Storm Surge (3 page)

“Yeah.
Okay,” the man said. He closed the
car door.
“One more day.”
By the dock, the ferry
sounded its horn.

“Damn it,”
Sharon said. “We’d better run. We’re
gonna
be late.”

“Remember,”
Max said.
“One more day.”

“Whatever,”
the repo man said.

The three of
them turned and started to jog towards the dock. As they ran, Sharon glanced
over at Max. “Thanks,” she said.

He nodded.
“He’s going to take the car as soon as we’re gone,” he said. Behind them, they
heard the car start up. “Okay, he’s not going to wait that long.”

They stopped
and looked back. The repo man was driving out of the lot, arm out the window,
middle finger extended. The brown truck followed. Sharon fought back tears.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”

The horn blew
again. “Come on,” Max said.

They barely
made it to the boat, Sharon and Glory gasping and out of breath. Max didn’t
even seem winded. “Look,” he said, “I can give you a ride home if you need one.
What time do you get off?”

“Three,”
Sharon said.

“Okay. You
work at the restaurant, right?”

She nodded.
She was starting to get her breath back.
“Yeah.
I’m
Sharon.”

“I’m…”

“Max, Yeah. I
heard. But you don’t have to give us a ride.
Really.
I’ll figure out something.”

“Yeah.
Okay. If you change your mind, call
the marina.”

“Okay. And,
really, thanks again.”

He
nodded,
his face expressionless. “Don’t mention it.” He
walked off, towards the bow.

Sharon turned
back to her daughter. Glory’s pretty face was red with anger and embarrassment.
“I can’t believe you let our car get repossessed,” she said.

I had to
pay your tuition
,
Sharon thought, but didn’t say. “I thought they’d wait at least one more
payment.”

“God, why do
you always have to embarrass me?” Glory said, her voice rising.

“Keep your
voice down.”

“How’s this,
then?” Glory dropped her voice to a savage whisper. “I hate you.” She threw
herself down on a bench by the rail and looked off into the distance. Her jaw
was set and her mouth was a hard thin line. The look reminded Sharon so much of
Glory’s father that she walked off to the rail a few feet away. She turned her
face into the stiff wind, letting it blow away her tears.

***

He stood at
the front of the boat, smoking a cigarette. He wondered why he’d tried to
intervene. The waitress was no concern of his. But everything about the greasy
little repo man screamed lowlife, and everything about her had said civilian.
And then the guy had mouthed off. And where he came from, when a lowlife
mouthed off, there was only one response, so ingrained as to be practically
instinctive. You smacked him down, hard, and in a way everyone could see. It
was a matter of respect. You didn’t have that on the street, you had to fight
every day of your life, and sooner or later, you’d lose.

“You think
I
…” he had started.
You think I care
? But here, he
needed to care. Here, he wasn’t connected. Here there was no power to back him
up. Not that he’d ever earned that much loyalty, but his skills made him valuable.

And that had
bought him some grace. Those days were gone, along with his name. He wasn’t
Mercer any more. He was Max Chase. Max was a nice guy. Max was a civilian. Max
was a friendly fellow who worked at the marina. He had to remember to be Max.

Kyle Mercer
took a deep breath, closed his eyes. When he opened them again it was Max Chase
who flicked his cigarette into the water churning beneath the bow. It was Max
who watched the low, humped shape of Pass Island coming up. They were close
enough now that he could begin to pick out individual houses.

For the type
of people who could afford to live or summer on Pass Island, a “little place at
the beach” meant a mansion the size of a small hotel, with amenities to match.
He wondered how many of these palaces would be left after the storm.

Max glanced to
his left at where the old lighthouse rose from a slight hill, the highest point
on the island. Compared to the graceful spires of the Hatteras and
Bodie
Island lights down the coast, the Pass Island Light
was almost squat, a massive, ugly octagonal structure of gray brick brought
over, boatload after boatload, from the mainland. It had stood since the early
1800’s
, weathering every storm. Even the keeper’s house,
built of the same material, had washed away and had to be rebuilt twice, but
the Pass Island light remained, stolid and immovable. He looked above the trees
and houses of the island. The sky was a hard, sharp blue, without the usual
haze. Max had an image of the storm out in the Atlantic, gathering all the
winds and waters to it like a warlord marshaling his armies. When the thing
hit, he planned to be as far inland as he could get, watching the whole thing
on TV. But first he had to get through this last day of work.

CHAPTER FOUR

They were
sitting in frigid air conditioning behind the tinted glass of a Jeep Grand
Cherokee, parked outside a tall chain-link fence. The fence was topped with
barbed wire. Guard towers stood at the corners. As they watched, a gate
shivered and rattled aside. A figure stepped out of the gate. It was a woman
with close-cropped blond hair. She was slender to the point of emaciation. She
looked over and saw the Jeep. Her shoulders moved in what might have been a
sigh or a shrug, and she walked over. As she drew closer they could make out
more of her features. She had a thin face with a prominent, beaky nose. There
was no expression on her face as she opened the back door and got in. She
looked the two men over,
then
nodded in recognition at
Blake.

“So who do I
owe this to?” she asked. Her voice had a harsh mountain twang.

“Friends in
high places,” Blake said.

She grunted.
“Who’s your pal?”

Worth stuck a
hand over the back of the seat.
“Worth.”

She shook her
head. “I don’t shake hands.”

Worth pulled
the hand back. “Okay.”

“No offense.”

“None
taken.”

“So,” she
said. “I
figger
it
ain’t
the kindness of this friend’s heart that shaved a year off a Federal sentence.
What’s the game?”

