By the time Joe arrived half an hour later, Scott had almost convinced himself that it probably was just his imagination. His head still throbbed. Earlier his vision seemed blurred. He hadn’t gone back into the cooler and now he felt a bit ridiculous.
Scott tried to concentrate while he kept his employees busy in the funeral home preparing the memorial service for Uncle Mel, the reclusive bachelor whose family wanted him buried before the hurricane rolled in. Scott told the employees they couldn’t go to the back offices because he was fumigating the walkway. It seemed like an absurd excuse even to him. Why fumigate anything before a hurricane? But no one questioned him, which further validated his salesmanship. Damn, he was good. Even in a crisis with all the stress he could make up stuff to believable levels.
He had left Joe for twenty minutes, tops. As soon as Scott could, he sneaked back, going outside and avoiding the walkway. Joe was closing and latching the walk-in refrigerator.
“Hey Scott,” Joe said. “I have to tell you, man, I wish you could have heard your voice. ‘The stiff moved.’” He laughed as he slapped Scott between the shoulder blades.
“Yeah, probably too much Scotch.”
“Or not enough,” Joe said as he pulled out his money clip and started peeling off hundred-dollar bills. “I’ll have a few more specimens to add before the storm, if that’s okay,” he said as he placed the bills on the corner desk.
Scott couldn’t count and listen at the same time.
“I’ll come back tonight. Try and cut and package up as much as possible. Take less room that way.”
“Sure, no problem.” Scott found himself saying the words while he struggled to keep his eyes away from the pile of hundred-dollar bills.
“I’d offer to take you to dinner again, but I think you might need to rest,” Joe said with a grin, the kind that went along with terms like “dude.”
“I’ll see you later.”
Scott offered a smile and a nod, feeling better as he reminded himself that this was a good business arrangement and that he really liked Joe Black. He let out a sigh. But as he watched Joe leave, Scott noticed something on the side of Joe’s khaki pants. He started to point it out then stopped himself. It looked like blood. Bright red, not pink. Splattered red blood. Corpses didn’t splatter blood.
CHAPTER 38
This would have been a day off for Liz Bailey if it wasn’t for Isaac churning a path directly at the Florida Panhandle. New projections had the storm making landfall sooner than what was earlier predicted. The wind and waves suggested the new projections were accurate.
Liz was accustomed to being out in winds like this. She wondered just how used to it Lieutenant Commander Wilson was. He tight-fisted the controls and fought against each gust. It felt like being in a car with the driver constantly accelerating, braking, and accelerating again, combined with an occasional roller-coaster plunge.
Kesnick looked at her. With his back safely to Wilson and Ellis, he rolled his eyes. She held back a smile.
From above they watched boaters coming in early, heeding the weather advisories. All the marinas were full, with lines of crafts waiting to tie up. There was no surefire protection outside of pulling your boat out of the water and hauling it as far north as possible. Some people were trying to do that by motoring up rivers and paying to dock their boats in places out of the storm’s path.
They were seeing an early surge. Waves already pounded seawalls and crashed up the beach, reaching the sand dunes. Surfers dotted in between the waves, bright spots of color bobbing up and down, disappearing and springing back into sight.
In the helicopter, Liz kept reminding herself to take it all in and remember how everything looked before Isaac hit. In 2004 Hurricane Ivan had decimated the area, ripping apart and chewing up everything in its path. The Florida Panhandle was where pine trees met palm trees, and the national forests that covered acres of land became shredded sticks, many snapped in two. Four-lane highways looked like a monster had taken a bite out of the asphalt, chewed it up, and spit it out. The massive live oaks, hundreds of years old, that lined Santa Rosa Sound were blown over, their tangled roots two stories high.
Pensacola Beach is about eight miles long and only a quarter mile at its widest, a peninsula with Santa Rosa Sound on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. During Ivan the two bodies of water looked like one, meeting in the middle.
Liz remembered that it had taken years to sift and separate the debris from the sand. Huge machines had occupied the coastline. Cranes became a part of the skyline. Blue-tarped rooftops were seen in every neighborhood. Hurricanes never discriminated.