Hurricane Fever (11 page)

But every time he got down, nose to the fiberglass, he would see something.

Maybe not reddish, but it seemed like it.

And the scrub brush would come out, and he’d start again.

Five times, scrubbing until his back ached, the tips of his fingers burned, until sweat dripped and burned his eyes.

Kit sat inside quietly for the hours of scrubbing. Roo ignored her presence. She didn’t belong. This wasn’t her grief, and she was smart enough to know that anything she did would be the wrong thing. She was a ghost in the ship as he moved around, cleaning, clearing things out.

Someone knocked politely on the side of the hull.

Roo slid the gun he’d hidden under a seat cushion out. He held it against the side of his thigh as he leaned to look out back toward the rear scoop of the port hull. “Hello?”

“Pastor Thompson here,” said the rail-thin man in the suit, his tightly curled, graying hair visible through the scuppers. He carried a satchel against his hip, and looked at all the bags tossed on the ground.

He caught Roo’s eyes. “What’s in the bags?” he asked.

“Delroy’s things.” Roo quietly flicked the safety of the gun back on. He placed it on the cockpit floor, out of sight, and sat down to look at the pastor. “He doesn’t need them anymore.”

Thompson took a deep breath. “You reached out to me to prepare Delroy’s memorial. But I am not just here for him. How are
you
doing, Mr. Jones?”

Roo stared at the man’s slim, brown leather shoes. “I’m numb. That’s how I am.” Everything felt silly and profound at the same time. Like the little silvered tips on the pastor’s shoes.

“Not angry?” Thompson asked.

What good was anger right now? “My soul was cauterized,” Roo murmured. “I was his only family. He, mine. When I came back to the islands, I found him in foster care. My brother had died. A neighbor’s whole roof landed on their house. Hurricane winds. Crushed the whole family, except Delroy, pinned beneath his parents. I came back to him so late, because I had left my family. I hadn’t even known he was orphaned until he’d been with other families for … too long.”

“It was a good thing you took him in,” Thompson said. “That was the right thing.”

Roo squinted. “I
thought
so. Three different families, he’d been with, when I came back and took him. But what good is that? What did I spare him from? A tough life. All I gave him was a decent life and then death too soon.”

Thompson reached up from where he stood on the ground and put a hand on the deck by Roo’s wet feet. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jones.”

Roo looked off past him into the shadows cast by hulls throughout the boatyard, lengthening due to the sun’s low angle.

“I guess,” Roo said, biting a lip. “I guess it wasn’t a bad way to die. Bullet in the head, they said. He didn’t have time to even realize what was happening. I’ve seen worse deaths.”

The pastor pulled his hand away from the deck, as if Roo had slammed a knife next to it.

“I visited someone in a cancer ward once,” Roo said. “Saw these kids dying of cancer. Terminal. That fucked me up something bad for weeks, seeing that. All those long, slow days. The suffering. Maybe I’m saying that to make me feel better. I just don’t know. I just don’t know.”

He saw the pastor thinking of something to say, caught off guard by the direction of Roo’s thinking out loud. Roo realized he should shut up and keep his thoughts to himself.

But that was the man’s job, wasn’t it? To listen? Wasn’t that why he’d come. Surely he’d heard worse?

Or maybe Roo would need to talk to a Catholic priest. The sort that heard the darkest confessions on the other side of a partition. Not a sunny, friendly, God-is-nothing-but-goodness-and-shiny-happiness pastor. The kind that wanted to provide comfort, and ease, but not really examine the crevices of the human condition. And Roo was digging around some crevices right now, that was for sure.

“So there won’t be any family at his memorial, Pastor,” Roo said.

“Other than you,” Thompson confirmed, pulling out a small pad from his satchel to write notes on.

“His friends will come. And others who knew him. I may not be there, so you will be making all the arrangements.”

Thompson finally dug his heels in, moving away from his role of being a comforting ear. “Mr. Jones, I can make the arrangements. Tasteful arrangements. I can talk to his friends and look at what he has left behind online and do that. But you need to come to the memorial.” He said it with a firm conviction.

“Look…” Roo stood up, but Thompson interrupted forcefully.

