Creatures of the Storm (9 page)

For one moment she didn’t think he was going
to do it. Then, almost in slow motion, he pulled the keys from his
pocket and handed them over.

“Thank you. And Michael,
please,
please
keep this in mind. If you give me one ounce of shit about
this, ever, I will gladly have that police officer take you out
back and shoot you into tiny little pieces. Are we
clear?”

His back straightened at that. He stripped
off his flesh-colored latex gloves and joined her in the hallway.
They didn’t speak a word to each other as they walked back to the
lobby.

Sheriff Peck was already having a low,
intense conversation with Cindy and Fender. Cindy was wringing her
hands and ready to cry; Fender was goggling. Rebecca, meanwhile,
stood well to one side, leaning in the doorway that led to the
Admin wing and watching the cop with an expression made up of equal
parts wariness and disdain. It was an expression that Lucy had seen
before, and not only on Rebecca, but on black men and women of all
ages, whenever there was a cop in sight.

“…meeting tonight?” Peck was saying to Cindy
as they entered from the laboratory wing.

“Yes,” she said. “You bet.”

“’Cause you should,” he told her, clearly not
listening to her answer. “You really should.”

“I have kids, Sheriff, I’ll be there for
sure.”

“Terrible thing,” Fender chimed in. “Totally
sucks.”

Peck’s attention snapped to him. “What do you
know about it, my friend?”

Fender’s eyes got big and he took a step
back. “Nothing, Sheriff. Not a thing, you know that.”

Peck focused on him like a cougar fixing on a
quail. “I don’t know anything like that, Fender. But I know you’re
not coming to the meeting tonight, are you?’

Fender started shaking his head before the
cop stopped talking. “Heck, no, Sheriff. No way.”

“’Cause you have no kids, my friend. You have
no family. You have your tacky little trailer way out here on the
edge of forever, and you have no business bothering the decent
people of this town. It’s none of your concern.”

Fender was almost pleading. “Shit, your
honor, come on, you’ve rousted my place twice already and you
didn’t find a thing! You got no reason–”

The Sheriff was almost nose to crooked nose
with the long-haired man. “Oh, I have reasons, my friend,” he said,
still staring him down. “I have good reasons. But I don’t have to
tell you about them, now do I?”

Apparently the phrase
‘probable cause’ hadn’t made it into his vocabulary quite
yet
, Lucy mused. “Here we are, Sheriff
Peck,” she said loudly, stepping forward to pull the cop’s
attention away from her trembling neighbor. “What can we do for
you?”

Peck took his time. When he did face her, his
eyes had lost some of their hardness, and his smile was
professionally bland. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said, “but I had a
few questions. For both of you, as it happens.”

Lucy was surprised in spite of herself. “You
two have met?” she said, looking at the Sheriff, then at Steinberg,
then back at the Sheriff again.

“A couple of times,” the Sheriff said mildly.
“Nice friendly chats.”

“Yes,” Steinberg said, as if he had swallowed
a turd. “Friendly.”

Must have been about the
last ATV incident
, Lucy thought. She had
been under the impression that it had never gone beyond a simple
traffic ticket. Now... Steinberg had dealt with the Sheriff
himself? And more than once? Yet again, and not for the first time
that day, Lucy wondered how much she had missed while working all
alone up in her lab, mourning for her lost love and generally
hating the world.

“Okay,” she said, recovering. “That’s fine.
I’m glad you’re here in any event.”

He raised a well-trimmed eyebrow at that.
“Really?”

“Yes. You take care of your business first,
then I have something important to talk to you about before you
go.”

“Oh… kay,” he said,
sounding strangely hesitant. Lucy thought maybe
he wasn’t used to talking to such decisive
women
,
or maybe
he couldn’t imagine any business more important than his
own
. Either way, he seemed almost relieved
to focus his attention on the other scientist in the room. “Dr.
Steinberg,” he said.

Michael regarded him, smirking.

“The ATV,” he said.

Michael continued to smirk.

