Storm Force

by Meredith Fletcher

  “What’s that about?” Kate asked. They were the only ones in the store. Wind and the big plate-glass windows didn’t mix and no one wanted to be around them.

  “The prison bus,” Tyler said. “I didn’t know about that.”

  “And I didn’t know about the dentist you opened up a can of whup-ass on.”

  “Anesthesiologist,” Kate corrected automatically.

  Marty grinned and shrugged. “Whatever. We were just catching up on our favorite Kate Garrett stories.”

  “You two,” Kate told them, “have way too much time on your hands if that’s how you’re spending it.”

  “It gets more interesting,” Marty said. “Turns out the anesthesiologist had an arrest warrant out for his butt.”

  “Why?”

  “I heard improper conduct with a patient or two. Homer, over at the sheriff’s office, mentioned something about digital pictures of those patients in his possession.”

  Kate felt a little better about the confrontation she’d had with Dr. Darrel Mathis. It was better to incapacitate by force a sleaze rather than a drunk.

  “Tyler showed me the video footage of you kicking that guy’s ass.” Marty shoved out his thumbs. “Two thumbs up. Way up.”

  “Not exactly the career choice I had in mind,” Kate said.

  “And the prison-bus thing is adding a new wrinkle,” Tyler said, pointing to the small television set that kept fading in and out on the local channels. “Seems one of those prisoners turned up dead.”

  Kate’s thoughts immediately turned to the blond man she’d seen with Jolly. The one who had taken her keys from her. “Which one?” She hoped it wasn’t the blond man. According to the news reports, Shane was the only one of the escapees who hadn’t been part of Desiree Martini’s kidnapping and disappearance.

  “Some guy named Phil,” Tyler said.

  Phil Lewis, Kate remembered. She didn’t remember much about him other than he’d been one of Jolly’s gang. “What happened to him?”

  “The police aren’t releasing that information at this time.” Tyler grimaced. “They’re only confirming that he’s dead. Oh, and they found your Jeep.”

  “Where?”

  “Not far from the campsites we’re heading to tonight. Evidently those guys didn’t try to get too far. Or maybe they wrecked your Jeep during their getaway. Sheriff Bannock and the FBI aren’t saying.”

  “The FBI is involved? Why?”

  “They originally handled the kidnapping thing,” Tyler said. He shrugged. “Maybe they just want to take care of old business. Clean the slate. Something like that.” He paused. “Either way, we’re going to have to be careful out there.”

  Kate silently agreed.

  “Don’t know,” Marty said as he rang up Kate’s gas and the supplies she’d ordered from him. “With this storm coming, I’m not sure if I’d want to face the storm or those escaped cons.”

  Neither, Kate thought, but she knew that was too much to hope for. But she wondered about the dead man. How and why had he died?

  Chapter 4

  The storm hit southern Florida’s coastline when Kate was only a few minutes away from the campsite. The black, roiling heavens opened up and poured forth a deluge of biblical proportions. The windshield wipers were hard-pressed to keep up with the torrent. Lightning seared the sky, followed by thunder that came closer and closer. The wind hit seventy and eighty miles an hour. The truck jumped viciously across the road, making driving hard.

  Anyone with sense is at home, Kate thought. She fought the steering wheel again, pulling the truck back into a straight course when it wanted to go sideways.

  “Damn!” Tyler swore after a particularly close lightning strike. “That one seemed to have our name on it.” He sat in the truck’s forward passenger seat and stared out at the storm.

  Already, small waves of rain swept across the highway, propelled by the surging winds. Debris filled the ditches and channels on either side, surely no more than moments from pouring out across the highway and causing all kinds of hazards. Two emergency vehicles, a fire truck and an ambulance, had roared past them.

  Kate had to concentrate on driving. Conditions had turned worse than she’d imagined. Even though she had four-wheel drive on the truck and good road beneath her, she knew she couldn’t trust the road.

