Shark Beach

by Chris Jameson

  He drew up to the dock, tied off, and said a prayer that the surf wouldn’t be bad enough to smash the boat against the pilings before he got back. The day before, he had purchased two enormous wheeled duffel bags. Now he extended the handles and rolled them up the dock, kicked open the rear gate of the Alvart estate, and hurried past the huge backyard swimming pool. With the wind howling, even he had barely heard the clatter of the lock shattering on the gate, so when he reached the sliding glass door he made a decision—time was more important than subtlety. He found a decorative stone by the pool and tossed it through the glass, then stepped through, shards crunching under his boots, dragging the wheeled duffels behind him.

  Rain swept in, swirling on the wind.

  An alarm sounded—run by a backup generator—which made him move a bit faster. But the main road was clogged with evacuating vehicles, and Captiva didn’t have its own police force. Even if that alarm signal somehow connected to a security firm, and even if they didn’t just chalk it up to wind damage, it would take a long time for anyone to come and check it out. Lennox would be long gone by then.

  With a grin on his face, he unzipped the first duffel and began his first-ever robbery.

  He’d never felt happier.

  * * *

  Simone flung her suitcase into the back of her rented Honda. They were all moving fast now, with surprisingly little chatter. Knowing this group, she would have expected them to be doing nothing but talking about the hurricane, but it seemed fear had shut them up. Marianna had gone and dragged Kevin and Tyler out of bed, so the two of them were last out the door. Simone heard them come out onto the wooden landing overhead, thumping their rolling suitcases down the steps.

  “Hey,” Nadia said. “Who’s riding with who?”

  Simone resisted the urge to correct her grammar. She turned to look at the others, all of them standing in the rain, and she wiped water from her eyes. “Marianna should ride with me.”

  Nadia blinked in surprise, then nodded. “I’ll ride with the lovers.”

  She dragged her suitcase over to the silver Audi Kevin had rented. “Come on, boys. I’m with you.”

  Marianna had watched this exchange with interest. Another day she might have had questions, but nobody had time to do any deep thinking just then. She hoisted her too-large suitcase and slid it into the trunk beside Simone’s. They both waited while Rashad did the same.

  At the neighboring house, the door banged open, slammed into the wooden railing outside, and the two families began to emerge. They processed their fear differently, apparently, because they moved as if a tornado was on the way instead of a hurricane, parents urgently snapping at their kids, the kids ignoring them.

  Their urgency amplified Simone’s own fear. Mandatory evacuation felt so much different than the voluntary order. Some people would stay on the island, she knew, people who wanted to remain with their property, or who thought they were in no danger, that they were smarter or heartier than everyone else and could ride out the storm. The night before, Simone might have claimed to understand, but now that the evac order was mandatory, she thought those people were complete idiots.

  “Come on,” she said, climbing into the car. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Rashad got into the back seat, Marianna taking shotgun. Simone fired up the engine, reversed out of the little driveway, waved to Kevin, Tyler, and Nadia, and then roared along the loose stone road, not pausing for the speed bumps, intent upon leaving Sunset Captiva behind.

  She got as far as the exit from the development, where she needed to turn right onto Captiva Drive, before she had to stop and wait. The traffic from the northern part of the island was bumper to bumper, and by the time she slipped out onto Captiva Drive, Kevin’s rented Audi was behind her, and the Scullys and the Hautalas were following him.

  The traffic crawled. The windshield wipers swept back and forth. Hard gusts bent the trees and swirled the palm fronds that already littered the road.

  Marianna had said nothing. Now she clicked on the radio and tuned it to a news channel whose commentators were doing a great job of scaring the shit out of anyone in the path of the hurricane. Simone changed the station, found some Latin music and left it there, the windshield wipers swishing. She glanced in the rearview mirror, where Rashad seemed to be trying to sleep.

  It felt like it might be the longest day of her life.