Peck sighed deeply. “All right, if that’s the
way you want to play it…” He pulled a small notebook from the
breast pocket of his sharply ironed shirt and referred to it with a
barely noticeable squint. Lucy wondered how he managed to keep that
crisp crease in his clothing in the midst of a major storm. She
also wondered how long it would be before the good Sheriff broke
down and got himself some reading glasses. “At approximately 2:30
this afternoon, a silver BMW was forced off a private driveway
connected to North Ridge Road. The driver subsequently lost
control, rolled down an embankment at high speed, and collided with
a rocky impediment causing serious injury to the driver and the
destruction of the vehicle.”

Lucy said, “Jesus Christ!” and turned to
Steinberg. “Michael?”

Michael shrugged. “Impediment, Sheriff Peck?
You gave your officers Word-A-Day calendars as Christmas gifts,
didn’t you? Admit it.”

Peck didn’t react. “Victims and witnesses
identified a bright red off-road vehicle as the reason the BMW left
the road in the first place.”

“Astonishing,” Michael said.

“To my knowledge, this facility has the only
bright red ATV in town.”

“Again, remarkable coincidence.”

Peck sighed again and put the notebook away.
“Look, son–”

Steinberg’s expression twisted into an ugly
new shape. “I am not your son,” he said with all the venom he could
muster.

Peck’s eyes narrowed. His
jaw tightened. “No,” he said, “you’re not. Because if you
were
my
son, you
little prick, you wouldn’t talk to anybody like that unless you
expected to get your head busted, and you sure as shit wouldn’t
talk to a police officer that way.”

A cold blue current slithered down Lucy’s
back. She took a step forward. “Now, hold on, hold on, let’s–”

Peck’s hand came up fast, so fast that for a
moment, Lucy wasn’t sure if he had a gun in it. He didn’t. All he
had was a finger pointing straight up from a canted elbow in a
“wait one moment, let me finish my point” gesture.

“I’ll get to you in a minute, Doctor,” Peck
said without looking at her. “Let me finish with this one first.”
His eyes never left Steinberg, whose smirk was beginning to
falter.

“Did you take the ATV out today?” he asked,
very steadily.

Steinberg cleared his throat and darted a
look at Cindy, then at Lucy. “No,” he said, and looked away.

“You want to try that again?”

More boldly: “No,” he said. “I’ve been
working in the lab all afternoon. Since lunch. Which I ate in my
office.” He smirked again, a ghost of his original expression.
“Chicken salad.”

Peck’s head swiveled to face Cindy Bergstrom.
She seemed to jolt when he looked at her, as if he’d touched her
with a live wire. “You agree, Cindy?”

Christ
, Lucy thought,
does he know
everybody here?
Okay, the Bergstroms had
been in town a long time, and he’d been Sheriff for a thousand
years, so, fine, he knew a lot of people, but still …

Cindy looked at her desk, at the floor, at
the walls, everywhere but at Peck. “Yes. I mean, yes, sir. Um…”

“He was here all afternoon?”

“As far as I know.”

“And the ATV stayed right where it is?”

“Yes.”

“And you have no idea how it got all muddy
and warm, just sitting there in the rain?”

Shit
, Lucy thought. So she wasn’t the only Junior G-Man in
town.

Cindy’s eyes got big as golf balls. Lucy
could see white all the way around. “No,” she said in the tiniest
voice imaginable.

“I don’t even have the keys,” Steinberg said
defensively. He managed to pull Peck’s gaze away from the
receptionist; Cindy almost collapsed the instant she was released.
“Doctor Wonderful there keeps them on her ample person at all
times.”

This time Peck did look at
her. Into her, with his head tipped forward, his high prominent
brow shadowing ghostly blue eyes. He looked at her without a word,
as if to say,
So now you’re going to join
this monkeyfuck
?

Shit
, she said to herself.
Shit shit
SHIT
. This was the last of it. This was
the end. When the Oversight Committee heard of this – and they
would – they were certain to pull the plug. Or worse yet, they’d
leave the facility right where it was and get somebody else to run
it, somebody who didn’t let psycho employees run people over,
somebody who hadn’t spent seven years kissing ass and playing the
game, and the last year pissing people off.

