“Hey, Dennis, what’s up?” Big Time said, trying to sound casual.
“You stand by there, Big Time,” Dennis said. He turned to Alan. “Could you come with us?”
Everyone witnessing this went silent, waiting for someone to reveal what was going on. Alan felt himself sweating all over. The security guards looked as if they were just waiting for him to bolt. Though he knew he could outrun them, he also knew there was nowhere for him to go. Finally, he nodded to Dennis and stepped forward.
Big Time watched as Alan was escorted away, a dull throb beginning in his stomach. He kept waiting for Alan to look back and give him an indication of his guilt or innocence. He knew the truth, though.
Elmer shook his head.
“Man, if I’d known he was busted, I would’ve snuck him out back in one of the boxes.”
“Shut up, Elmer.”
• • •
Muhammad watched as Alan and the security guards walked past. He aimed a questioning glance at Mukul, who simply shrugged and got back to work, plugging and re-plugging cables into the computers they pulled off the line.
All down the line, everyone was talking and pointing, incredulous looks on their faces. Except, Muhammad noticed, Big Time, who was already burying himself back in his work.
• • •
Word traveled fast, and everyone on the factory floor was soon watching as Alan was escorted up the stairs to the second-floor catwalk. As he disappeared into the offices beyond, the girl at the station next to Zakiyah’s, Mandy, glanced over at her co-worker.
“Ain’t that your man?”
Even as he was being led away, Zakiyah could still see Alan’s swagger in his step. For some reason, this made her angrier than the thought that he’d done something criminal.
“He’s my baby’s daddy, but that don’t make him a man.”
All the women within earshot started laughing. Zakiyah forced a smile but could barely keep it together.
Chapter 6
Phil Snyder loved living on Galveston Island. He’d been coming here with his parents and grandparents since he was a little boy in the late ‘60s and had always hoped to retire early there. But by “early retirement,” he hadn’t meant buy one of those ten-bedroom affairs on the water the wealthy tended to purchase, only to use it as a rental property for most of the year.
No, he wanted to be a local, an islander.
When he got just enough money together to buy a one-bedroom fishing shack off the seawall, he did it and left his old life in Houston behind. Instead of financial planning, his admittedly meager income now came from selling fish he pulled out of the Gulf to various area restaurants. This generally consisted of speckled trout, bull reds, flounder, and sheepshead. Sometimes he got lucky with a rare redfish or found himself taking up an empty slot on a charter boat. Out in the Gulf, he was able to bring back snapper, dorado, kingfish, or even grouper. A single good-sized tuna or sailfish could pay for his groceries for a month. A 600-pound blue marlin he once caught eighty miles out made him $3,000. He hadn’t had to work for months after that, but did anyway because he enjoyed it, using the money to pay for long-needed repairs to the shack.
Like a lot of islanders, he had come to appreciate hurricane season if only because it meant the tourists thinned out completely, leaving only the thirty-eight percent of the population that was there year-round. With Eliza now predicted to make a direct hit on Galveston’s shores, folks stocked up on water and supplies to weather the storm. The rain had been coming in pretty steady since the night before and the tide had gone out much lower than normal, sure to return with a vengeance with the storm surge.
Among the locals, there was more a feeling of giddy anticipation in the air, almost a party atmosphere tinged with nervous excitement. Making it through a hurricane was a rite of passage for islanders. This was just another opportunity to prove they were of heartier stock than the mainlanders. Boards were dragged out of garages and nailed over allegedly storm-proof windows. Police cars drove up and down the seawall, informing residents which high schools would be open and which would have food if they needed a place to go. A lot of the cops were islanders or lived just on the other side of the bridge in Kemah or League City. They tended to treat islanders like neighbors, not a populace to be shepherded (as had been his experience as a younger man in the Houston suburb of Spring), so Phil got along with them.
There were three things that Phil liked telling strangers about his adopted city.
“First, Galveston, not Houston, was originally the center of Gulf trade; Strand Avenue, where all the banks were located, dubbed ‘the Wall Street of the South.’”
“Second, that when Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked there in the 1500s, he’d dubbed the place Isla de Malhado, ‘the island of misfortune,’ though some translate that to ‘the island of doom.’”
“Third,” Phil would continue, lowering his voice, “the Galveston hurricane of 1900 is still the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States, having claimed between 6,000 and 12,000 lives, though many put that number way up around 25,000. The discrepancy is due to just how many bodies were swept away but also the lack of any kind of updated census. I mean, Galveston was a boom town attracting folks from all over. Some people were swept off the face of the earth, but if their family back home weren’t up to date on their whereabouts, their absences weren’t noted by anyone.
“A lot of bodies poured into the Gulf that day. Ships were pulling them onto their decks for days, weeks, months, only to have to re-bury them at sea when they were radioed from shore that there wasn’t enough dry land for any more graves. When