  “Marianna, listen,” she said, glancing over at the passenger seat. “This is … maybe it’s good that we have some time to talk.”

  “About you guys trying to ghost me, you mean?” Marianna asked, giving her a knowing look.

  “That. And about why. I mean, there’s no excuse. We were totally immature—”

  “I won’t argue that. But I know why. I get it, Simone, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to come with you guys. Whenever there’s a group of friends, it always comes down to two girls—two women, ’cause we’re women now, I guess—getting closer. Maybe I pissed you guys off, maybe there are times I’m irritating or a bitch, but we all are.”

  “We definitely all—”

  “I’m not done,” Marianna said in an icy tone. “My point is that women do this shit to each other all the time. You guys could have handled it better, but in general, we have to stop doing this, treating each other like the enemy, pairing up and shutting out the ones who don’t seem to belong. Witches gathered in covens, in circles, and there’s power in that. Do you think it’s an accident that men are afraid of women gathering in groups and standing up for themselves? But we undermine our own needs by doing this horribly, bitchy thing where we have to have some outsider to mistreat in order to make ourselves feel better.”

  “You’re saying you understand, and I guess you do, but you sound like you’re still pretty pissed about it.”

  “I am. But I’m glad you wanted to talk about it. Step in the right direction.”

  Simone nodded in agreement and muttered, “Okay.” It was a beginning, anyway. As much as she had just taken a verbal beating, it had been worth it just to get the conversation started.

  The wind gusted hard enough that they felt it pushing against the car. Simone tightened her grip on the steering wheel. In the back seat, she heard a clinking of glass and glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see Rashad using his opener to pop the cap off a bottle of beer.

  “Are you kidding me? It’s not even nine a.m.”

  Rashad grinned and held the bottle between the front seats, waiting for one of the girls to take it. “We’re in dead-stop traffic. It’s going to take us hours to get to the mainland. By then, these beers will be warm and we might be drowning.”

  Simone glanced at Marianna, who shrugged her shoulders and took the sweating beer bottle.

  “The hell with it,” Marianna said. “When you put it that way.”

  With a shiver, Simone looked into her mirror again. “Fine. Give me one. Hurricane Juliet can kiss my ass.”

  She cranked up the music loud enough that the whole car thumped with the bass. When Rashad handed her the beer, she took a long sip and then raised the bottle to toast the oncoming storm.

  “Good morning, Florida!” she shouted over the music. “Fuck off and die!”

  * * *

  Matti drove, with Jenn in the passenger seat. Jesse lay sprawled in the back, center seat belt around his waist in spite of his prone position. He held his phone aloft, staring up at the screen, scanning for whatever information he could find on the hurricane.

  “Anything?” Jenn asked.

  “Anything not on the radio?” Matti amended.

  “Barely any signal,” Jesse replied. “But it’s pretty clear we’re not getting anywhere fast. We could binge a season of something on Netflix and still be stuck on this road.”

  Matti feared he might be right. He hadn’t really considered how many of the people would be staying at South Seas Plantation on the northern tip of the island. The condo complex must have been much larger than he’d imagined. Too ma
ny people on Captiva, and on Sanibel, had waited for the evac order to become mandatory. They had all been stupid.

  “You all right, honey?” Jenn asked.

  Matti nodded, watching the cars ahead of them. An SUV waited a few seconds too long to inch forward and someone started honking a horn.

  “I’m all right. No idea why anyone would beep. Nobody’s getting off island any time soon. Only one road in, one road out.”

  “I’m sure by now they’ve stopped letting people drive onto the causeway,” Jenn said. “They’ll have opened the oncoming lane, so that’s twice as many people who can leave at once.”

  Matti watched the Scullys’ rented Toyota RAV4 creep ahead a few feet in front of them. “If so, it doesn’t seem to be helping much.”

  Jenn took his right hand and squeezed. “Breathe, Matti. We’re in the same boat as all of these other folks. Worrying about it won’t make the cars move any quicker.”

