Stormy Weather

By Carl Hiaasen

FICTION

Star Island
Nature Girl
Skinny Dip
Basket Case
Sick Puppy
Lucky You
Stormy Weather
Strip Tease
Native Tongue
Skin Tight
Double Whammy
Tourist Season

FOR YOUNG READERS

Scat
Flush
Hoot

NONFICTION

The Downhill Lie: A Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport
Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World
Kick Ass: Selected Columns
(edited by Diane Stevenson)
Paradise Screwed: Selected Columns
(edited by Diane Stevenson)

For their expertise on the most esoteric subjects, I am deeply grateful to my good friends John Kipp (the finer points of skull collecting), Tim Chapman (the effects of canine shock collars on human volunteers) and Bob Branham (the care and handling of untamed South American coatimundis). I am also greatly indebted to my talented colleagues at the Miami
Herald
, whose superb journalism in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew provided so much rich material for this novel.

C.H.

This is a work of fiction. All names and characters are either invented or used fictitiously. The events described are purely imaginary, although the accounts of a hurricane-related tourist boom, monkey infestation and presidential visit are based on real occurrences.

On August 23, the day before the hurricane struck, Max and Bonnie Lamb awoke early, made love twice and rode the shuttle bus to Disney World. That evening they returned to the Peabody Hotel, showered separately, switched on the cable news and saw that the storm was heading directly for the southeastern tip of Florida. The TV weatherman warned that it was the fiercest in many years.

Max Lamb sat at the foot of the bed and gazed at the color radar image—a ragged flame-colored sphere, spinning counterclockwise toward the coast. He said, “Jesus, look at that.”

A hurricane, Bonnie Lamb thought, on our honeymoon! As she slipped under the sheets, she heard the rain beating on the rental cars in the parking lot outside. “Is this part of it?” she asked. “All this weather?”

Her husband nodded. “We’re on the edge of the edge.”

Max Lamb seemed excited in a way that Bonnie found unsettling. She knew better than to suggest a sensible change of plans, such as hopping a plane back to La Guardia. Her new husband was no quitter; the reservations said five nights and six days, and by God that’s how long they would stay. It was a special package rate; no refunds.

She said, “They’ll probably close the park.”

“Disney?” Max Lamb smiled. “Disney never closes. Not for plagues, famines, or even hurricanes.” He rose to adjust the volume on the television. “Besides, the darn thing’s three hundred miles away. The most we’ll see up here is more rain.”

Bonnie Lamb detected disappointment in her husband’s tone. Hands on his hips, he stood nude in front of the TV screen; his pale shoulder blades and buttocks were streaked crimson from a day on the water flumes. Max was no athlete, but he’d done fine on the river
slide. Bonnie wondered if it had gone to his head, for tonight he affected the square-shouldered posture of a college jock. She caught him glancing in the mirror, flexing his stringy biceps and sizing up his own nakedness. Maybe it was just a honeymoon thing.

The cable news was showing live video of elderly residents being evacuated from condominiums and apartment buildings on Miami Beach. Many of the old folks carried cats or poodles in their arms.

“So,” said Bonnie Lamb, “we’re still doing Epcot tomorrow?”

Her husband didn’t answer.

“Honey?” she said. “Epcot?”

Max Lamb’s attention was rooted to the hurricane news. “Oh sure,” he said absently.

“You remembered the umbrellas?”

“Yes, Bonnie, in the car.”

She asked him to turn off the television and come to bed. When he got beneath the covers, she moved closer, nipped his earlobes, played her fingers through the silky sprout of hair on his bony chest.

“Guess what I’m not wearing,” she whispered.

“Ssshhh,” said Max Lamb. “Listen to that rain.”

Edie Marsh headed to Dade County from Palm Beach, where she’d spent six months trying to sleep with a Kennedy. She’d had the plan all worked out, how she’d seduce a young Kennedy and then threaten to run to the cops with a lurid tale of perversion, rape and torture. She’d hatched the scheme while watching the William Kennedy Smith trial on Court TV and noticing the breathless relief with which the famous clan had received the acquittal; all of them with those fantastic teeth, beaming at the cameras but wearing an expression that Edie Marsh had seen more than a few times in her twenty-nine action-packed years—the look of those who’d dodged a bullet. They’d have no stomach for another scandal, not right away. Next time there’d be a mad stampede for the Kennedy family checkbook, in order to make the problem go away. Edie had it all figured out.

She cleaned out her boyfriend’s bank account and grabbed the Amtrak to West Palm, where she found a cheap duplex apartment. She spent her days sleeping, shoplifting cocktail dresses and painting her nails. Each night she’d cross the bridge to the rich island, where
she assiduously loitered at Au Bar and the other trendy clubs. She overtipped bartenders and waitresses, with the understanding that they would instantly alert her when a Kennedy,
any
Kennedy, arrived. In this fashion she had quickly met two Shrivers and a distant Lawford, but to Edie they would have been borderline fucks. She was saving her charms for a direct heir, a pipeline to old Joe Kennedy’s mother lode. One of the weekly tabloids had published a diagram of the family tree, which Edie Marsh had taped to the wall of the kitchen, next to a Far Side calendar. Right away Edie had ruled out screwing any Kennedys-by-marriage; the serious money followed the straightest lines of genealogy, as did the scandal hunters. Statistically it appeared her best target would be one of Ethel and Bobby’s sons, since they’d had so many. Not that Edie wouldn’t have crawled nude across broken glass for a whack at John Jr., but the odds of
him
strolling unescorted into a Palm Beach fern bar were laughable.

