Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 07 - Tubby Meets Katrina Read Online Free PDF Page B

slamming of loose shutters and shed doors, and the rusty whine of attic ventilators gone crazy. His nerves were winding up. Rain began to come down in loud waves that beat against the sliding glass doors facing the backyard of his house. He tried to make a supper of a can of turtle soup found in the cupboard, but it didn’t satisfy. He finished off his bourbon. The Fritos were history. He looked hungrily at his last can of medium black olives. And the storm was still hours away from land.
    He ventured outside from time to time, to gauge the torrent, test his stamina against nature, see what odds and ends were blowing up the street, but each time he retreated quickly back to shelter. Wandering through the house he allowed himself some rare introspective moments, not something he typically indulged. A quick inventory of his life produced some good points, like getting married, raising kids, winning the Hambuckle case, settling Darryl Alvarez, meeting Faye Sylvester, not all so bad. His mind blew past the bad parts, like the end of his partnership with Reggie Turntide, like… He had to stare for a long moment at his hands to see if there was any blood there. He opened a last bottle of red wine. There wasn’t any more booze in the house. He made himself a pot of coffee. At least the gas stove was still working. He tried to call his daughters, but all the phones in the world seemed to be ringing busy.
    About midnight the hurricane finally rocked in. Tubby no longer had to watch weather jockeys get blown down the street on his several television sets, now he could hear the wind howl like a jet plane taxiing past his front door and feel his whole house shake. It was deafening and frightening. Burglar alarms went off in houses down the street. Trees snapped and crashed into his home. The floor vibrated. Windows rattled and waves of horizontal rain banged against the few inches of wall that separates any of us from the next life. His neighbor’s big hackberry, must have been forty feet tall, came down and loudly crunched the wooden fence between the houses. The ground, the heart-of-pine floor beneath Tubby’s feet, bounced when the tree hit. There was the sound of breaking glass, and Tubby hurried upstairs to find that a window had blown out and a jet of water as from a fire hose was shooting over his washer and dryer. Rain pellets, or were they shards of glass, burned his face, and he had to withdraw. He heard a transformer pop outside. All the lights went out.
    He managed to get downstairs, feeling his way to the living room sofa. He sat down there and leaned his head back against a pillow, waiting to see what would happen next.
    Even the walls of Templeman II Prison seemed to shake. Bonner could feel it through the concrete pressing into his back. He listened to the guards talk excitedly outside the cell. Prisoners in other cell blocks were screaming, demanding information. His own group was straining to stay cool, but time was getting short. One guy rocked back and forth on his haunches and appeared ready to spring, teeth bared. Some kept their heads down, covered by elbows and knees. One man paced the room, and another did standing push-ups against the wall.
    A dude with a scar on his cheek got in Rivette’s face and called him one ugly honky. Bonner grabbed the big man’s ears and screamed in his face, “I ain’t a honky! I am Katrina,” and he kissed the startled inmate on the lips. The man fell away in terror.
    This was a new idea that had just come to Bonner Rivette. He had long identified with the woodland spirits, those who had snuck over from Europe with the white race and found new homes, even in the ravine-etched forests of Louisiana, but he had never felt communion with a salt-water wind from the Gulf of Mexico before. It was an attractive ally, if he could just get close enough to it.
    As the other prisoners reasoned-out what they had just seen him do, and shuffled away to their separate corners, Bonner