"So we gonna do these expensive-ass fishing camps after the storm, right?"
No one answered. They'd been over the plan already. Buck had been twisting the images around in his head, just like when he'd lain awake all night in prison, working the details, what it was going to look like when he got out, what he was going to do, how this time he was going to be so careful there was no way he'd make the same mistakes again and get caught. Every opportunity could be the big score that would set him up.
"But what if the damn hurricane busts stuff up? A nice fishing rig or a stereo or somethin' ain't gonna be worth much if it's busted up," Wayne said. "I mean, I know it'll be easier to get into the places like you said, Buck, make it look like nature done it and all. But suppose the good stuff gets damaged before we get there?"
Buck understood the boy was anxious; that always happened once you had a plan set and you were young and giddy, wanting to get your feet moving and your fingers on something profitable. He'd probably been the same way when he was younger, not as bad, of course, but somewhat the same.
"Son," he said, still not looking up. "You hear that howl outside, boy? Ain't a thing you can do about that 'cane coming in now. She's gonna do what she gonna do, then we'll run on out on the airboat as soon as she moves on through just like we planned. We'll hit them places and see what 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 for its scream to come.
TEN
"She'll hold together," I said, like a mantra now, but I was wrong. The wind had increased fourfold in strength over the last hour. Sherry and I were now deep into the night. We'd lost the electricity from the generator long ago. In blackness the low hum had grown an octave higher, singing a song of nature pissed off. Then the east-side window of the room, behind where Sherry and I were huddled, suddenly blew out with an explosive sound of shattering glass. I covered both of our faces to shield us from the fragments, but when nothing came I turned a flashlight beam onto the back window and saw that every shred of glass and most of the window frame was simply gone, sucked out into the storm.
The change of pressure in the room and the instant exposure to the wind created a vortex of shredding papers and sailing books and dishes. Flapping fabric and smashing glass joined with the pitch of the wind to create a din that made me lose even my sense of direction. I thought of trying to somehow muscle one of the couch mattresses up to cover the exposed hole where the window had been and was still contemplating how I would manage it in the dark when the entire structure shuddered again and even the floor seemed to shift. I knew we were anchored into the substrata of the Glades on several foundation posts, but I still had the feeling of being on a ship floating on water and caught in a typhoon that would surely roll and sink us. The kitchen area window was the next to go, this one coming apart with a splitting sound, but the shards of glass this time seemed to follow a direct line through the room to the opening at the opposite side. The fractured glass was immediately followed by a rush of wind-driven water that now had a path into the building.
"Are we going to drown, Max? Damn, I'd hate to drown," Sherry said over the howl. Her voice was not panicky or defeated but marvelously cynical for our situation. I didn't want to repeat my lie that the building would hold together, but we were in the middle of the swamp, not on the coast. Since the depth of the water below us was barely three feet I figure as long as we could stay behind something to give us leeward shelter and keep the wind-born water out of our throats we certainly wouldn't drown.