I parked in a slot next to the stout building that housed the cashier and what was surely a selection of junk food long past its sell-by date. I sat for a moment and watched the comings and goings across the street—that is to say, I watched nothing happen at all. So I ambled over to get a closer look.

  Traffic was almost nonexistent, which was no surprise given the street ran along the rail line and dead-ended in some kind of stone yard.

  I heard the prickly hum of electricity as I looked through the mesh gate and saw a small trailer, the kind a construction company might dump on a large building site as the foreman’s office, its windows covered in grime. No vehicles anywhere. Opposite the trailer I could see rows of electrical transformers and other equipment. I really didn’t know a lot about electrical power supply, other than the basics we learned back in school. The idea that electrons moved from one place hundreds of miles away through a filthy, half-abandoned yard like this one and then into my refrigerator to keep my drinks cold was akin to black magic as far as I was concerned.

  I spotted a silver box on the wall by the gate with a keypad but no visible speaker. I stood with my hands on my hips looking up at the top of the gate, wondering if some kind of vault onto the other side might be possible, but the razor wire gave discretion victory over valor.

  Seeing nothing of interest, I wandered back over to the gas station. It felt like a long shot, the idea that such a business might bother having security video, but I knew from experience that such looks could be deceptive. Often the business owners who were too tightfisted to keep their stores clean opened their wallets just enough to spring for a second-grade video system to deter would-be gasoline thieves.

  I pushed in through the door of the gas station. There was no electronic ding-dong or the rattle of a bell, but the hinges creaked so loudly there was no sneaking in. My instincts on the quality of the merchandise seemed vindicated. The end cap closest to the door held a selection of potato chips, each bag topped with a greasy sheen.

  The cashier sat behind a glass pane that offered nothing but the veneer of protection. For reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom, several dollar bills were taped to the glass along with a handwritten note that said this location had sold the winning ticket in Powerball. The printing on the note was faded so badly I wondered in what decade that windfall had occurred.

  I nodded to the cashier as I approached and got so little response that I was afraid for a moment I’d stumbled upon a guy who had died weeks earlier. But I noticed him blink ever so slowly, like a chameleon.

  “Morning,” I said.

  He cocked his head like a parrot.

  I found that the best way to elicit a positive response from such a person was to use either hollow threats against the guy’s health or his employment, or to ingratiate myself by buying something. He looked like he could do with a good blood transfusion, and getting him fired might be a positive career move. I went with the latter option.

  “You got any gas?” I considered asking for a hot dog but feared that once seen, the state of the so-called foodstuff might linger in the memory.

  “We’re a gas station, ain’t we?”

  “Can you give me twenty bucks’ worth?”

  The guy squinted out the window at the four vacant gas pumps then looked back at me. “You don’t got no car?”

  “It’s parked on the side. I thought I might need some air in the tires.”

  “That thing don’t work.”

  “Figures. Just the gas, then.”

  “I don’t know which pump you gonna stop at.”

  I took a deep breath in through my nose and out through my mouth then pointed at the closest pump. “That one.”

  “That’s number two,” said the guy as if this was vital information.

  He rang up the charge on an ancient cash register, and I paid cash.

  As I slipped my twenty through the hole in the glass, I said, “You got security video here?”

  His eyes pinched some, and he glanced underneath the counter, perhaps at a shotgun or a baseball bat.

  “I’m not going to knock you over,” I said, holding my palms up in peace. “I just wondered if you had any video outside. Maybe something that looks across at the substation over there.”

  The guy peered through the window again, but only a small warehouse with a hand-painted sign reading Sinks was visible.

  “It’s on the other corner,” I said, pointing.

  He looked across the sordid collection of merchandise in the store, toward the back wall, as if he had X-ray vision. “Hardly anyone goes in or out of there, and they never buy gas.”

  “There is another twenty for you if you’ve got video.”

  He didn’t bother locking the front door as he led me into a back room. It wouldn’t have been impolite to call it a closet. There was a monitor sitting on a dirty desk, and a desktop computer covered in a heavy layer of grease and dust.

  “When did you want to see?” asked the guy.

  “This morning, around eight fifty-five.”

  He turned the computer on, and we waited for a good five minutes as the thing booted up. I used to have a car like that, once upon a time; you had to start it five minutes before you ever went anywhere, or you might get nowhere at all.

  The guy brought up a screen and typed some stuff in. It was that blocky type, DOS, I think they called it. It looked like that old Matthew Broderick movie about the computer starting World War III. Ancient.

  “You’re lucky,” he said. “This thing only keeps twenty-four hours of video.”

  He opened up the footage where the timecode said 8:32 a.m. The picture quality was poor—not so much black-and-white as blue-and-white, and grainy as a breakfast cereal.

  We watched the video as the time crept forward. The camera must have been mounted on the canopy over the forecourt, positioned to the side the cashier couldn’t see from his post, designed to snap the license plate of any ne’er-do-well who dared to pump gas and not pay. The notion that this was a pay-before-you-pump kind of place crossed my mind, so I couldn’t help but think that the security system was somewhat redundant. Yet I was glad it was there.

