Hurricane Fever Read online

  “No,” Tinker looked down. “Not this storm.” He’d have to shelter on land at a friend’s, wondering yet again if his home would be there in the morning. Or whether he’d find it dashed up against the shore somewhere.

  “Sorry to hear it,” Roo said, genuinely. He nodded at Seneca. “Tinker’s next; on my tab, yeah?”

  She nodded.

  “Thanks, Roo. Another beer, Seneca.” Tinker tapped the counter. “Storm shouldn’t be too bad, right? Sixty-five miles an hour, they’re saying. Was thinking I might ride it out.”

  Roo looked at the harbor, open to the ocean. St. John’s hills in the distance. A green ferry cut through the rolling waves, chugging its way over to the other island with a load of cars and people. “You don’t want to do that, Tinker.”

  Tinker shrugged. “Got a lot of chain laid down for my anchor.”

  “Let the ship ride by herself,” Roo counseled.

  “Maybe,” Tinker said. “And afterwards, I’m going to try and get south for the season. Maybe I’ll see you in the Grenadines for once.”

  Roo smiled at Tinker’s perennial optimism. “I’ll buy you drinks for a full week if I see you in Bequia,” he said with a smile, knowing full well he was never going to have to pay out on that bet.

  Tinker raised his beer happily, Roo raised his glass, and they tinked them together.

  “How’s Delroy?” Tinker asked. “He putting you in the bar today?”

  Roo shook his head. “Just a long day prepping my boat. Delroy’s okay.” He glanced at the wooden-rimmed clock over the multicolored bottles in the back of the bar. Okay, but late again.

  It would be tempting to go walk toward school to find him. But Roo killed that impulse. Delroy was almost ready to graduate. Nothing much he could do if the boy was ready for trouble.

  And he’d kept out of trouble the last couple years well enough.

  Roo had drifted away from the islands. Been recruited away from them and into to a different life. He’d had nothing to hold him down back then. No one but a brother who, understandably to Roo now, didn’t want to have anything to do with him.

  When Roo came back to the Virgin Islands, he found not only the buildings changed, the people he’d known gone or moved on to other things, but found his brother had died. His wife as well.

  Roo found his nephew Delroy stuck with a foster family doing their best. But Delroy was twisted up with anger and loneliness that they couldn’t handle. He’d been throwing in with a crowd as angry as he was, looking to define himself with trouble.

  So Roo picked him up.

  There wasn’t much trouble Delroy could imagine or cause that Roo hadn’t seen. And Roo needed a hobby in his new retirement.

  He had made Delroy his hobby.

  New school, new life. New family.

  Delroy didn’t turn into a scholar. But he calmed down.

  Roo set his empty glass on the bar. “Tinker, you give Delroy a ride out when he gets here? He let his cell phone go dead again. Or left it in his room again.”

  “Yeah, man.”

  * * *

  Roo soaked up the sun as he hopped into a fifteen-foot-long semirigid inflatable dinghy. He untied from a cleat with a quick half flip of a wrist and tossed the painter down into the fiberglass bottom, then flicked the electric engine on.

  Most of the boats with people living aboard them here in the harbor had already fled. Either south for the summer, to hide from hurricanes, or to hurricane holes—places naturally still and fetid, which meant very little storm surge. Tie your boat up in a spiderweb of ropes to mangroves and with anchors out on all points, and you would ride the storm just fine.

  There were usually maybe fifty boats that had people living on board them anchored here. The other fifty or so were hobbyists. People who used boats like most people used boats: for fun, on weekends.

  Halfway out to the Spitfire II Roo’s phone buzzed.

  He ignored it for a second. Focused on weaving the dinghy around boats at anchor. The electric motor wasn’t as fast as the old gas-powered fifteen-horsepower motor that he used to roar around with. But he could get this one charged up via the ship’s solar power. Slow for cheap was good.

  The phone buzzed again.

  If that was Delroy, he was going to have to figure out how to hitch that ride with Tinker, as he had many times already. Or swim.

  Roo had made Delroy do that once.

