Read Tropical Freeze for Free Online

Far Eastern hardwoods out of your lower tract.”
    The man looked at Thorn and squeezed his face into a sour smirk. He dashed off a quick scribble on his clipboard, took a thumbtack out of his shirt pocket. He stepped over to one of the cedar telephone poles, the stilts that Thorn and Jack had augered into the coral bedrock. The man fastened a red tag to it.
    “You’re officially out of business,” Carmel said, looking into the bureaucratic middle distance. “You want a list of your violations and methods of compliance, you come to the county building anytime Monday through Friday, ten to two. But let me tell you something, wild man. You so much as start up a power saw on this place, and you’re bunking with the sweethearts at the county jail.”
    He walked back to his station wagon, got in, and drove away.
    Jack and Garfunkel came over.
    “Well?” Jack said.
    “Let’s take the afternoon off, Jack. Go rip the faces off some barracuda. How ’bout it?”
    “Whatever you think,” Jack said. “Whatever makes you happy.”
    Darcy Richards stood in front of the WBEL weather map and pointed to the satellite photo of a front pushing down from Canada. It was the first major Arctic invasion of the season, a five-hundred-mile-wide glacial arm stretching through the Midwest and into North Georgia, its wispy fingers already tickling Atlanta.
    “Well, the radar boys tell me this is a fizzler. They say it’s going to run out of momentum in Jacksonville. But I say this is the real thing, a genuine Siberian express hiding in a dip in the jet stream.” Darcy smiled into the lights. “Right on schedule, second week in January. So, I’m warning you, get out your camel hair coats. It’s gonna get damn cold this weekend.”
    The national temperatures flickered into place behind her, and the producer whispered into her earphone, “Temps, temps.”
    Darcy said, “You know, the station pays a fortune for these electronics, but to tell the truth, that’s mainly to trick you folks into thinking we know what we’re talking about.”
    “Come on, Darcy,” said the voice in her ear. “Easy now.”
    “What I think is, we’ve blown it. I think we’ve put too much fancy jargon between us and the weather. Low-pressure ridge, tropopause, adiabatic changes. We’ve gotten as bad as lawyers. As my daddy used to say, if you want to change the world, first thing you got to do is start calling things by their right names.”
    The voice said, “Eight, seven, six, tossing it back to Jill and Mike, five …”
    Darcy stepped toward the camera, to the edge of the set. She stood there for a moment and smiled at the cameraman, who was smiling at her. Right with her.
    “So, I’m saying it plain. It’s gonna get damn cold.”
    The young man and woman sitting at the WBEL’s news central desk grinned like maniacs as Darcy took her seat again next to the black sportscaster.
    The male anchor turned his bright teeth on Darcy. “Well, we can always count on you, Darcy, to tell it like it is.”
    Darcy nodded to him and then nodded into the lights.
    The female anchor started in on the Hollywood news notes, something about a young actress dating one of the Kennedy boys.
    Ozzie Hardison switched off the television set and stood there, getting his breath back. Bonnie, his old lady, was hammering on the front door, but Ozzie didn’t move. He was holding on as long as he could to the weatherlady’s face, her body. For months now he’d been planning on liberating a VCR from some weekend house around Key Largo so he could tape her and play her back, put her on freeze-frame, slo-mo. Count her freckles.
    “You dorkus, open the door!” Bonnie got one eye up into the little window near the top of the door and yelled at him. “You dickbrain!” She hammered some more, clacking her beer bottle against that little window.
    Ozzie walked into the bedroom, wiped some sweat from his lip. He was still feeling weak. Man, the weatherlady had looked good tonight.