Zargoza and his men stacked steel desks along the western side of the boiler room, trying not to show fear. City and Country hid in their closet. The International Olympic Committee was jammed into another room, praying in a symphony of tongues. Art Tweed stood in an open doorway, watching the storm approach, not afraid to die.
In room one, Serge chomped with appetite from the bag of fortune cookies. “What a rush!”
The door of room ten was barricaded with cardboard boxes containing thousands of zebra-striped beepers. Huddled in the bathroom were the Diaz Boys, except for Juan, who was curled on the floor outside the door holding a metal garbage can lid for a shield.
Juan pounded on the locked door. “C’mon, let me in!”
“No room.”
“It’s because I’m the cousin, isn’t it?”
“Ridiculous!”
Twenty minutes after the first gusts, everyone was packed in tight wherever they had decided to ride it out. Some sat with knees up against their chests, rocking nervously. It was five P.M. and pitch black. Without power there wasn’t just no light, but no artificial noise-no TV or air-conditioning, no radio, no hum of electronic anything. Nobody was talking either. Nothing left to do but hang on. The wind howled against the building and the trees, and waves slapped the pylons of The Florida Room down on the beach. Every few seconds the noise of something unidentified breaking or snapping off was heard in the distance-people in the rooms trying to identify the sound of what just went. The concrete construction of Hammerhead Ranch inspired confidence, but the building was still producing far too many noises for anyone to relax. It didn’t sound like something of cement, more like a wooden ship. There was a rolling, creaking sound-twenty carpenters with claw hammers slowly prying galvanized nails out of soft pine. Glass broke and then a scream-the window in someone else’s room giving out.
It was Johnny Vegas’s room, and the scream was from the beautiful naked woman who ran in the bathroom, refused to come out and started crying.
Hammerhead Ranch was in the worst possible location. The center of Hurricane Rolando-berto was coming ashore fifteen miles north at the Pasco County line. As the storm spun counterclockwise, the deadliest bands of wind tightened and whipped around from the southeast corner of the system right into Hammerhead Ranch. The creaking of the building increased, and more glass shattered. The wind rushed around the motel and jammed up under the eaves. The sound was a roar now, and attention stayed on the windows. Once the glass goes, the hurricane is inside the room, and everything becomes a missile. The panes of rooms thirteen and fourteen shattered, and books and cups and letter trays assaulted Zargoza and his goons. There was a final crash-bang drumroll, and the roof peeled off the motel like the tongue of an old boot. It hung straight up for a second, the guests staring into the sky in disbelief. Then it cracked in half and the top part did a backflip into the side of the condominium next door. Two more gusts and the rest was gone too.
Now everyone was trapped in their rooms by their own barricades, and they tore at the desks, tables, dressers, chairs and mattresses blocking the exits. The same idea hit everyone at the same time: Get to the bar!
The bartender was already inside, quaking in the kitchen. The shutters were fastened hard, and he had no way of seeing the wave of refugees heading his way. Zargoza was first to arrive, and he didn’t mess with preliminaries. He blew the lock with a.44.
The guests piled in, and Serge and Zargoza slid an arcade game in front of the door. Some of the guests had quieted down, some still whining, many clearly a short push away from a total crack-up.
Serge took charge.
“Please calm down,” he said, confidently strolling to the middle of the room. “I want everyone to just chill. What happened to the motel is not going to happen here. This place was built like Gibraltar. The wood’s half petrified. It’s heavy as lignum vitae-some of it won’t even float anymore. Those joists are true four-by-sixes, and the builders cross-nailed it for extra strength. Look at this…”-he walked over and pointed up at the angle joints where the roof met a corner of the room-“…this is ship construction. It’s meant to survive storms at sea, so I think it’s a safe bet it’ll make it on land. You don’t need to worry at all. We got our own generator out here and some stored water. We’re in good shape…”
People let out sighs. They gave Serge eye contact, nodding in agreement as he spoke-Serge reining in their hysteria, getting the runaway stagecoach back under control.
Zargoza leaned against the cash register, arms crossed, still holding the.44 in one hand. He thought: This guy’s good.
A small boy raised his hand.
Serge pointed to him. “We have a question in back?”
“What’s the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon?”
“I’m glad you asked that, son,” said Serge. “You see, both hurricanes and typhoons are cyclonic storms. Hurricanes occur in the Atlantic Ocean, and typhoons in the western Pacific region, often in the South China Sea. Did you know that cyclonic storms turn counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere but clockwise in the southern?”
“Wow!” said the boy. “No, I didn’t.”
“Want to see something neat?” said Serge.
“Sure do!”
He followed Serge into the bathroom. Serge raised the lid of the toilet and flushed.
“See?” he said. “It flushes counterclockwise, just like a hurricane. That’s because we’re in the northern hemisphere. You go down to Argentina or Chile, and all the toilets flush clockwise.”
“Wow!” said the boy.
They walked back into the main bar area. Serge looked over at the goons and the Diaz Boys, and he noticed Zargoza was having a rough time keeping a lid on them.
“Will you listen to the man!” Zargoza pleaded. “He was right about this building, wasn’t he? It’s holding up like a missile silo! Not a creak.”
He caught Serge in the side of his vision. “Serge! Hey, come here! You talk to ’em. You’re good with that sort of thing. Tell ’em there’s nothing to worry about.”
“He’s right,” said Serge. “Everyone’s going to be okay. This your first hurricane party?”
The Diaz Boys and the goons nodded.
“Good, good,” said Serge. “Nothing to it. I was telling Lenny about my first hurricane party back in ’65. That was Betsy, killed seventy-four. Donna, back in ’60, killed one forty-eight, but I wasn’t born yet. Then there was Okeechobee in ’28, killed eighteen hundred out at the lake, but the big one was Galveston in 1900, six thousand perished.”
The men turned a whiter shade of pale.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Serge said with an awkward laugh. “Getting off-track. Like I was saying, you want to keep thinking good thoughts. My first hurricane party was a blast. We were over on the east coast in Riviera Beach, just above West Palm. When she started to blow, we cut the power in the house so there wouldn’t be a fire. We lit candles and played Monopoly in the hallway. We had a big metal drum of Charles Chips and we listened to our little transistor radio for the mounting death toll down in Fort Lauderdale and Miami…”
The goons went green.
“Oops, sorry again,” he said. “How about a movie? The VCR still works ’cuz of the generator and I just happened to bring some great Florida flicks.”
He held up a gym bag full of videocassettes.
Serge got the VCR going and popped in a tape. “The important thing now is to keep your minds occupied, not to think about your situation.”