He threw his phone on the passenger seat of the Corvette. He was still parked outside the wrought-iron gate of Diane’s estate. The neighborhood around him was empty. Some of the residents had probably left town ahead of Chayla, and all the others were inside, cursing the fact that the storm had landed on a summer holiday. As he watched, the lights glowing in the palatial homes went dark. He didn’t see lights anywhere now. Not on the street. Not inside Diane’s estate. The power was out. The morning was already grim under the black sky, and the outage seemed to extinguish the last glimmer of life.

Cab got out of the car. Despite his black trench coat, he was already wet to his skin where the rain streamed under his collar. He shoved his hands in his pockets and studied the dense foliage closing in around the estate. The brick walls were overgrown with ivy. Trees knelt down and stretched out their branches on both sides of the walls.

He walked to the end of Coachman Street, where the elegant cobblestones ended. He followed the wall of Diane’s estate, avoiding the rivers overflowing out of the curbs. Flying leaves made a kind of green snow in the air. Where the road turned, he found a row of compact bungalows on a tree-lined street. There were no cars anywhere. Everyone had pulled their vehicles inside the safety of their garages. He saw no lights here either. The outage covered the entire block.

Turning in the opposite direction, he followed Richards Street to where it ended two hundred yards later at Asbury Place. Nothing was different here. The area felt equally desolate and dark. No cars on the street in either direction. No power. He glanced at a house on the north side of the T-intersection that was obviously deserted, with boarded-up windows and NO TRESPASSING signs posted on the front door. Another foreclosure house among thousands in Florida.

Cab walked toward the bay, where the houses got larger again. He could see the wild panorama ahead of him, besieged by the storm. The thin trunks of the palm trees were bent over like question marks. A spiny frond slapped his face so hard that it felt like the cut of a knife, and when he touched his hand to his cheek, it came away with blood that was quickly washed clean by the driving rain. It was growing more and more unsafe to be outside in the storm. There were no perceptible threats in the neighborhood around him, but that didn’t make him feel better. The threats that bothered him were the ones he couldn’t see.