Category five, p.5
Category Five, page 5
Mira had gone for water and pet food and had returned with all sorts of canned goods, cheeses, coffee, jars of peanuts, sunflower seeds, trail mix, batteries, flashlights, packaged juices, eight bags of ice, three dozen eggs, and fresh fruits and vegetables. She’d intended to wait until Publix opened to buy the fresh stuff, but once she and Annie were in the store, it seemed more prudent to buy everything now.
Prudent or stupid? she wondered as she and Annie began rearranging items in the floor freezer in the garage. At this rate, she was going to need another fridge to hold everything she’d bought. And why had she bought flashlights? There were eight flashlights in the garage. She knew because Sheppard had informed her of the number several days ago. Informed her in that irritated tone of voice that made it clear he believed that two flashlights for every person who lived in the house were at least one too many per person. But the three she’d bought were hurricane lanterns, powerful and supposedly long-lasting.
And if the flashlights annoyed him, just wait until he saw the water. Ten gallon jugs of distilled water and three twelve-packs of distilled bottled water. Shep considered bottled water to be an environmental hazard. Plastic killed fish, dolphins, whales, and fouled ocean ecology. It took centuries to disintegrate. That famous line in The Graduate—the future is in plastic—had come true in spades, Sheppard said, and to what end?
They’d had this discussion several times since he’d moved here and she knew they would have it again and again because he just didn’t get it. She detested the taste of faucet water. She detested that bureaucrats had decided that she and everyone else on Tango Key had to be protected against cavities and had added fluoride to the water supply. She’d told him as much, too, laid it out clearly. She, Annie, and Nadine would continue to drink their bottled water and he could drink out of the toilet if he wanted to. Flashlights, water, and what else?
Five years together, she thought, and the real issues hadn’t come up until they’d moved in together.
Her cell rang for the second time in ten minutes. Neither she nor Annie had recognized the number the first time, but not that many people had her cell number, so she took the call.
“Hello?”
“Mira?”
She didn’t recognize the man’s voice. “And you are… “
“Leo Dillard.”
Fuck.
“I apologize for calling at this hour.”
Then why did you call? “I’m awake, Leo. What’s going on in Alabama?”
“I’m on Tango. In fact, I’m here at the women’s jail with Shep.”
Hey, that’s wonderful news, Leo, oh pal, oh buddy. “Okay.” She paused. She could hear noise in the background and felt like wringing Sheppard’s neck for giving her cell number to Leo Dillard. “And?”
“We need your help.”
Her help. Uh-huh. She had helped Dillard on investigations several times in the past, sometimes by phone, once in person. Either way was the same thing for her, a challenge because Dillard’s energy was a wall of cynical skepticism that was difficult to get around. But it wasn’t just his skepticism; she’d read for plenty of skeptics over the years. It was her fear that she might inadvertently read Dillard himself, a complete gross-out event, on a par with reading some neocon who believed that a woman’s role in life was to give birth, obey her husband—or her father, brother, uncle, or some other man—and to basically shut up and not be seen. Yeah. Just what she needed. Leo Dillard.
As he explained the situation, her reluctance to get involved deepened. Yet, even though the feds didn’t pay quickly, they paid well. She would need extra money to cover the expenses of Nadine’s absence. All of this flew through her mind as Dillard explained what he needed and Annie stood there, glaring at her, aware of what was going on.
But of course she was aware. Her antenna probably had gone up the instant Mira had said Dillard’s name. Annie knew the score.
Mira’s eyes met her daughter’s and Annie mouthed, No, tell him no.
“And your fee, Leo?” Mira asked, looking away from her daughter.
She had learned that with Dillard, the business part of this had to be up front and spoken before she consented to anything. He named an absurdly high fee and she suddenly knew that Sheppard had negotiated it. She smiled. Sheppard might be a prick about flashlights and bottled water, she thought, but he knew what her psychic input was worth.
She started to say that the fee was fine, but Annie now waved her arms, telling Mira to hang up, they needed to talk. “I’ll call you back in five minutes, Leo.”
“Five minutes? I need an answer now, Mira.”
