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A dark blouse, light skirt, her thick hair simple and straight. Just the way he liked it. Hippie chick hair, bangs coming close to her eyes. The color was more red than blond. And tonight she’d even licked her lips once; that drove Ozzie right across the line, made him grab his hard-on through his jeans and squeeze.
    Bonnie banged and banged on that door. A neighbor across in the Bomb Bay Village trailer park yelled at her to shut up. She screamed back at him to piss up a palm tree, and she went right back to pounding on the door, down to a good steady rhythm.
    It was Friday, so the weatherlady would be pulling into her trailer in a couple of hours, spending another weekend in Key Largo. Shacked up with that blond asshole. Ozzie didn’t know what she saw in that white bread guy. Mr. Neat. Mr. Haircut. But then it didn’t really matter. ’Cause Mr. White Bread wasn’t long for this earth. Ozzie could just tell.
    Darcy drove her Fiat Spider up Biscayne Boulevard, watching the wind shake the cabbage palms. She breathed in that hint of ozone, an electrical turbulence from the first collision between the strands of cold, dry air and the sultry high-pressure ridge over Florida.
    The squall line would arrive by Sunday. A wall of boiling black fog, storms breaking out along the edge where the two air masses clashed. Those squalls could be more turbulent, do more damage, than some hurricanes.
    And these were the charged hours before it happened. When the first opposing scouts met and struggled briefly and quietly at twenty-five thousand feet. All that icy air piling into a rounded prow as it advanced. The air closer to the ground slowed down by friction against the earth. Stringy gray nimbostratus clouds reaching out, the upper air unstable.
    As usual she had had an early hint of it, something like the tartness of green apples in the back of the throat, a quiet burn in the sinuses. It was something no radar could trace and no normal person would even give words to. But it was her work and the nearest thing to a gift she had.
    It wasn’t a sense or a superstition, didn’t reside in the nose, the bunions, or any section of her viscera. It was the weight and color of the air, the taste in her lungs, the vibrations her bones could hear, the odor of light. Weather moved through her as if she were permeable, and she extracted from the currents their messages, whispers of where they had come from, where headed.
    She drove the Coconut Grove route tonight. Wangled through a complicated intersection governed only by yield signs. Nearly got hit by a Ford, honked at by a black pickup truck. Yield signs! Deputy sheriffs were unloading footlockers of cocaine at the Port of Miami at noon. What made anybody think yield signs still worked?
    She’d heard that almost every bill above a twenty in South Florida had been found to be dusted with traces of the drug. Little white footprints, ghost tracks. Death dust everywhere. It was in the air, maybe giving everyone a faint high all the time, getting in there and making the synapses fire a little hotter. Maybe that was causing the quicker pulse on the streets. The silt of cocaine on every bill. It got into the blood and simmered on low, rendering the brain down little by little to a thick broth of its former self.
    As her front wheels hit the rough asphalt of the Bomb Bay Village trailer park, all the automatic streetlights in the village switched on. She drew the Fiat up onto the cement slab outside Gaeton’s silver Airstream. The place had become her weekend retreat for the last few months.
    A brown Mercedes was parked in front of the mobile home and Thorn was lying in the recliner on her porch, shaded from the twilight by a green and white awning that was attached to one side of the Airstream. The lights switching on like that, Thorn over for a rare visit, the first major front coming. Darcy felt a foolish surge of happiness. Signs, signs, a world of signs. Things on the verge of change.
    Thorn