Stormy Weather Read Online Free PDF

He swung the Remington toward the house and pulled the trigger. The blast tore a hole the size of a soccer ball in the garage door.
    “Hush,” said the drunken salesman, cupping a hand to one ear. “Hear that? Dead fucking silence. Shoot off a twelve-gauge and nobody cares. Nobody comes to see. Nobody comes to help. Know why? Because of the hurricane. The whole place is a madhouse!”
    The man with the crooked jaw asked, more out of curiosity than concern: “What is it you want with us?”
    “I haven’t decided,” said Tony Torres. “Let’s have a drinky poo.”
    A week before the hurricane, Felix Mojack died of a viper bite to the ankle. Ownership of his failing wildlife-import business passed to a nephew, Augustine. On the rainy morning he learned of his uncle’s death, Augustine was at home practicing his juggling. He had all the windows open, and the Black Crowes playing on the stereo. He was barefoot and wore only a pair of royal-blue gym shorts. He stood in the living room, juggling in time to the music. The objects that he juggled were human skulls; he was up to five at once. The faster Augustine juggled, the happier he was.
    On the kitchen table was an envelope from Paine Webber. It contained a check for $21,344.55. Augustine had no need for or interest in the money. He was almost thirty-two years old, and his life was as simple and empty as one could be. Sometimes he deposited the Paine Webber dividends, and sometimes he mailed them off to charities, renegade political candidates or former girlfriends. Augustine sent not a penny to his father’s defense lawyers; that was the old man’s debt, and he could damn well settle it when he got out of prison.
    Augustine’s juggling was a private diversion. The skulls were artifacts and medical specimens he’d acquired from friends. When he had them up in the air—three, four, five skulls arcing fluidly from hand to hand—Augustine could feel the full rush of their faraway lives. It was inexplicably and perhaps unwholesomely exhilarating. Augustine didn’t know their names, or how they’d lived or died, but from touching them he drew energy.
    In his spare time Augustine read books and watched television and hiked what was left of the Florida wilderness. Even before he became wealthy—when he worked on his father’s fishing boat, and later in law school—Augustine nursed an unspecific anger that he couldn’t trace and wasn’t sure he should. It manifested itself in the occasional urge to burn something down or blow something up—a high-rise, a new interstate highway, that sort of thing.
    Now that Augustine had both the time and the money, he found himself without direction for these radical sentiments, and with no trustworthy knowledge of heavy explosives. Out of guilt, he donated large sums to respectable causes such as the Sierra Club and the NatureConservancy. His ambition to noble violence remained a harmless fantasy. Meanwhile he bobbed through life’s turbulence like driftwood.
    The near-death experience that made Augustine so rich had given him zero insight into a grand purpose or cosmic destiny. Augustine barely remembered the damn Beechcraft going down. Certainly he saw no blinding white light at the end of a cool tunnel, heard no dead relatives calling to him from heaven. All he recalled of the coma that followed the accident was an agonizing and unquenchable thirst.
    After recovering from his injuries, Augustine didn’t return to the hamster-wheel routine of law school. The insurance settlement financed a comfortable aimlessness that many young men would have found appealing. Yet Augustine was deeply unhappy. One night, in a fit of depression, he violently purged his bookshelves of all genius talents who had died too young. This included his treasured Jack London.
    Typically, Augustine was waiting for a woman to come along and fix him. So far, it hadn’t happened.
    One time a dancer whom Augustine was dating caught him juggling his skulls in