Hurricane Fever Read Online Free PDF Page B

up his camera and started recording the man. The man stopped himself, and then said, “We need to talk.”
    “Sorry.” Roo shook his head. “Like that man said there: no more tickets.”
    He stepped back into the throngs of noisy partiers. They were hurricane chasers from Europe. They’d fly down right before a big one with duffel bugs of emergency rations to watch the storm from a sturdy hotel, excitedly sharing clips of them leaning into the wind or daring each other to go outside.
    The pontoon boat loosed its ropes, and the electric engine burbled away as they kicked back from the dock. The man swore, pulling a phone out of his pocket and shaking his head.
    For several minutes Roo scanned the area for other boats, or a helicopter. But the tail wasn’t being backed up at that level. If Roo had been rushing to get here, it made sense that anyone else had trouble getting resources to the ground quickly as well. And with a hurricane about to hit, most of the equipment they could rent would be tied down for the weather.
    Roo picked up his phone and listened to the message from Zee one last time. Then he called Delroy.
    “I’m on the booze cruise paddling through the middle of the harbor,” he said. “Bring the dinghy after it, come get me off this damn thing, okay?”
    He waited until he saw Delroy’s lights, his nephew gunning the engine to close in with them. Then he looked down at the phone in his hands.
    Roo dropped it overboard into the dark water.

 
    5
    In the quiet still of predawn, they slipped out of Road Harbour, putting the multicolored buildings dotting the brownish-green hills to Spitfire ’s stern. The dinghy swung in the davits behind them, and the wake from the silent electric engines churned gently as they headed back west along Tortola’s rocky coast.
    The world was ghost-quiet, except for the crack of sails and the burbling of water against hull. Roo watched as Nanny Cay marina slid past, filled with bristling masts sticking over the breakwall.
    Early morning traffic buzzed along Francis Drake Highway, following the coastline with him.
    When the sun rose over the hills and humps of Virgin Gorda farther east, it was baleful and grim, sliding behind a wall of dark clouds.
    They sailed under an ochre light between Little Thatch and Frenchman’s Cay on the West End of Tortola, the catamaran jibing against the gentle wind as Roo turned northeast toward Jost. Roo ran the engines hard, chewing through the batteries to help keep the pace up, leaving the mainsail up for the occasional puff to help drive them along.
    As they passed out from the protection of Tortola’s West End, the swells rose again. Delroy woke up, staggering out of his cabin with loud thumping footsteps that came natural to all teenage boys. He climbed up the stairs out of the right hull and into the main cabin and blearily fumbled around the galley.
    The smell of coffee filled the air around the cockpit as it leaked out of the main cabin’s sliding door.
    When Delroy came out with an extra cup for him, Roo nodded toward the bows. “Jost up ahead. We sailing right for Great Harbour, so just watch out for lobster traps.” Most of the buoys were smaller than a soccer ball and, although brightly colored, hid in the dips and crests of waves and swells.
    If the propellers caught on one they’d get snagged. Most of the work sailing up between St. Thomas, St. John, and Tortola consisted of keeping an eye out for the things.
    A lot of them were chipped with solar-powered beacons and popped up on the navigation display. Most fishermen didn’t want to lose a pot and paid a little extra for the newer buoys. But some still used old plastic bottles filled with air to tie the lobster trap lines to, and those required old-fashioned attentive human eyeballs to spot.
    Delroy grunted, still not at the part of the morning where he was going to speak, and sat on the captain’s chair. He squinted out over the main cabin ahead and sipped his