"Thanks, honey," he said.
"Bring that one back with you. OK?"
"Yeah, sure. You can bet on it."
SIXTEEN
"Whoa, check it out," Marcus said from across the room, and Wayne seemed to be able to tell by the sound of his friend's voice he wasn't just shittin' him. Wayne was staring, really staring, down into what looked to be a pile of oddly angled polished wood. Marcus stepped over some pots and pans and crossed the bare carpet that sat square and clean and seemingly untouched in the middle of the room.
"What?" Wayne said, watching Marcus kneel and stick his hands into the pile of wood. Marcus came up with a half a dozen CDs, spread in his fingers like a poker hand.
"Dude's got some music, man. Good stuff, too. Twista, Jay-Z, Tha Marksmen," Wayne said, reading off the labels.
"And check out the machine, man," he said, pointing at the stereo player still sitting in a slot in the wall cabinetry. "That's worth some cash right there, unless we wanna keep it, you know."
Wayne looked up to give his pal a wink that seemed to assure him they would do whatever they wanted on this little heist safari of theirs. It was a pact they'd come to after their first stop this morning, a moderately damaged fishing camp just on the southern edge of Broward County and the closest GPS coordinate on the list. That camp had been nice enough in its time, a two-bedroom deal with a great room that had one of those big round metal fireplaces in the middle to warm the night in winter. But one wall was now completely gone, ripped away like a leaf of notebook paper, leaving some curtains blowing in the wind, off-white lace curtains that Marcus could tell were better quality than the ones his own mom had in their regular home, not their vacation getaway. They'd found some music there too. But it was mostly old-style R amp; B stuff, John Lee Hooker, Wilson Pickett, stuff his old man used to listen to before he left. He and Wayne had attacked the place like scavengers, picking up fishing reels, an intact kitchen blender, and half bottles of Chivas and Van Gogh vodka all strewn around in the aftermath of the storm. That's when Buck stepped in and said he was laying down "ground rules." We only take shit we can selclass="underline" 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 can in hand, sloshing the contents in a careful path along the first floor baseboards of the entire place they'd just looted. Make sure you get it on all sides and in the corners so that every remaining wall would go up in flames. Fuck 'em. Asshole city boys and their seaside mansions out here, he thought. He could especially see the now broken photos curling up and going black in the flames. He'd picked one up in the den area: four guys no older than him, big-ass grins on their faces, the two on the ends holding trophy-size mangrove snapper, the two on the inside holding half-full bottles of piss yellow Corona beer. One actually had on a polo shirt, probably with his country club logo on it but Buck couldn't tell. One had a ring on his right hand with a rock as big as the eye of the fish he held hooked in the gills. Buck was not normally a jealous sort. He didn't look at fancy sports cars at the casino or on trips into Naples and lust after them. The big plasma television sets he saw when he was creeping one of those suburban homes did not have any allure to him. He'd go down to the bar at the Rod amp; Hunt Club and watch their big screen game for the price of a few beers.
But for some reason this monstrous, yellow-painted structure built like an ass pimple out here in the middle of the Glades and filled with all the comforts of those homes had put him in a pissy mood. Hell, he ought to be thanking the owners. He'd found their stash of booze, a case of some kind of imported rum, back in the corner of a pantry closet. He'd picked up a fine pair of binoculars upstairs in one of the bedrooms; six hundred bucks retail, probably unload them for two hundred to Bobby the Fence. Then he'd pulled out the drawer that he almost missed in what was probably the master suite. The thing was actually built into the bed frame. He'd stubbed his toes on it, expecting his foot to slide under the mattress when he'd stepped up close to the bed and instead kicking the solid frame below.