Thin Slice of Life

Chapter 16

The following day, after breakfast and another chart reading, Charlie switched off the radio and surveyed the horizon. It was overcast and gusty but not stormy yet. He and Raul took advantage of the relative calm and spent several hours doing minor repairs and adjustments to the boat. The rising ocean swells were increasing so he and Raul lowered the stabilizers to moderate the pitching. By lunch, Charlie’s battery had run down. He was exhausted. Only six days back and he’d been stabbed, witnessed a sniper take out an aide to a Texas Senator, gone toe to toe with Fu Manchu, and been affronted by an attractive Woman of Mystery. He decided he needed a nap. “Listen up Raul, your job is to stay tuned to that radio while I catch forty winks.” Raul looked puzzled. “While I sleep,” Charlie amended. “Wake me up if you hear them say anything about the storm changing directions. Or in two hours, whichever happens first. Comprende?” Raul nodded, a serious expression on his face. “That would be three o’clock. You got it?” He gestured toward the clock in the pilothouse. “Sí, Charlie.” “Okay, I guess you and Ringworm are in charge now,” he added, CHAPTER 16 99 |16 softening his tone a bit. “Permission to pass out, First Mate de la Rosa?” Raul laughed and saluted. “Adelante, Charlie.” Charlie climbed into the bottom bunk, closed his eyes and immediately fell asleep. — Earlier that morning, Miguel Negron turned on the lights in the Key Allegro Marina store/restaurant/cocktail lounge, fired the burners on the stove, and started a pot of coffee. He enjoyed the early mornings before the regulars arrived. It afforded him time to mull over such thoughts as meandered onto his personal tabula rasa. He flicked on the radio and listened to the weather report. Hurricane Lana had entered the Gulf and was changing directions every few hours, heading everywhere from Vera Cruz to Mobile, Alabama. Landfall was a meteorological crapshoot. He looked out past the cafe area through the front window towards the crimson east. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. Now why the fuck did I think of that, he wondered idly. Within minutes the red sunrise changed to orange and then to a disturbing saffron color. The sickening glow filled the entire building and the interior of the room. Miguel, who had ridden out Hurricane Beulah in the county jug in Brownsville, had a bad feeling about Lana. If I blow away to Cuba, I’m gonna have Marisol’s ass, he thought. The last thing he wanted was a change in the weather. Or any kind of change for that matter. For better or worse, Fulton and the Key Allegro Bar & Grill had started to feel like home to him. Later that afternoon Marisol dropped by the Marina to discuss Miguel’s hurricane evacuation plan—there were procedures to be followed whenever a parolee left town or his job. Up until now the hurricane swirling offshore had been something of an abstraction to Marisol, but the empty boat basin and boarded-up buildings she passed on the way to the Marina underscored the urgency of the impending situation and caused her to worry. A savage storm was out there in the Gulf…and maybe Johnny was out there, too. In the back of her mind she harbored the faint hope that someplace, somehow, he was still alive. She also worried briefly for Charlie and Raul, who day before yesterday had unexpectedly disappeared from Fulton Harbor, presumably on the Ramrod—headed for safer environs, she hoped. 100 16| But Miguel wasn’t planning to go anywhere. “I’m stayin’ here, chica,” he mumbled. He was holding a half-dozen roofing nails in his mouth and was about to hammer a 4x8 piece of quarter inch plywood over one of the restaurant bay windows. It was a modest little business but he had been charged with running it. That meant protecting it from fire, storms, looters or any other threat. Mother Nature be damned, that bitch. “It’ll be dangerous,” Marisol warned. Miguel snorted. “Right. I’m shakin’ in my boots.” “The weather report said the barometer is going through the basement; everyone with any sense is getting as far away from here as they can get.” “This morning they said it was going to Mexico.” “That’s what everybody thought. But about two...