  She went east off Plantation Parkway, toward Everglades National Park. She turned back south on one of the dirt roads that led to a campsite she’d set up for two brothers from Missouri and their three teenaged sons. They were a good group, the kind of clients she wanted to keep. But they were inexperienced with Florida’s weather and the sudden, aggressive nature of tropical storms. She’d used Tyler’s cell phone in an effort to reach them but hadn’t been successful. She would have been in touch with them before if it hadn’t been for getting the kids, the bus wreck and the problem with Mathis.

  The road had turned to soup under the driving rain. A firm foundation existed beneath the mud, but the tires had to chew through a few inches to reach it. Even then, the rain would soak down into those levels too. In years past, lumberjacks, hunters—of both game and rare orchids and other plants—and residents had used all the dirt roads in the area. The state and federal government didn’t provide for much more than grading, which didn’t even begin to solve the pothole and drainage problems.

  Kate used the lower gears, slowing to a crawl. The headlights barely reached through the driving sheets of rain that looked silver-gray in the glare. Also, the innumerable potholes provided a deadly minefield of potential strut-busting bangs and bumps that could tear the truck’s front end out and leave them stranded to ride out the storm.

  “—record high amounts of rain and wind,” the newscaster droned on over the radio. “The Coast Guard is already reporting thirty- and forty-foot swells in the Gulf of Mexico. Meteorologists are continuing to upgrade the storm as conditions worsen. People living in the low areas and in Everglades City are advised to seek out high ground as Hurricane Genevieve comes roaring into the coastal areas.”

  Another white-hot dazzle of multi-veined lightning ripped across the sky, followed by a cannonade of thunder that vibrated the truck and caused Tyler to jump. He cursed as he shifted and tried to relax.

  “Did I ever tell you that I don’t like storms?” he asked.

  Kate looked at him, seeing the fear and nervousness in him. During the confrontation with Mathis, Tyler had been totally calm and collected, even with drunken men and weapons potentially in the mix. But the storm had him stressed. Kate knew it was like that for a lot of native and long-time residents who had survived the big ones.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “I think you’ve mentioned it before.”

  “Well,” Tyler said. “I really don’t like them. In case there was any confusion.”

  A gust of wind slammed the truck and forced it off the road. Kate kept calm and guided the steering rather than fight it. The passenger-side tires dipped down, falling off the road entirely, picking up water and creating a jetstream against the truck’s side that sluiced the window with muddy water. Kate brought the truck back up on to the road through steady effort.

  “Damn,” Tyler groaned. He looked pale in the darkness.

  “Maybe you should have stayed home,” Kate suggested.

  “It’s a little late for that now, isn’t it?” Tyler asked.

  “Don’t you throw up in my truck,” Kate warned, trying to lighten the moment.

  “Ha, ha,” Tyler said dryly. “I’m not going to throw up. But I can’t guarantee that the seats are going to stay dry.”

  Despite the tension of the moment, Kate laughed. Tyler joined her, but it sounded strained. “I appreciate you coming along,” she said a moment later.

  He shrugged, like it was no big deal. “There’s nothin’ on television, and Dad has a fit when I use the generator to run the X-Box. I mean, what the hell else can you do when it gets like this?”

  “What’s your dad doing?”

  �
�Watchin’ the weather. Like all the old guys do. Keeps wanderin’ out to the front porch, standin’ there nursin’ a cup of coffee an’ a cigarette, shakin’ his head, an’ talkin’ about the big ones he’s seen in the past an’ how this ain’t gonna compare to them. Like all that’s gonna do something toward preventin’ what we got goin’ on here now.”

  Another lightning strike hit a dwarf cypress tree ahead and on the left. For a moment, the tree’s crown ignited in flames and sparks, and the Spanish moss stood out stark and mysterious. The flames blazed for a moment, then the tree fell over into the deep slough on that side of the road and extinguished in the black, running water that cascaded deeper into Big Cypress Swamp.

  “Damn,” Tyler sighed. “We’re gonna need a rowboat to get out of here.”

  Nearly an hour later, they reached the campsite. The area was primitive, holding only four screened chickees. Tyler had referred to them as “chickees on steroids” because the original designs hadn’t included walls, which these had.