  He lifted her hand and kissed her fingers. “I know, love. I’ll breathe.”

  In the back seat, Jesse piped up. “Hey, at least we’re not in the car with Rick and Corinne.”

  Matti laughed, but immediately felt badly about it. “They’re doing their best.”

  “Are they?” Jenn asked.

  “They’re trying,” Matti said.

  Jesse let his hands flop down onto his chest, covering his phone like it was treasure. “Dad, you don’t have to make excuses for them. Mrs. Scully seems like she’s trying to keep it together, trying to keep Emma and Kelsey from dealing with a lot of it, but Mr. Scully has some serious issues. The guy needs therapy yesterday.”

  Matti couldn’t argue with the truth. The families had been friends for a long time, and he had never seen Rick as on edge as he had seemed this week. Every relationship had its rocky periods, stretches of time when stress and anxiety and outside forces conspire to wind up one or both people so they grated on each other, fraying the connection they shared. Matti and Jenn had gone through a very bad patch when Jesse had been a toddler, and it had almost been the end of them. But they had made it through, and now he couldn’t imagine life without her.

  He squeezed his wife’s hand. “I really hope they make it through this.”

  “Me too,” Jenn replied. “But I swear, honey, I’m not holding my breath.”

  The traffic crawled forward a little, then stopped again. Matti breathed deeply and watched the back of the Scullys’ rental, wondering where they would all sleep tonight. Not that it mattered, really. As long as Jenn and Jesse were safe and they were all together, he did not care where they ended up.

  * * *

  When Deputy Hayes noticed the boat zipping in toward Blind Pass, she spared it only a single, stray thought. Coming in fast. That was it, because why wouldn’t it be coming in fast? If she had been out in the Gulf with the hurricane churning toward landfall—if she had been stupid enough to take a boat out on the water, as rough as the seas were getting, the way the waves were crashing and the wind pounding—well, she would have been full throttle toward safe harbor herself.

  But she only noticed the boat for a second. The cars were a more immediate concern. There were only two lanes, one in either direction, but now both were filled with vehicles headed off the islands. Once upon a time, people would have evacuated the day before, when the governor had called it voluntary, but folks had either become more stubborn or stupider over time. As a cop, Deputy Hayes had come to believe it was that most people these days simply did not think the rules applied to them. They would rather ignore authority and wise counsel than let anyone tell them what to do … right up until they realized it might kill them.

  Static flared on her radio, a crackling voice came on. “—got a problem over here. I could use some backup.”

  Deputy Hayes frowned, stood a bit taller, then walked a few yards onto the bridge at Blind Pass. With the rain slashing down and the gray sky, she could barely make out the tops of cars and the flashing lights of emergency vehicles on the other side. The bridge itself was not much to speak of, just a short span that crossed the narrow pass between Sanibel and Captiva. The tides rushed in and out below it, people fished from its railings, and there was a tiny beach parking lot on the Captiva side, but otherwise it was just a connector, maybe a hundred feet long.

  Someone honked their horn, and Deputy Hayes spun to glare at the driver of a bright yellow Land Rover. The car in front had room to move but hadn’t crept forward yet, and Mr. Land Rover had taken issue.

  “You’re not going anywhere!” she barked. “Three feet isn’t going to make a difference!”

  He glared back at her. Deputy Hayes yanked back the hood of her slicker to make sure he could see her face, see the disapproval written there. The rain soaked her, but she knew she would be soaked through for hours yet, so she did not care. Mr. Land Rover threw up his hands in exasperation, but he did not touch the horn again.

  Deputy Hayes marched across the bridge, listening to the static and the voices on her radio. The Sanibel side was not her jurisdiction, but part of her job was to help other law enforcement personnel in need, anywhere in the county, so she approached a spot in the midst of traffic where Sanibel and state police officers had crowded in front of a dented Volkswagen. The VW sat in the parking lot of the little convenience market on the Sanibel side. The car’s nose jutted from the parking lot, but it still took her a second to realize that the driver had come out of the little side street past the market and tried to get onto the bridge going the wrong way.

