Chapter One
Sneak Peek: Stormy
My phone buzzes against the bar top like an angry wasp, and I already know it's nothing good. Nothing good comes through on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of hurricane season when the sky outside looks like God's holding a grudge.
I pick it up and read the alert twice. Then a third time, because sometimes you need to let bad news sink in proper before you start cussing at it.
Hurricane Peter.
I set the phone down and stare at it.
"Peter," I say to Sheila who is behind the bar drying glasses like the world isn't about to end.
"They're sending a Category 4 Hurricane Peter to kill us.
Not a Hurricane Razor. Not a Hurricane Blade.
A Peter. I'm supposed to board up my windows and sandbag my doors for a storm named after my Uncle Pete, who once got his head stuck in a porch railing at a Fourth of July cookout. "
Sheila doesn't look up from the glass she's polishing. "Are you done fussing?"
"No, I'm just saying. If a hurricane is going to wipe me off the map, I'd like it to sound a little more dignified in the obituary. 'Big Tex, taken out by Peter.' Sounds like I lost a bar fight to an accountant."
Sheila sets the glass down and picks up another one.
She's been bartending here since before I took over, and she has a gift for letting me talk myself out like a wind-up toy running down.
She's somewhere north of sixty, with silver hair she keeps pinned up and a look that can make a three-hundred-pound biker apologize for breathing too loud.
She's the mama of this bar and everybody in it, including me.
"Category 4 or higher," I say, reading the alert again.
The humor drains out of me like bathwater.
I've been watching Peter on the weather models for a week, tracking that little swirl across the Gulf the way you'd watch a fist drawing back.
The models kept wobbling, kept disagreeing.
Maybe it goes east toward Apalachicola. Maybe it curves and hits Mobile.
But as of this morning, every single spaghetti line on the map converged on Panama City like an arrow through a bullseye.
And now there's an evacuation order on my phone and my bar sits directly on the Gulf of Mexico.
I've been through this before. Hurricane Michael, 2018.
Category 5 when it came ashore, though they didn't figure that out until later.
I remember thinking the world was ending.
I remember the sound of it and what the building looked like after.
I remember finding a fishing boat in the parking lot and the toppled McDonald's sign that took a year to fix.
Some people go through a disaster like that and they leave.
Pack up and move inland, swear they'll never live on the coast again.
I rebuilt. Took us almost two years to get Big Tex's Roadhouse back to what it was, and in some ways it's better now.
Three stories of poured concrete, steel-reinforced on the lower level after Michael taught me what storm surge can do to cinder block.
The first floor is the bar with a long mahogany bar top that Dad built with his own hands back when he opened this place thirty years ago.
There are pool tables, a little stage for live music on weekends, and a gift shop near the entrance where tourists buy overpriced t-shirts and shot glasses with the bar's logo on them.
Second floor is storage and an event space I rent out for private parties and weddings. Third floor is mine. A small apartment with two bedrooms and one bathroom that's just big enough to turn around in. That's where I've lived since I took over.
My dad was the original Big Tex. He started this bar when I was a baby, built it from a concrete shell and a liquor license into one of the best-known biker bars on the Florida Panhandle.
He was the kind of man who'd give you the shirt off his back and then apologize that it smelled like cigarette smoke.
The cigarettes killed him two years ago.
Lung cancer. Aggressive, fast, the way he did everything.
He went from diagnosis to gone in four months, and when the dust settled, I was left to run the Roadhouse.
I don't say it out loud much because it sounds like a Hallmark movie, but keeping this bar alive is the only way I know how to keep him alive.
Every board, every nail, every coat of paint is his legacy.
The name on the sign is his. The regulars who've been coming here for decades are his.
I'm just the son trying to fill his big boots.
So, yeah, I'm not leaving. Hurricane Peter can come and do his worst. I'll be right here with Dad's bar.
"Sheila." I look at her straight. "You need to go home."
She stops polishing. "Excuse me? What did you say?"
"Go home. Get your family together, get your house squared away, stock up on whatever you need. Do not come back here until this storm is past and I tell you it's safe."
"And what about you? What are your plans?"
"I'll be right here where I'm supposed to be."
