Then she broke into the most hauntingly beautiful rendition of Katy Perry’s “Firework,” a cappella, she sang it slowly and mournfully, hauntingly hymnally, far from any version anyone anywhere had ever heard, with Jenn Chojnacki zipping back and forth behind her head miming slow-motion 4th of July fireworks, and before Danielle finished, half of America had to be crying and the other half on their phones calling the National Guard or Red Cross. “Help that poor girl!”
I know I wasn’t crying.
I was too terrified to cry.
I doubted Baylor, who, if he wasn’t watching in Pine Apple, would hear about it soon enough, was crying either.
He was probably running. To Biloxi.
Because Fantasy was telling us over national television that whoever we were after at the Bellissimo had Baylor’s fiancée, July.
The tablet went black at the same time we plunged into the rain. Not only the rain, pounding the helicopter from all sides, but the wind. The pilot shouted over his shoulder, “WE GOT THIS. RELAX.”
(Relax?)
“TEN HARD MINUTES AND WE’LL HAVE YOU DOWN.”
Bradley and I held onto each other for dear life as the hurricane winds pummeled the rocking helicopter.
“FIVE MINUTES.”
I had no idea how we were flying in it, and I sure couldn’t imagine walking in it if we lived through landing.
“THREE MINUTES.”
We pitched forward, and no sooner righted ourselves than we were thrown back. We hit the right side of the copter only to be thrown to the left. We barely heard the mustachioed copilot yell, “HEADS DOWN, HUG YOUR KNEES.”
I hoped it would be quick.
The crash.
I think I blacked out.
* * *
The next thing I knew, my husband was shaking me and the helicopter wasn’t moving.
It was and it wasn’t.
Still rocking side to side, still being crushed by rain, I realized the force behind the helicopter’s momentum was external. We’d landed. And we’d lived through it. I had my husband beside me and my head was still on my neck.
The pilot pulled his headphones off, turned in his seat, and extended a hand. “Congratulations. You two are official storm chasers.”
Neither of us moved. Or blinked. Or anythinged.
He withdrew the hand.
I tried to get my bearings. There was no visibility beyond the windshields, so nothing allowed a perspective as to the direction we should run for the concrete tunnel. I placed mental landmarks—the concrete inland porch, the telescope—and wondered how long we could blindly bat our way into Disaster before the wind swept us up, over the concrete balustrade, off the thirteenth floor, and to Kansas. None of which mattered when the pilot announced, “Sorry we couldn’t get you where you were going.”
Well, where were we?
“You have fifty or so feet to get to the ramp, and I’ll keep the lights on for you,” the pilot said. “Follow the light and it will get you onto the ramp.”
What ramp?
“Follow the ramp to one of the middle floors, where you’ll be safe until you can figure out how to get into the building.”
Middle floors of what?
Get into what building?
Where were we?
“Find a car,” he said, “and get in it.”
The copilot joined in. “If this upper level keeps up—”
Upper level what?
“—and keeps forcing the pressure down—”
What pressure?
“—we’re going to have a quick downgrade of the winds,” the copilot said. “And if you ask me, this storm is going to be blown apart before it can make landfall.”
The best news I’d ever heard.
In my life.
“What are the chances of that?” Bradley asked.
“I’d say ten percent,” the copilot said.
Then the pilot said, “It’ll be another three or four hours of this. By then Kevin will either be on top of you or kicked out to sea.”
* * *
We’d landed on the seventh level of the Bellissimo parking garage. The exposed top level. After three failed attempts, the pilot had abandoned landing on the thirteenth-floor helipad and flew over the top of the Bellissimo to put us down on the larger-target parking lot.
I didn’t follow the helicopter’s lights to the ramp, because I had my head buried between my husband’s shoulder blades and rode on his back the fifty (miles) feet to the ramp. He was the one who followed the helicopter lights through the storm, and mercifully, it wasn’t long before the rain was only hammering us from the right, not all the way around. I let go and slid down Bradley’s back, running with him toward huge glow-in-the-dark painted letters on a concrete pillar that spelled out LEVEL SIX. We rounded the descending ramp, the rain so loud we couldn’t hear ourselves think, and didn’t stop spiraling down the concrete drive until we reached level four of the parking garage. There we caught our breath, slowly made our way with feet of lead to the middle, where, for the first time since we’d taken off in Pine Apple, we were far enough away from loud transportation and even louder rain that we didn’t have to yell at each other to be heard. “We’re stopping here?” I choked the words out between pants.
“Let’s find a car,” he panted back.
The good news was we were alive.
The bad news was we were in a dark exposed parking garage during the worst storm either of us had ever been in, not only on the opposite side of the Bellissimo we needed to be on, but with no way into the building.
“Let’s—” Bradley took deep breaths between words “—get—to—that—car.” He pointed. We could barely see the reflections of two cars. Parking spaces for four hundred cars, but only two spaces occupied within our limited line of vision. We made a run for a dark sedan that was the older of the two, which would make it the easiest to break into. It was, of course, locked. Bradley raised and braced an elbow to knock out a backseat passenger window when I stopped him. “No! You’ll never break the window, but you will break your arm. Kick it out and aim for an edge. Not the middle.”