“Five minutes, Leo.” Her frigid tone ended that conversation. She disconnected and looked at Annie. “What?”
“Why help him out, Mom? He nearly prevented us from… you know…”
The unfinished sentence hung there between them. Annie didn’t need to finish it. Mira knew she was about to say that when Dillard had meddled in Sheppard’s investigation into the black water events, he nearly prevented her and Annie from returning to their own time. But that was then, this was now.
“What he’s willing to pay will cover the extra help I have to hire with Nadine out of commission for six to eight weeks. I can’t afford not to do it.”
“Shep can help make up the difference,” Annie argued.
“The store belongs to Nadine and me, not to Shep.”
Annie started to say more but Mira touched her index finger to her lips; she heard Nadine’s wheelchair clicking up the hallway. When Nadine rolled into the kitchen a few moments later, she looked pointedly at each of them, as if in admonishment.
“You two are carrying on so loudly out here I couldn’t help overhearing.” She stabbed her fingers through her short salt-and-pepper hair and eased a pencil down inside her cast to scratch an itch. “And just for the record, Mira, I can still teach yoga classes and help out at the store from a wheelchair, you know.”
“I know you can. But I don’t want you to feel obligated, that’s all.”
“Why should she do a job for that despicable Dillard guy?” Annie burst out. “Tell her, Nana Nadine. The man’s a real idiot.”
“This isn’t for us to decide, Annie.”
“But we should be making preparations for getting off the island, for evacuating.”
“We can’t evacuate,” Mira said. “Sheriff Emison has closed the bridge because of the jailbreak.”
“What?” Annie looked horrified. “How can he do that? There’s a hurricane out there and Emison shuts the bridge? What’s wrong with him? It’s got to be illegal, right?”
Mira shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Nadine patted the air with her hands. “Calm down, mi amor,” she told Annie. “Right now, we’re only under a hurricane watch. That doesn’t mean the hurricane’s going to hit us.”
Annie threw out her hands. “I live with two psychics and neither of you has any feeling one way or another about whether this storm’s going to hit? Is that what you’re telling me?”
Mira and Nadine exchanged a glance and Mira knew they were thinking the same thing—that when it came to hurricanes, it was difficult to separate fear from a genuine psychic impression. Fear—not psychic certainty—had prompted her to spend over a hundred bucks on food and supplies.
“It’s too difficult to read something like a hurricane,” Nadine said finally. “And besides, the hurricane isn’t the point now. Dillard is:’ She turned her dark eyes on Mira again. “If you want to help out Shep by doing this job for Dillard, then by all means do so. But just remember that every time you read a crime scene, Mira, you open a psychic door between you and the perpetrators.”
Entanglement, Mira thought.
Annie rolled her eyes, her exasperation obvious. “Wait a minute here, Nana Nadine. How come you’re not raving about Shep pulling Mom into something like this? You always have in the past.”
Nadine rolled her wheelchair over to the fridge, opened it, and helped herself to an apple. Then she moved over to the counter and proceeded to slice the apple into quarters.
“Nana?”
“I heard you,” Nadine said. “I’m thinking about it.”
“What’s there to think about?”
She turned the chair, facing Annie. “I’ve never pretended to like Shep’s line of work, Annie. But the fact is that he’s a member of this family now and this Dillard man is his boss. If your mother reading the crime scene will help Shep, then that’s one thing. But if she’s doing it for money, that’s something else.”
“But Shep didn’t ask,” Annie said. “Dillard did. He called her cell, not Shep.”
“Shep probably told Dillard that if he wanted my help, he should call me,” Mira said. “That means Shep’s okay with whatever I decide.”
“It means, of course, that Sheppard is also opening that door,” Nadine cautioned. “Is he willing to live with the consequences? Are you?”
“Are we?” Annie chimed in, looking at Nadine. “We’re part of her decision, too.”
“Oh, forget it. I’ll call him back and tell him I can’t do it,” Mira replied, exasperated.
“Wait a minute,” Annie said, holding up her hands. “If they catch these people, will they open the bridge?”
