Acts of Nature

by Jonathon King

  “What?” Wayne said, watching Marcus kneel and stick his hands into the pile of wood. Marcus came up with a half a dozen CDs, spread in his fingers like a poker hand.

  “Dude’s got some music, man. Good stuff, too. Twista, Jay-Z, Tha Marksmen,” Wayne said, reading off the labels.

  “And check out the machine, man,” he said, pointing at the stereo player still sitting in a slot in the wall cabinetry. “That’s worth some cash right there, unless we wanna keep it, you know.”

  Wayne looked up to give his pal a wink that seemed to assure him they would do whatever they wanted on this little heist safari of theirs. It was a pact they’d come to after their first stop this morning, a moderately damaged fishing camp just on the southern edge of Broward County and the closest GPS coordinate on the list. That camp had been nice enough in its time, a two-bedroom deal with a great room that had one of those big round metal fireplaces in the middle to warm the night in winter. But one wall was now completely gone, ripped away like a leaf of notebook paper, leaving some curtains blowing in the wind, off-white lace curtains that Marcus could tell were better quality than the ones his own mom had in their regular home, not their vacation getaway. They’d found some music there too. But it was mostly old-style R & B stuff, John Lee Hooker, Wilson Pickett, stuff his old man used to listen to before he left. He and Wayne had attacked the place like scavengers, picking up fishing reels, an intact kitchen blender, and half bottles of Chivas and Van Gogh vodka all strewn around in the aftermath of the storm. That’s when Buck stepped in and said he was laying down “ground rules.” We only take shit we can sell: jewelry, real nice pieces of electronics like handheld GPS or shortwave radio stuff, or maybe portable TVs. Only take the sealed booze. Check the drawers and stuff for real money and don’t ever pass on some tin container that might have a stash in it. “These city assholes come out here to party like there’s no rules. There’s a lot of pot and coke and stuff they keep out in these places, so use your eyes, boys.”

  Yeah, they’d use their eyes. And if they found any drugs, they were going straight into their pockets and he wasn’t going to know any different. Wayne winked at his bud. After about an hour of sorting through the place, Buck called them in.

  “Can’t spend too much time in one place, boys,” he said. “Not that we’re worried about anybody coming by that we won’t hear ahead of time, but if it ain’t a rich site, we’re gonna move on. There’s bound to be a mother lode out here someplace.”

  It was the flicker of excitement in his eyes that got the boys motivated. It wasn’t often Buck got jazzed by anything. Even when they did the jobs in the suburbs when shit would get hinky or that time they found that coin collection that they’d sold for eight grand, Buck was still level, moving ahead, but never jumping, never showing emotion. But there was something different in the guy’s eyes this time. He was liking this shit. They loaded up the airboat with a few things and got her started again. Buck had decided they’d go well north and east to one of the high spots on the map and then work their way down toward home “just in case we find something heavy.”

  This new place had some definite possibilities. But it was weird. Marcus again went to the middle of the big room and did a three-sixty, scanning the walls, where some of the shelves and cabinetry appeared absolutely untouched. But like the kitchen pots and pans that were jumbled on the floor about fifteen feet away from where they should have been, so too were some couch throw pillows and a lamp and a DVD player about fifteen feet from the den area where they matched. A bookcase on the eastern wall was empty, the books fifteen feet away, piled up against the refrigerator and kitchen island. And in the middle Marcus was standing on a pristine, pearl gray carpet. His eyes moved up the walls to the second floor, to the sheared-away beams that had once supported a cathedral ceiling, until he was staring straight up into the clouds passing high above. It was like a tiny tornado, spinning within the chaos of the hurricane, had peeled away the entire roof and then dipped its finger straight down into the building and did a little twirl and then left.

  It was disconcerting to Marcus, and he stood there thinking of the time when he was very young, maybe about the time his father had left. His mom had decided to make changes in their lives to forget the past and she’d completely redone his room; moved his bed to another wall; the dresser, the bedside lamp, even the posters, all shifted. He remembered now how it had confused and scared him when he would awake in the middle of the night and have that overwhelming feeling that he didn’t know where he was. That fear came over him now, that he was someplace so foreign and unsafe that there was nothing familiar to hold on to.

