this world”?
Electricity was still a memory two days after Simone rolled through. Even the concrete poles were leaning like a team of tug-of-war combatants, pulling lines that had yet to snap. Many of their wooden brothers had lost it at the waist, sheared off and splintered at their middle, broken marionettes tangled in their own string. City and county road crews had shoved most of the large branches and debris off to the side of the major highways, but any side street was a maze like those games the kids used to draw while they waited for food at Denny’s: get the farmer to market without being stopped!
Harmon had already steered around a hundred broken roof tiles lying in the streets of his own neighborhood, had driven up into some guy’s yard to get around a forty-foot ficus tree that completely spanned two-lane Royal Palm Drive, and slipped between the crossing arms at the FEC railroad tracks at Dixie Highway, which were halfway down, their ends sheared off but still waving in the wind.
He stopped again at the intersection of Commercial and Powerline Roads and watched the headlamps of six vehicles slide through, cutting him out of his turn until he was forced to inch out and physically stop cross traffic before they’d defer to him.
“Go back to Brooklyn,” he whispered under his breath.
When he finally got to the airfield, the early sunrise was backlighting a dozen lumps of dark plane wreckage, twisted angles and barely discernible fin shapes. He shook his head at the number of tumbled aircraft that had been strapped down out on the tarmac for lack of an