  But they needed to get moving soon. Roo slowed the dinghy down and pulled out the phone. It was an incoming call. But with a blocked number.

  That … was next to impossible. Not with the setup Roo had.

  He licked his lips, suddenly nervous. Flicked at the screen to answer and put the phone up to his ear, trying to shield it from the occasional spray of saltwater.

  “Hey old friend, it’s Zee,” said an utterly familiar voice. Roo smiled for a second at the blast from the past. He started to reply, but the voice continued quickly. “And if you’re getting this message from me, it means I’m dead.”

  Roo killed the throttle. The dinghy stopped surging forward and just pointed into the waves, bobbing slowly.

  “Listen, I’m sorry to lay some heavy shit on you, but I kinda need a favor,” the voice on the phone continued.

  3

  When Delroy clambered onto the back steps of the Spitfire’s left hull, backpack slung artfully under one arm, he looked suitably abashed. Tinker waved from his creaky wooden dinghy, kicked the motor into reverse, and headed back for shore to root back down at the Sand Dollar. His beard kicked about in the wind.

  “I was…” Delroy started to excuse himself.

  “Don’t matter,” Roo said. “Toss your bag in your cabin. We leaving.”

  The Spitfire II had a traditional European catamaran look: a large organic cabin straddled the space between the two thin and rakish hulls. Large oval windows, tinted black, gave it its not-from-Earth look. It also created sunny open spaces in the main cabin, which had a dining table and comfortable settee. The galley, up against the side of the main cabin, featured granite-topped counters and a two-burner stove.

  Roo walked from the rear cockpit’s semi-open area where he had greeted Delroy back into the main cabin. He crossed the galley and through a sliding door forward into a tiny second cockpit in the front of the catamaran.

  The forward decks of the two hulls were accessible from here, as was the netting spread between them. Roo bounced across the netting with a practiced moon-walking step to the motorized windlass on the right hull.

  He leaned against the stainless steel railing with a hand and kicked the manual brake on the motor off. He checked the anchor chain running through it, making sure the windlass’s wheels could catch the links and engage the chain.

  Then he walked back through the main cabin to the rear cockpit. Delroy looked up from pulling his shoes off.

  “I know, I know, you in a hurry to get to Honeymoon Bay,” Delroy said, still trying to apologize. “I promised I’d be back in time. But…”

  It might have been that girl he was seeing. Or a friend. Or trouble. Roo didn’t care. He moved to climb up into a slightly raised area on the right of the cockpit where the wheel was mounted. He tapped one of the clear windows looking out over the top of the main cabin.

  This was the nerve center of the thirty-seven-foot-long catamaran. The sheets from the sails all led into the tiny, raised control center. The sails were all roller furlinged; a press of a button unrolled the sails out. From here Roo could adjust the sails, steer, and power the catamaran.

  The clear window booted up. Navigation equipment, weather reports, GPS, speed indicators, autopilot, and sail controls all flickered on.

  Roo glanced at weather predictions, thinking, and then noticed Delroy staring at him. His nephew knew, by now, that something was up.

  “Ain’t Honeymoon Bay we going for just yet,” Roo told Delroy.

  The teenager frowned. “Where we going?”

  “Tortola.”

  Roo
tapped the screen and the motorized anchor winch whined as it began to pull the anchor chain up.

  “Tortola?” Delroy was confused. Three days of tracking Makila, planning for Makila, getting ready. Now Roo had changed it all up. Roo knew his nephew was wondering if his uncle had gone mad.

  “Something I have to do,” Roo said.

  “Right now?” Delroy’s face twisted with incomprehension. “Makila coming for us … and we heading for Tortola?”

  “It’ll take four hours,” Roo said. Spitfire II made good time. It was four already. “We get there at seven or eight, depending. Makila won’t hit until late tomorrow.”

  Delroy stared at Roo. Normally Roo lectured him about being calm, not taking risks. Roo knew he was having trouble processing this sudden tack in behavior.

  “Look,” Roo said. “You can stay on land in Tortola at a hotel, if you want. But I need to get there quick.”

  “Take the damn ferry,” Delroy said.

