There on this strange, alien landscape in the driving rain, he began to second-guess turning around. But that was the point of this lunatic, soaking wet stroll, after all. To see if they had made the right call, and to find out what the hell was going on. Rashad figured there would be some kind of emergency personnel on the road, someone with answers.
“Slow down!” a voice called.
Rashad looked back to see Tyler and Kevin, hand in hand, hurrying to catch up. Kevin could be arrogant and Tyler never managed to be as funny as he thought he was, but Rashad enjoyed being with the two of them when they were together. They soothed each other, smoothing their edges, and it was sweet to see.
“Me slow down?” he called through the wind and rain. “You guys hurry up!”
They did, running after him, laughing as if there was no hurricane bearing down on them and all of this would blow over.
Blow over, he thought. That was the problem, wasn’t it? Looking at the trees bending in the wind, feeling the way each gust seemed to want to pick him up by his flapping rain coat and carry him off like Piglet in that Winnie the Pooh cartoon, he worried that every house and tree might just blow over.
“You sure you have a cell signal?” Kevin asked, as he and Tyler came right up behind Rashad. “I’ve got nothing. I don’t want to walk all the way down to Blind Pass if we can’t even call them to tell them what happened.”
“Me either,” Rashad said. “But yes, I have a signal.”
Tyler laughed, turning his face up to the rain. “This is crazy. We should have just gotten out of the cars and walked. We were halfway there already.”
Rashad didn’t argue. He was right. They should have walked when they were closer, but they had not come up with the idea until they had already arrived back at their rented house in Sunset Captiva.
“We should at least walk on the road,” he said. “Otherwise it’ll take forever.”
“This is like a dream, though, isn’t it?” Tyler said.
“You’re a romantic, Ty,” Kevin replied, “but save it for after the storm.”
With Tyler’s reluctant acquiescence, the three of them cut over to the road not far from the Tween Waters Inn. The line of cars seemed to have stopped cold. Some people had even turned their engines off, conserving gas for when they could drive again. More and more cars were headed the other direction. Rashad flagged down a BMW and tried to ask the woman behind the wheel what was going on, but she said she didn’t know in a tone so dismissive he actually flinched.
The rain kept falling and the wind picked up. Branches fell. A coconut thumped to the ground on the roadside. A few people called them crazy, taking the time to roll down their windows just to share that thought, but they kept walking. Rashad could be stubborn like that, and he knew it, but eventually they made it all the way to Blind Pass, where cars were jammed into the little beach parking lot and a single police car—a Lee County sheriff’s vehicle—sat amongst them, emergency lights flashing. With the rain and the gloom, the sky had grown so dark it might as well have been night, so it was only when they were at the edge of the Blind Pass bridge and a sheriff’s deputy—the same one who had come to the house the night before—shouted and started to wave them off, that Rashad realized that part of the bridge had broken away.
“Holy shit,” he muttered.
Kevin wasn’t so quiet. “What the fuck is this?” he shouted at the deputy. “What are you doing?”
The woman—Deputy Hayes, Rashad remembered—looked at him as if he were crazy. “Trying to keep people alive. What are you doing, coming out here on foot? Get back in your car or go down to the beach and wait for the fishermen to ferry you across.”
Rashad frowned, wiping rain from his eyes. The sound of the wind whipping the hood of Nadia’s raincoat around his head seemed to grow louder as he tried to make sense of what the deputy had said.
“We came from the house we rented,” Tyler explained to her. “We walked.”
Rashad dropped out of the conversation. He walked back toward the line of cars, then to the edge of the road. To his right, people were massing in the parking lot, in amongst the cars that were jammed there. They were going over the edge of the lot, down the incline to the beach, almost lost to view in the storm. Rashad glanced back across the bridge and saw the police cars and an ambulance there, saw the line of people stringing up from the seawall, and abruptly he understood.
The waves were massive, crushing things that smashed through Blind Pass every ten seconds, but there were two fishing boats in the water and their crews were risking their lives and livelihood to help people get off Captiva. The inlet gap might have been only a hundred feet, but as Rashad watched, it seemed an impossible distance. The captains of those boats were taking turns blasting their vessels into the oncoming waves, unloading passengers on the Sanibel side, and then coming back to load up again. People were hanging on for dear life. Water crashed over the sides and onto the decks. Those who were fleeing had to hold ropes and jump into the shallows while waves battered them and people on shore helped drag them to land.
Rashad turned and strode back to Deputy Hayes. “This is insane. You’ll never get everyone off the island.”
“You think they don’t know that?” she called, raising her voice against the wind.
“It’s so dangerous,” Rashad said. “Someone’s going to drown any minute now. You’ve got to stop them.”
Deputy Hayes glared at him. “I’ve been out here all day, kid. Accident took out part of the bridge maybe an hour ago and the fishermen started in on this immediately. They know the risk. No helicopter is going to fly in this and there’s no other way off the island.”
Tyler had gotten a look at the ferrying operation now, and he turned to her as well. “How long can they keep this up?”
“I’ve been telling them to call it off since ten minutes after they started,” Hayes said. “But the people keep coming, abandoning their cars on the road.”