  “Marcus!”

  Buck was leaning over a spiral, wrought-iron staircase that gave access to the bedroom upstairs.

  “Marcus? What the fuck, son. You gonna help or just watch, boy? Get your ass up here and go through this other bedroom.”

  “I got it, Buck,” Wayne said, then turned to Marcus. “Why don’t you see if you can pack up that player with something waterproof, man.”

  He nudged Marcus with the satchel he’d filled with CDs and had slung over his shoulder and on the way past whispered, “Got us some booty here, brother.”

  Wayne was sounding giddy too. “Both you guys are fucking lost,” Marcus said.

  Buck was filling the gas tank of the airboat when a hot, dangerous urge came into his head and he stopped to wonder where the hell it came from. He could suddenly see himself: the red five-gallon can in hand, sloshing the contents in a careful path along the first floor baseboards of the entire place they’d just looted. Make sure you get it on all sides and in the corners so that every remaining wall would go up in flames. Fuck ’em. Asshole city boys and their seaside mansions out here, he thought. He could especially see the now broken photos curling up and going black in the flames. He’d picked one up in the den area: four guys no older than him, big-ass grins on their faces, the two on the ends holding trophy-size mangrove snapper, the two on the inside holding half-full bottles of piss yellow Corona beer. One actually had on a polo shirt, probably with his country club logo on it but Buck couldn’t tell. One had a ring on his right hand with a rock as big as the eye of the fish he held hooked in the gills. Buck was not normally a jealous sort. He didn’t look at fancy sports cars at the casino or on trips into Naples and lust after them. The big plasma television sets he saw when he was creeping one of those suburban homes did not have any allure to him. He’d go down to the bar at the Rod & Hunt Club and watch their big screen game for the price of a few beers.

  But for some reason this monstrous, yellow-painted structure built like an ass pimple out here in the middle of the Glades and filled with all the comforts of those homes had put him in a pissy mood. Hell, he ought to be thanking the owners. He’d found their stash of booze, a case of some kind of imported rum, back in the corner of a pantry closet. He’d picked up a fine pair of binoculars upstairs in one of the bedrooms; six hundred bucks retail, probably unload them for two hundred to Bobby the Fence. Then he’d pulled out the drawer that he almost missed in what was probably the master suite. The thing was actually built into the bed frame. He’d stubbed his toes on it, expecting his foot to slide under the mattress when he’d stepped up close to the bed and instead kicking the solid frame below.

  He’d gone to his knees and saw the handles and the lock. The pry bar he carried took care of the latter. When he pulled out the sliding drawer he was not exactly surprised, considering the boys he’d seen in the photos, to be met by the odor of gun oil and the sight of carefully wrapped firearms. But the five weapons he took out and arranged on the bed mattress were exceptional.

  A 30-30 Winchester rifle, old style as far as he could tell, but in such pristine shape it had to be a collector’s item. He couldn’t help but pick it up, throw the lever action, and sight down the barrel, dreaming scenes of the Old West. Yee ha. He smiled. Born in the wrong century.

  Then there was the Mauser, a German-made World War II classic,
heavy, built to last, knock down a fucking mule with one shot. As he had already figured, these guys weren’t real hunters, they were playboys, out here to make noise with their expensive toys. There was a twelve-gauge over-and-under shotgun there as well, the most utilitarian of the group and no doubt used to knock a few curlew out of the evening sky just for the hell of it.

  Then there were two handguns: an old 9mm Glock, the one law enforcement gave up on after a couple of heavy-fingered cops said they fired prematurely, and a .45-caliber revolver of the style Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry might have carried but too fucking big for anyone to lug around these days except for some asshole drive-by gangbangers who thought the sound of it was cool because it was louder than their car stereos when it touched off.