Blake handed
her back a
looseleaf
binder. It had previously
belonged to the man who was now at the bottom of the ocean.

She flipped
through the binder idly,
then
stopped at one page.
“Well,” she said, “I tell you one thing I am
gonna
need.”

“Already
thought of it.
Not
a problem,” Blake said.

“You planned
this ahead, I guess.”

Blake nodded.
“I laid some groundwork early.”

“So where’s
this going down?”

“A little
place called Pass Island.”

“You know it’s
about to get hit by a hurricane, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And
that’s…let me guess…not a problem.”

“Nope,” Blake
said. “It’s an opportunity.”

“Right.”
Karen Montrose said. “I suppose I
don’t have a lot of choice here.” She raised a hand. “Don’t bother. I know the
answer.”

CHAPTER FIVE

 Max gave
the last screw one final turn,
then
leaned back slightly
on the ladder. He stuck the screwdriver in his pocket and grasped the metal
storm shutter fastened over the window. He tried to shake it. The shutter held
fast, locked down by the heavy screws at each corner. He glanced at the house’s
other windows, armored and sealed now by identical dark-green metal covers.
There were a lot of them. It was a lot of house.

Max took a
bandanna out of his back pocket and mopped his brow. The wind on the island had
died to a few weak puffs, and the heat was oppressive, maddening. At least it
was less humid. He climbed down the ladder. He was at the bottom when he heard
the voice behind him.

“That looks
great. Thanks.”

He whirled,
one hand going to the screwdriver stuck in his pocket. It was only the woman,
standing behind him. The smile on her face died at the look in his eyes. She
stepped back, her own eyes widening slightly. Max took a deep breath and
relaxed.

“Sorry,” the
woman said uncertainly. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No,” Max
said. “It’s okay.” He gestured up at the storm shutters. “That’s the last of
them.
Should hold.”

“Thanks so
much,” the woman said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She sighed
theatrically. “Brian’s absolutely useless at this sort of thing.”

Brian was the
husband, Max remembered. He was some kind of big shot in banking.
Or insurance.
Max was a little fuzzy on which one. She was
Kathy. “With a K,” she’d told him, even though there was no reason to. She’d
been letting little disparaging comments about her husband drop ever since
she’d come by the marina and asked if he’d like to come by the house and earn a
few extra bucks putting up their storm shutters. He’d noticed her before, of
course. It was hard not to. She had a classically beautiful face, high
cheekboned
and framed by a waterfall of lustrous
raven-black hair. Her body was long and lean, without an ounce of fat on it as
far as anyone could tell. As much time as she spent sunning herself in the
skimpiest of swimwear on the deck of the husband’s forty foot cruiser or on the
sundeck of their three story “beach cottage,” Max would have noticed. Right
now, for instance, she was dressed in a red bikini, covered only nominally by a
light silk robe. She saw the way he was looking at her and smiled, ever so
slightly. Max had looked at her that way before, when she’d come by the marina.
It seemed to make her happy.

“It’s hot out
here,” she said. “You must be parched. Would you like to come in for some
water?
Or maybe lemonade?”
Max looked toward the
driveway. “Brian won’t be back for hours,” she said.

Max hesitated.
Nothing good would come of this in the long term. If they were caught, the best
he could expect would be to lose his job. Taking Kathy-with-a-K up on her offer
was a terrible idea. But Max had been living down here, in this strange place,
alone, for almost a year. Most of his isolation had been by choice. But what
she was offering wasn’t intimacy; it was release. And that was something he
could use right now.

“Sure,” he
said.

Later, they
lay together in the tangle of sheets, in the middle of the biggest bed Max had
ever seen, with the sweat cooling and drying on their bodies. A picture window
across the room looked out over the sound towards the mainland.

“Wow,” she
said. She rolled towards Max and he took her in his arms. She gave a little
purr of contentment and snuggled against his chest. “That was good,” she
murmured.
“Very, very good.”
She nibbled at his nipple
playfully until he squirmed. That made her chuckle, deep in her throat. She ran
a long nailed hand down his side. Suddenly, she frowned as her fingers ran over
his lower back. “What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

“No,
really.
Let me
see.” She pulled away slightly and tried to turn him on his stomach. Max sighed
and let her. He rested his head on his forearms and stared at the headboard,
like a man undergoing a painless but tedious medical exam.

“Oh, my god,”
she breathed when she saw the puckered scar on his back. There was another to
match it one on his lower stomach.
Entry and exit.
“What happened to you?”

“I got shot,”
Max
said,
his voice expressionless.

“Wow,” she
said again. She ran her fingertips over the scars. Her eyes were bright and
eager, like they’d been earlier. “Were you in the army?”

“I was a
soldier.” It was sort of true.

She leaned on
an elbow and arched a perfectly plucked eyebrow at him. “So are we going to
play Twenty Questions about this?”

Max sighed. “I
got careless.”

“What
happened?”

“I don’t want
to talk about it.”

She sat up,
her face clouding over. She hadn’t pulled the sheet up, and her small, firm
breasts were inches away. But Max wasn’t in the mood anymore. She glanced at
the clock and drew her breath in with a quick hiss.

“You need to
leave,” she said.

Yeah
, Max thought.
I do
. He slid
out of the bed and pulled his jeans on. She snuggled up behind him and put her
arm around his waist as he pulled his shirt over his head. She nuzzled briefly
at the scar on his back. He drew away and pulled the shirt down over it. She
didn’t seem to notice his discomfort. “We should do this again,” she said,
“When I get back.”