Rashad thought about calling the others. His cell phone felt suddenly much heavier in his pocket.
Kevin came up beside him. “Even if we got across,” he said, “we’d have no car and no luggage. Where would we go?”
Hayes overheard. “You’d be shuttled to a hotel on the mainland. The traffic on Sanibel’s bumper to bumper, too, but the causeway isn’t collapsing any time soon, so you’d still get off.”
Rashad took out his phone. Even as he did, he glanced back down into Blind Pass and watched one of the fishing boats nearly capsize. It crested the wave and made it across, but only barely. Some of the people in the parking lot cried out in alarm and then there was much nervous chatter before some of them turned and went the other way, down onto the beach or back to the road, where they started a trek in the direction of whatever accommodations they’d had the night before.
He glanced at his phone. One bar. He might get through or he might not, but how long would it take the others to get here? Would the fishermen still be running ferry service by then? He thought not.
Most of the houses on Captiva had been built on stilts for just this situation. With luck, the structures on the island would survive. A lot of trees would come down. The water might cover a lot of the land, but their rental house would still be standing when it was over. He hoped.
“Tyler, Kevin, let’s go,” he said. “We’re gonna ride it out.”
Deputy Hayes started trying to talk them out of it. “You should get out of here while you still can.”
Rashad looked at her. “So should you.”
Neither of them had anything more to say. Rashad watched as Kevin reached out to take Tyler’s hand again, and then the three of them started back along the street, picking up their pace, not speaking about the danger of the hurricane closing in.
Closing in? Rashad thought, as the rain pelted him and the wind tried to push him into a car. It’s already here.
* * *
Corinne Scully had always loved folklore and legends from around the wor
ld. She loved all the monsters and gods of mythology, but some lingered in her mind more than others. Of late her thoughts had returned again and again to the story of Perseus attempting to slay the Gorgon Medusa, she with the nest of snakes where her hair ought to have been. The snakes were so spectacular that they seemed all most people focused on when it came to Medusa, and Corinne agreed it was a great visual. But it caused people to skirt over the other major element of Medusa’s myth—that she could turn a man to stone with nothing but a glance.
My kind of woman, Corinne thought, not for the first time.
She stood just inside the sliding glass door that led out to the second-floor balcony at the back of their rented house. Rick had popped the lock on the maintenance closet downstairs and found a fat roll of duct tape, and she’d been crisscrossing the windows with it ever since. The phone had rung shortly after they had returned to the house, a call from the property management company that looked after the place. The woman on the line had seemed surprised to find them at home, said they were calling to encourage any stragglers to depart, that the property management team had been trying to get to all of the houses to board up the Gulf-facing windows but that they had only finished half of the Sunset Captiva homes before the bridge over Blind Pass had gone out, cutting them off from a resupply truck. The staff was taking shelter at their Captiva office—yes, on the second floor, the woman had said.
Corinne had asked the woman if she thought they would be safe in the house.
Depends on the storm, doesn’t it? the woman had replied.
The words haunted her now, and Corinne stood at the slider with the roll of duct tape in her hand and stared out through the curtain of rain. Several trees were already down. One lay diagonally across the screen porch of the house next door, and she hoped the spring-breakers were okay. They were irritating, those college kids, but they seemed decent enough in spite of it. She had zero interest in turning any of them to stone.
Her husband, on the other hand …
She loved Rick, but he had been making it progressively more difficult for a long time. Corinne had always believed that a marriage was the place you came home to, the place you laid bare your soul and shared your troubles, lightening the burdens of the world. Once, she had thought her husband believed the same, but little by little he had shut her out. Her theory was that Rick wanted to insulate her and the girls, to protect them from his anxieties and fears, but although she had tried to disabuse him of the notion, somehow he still failed to see the damage his philosophy had done. Was doing. The more he shut her out, the more frayed his nerves became, and the less interested she was in soothing them.
He’s a prick, she thought. Don’t make him a victim.
The urge to write him off had been growing in her for a while, but though her bruised ego and wounded heart wanted to keep it simple, she knew it was anything but. The man she had married had never been the sort to alienate his wife and children. He needed therapy, probably medication, and he sure as hell needed an attitude adjustment. The only real question that remained for her was whether or not she would still be married to him by the time he realized just how badly he had fucked it all up.
“Hey,” Rick said, stepping into the bedroom, rapping softly on the door.
Corinne wanted to turn around, but she couldn’t. Her hand gripped the roll of duct tape—she hadn’t taped off the sliding glass door in their room yet and it needed to be done. The door shook, the glass seemed to flex, as if it might explode inward at any second. The wind howled outside. The whole house shook, bending away from the wind.
She thought about Perseus and Medusa. How many men had Medusa turned to stone with her gaze? Surely hundreds, at the very least. But then Perseus had come along with his shield and used it to reflect her own gaze back at her, and then it was Medusa who turned to stone, frozen forever.
