Hurricane Fever

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “You’re looking to start a war?” Jacinta asked.

  Roo set the freezer bags down between them, back at the front of the room. “I think one came to me,” he said grimly.

  Jacinta held up a finger, and the other hand tapped the air quickly. “The boatyard? That was you?”

  He nodded.

  Jacinta made a face. “You could get guns up near Red Hook, so those aren’t the real reason you came.” Not much escaped her attention.

  “That woman outside in your waiting room, you have a good picture of her from your cameras?”

  “Yes,” Jacinta nodded.

  “Find me out who she really is,” Roo said. “She’s claiming she’s Zee Barlow’s little sister.”

  “Zee has a little sister?”

  “That’s what she’s saying.” They looked at each other for a moment. “But I knew Zee for years and years. And you know one thing Zee didn’t have?”

  “A sister,” Jacinta said.

  “No sistren, no brethren,” Roo confirmed.

  “She’s very light-skinned,” Jacinta said.

  “It’s the Caribbean,” Roo said. Jacinta shrugged in semi-agreement. “Zee passed for white when we trained in the UK. She could be his sister.”

  “Could be a half sister he kept protected,” Jacinta added.

  “Yes. Either way, I need for you to tell me how the fuck she’s sitting out there when there are no records of her. And the picture I took on my phone comes up with nothing when I search her face against publicly available images. The woman’s a ghost. Not many people are ghosts these days.”

  “I know she’s a ghost,” Jacinta said. “That’s why she’s sitting out there, even though she’s your guest. Someone shows up to my door and I can’t figure out who they are, I get nervous.”

  Roo rubbed his forehead. “I know you have some CIA on the take, guns for drugs to get you into the old country. Use them.”

  “That’s a big favor,” Jacinta said.

  “More than the one you owe me?”

  “Even for that.” Jacinta crossed her arms. “But those two freezer bags, that shit ain’t free. That’s extra in the ledger.”

  “I’ll pay bills or heavy metal for the guns when you tell who the woman standing out there really is,” Roo said.

  “Heavy metal?” Jacinta looked interested.

  “Platinum.”

  “Seriously, man, what are you doing with platinum? You got all high roller on us.” Jacinta’s eyes gleamed behind the data projected from her glasses. “Did you get that up in the Arctic, right before you ‘retired?’ A lot of people up there are still diving the area with ROVs in radioactive water, looking for the Tellus and the treasure it sank with.”

  Roo interrupted that line of thought, not willing to let her follow it through. “Just tell me who the sister is.”

  Jacinta scratched her lip, annoyed at getting bumped back to the business at hand. “All right. You need someone to take your bags back out to your little car?”

  “I’ll manage,” Roo said.

  11

  She waited until they’d climbed up Raphune Hill and higher up onto the mountainside, where the air cooled and the occasional floral scents beat out the smell of hot asphalt. She must have realized he wasn’t in any mood to talk; Roo was driving without thinking, just following routes laid into the back of his memory. He kept trying to call Delroy. “My clothes and laptop are back at my hotel,” Kit finally murmured.

  He looked over. “If you go back, you’re probably dead.”

  She digested that, looking down at her knees. Smoothed the pants fabric out unconsciously. “Shit.”

  That was that.

  They snaked their way back through the heavy shopping areas around Tutu, and then off to the Clarence Henry Center.

  “What is this?” Kit asked, looking at the gleaming five-story, solar-power windows of the Henry building and the geodesic dome of the Academic Hall.

  “School,” Roo said. “Wait here.”

  The student-designed and -maintained gardens were full of tiny robotic gardener balls that fled Roo’s quick steps as he hurried to the Academic Hall. He was looking for anyone he recognized, like lecturers for any of the recent student-created classes or friends of Delroy’s.

  “Pablo!” Roo shouted by the edge of the car park’s grass and low-bushes that marked out each parking space.

  A young Puerto Rican with locks looked up from playing with some three-dimensional object in the air only he could see, and waved.

  Roo walked up to him. “I’m looking for Delroy.”

