I continued working on Sherry’s wound. The last layer of gauze was sticking to her leg from the dried blood at the edges. I poured some of the isopropyl alcohol over it to loosen the catches, tugged at it again and she winced with pain.
“Sorry.”
She squeezed her eyes tight again in answer.
Exposed, the flap that had ripped out when the broken bone ruptured through her skin was red and there was a circle around it that was also starting to flame. Infection. But it was impossible to tell how deep. I washed my index finger and thumb with the alcohol and then pulled the flap up. Sherry sucked air through her teeth.
“Careful over there, doc,” Marcus said and then sniggered.
Even the boys were growing bolder. That too would be to my advantage. I did not respond. I took the tube of Neosporin from the first aid kit and again squirted the antibiotic cream into the wound. I used the last roll of gauze to rewrap the wound and then taped it in place. Shuffling down to the end of the bed, I checked Sherry’s foot. It was cold to the touch and even in the indirect light from the lantern I could see her toes had gone pale. Circulation was going bad. The rest of the leg seemed swollen. She’d never be able to stand on it. We weren’t going to be running anywhere. By the time I finished I was drenched with sweat. A trickle ran down the space between my shoulder blades, no doubt leaving a path through the grime I could feel now like a second skin.
I checked over my shoulder and the crew was paying no attention to me. They’d started eating whatever they brought in the cooler and seemed confident that I was not much of a risk, though I could still see part of the handle of the .45 protruding out of Buck’s waistband. While the suck and smack of their eating noises continued, I spun around into a sitting position and used what was left of the medical tape to strap my unsheathed knife to my calf. I pulled my pants leg over it and then shimmied back to the wall and pressed my back against the locked door. Logistics was now my problem and I rolled the new scenario around in my head like a rough stone, nicking at the bumps and fractures and fissures, trying to smooth it so I would have some kind of a plan that might give us a chance.
Would I be fast enough to cut the bindings on my ankles, make it across the room, get my knife into Buck’s neck, and then handle the boys before they could react? How quick was the Gladesman? He’d already shown his physical ability by tossing me across the room when he’d caught me unaware. But this time I’d be the one with the surprise. Would the young ones freeze up? Or were they seasoned enough to not panic and use their own blades? I looked up from under my eyebrows. Buck was hunched over in the chair, licking his fingers, and cut a look over at me. He was not relaxing; he was doing the same thing I was, working at his next move. They were waiting for something and I was sure he was the only with an idea of what that would be.
“Take a can of those peaches we found over to Mr. Freeman,” he said to the boys without designating which one. The idiots looked at each other.
Wayne finally rose from his position on the floor. He bent and picked up a can and then used the knife from his belt sheath to stab through the tin and cut open the top. He looked over at me and hesitated.
“Should I tie his hands up first?”
“Only if you want to feed him yourself,” Buck said, a touch of condescension in his voice that made the other one smile.
Wayne brought the can over to me and set it down on the floor a foot or so from my bound ankles.
“Can you get me a fork?” I asked.
“Yeah, right,” the kid said. “Somethin’ nice and sharp.” He turned and walked away.
I stretched out and took the can and then shuffled on my knees to Sherry’s bedside and then with my fingers I gently fed a peach slice to her. At the taste of the sweet juice her lips parted like a weak fish and she suckled at it at first and then slightly opened her eyes and took the whole thing into her mouth. I waited for her to chew and swallow and then gave her another.
“You’re a cop too, ain’t you, Freeman?”
Buck was speaking, but I did not turn my eyes from Sherry’s.
“You’ve got the look. That confidence thing like cops and prison guards got. I seen plenty of it over the years.”
While Sherry ate I swallowed a couple of the peach slices myself. I had not eaten anything but a small piece of the chocolate in more than twenty-four hours and was thinking of my own strength.
“I think Wayne here was right about what he heard when the lady said she was a cop. And I think you’re one too. You ain’t called her your wife or your honey or your fiancée.”
I fed another slice to Sherry and one to myself. I was listening, just as Buck had obviously been doing. I may have underestimated him and that was a bad sign.
“What I think, Officer Freeman, is that she’s your partner,” Buck said. “You all might have been stupid enough to be out here in the Glades during a hurricane, but I don’t believe that it was for no reason.”
He paused again, maybe letting his thoughts catch up with him. It reminded me of the long, southern drawl used by Nate Brown, who never hurried his speech, but never said much that was just filler either. I found myself wondering whether they lived in the same area of southwest Collier County.
“No, officer. I think you all know exactly what’s in that fucking room next door and that’s the reason you’re out here,” Buck said. “Nobody builds a bunker like that out in these parts without having something damn valuable to store inside. And the fact that we got two cops out here trying to get into it makes me believe that there are drugs involved. Bricks of cocaine? Bundles of pot? Stuff got air-dropped into the Glades and then pulled out by some group of dealers who are smart enough to store it out here until they got a buyer on the coast that can move it fast.”
