"Elma!" Squires said. "From my private stock, please."
The bartender, an elderly mainstay of the place named Elma Mclamb, put her crossword puzzle down and reached down under the counter to open the door of a small cooler and came out with two bottles of Arrogant Bastard. The beer came from a brewery in San Diego and was only distributed in a few of the western states but Squires had acquired a taste for its dark flavors while doing some work for the Marines and now had it shipped to the Elbo Room at his expense. If Harmon hadn't known the man better, he might have thought it was some kind of show-off status thing, but Squires was not a poseur. And he rarely shared the stuff.
The two men sipped from the bottles and looked out over the gray waters of the Atlantic to the horizon where the color of sky and ocean were so close one could hardly find the line that separated them. Harmon understood why his friend chose both this place and the view: neither changed. The Elbo Room had remained pretty much the same worn and welcoming place it had been since the 1960s when they filmed Where the Boys Are on this stretch of Fort Lauderdale beach. The two street-front walls of the tavern opened full to the sidewalks; the shutters that covered them were raised every morning at nine. Inside, the oval bar held the scars and chipped initials of three generations of teenagers emboldened with skittering hormones and the freedom of spring break. The city put a big damper on the annual craziness back in the 1990s when the yearly bacchanal got too big and rowdy for the changing times, but even the high-priced restaurants and the faux mall that sprouted up to replace the wet T-shirt bars and seaside novelty shops couldn't destroy the tradition. College kids still came. Locals looking to show off their cars and tans and energy still moved up and down the strand. The city couldn't change that any more than they could stop the tide from sliding up and down the beach.
Squires liked the constancy, in fact got surly when things changed.
"You ride out the storm here?" Harmon finally asked.
"Upstairs," said Squires. "They closed the shutters down here so we went up on the balcony. Better view anyway."
"You guys are nuts."
"Yeah. But it was cool. The only time these days when you can look out to the east and not see any freighter or container ship lights out there waiting to get into the port," Squires said. "And when the power went out, man, it was blackness all up and down the coast. Reminded me of jumping out the back of a C-one-thirty at twenty thousand feet over the desert. Very cool."
"If you say so, big man," Harmon said.
Squires took another long pull on his beer.
"So where we goin'?"
"Local job," Harmon answered. "Boss wants us to catch a helicopter ride out over the Everglades. Says they've got some kind of a research facility out there that needs a storm assessment done. In his words: 'Make sure it's not exposed.'"
Squires gave him a questioning eye.
"Didn't know we had a facility out in the Glades."
"Me neither. But the man seemed pretty concerned, you know, that tick in his voice that means somebody higher up the ladder is the one asking."
"Yeah. Everybody's got someone up the line," Squires said, finishing the beer. "So when we going?"
"The pilot says he's got to get his ship back out of the hangar after they broke it down and secured it for the storm. We're looking at tomorrow morning, earliest," Harmon said. "It's out at the regular site at Executive Airport. You can get out there all right?"
Squires nodded.
"We taking anything special?"
"This place is supposed to be empty. So just pack your standard inspection gear. Shouldn't take us more than a few hours. You'll be back for happy hour."
"Sounds like a good day to me," Squires said and again raised his hand. "Elma!"
NINETEEN
By the time they got to their next target, the boys were drunk.
They'd been sitting up behind Buck in the wind and noise of the airboat passing the Van Gogh vodka back and forth and giggling. Buck had his earplugs in and never bothered looking around. He was focused on the GPS coordinates and planning out in his head how he was going to unload the guns they'd stolen from the last place. It was a nice haul overall, but instead of maybe calling it a day and figuring they'd done well for themselves, Buck just kept pushing on, a little giddy himself over how well this idea was all coming out. They hadn't seen another boater or even an airplane since they'd left the docks. It was like one of those neutron bombs had gone off, killing everything and leaving the world just for their picking. Hell, they had two or three thousand dollars worth of stuff on board already. The guns themselves should go for two if that greaser Bobby didn't try to rip him off. Buck knew that the middleman had the advantage of knowing how much he hated dealing with firearms. Fucker would lowball him and Buck would end up taking less than he should just to get rid of the stuff. The guns made him nervous just thinking about them stacked below. But the tenseness wasn't strong enough to throw him off his euphoria. Christ, if they picked up another score like the last one, maybe he'd be on his way to Hendry County in a couple of weeks.