“I’m not here to give you a sales pitch, but everyone has some kind of moment where they need to say good-bye. It is important. Whether you are a believer, which you may not be, or just angry. As human beings, we all need to mark a moment, and come to terms with what has happened. Remember the person that was, even if you don’t believe they continue on. Honor that, for them. And maybe, to find a small measure of peace.”

Roo took out his phone. “No peace to be found here, Pastor,” he said. “But I’m going to give you an unlimited line of credit. I want a good memorial. That is how I will mark the moment.”

“You can’t run away from it,” Thompson said, slipping his pad away.

“I’m thinking about running toward something else,” Roo said.

“The middle of grief is not a good time to be making major decisions.”

Roo laughed sadly. “There’s never a
good
time to make a major decision. Mister Thompson, there’s another damn hurricane coming. There’s no time for waiting around. There never is, in the summer, here.” Roo could hardly remember a time when hurricanes let up. Too much heat in the atmosphere. Too much carbon dumped into it. And now they bore the brunt of it. Storm after storm slamming into the islands, the hurricane season extending ever longer. The sea rising up over the beaches, threatening the reason tourists came to visit the islands.

A huge wave of loss threatened to unmoor Roo as he thought about the past and then tried to cut it away.

Thompson got his attention back to the moment. “A big one coming. A lot of families will be hurting in a week’s time.”

“Then don’t waste time out here with me,” Roo told him. “Go back to those who need you. And do good by my nephew.”

“I will,” he said.

Roo looked back down at his phone. And then sent a massive donation to the man’s church.

In Delroy’s name.

He wasn’t sure if it was enough to help with any future sins, but it would be enough to help anyone in Thompson’s community about to suffer from the next explosion of weather-related fury coming their way. He picked the gun back up.

Downstairs he reached past Kit, who was sitting in the chart table area near the VHF radios, paper navigation charts, backup RDF units, and Roo’s wall-mounted screens. He ripped an old map of the Caribbean with pins stuck into various islands and angrily threw it in the trash.

A senior summer trip that he would not be taking with Delroy.

He stalked past Kit, who sat so still it was as if she was afraid any movement or words would destroy him, like a hammer to porcelain.

In his cabin, the door locked and the gun resting on his bed, Roo stripped off his wet clothes until he stood naked. Nothing but the chain with the tree frog on the end.

That damn frog.

The damn forwarded voice mail.

Roo looked through the slats in his room door into the corridor. Kit hadn’t stirred. Silence hung heavy throughout the catamaran.

He pulled out a pad Velcroed to the wall. Plugged the tree frog into it, and flipped through the data again.

More of the same bullshit. Charts of average hurricane formation data for the past century. Growing activity. Nothing you couldn’t snag from any weather research site.

And more of that esoteric stuff about particulates riding high in the atmosphere.

“What were you trying to leave me, Zee?” Roo asked the wall.

But the smooth fiberglass had no reply.

Zee was studying dust in the Saharan Air Layer. As Roo had told Delroy. Storms would rip across the deserts of West Africa and whip the dust up high into the air. And above the wetter, colder Atlantic air a dryer layer would hold the dust and sweep out across the ocean to rain softly down in the islands.

With the jet stream wobbling to dip down into the Americas, changing wind patterns due to colder Arctic air constantly battling and changing everything up and down the East Coast, secondary layers often took the dust up into Florida nowadays. Sometimes farther.

Roo pulled the data out. Zee died to protect it, and there was more. But Roo had never been a researcher. He’d ridden desks, true. Back when he’d been up to no good, Caribbean Intelligence Group pulled Roo out of house arrest, cut the GPS chip out of his ankle, and told him they could use a grifter.

Social engineering, they’d told him. There were some hackers that could dig into code, or find vulnerabilities in the programming. But the weakest link? The people actually using programs. And Roo had a knack for exploiting the link between the keyboard and the screen.

You could dress up in a pair of khakis and a blue dress shirt with a name tag and fake company name and show up to fix almost any network or computer. You could frantically call someone and tell them they needed to access a certain security site. You could get anyone to give over all sorts of personal information to fix a problem with their file in HR, if they thought you were HR.

Fifteen minutes on a phone, and Roo could usually get what would take hours to force one’s way into. Roo read people, figured out how to follow the threads up the chain. Took action.