  Buck had stared at the collection for a few seconds. In his excitement over the total haul in the house, his natural wariness of the weapons was lost. No, he didn’t like guns. He’d heard too many stories of their violence and how it inevitably came back on you. But there was something about this day that was feeling too easy, everything working out the way he’d envisioned it, the way he boasted on it to the boys. It was all going smoothly and Buck had spent nearly thirty-three years on this earth and nothing had ever gone completely smoothly for him. The guns were now stashed under the pile of other things they’d decided to take. Buck had slipped them there himself, not bothering to tell the boys what he’d found. He’d taken three boxes of ammunition from the secret drawer and wrapped them and the rifles and the big .45 in a blanket and covered that with some raingear he’d found to keep them as dry as possible.

  Now he shook off the urge to torch the place and emptied the gas can into the tank and then tossed it onto the dock of the house. Fuck it, he thought. Don’t overdo it just to get back at the assholes for trespassing on your life. This mission ain’t about them. If you set the place on fire, you’re sending up a smoke signal that anybody could respond to. Do the job, Buck. What you gotta do. Be smart.

  “OK, boys. Let’s move on. We’re burnin’ daylight,” he said. Buck and the Duke. He reached into the seat trap and took out the GPS.

  “Next on the list ain’t but an hour south. If she’s still standing we might be able to spend the night there.”

  Wayne and Marcus put a final knot in the line holding their newfound booty and climbed up into the backseats.

  “You say so, captain,” Wayne said, and when Buck hit the ignition and the big engine caught and the noise ripped into the heavy air, the boys looked at each other and grinned and passed the bottle between them. They’d already opened the Van Gogh vodka that they’d lifted from the kitchen and found they liked the espresso flavor.

  SEVENTEEN

  I was in the water, waist deep, sloshing around at the edges of the raised cabin deck, one eye peeking up under the two-by- eight stringers for some sign of a trap door, the other watching for Wally.

  I had climbed back up on top of the structure when it became apparent that there was no way I was getting into the mysterious room from the inside. I’d already dismantled part of the metal frame of the other bed next to Sherry, an old prison trick inmates pulled to salvage strong enough chunks of metal to shave sharp and make killer shivs out of. I used one of the unsharpened chunks as a pry tool but it had been useless against the frame of the security door and after I worked for an hour to peel back a piece of baseboard and then chopped at the low corner of the wall, I gave up.

  Outside, I even climbed back up on the roof where I’d found access before and scoured the panels for a ceiling entry to the other room. I found a vent that might have been for recirculated air. And a damaged edge I was able to peek into, only to find a secondary sheath over the room, some kind of fiberboard or waterproof polymer that was too tough to gouge through.

  “You look too frustrated, Max,” Sherry had said when I gave up and rejoined her. The aspirin from the medical kit had brought her fever down some. Her eyes were more alert. I’d opened a can of sliced peaches I’d found warm in the small refrigerator and used my fingers to fish out individual pieces and feed them into her mouth. The sugar and solid food had helped.

  “Those are just my normal age lines,” I said, tightening my face to make the look more severe. “You certainly know that by now.”

  Again the light grin came to her face, accented by the glistening smear of peach juice on her lips.

  “No. That look is you grinding on something. The other is frustration at something that’s beating you.”

  “OK,” I admitted. “There’s got to be a way into that fucking room.”

  I told her what I’d found through the roof, the change in materials that seemed only to surround that half of the building.

  “Why would someone build one part of the cabin one way and the other so much more fortified?”

  “Fortified or waterproof?” Sherry said.

  “Both,” I said. I had traced the electrical fines from the small refrigerator and a waterline from the sink. Both went through the floorboards in the direction of the other room. I’d taken another trip outside in search of a generator room I might have missed. Nothing. The electrical supply was in the other room as well.

  “High-tech lock, waterproofed and fortified. There’s something valuable inside,” she said.

  “Out here, in the middle of nowhere?” I tossed it back to her.

  “Drug drop. Distribution point?”

  “Cop thinking,” I said, with a cynical twinge.

  “Duh, yeah.”

  I might have thought of it myself. But it had been a while since I’d worked narcotics and only in the streets of South Philadelphia, never in the swamp.