  Kate had built the shelters, modeling them on the small, elevated cabins the Seminole people had lived in.

  As a little girl, she’d seen them in the Seminole Camping Village on the Big Cypress Reservation near Fort Lauderdale and had fallen in love with them. She’d even built one in back of the house where she now lived. That one was more traditional, without walls and with a rush roof that sometimes leaked. Hannah loved going there for picnics with her mom and to “look for dinosaurs.”

  A massive SUV sat under a bald cypress tree. Water and mud were already creeping up the tires. If it didn’t move soon, it was going to get mired where it was. Kate knew she didn’t have the room she needed to haul the men and their sons back to Everglades City. They needed to get moving now, while they still could.

  Electric lanterns glowed inside two of the chickees, tearing holes in the darkness and offering shelter from the storm. The hiss of rain sluicing into the earth deafened Kate for the most part, but she still heard the chuckatapop-chuckatapop-chuckatop of the gasoline-powered generator she had there for emergencies.

  Water already covered most of the land, several inches deep in places. Kate’s hiking boots kept her feet dry, but mud clumped up on the tread, adding weight. She pulled her poncho tightly around her but knew it was a situation she couldn’t win. No matter what, she was going to get wet tonight.

  She pointed Tyler to one of the chickees and she took the other. Climbing up the slightly inclined ladder, Kate knocked on the door. “Mr. Iverson,” she yelled, hoping he could hear her over the rain.

  Rock-and-roll music blared from inside the chickee. They were watertight. She’d made certain of that when she’d constructed them, and when she weather-stripped them right before each rainy season. Maintaining the cabins, chickees and campsites was a lot of work, but it was work she felt good about.

  She banged on the door again. “Mr. Iverson!”

  This time the door opened. Clarence Iverson, the older brother, peered out at her. He wore thick glasses and had ginger-colored hair. He was in his late forties and had the kind of relationship with his two boys that Kate wished she had with Steven and Hannah. It was, she’d reflected a few times since dealing with the brothers over the last three years on their annual guy-trips, the kind of relationship she had with her dad.

  “Ms. Garrett,” Iverson greeted. Since the chickee was so low, he had to stay on his hands and knees.

  Behind him, two young teenagers sat up in their sleeping bags. There was little room for anything else in the shelter. Luxury was never offered or even mentioned when renting the chickees out. Both boys looked slightly worried.

  The gale winds slammed against the chickee, causing it to sway a few inches. Then thunder exploded again and Kate felt it vibrate through the wood beneath her hands.

  “You know I’m not one to complain,” Iverson said, “but you’ve really got to do something about these noise levels. I mean, blaring rock-and-roll at this time of night?”

  Both teens rolled their eyes and yelled, “Dad!”

  Iverson grinned at them. “Told you that you’d get in trouble playing music that loud. Man, your mom’s going to hate it when I have to leave you here in prison.”

  The mention of prison reminded Kate of her earlier encounter with the DOC bus. And the fact that the escaped prisoners, except for the dead one, were still in the area.

  Despite the situation, Kate grinned. The Iverson brothers were firefighters from St. Louis. They were good men, solid men. Men like her dad. If Kate was still interested in pursuing—or better yet, being pursued by—a man, that was the kind of man she’d want. Unfortunately, all the ones she knew were taken.

  And it wasn’t like she was looking. The last thing she needed was a man in her life breaking her stride. Steven and Hannah came first.

  “Mr. Iverson,” Kate said, “you’re going to have to leave.”

  Iverson looked at her then. Concern etched his face. “The storm?”

  Kate nodded. “Hurricane Genevieve. It turned. We’re right in its path.”

  Iverson shoved his head out into the rain. The chickee swayed threateningly again. “Looks worse than they were expecting.”

  “It is,” Kate agreed, having to raise her voice over the howling wind and the rumbling thunder. Lightning danced naked in the sky, flip-flopping like a centipede. “And it’s going to get worse before morning.”

  “What do you recommend?” Iverson asked.