When they'd gotten within a mile of the next fishing camp, Buck spotted the hard edges of a building out on the gray horizon and pointed to it with one hand, not knowing that his crew behind him was more interested in the vodka and its effect on their fuddled equilibrium than on his navigation. He wove his way through some low sawgrass and stayed out on the gaps of open water as best he could while maintaining a fairly straight trajectory toward the camp. As before, he started running a scenario through his head just in case they pulled up to some owner or even a local checking out the damages. Rescuers, he'd decided. We're just out here looking to see if anyone needed help, was possibly stranded or hurt. Good Samaritans was what they were.
But as he steered closer, coming in now from the northwest, Buck could see that no cover story was going to be necessary. The hard angles he'd seen from a distance were now forming up to be one single wall, the only one that remained standing. The rest of the place was trashed. The neutron bomb. No survivors.
Buck pulled back the throttle and turned around, catching his assistants playing some kind of preteen thumb-wrestling game and smiling like a couple of idiots out at the forensics unit for the criminally insane at Raiford. I got a real criminal enterprise going here, Buck thought, my own crew of Luca Brasi. "Don Corleone, I come to you on this da day of your daughter's wedding…"
He thought about the Godfather's leg man, his eyes popping out of his head with a garrote around his neck. He could squeeze these punks. But then who's gonna do the heavy lifting? He swung the airboat up to the partial dock and cut the engines, and the cessation of movement gained the attention of the boys, who, it was now obvious, were drunk as skunks. Buck reached between them and snagged the near-empty vodka bottle and flipped it over his shoulder into the water.
"Find what you can find and let's get out of here," he said and the boys turned their faces away like eight-year-olds who got caught jerking off. Buck jumped down onto the deck and headed for the smashed outbuildings and leaving the useless pantry and kitchen wall to the boys.
"Fuck him," said Marcus, only loud enough for Wayne to hear. "Guy could ruin a good wet dream, know what I mean?"
Wayne looked at him with a blank stare.
"No, I guess you wouldn't, Stumpy," Marcus said and stepped away quickly, laughing, but also avoiding Wayne's reach.
"Ain't nothing worth a shit in this mess anyway, 'less you're looking for a nice fish trophy," he said, bending to pick up a fiberglass bonefish that lay crippled with a broken tail on the floor, its long wooden mantel missing.
Wayne poked around in the stuffing and swirl of ripped curtains and cracked debris, kicking at the piles with little interest and stumbling a bit from both the effect of the alcohol and the odd sense of still being on a boat. The missing walls caused the edges of the plank foundation to meld with the water and the open horizon and he was caught by the feeling he might step off the edge of the world if he wasn't careful. He tried to focus on something close and thought it was way weird that the refrigerator and the kitchen wall were still standing. It was like old lady Morrison's house when the wrecking crew came to scrape it off the plot where they built the new marina in Chokoloskee. They were kids and watched in fascination as the big-clawed backhoe chewed through the roof and pulled down the walls of a place they'd passed on their bikes a thousand times. No one their age had ever lived there, only the old woman whose husband had died years before. Then one day the ambulance came and they carted Ms. Morrison out on a stretcher and the place stood dark and empty for years. They might have gotten a glimpse inside when they went trick-or- treating or something as children, but when the place was laid bare by the machinery, they watched in fascination as the pink-papered walls and the porcelain sinks and even an old four-poster bed got scraped into a pile and then loaded into a dump truck. When the claw scooped up the toilet all the kids laughed but only for a second, then they rode on, down to the docks where they could fish and skip stones out onto the bay and do the dumbass things you did when you were young without a thought about your own house being scraped off the face of the earth by a storm or by a fucking backhoe.