Storm Force. Meredith Fletcher

their getaway. Sheriff Bannock and the FBI aren’t saying.”

      “The FBI is involved? Why?”

      “They originally handled the kidnapping thing,” Tyler said. He shrugged. “Maybe they just want to take care of old business. Clean the slate. Something like that.” He paused. “Either way, we’re going to have to be careful out there.”

      Kate silently agreed.

      “Don’t know,” Marty said as he rang up Kate’s gas and the supplies she’d ordered from him. “With this storm coming, I’m not sure if I’d want to face the storm or those escaped cons.”

      Neither, Kate thought, but she knew that was too much to hope for. But she wondered about the dead man. How and why had he died?

      Chapter 4

      The storm hit southern Florida’s coastline when Kate was only a few minutes away from the campsite. The black, roiling heavens opened up and poured forth a deluge of biblical proportions. The windshield wipers were hard-pressed to keep up with the torrent. Lightning seared the sky, followed by thunder that came closer and closer. The wind hit seventy and eighty miles an hour. The truck jumped viciously across the road, making driving hard.

      Anyone with sense is at home, Kate thought. She fought the steering wheel again, pulling the truck back into a straight course when it wanted to go sideways.

      “Damn!” Tyler swore after a particularly close lightning strike. “That one seemed to have our name on it.” He sat in the truck’s forward passenger seat and stared out at the storm.

      Already, small waves of rain swept across the highway, propelled by the surging winds. Debris filled the ditches and channels on either side, surely no more than moments from pouring out across the highway and causing all kinds of hazards. Two emergency vehicles, a fire truck and an ambulance, had roared past them.

      Kate had to concentrate on driving. Conditions had turned worse than she’d imagined. Even though she had four-wheel drive on the truck and good road beneath her, she knew she couldn’t trust the road.

      She went east off Plantation Parkway, toward Everglades National Park. She turned back south on one of the dirt roads that led to a campsite she’d set up for two brothers from Missouri and their three teenaged sons. They were a good group, the kind of clients she wanted to keep. But they were inexperienced with Florida’s weather and the sudden, aggressive nature of tropical storms. She’d used Tyler’s cell phone in an effort to reach them but hadn’t been successful. She would have been in touch with them before if it hadn’t been for getting the kids, the bus wreck and the problem with Mathis.

      The road had turned to soup under the driving rain. A firm foundation existed beneath the mud, but the tires had to chew through a few inches to reach it. Even then, the rain would soak down into those levels too. In years past, lumberjacks, hunters—of both game and rare orchids and other plants—and residents had used all the dirt roads in the area. The state and federal government didn’t provide for much more than grading, which didn’t even begin to solve the pothole and drainage problems.

      Kate used the lower gears, slowing to a crawl. The headlights barely reached through the driving sheets of rain that looked silver-gray in the glare. Also, the innumerable potholes provided a deadly minefield of potential strut-busting bangs and bumps that could tear the truck’s front end out and leave them stranded to ride out the storm.

      “—record high amounts of rain and wind,” the newscaster droned on over the radio. “The Coast Guard is already reporting thirty- and forty-foot swells in the Gulf of Mexico. Meteorologists are continuing to upgrade the storm as conditions worsen. People living in the low areas and in Everglades City are advised to seek out high ground as Hurricane Genevieve comes roaring into the coastal areas.”

      Another white-hot dazzle of multi-veined lightning ripped across the sky, followed by a cannonade of thunder that vibrated the truck and caused Tyler to jump. He cursed as he shifted and tried to relax.

      “Did I ever tell you that I don’t like storms?” he asked.

      Kate looked at him, seeing the fear and nervousness in him. During the confrontation with Mathis, Tyler had been totally calm and collected, even with drunken men and weapons potentially in the mix. But the storm had him stressed. Kate knew it was like that for a lot of native and long-time residents who had survived the big ones.

      “Yeah,” she replied. “I think you’ve mentioned it before.”

      “Well,” Tyler said. “I really don’t like them. In case there was any confusion.”

      A gust of wind slammed the truck and forced it off the road. Kate kept calm and guided the steering rather than fight it. The passenger-side tires dipped down, falling off the road entirely, picking up water and creating a jetstream against the truck’s side that sluiced the window with muddy water. Kate brought the truck back up on to the road through steady effort.

      “Damn,” Tyler groaned. He looked pale in the darkness.

      “Maybe you should have stayed home,” Kate suggested.

      “It’s a little late for that now, isn’t it?” Tyler asked.

      “Don’t you throw up in my truck,” Kate warned, trying to lighten the moment.

      “Ha, ha,” Tyler said dryly. “I’m not going to throw up. But I can’t guarantee that the seats are going to stay dry.”

      Despite the tension of the moment, Kate laughed. Tyler joined her, but it sounded strained. “I appreciate you coming along,” she said a moment later.

      He shrugged, like it was no big deal. “There’s nothin’ on television, and Dad has a fit when I use the generator to run the X-Box. I mean, what the hell else can you do when it gets like this?”

      “What’s your dad doing?”

      “Watchin’ the weather. Like all the old guys do. Keeps wanderin’ out to the front porch, standin’ there nursin’ a cup of coffee an’ a cigarette, shakin’ his head, an’ talkin’ about the big ones he’s seen in the past an’ how this ain’t gonna compare to them. Like all that’s gonna do something toward preventin’ what we got goin’ on here now.”

      Another lightning strike hit a dwarf cypress tree ahead and on the left. For a moment, the tree’s crown ignited in flames and sparks, and the Spanish moss stood out stark and mysterious. The flames blazed for a moment, then the tree fell over into the deep slough on that side of the road and extinguished in the black, running water that cascaded deeper into Big Cypress Swamp.

      “Damn,” Tyler sighed. “We’re gonna need a rowboat to get out of here.”

      Nearly an hour later, they reached the campsite. The area was primitive, holding only four screened chickees. Tyler had referred to them as “chickees on steroids” because the original designs hadn’t included walls, which these had.

      Kate had built the shelters, modeling them on the small, elevated cabins the Seminole people had lived in.

      As a little girl, she’d seen them in the Seminole Camping Village on the Big Cypress Reservation near Fort Lauderdale and had fallen in love with them. She’d even built one in back of the house where she now lived. That one was more traditional, without walls and with a rush roof that sometimes leaked. Hannah loved going there for picnics with her mom and to “look for dinosaurs.”

      A massive SUV sat under a bald cypress tree. Water and mud were already creeping up the tires. If it didn’t move soon, it was going to get mired where it was. Kate knew she didn’t have the room she needed to haul the men and their sons back to Everglades City. They needed to get moving now, while they still could.

      Electric lanterns glowed inside two of the chickees, tearing holes in the darkness and offering shelter from the storm. The hiss of rain sluicing into the earth deafened Kate for the most part, but she still heard the chuckatapop-chuckatapop-chuckatop of the gasoline-powered generator