“Whoa, whoa,” Hauser held up his hand, trying to stave off bad news. “Hurricanes don’t have lightning.”
“You need new data. Rita, Emily, and Katrina—three of the most powerful storms of 2005—were all electrical hurricanes. The satellites are picking up flashes in the wall of Dylan’s eye that are probably the largest in recorded history. Per meter he probably measures fifty percent stronger than the worst of mesoscale thunderstorms. And he’s twelve thousand percent larger than any thunderstorm on record. You can expect lightning like no one’s ever seen before, Sheriff.”
There was something else in Dennison’s voice, something behind the bad news. It wasn’t huge, but it was important, because Hauser could hear it; he was used to listening to what people said between their lines of dialogue. “What are you not telling me?” Hauser asked.
“This is about two hours before we are past the tipping point, but everything says you are going to be asked to evacuate your county. I’d start now if I were you. Just get everyone the fuck out, excuse my frankness.”
Hauser wanted to say that Montauk wasn’t like New Orleans, where the poor would be left behind and nobody would be to blame. No, here the out-of-work fishermen and the old canning-factory layoffs would love to take a trip on a government bus to a week in a gymnasium in some other state where they could get free coffee and play cards all day. Maybe get new sneakers. No, it would be the rich who would refuse to go. A lot of them felt that their wealth entitled them to some sort of divine protection. “I could try. And I’d get some people out. A lot of people would refuse to leave their—” he paused, trying to find another word for stuff—“things,” he said.
Dennison uh-huhed, and said, “Print up flyers, distribute them by hand. Use manpower for that. Tell them you need their signatures if they are going to stay. There is no guarantee that there will be any emergency services once the storm makes landfall. Spell it out that they are risking their lives if they stay. Let them know that the power grid will probably fail. Land telephone lines will stop like a dead heart. I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but you have to listen to me. The electromagnetic field that this storm will generate is going to fry all antennas, including cell phone towers. Forget iPhones. Forget BlackBerries. Forget the goddamned Motorola brick. No more communication. Grid-based electronics will go, everything plugged into an outlet will simply overload and die in a single flash of lightning that could be the largest in history. Even the surge-protected circuits will go. I hope we’re wrong, I really do. But this is one of those times when the Boy Scout motto applies. Get all of your people together ASAP and get a working plan of defense into action. Talk to your citizens. We have a media branch that can help you get a website up to help with inquiries, otherwise you and your people will spend the next two days answering the same questions over and over and over and you need that time to get your citizenry out of there. If I had anyone I loved out on that narrow isthmus facing Dylan, I’d get them inland as fast as I could.”
Hauser was still trying to absorb the walkie-talkie advice. “I appreciate the call.”
“I left my number with your receptionist and we’ve sent full contact packages to the email address of every civil servant in your area. If you can, get another branch of the city to print the flyers and donate personnel to handing them out. The library or post office. That would be smart. Get them all orange highway vests and a flashlight; Swiss Army knife; name tag—people just fucking love name tags; and all the damned coffee they can drink. Call me directly if you need help, I’ll be at the office until Dylan dies out. And please, use our media package. Get a website up fast—these days, if it’s not on the web, people don’t believe that it exists.”
“Sure.”
“Take care.”
Hauser hung up, glad that Dennison hadn’t said God Bless. Then again, Be Prepared was pretty close. But a lot better than trusting an invisible man in the sky. “Jeannine!” he bellowed.
He heard the click-click-click of her heels, then his door opened. “Yes, Sheriff?”
“Where do we keep the walkie-talkies?”
Her face scrunched up and she asked, “What’s a walkie-talkie?”
Hauser felt the acidic surge of heartburn flare up in his stomach. He faced the nearly blank page of the press release, realizing that he was going to be doing a lot of these in the next few days. “Get me some Tums or Rolaids or some such shit and I want to see Spencer and Scopes in my office in five minutes. Get everyone in here in an hour for an emergency meeting. Pull in everyone. And call everybody you know and tell them to get inland in a hurry.”
Jeannine’s eyes shifted uncomfortably. “Is it going to be bad?”
“It’s going to be worse than bad, Jeannine.” Hauser stared at the page, his eyes unmoving. “A lot worse.”
14
His father was still sleeping. Still snoring. Still looking like one of those after photographs that little communities put up by the side of the road to remind people to keep fresh batteries in their smoke detectors. Jake had come back here because the sheriff’s department was dragging its feet with the reports. Even though eight hours was still under accepted law-enforcement standards, it was well below what a competent FBI forensics team would consider permissible. So Jake had come back to the hospital to get some more work done. With the new reports from the medical examiner, things were expanding and he needed time to correlate the new information with the old. So he sat in the corner trying to stare into the house down the beach. But all he could see was the hospital room.
The flowers had been carted down to the children’s ward and the rainforest effect had almost dissipated. The room still smelled of flora and dirt but it wasn’t as humid. A single tasteful arrangement of calla lilies and baby’s breath in a tall wheel-cut crystal vase sat on the imitation-wood nightstand. The card was sealed in a little white envelope secured with a single staple. Jake ripped it off the foil ribbon and pried it open. On simple white stationery were the words, Get well soon, old friend—David Finch.
Jake shook his head, tucked the card back in the envelope, and tossed it into the wastebasket. Finch had been the first gallery owner to take a chance on Jacob. Because of this, combined with his being the shrewdest art dealer on the East Coast, Jacob had stayed with him for more than fifty years. Jake hated Finch, always had, and the thought of the obsequious little fuck tightened his stomach into a greasy knot.
“Goddamned fag flowers,” a voice croaked.
Jake turned to his father. “Hello…um, Jacob. How are you?” The doctor had guaranteed that his father would sleep for two days on the pharmaceutical cocktail they’d primed into his IV.
“What day is it? More red, Godammit! More red!”
More red? What the hell was that about? Where was the nurse? “You’re Jacob Coleridge. Remember?”
“Jesus fucking Christ. What are you? Retarded? Of course I’m Jacob Coleridge. What’s with the ugly flowers? White? Is it a wedding or a funeral? Who the hell buys white flowers? Only the stupid, the unimaginative, or the sycophantic send white. Must be from Dave. What the fuck do you want? Where are my clothes?” And then he saw his hands, two big gauze-wrapped stumps the size of pineapples. On his left hand, a black scab of blood was hard and cracked and the white outline of the fabric’s weave shone through and he examined it. “What the hell is THIS?” he said, throwing his hands into Jake’s face. “Take these off, for fuck’s sake.”
The doctor yesterday had warned him that the morphine could alter his father’s personality. He said that many patients at the tail end of a terminal illness just drifted off into a hallucinatory dementia that robbed them of much of their identity. The morphine, coupled with his father’s Alzheimer’s, could make Jacob Coleridge a very ugly man to be around. As soon as Jake had stopped laughing he told them to give the old man as much morphine as they could load into a caulking gun. But it sure didn’t seem to be slowing him down at all. Suddenly he realized where his own metabolism had come from.