Eye of the Sh*t Storm by Jackson Ford (most romantic novels .txt) 📕

“What do you mean?” Nic says.

“Well, we’ve got some time, right?” It’s around eleven-fifteen, a little under an hour from the deadline. The rain has picked up now, plastering my hair to my forehead. I have to keep wiping drops out of my eyes. “Maybe there’s a way to get Reggie back without losing Leo.” I cast a guilty look at him, and he just shrugs.

“Maybe.” Nic sounds unsure.

“I mean, it’s not like this Zigzag guy is bulletproof.” I say.

“You got a gun hidden somewhere we don’t know about?” Annie says.

“I don’t mean literally bulletproof. I’m not saying shoot him. But it seems like it’s tough for him to hit more than two people at once, so maybe we could… I don’t know, ambush him somehow…”

Nic gives me a dubious look.

“Besides,” I continue. “He’s not all there – did you hear what he was saying? All that my house is a lie and the walls go on for ever and blah-blah?” I try to say it like it’s no biggie, but truth be told, even repeating the words sends a horrid little shiver up my spine.

“If he took Reggie, and set all this up,” Nic says, “then he’s obviously not a complete fruitcake. Plus, he knows how many of us there are. If we don’t all show at the same time, he’ll figure out something’s up. It’s not worth the risk.”

“We… we wait until we’ve made the exchange, till we’ve got Reggie back. Then we can hit him. He can’t take all of us at the same time.”

“Good plan,” Annie mutters.

A group of people – homeless folk from the camp, it looks like – move past us on the opposite side of the river. They’re arguing about something, angry voices reaching us.

A brainwave. “Hey.” I snap a finger at Leo. “You’ve still got some juice, right? You didn’t blow it all on that pigeon?”

“Um,” he says. “I think so.”

“Perfect!” I spread my hands. “So we zap him the second we see him. Boom. We all go home.”

Nic shakes his head. “Nice idea, but I’m guessing he’ll take that into account. He obviously knows what Leo can do.”

“Stop bursting my balloon, man. Take it into account how?”

“He’ll probably keep hold of Reggie until they make the exchange.” Annie’s voice is as dead as our footsteps. “He’ll dose Leo with something, then let Reggie go.”

“If he does it at all,” Nic mutters.

Annie glares at him. “Got something you wanna say, vato?”

“Chill, both of you,” I tell them. Last thing we need is to have some bystander come find out if we’re OK. And there are bystanders now – groups of people pushing their belongings in shopping carts, loners toting backpacks. One of them, a crusty old guy with a unibrow, glances in my direction, gives me a sour look. I have to resist flipping him the bird.

“Why are there so many people?” Leo asks suddenly

“There aren’t that many…” I trail off. He’s right. It’s not just a few small groups here and there. The bend of the river is up ahead, curving back around to the west, and in the space between the bend and where we are, there must be a hundred people. There’s a little more ambient light here than there was further up the river, so they’re not difficult to spot. I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts that I genuinely didn’t notice.

There’s the roar of a motorcycle engine, making me jump. The Legends – they found us.

But it’s not them. On the other side of the rushing water, a beat-up old Triumph zooms past. The bike has a sidecar, and the person in it – a bearded man holding a baseball cap down on his head – is yelling something at us. Impossible to hear over the roar of the engine. The man’s windbreaker has come loose, flapping out the back of the sidecar like a superhero cape.

“OK, hold up.” Annie strides over to the nearest group on our side, a cluster of teenagers – two girls, three boys, all of whom look worried. “What’s going on?” Annie points upriver. “Why’s everybody heading out?”

I don’t quite hear the response, which comes from one of the older boys, a kid with a dirty Clippers hoodie about ten sizes too big for him.

Annie snaps her head in the direction of the homeless camp. “For real?” she says.

“The hell is happening?” Nic asks me. All I can do is shrug.

Annie jogs back to us. “We got a problem.”

“Yeah, I figured.” I nod to the kids. “What’s up?”

“Flash flood.”

“What?” Nic says.

“What do you mean, a flash flood?” I blink at her. “From where?”

It’s dumb question. I know where.

A certain collapsed bridge further upriver. A mess of concrete slabs and burned metal. A nice little barricade for the storm water to pile up behind.

My stomach gives a sickening wrench – technically the bridge collapsing wasn’t my fault, but…

But it wouldn’t have happened at all if we didn’t steal that meth. And whose idea was that?

“What’s a flushflood?” Leo asks Nic. Nic ignores him, straightening up, craning his neck to spot an exit from the river. There isn’t one. It’s wall-to-wall flood barriers, because of course it is. Before the quake, the 710-105 interchange was major. It makes sense that the LA City Council would want to protect the areas around it first.

When you’re raised in Wyoming, you get pretty good at reading the weather, staying out of the creeks and the ravines. Apparently I forgot it after I left the state, mostly because it’s not something you have to worry about while cruising for tacos down Sunset Boulevard.

We have one thing going for us. Flash floods are scary, but they don’t move all that fast. Ten feet per second is pretty normal, which sounds awful, but isn’t actually that bad.

“How long?” I ask Annie. “Did they—?”

She’s gone pale. “Forty-five minutes. Maybe.”

Well, shit.

“What happens when the flash gets here?” Leo says, his