  “No. No, not a good idea.” There’d be more sophisticated people-scanning equipment taking a close look at everyone passing through customs, even in little old Tortola. Iris scanners, gait recognition cameras feeding patterns into central databases.

  It was safer to get in after hours. Go into town with the dinghy without passing by anywhere official. Give him the time he needed. Then Roo could slip out in predawn. Clear customs at Jost Van Dyke, where it was all real old-fashioned paperwork and he would be in a better position if people were looking for him.

  It was a touch of paranoid thinking. But it had never hurt him before.

  Not with a call like that.

  “It’s just a PO box,” Zee’s voice had told him. It was a recording that had been triggered. Maybe a piece of software on a site sitting somewhere, scanning the news for a death notice. Or that hadn’t been reset by a called-in password check, thus triggering out a message. “There’s something waiting for you in there. I need you to keep it safe. It’ll help you, or whoever you think it’s safe to give it to, find my killers. Revenge from beyond the grave … you know? You’ll know what to do.”

  Roo rubbed his forehead. “Just get up on deck, Delroy, and start hosing off the chain.” He didn’t want the nasty mud that would be coming up on the chain getting sucked into the anchor locker stinking up the starboard hull of the catamaran.

  * * *

  It had been a sunny week and the solar panels on the top of the main cabin had filled up the ship’s batteries to capacity. Roo gunned the two electric engines to swing them out past Cabrita Point, crammed with its multicolored hotels and upscale condos that looked out from their perches over the sea toward St. John, squared architecture’s corners clashing with rolling hills.

  Pretty real estate, but Roo could always move to anchor his home off any of the sparkling white beaches they saw in the distance. Hell, he could even anchor right in front of those expensive condos.

  The farther away from Red Hook and into the ocean, the taller the swells grew. And the wind kicked up nicely.

  Roo let the mainsail out from the cockpit, motors whining slightly as winches spun to pull the sail out from inside the mast where it was neatly rolled up. The Spitfire leaned only just slightly as she caught the wind. Unlike a monohulled ship, there would be no dramatic pitch as the sails filled out.

  They were moving along nicely now. Roo cut the engines off and unfurled the jib. The great triangle was yanked smoothly all the way back down just past the mast and the mainsail. He trimmed it all with a few more corrections of the electric winches.

  “Watch the wheel,” Roo said to Delroy when he got back in from scrubbing the muck off the decks the chains had dragged up. He set the autopilot and checked the blips and projected paths of other ships in the area on his windscreen. The autopilot would handle most situations, steering around other ships and avoiding reefs. If Roo really wanted to, he could probably ignore sailing the little catamaran until they reached Road Harbour. It would maximize speed, trim the sails, all while guiding them along the edge of St. John and then tacking out for Tortola.

  Hell, he’d even once fallen asleep with the autopilot on and been woken by its “destination reached” bleat of an alarm on a trip to Virgin Gorda. Roo’d opened his eyes, blearily, staring at a beach just a hundred yards away from the bow of the ship as the autopilot kept the catamaran paused, pointed into the wind.

  It was a long way from the old days, where you’d sit at the wheel and adjust the sails, aiming the ship yourself for hours on end with nothing but your thoughts and the wind in your face.

  Roo ducked down into the galley and made turkey melt sandwiches. Fresh French bread, organic turkey, crisp lettuce, all of it grown at the new fifteen-story vertical farm in the unlikely location of Bolongo Bay.

  Outside the large oval windows located just over the galley’s stone countertops, the crisp, white sandy St. John beaches passed by on the port side of the catamaran. Solomon Bay and Caneel. Tourists splashed around in the clear water or beached themselves on colorful towels like contented seals. They’d jet out before Makila hit and leave the cleaning up after the storm to everyone who actually lived here. The tourists would come back once the beaches were sparkling again.

  Maybe he was no different. Living on the boat, never fully engaging with everyone on land. Separate somehow.

  “Uncle Roo!”

  Roo realized he’d been standing at the galley, staring out the window. Just letting the boat rock under his heels, swaying with it as it moved over and through the swells.

