Acts of Nature

SIXTEEN

“Whoa, check it out,” Marcus said from across the room, and Wayne seemed to be able to tell by the sound of his friend’s voice he wasn’t just shittin’ him. Wayne was staring, really staring, down into what looked to be a pile of oddly angled polished wood. Marcus stepped over some pots and pans and crossed the bare carpet that sat square and clean and seemingly untouched in the middle of the room.
“What?” Wayne said, watching Marcus kneel and stick his hands into the pile of wood. Marcus came up with a half a dozen CDs, spread in his fingers like a poker hand.
“Dude’s got some music, man. Good stuff, too. Twista, Jay-Z, Tha Marksmen,” Wayne said, reading off the labels.
“And check out the machine, man,” he said, pointing at the stereo player still sitting in a slot in the wall cabinetry. “That’s worth some cash right there, unless we wanna keep it, you know.”
Wayne looked up to give his pal a wink that seemed to assure him they would do whatever they wanted on this little heist safari of theirs. It was a pact they’d come to after their first stop this morning, a moderately damaged fishing camp just on the southern edge of Broward County and the closest GPS coordinate on the list. That camp had been nice enough in its time, a two-bedroom deal with a great room that had one of those big round metal fireplaces in the middle to warm the night in winter. But one wall was now completely gone, ripped away like a leaf of notebook paper, leaving some curtains blowing in the wind, off-white lace curtains that Marcus could tell were better quality than the ones his own mom had in their regular home, not their vacation getaway. They’d found some music there too. But it was mostly old-style R & B stuff, John Lee Hooker, Wilson Pickett, stuff his old man used to listen to before he left. He and Wayne had attacked the place like scavengers, picking up fishing reels, an intact kitchen blender, and half bottles of Chivas and Van Gogh vodka all strewn around in the aftermath of the storm. That’s when Buck stepped in and said he was laying down “ground rules.” We only take shit we can sell: jewelry, real nice pieces of electronics like handheld GPS or shortwave radio stuff, or maybe portable TVs. Only take the sealed booze. Check the drawers and stuff for real money and don’t ever pass on some tin container that might have a stash in it. “These city a*sholes come out here to party like there’s no rules. There’s a lot of pot and coke and stuff they keep out in these places, so use your eyes, boys.”
Yeah, they’d use their eyes. And if they found any drugs, they were going straight into their pockets and he wasn’t going to know any different. Wayne winked at his bud. After about an hour of sorting through the place, Buck called them in.
“Can’t spend too much time in one place, boys,” he said. “Not that we’re worried about anybody coming by that we won’t hear ahead of time, but if it ain’t a rich site, we’re gonna move on. There’s bound to be a mother lode out here someplace.”
It was the flicker of excitement in his eyes that got the boys motivated. It wasn’t often Buck got jazzed by anything. Even when they did the jobs in the suburbs when shit would get hinky or that time they found that coin collection that they’d sold for eight grand, Buck was still level, moving ahead, but never jumping, never showing emotion. But there was something different in the guy’s eyes this time. He was liking this shit. They loaded up the airboat with a few things and got her started again. Buck had decided they’d go well north and east to one of the high spots on the map and then work their way down toward home “just in case we find something heavy.”
This new place had some definite possibilities. But it was weird. Marcus again went to the middle of the big room and did a three-sixty, scanning the walls, where some of the shelves and cabinetry appeared absolutely untouched. But like the kitchen pots and pans that were jumbled on the floor about fifteen feet away from where they should have been, so too were some couch throw pillows and a lamp and a DVD player about fifteen feet from the den area where they matched. A bookcase on the eastern wall was empty, the books fifteen feet away, piled up against the refrigerator and kitchen island. And in the middle Marcus was standing on a pristine, pearl gray carpet. His eyes moved up the walls to the second floor, to the sheared-away beams that had once supported a cathedral ceiling, until he was staring straight up into the clouds passing high above. It was like a tiny tornado, spinning within the chaos of the hurricane, had peeled away the entire roof and then dipped its finger straight down into the building and did a little twirl and then left.
It was disconcerting to Marcus, and he stood there thinking of the time when he was very young, maybe about the time his father had left. His mom had decided to make changes in their lives to forget the past and she’d completely redone his room; moved his bed to another wall; the dresser, the bedside lamp, even the posters, all shifted. He remembered now how it had confused and scared him when he would awake in the middle of the night and have that overwhelming feeling that he didn’t know where he was. That fear came over him now, that he was someplace so foreign and unsafe that there was nothing familiar to hold on to.
“Marcus!”
Buck was leaning over a spiral, wrought-iron staircase that gave access to the bedroom upstairs.
“Marcus? What the f*ck, son. You gonna help or just watch, boy? Get your ass up here and go through this other bedroom.”
“I got it, Buck,” Wayne said, then turned to Marcus. “Why don’t you see if you can pack up that player with something waterproof, man.”
He nudged Marcus with the satchel he’d filled with CDs and had slung over his shoulder and on the way past whispered, “Got us some booty here, brother.”
Wayne was sounding giddy too. “Both you guys are f*cking lost,” Marcus said.