  At 8:46 a white truck slowed at the top of the frame and pulled in front of the gate at the substation. The picture was too blurry to make out the license plate, but whoever was driving knew the key code: the gate opened, and the truck drove in.

  We kept watching as the timecode crept up and passed the 8:55 mark, when Monaro had told me the power outage occurred. At 8:59 the gate opened once more, and we saw the truck pull out and drive away.

  I could make out the FPL logo on the side of the vehicle. It was one of those maintenance trucks, the kind that looks like a pickup with a canopy over the truck bed, where the workers keep their tools and wire and whatever else it is they use to keep our electricity flowing. What I couldn’t make out was any kind of identifying feature. All FPL maintenance trucks looked pretty much the same.

  I asked him to run the video back so we could see the truck again, and when it turned I got him to pause the shot. But the frozen picture was so fuzzy it was difficult to even confirm it was a vehicle.

  I was about to give up when the guy said, “Hang on,” and punched some keys to bring up a different camera angle. This one had more or less the same view as the cashier himself, across the forecourt to the street that led away from the tracks. “If he’s not going to the place with all the rocks and stuff, then he’s going out this way.”

  He was right. We watched as the FPL truck drove by the other side of the gas station, clearly having turned the corner offscreen. Again he paused the video, but once more I couldn’t make out much.

  “Thanks for trying,” I said.

  “Hang on,” he said again. He rewound the video, and as the truck drove by for a second time, he pointed to the rear side of the truck bed. “There,” he said, his finger following the vehicle across the screen. “That’s a unit number.”

  I leaned in. “Can you read it?”

  He rewound and we watched the truck for a third time.

  “The first thing is a pound sign,” said the guy.

  “Like a hashtag,” I said.

  “Whatever.”

  It took a few more minutes of rewinding and replaying to get the whole number. We pieced it together one number at a time. After the eighth pass, we had something.

  “Number 14646,” I said.

  “That’s his unit number. That’s your man.” Then he frowned. “This guy owe you money or something?”

  “Not me, not exactly.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I sent Ron a text message to let him know that I was returning, and then I wound my way back to the arena. When I arrived there was no one at the front entrance. Not Devon, the security guard, nor anyone else. The tinted glass door that we had previously entered through was closed, so I gave it a yank, to no avail.

  I stepped back and pulled out my phone. With a shudder the door flung open, and Ron stuck his head out into the sunshine.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” he said.

  I put my hand against the door to hold it open and asked Ron what was going on.

  “They locked the place down completely. Even old Devon has been called inside. I’m afraid that young man might wilt without the sunshine.”

  “And Monaro?”

  “He’s zooming around on his Club Car like a drunk man on a golf course. Not sure what’s going on exactly. I’ve been waiting here to let you in.”

  There was movement in the dim light behind Ron that I couldn’t quite make out from my sunny position outside. But I heard the voice.

  “Shut that damn door,” he said. “We need to keep the damn humidity out.”

  I took a couple of quick steps in and let the door close behind me with a bang. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a man in coveralls watching us. He shook his head like he was looking at the dumbest tumbleweeds ever to roll into his neighborhood, and then he strode off along the concourse.

  Ron and I looked at each other, and he shrugged.

  “We could just stand here and wait for the Club Car to come zipping by,” he said with a grin.

  “I get the distinct impression he keeps the golf cart down on the maintenance level. But I have a better idea.”

  “Into the bowels?”

  “Something like that.”

  I led Ron to the control room, where I had previously left Monaro. I tried the door and found it locked, but my attempt must have roused someone because it almost instantly snapped open. Monaro stood there with the radio to his mouth. He gave me his customary stern face and added a shake of the head for good measure. Then he turned and continued barking orders into the radio.

  Ron and I stepped inside. The other guy was still in his seat, looking at his laptop. There were still no red warnings on the screens or sirens blaring, but the mood seemed to be even more tense.

  Monaro dropped the radio from his mouth and looked at me.

  “There’s no one at the substation,” I said. “They don’t appear to be fixing anything.”

  I was about to tell him about the FPL truck in the video when he waved his hand in the air as if to brush my information away.

  “That’s not my concern right now,” he said. “The arena AC system is down.”

  “Obviously,” I said, “since the power’s out.”

  “No, no. You don’t get it. I told you, the refrigeration system for the rink is on a dedicated line, from the grid. But the ambient AC is handled by our internal system. Solar panels, the battery panel.”

  “So if the power to the AC is still on, why do you say it’s off? It’s not that warm in here.”

  “Not yet it’s not. And heat is not the problem. The problem is humidity.” Monaro pointed to bar charts on his screen, the kind of thing you see on the news to help explain how the national debt keeps rising day after day.

  I gave Monaro a blank look.

  “It’s the humidity reading,” he said. “It’s going up. Fast.”

  “Why is humidity such a big deal? This is Florida, it’s always humid.”

  A crackle on the radio drew Monaro’s attention, and he told whoever was listening to call the rental place and get the loader on standby. The voice at the other end said the loader was already on the truck, awaiting his order.