His look asked how I knew.
“Dateline.”
His look said, “Ah.”
It took three kicks.
He was avoiding glass shards, reaching through to open the car door, when I smelled it.
Eucalyptus.
So, as it turned out, I spent the hour before Hurricane Kevin was scheduled to make landfall alone with my husband in FEMA’s car on the fourth level of the Bellissimo parking garage.
The good news was we learned who FEMA’s partner was. The better news was we learned where July, Filet, and his cousin Broom were. The bad news was we couldn’t get to any of them. The worse news was we’d left my mother’s Tupperware in the helicopter.
NINETEEN
We had no form of communication. We had no phone, and even if we’d had one, we didn’t have service, so we couldn’t call my parents and let them know we’d arrived (somewhat) safely. I imagined by that time, my father would have called the satellite phone on Disaster, if it still worked, only to hear we hadn’t made it yet. Then No Hair would have called the pilots, only to hear we’d landed, leaving everyone to wonder where in, or out, of the storm we were.
We didn’t have a computer, and even if we’d had one, we didn’t have internet, so we couldn’t search for how or when July had returned to Biloxi, if No Hair’s wife, Grace, was with her or not, and for sure, we had no way of knowing how, when, or even why July had been abducted.
What we did have was a dim dome light and a backseat full of do-it-yourself crime scene investigation junk: straight-edge razor blades, oversized chemistry goggles, Ziploc bags, twine, pipe cleaners, felt-tip markers, aluminum foil, a quart of turpentine, a dustpan, a gallon of Gorilla Glue, empty squi
rt bottles, suspiciously full squirt bottles, swim fins, measuring cups, a glow stick, Play-Doh, four funnels, an avocado green rotary phone, fishing line, a turkey baster, and among many other miscellaneous and obscure items, all covered in broken glass from the busted window, a black iron fireplace poker. But it was the front seat that would lead us to July, Filet, and Broom. In the console between the seats, we found three sets of fake credentials for FEMA and his partner. I slipped two in the back pocket of my drowned jeans—one each. Under the passenger seat, we found dossiers on Filet, Broom, and six of their immediate family members—two wives, four children—who lived in Nha Trang, Vietnam. As in Southeast Asia. Beneath the thick files, in a large white envelope carrying the U.S. Department of Homeland Security seal, the return address that of the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Jackson, Mississippi, we found six passports, travel visas, and hot-off-the-press Social Security cards.
The smell of ink hit me. Ink. Not eucalyptus. The file folder and the Homeland package couldn’t have been in FEMA’s possession long.
Clearly, we were looking at Filet’s and Broom’s payday for their participation in the Hurricane Heist—coerced or accomplices, we didn’t know yet—documentation and passage to America for their loved ones. And it was the answer to FEMA’s cryptic clue from the backseat of Daddy’s patrol car: international connections.
Lastly, in the front seat floorboard, we found two empty velvet-lined Movado watch boxes. Just like the velvet-lined boxes that held the Movado watches we sold at Rocks, the Bellissimo jewelry store in the lobby outside of the casino, and just like the watch one of the dead gaming agents had been wearing, and just like the watch Emergency, on loan from Jackson, Mississippi, wore—the man whose picture was in my back pocket. Jackson? Where the Bellissimo’s fifty million dollars were headed before we intercepted? Jackson? Home of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for Mississippi? Then there was Filet’s last transmission on the two-way radio: The manses? The boxeses? The velvetses?
Filet and Broom were locked in Rocks on the ground level of the Bellissimo, not at all safe from the storm surge should the Gulf have already breached the building. And July, having fought her way home to Baylor through Hurricane Kevin, for her efforts, was surely with them.
* * *
I was making good use of the headrest on the passenger seat in FEMA’s car. We had nowhere to go and no way to get there, so for the first time in almost forty hours, with the exception of three measly hours of restless sleep the night before, I let my body relax. Not my brain. Just my body. We were smackdab in the middle of the fourth parking level, relatively safe, but still, storm debris managed to find its way to us. Bradley clicked on the headlights when we heard what sounded like a refrigerator dancing in front of the car, but it was just a rusty red gas can propelled by crosswinds.
I turned the business card we found in FEMA’s glove compartment over and over, as if with the next flip it would give me more information. I placed it on the console between us. “I think Emergency Response Agent Werner Graham and FEMA Agent Laverne Goosed both walked into the police station wearing the right uniforms with falsified credentials and made themselves at home. Any other day—” it bore repeating “—any other day, someone would have caught it,” I said, “caught them. Think of the chaos here when the weather news broke. Imagine the chaos there.”
Bradley picked up the business card. He flipped it a few times. “Do you think Filet and Mop are their partners or their pawns?”
“Filet and Broom? I don’t know,” I said. “My best guess is they were FEMA and Emergency’s errand boys.”
“One of their errands being to lockdown the casino then shoot your laptop?” Bradley asked. “And not ask why?”
By way of explanation, I pointed to the file folders between us full of passports. And truth be told, I’d type eight numbers, hit enter, then shoot a laptop no questions asked for my family.