  “He left for home already,” Pablo said.

  “I’ve been calling him,” Roo said, despair suddenly creeping into his voice.

  “He’s been deep in this week’s project,” Pablo said. “Shut down all outside interruptions to get it done for the group. We’re test launching a balloon that should be able to get us some pictures from the edge of space, but the uplink won’t work. Delroy left early to go home and work on it alone. Plus, he left his phone in his room and wanted to get it back. Don’t worry, he’s headed straight home, I promise you!”

  He yelled that last bit out as Roo ran back for the car.

  Roo slammed the door shut and reached back for one of the insulated grocery bags. He unzipped it, pulled out a pistol, loaded it, and put it on his lap.

  That done he swung them back out on the road.

  “If I can’t go back, what do you recommend I do next?” Kit asked, breaking Roo’s concentration a few minutes later.

  “What?”

  “What do I do? Where do I stay? What are my options … woah!” That was a response to Roo zipping around a large water truck, again facing oncoming traffic, and then pulling in just front of it.

  She released her death grip on the door handle.

  “Get on your phone,” Roo said. “Get a reservation under a fake name. When you get there, pay cash. Tell them an ex-husband is stalking you if they insist on seeing your ID. You’ll get a room. Particularly if you add a little to the cash.”

  “I have a few thousand on me,” she muttered.

  “That’ll do,” Roo said curtly.

  He tore through traffic as best he could, though being careful not to get pulled over. Minutes counted.

  The gun was still on his lap when they approached the boatyard. Emergency lights flickered and strobed between the masts. Virgin Islands Police Department cars blocked the gate, yellow caution tape fluttered in the wind along with courtesy flags on the rigging throughout the yard.

  “They could be here for the other men,” Roo said, his voice scratching his throat as he slowed down.

  Kit cleared her throat. “Give me the gun,” she said.

  One of the policemen approached them, wiping sweat from his brow, motioning them over to park away from the gate. As Roo guided the car in, Kit slid the pistol back into the silvered, bulging cooler bag and zipped it closed.

  They still bulged in odd places, but the thick panels didn’t betray what was inside thanks to the gas masks and ammunition Roo had packed against the sides.

  Another member of the VIPD looked over at them, then back at a small screen on the sleeve of his wrist. “Eugene, that’s him!”

  The nearer cop, suddenly more alert, hand on the gun at his waist, motioned Roo. “Can you get out of the car, please?”

  Roo nodded, keeping his hands obviously clear of anything.

  “Are you Prudence Jones, the owner of the catamaran Spitfire II?”

  Again, Roo nodded.

  “We need to talk.” He seemed both nervous, and a little sad.

  There were people around the gates of the yard. Curiosity crowds. Trying to see what had happened. Part of that human urge to see the story themselves.

  It made Roo nervous.

  Then he saw the body on the stretcher by the boat. The dark brown hand on the white plastic. Roo lurched forward. “No.”

  Kit’s feet crunched on the gravel as she got out as well. />
  “Hey…” the cop said. But Roo didn’t care. He staggered past him, through the caution tape and into the boatyard.

  “Stop!” someone else yelled. The voice cracked with authority and broke through the whirlpool of grief beginning to suck everything inside of Roo down into itself.

  Roo dropped to his knees and stared at the sheet-covered body a hundred feet away. He should have left Delroy alone with that foster family. Because now Roo’s own past had come back and killed the boy.

  Hadn’t it been the right thing to do, though? Look after family?

  Roo buried his face in his hands and stared at the gravel by his knees. It was covered in reddish paint flecks scraped away from a boat’s hull.

  The wind swept them away in a gentle whirlwind of hot dust.

  12

  They recorded Roo’s lies with tiny cameras embedded in their shiny hats, taking his statements. He mumbled through the haze of it all. Spinning a story about grocery shopping and shock.

  Soon enough they’d find out he was involved in this. Cameras from across the street subpoenaed, the GPS in his rented car. Face recognition would create a timeline and they would realize Roo lied.