  “Roo, man, I’m hungry,” his nephew complained.

  The sandwiches had been finished a long time ago. Cut into pairs of neat triangles with cheese dripping over the sides.

  What the fuck was he thinking, actually going to a dead drop when he’d been out of the system for so long? A dead man’s dead drop.

  That was spy shit.

  Roo had left that spy shit behind.

  He wasn’t hitting the gym every day. Wasn’t training hand to hand. Wasn’t running any cells or playing any networks. No, he spent his time reading books and keeping the old catamaran in good shape.

  And making sure Delroy made it through high school.

  But he’d taken that kid out at the grocery store easily enough, right?

  But that was just a kid, Roo, he told himself. He lifted the lid of the fridge built into the counter and pulled out two sodas. A kid not much older than Delroy.

  * * *

  Delroy looked him right in the eye. “What got you all moody, Uncle? What’s all this about?”

  “I…” Roo squinted. “I have to do a favor for a very old friend.”

  “Right now. Before the storm? On Tortola?”

  “Yeah.” Saying it made it real for Roo. He put the can down and looked out over the side of the rear cockpit toward St. John as the catamaran’s autopilot skirted the lighter-colored water of the reefs. “Fifteen years ago the Caribbean Intelligence Group formed up. All the islands pooling resources. We tried to create a network to stop the big countries pushing us around. But there wasn’t money for all of us to create some super spy agency. In the beginning we had to go and ask for help. Seventeen of us analysts went to train in London with the SIS, what everyone usually calls MI6. Known Zee ever since I met him at Gatwick Airport, waiting to get picked up. Ended up figuring out how to use the bus together because they forgot we were coming.”

  They’d both been wet, cold and shivering, pulling their luggage around annoyed commuters.

  Roo looked over and saw Delroy smirk. He didn’t really buy much of the “uncle as ex-spy” stories Roo occasionally let slip. Roo knew the boy figured him for a desk jockey trying to puff his chest and talk things up.

  “He was the closest thing I had to family for five years,” Roo said. “Before I went north.”

  “North to the U.S.?” Delroy asked. He’d taken a few massively open online courses from star professors and was curious about living on a campus in a new country. Roo had been, carefull
y, encouraging the notion. No one in their family had ever even gotten to college. Not Roo, not his brother.

  “No, not America,” Roo said. “The North Pole.”

  Roo’s family had lived on Anegada, the only island in the Virgin Islands that sat on a flat bed of coral. The rising ocean had swallowed it, leaving it as what it had been hundreds of thousands of years ago: little more than a submerged reef north of Virgin Gorda.

  The family had scattered. Roo, rootless and wandering. His brother, Vincent, to try and build a house on a bad piece of land in Virgin Gorda, looking for just the opposite. Vincent hunkered down for hurricane after hurricane as the summer seasons grew more intense.

  Rescue workers found Roo’s brother in the remains of the house along with his wife, both their backs broken by the debris of cement and roof beams, with baby Delroy sheltered between them.

  Delroy sighed. “So why can’t your friend from Intelligence just go do his own damn favor? Why he causing trouble for us now?”

  “He said he was dead,” Roo said.

  “He said he was dead?” Delroy’s face screwed up, squinting as he absorbed that.

  “He left me a message,” Roo said. “So I’m going to Tortola.”

  4

  The sun had long since slunk over the ocean’s horizon. The sloping hills around Road Town glittered with light and activity that Roo paid little attention to. Instead he stared at the mailbox center across the road from the restaurant and absentmindedly picked apart a chicken roti with a fork. He could see through the glass front to a large desk, with hundreds of keyed mailbox slots on the wall behind. Displays of packing material dotted metal grids in the lobby area. A trickle of people on electric mopeds coasted down the street, engines adding a random background whine to the air.

  “You want more coffee?” The young woman who had served up the quick meal from the counter was outside, washing down the plastic tables with a rag. “We almost closed, and I’ll go toss it out soon.”

  Roo shook his head. “Thanks.”

  “All right. After we lock up you can sit out on the chair, we don’t bring them in.”