I was in the middle of a memory—Biloxi Police Captain Sandy Marini volunteering for the ride along with Emergency—which made me wonder exactly what Emergency had planned for us had she not been with him. Then I chased the memory one step further to Emergency struggling unsuccessfully to pull Danielle out of the murky dungeon flood water. I was just about to wonder if he was, in fact, not pulling, but pushing, trying to drown her, which led to the sobering realization that the three of us—me, Bradley, and Danielle—may very well owe Sandy Marini our lives, then all my thoughts were interrupted by a thunderbolt striking with the force of fifty wrecking balls hitting the parking garage from all sides.
Why wouldn’t the storm stop? Just stop?
And why, after completing their chores—stealing designer drugs, spiking the lasagna, entering lockdown codes, shooting laptops—hadn’t FEMA and Emergency disposed of the chef and the housekeeper? Why lock them up and wait for Hurricane Kevin to kill them? If Emergency had been willing to kill me, Bradley, and Danielle—why keep the chef and housekeeper around? Or for that matter, July?
If they were still around.
My blood ran ice cold as I realized we had to find a way into the building.
* * *
The thunder and lightning didn’t last long; the thunder and lightning lasted forever. When it finally dialed back enough for us to breathe, we untangled. Me somewhat reluctantly. When I no longer had my face buried in my husband’s chest, my eyes started Gorilla Glue burning again. If we hadn’t busted a window to find shelter in what turned out to be FEMA’s car, we’d have busted one out to breathe, because FEMA’s car needed ventilation. The do-it-yourself crime scene investigation kit fumes were barely overpowered by the eucalyptus permeating every inch and all the contents of the car.
We held hands over FEMA’s fragrant one-stop-shop business card, touting temporary-employment, check-cashing, pain-relief, immigration, and bail-bond services. The address was a P. O. Box in Jackson, Mississippi. They were, if nothing else, the most opportunistic criminals I’d ever encountered during my six years as a police officer in Pine Apple and my years in security at the Bellissimo. They’d certainly taken full advantage of us. And that was the thing about Mother Nature’s violence—the opportunities. Hurricane Kevin, like all severe weather, gave everyone it touched the chance to show their true colors. The best and the worst of humanity rose to the surface when forced to survive an event over which they had no control. Most worked together with the common goal of coming out on the other side whole.
Some did not.
Some saw it as the chance of a lifetime in a good way. Maybe fathers said what needed to be said to sons. Maybe wives to husbands, the same. Then there were people like Danielle, who the storm showed a side of I’d have never seen otherwise, and who Hurricane Kevin would mark time for—before the storm she couldn’t read, and after, she would. I’d see to it. And Jug Dooley. Hurricane Kevin would effectively put an end to his life of petty crime, general laziness, and living off the land. His habit of never passing up something for nothing would finally catch up with him. Baylor showed his stripes, having finally matured enough that when faced with the choice of his own happiness versus the lives of many others, sacrificed. And July, who at some point must have realized her marriage couldn’t be just about her; it went beyond the circle of two, and honoring Baylor meant honoring his commitments. I thought of my mother, doing what she did best in troubled times, providing nourishment, or, better put, mothering, at that particular moment in time, our daughters. I thought of Anne Cole and what Hurricane Kevin had revealed about her, that after a quarter of a century, she might be ready to move on and share her life with someone. There was Fantasy, always the calm in my storm, never more so than the storm we were in, and for whom family was first, securing her own, and doing everything she could to secure everyone else’s. And I thought of Bianca, for whom heritage was key. She never hesitated to remind us of her lineage, her pedigree, her pride in the fortuitous Italian blood pumping thr
ough her veins, and as a result of her true-blue blood, so many others were safe from the storm in the shelter her father built for her. I thought about No Hair, our rock, who could do ten things at once, always two steps ahead of the bad guys, and always with the uncanny knack for knowing exactly when to strike. I hoped, despite the fact he had to be worried sick about his wife, he was on Disaster preparing to strike just then. But mostly, in that half hour before Hurricane Kevin made landfall, I thought about how exceedingly uncomfortable endless hours of wet clothes were.
* * *
I think we dozed off.
When we woke up holding hands, no more than fifteen minutes later, the rain and wind were gone. It was eerie, the silence of the dense fluid air.
“We must be in the eye.” Bradley stretched and craned.
“Or just a break in the storm.”
Or maybe, neither of us could say out loud, the rain had momentarily stopped to give way to storm surge. There could be fifty feet of water below us, washing through the Bellissimo and Biloxi.
“It’s time,” Bradley said.
We kissed.
* * *
I popped the hood.
By the light of the glow stick from the backseat, I used the point of the fireplace poker to bypass the terminals on the starter.
It worked.
Bradley rolled down the driver window, stuck his head out, and said, “Where’d you learn that?”
“Top Gear.” I slammed the hood. I dusted my hands. I got back in. “Let’s go.”
We drove down the spiraling ramp, losing two tires—right front, back left—to mysterious storm debris we encountered along the way, and limped down the ramp to the parking garage entrance on the other two tires to see Biloxi where we’d left it.
We surveyed Beach Boulevard as much as the headlights would allow.
Double Agent Page 19
