The Day the Lights Went Out

East End of Stock Island

July 2

Little Angie is terrified, and I’ll be honest, I don’t know what to tell her. She just sits there, rocking back and forth at the edge of the table. I’ve told her twice to stop or she’ll fall.

[30 second delay]

I knew Donald Tiune. I didn’t know him as Donald Tiune. He was just Mr. Tiune to us. Some old guys came around the fleet once a week and serviced the cars. I think I remembered hearing somewhere that he had retired from the city. I might have even known that he worked with Energy Services.

What I did not know—had no idea—was that for forty years, Donald Tiune was the Lower Keys power grid, heart and soul. He knew every line, every transformer... hell, every power outlet on Stock and Key West.

Just inside the front door, we found the first body, a man on the short side of twenty. Although I found a bullet in his pocket, he seemed ill-equipped for a security job. I could only hope that he enjoyed the last cigarette from the empty pack on the floor beside him. He had ligature marks around his neck, but the overlapping lines across his throat meant he hadn’t gone fast. Someone had stopped just short each time, maybe asking questions, before finally finishing him off.

Wisdom found a second body. I recognized what was left of the guy. He used to volunteer at the library, but I can’t recall his name. He was beaten bloody and tied up, still alive, in an office chair, bound by about ten feet of barbed wire. The skin had tiny pick-marks all over his arms and legs, but a spray of blood down his shirt and across the wall made me think he had ended it himself, like he pressed the side of his neck into one of the barbs and squeezed it in with his shoulder until he passed out. There’s something about a man who’d take his own life rather than face whatever is standing right in front of him. I can’t say for certain he did it because he was looking at our SEAL, but it feels right.

We found Donald Tiune in the center of the building, in a steel-walled control room that looked like the cockpit of a 1960’s spaceship, complete with more dials and gauges than I had ever seen. As I looked down at his body, it was like meeting him for the first time. Tiune was always small, but at 78 years of age, curled up on the bare cement floor next to that big rusty turbine, he looked like a child’s toy tossed unceremoniously into a toy box.

Blood spatter layered the entryway, fine droplets indicating blunt force. We found more in the hallway next to the office rooms, darker, meaning from deeper wounds. Little tidal pools of blood lay all around where Tiune’s body had finally given out. Any ounce he had left in him, he left right there on the floor. That man had put up the mother of all last stands.

As a cop, I’m not supposed to jump to conclusions—let the facts lead to conclusions, not the other way around. Still, this smelled like our guy—like Cauthron.

The only satisfaction I could draw from this was that, hopefully, underestimating Tiune had cost his attacker something in the end. Based on the blood trail, the old man had kept getting back up, struggling to his feet and answering the bell for another round. Maybe our SEAL wasn’t as lethal as the Navy thought.

It wasn’t much comfort, though. I stood outside the building with Wisdom and a couple of the other guys, just listening to the sound of the island—or more like the lack of sound, the quietest I’d ever heard it. You could almost make out each cricket. When we turned off our flashlights, complete darkness enveloped us, and it felt like the whole island was holding its breath. We knew the screams and gunshots and all the rest of it would start up at any time, but for those few minutes, only the anticipation lingered. Everyone was probably wondering if the power would come back on again, as it had last time.

Zero chance of that. While we pulled security and walked the grounds, Ronnie McKenzie went to work inside. He was the last real city engineer on the island, and our last hope to figure out what Tiune had been doing, and more importantly, how to do it. The warehouse had an old diesel turbine, and somehow Tiune and his buddies had run wire all the way out of the building, down the beach into the water, then up the channel to the transmission station on the northeast end of Stock Island. The wires were tied together, a “really professional job” according to Mackenzie, including a lineman’s splice that held together even under tension. Mackenzie told me that, even if the system had been functional, he still couldn’t figure out how Tiune had worked the switchboard with the huge differences in current, or how he modified the turbine. Now, the main switches and controllers had been broken or bent, and the entire operating command board had been destroyed. A pair of steel rods had been jammed directly into the contacts, rupturing them and scorching both the wiring and the distribution nodes. Even if we had the know-how, MacKenzie was a few million dollars short on supplies to even attempt any repairs.

“It’s hopeless, Boss,” he said.

We drove back to the compound in the dark, defeated.

For the last six hours, it’s been nothing but shouting and emergency this and emergency that. Nobody has said it yet, but I know at least some of them blame me. We had a couple guys out here early on, for security. That was weeks ago. Nobody ever messed with the building, and Tiune said that he’d made his own arrangements. We needed everyone back here, so we just stopped posting it. Like I said, weeks ago. Sins of the past.

If they decide to pin this one on me, fine, but I don’t see what I could have done. If Cauthron had wanted the power off, he could have just damaged the transmission station. We never had anyone watching that. And if it was him, anybody we left out there would probably just be dead along with those three.

I’m worried. I’ll admit it. No power means we can’t pump water. It means even more open flames and even more fires and burns and smoke inhalations. No, I know. This will probably all get laid at my feet.

Just like the bridge.

[1 hour, 22 minutes later]

The mystery is solved. Peduto knew the story. He caught me outside of the chambers and we started to talk. This, this is what he told me....

[11-second delay, deep breathing]

Donald Tiune has a wife, Elizabeth. It had to be a fucking Elizabeth, didn’t it?

[18-second delay, audible crying]

In the hospital. Oh God, keep it together. Keep it together. They married when they were like 20 or something. Let’s see. He said 54 years. So that would mean he was 24. Okay. Yeah, she had an aneurysm or something. She’s on life support at the hospital.

So the bridge blows, and the power lines are all down in the water with everything else, and the power goes off all over the city. And... and... and so this old guy goes to the hospital to check on his wife and they’re all freaking out because... okay, I’ve got to explain. Lower Key’s Medical has two backup generators. The main one runs off gas just like that turbine. The auxiliary runs on batteries. The gas one can go as long as you keep feeding it gas, but the battery one is only good for a few hours.

So he goes to check on the missus and finds out that the gas generator isn’t working. Problem with old fuel or something, and everybody is scrambling around and he’s trying to help, but they’re going to have to flush the lines, and it’s going to take too long, and they don’t have enough batteries and they’re going to lose power. With no way to transport them out, everybody on life support is... is going to die.

[13-second delay]

That guy... that little guy, he asks their repair people what they need and they say, “A miracle.” And he says, “You keep going.”

[5-second delay]

“You just keep Elizabeth alive. I’m going to get you your miracle.”

And that’s what he did. We’ve had power for the last eight weeks because of one man... one man who loved his wife so much... that he found a way to get power to the hospital until they could fix their diesel generator. It wasn’t for us. He did it for her.

[33-second delay, audible crying]

And he fought that guy. He went at him... just swinging a wrench, then a ball-peen hammer, finally just his hands, trying to keep that thing away from the turbine, doing anything to make sure the hospital wouldn’t lose power again—to make sure his wife would have just a few more minutes.

[1 minute 45 second delay]

I know everybody here thinks it’s hopeless, thinks this place is going to be a slaughterhouse any minute now... but they’re wrong. They’re wrong. I know it looks bad. We need a miracle. But you just hang on. You hear me, people? You just hang on.

I’m going to get you your miracle.