She gives me a look that could strip paint off the walls. "You're staying here?"
"Yes ma'am."
"In a mandatory evacuation zone. During a Category 4 hurricane."
"That is correct."
"All by yourself? What if something bad happens?"
"I won't be alone. That son-of-a-bitch Peter is coming to visit."
She doesn't laugh, but she doesn't try to argue with me either.
Sheila has known me long enough, and knew Dad long enough before that, to understand what this place means.
She comes around the bar, reaches up, grabs my face with both hands, and pulls me down to her level, which is considerable pulling given that I'm six-five and she's five-foot-nothing in shoes.
"You call me," she says. "Every hour during that storm. You miss one check-in and I will drive back out to this beach in the middle of a hurricane and drag you out of here myself. Don't think I won't."
"Yes ma'am."
"Your daddy would've stayed too," she says, quieter. "Stubborn damn fools. Both of you."
She hugs me hard, like she's trying to squeeze the stupid out of me and then she's grabbing her purse and heading for the door. She stops halfway.
"What about boarding up the windows? Need my help?"
"Nope, I'm heading to the hardware store right now. I'll get her buttoned up tight. You go on now."
She nods once, sharp, and she's gone. The door swings shut behind her and the bar goes quiet. Not the good kind of quiet, the Friday-afternoon-before-the-rush kind. This is the quiet that comes when everyone with any sense has already left.
I take one long look around my place. Dad's place.
The stools pushed up to the bar. The neon signs I haven't turned off yet — BIG TEX'S ROADHOUSE in red and blue, and a Harley-Davidson logo.
The signed photos on the walls from every biker rally, charity ride, and parking lot cookout we've hosted in the last thirty years.
The pool tables with their green felt tops.
The scuff marks on the hardwood floor from a thousand boots.
"Alright, Pete," I mutter. "Let's see what you got."
I grab my keys. "Hold down the fort, Bertha," I say to the grill on my way through the kitchen.
Big Bertha is a six-foot offset smoker I welded together from two oil drums and a prayer.
She doesn't answer, but I swear she looks worried.
"I know, sweetheart. I'll be back to tuck you in before that mean old Hurricane Peter gets here. "
The sky has turned the color of an old bruise by the time I pull onto the beach road. The first outer bands are pushing through. Sudden walls of rain that blow sideways for ten minutes, then stop, then start again, like the storm is clearing its throat.
The wind has some teeth to it already, gusting hard enough to shove my truck toward the center line. The beach road is mostly empty. Everybody's heading towards the evacuation routes going north on the highways, away from the water. I'm one of the few idiots heading the other way.
That's when I see him the first time.
A biker. He's small. That's what I notice first. Not small like short necessarily, just compact.
Lean. He's standing next to a motorcycle under the overhang of a closed-up souvenir shop.
One of those places that sells airbrushed t-shirts and pink flamingo floats. The shop's been shuttered and boarded.
The biker hasn't been. He's got a helmet on with the visor down and a light jacket that's soaked through to the skin. The jacket isn't rain gear. It's a regular jacket, the kind you'd throw on for a cool morning ride, not for the leading edge of a Category 4 hurricane.
I drive past. I note the image of the lone rider, no cover, no plan, bad weather, and wonder what his situation is. Probably waiting for the rain to ease up a minute so he can ride out. It's not my problem. I've got a hardware store to get to and a bar to board up.
The hardware store is a zoo, which I expected. Every person left in Bay County who isn't already halfway to Dothan, Alabama is in this parking lot right now. They're loading plywood and bottled water into their vehicles with the grim focus of people who've done this before.
I load up too. More plywood than I probably need, but I learned from Hurricane Michael that you can never have enough.
Boxes of three-inch nails. Two extra propane tanks.
Every case of bottled water I can fit. Duct tape, tarps, batteries, a hand-crank radio because cell towers don't survive Category 4 winds.
I make small talk with a couple of guys I know from the area, both of them evacuating, both of them telling me I'm crazy. I don't argue. They're not wrong.
The guy at the register looks at my cart and says, "You building an ark, Big Tex?" and I say, "Brother, if I was building an ark, I'd need a bigger truck and a lot more beer."