Again he took that pause, and when I looked up his face was in shadows but the light was on those of his young crew and they were more hang-mouth stunned than I was.
“No shit! Buck,” Marcus said, a smile beginning to build in his eyes.
“Whoa,” was all Wayne could say and if Buck’s scenario hadn’t included a couple of law enforcement officers, one near death and one tied up in the corner, the two of them would have high-fived each other.
Still I didn’t react. I had to give Buck some credit. If I hadn’t already been inside the computer room next door, seen the digital readouts and odd collection of cables and wiring, the tale he was spinning might have made perfect sense to me too.
“So whataya say, Officer Freeman? Am I right? You and your partner there doing a little recon work and got stuck in the storm?”
This time I kept my eyes focused on the dark circles where Buck’s eyes could still not be seen in the shadow, but I knew he could see mine.
“No. You’re one hundred percent wrong,” I said. It was an easy line to say convincingly because it was the truth.
That childish hissing noise came from one of the boys behind him.
“Yeah, right.”
“Well, it don’t matter what you say now, officer. I’m thinking we got a big payday coming and when daybreak comes so we can find a way into that room, that’s what we’re gonna do come hell or high water,” he said and tossed Marcus the roll of tape.
“Tape his hands back up,” he said to the boy.
Marcus came over, swaggering a little now, and gave me a little chin nod, and I reacted instantly by crossing my wrists and offering them up to him.
“So you ain’t such big shit after all, Mr. Law,” Marcus said, wrapping the tape around while I again flexed my tendons to keep the binding as loose as possible. But I had already won my battle. The kid had either been too cocky or was just plain stupid. Because I had submissively raised my hands to him, he’d taken the easy offer and bound them in front of me instead of making me roll over and taping them behind my back.
“An’ Wayne!” Buck said, snapping orders to the other one and reaching down to pick up a package sheathed in oilskin that they’d brought in with the cooler. He unwr
apped a gleaming over-and-under shotgun and tossed it three feet into Wayne’s surprised hands. “You got first watch.”
TWENTY-FOUR
When the traffic lights are lying on the ground, you consider the intersections as four-way stops, and then steer around the dented and broken yellow thing in the road, and then avoid the power lines still attached to it if possible. It’s one of those rules you learn in South Florida if you’ve been here for a few hurricanes.
As Harmon made his way to the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport at dawn, he wondered why folks couldn’t figure that out. Do all transplanted New Yorkers just figure, “What the fuck, I’ll just plow right on through and everybody else can look out for me because only the rude and pushy survive in this world”?
Electricity was still a memory two days after Simone rolled through. Even the concrete poles were leaning like a team of tug-of-war combatants, pulling lines that had yet to snap. Many of their wooden brothers had lost it at the waist, sheared off and splintered at their middle, broken marionettes tangled in their own string. City and county road crews had shoved most of the large branches and debris off to the side of the major highways, but any side street was a maze like those games the kids used to draw while they waited for food at Denny’s: get the farmer to market without being stopped!
Harmon had already steered around a hundred broken roof tiles lying in the streets of his own neighborhood, had driven up into some guy’s yard to get around a forty-foot ficus tree that completely spanned two-lane Royal Palm Drive, and slipped between the crossing arms at the FEC railroad tracks at Dixie Highway, which were halfway down, their ends sheared off but still waving in the wind.
He stopped again at the intersection of Commercial and Powerline Roads and watched the headlamps of six vehicles slide through, cutting him out of his turn until he was forced to inch out and physically stop cross traffic before they’d defer to him.
“Go back to Brooklyn,” he whispered under his breath.
When he finally got to the airfield, the early sunrise was backlighting a dozen lumps of dark plane wreckage, twisted angles and barely discernible fin shapes. He shook his head at the number of tumbled aircraft that had been strapped down out on the tarmac for lack of an indoor hangar to park them. Some appeared to have simply folded in on themselves, fuselages crushed in the middle like broken spines. Others sat upright but their wings were missing, picked off and discarded like a mean kid might do to a giant dragonfly. There was little activity on the south side of the airfield so Harmon broke all normal driving rules and made a beeline across the tarmac to the Fleet Company hangar. He could see Squires’s Jeep sitting next to the open bay doors, and before he got to park, his partner and another big man appeared, moving slowly out of the huge building and putting their backs into the task of wheeling a helicopter onto the airfield. Harmon pulled up next to the black Wrangler and sorted through his ops bag; let them do the heavy work, he wasn’t in the mood for heavy work today.
Again he checked off the list in his head as he touched each item in his bag. He stopped at the frequency transmitter. He’d used them before to electronically restart the power systems on ocean oil rigs. You needed lights to land and the frequency could switch them on and unlock doors before you even touched down. And then his fingers settled on the slick skin of a brick of incendiary C-4 explosive.
