STORMY WEATHER By CARL HIAASEN

The unit’s first afternoon was spent erecting tents for the homeless and unloading heavy drums of fresh drinking water from the back of a Red Cross trailer. After supper, Cain Darby was posted to a curfew checkpoint on Quail Roost Drive, not far from the Florida Turnpike. Darby and another Guardsman, the foreman of a paper mill, took turns stopping the cars and trucks. Most drivers had good excuses for being on the road after curfew-some were searching for missing relatives, others were on their way to a hospital, and still others were simply lost in a place they no longer recognized. If questions arose about a driver’s alibi, the paper-mill foreman deferred judgment to Sergeant Darby, due to his law-enforcement experience. Common violators were TV crews, sightseers, and teenagers who had come to steal. These cars Cain Darby interdicted and sent away, to the Turnpike ramp.

At midnight the paper-mill foreman returned to camp, leaving Sergeant Darby alone at the barricade. He dozed for what must have been two hours, until he was startled awake by loud snorting. Blearily he saw the shape of a large bear no more than thirty yards away, at the edge of a pine glade. Or maybe it was just a freak shadow, for it looked nothing like the chubby black bears that Cain Darby routinely poached from the Ocala National

Forest. The thing that he now thought he was seeing stood seven feet at the shoulders.

Cain Darby closed his eyes tightly to clear the sleep. Then he opened them again, very slowly. The huge shape was still there, a motionless phantasm. Common sense told him he was mistaken-they don’t grow thousand-pound bears in Florida! But that’s sure what it looked like….

So he raised his rifle.

Then, from the corner of his eye, he spotted headlights barreling down Quail Roost Drive. He turned to see. Somebody was driving toward the roadblock like a bat out of hell. Judging by the rising chorus of sirens, half the Metro police force was on the chase.

When Cain Darby spun back toward the bear, or the shape that looked like a bear, it was gone. He lowered the gun and directed his attention to the maniac in the oncoming truck. Cain Darby struck an erect military pose in front of the candy-striped barricades-spine straight, legs apart, the rifle held at a ready angle across the chest.

A half mile behind the truck was a stream of flashing blue and red lights. The fugitive driver seemed undaunted. As the headlights -drew closer, Sergeant Darby hurriedly weighed his options. The asshole wasn’t going to stop, that much was clear. By now the man had (unless he was blind, drunk or both) seen the soldier standing in his path.

Yet the vehicle was not decelerating. If anything, it was gaining speed. Cain Darby cursed as he dashed out of the way. If there was one thing he found intolerable, it was disrespect for a uniform, whether it belonged to the Department of Corrections or the National Guard.

So he indignantly cranked off a few rounds as the idiot driver smashed through the barricade.

No one was more stunned than Cain Darby to see the speeding truck overshoot the Turnpike ramp and plunge full speed into a drainage canal; no one except the driver, Gil Peck. The sound of gunfire had destroyed his ragged reflexes, particularly his ability to locate the brake pedal. He couldn’t believe some peckerwood Guardsman was shooting at him.

What did not surprise Gil Peck, considering his heavy cargo of stolen bricks, was how swiftly the flatbed sunk in the warm brown water. He squeezed through the window, swam to shore and began weeping at his own foul luck. All his hurricane booty was lost, except for the package of hash, which bobbed to the surface at the precise moment the first police car arrived.

Yet the drugs weren’t the most serious of Gil Peck’s legal concerns. As he was being handcuffed, he declared: “I didn’t kill him!”

“Kill who?” the officer asked.

“The guy, you know. The guy at the trailer park.” Gil Peck assumed that’s why the cops were chasing him-they’d found the body’of the crucified man.