Corinne had been a proud woman, strong and confident. She had dealt with the same abhorrent behavior by men that most other women encountered. Creepy colleagues, roaming hands, inappropriate comments, veiled threats, microaggressions. For most of her life, she had turned those men to stone with a glance, and she’d done it to her own husband many times. But out in the car today, the way Rick had behaved, she had felt as if Perseus had reflected her gaze back at her, and she had been the one frozen, turned to stone.
“You shouldn’t be so close to the glass,” Rick said, with an apology in his voice that she’d heard so many times. Not the words, just the tone.
Corinne remained stone. Though only late afternoon, it had gone dark as night outside. The rain swept across the sliding glass door, and as she stared at her reflection in that dark glass, she could see Rick behind her, standing just inside the bedroom, barely over the threshold. The weight of their argument remained, as if their marriage had been holding its breath ever since.
“Honey,” he said. “You okay?”
She smiled at the audacity. “No,” she said, proving a stone statue could speak. “Of course I’m not okay.”
Her own voice seemed to reverse Medusa’s curse, and she picked up the roll of tape and began to drag it across the glass, laying down a diagonal strip that sliced across the top half of the door. She completed the X, then started to make another one on the bottom half of the glass.
“Corinne.”
On one knee, she turned to look at him. Wondering who he was. Who they had become, these two married people with their beautiful daughters, who didn’t deserve any of this.
“I know you’re angry,” he said.
She wrinkled her brow, calling out the idiocy of the statement without saying a word.
Rick held up both hands. “Okay. I know. You have every right to be. I’ve got a lot of shit to work out. I feel like my thoughts are all tangled up, like crossed wires. Fucking power lines, on the ground, exposed, ready to electrocute me with the wrong step.”
She refused to smile, just kept her face blank. “Were you always such a drama queen?”
“Pretty much.”
“Look, now’s not the time,” Corinne said.
“I know. That’s what I’m saying. I’m sorry, and I’m going to make my apologies to the girls, too. But right now they’re afraid—”
“I’m afraid.”
Rick nodded. “Me too. We’ll be okay—I believe that—but it’s a scary scenario. We’re all watching the news downstairs and it’s a category three right now but they’re thinking just before it really hits, it could die down to a category two, maybe even one. That’s just a couple of hours from now. But…”
Corinne stared out at the storm, the sky so dark that she couldn’t even see the raging Gulf beyond the trees. “Jesus,” she whispered.
Rick came up behind her. He rested a hand on her hip, familiar but not intimate, connected to her as he always would be.
“I was just hoping we could call a truce for now, and work this out after the storm.”
She looked at him in the glass, despite the slash of silver duct tape across the reflection of his face. “We will work it out.”
“Absolutely.”
I still want to turn you to stone, she thought, but it seemed like a less-than-productive thing to say out loud.
With a soft pop, the lights went out. Downstairs, where the girls were gathered at the television with the Hautalas, voices lifted in alarm and protest.
“Shit,” Corinne said. “So much for watching the weatherman. Or anything else.”
“We have our phones until the batteries die,” Rick replied. “But this is probably for the best. It’s time to choose the safest room and batten down the hatches.”
He offered his hand. Corinne stared at it for a moment before accepting it, and they clasped fingers. Rick gave her half a hug and a kiss on the corner of her mouth, and that was all right. At the moment, it was the only thing she wanted from him.
When the storm had passed, she would decide what came next.
CHAPTER 6
Lennox knew he had waited too lo
ng. His boat bobbed beside the dock, tied to the pilings and smashing against the weighted rubber fenders that dangled both from his boat and from the dock itself. Too long, yes, but as he hurried down the dock, he could not muster up any regret. He dragged a rolling duffel behind him, but the real prize from this house—the third one he’d hit—was in a gym bag over his shoulder. Inside the bag, wrapped in two of the softest, most luxurious towels he had ever touched, was a vase that a quick Google search on his phone suggested might be worth about ten thousand dollars. Googling the thing on his phone had perhaps not been his smartest hour, but it would hurt him only if the police knew to question him in the first place.
The vase wasn’t the only thing. The jewelry from this third house had been a breathtaking haul. The Marchand family hailed from France, and he figured they had to have descended from nobility or something—or at least corporate nobility—because Mrs. Marchand’s jewelry box had yielded diamond earrings, bracelets, and more, along with other items that added up to tens of thousands of dollars. One ruby necklace—discovered inside a safe that had been absurdly easy to pry open—had to be worth at least twice as much as the vase.
Three houses. Once the power had gone out, it had been so simple. The most difficult part of his life of crime thus far had been selecting the homes to rob. The movie memorabilia from the German director’s house would be hard to hock without getting caught, but maybe he would just hang onto Alvart’s collection. Once he sold the jewelry and other valuables he had gathered at the three homes, he wouldn’t have to work for a couple of years, at least. Of course he would have to stay away from Captiva for a while, but there were a thousand tropical places where he might hole up on his ill-gotten gains. Saint Lucia would be beautiful any time of year, and he could vanish there.
Lennox ignored the rain, but the wind gave him no option. As he walked down the dock, he bent against its power, leaning into it. A gust struck him so hard that he tumbled sideways, the shoulder bag swinging, the rolling duffel tugged from his grasp.
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