Zee, on the other hand, he would dig and dig until patterns came. They’d worked well together. Zee, the bloodhound. And Roo, moving pieces around the board based on Zee’s research.

He could read Zee’s raw research until his eyes bled and not spot what was obvious to Zee.

Roo needed to tackle this in a people direction.

Or he could turn his back on all this shit and put the boat back in the water. Run before the hurricane, like a Viking of old on a longboat before the storm. Lose himself. Start over.

One of the boards creaked outside.

Roo, still naked, picked up the gun and aimed it right at the door. “Yeah?”

“I don’t…” Kit said, her voice breaking slightly. “What happens next, Roo?”

He looked at the broken outline of her silhouette through the slats in the upper part of the door.

That was the question, wasn’t it?

Gun still raised, he moved until the barrel almost touched one of the wooden slats. “Are you serious about justice?” Roo asked, his voice cracking slightly. “Ready to risk it all to find out who did this to Zee, to my Delroy? No matter where it takes us? Because your brother and I, we didn’t sit behind desks when we first met, you understand?”

Kit shifted on the other side of the door’s slats. “I’ll go wherever it needs to go. We have no parents, no other family to mourn us. It was just him and me. I’m willing.”

“I think they found me through you,” Roo said, leaning his forehead against the door. “So let’s turn this around, yeah? It’s time for you to go back to that hotel room you told about.”

She stopped moving forward. “You’re going to use me as bait.”

More like chum, because those men were sharks. And if she was naïve, she wouldn’t know it. She would trust him and say yes and walk willingly into a line of fire. But if she was in the business, like Roo, then she knew it was going to be dicey, and ugly, and that this was a stupid move for her.

So, Roo thought, let’s see how committed Zee’s possibly fake sister is to this.

“Yes. See that police car up by the gate? It’s going to keep trouble away. So we’re gonna get real up close and personal.”

“And then?”

“Going to kill the clot-bastard-fuckers for Delroy. And find out why they came up on us. I’m going to tug on this line and see where it leads. Because it’s this, or … I go become someone else. Someone more broken, and tired, and alone. And always I’ll wonder, who did it? Why? What was it for?”

Kit took a deep breath, then sighed. “I’ll be your bait. For Zee.”

“For Zee,” Roo said. “And Delroy.”

13

Frenchman’s Reef Hotel stuck out of one of the corners of Charlotte Amalie’s harbor. From it you could see the whole town sprinkled along the curving bowl of the mountain-made amphitheater of the harbor. Everything stretched around that curve. From Frenchman’s Reef, to Yacht Haven, which was clustered with gleaming mega-yachts for the unbearably rich, all the way to Frenchtown, where fishermen still pushed out to sea in wooden, brightly painted fishing boats.

Roo, flamboyantly out in the clear air in his camouflage as a tourist, walked by room after room. The doors to his left, railing to his right. And behind the rails, the nighttime lights of Charlotte Amalie twinkled.

At the pool, an overweight, pasty woman in a mumu-looking bathing suit had handed Roo an armful of wet, sunscreen-smelling towels.

“Here you go,” she’d said, with an air of casual expectation.

Kit had opened her mouth to object, but Roo had just nodded and taken them. At the edge of the pool he had pulled on a pair of swimming trunks, doused himself sopping wet with a hose, and pulled on a Hawaiian shirt that assaulted anyone passing by with its tropical colors.

“You go ahead,” Roo told Kit. “Let them grab you. Fight them, but let them take you. I’ll be right behind.”

He had draped one of the towels over his head to obscure his dreads, wore wet, squeaking flip-flops, and had wrapped the other towel around his waist.

A bright red duffel bag, the last towel casually drooped from the space between the handles, bumped against his hip.

Kit now reached the stairs ahead of him and, after a deep breath, started up.

Roo watched her go until her feet were all that were visible. A pair of professionally efficient pumps, scuffed from the gravel, that ticked up one more set of stairs and disappeared.

He kept moving toward the open stairs. Found his first target just around the corner, down the stairs just in the shadow. Smaller muscle, keeping an eye on the stairs and pulling the trap closed. He was paying more attention to Kit and getting ready to follow her up.