  But if he told the truth right now … he would lose his options. They’d start looking into who he was, and right now the false identities he gave them should hold up to a first pass, but he didn’t want to get caught up in the mess that would happen under deeper investigation. He wouldn’t hold up under a deeper dive. They’d know he didn’t kill Delroy, but the false identity would end with him being location chipped and asked to stay put while it was all resolved.

  And right now, Roo was starting to think he didn’t want to get stuck.

  Officer Standish Simpson, according to his badge, had Roo sign an old tablet, then thumbprint it as he finished the interview. “These people who attacked your nephew, they flew in just yesterday.”

  “You should call someone to make arrangements quick,” another officer informed Roo in a soft voice. “Don’t have much time before Hurricane Njema hits.”

  “Will you even have time to look for Delroy’s killers?” Roo asked bitterly. They would be preparing for Njema to hit. And she would be worse than just a tropical storm like Makila.

  “We hunting,” the officer said. “We hunting.” He put a reassuring hand on Roo’s shoulder and left.

  Kit stood in front of him now with the two oversized shiny freezer bags of weaponry. Roo stared at her, speechless for a second.

  “Are you done searching the boat?” she asked Officer Simpson. “I need to put these in the freezer for Roo. For the hurricane. I’ve been standing here this whole time with them. I know this is a horrible time, but they need to get put away.”

  Roo looked back at the car, then at her, and blinked. All this would have fallen apart if a single officer had looked in the bags she’d been holding patiently all this time.

  “Yeah, yeah, go on,” they told her, and Kit headed confidently for the Spitfire.

  She climbed the ladder, stepped around the edge of the cockpit to avoid a blue tarp, and went inside with the freezer bags of guns.

  “Don’t leave the island, Mr. Jones,” Standish said, jolting his attention back over. “We will be following up.”

  They weren’t thinking he’d leave. Certainly not by boat on dry land in a dockyard, not with a hurricane on its way shortly. But as they all faded away, Roo noticed that a single officer remained in a car parked just a little bit up the road from the gate.

  They’d taken his information, they’d pieced together a small part of the story. But they weren’t naïve. They were keeping an eye on him.

  When he got back to the Spitfire, Roo yanked the blue tarp away and stared at the now-browning blood hardening on the fiberglass floor. Some of it trickled down the port side.

  “You shouldn’t have stayed with me,” Roo said into the dark cabin, staring at the pooled blood.

  Kit didn’t say anything.

  “Now they’ll suspect you as well.”

  “Those are my bodyguards that died; they’ll figure out I’m involved soon enough,” Kit said. “The question is: what do we do now?”

  Roo still hadn’t looked in toward her.

  “There’s a scrub brush, and some soap, under the sink in the galley,” he told her. “Please bring it out here.”

  * * *

  The fiberglass on the cockpit’s deck surface wasn’t smooth. Artificially pocked and texturized, it gave feet and shoes traction. Even when slick with ocean water. And that same texturized surface meant the blood clung to the nanoscale pits and cracks.

  Roo got on his hands and knees with the bucket and scrub brush and put his back into it. Five times he scrubbed and rinsed, each time the cockpit floor releasing more and more blood, then dirt, then grime.

  But every time he got down, nose to the fiberglass, he would see something.

  Maybe not reddish, but it seemed like it.

  And the scrub brush would come out, and he’d start again.

  Five times, scrubbing until his back ached, the tips of his fingers burned, until sweat dripped and burned his eyes.

  Kit sat inside quietly for the hours of scrubbing. Roo ignored her presence. She didn’t belong. This wasn’t her grief, and she was smart enough to know that anything she did would be the wrong thing. She was a ghost in the ship as he moved around, cleaning, clearing things out.

  Someone knocked politely on the side of the hull.

  Roo slid the gun he’d hidden under a seat cushion out. He held it against the side of his thigh as he leaned to look out back toward the rear scoop of the port hull. “Hello?”

  “Pastor Thompson here,” said the rail-thin man in the suit, his tightly curled, graying hair visible through the scuppers. He carried a satchel against his hip, and looked at all the bags tossed on the ground.

