The product was a sturdy harness that allowed the stranger's arms to wave free. Webo Drake tested the knots and pronounced them tight. "Can we go now?" he asked the one-eyed man.
"By all means."
"What about the squirrel, sir?"
"It's all yours," the stranger said. "Enjoy."
Jack Fleming coasted the car downhill. At the foot of the bridge, he veered off the pavement to get clear of the traffic. Webo Drake found a rusty curtain rod in a pile of trash, and Jack used it to hoist the animal carcass out of his father's Lexus. Webo stood back, trying to light a cigaret.
Back on the bridge, under a murderous dark sky, the kneeling stranger raised both arms to the pulsing gray clouds. Bursts of hot wind made the man's hair stand up like a halo of silver sparks.
"Crazy fucker," Jack Fleming rasped. He stepped over the dead squirrel and threw the curtain rod into the mangroves. "You think he had a gun? Because that's what I'm telling my old man: Some nut with a gun kicked out the car window."
Webo Drake pointed with the cigaret and said, "Jack, you know what he's waiting for? That crazy idiot, he's waiting on the hurricane."
Although the young men stood two hundred yards away, they could see the one-eyed stranger grinning madly into the teeth of the rising wind. He wore a smile that blazed.
"Brother," Jack said to Webo, "let's get the hell out of here." The tollbooth was unmanned, so they blew through at fifty miles an hour, skidded into the parking lot of Alabama Jack's. There they used the one-eyed man's ten-dollar bill to purchase four cold cans of Cherry Coke, which they drank on the trip up Card Sound Road. When they were finished, they did not toss the empties from the car.
A noise awakened Bonnie Lamb. It was Max, snapping open a suitcase. She asked what in the world he was doing, fully dressed and packing his clothes at four in the morning. He said he wanted to surprise her.
"You're leaving me?" she asked. "After two nights." Max Lamb smiled and came to the bed. "I'm packing for both of us."
He tried to stroke Bonnie's cheek, but she buried her face in the pillow, to block out the light. The rain was coming harder now, slapping horizontally against the windows of the high-rise hotel. She was glad her husband had come to his senses. They could do Epcot some other time.
She peered out of the pillow and said, "Honey, is the airport open?"
"I don't honestly know."
"Shouldn't you call first?"
"Why?" Max Lamb patted the blanket where it followed the curve of his wife's hips.
"We're flying home, aren't we?" Bonnie Lamb sat up. "That's why you're packing."
Her husband said no, we're not flying home. "We're going on an adventure."
"I see. Where, Max?"
"Miami."
"That's the surprise?"
"That's it." He tugged the covers away from her. "Come on, we've got a long drive"
Bonnie Lamb didn't move. "You're serious."
"-and I want to teach you how to use the video camera."
She said, "I've got a better idea. Why don't we stay here and make love for the next three days. Dawn to dusk, OK? Tear the room to pieces. I mean, if it's adventure you want."
Max Lamb was up again, stuffing the suitcases. "You don't understand. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance."
Right, Bonnie said, a chance to drown on our honeymoon. "I'd rather stay where it's warm and dry. I'll even watch Emmanuelle VI on the Spectravision, like you wanted last night." This she regarded as a significant concession.
"By the time we get to Miami," said Max, "the dangerous part will be over. In fact, it's probably over already."
"Then what's the point?"
"You'll see."
"Max, I don't want to do this. Please."
He gave her a stiff, fatherly hug. She knew he was about to speak to her as if she were six years old. "Bonnie," Max Lamb said to his new wife. "My beautiful little Bonnie, now listen. Disney World we can do anytime. Anytime we want. But how often does a hurricane hit? You heard the weatherman, honey. 'The Storm of the Century,' he called it. How often does a person get to see something like that!"
Bonnie Lamb couldn't stand her husband's lordly tone. She couldn't stand it so much that she'd have done anything to shut him up.
"All right, Max. Bring me my robe."
He kissed her noisily on the forehead. "Thatta girl."
CHAPTER TWO
Snapper and Edie Marsh got two rooms at the Best Western in Pembroke Pines, thirty miles north of where the storm was predicted to come ashore. Snapper told the motel clerk that one room would be enough, but Edie said not on your damn life. The relationship had always been strictly business, Snapper being an occasional fence of women's wear and Edie being an occasional thief of same. Their new venture was to be another entrepreneurial partnership, more ambitious but not more intimate. Up front Edie alerted Snapper that she couldn't imagine a situation in which she'd have sex with him, even once. He did not seem poleaxed by the news.
She went to bed covering her ears, trying to shut out the hellish moan of the storm. It was more than she could bear alone. During the brief calm of the eye, she pounded on the door to Snapper's room and said she was scared half to death. Snapper said come on in, we're having ourselves a time.
Somewhere in the midst of a hurricane, he'd found a hooker. Edie was impressed. The woman clutched a half-empty bottle of Barbancourt between her breasts. Snapper had devoted himself to vodka; he wore a Marlins cap and red Jockey shorts, inside out. Candles gave the motel room a soft, religious lighting. The electricity had been out for two hours.
Edie Marsh introduced herself to the prostitute, whom Snapper had procured through a telephone escort service. Here was a dedicated employee! thought Edie.
The back side of the storm came up, a roar so unbearable that the three of them huddled like orphans on the floor. The candles flickered madly as the wind sucked at the windows. Edie could see the walls breathing-Christ, what a lousy idea this was! A large painting of a pelican fell, grazing one of the hooker's ankles. She cried out softly and gnawed at her artificial fingernails. Snapper kept to the vodka. Occasionally his free hand would turn up like a spider on Edie's thigh. She smashed it, but Snapper merely sighed.
By dawn the storm had crossed inland, and the high water was falling fast. Edie Marsh put on a conservative blue dress and dark nylons, and pinned her long brown hair in a bun. Snapper wore the only suit he owned, a slate pinstripe he'd purchased two years earlier for an ex-cellmate's funeral; the cuffed trousers stopped an inch shy of his shoetops. Edie chuckled and said that was perfect.
They dropped the prostitute at a Denny's restaurant and took the Turnpike south to see what the hurricane had done. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper lunacy, fire engines and cop cars and ambulances everywhere. The radio said Homestead had been blown off the map. The governor was sending the National Guard.