Besides, Edie Marsh was nothing if not a realist. John Kennedy Jr. had movie-star girlfriends, and Edie knew she was no movie star. Pretty, sure. Sexy in a low-cut Versace, you bet. But John-John probably wouldn’t glance twice. Some of those cousins, though, Bobby’s boys—Edie was sure she could do some damage there. Suck ’em cross-eyed, then phone the lawyers.

Unfortunately, six grueling months of barhopping produced only two encounters with
Kennedy
Kennedys. Neither tried to sleep with Edie; she couldn’t believe it. One of the young men even took her on an actual date, but when they returned to her place he didn’t so much as grope her boobs. Just pecked her good night and said thanks for a nice time. The perfect goddamn gentleman, she’d thought. Just my luck. Edie had tried valiantly to change his mind, practically pinned him to the hood of his car, kissed and rubbed and grabbed him. Nothing! Humiliating is what it was. After the young Kennedy departed, Edie Marsh had stalked to the bathroom and studied herself in the mirror. Maybe there was wax in her ears or spinach in her teeth, something gross to put the guy off. But no, she looked fine. Furiously she peeled off her stolen dress, appraised her figure and thought: Did the little snot think he’s too good for
this
? What a joke, that Kennedy charm. The kid had all the charisma of oatmeal. He’d bored her to death long before the lobster entrée arrived. She’d felt like hopping on the tabletop and shrieking at the top of her lungs: Who gives a shit about illiteracy in South Boston? Tell me about Jackie and the Greek!

That dismal evening, it turned out, was Edie’s last shot. The summer went dead in Palm Beach, and all the fuckable Kennedys traveled up to Hyannis. Edie was too broke to give chase.

The hurricane on the TV radar had given her a new idea. The storm was eight hundred miles away, churning up the Caribbean, when she phoned a man named Snapper, who was coming off a short hitch for manslaughter. Snapper got his nickname because of a crooked jaw, which had been made that way by a game warden and healed poorly. Edie Marsh arranged to meet him at a sports bar on the beach. Snapper listened to her plan and said it was the nuttiest fucking thing he’d ever heard because (a) the hurricane probably won’t hit here and (b) somebody could get busted for heavy time.

Three days later, with the storm bearing down on Miami, Snapper called Edie Marsh and said what the hell, let’s check it out. I got a guy, Snapper said, he knows about these things.

The guy’s name was Avila, and formerly he had worked as a building inspector for Metropolitan Dade County. Snapper and Edie met him at a convenience store on Dixie Highway in South Miami. The rain was deceptively light, given the proximity of the hurricane, but the clouds hung ominously low, an eerie yellow gauze.

They went in Avila’s car, Snapper sitting next to Avila up front and Edie by herself in the back. They were going to a subdivision called Sugar Palm Hammocks: one hundred and sixty-four single-family homes platted sadistically on only forty acres of land. Without comment, Avila drove slowly through the streets. Many residents were outside, frantically nailing plywood to the windows of their homes.

“There’s no yards,” Snapper remarked.

Avila said, “Zero-lot lines is what we call it.”

“How cozy,” Edie Marsh said from the back seat. “What we need is a house that’ll go to pieces in the storm.”

Avila nodded confidently. “Take your pick. They’re all coming down.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah, honey, no shit.”

Snapper turned to Edie Marsh and said, “Avila ought to know. He’s the one inspected the damn things.”

“Perfect,” said Edie. She rolled down the window. “Then let’s find something nice.”

•  •  •

On instructions from the authorities, tourists by the thousands were bailing out of the Florida Keys. Traffic on northbound U.S. 1 was a wretched crawl, winking brake lights as far as the eye could see. Jack Fleming and Webo Drake had run out of beer at Big Pine. Now they were stuck behind a Greyhound bus halfway across the Seven Mile Bridge. The bus had stalled with transmission trouble. Jack Fleming and Webo Drake got out of the car—Jack’s father’s car—and started throwing empty Coors cans off the bridge. The two young men were still slightly trashed from a night at the Turtle Kraals in Key West, where the idea of getting stranded in a Force Four hurricane had sounded downright adventurous, a nifty yarn to tell the guys back at the Kappa Alpha house. The problem was, Jack and Webo had awakened to find themselves out of money as well as beer, with Jack’s father expecting his almost-new Lexus to be returned … well, yesterday.

So here they were, stuck on one of the longest bridges in the world, with a monster tropical cyclone only a few hours away. The wind hummed across the Atlantic at a pitch that Jack Fleming and Webo Drake had never before heard; it rocked them on their heels when they got out of the car. Webo lobbed an empty Coors can toward the concrete rail, but the wind whipped it back hard, like a line drive. Naturally it then became a contest to see who had the best arm. In high school Jack Fleming had been a star pitcher, mainly sidearm, so his throws were not as disturbed by the gusts as those of Webo Drake, who had merely played backup quarterback for the junior varsity. Jack was leading, eight beer cans to six off the bridge, when a hand—an enormous brown hand—appeared with a wet slap on the rail.