  He caught Roo’s eyes. “What’s in the bags?” he asked.

  “Delroy’s things.” Roo quietly flicked the safety of the gun back on. He placed it on the cockpit floor, out of sight, and sat down to look at the pastor. “He doesn’t need them anymore.”

  Thompson took a deep breath. “You reached out to me to prepare Delroy’s memorial. But I am not just here for him. How are you doing, Mr. Jones?”

  Roo stared at the man’s slim, brown leather shoes. “I’m numb. That’s how I am.” Everything felt silly and profound at the same time. Like the little silvered tips on the pastor’s shoes.

  “Not angry?” Thompson asked.

  What good was anger right now? “My soul was cauterized,” Roo murmured. “I was his only family. He, mine. When I came back to the islands, I found him in foster care. My brother had died. A neighbor’s whole roof landed on their house. Hurricane winds. Crushed the whole family, except Delroy, pinned beneath his parents. I came back to him so late, because I had left my family. I hadn’t even known he was orphaned until he’d been with other families for … too long.”

  “It was a good thing you took him in,” Thompson said. “That was the right thing.”

  Roo squinted. “I thought so. Three different families, he’d been with, when I came back and took him. But what good is that? What did I spare him from? A tough life. All I gave him was a decent life and then death too soon.”

  Thompson reached up from where he stood on the ground and put a hand on the deck by Roo’s wet feet. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jones.”

  Roo looked off past him into the shadows cast by hulls throughout the boatyard, lengthening due to the sun’s low angle.

  “I guess,” Roo said, biting a lip. “I guess it wasn’t a bad way to die. Bullet in the head, they said. He didn’t have time to even realize what was happening. I’ve seen worse deaths.”

  The pastor pulled his hand away from the deck, as if Roo had slammed a knife next to it.

  “I visited someone in a cancer ward once,” Roo said. “Saw these kids dying of cancer. Terminal. That fucked me up something bad for weeks, seeing that. All those long, slow days
. The suffering. Maybe I’m saying that to make me feel better. I just don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  He saw the pastor thinking of something to say, caught off guard by the direction of Roo’s thinking out loud. Roo realized he should shut up and keep his thoughts to himself.

  But that was the man’s job, wasn’t it? To listen? Wasn’t that why he’d come. Surely he’d heard worse?

  Or maybe Roo would need to talk to a Catholic priest. The sort that heard the darkest confessions on the other side of a partition. Not a sunny, friendly, God-is-nothing-but-goodness-and-shiny-happiness pastor. The kind that wanted to provide comfort, and ease, but not really examine the crevices of the human condition. And Roo was digging around some crevices right now, that was for sure.

  “So there won’t be any family at his memorial, Pastor,” Roo said.

  “Other than you,” Thompson confirmed, pulling out a small pad from his satchel to write notes on.

  “His friends will come. And others who knew him. I may not be there, so you will be making all the arrangements.”

  Thompson finally dug his heels in, moving away from his role of being a comforting ear. “Mr. Jones, I can make the arrangements. Tasteful arrangements. I can talk to his friends and look at what he has left behind online and do that. But you need to come to the memorial.” He said it with a firm conviction.

  “Look…” Roo stood up, but Thompson interrupted forcefully.

  “I’m not here to give you a sales pitch, but everyone has some kind of moment where they need to say good-bye. It is important. Whether you are a believer, which you may not be, or just angry. As human beings, we all need to mark a moment, and come to terms with what has happened. Remember the person that was, even if you don’t believe they continue on. Honor that, for them. And maybe, to find a small measure of peace.”

  Roo took out his phone. “No peace to be found here, Pastor,” he said. “But I’m going to give you an unlimited line of credit. I want a good memorial. That is how I will mark the moment.”

  “You can’t run away from it,” Thompson said, slipping his pad away.

  “I’m thinking about running toward something else,” Roo said.

  “The middle of grief is not a good time to be making major decisions.”