“That’s what Dillard led me to believe?”
“Then you have to do it, Mom. The sooner the bridge is open, the sooner we and everyone else can evacuate.”
An exuberant about-face, Mira thought. Welcome to the world of teenage hormones and angst. “If it’s necessary,” Mira said, and didn’t bother pointing out all the details that would have to be tended to before they left the island.
“Just remember,” Nadine said, “if you run from what you fear, it follows you.”
Annie frowned. “Meaning that if we evacuate, the hum-cane will follow us up the coast?”
“Meaning that one way or another, you’ll have to confront your fear.”
“Whatever. Call him back, Mom. I’ll go with you. As a team. Okay? I’ll help.”
“Is it okay with you, Nadine, if we leave you here alone for a while?”
Nadine looked indignant. “Just because I broke my foot doesn’t mean I’m incapacitated, you know.”
“I just meant—”
“I know what you meant.” She reached into a small canvas bag that hung from the arm of the wheelchair and brought out a necklace that Mira recognized. It was a moldavite sphere that hung from a silver chain. It had been given to Nadine by a Chilean healer long before Mira’s birth, as payment for Nadine’s help to the man’s family. Mira remembered seeing this necklace first when she was maybe four or five and being entranced by it.
What kind of stone is that, Nana?
Moldavite, mi amor. It keeps records about the planet. It heals. It protects. It allows us to hear the music that’s in our hearts, our bodies. It helps us to become more.
Nadine’s poetic description had been fine when she was a kid, but now, as an adult, she understood her grandmother believed the stone was magical because it supposedly came from outer space. An E.T. stone. Nadine wore it on special occasions and the fact that she insisted Mira put it on meant she was worried about her reading a crime scene for Dillard.
“What am I supposed to do with it?” she asked, running her finger over the cool, green stone.
“Nothing. It knows what to do.”
“It’s your amulet, Mom,” Annie remarked.
“Exactly,” Nadine agreed. “Now get on the phone and tell Dillard you’ll do it. But be clear about your parameters. He’ll try to push you around.”
Fat chance of that. Frankly, she was more worried about Nadine’s remark that by reading a crime scene, she was opening a psychic portal between herself and the perpetrators. Entanglement, just as Sheppard had said. But once the reading was over, the entanglement ended and the psychic portal slammed shut, didn’t it?
After all, she had tuned in on a lot of perps over her years with Sheppard and only three had affected her directly. Hal Bennet, the man who had killed her husband and inadvertently been responsible for her meeting Sheppard; Patrick Wheaton, who had nabbed Annie, taken her into the black water mass, and thus been responsible for her and Sheppard’s journeys back to 1968; and Allie Hart, who had abducted Mira as revenge against Sheppard—and been responsible for Mira’s experiences with her dead husband.
All these events had been extremely personal. But reading a crime scene did not have to be personal, she reminded herself. Besides, if she helped Emison and Dillard find the perps, then Emison would open the bridge, and people who wanted to evacuate would be able to do so. Therefore, her efforts would be serving a greater purpose.
“Mom? Are you going to call him or not?”
Still not entirely certain she was doing the right thing, Mira punched out Dillard’s number.
Chapter 4
Hurricane/Typhoon John, which developed in the Pacific Ocean in 1994, was the longest-lasting hurricane. During its thirty-one-day duration, it was both a typhoon and a hurricane.
I am water, Franklin told himself as the bedroom door shut behind them. And he was about to be poured into the vessel called Lover.That meant romance, whispering sweet nothings, taking his time, moving the way a slow river moved, savoring the shape and texture of the banks that contained him. It meant savoring the completion he’d sought ever since Crystal had been arrested.
But it didn’t happen like that. The instant the door shut, he and Crystal tore at each other’s clothes like hungry wolves and fell back on the waterbed. The inside of his head exploded. His skin burned to a crisp. He became fire. And it was all over in five minutes.
Then they lay there, fingers laced together, both of them sweaty and breathing hard. The air-conditioning unit in the window, which ran off the solar panels now, gasped out cool air that eventually brought goose bumps to his skin. He reached down and pulled the black sheet up over them.