  “—no vehicles allowed onto Captiva, sir,” one of the Sanibel cops said, shouting to be heard over the storm. “You need to head off island. Get in line. If you stay—”

  The driver of the car shouted something in return, but the wind and rain and the crashing of the waves around the pilings of the bridge drowned him out. Deputy Hayes thought she caught something about his wife, and she picked up her pace. By the time she reached the car, the shouting match had turned fiery.

  “You’re not listening to me,” said the driver, a good-looking bald guy with an accent she couldn’t place. Somewhere they spoke Spanish was all Hayes could figure. “My wife is at South Seas Plantation. I have to get her—make sure she’s safe!”

  The Sanibel cops began making threats. Hayes didn’t have time for this. What did they think would happen now? If they dragged him out of the car to arrest him, they didn’t have anywhere to put him until the evacuation was complete. And the driver had even less brains—no way would he be able to drive all the way to the resort at the other end of Captiva with cars filling both lanes.

  Behind her on the bridge, cars started to honk. Vehicles moved forward a few feet before stopping, then began to move slowly, making actual progress for ten or fifteen seconds before coming to a halt yet again. She could practically feel their frustration.

  “Sir,” she said, hurrying to join them. “I’m in contact with the folks at South Seas. If you know what unit your wife is in, I’ll call them now and make sure they explain the situation to her and put her in a vehicle headed this way. I’m sure one of the employees or another guest would be happy to bring her this far. You can park here in the lot until she arrives. Fair enough?”

  The man seemed about to argue, but the horns blared again and the cars started to roll, and the guy seemed at last to really see how impossible a task he had set for himself.

  “Yeah, yeah. That would be perfect. Thanks so much.”

  The Sanibel cops gave her grateful looks, even nodding. Gary Jensen rolled his eyes at her. Jensen was one of those cops who fetishized his authority and wanted civilians to obey him because of the uniform. He didn’t care about logic or feelings, and he no doubt hated her reasonable solution to this problem, but Deputy Hayes didn’t care. The problem had been solved.

  People were shouting on the Captiva side of the bridge. Someone had snuck up on the dirt shoulder and tried to make a third row, hoping to cut the line to get over the bridge. Fucking assholes. There were always people
who thought their needs were more important than the needs of others.

  She started jogging back across the bridge. The rain and wind had swallowed the roar of the boat’s engine, but now the whine pierced the storm. Halfway across the Blind Pass bridge, Deputy Hayes turned and saw that same boat. Instead of throttling down, if anything it seemed to be moving faster, bouncing atop the waves as it careened toward the bridge.

  “What the hell?” she muttered to herself as she cut to her left, running for the railing.

  Three guys in the thirty-footer, bearded twentysomething morons risking the storm just to go fishing and now realizing how stupid they’d been. The wind whipped across the bridge, gusting harder. The trees on either side of the pass bent and the rain came down sideways, and these fools had finally realized how fast they needed to get their asses somewhere safe. But at that speed, with the storm surge, the tide had risen so high that they were barely going to make it under the bridge.

  When Deputy Hayes spotted the wave, she knew she could erase the barely.

  “Hey!” she shouted, waving her arms back and forth, trying to get their attention. “Turn around! Slow down, goddammit! Slow down!”

  One of them pointed to the gap beneath the bridge, and she knew they hadn’t seen her and that the storm had stolen her words. They jetted through the pass and she realized time had run out. Swearing loudly, drowning in the noise of car horns and raging wind and crashing surf, she turned and ran for the Captiva side of the bridge just as the wave swept in behind the boat. The craft lifted, turned sideways, and crashed into the pilings beneath the bridge. Deputy Hayes bent into the wind, pumping her legs, but she heard the whoomp behind her as the boat’s fuel tank blew.