This was not standard equipment in the states and the order to take it along was unnerving to Harmon. In domestic work he and Squires were a security team, not a demolition unit. Yeah, they might have had to muscle some rig workers in the past. And yeah, they did have to entice the manager of one gas operation to confess to his paper swindling with the help of a gun muzzle pressed to his forehead. But the idea of blowing up and melting infrastructure on home soil was a new twist for Harmon. He knew ATF guys. He knew how good their bomb investigators were. If they were put on the site after a suspicious explosion they were bound to find something.
But Crandall’s instructions had been pretty clear. He was the boss. “If the place looks compromised, like anyone has been on the site and might expose its purpose or existence, fire it off the planet.”
The orders had set Harmon’s senses buzzing. There was something here unknown to him and that always got him going. What was going on inside the United States that the company would be willing to take a chance and incinerate a site? Won’t know until I get there, he had finally determined. But you bet I’m not blowing anything until I know what I’m blowing. Harmon zipped up the bag and got out, locked the doors of his Crown Victoria, and crossed over to where the men were loading the aircraft.
“Morning, chief,” Squires said to him. They shook hands as usual, and as usual Harmon visually checked his partner’s eyes for broken blood vessels and dilated pupils or any other sign that might indicate he was not completely sober or was too hungover to perform his duty, which basically was to protect Harmon’s ass. And as usual, Squires showed absolutely no sign of impairment. The man was a physical wonder work. He was dressed in his black cargo pants and a black T-shirt, a plain baseball cap on his head that only seemed odd because of the absence of a logo. He looked like a SWAT team member and you wouldn’t be far off to describe him as such. Harmon on the other hand had refused to revert back to a time of what he sometimes called his ill- spent youth. He had dressed that morning in a pair of blue jeans and a knit polo shirt, same as always. The night before he had fueled the generator system of his home and started the emergency power system. His was the only house on his block that had shown light through its windows after dusk. He had kissed his wife this morning on the cheek when he left. He’d told her that he would be home before nightfall. She always knew that his promise was contingent on many factors, factors she never bothered to ask about. She had been with him for many years. She was his wife when he was still in the military and still bore his children. When he got out and started working clandestine missions she knew too what his nature was and that it would never change. There was a need inside him, maybe a pride in doing what he did and what he considered to be his only talent and calling. She knew. But they did not speak of it. It seemed as though both of them were more comfortable in the guise that he was a simple businessman off to work on unusual but routine projects. Her response that morning was the same as it had always been: come back safe.
“This here is Fred Rae. He’ll be your captain today,” Squires started with that singsong delivery every flight attendant has memorized. “Please stow all your carry-on luggage in the bins above or in the space provided under your seat. As we will have a full flight today…”
The chopper pilot took Harmon’s hand but was looking past his shoulder at Squires with a quizzical look.
“Don’t mind him,” Harmon said. “He loves the smell of napalm in the morning.”
An accepting smile crossed the guy’s face. He shook his head slightly and turned to continue his preflight check. Harmon and Squires huddled.
“OK, sarge,” Squires started, always pulling out the military speak when he was moving on an operation. “We got any objective here or you going to continue to keep that to yourself until we get dropped in on this mystery zone?”
Harmon, looked at this partner. Always a hard guy to keep anything from.
“Dropped in?” he said.
“I saw the fast rope bags already loaded in the air frame.”
“Yeah? Well, all we have is a quick turnaround. Crandall’s orders are to fly out to these coordinates in the near Everglades, some kind of a research facility, zip down to the station because there’s no place to land the chopper. Then we check out any damage the storm might have done, make sure it can be powered up by the remote, take some pictures, and then call back the chopper to lift us out. Few hours, tops.”
Squires let the info roll around in his head, maybe comparing it with earlier assignments, maybe with the memories in his head of ops in his vast military background. He pursed his lips. Nodded his head.
“I fucking smel
l something, chief,” he finally said. “And it ain’t kosher.”
Harmon looked away. His partner was already suspicious and he hadn’t even mentioned the C-4.
“You don’t even know what kosher means, Squires,” Harmon finally replied, picking up his bag and hefting it into the helicopter.
“Means illegal.”
“Like we haven’t done that before?”
Squires fixed a nonjudgmental gaze on him.
“Not this close to home.”
On the pilot’s signal both men climbed up into the cockpit, Squires riding shotgun in the rear seat, and they clamped radio headsets over their ears as the whine of the single engine slowly increased and the blades began spinning to action. There were no other active aircraft on the field that Squires could see. When they started to rise in the gray sky they swung immediately to the west, the rising sun at their backs and below the most obvious destruction of the now finished storm was in the dumped airplanes and scattered trash of trees and the patchy scabs of rooftops where orange barrel tiles had been stripped away. A hangar near the end of the runway was caved in, as if it had been chopped at the middle of its roof peak by the edge of a giant hand.
“Mr. Rae,” Harmon said into the mouthpiece, his voice sounding with an electronic crackle, “can we travel at a higher altitude, please. I really don’t need to see this all again.”
Acts of Nature Page 17