Great fucking
choice
, she told herself. Do the right
thing – turn the little maniac over to the cops so he would finally
get what was coming to him…and lose the facility. Or do the wrong
thing and cover his pimply ass one more time, to save the Station.
And, incidentally, herself.

Like it was even a contest.

She fished the keys out of her pocket. “Right
here, Sheriff. Only one set, and I have ‘em.”

“And you’ve had them …?”

“All day. Since Monday, in fact. Maybe
there’s another red ATV in town after all. Tourists or visitors.
Somebody who came over the ridge to raise hell.”

He stared at her. And stared. And stared.
Then he shook his head and turned away. “Frankly,” he said,
sounding truly disgusted, “I don’t have time to deal with this
right now. I’ll be back when the storm breaks. You all stay in town
‘till then, won’t you?” He stopped and looked over his shoulder,
straight at Michael Steinberg. “Won’t you?”

Steinberg smirked one more time and added a
shrug. “Where would I go?” he said. “After all, I work here, don’t
I?” he gave a sidelong glance at Lucy. She felt her stomach flop
like a dying fish.

The Sheriff was already halfway to the door
before Lucy realized he was leaving. She quick-stepped to follow
him, moving as fast she could without actually breaking into a run.
Damned if she was going to run after him like some eager
schoolgirl.

She caught up with the sheriff inside the
entrance. The sky outside had darkened even more as the hidden sun
began to set. The rain was thick and dull as molten pewter, coming
down harder than ever. Everything, including the palms and the
succulents, even the carefully cultivated California poppies,
looked ancient and lifeless in the dying light.

“Sheriff Peck?”

He turned on her with an expression that
clearly said he had already taken about as much as he could stand.
“What?”

“You have a town meeting tonight,
correct?”

He did everything but tap his foot with
impatience. “Yes. So?”

“I want you to urge everybody who shows up to
leave town for a while. Immediately. At least until the storm
breaks.”

That stopped him. He shook his head as if to
clear his ears. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I know tonight’s meeting is about the little
girls who are missing, but look, we have data here that indicates
it’s going to continue to rain like this for at least the next two
days, maybe longer.”

He set his jaw. “Not a chance.”

“No, it’s not a chance, Sheriff, it’s a fact.
There’s no way this town’s drainage or emergency personnel can
handle what’s going to happen. What’s already happening. You know
that.”

“When exactly did you become an expert on
what my people can and can’t handle?”

“Your people, Sheriff?”

“The people of this town are my people,
yes.”

They stared at each other for a long moment,
sizing each other up, but Lucy wouldn’t let it go. “You don’t have
to call it an evacuation if you don’t want to. Just tell people it
might be safer if they–”

“Oh, for …” He rubbed his eyes for a moment,
clearly trying to control himself. “It’s only been raining for
three hours, Dr. Armbruster. And you’re telling me I’m supposed to
tell the whole town to up and go? And based on what, again? On the
word of a scientist that nobody’s ever heard of, who I met this
afternoon? I don’t think so.”

“It’s not about me, Sheriff. It’s about the
facts. I can show you.”

“I have to go,” he said, and fit his
flat-brimmed hat back on his crew cut. “Let’s talk tomorrow, if
there’s a reason to.” He pulled open the glass door and almost
threw himself out.

“Sheriff, come on!”

“Tomorrow!” he bellowed over his shoulder,
and disappeared into the billowing darkness. Ten steps from the
building, he faded into the mist like a bad dream.

Lucy stood in front of the glass doors for a
long time, staring into the slate gray storm as the last of the
daylight dissolved. Finally she turned around and faced the
desk.

They were waiting for her. Looking at her.
She didn’t have a single clue what to say.

She spread her hands. “Go home if you want.
Stay if you want. It’s safer here on high ground no matter what
happens. There are cots and bedding in storage, but…you know that.
Of course you know that.”

Cindy Bergstrom was gazing at her from under
her cap of curls, still looking like a well-whipped dog. Rebecca
Falmouth-Hanson was almost glowing with ready-to-serve sympathy.
Fender, as usual, did not seem entirely clear on what had just
happened. And Michael Steinberg was doing his best not to laugh out
loud.