  It all sounded vaguely military to me, like a call to arms.

  Monaro clipped his radio onto his hip and opened the door.

  “Follow me,” he said as he strode away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  We got in Monaro’s golf cart again. I let Ron take the front seat, and I jumped on the rear-facing bench at the back. We zipped around the maintenance concourse then out toward the arena floor. Monaro hit the brakes hard, like he was stopping for a bunny on the road, and I pressed back into my seat, hoping Ron hadn’t flown out the front.

  The basketball court floorboards were all gone, as were most sections of the black underlay. The last of the insulating rubber was being removed at the other end, suggesting it was stored on the opposite side of the arena from the floorboards.

  We followed Monaro to the very edge of the ice rink, where a low fog had formed all the way across, making the whole thing look like an eighties disco.

  “Is this normal?”

  “No,” said Monaro. “This is not normal.”

  “So how? Why?”

  “What do you know about humidity and dew points?”

  “I grew up in Connecticut,” I said. “The ice just made itself.”

  “Sure, but did you ever notice in the winter that your throat would get dry, or your nose might bleed for no reason?”

  “Yeah, because the air was dry.”

  “Exactly. Up there you get both extremes. Summer brings heat and high humidity, but winter is the exact opposite—cold with low humidity, often around thirty percent. That’s ideal for making hard, dry ice. But we never get that kind of humidity here in Florida. A dry air day here might be sixty percent, and then tomorrow it could be close to a hundred percent.”

  “So you’re saying humidity is causing this fog?”

  “It’s really got to do with dew point,” said Monaro. “But I don’t want to explode your brain, so, yeah, let’s call it humidity. And it’s death to good ice. See, we can keep it frozen by dropping the temperature, but that creates an ice pack with air bubbles, and that means poor-quality ice and a bad surface.”

  As we watched the soft fog roll across the arena floor, the radio squawked again.

  “Monaro,” he replied.

  “Boss, you’re needed in the AC machine room, like now.”

  We all clambered back into Monaro’s golf cart, and he explained as he drove.

  “See, in order to keep the ambient air comfortable for the patrons while also keeping the humidity low enough for good ice, we have to precool the air that goes into the AC system, to bring the humidity down. It’s called a dehumidification system. Basically it’s a series of pipes that use cold water to cool the incoming air, before going through to the AC system proper, which then further cools the air and drops the humidity. It drops the temperature so low we actually have to warm it before putting it back out into the arena.”

  “You heat the air in a Florida arena?” I asked.

  “Yes. The same water that precools on the front end then goes around as warmer water on the back to slightly warm the air. But the system allows us to produce the temperature we need in the ambient air while keeping the dew point—your humidity—artificially low. If we didn’t, then people would have to dress like they were in a Minnesota winter during a game. Most Floridians I know don’t even own those kinds of clothes, and the snowbirds who come down sure as hell don’t bring their winter coats with them.”

  “So you’re like your own little ecosystem in here,” I said.

  Monaro nodded. “Now you’re getting it. See, if the dew point increases, then we get fog, just like you do on a cool Connecticut morning, before the sun burns it off. In reality, it’s not burning anything; it’s just raising the temperature, and so raising the dew point. But for us the problem is that fog means the ice is melting slightly, just like on a frozen pond in New England. But freezing, thawing, and then refreezing ice over and over produces poor-quality ice and a dangerous surface.”

  “Don’t you have a Zamboni?” asked Ron. “Isn’t that what they use for ice hockey?”

  “Yeah, we’ve got a Zamboni,” said Monaro. “And it’s not ice hockey; it’s just hockey.”

  “We played hockey at my school growing up,” said Ron. “And it was played on grass. Didn’t get a lot of snow in Jamaica.”

  “That’s field hockey,” said Monaro.

  “It’s just hockey where I come from,” said Ron. “So what about the Zamboni?”

  “The Zamboni is like a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. The players’ skates rough up the surface, and a Zamboni is designed to take care of the ice quickly but temporarily. It shaves a thin layer off and pulls that ice up into a waste tank. Then it deposits clean water back onto the ice and spreads it out evenly and smooths it down using the conditioner. The layer of water is so thin that it freezes almost instantly, leaving a smooth surface. But it’s so thin and so new that the ice doesn’t stay in good condition for long. That’s why you see the Zamboni come out during every break in a hockey game. Either way, if the humidity stays up, the Zamboni fights a losing battle.”

  Monaro stopped with a jolt, a good way short of the machine room. We jumped out of the golf cart, and I instantly wished I had some of that Minnesota winter gear that Monaro had been talking about. Water was spewing out of the AC machine room into the concourse. Monaro strode right on in, splashing through the water and into the room.

  Ron shook his head—I’m sure ruining a perfectly good pair of shoes was not on his agenda. I, on the other hand, was wearing deck shoes. For the most part they were affectation. I didn’t sail, at least not enough to justify specialist footwear, and not usually without Ron. I just found them comfortable, and they looked good without socks. I figured they were designed to get wet, so I really had no excuse.