Storm Force

“I’ll be back as quick as I can.”

“No problem,” Megan said. “With the storm coming in so strong, my dad wanted me to spend the night here. If that’s okay with you.”

Kate smiled at her. “You’re always welcome here.” Then she called Steven and Hannah to her, telling them to mind Megan till she got back.

Steven acted put out, but Hannah hugged her mom and told her to hurry back.

“Be safe,” Kate told her kids.

“You always say that,” Steven grouched. “Why do you say that? ‘Be safe.’” His tone mocked her.

Kate felt the familiar mix of anger and frustration and hurt that came with her son’s attitude. “Because,” she said, “I want you to be safe. It’s what my dad always told me.”

Steven rolled his eyes and said, “Whatever,” then headed back to his room and the video game.

Not knowing what else to do to address the situation, Kate was out the door and into the rainstorm Hurricane Genevieve was offering as an hors d’oeuvre.

Tyler was waiting at the convenience store/bait shop when Kate arrived. He was dressed in a rain slicker and had gear rolled up in a sleeping bag slung over one shoulder. During storm season, it was better to be safe than sorry. Carrying gear back out if it wasn’t needed was much easier than needing gear and not having it.

Kate parked at the pump, topped off the gas tank, then went inside, struggling against the high winds. They had to be at least fifty miles an hour, and the storm hadn’t even reached them yet.

“The woman of the hour,” Marty Dillworth said. He was a big man with fuzzy black hair and a scruffy beard. He’d gone away to Florida State University for a computer degree or film degree. No one could ever settle on one story or the other when they were talking about Marty. He wore sweat pants and a superhero T-shirt.

“What’s that about?” Kate asked. They were the only ones in the store. Wind and the big plate-glass windows didn’t mix and no one wanted to be around them.

“The prison bus,” Tyler said. “I didn’t know about that.”

“And I didn’t know about the dentist you opened up a can of whup-ass on.”

“Anesthesiologist,” Kate corrected automatically.

Marty grinned and shrugged. “Whatever. We were just catching up on our favorite Kate Garrett stories.”

“You two,” Kate told them, “have way too much time on your hands if that’s how you’re spending it.”

“It gets more interesting,” Marty said. “Turns out the anesthesiologist had an arrest warrant out for his butt.”

“Why?”

“I heard improper conduct with a patient or two. Homer, over at the sheriff’s office, mentioned something about digital pictures of those patients in his possession.”

Kate felt a little better about the confrontation she’d had with Dr. Darrel Mathis. It was better to incapacitate by force a sleaze rather than a drunk.

“Tyler showed me the video footage of you kicking that guy’s ass.” Marty shoved out his thumbs. “Two thumbs up. Way up.”

“Not exactly the career choice I had in mind,” Kate said.

“And the prison-bus thing is adding a new wrinkle,” Tyler said, pointing to the small television set that kept fading in and out on the local channels. “Seems one of those prisoners turned up dead.”

Kate’s thoughts immediately turned to the blond man she’d seen with Jolly. The one who had taken her keys from her. “Which one?” She hoped it wasn’t the blond man. According to the news reports, Shane was the only one of the escapees who hadn’t been part of Desiree Martini’s kidnapping and disappearance.

“Some guy named Phil,” Tyler said.

Phil Lewis, Kate remembered. She didn’t remember much about him other than he’d been one of Jolly’s gang. “What happened to him?”

“The police aren’t releasing that information at this time.” Tyler grimaced. “They’re only confirming that he’s dead. Oh, and they found your Jeep.”

“Where?”

“Not far from the campsites we’re heading to tonight. Evidently those guys didn’t try to get too far. Or maybe they wrecked your Jeep during their getaway. Sheriff Bannock and the FBI aren’t saying.”

“The FBI is involved? Why?”

“They originally handled the kidnapping thing,” Tyler said. He shrugged. “Maybe they just want to take care of old business. Clean the slate. Something like that.” He paused. “Either way, we’re going to have to be careful out there.”

Kate silently agreed.

“Don’t know,” Marty said as he rang up Kate’s gas and the supplies she’d ordered from him. “With this storm coming, I’m not sure if I’d want to face the storm or those escaped cons.”

Neither, Kate thought, but she knew that was too much to hope for. But she wondered about the dead man. How and why had he died?

Chapter 4

The storm hit southern Florida’s coastline when Kate was only a few minutes away from the campsite. The black, roiling heavens opened up and poured forth a deluge of biblical proportions. The windshield wipers were hard-pressed to keep up with the torrent. Lightning seared the sky, followed by thunder that came closer and closer. The wind hit seventy and eighty miles an hour. The truck jumped viciously across the road, making driving hard.

Anyone with sense is at home, Kate thought. She fought the steering wheel again, pulling the truck back into a straight course when it wanted to go sideways.

“Damn!” Tyler swore after a particularly close lightning strike. “That one seemed to have our name on it.” He sat in the truck’s forward passenger seat and stared out at the storm.

Already, small waves of rain swept across the highway, propelled by the surging winds. Debris filled the ditches and channels on either side, surely no more than moments from pouring out across the highway and causing all kinds of hazards. Two emergency vehicles, a fire truck and an ambulance, had roared past them.

Kate had to concentrate on driving. Conditions had turned worse than she’d imagined. Even though she had four-wheel drive on the truck and good road beneath her, she knew she couldn’t trust the road.

She went east off Plantation Parkway, toward Everglades National Park. She turned back south on one of the dirt roads that led to a campsite she’d set up for two brothers from Missouri and their three teenaged sons. They were a good group, the kind of clients she wanted to keep. But they were inexperienced with Florida’s weather and the sudden, aggressive nature of tropical storms. She’d used Tyler’s cell phone in an effort to reach them but hadn’t been successful. She would have been in touch with them before if it hadn’t been for getting the kids, the bus wreck and the problem with Mathis.

The road had turned to soup under the driving rain. A firm foundation existed beneath the mud, but the tires had to chew through a few inches to reach it. Even then, the rain would soak down into those levels too. In years past, lumberjacks, hunters—of both game and rare orchids and other plants—and residents had used all the dirt roads in the area. The state and federal government didn’t provide for much more than grading, which didn’t even begin to solve the pothole and drainage problems.

Kate used the lower gears, slowing to a crawl. The headlights barely reached through the driving sheets of rain that looked silver-gray in the glare. Also, the innumerable potholes provided a deadly minefield of potential strut-busting bangs and bumps that could tear the truck’s front end out and leave them stranded to ride out the storm.

“—record high amounts of rain and wind,” the newscaster droned on over the radio. “The Coast Guard is already reporting thirty- and forty-foot swells in the Gulf of Mexico. Meteorologists are continuing to upgrade the storm as conditions worsen. People living in the low areas and in Everglades City are advised to seek out high ground as Hurricane Genevieve comes roaring into the coastal areas.”

Another white-hot dazzle of multi-veined lightning ripped across the sky, followed by a cannonade of thunder that vibrated the truck and caused Tyler to jump. He cursed as he shifted and tried to relax.

“Did I ever tell you that I don’t like storms?” he asked.

Kate looked at him, seeing the fear and nervousness in him. During the confrontation with Mathis, Tyler had been totally calm and collected, even with drunken men and weapons potentially in the mix. But the storm had him stressed. Kate knew it was like that for a lot of native and long-time residents who had survived the big ones.

“Yeah,” she replied. “I think you’ve mentioned it before.”