  “OK. It’s isolated enough for drop-offs, but the only way you distribute from here is by airboat,” I said. “Only way quick enough.”

  “Too piecemeal and too expensive,” she said and ate more of the peaches.

  I stared off toward the end of the bed, like I was thinking, but really looking at her toes, for discoloration. Though her mind was sharper and her mood higher with the food and rest, we were going to have to get her out of here soon. The chances of someone coming by or looking for us were minimal. Even if Billy started looking for me, which he would, or if Sherry’s supervisors got anxious, would there be anyone dispatched to my river shack? And when they found it, if it were still standing, would they make a jump in reasoning that I’d been stupid enough to take us somewhere by boat? It could be days and we sure as hell didn’t have days. I didn’t see a way to patch my canoe with the materials we had. Whatever was in that room might be our savior if we were to have one.

  “The Fisher Body plant in Lansing, Michigan,” Sherry said. Her tone turned my head because she did not seem to be directing the odd and disconnected words to me but to the wall. She was looking off to a memory.

  “I must have still been a teenager. It was one of those stories in the news that for the first time took my attention away from that bullshit in high school.”

  I knew Sherry had grown up in Michigan, the daughter of blue-collar parents, working class in an area and in a time where working class was a prideful tide.

  “I remember it because I was scared to death back then of being stuck somewhere without air. Maybe I’d been swimming somewhere in the lake and lost my breath or maybe my brothers had locked me in the closet or something when I was little. But I was always scared back then that I would be trapped somewhere without air.”

  I looked closely into her face, then straight into her eyes, checking for the dilation of her pupils. If she was going into some kind of hallucination from the trauma, I might have to just patch the canoe as best I could and make a run for it. I took her hand in mine.

  “There’s plenty of air, Sherry. We’re OK. All right? You can breath here, baby.”

  Her eyes reacted and she shifted them to me.

  “Oh, shit. No, I’m sorry, Max,” she said. “I’m not flipping out on you. No. I was thinking of an old story, back in my hometown.

 
“There was this accident at the auto factory. There were these three workers, guys in the paint department on the line at Fisher Body where all the cars for GM were assembled. These guys were doing cleanup in one of these deep pits where they dipped the cars for rust-proofing or something. They were pits that were sealed and waterproof. Maybe it was some kind of maintenance that they had to go down in these things and clean up excess paint or something.

  “But whatever they were using, maybe some new solvent or something to break down the paint, they got themselves surrounded in a cloud of the stuff. They couldn’t breath and started choking and collapsed and when the supervisor realized what was happening, he went down the ladder to help them and he was overcome by the stuff too. By the time someone got an oxygen mask on to go down for them, they were all dead.”

  She was staring at the wall again, remembering. I gave her time. Sherry is not someone you ask too early what the hell her point is.

  “After that, the company installed trapdoors in all the sealed pits, a way to get out if something happened, a quick- release porthole in the floor that someone could get out of if they fell in or got caught down there.”

  Again, I got caught looking at her eyes, like I had many times since I’d met her, amazed.

  “I’ll go down under the room and check it out,” I said. “Good idea,” Sherry said and smiled, a real smile this time, and not just a grin.

  I was in the water, waist deep, watching for Wally, looking for a seam, a handle, any indication of a trapdoor. I knew the stringers below were probably creosote-soaked timber. Out here the wood would rot in no time in the constant moisture even if it was up above water level. I found the timbers green and slick with algae. The odor was ripe in the way a compost pit would be if you stuck your nose into it. The fingers of my left hand were curled up over the edge of the deck and I was using the flashlight in my right to beam the spaces between the stringers. My feet were squishing in muck and it took effort to pull each one up out of the suction and take a step down the line. My ears were tuned to any stirring in the nearby grasses, any grunt from a large predator with a bad eye. I worked my way all the way around three sides before the light caught a raised anomaly in the otherwise black-green underbelly of the cabin. Spotting down parallel stringers there was an edge, barely an inch difference, protruding from the flat board surface. It was about eight feet in from where I stood.