Buck was filling the gas tank of the airboat when a hot, dangerous urge came into his head and he stopped to wonder where the hell it came from. He could suddenly see himself: the red five-gallon can in hand, sloshing the contents in a careful path along the first floor baseboards of the entire place they’d just looted. Make sure you get it on all sides and in the corners so that every remaining wall would go up in flames. F*ck ’em. A*shole city boys and their seaside mansions out here, he thought. He could especially see the now broken photos curling up and going black in the flames. He’d picked one up in the den area: four guys no older than him, big-ass grins on their faces, the two on the ends holding trophy-size mangrove snapper, the two on the inside holding half-full bottles of piss yellow Corona beer. One actually had on a polo shirt, probably with his country club logo on it but Buck couldn’t tell. One had a ring on his right hand with a rock as big as the eye of the fish he held hooked in the gills. Buck was not normally a jealous sort. He didn’t look at fancy sports cars at the casino or on trips into Naples and lust after them. The big plasma television sets he saw when he was creeping one of those suburban homes did not have any allure to him. He’d go down to the bar at the Rod & Hunt Club and watch their big screen game for the price of a few beers.
But for some reason this monstrous, yellow-painted structure built like an ass pimple out here in the middle of the Glades and filled with all the comforts of those homes had put him in a pissy mood. Hell, he ought to be thanking the owners. He’d found their stash of booze, a case of some kind of imported rum, back in the corner of a pantry closet. He’d picked up a fine pair of binoculars upstairs in one of the bedrooms; six hundred bucks retail, probably unload them for two hundred to Bobby the Fence. Then he’d pulled out the drawer that he almost missed in what was probably the master suite. The thing was actually built into the bed frame. He’d stubbed his toes on it, expecting his foot to slide under the mattress when he’d stepped up close to the bed and instead kicking the solid frame below.
He’d gone to his knees and saw the handles and the lock. The pry bar he carried took care of the latter. When he pulled out the sliding drawer he was not exactly surprised, considering the boys he’d seen in the photos, to be met by the odor of gun oil and the sight of carefully wrapped firearms. But the five weapons he took out and arranged on the bed mattress were exceptional.
A 30-30 Winchester rifle, old style as far as he could tell, but in such pristine shape it had to be a collector’s item. He couldn’t help but pick it up, throw the lever action, and sight down the barrel, dreaming scenes of the Old West. Yee ha. He smiled. Born in the wrong century.
Then there was the Mauser, a German-made World War II classic, heavy, built to last, knock down a f*cking mule with one shot. As he had already figured, these guys weren’t real hunters, they were playboys, out here to make noise with their expensive toys. There was a twelve-gauge over-and-under shotgun there as well, the most utilitarian of the group and no doubt used to knock a few curlew out of the evening sky just for the hell of it.
Then there were two handguns: an old 9mm Glock, the one law enforcement gave up on after a couple of heavy-fingered cops said they fired prematurely, and a .45-caliber revolver of the style Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry might have carried but too f*cking big for anyone to lug around these days except for some a*shole drive-by gangbangers who thought the sound of it was cool because it was louder than their car stereos when it touched off.
Buck had stared at the collection for a few seconds. In his excitement over the total haul in the house, his natural wariness of the weapons was lost. No, he didn’t like guns. He’d heard too many stories of their violence and how it inevitably came back on you. But there was something about this day that was feeling too easy, everything working out the way he’d envisioned it, the way he boasted on it to the boys. It was all going smoothly and Buck had spent nearly thirty-three years on this earth and nothing had ever gone completely smoothly for him. The guns were now stashed under the pile of other things they’d decided to take. Buck had slipped them there himself, not bothering to tell the boys what he’d found. He’d taken three boxes of ammunition from the secret drawer and wrapped them and the rifles and the big .45 in a blanket and covered that with some raingear he’d found to keep them as dry as possible.
Now he shook off the urge to torch the place and emptied the gas can into the tank and then tossed it onto the dock of the house. F*ck it, he thought. Don’t overdo it just to get back at the a*sholes for trespassing on your life. This mission ain’t about them. If you set the place on fire, you’re sending up a smoke signal that anybody could respond to. Do the job, Buck. What you gotta do. Be smart.
“OK, boys. Let’s move on. We’re burnin’ daylight,” he said. Buck and the Duke. He reached into the seat trap and took out the GPS.
“Next on the list ain’t but an hour south. If she’s still standing we might be able to spend the night there.”
Wayne and Marcus put a final knot in the line holding their newfound booty and climbed up into the backseats.
“You say so, captain,” Wayne said, and when Buck hit the ignition and the big engine caught and the noise ripped into the heavy air, the boys looked at each other and grinned and passed the bottle between them. They’d already opened the Van Gogh vodka that they’d lifted from the kitchen and found they liked the espresso flavor.