  That was why Kate loved having clients like the Iverson brothers and their sons; they were never a problem and they always listened. She was slowly building her client base, weeding out the problem ones like Mathis. Unfortunately, she still needed high rollers like the anesthesiologist to keep Garrett Guides comfortably in the black while managing to fund custody pursuits.

  “There are hotels in Everglades City,” Kate said. “I’ll refund your money for tonight.”

  Iverson shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. You can’t control the weather. I’m glad you came out all this way to check on us. I thought we could just sleep through it. Give us a second to get squared away.”

  The two boys high-fived each other. “A hotel!” one said.

  “Beds and television!” the other one said. “Now that’s a vacation!”

  Iverson glanced back at Kate. “As you can see, Ms. Garrett, the boys are heartbroken.”

  Kate laughed and retreated down the ladder. “Just toss your gear down. I’ll keep it out of the mud.”

  The Iversons, the boys’ excitement at spending the night in the hotel notwithstanding, were expert campers. They had their gear packed in minutes. Iverson dropped the rolled sleeping bags down. Kate caught them and slung them over her shoulder.

  Tyler was already ferrying equipment to the SUV, wading through water that was up over his ankles now. It’s getting deeper, Kate realized. Fast. Fear rose in her then as the winds hit the extra surfaces created by the sleeping bags over her shoulder and nearly swept her away. She walked deliberately, leaning into the shifting winds, having to move constantly.

  Within minutes, they were packed and loaded into the SUV.

  “Do you know the way to Tamiami Road?” Kate asked, shouting through the noise of the storm.

  Willard Iverson, the younger brother, sat behind the wheel. “Yeah.” He closed his eyes tight against the lashing rain. “We’ve been to Everglades City a couple times since we’ve been here. Had to get movies for the tenderfeet.”

  “Yeah,” one of the boys yelled from in the back. “Gross, gory zombie movies. Our moms won’t let us watch them at home.”

  “Just our way of communing with nature and the unnatural,” Clarence Iverson said, grinning. “We had to throw in pizza to swear them to secrecy.”

  Kate smiled, wondering what Steven would think about watching zombie movies. Those had been a staple of her brother’s, and she and her sisters had raided his popcorn and joined him on most nights that he didn’t have one of his buddies over to spend the ni
ght. Everything had been so simple then. Zombies had been monsters with rules, not attorneys.

  “Are you going to be all right driving in this?” Kate asked.

  “I drive a fire truck in St. Louis, Ms. Garrett,” Willard Iverson said.

  “This isn’t St. Louis,” Kate reminded, “and I don’t think you’ve ever had a hurricane there.” Lightning flashed and thunder boomed.

  “No, ma’am. Just mentioned that so you’d know I was trainable.”

  Kate smiled again. “Stay to the middle of the road. Floodwaters are going to mask the potholes. Go slow. You break a strut or screw up the front end, you’re stuck. Emergency services are going to be out, but they’re only going to known sites, not cruising for people needing help. Certainly nowhere out this far. Their orders are to help when they know they’re needed and when they know they can.”

  “I can appreciate that.”

  “If a disaster is declared,” Kate said, “emergency services are going to take over all the cell phone frequencies. You might be able to get through on 911, but that’s not a guarantee either.”

  “Are you going back to Tamiami Road, Ms. Garrett?” Clarence Iverson asked.

  Kate shook her head. “Tyler and I have got two more sites to check on. If you don’t have any trouble, you’ll be back at Everglades City before we finish up out here.”

  “We’ll wish you good luck then.” Willard Iverson offered his hand.

  Kate took it and shook.

  “Tyler,” Willard Iverson said, offering his hand to him. “You two be safe.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tyler said, shaking hands. “We’ll do that, sir.”

  Kate headed back to the truck, holding the hood of her poncho down. Without warning, the wind rose up again and knocked over one of the chickees. Damn, Kate thought, watching as the structure was blown away and shattered against a copse of cypress trees.

  She settled in behind the truck’s steering wheel, grateful for the slight warmth pouring from the heater. The warmth was more a psychological comfort than anything. Tropical storm conditions weren’t cold; they were just wet, awfully, awfully wet.