“That was heaven,” Crystal said softly. “Just like this bed.”
She flung her arms over her head and the bed bounced and jiggled. She laughed and did it again. And again. Franklin started doing it, too, and pretty soon they were rocking and rolling on the king-size waterbed, laughing and snorting and trying to be quiet about it because the Amazon was asleep in the front room.
In the early days of their relationship, when they had both been in the weather business, they used to spend most of their free time in a waterbed at his town house in Coconut Grove. Sometimes, they never left the place. They had food delivered that they ate in bed, they watched movies in bed, and once, when the waterbed had broken because they were jumping on it, they had made love in the sea of water that had covered his bedroom floor. In those days, they both had been water.
But in the first several months after he’d been fired from the Hurricane Center, he lost the center of himself and ceased being water. Some days he had been earth, other days air. And sometimes fire, the element he liked least of all. On a few occasions, he had become what he thought of as a fifth element, metal. And it was as metal that he and Crystal had planned the heist that had gone wrong.
Metal was dangerous. When he lived from a place of metal, he was consumed by aggression, hostility, bitterness, a hunger for revenge. When he was metal, he couldn’t see the larger picture.
He suddenly wondered what element Crystal had been after they had left the weather business and moved to northern Florida. Air? Earth? In retrospect, it seemed obvious that during that dark time, Crystal had been whatever he had been, as though she were an extension of his flesh, his soul. But perhaps that meant she had been the very paragon of water, able to assume the shape of whatever vessel contained her.
So what was she now? She was still fire in bed, but what about the rest of the time?
The waterbed finally settled into stillness. In his head, he saw the water inside the bed as a lake at dusk, the very center of it shimmering with silver, the edges lost in shadows. He could float in that lake forever.
“I’ve always been kinda curious about something, Billy. When we pulled the job, how’d you know all the details about the money transfer that day?”
Interesting question, he thought, and too long a story to go into now. So he lied. “I spent weeks observing the routine at the bank, that’s how I knew.”
“Yeah? So anyone could, like, observe a bank and learn the routine?”
“Well, no, the routines vary. But there’re patterns to watch for, just like with weather systems.”
“Patterns.” She repeated the word carefully, as if it were new to her.
He didn’t like the direction of this conversation, so he changed the topic. “Tell me about jail, babe’ He raised her hand to his mouth, kissed each of the knuckles. “What was it like?”
“Like? It wasn’t like anything.”
“Describe it.”
She jerked her hand away from him, rolled onto her side, lifted up and rested the side of her head in her hand. The light seemed to tunnel through the curls of her wild blond hair just so that it could kiss the curve of her cheek. She brought her index finger up the center of his chest, his throat, up over the curve of his chin to the tip of his nose. “Why?”
“Because for days and weeks I tried to imagine you in jail and I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see you there. I just couldn’t conjure your face and body in a skit hole.”
She flopped back against the bed, making it jiggle and rock, and folded her hands under her head. Eyes glued to the black ceiling, she said, “Dade was the shit hole. There, your life belongs to the state. You’re an indentured servant. You’re a slave to fucked-up guards. You learn to sleep with your eyes open.” She paused. “We used to get out for exercise in the yard for a while every day. And one day, these black chicks started hassling me. They started with the stupid blond jokes, then things went south from there.”
Franklin shut his eyes as she spoke and her voice flowed like water across the inner screen of his eyes. He could see her, see the yard, the hot light, see it all.
“Suddenly, I… I was surrounded by six or eight of these dykes, all clutching shanks. They hissed like snakes, they said if I agreed to fuck them, they would protect me. Then… then this tall mulatto chick—Tia—strolls out into the yard and suddenly everything stops. She shouts at a dyke who’d been talking shit to me. The dyke spins around, threatening Tia. The other women drop their shanks and split. But Tia and this woman keep moving closer to each other, and then… then they’re, like, going at it, okay? Except that Tia doesn’t have a shank. She doesn’t have anything. She spins, she dances, she laughs, and then she’s moving so fast she’s a blur.
