Wayne and Marcus looked at each other, shrugging their shoulders like they were afraid to offer up the wrong answer to Buck's simple question.
"Uh, yeah," Wayne finally said and both of them nodded their heads as they climbed into the pickup truck. Marcus took the backseat of the club cab.
Buck got behind the wheel dunking: Jesus H. I know these two haven't been smoking pot for at least a couple of hours. How did two human minds get so dense? He let it go.
"He gave us six possibles," Wayne said, taking a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolding it for Buck to see. "Here's the GPS coordinates for each one so we could use that handheld unit and he said you can get out to the first one in a couple of hours."
Buck started the truck engine and looked over at the paper. It was the lined type you used in school, the kind with the three-ring binder holes in it. The numbers made no sense to anyone unaware of global positioning systems, but most of the people in the Glades had been using the GPS to mark fishing grounds and crab trap placements for the last fifteen years. Out on the Gulf waters it had become almost essential, a quick and easy way to find your way on a sea of nothing but bare horizon once you were out beyond sight of land. Then they started miniaturizing the technology so everyone and their grandmother were using the thing now. They even started building them into high-priced cars and even cell phones so you could be a halfwit and still find your way around. It was the way of the world now, Buck thought. Easier and softer. Same with the people. That's what made them such simple prey. They got fat and comfortable. Might as well have been asking for it.
"So this sweeper guy knows these camps?"
"Yeah. His uncle is a kinda contractor and ferries the building supplies and stuff out to these places when they're building them or redoin' them all modern. Sometimes this kid goes along with his uncle to load and unload the wood and shingles and plumbing pipes an' all. They've got a big ol' airboat that lugs it," Wayne said, rushing on with as much detail as he could so that Buck wouldn't think he was just stupid and they wouldn't have just wasted two hundred dollars on the locations and that would really piss Buck off.
Marcus sat in the back where he always did, watching the backs of the others' heads. Wayne was stealing his idea, of course, and he'd never get any credit for it if it worked out. But then he figured he also wouldn't catch all the shit if it didn't. That was the trade-off.
Buck looked at the numbers again. He'd have to map them out to have a clue where they were. All three sat in silence for a couple of minutes until Wayne couldn't take Buck's lack of response any longer.
"Toby said this here one, at the top, is only about a half hour north off Alligator Alley on the airboat and then the others are pretty close too."
He kept looking at the paper, like you could see something there, like he was studying the numbers just like Buck appeared to be.
"OK, we'll see about that," Buck finally said. "I've got a surveyor's map back at the house. We can plot these out and see just what kind of access two hundred dollars just bought us." Buck knew the Glades could be a tricky place to navigate even in the best of times. And although the boys were oblivious to the weather Buck had been watching in the casino, he knew a coming storm could work for them as well as against them.
He looked back over his shoulder as he started the truck and said to Marcus: "This plan of yours might still have life."
NINE
Harmon was in the back of his house in Coral Springs, a cordless electric drill in his hand, spinning tight the wing nuts that held his hurricane shutters over the rear sliding glass doors. The sun was out. He was already sweating profusely with the effort of carrying and mounting the steel panels from his garage and stacking them in front of every window and door to his home. Each one was marked with its designation: N SIDE BEDROOM, S SIDE DINING. He'd been through this many times during his years living down here and now it had become ritual. But he never went so far as to say he'd gotten used to it.
With the attachment on the drill he whizzed the nut on the W SIDE BATH and then took a break. Inside his house the lack of light created by the sealed windows was already giving him a mildly claustrophobic feel. He poured himself a glass of cold water from the refrigerator and sat at the kitchen bar, watching the local weather channel on the television. The station had not been changed for the last twenty-four hours. His wife called him obsessed but he just flitted her off with the back of his fingers, told her she was right, it was probably a waste of time and effort, go on with whatever you were doing and don't mind me. She shook her head and did just that. Harmon kept his face turned to the TV. He was scared and given who he was, the years that his wife had spent with him overseas on security details in the military, even the time he'd had to hand-strip down a couple of asshole muggers on the street in Miami in front of her when they'd tried to rob them and he'd left them both with snapped bones, mewling like broken kittens on the sidewalk, he'd never showed fear. Harmon was considered an expert with a handgun. He was also good at close-quarters hand fighting, techniques he'd learned long ago that had become so ingrained that despite his age he could regain them in an instant, not unlike riding a bike or crushing a man's windpipe before he could yell out an alarm. Harmon was not a man who panicked and his wife and family had depended on that. But today he was scared and would be until the threat of this new hurricane had passed. Harmon had seen the strength of such a storm. It was nothing you could fight, nothing you could kill, nothing you could stand up against if it decided to cross your path. It was bigger and stronger than man. And if it wanted you, all you could do was huddle down with your head between your knees and kiss your ass good-bye, as Squires would say.
He took another deep drink of the water and refocused on the news. Hurricane Simone had swung north from the Yucatan Peninsula and then stalled for a day in the Gulf of Mexico. There it sucked up energy from the heat rising off eighty-two-degree Gulf water and ate itself into a huge category four monster. Some people likened it to spilling millions of gallons of gasoline on a forest fire, fueling a force that already couldn't be stopped from eating everything in its path. But Harmon had been in the middle of a forest fire. He had also been in the center of a hurricane and the comparison was lost on him.
On the tube the muted commentator was incessantly moving his lips while pointing out the steering currents-a high pressure system moving down from the western states and a sucking low off the southeast Atlantic-that was now bringing the storm back to Florida. The red-shaded "cone of probability" graphic was now a thinner triangle whose narrow end was just off the coast of Naples on the west side of the state and then spreading out to cover everything from the big blob of blue representing Lake Okeechobee on the northern edge down to Miami on the south.