Read Online Acts of Nature by Jonathon King - Free Book Online Page B

into a casino, especially the kind that would tell some folks to go home and start buying plywood instead of gambling chips. The meteorologists had given the storm a name a few days ago and it was some sort of rule this year that it had to be female so they dubbed her Simone. The weather guys had been tossing around a bunch of “Sloppy Simone” jokes until she formed up in strength and purpose and killed three people on Grand Cayman Island coming through the passage south of Cuba. Now she was turning into a real bitch. She was a category three with a hundred-twenty-mile-an- hour winds and they had one of those electronic tracking maps up on the screen now and the weather girl with the tight sweater and bleached blond hair was waving her delicate fingers like she was on some kind of game show. She was pointing at the red spots where the storm had been at midnight, six this morning, and now close to three in the afternoon. Simone had wiggled around off the Yucatán coast but then took a sudden right turn to the north and started huffing. They put one of those “cone of probability” graphics up there that put the landfall possibilities anywhere from Galveston to the Big Bend of central Florida, and Buck whispered to himself: “Shit, them guys over on the roulette table got better odds than that, eh?” The screen flashed a huge banner—“Storm Alert, Tracking Simone”—and then went to some commercial selling gas- powered generators. Buck got the bartender’s attention and then stared at her breasts while he ordered a double bourbon with a beer chaser.
    “Looks like weather comin’,” he said to the girl’s eyes this time when she came back with his drinks, see if he could get her to stay down here. She was cute in a pale, thin kinda way.
    “Can’t be any worse than last year,” she said. “Uh, Mr. Hall.”
    Buck tensed up, just a notch. The bartender had used the name on the credit card Buck had passed to her for the first round and he was caught by surprise that she’d memorized it. Maybe that was company policy too. It had only been twenty minutes since he’d scrummed up against some older guy in a bar upstairs and lifted his wallet out of his polyester sport coat pocket. Buck had gone straight to the men’s room and locked himself inside a stall and lifted out fifty-three dollars in cash and two credit cards. The American Express card had the name Richard Hall stamped on it. Member since 1982. He’d dumped the wallet in the chrome trash receptacle and come downstairs.
    “We’ll worry about her when she gets to Naples, sweetheart,” he said to the bartender, recovering. She gave him a nondescript tip of her chin and turned away. Fucking snowbird, he thought.
    Buck’s parents and their parents before them had watched such storms approach for a century. Like most people born and raised in southwest Florida, they didn’t need some long- range predictions. Hell, these national weather forecast guys could track a fart coming off the African coast and watch it meander for three weeks across the Atlantic. Buck’s father had taught him to watch the weather on the horizon, note the slope of the Gulf water swells, pay attention to the birds and the lack of feeding fish.
    “The animals know what the world is doing long before we do, son.”
    Like most native Gladesmen, his daddy knew how to button down, tie off his boat, and strap down anything else that might fly off in a hundred-mile-an-hour gust or float away on an eight-foot storm tide and then just see what came. They’d dig out after. It was the way it was. Shit, look at New Orleans. Doppler weather my ass. If you could run, you ran. If you stayed, for whatever reason, you did the best you could and started again with whatever the storm left you. Survivors survived. The dead didn’t.
    It had been the same way in prison. You fought if you could, scammed if you could, joined up if you could, took what you could. Buck had taken the fight route just