"You're a cop too, ain't you, Freeman?"
Buck was speaking, but I did not turn my eyes from Sherry's.
"You've got the look. That confidence thing like cops and prison guards got. I seen plenty of it over the years."
While Sherry ate I swallowed a couple of the peach slices myself. I had not eaten anything but a small piece of the chocolate in more than twenty-four hours and was thinking of my own strength.
"I think Wayne here was right about what he heard when the lady said she was a cop. And I think you're one too. You ain't called her your wife or your honey or your fiancee."
I fed another slice to Sherry and one to myself. I was listening, just as Buck had obviously been doing. I may have underestimated him and that was a bad sign.
"What I think, Officer Freeman, is that she's your partner," Buck said. "You all might have been stupid enough to be out here in the Glades during a hurricane, but I don't believe that it was for no reason."
He paused again, maybe letting his thoughts catch up with him. It reminded me of the long, southern drawl used by Nate Brown, who never hurried his speech, but never said much that was just filler either. I found myself wondering whether they lived in the same area of southwest Collier County.
"No, officer. I think you all know exactly what's in that fucking room next door and that's the reason you're out here," Buck said. "Nobody builds a bunker like that out in these parts without having something damn valuable to store inside. And the fact that we got two cops out here trying to get into it makes me believe that there are drugs involved. Bricks of cocaine? Bundles of pot? Stuff got air-dropped into the Glades and then pulled out by some group of dealers who are smart enough to store it out here until they got a buyer on the coast that can move it fast."
Again he took that pause, and when I looked up his face was in shadows but the light was on those of his young crew and they were more hang-mouth stunned than I was.
"No shit! Buck," Marcus said, a smile beginning to build in his eyes.
"Whoa," was all Wayne could say and if 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 indoor hangar to park them. Some appeared to have simply folded in on themselves, fuselages crushed in the middle like broken spines. Others sat upright but their wings were missing, picked off and discarded like a mean kid might do to a giant dragonfly. There was little activity on the south side of the airfield so Harmon broke all normal driving rules and made a beeline across the tarmac to the Fleet Company hangar. He could see Squires's Jeep sitting next to the open bay doors, and before he got to park, his partner and another big man appeared, moving slowly out of the huge building and putting their backs into the task of wheeling a helicopter onto the airfield. Harmon pulled up next to the black Wrangler and sorted through his ops bag; let them do the heavy work, he wasn't in the mood for heavy work today.
Again he checked off the list in his head as he touched each item in his bag. He stopped at the frequency transmitter. He'd used them before to electronically restart the power systems on ocean oil rigs. You needed lights to land and the frequency could switch them on and unlock doors before you even touched down. And then his fingers settled on the slick skin of a brick of incendiary C-4 explosive.
This was not standard equipment in the states and the order to take it along was unnerving to Harmon. In domestic work he and Squires were a security team, not a demolition unit. Yeah, they might have had to muscle some rig workers in the past. And yeah, they did have to entice the manager of one gas operation to confess to his paper swindling with the help of a gun muzzle pressed to his forehead. But the idea of blowing up and melting infrastructure on home soil was a new twist for Harmon. He knew ATF guys. He knew how good their bomb investigators were. If they were put on the site after a suspicious explosion they were bound to find something.