weekend,” he said. “We’ll have plenty of boats to choose from.”
Moe laughed, then became pensive. “I still don’t get it. How can a salvage company take a guy’s boat even if it’s not damaged? Are we sure this is legal?”
Heller began to nod, but his expression said,
The lawyers had told Bern neither clause would hold up in court. So far, though, the insurance companies had played along—they were the slimiest con artists on the scene. And the state cops hadn’t lifted a finger.
“This was all your grandfather’s idea?”
“Basically. I arranged all the details, of course.”
“He musta been quite a guy. I think I told you how sorry I was—”
“Yes,” Heller said, “he was a wonderful gentleman. The point is, the state cops, and the insurance people, don’t care what we do.”
Moe began to smile. It was like finding barrels of money in all this wreckage. “I counted forty-five or fifty boats in perfect shape. The biggest—thirty-footers and over—most of those, we stored on cradles outside. Like the Viking diesel, your favorite. Augie’s, too.”
Augie Heller was Bern’s nephew. One of several relatives on the payroll. The little creep had used the boat so much lately that he’d been acting like the Viking was his.
Not a chance.
The Viking was Bern’s. Or soon would be.
Who wouldn’t like a forty-three-foot yacht with plush staterooms, a Bose entertainment system, and a pilothouse that made him feel like an expert seaman, just sitting at the wheel, even though Bern had never spent a day offshore.
He’d driven the boat several times, but always stuck to the inland waterways. Sometimes he took it down the Intracoastal for dinner at South Seas Plantation, or Grandma Dot’s. Man, the boat was
What was today? Tuesday, September 14th. Augie had asked to use the Viking tomorrow—the kid had been taking the boat offshore to fish for grouper. So maybe he’d take a couple of beers, the old map, and figure out the GPS tonight.
Bern was thinking about that as Moe continued, “And the Cuban’s boat. There’s another one that didn’t get a scratch. That’s why he’s so pissed off.”
“Screw ’im. Far as he knows, it got smashed.”
“Well…I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
Moe said, “Well, the thing is, Javier was a fishing guide on Sanibel before he came here. He knows the business. I tell most of these hicks their boat’s totaled, call your insurance agent, they’ll say, ‘Duh-h-h-h, okay.’ Not the fishing guides, though.”
Heller began to get suspicious. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Well, Bern, there’s kind of a problem…Javier
“What do you mean no one was here? What about that old fart you hired as a watchman, what’s his name?”
“Arlis Futch. He’s lived around here forever. He’s a pal of Javier’s, so…well, I guess Arlis let him have a look.”
Heller’s face was wide as a box, and his jaw muscles flexed when he was irritated. “I suppose the Cuban came other nights, too.
The boss was asking if Javier Castillo had seen the bulldozer working in the dark, in the rain, flattening the Indian mounds to fill what had been mangrove swamp.
“It’s possible.”
Heller’s jaw was flexing now. A pit bull on a leash. “Jesus, I tell you to do something, it still doesn’t get done.”
“I had to evacuate the island. It was mandatory.” Moe’s tone asking:
“The colored guy, though, he stayed here. He didn’t run. And the old fart.”
Moe said, “I guess. Them and a few others.” His tone flat now. “Javier lives south, where the eye came ashore. His house was totaled; now his wife’s run off. Javier told me he was coming back with a gun because he had nothing to lose.”
“Bullcrap,” Heller said. He was picturing the skinny Cuban with a gun, cops yelling
Good. He hoped it happened.
“Everybody’s got something to lose,” he told Moe, stealing one of his grandfather’s lines. “Find out what it is—and that’s how much you can take.”
LABORATORY LOG
MARION D. FORD
DINKIN’S BAY, SANIBEL ISLAND, FLORIDA
Returned two days ago, near midnight, 12 hours before a hurricane made landfall. Direct hit on Gulf islands, winds 150 MPH, gusts higher. The marina, my house and lab badly damaged.
When windows imploded, roof began to go, I grabbed a piling, watching whole trees, a canoe, sections of dock, a bicycle tumble skyward, cauldroning like birds.
The storm’s northwestern wall was a phalanx of tornadoes. Tornadoes have a signature sound. A diesel scream that ascends on approach…
Picking through wreckage, Javier Castillo asked about the stitches in my forehead. I told him I was hit by something during the storm. “God plays with us, sending a hurricane like that,” he said in Spanish. I am tired of his shitty jokes.
Trees are leafless, like nuclear winter. Last night, I watched stars through my open roof, head throbbing, as I replayed the worst of the storm. The wind accelerating past my ears, blowing so hard that it was as if I’d fallen out of a jetliner. No possibility of establishing control, so analysis was pointless. A shadow vanishing into itself. That’s how I felt. Released.
No power or phones. Islanders with million-dollar homes barter in new currency: water, generators, fuel. National Guard has arrived, trailing insurance adjusters, imposters, contractors, politicians in helicopters, lawyers, land speculators with cash. A few marinas are price gouging—or worse.
