The men came right after the hurricane had started.
The winds were howling and the rains driving, but you could tell that the worst was still to come. Clouds that low and that dark wouldn’t be content with just a little rain and wind. I was on my balcony, an odd place for someone in a hurricane, admittedly, but the winds were from the southeast, and my L shaped building with the catwalks and balconies facing downtown Miami blocked the wind. I could see the palm trees bent over and the bay kicked white by gusts, but sitting on a foldable lounge chair, feet on the railing, cup of coffee in my hand, .45 on the floor, I felt like I was watching a movie of a hurricane rather than living through one.
I was sitting there thinking of a friend of mine, Arabella. She’d died recently, her funeral just a few days previous, not many people there, just me and her two brothers and a cousin. Life can get lonely when you don’t have kids and not married, and Arabella had been a party girl, and well, people only have time for party girls when they’re looking to party. But I had always liked her. So there I had been in a stiff, rarely worn suit sweating in the Miami afternoon sun listening to a priest who didn’t know her try to say nice things.
But when the men came, I wasn’t thinking about Arabella’s funeral. I was thinking about a hurricane that missed us, me and Arabella crouched over candles in an Euclid Avenue apartment. The lights hadn’t even gone out, but Arabella wanted to use the candles anyway. We’d bought the damn things, so we were going to use them, she’d said. This hurricane had been shortly after a brutal breakup, and Arabella, who’d never liked my recently ex-girlfriend, was keeping me company. She was reading my tarot cards, except she didn’t really know how, kept having to check some book. She’d flip a card, squint in the candlelight to figure out what it was and turn to the book. Try to make out what it meant. She was like that, determined, if she’d wanted to do something, she’d find a way. It never mattered to her if people approved of the way she went about it. If she wanted to read tarot cards, she read them. If she had to look at a book to figure it out, well she wasn’t an expert, so piss off. I had pointed out that turning on the lights would make reading the book easier, but she hadn’t given a shit.
Don’t ruin the ambiance, she’d said.
She’d ended up jumping from the fifteenth floor of a building on West Avenue. Nobody sure of why. Nobody willing to claim to having been there. The kind of death that doesn’t make it into the newspapers, a party girl approaching forty, a fifteen-story fall, nobody gave a shit. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Everybody so willing to judge people because of the choices they make. Pretty sure none of us would come out all right if our life was put up on a big screen for everyone to see. I guess you could say the hurricane was making me morose.
Or poetic.
Was there a difference?
Then I heard their boot heels coming up the stairs and the clack of a door swinging shut, their shadows appearing around the corner, two men, one tall and thin like a rail and the other short and squat like an anvil. They stopped there, just far enough into the moonlight that I could see their shadows but not far enough that I could see their faces.
I moved the .45 from the floor to my lap. Seemed like a prudent measure. I couldn’t think of a reason other than looting for two men to be out in a storm like this. Great time to kill someone too. Police were off the streets, sheltering from the winds, emergency crews held off the roads. A body might not get found for days, and while I’d certainly been on the straight and narrow for a while, well, men like me, we have our stories. So, I made sure the safety was off and barrel pointed in the right direction, right at the shadows standing in the hall.
“How you guys doing?” I asked.
The short squat one walked far enough that I could catch a glimpse of his square bearded chin. But I knew who he was before he got close enough to see his face, just from the way his arms swung as he walked, not in unison, but not opposite either, left arm swinging a few inches in front of the right. I only had ever seen one man walk like that. Reginald Powell. Generally known to everyone as Reggie. I’d always called him Reginald though, mostly because he hated that name.
“Hey, Mikey,” Reginald said. He was the only person that called me Mikey. Everybody else called me Michael. Michael Shale. I figure calling me Mikey was his revenge for me calling him Reginald. Worst part, it totally worked. I hated being called Mikey.
“Strange time to come for a coffee,” I said.
“She wants to see you,” he said.
“Now? Whole town is going to be underwater before long, case you missed the news.”
“Then we should hurry,” he said.
“Piss off Reginald. I’m comfy on my balcony. Besides, I got an over under bet with the guy a floor below. See those three sailboats anchored there? I put the line at 1.5. He took the over, so I need 2 out of three of those anchors to hold. What you think? Want some action?”
Reginald walked up and leaned against the railing. He was looking at the boats. As much as I disliked him, he never could walk away from an enticing bet and always paid up if he lost. Even total assholes had their good sides.
“I’ll take the over for $1000,” he said.
I nodded my head and leaned back in my chair and took a sip of my coffee.
“Ready to go?” he said.
“Told you I ain’t going anywhere. Now get lost.”
The long lean shadow behind Reginald started to stir, but Reginald raised his hand.
“She wanted me to tell you that it’s important,” he said.
Fuck.
She, the person who wanted to see me during a hurricane, was Silvana Martinez, otherwise known as the love of my life, or at least former love of my life. Does the love of your life ever really cease being that person though? I mean, sure, we meet other people, tell ourselves they’re better, we’re happier, but do we ever lose the memory of that electricity between two people who shouldn’t ever be together no matter how bad they want to? I don’t know the answer to that one. Mostly, I just try to block out her memory, but you and I both know there ain’t no blocking those memories out.
So, while Silvana Martinez wasn’t someone I necessarily wanted to see, she also wasn’t someone I was opposed to seeing, no matter how much I denied it to myself, nor was she a woman prone to exaggeration. If she sent two men looking for me at the beginning of a hurricane with the message, it’s important. It wasn’t just important.
It was life or death critical.
I stood up, folded up my chair and carried it inside. Left the coffee cup on the counter, blew out the candles, and put my gun in a holster and the holster against the small of my back. Grabbed a flashlight and went back out the door to the two men waiting for me. A few minutes later we were driving the storm lashed streets.
Silvana lived only four blocks away, but I wasn’t walking.