First Thrills

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” Mira unlocked the front door and got the burglar alarm shut off all in one practiced movement.

“I really need to talk to Dad.”

“Well, as soon as I see him or hear from him, I’ll make sure he calls you.”

There was a silence on the other end. Trisha knew all was not right with her father. He had a definite eye for the ladies. Mira was his fourth wife. And his last.

The shamus’s videos depicted Rob in a dark, shadowy Key West dive bar having cocktails with a healthy looking blonde young enough to be another daughter. She’d been identified as a grad student majoring in marine biology, and she was a member of the Coast Guard Reserve.

Trisha was speaking… “I need to see this in a different light.”

“See what?” Mira tried to pay attention. “Sorry, the connection went dead for a minute.”

“Yeah, the storm will be coming through there soon.”

“Storm?”

“Mom, you need to keep up and watch the news. Hurricane Damon. You need to follow the storm warnings. You’re in the Florida Keys, for Chri’sakes.”

Mira gave a little laugh.”We’ll batten down the hatches like we always do. And I’ll keep a lookout for your dad. Maybe he’s in poker game with his cronies.”

“I think I’m going to switch to law. Maybe the GMAT was an aptitude test.”

“Like in that movie with Melanie Griffith,” said Mira. “A mind for business, but a body for sin.” Mira felt she was blabbing, but Trisha actually laughed before she cut the connection.

She called me Mom, thought Mira. For the first time she felt the beginning of doubt about her actions. She had always hoped for a relationship with Trisha. She had always wanted a daughter.

The thought was quickly followed by another: No going back now.

The storm hit at four in the morning. It woke Mira from a troubled dream in which half- decayed humans chased her down an alley. In the nightmare, she had frantically scratched at her arm. When she rolled up the sleeve of her nightgown, she found an oozing bloody tattoo of zombies.

Still a dream…

Awake completely now, she lay on the sweat-dampened sheets with her eyes open wide, staring at walls alive with the wild shadows of palm fronds dancing in the storm outside the window.

She put her sleep mask on, but it didn’t help. It was as if she could still see the shadows. As if they were inside the mask.

Drenched in perspiration, she listened to the wind howl like banshees and the rain pound at the storm shutters. There was no going back to sleep without help. She climbed out of bed, plodded barefoot into the kitchen, and washed down an Ambien with two fingers of gin.

The last thing she was conscious of before sleep finally claimed her was the constant roar of the wind.

When she awoke again at daybreak, she looked outside. She blinked and looked again. The yacht was gone from its moorings!

The wind was still roaring and Mira felt like going back to bed. Maybe she could go back to sleep and when she woke again it would all be a bad dream. Maybe that was what life really was-dreaming, waking, dreaming, waking. Maybe none of it was real.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could choose which dream was real?

She slipped back into the satin sheets and put her sleep mask back on. For good measure, she slathered on some neck cream. Possibly the storm would serve some type of purpose. She was getting her beauty sleep. And the boat, as she called it, was insured, after all

At one in the afternoon, utter silence awakened her. Yes, this was more like it. But when Mira looked outside for the second time that day, a worse sight greeted her. The yacht was still MIA. But now flood waters ›had crawled over the pilings and were at the back glass French doors. She pulled on a robe and hurried to check it out more closely.

The doors were not doors anymore, just gaping holes where the storm debris was rushing inside. Glass shards littered the Persian rugs.

Hurricane Damon had been worse than anyone had anticipated. There had been no order to evacuate the Keys, as usually happened when a really powerful hurricane was headed toward the islands. At least no order that Mira, in her fury of activity, had been aware of. When you were orchestrating the murder of your husband, you tended to block out a lot of what ever else was going on around you. Damon must have gained intensity with unexpected rapidity as it approached in the night.

Mira couldn’t get a signal on her cell phone or even on a landline.

You’re a bastard, Damon!

She hurriedly pulled on some jeans and a shirt and got her purse. The gun was still in there; perhaps she should leave it home. But she felt naked without it, as if it were a talisman that could protect her.

She took the gun. If anyone questioned it, she’d say looters were always a threat.

The garage, the Jaguar, and Mira’s Mercedes were still dry, thank God.

She backed the Mercedes out of the driveway, plowing into what seemed like a shallow lake. Highway One was flooded to the north, in the direction of Miami. She headed south, toward what she hoped was higher ground.

Daytime, but the sun hadn’t actually come out and the sky was a mustard-colored burnt haze. Fallen palm fronds, coconuts, and chunks of plywood littered the road. Mira felt like the last survivor on earth.

Punishment. Retribution. Had she caused all this somehow? The victim mentality, the P.I. had termed it. Everything was all her fault. What she was learning was that it was difficult to know whose fault just about anything really was. Life kept getting more and more confusing. What it came down to was that a person had to take care of his or herself. That was about all the moral compass Mira carried.

She pulled abruptly to the right into a parking-lot swale. Lorelei’s Bar and Restaurant. Maybe they were open. There were actually a couple of cars in the parking lot. Hurricane Party? Mira had heard about them but had never been to one. She hurried into the bar.

A decorator had gone berserk and designed the entire interior nautical. Right now, Mira didn’t really want to think about the ocean. The decor made her seasick just looking at all the life preservers and light house paintings. There was even an aquarium full of what looked like baby squid.

“We’re closed, lady,” said a grizzled man from the corner shadows.

“No party?” Mira’s teeth wanted to chatter. “Why not? The storm’s over.”

“Lady, don’t you know what’s going on?”

Mira shook her head.

He got off his bar stool and walked over to her. Big mistake. She could smell a week’s worth of sweat, tequila, and tacos. “It’s the eye now. We’re right in the middle of the eye of the storm.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re not from around here. Not a Conch. But I knew that.” He sneered and looked over at her Louis Vuitton purse.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “Why don’t you just tell me?” She wanted to actually pull out her gun and give him the second surprise of his day. Shooting people could become a habit, a bad habit. Worse than shopping too much.

“You see, the storm will seem for a while like it’s stopped. But don’t let it fool you. It’s like a woman who’s in a fury. It can’t stop. It’ll swirl around and around. Lull you into thinking it’s not deadly. Then when you least expect it… One thing I learned is, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, except maybe a hurricane. If you ask me, they should go back to namin’ them all after women.”

Mira didn’t wait to hear the rest. She hurried back outside and, gunning her Mercedes, broke every speed law in the books in getting back to the house.

The eerie calm was worse than anything she had ever felt. The waters had risen higher. She wondered when the storm hit again, when the eye passed, would the house withstand the winds? She got out of the car into ankle- deep water.

The sky had turned a gunmetal gray. Her skin crawled as the barometric pressure began to drop. The eye of the storm was passing, taking with it any false sense of security.