“Spicy, but you can still taste the ingredients,” Danny said to Eleanor.
Three thirteen-year-old boys, the Bixby twins and their cousin Cub Maas, were running for their lives.
They had propped the stick of an immense, illegal rocket firework (
Sky Penetrator
, it promised, in gaudy orange letters on the side) in a two-liter Mountain Dew bottle. The fuse was fizzing away at terrifying speed. The boys hurled themselves behind the recycling dumpster in the alley back of the hardware store just as the rocket lit up, a pillar of white sparks blasting out from among its tailfins. The two-liter bottle crumpled and caught fire, and a carbonized star was permanently scored into the concrete yard.
The rocket took off. Not ponderously like a space shuttle or an Apollo rocket, but more like something from a cartoon: One moment it was blasting away at the pavement, and the next it was gone into the sky on a crooked pillar of smoke. The twins saw it go but Cub was too afraid to break cover until it was well up in the air. They all saw it reach its zenith and hang there; then it exploded with a mighty roar they could feel on their cheeks.
Danny hit the deck—in this case the deck of the flatbed truck. Her gun was in her hand before the thought occurred to her, and then she was up on one knee with the firearm out in front of her, watching the red, white, and blue firework blossoming overhead in a drum roll of explosions. Zach Greer leaned over, folded his enormous mitt over the gun, and pushed it down, but a number of people in the crowd had already seen. A ripple of concerned remarks mingled with the laughter and cheers at the early incendiary
display. Even a war hero should think twice about waving a gun around. Danny heard the concern beneath the crowd noise. Even as she shoved the gun back in the holster, the blush of humiliation was back, roasting her face. She had an egg-shaped chili stain on her knee.
“It’s the Fourth of July, Sheriff,” Zach Greer whispered. He’d been in the Army during a rare lull in the endless national war program. “Lot of bang-bang gonna happen today.”
“You guys go ahead and finish the chili. I gotta find out who did that and skin him alive,” Danny said, and hopped down off the flatbed. “I vote for the Rosarita’s,” she said, and hurried away.
Danny called the station to see if anybody was on to the perps yet. Nick answered the radio: Someone said it came from behind the hardware store. But he had more important news, if Danny could come to the station right away. When she asked him what the news was, he said he didn’t think it was an open radio kind of thing.
“Kelley?” Danny said.
“Something else.”
“There’s not a 10-code for it?”
“Let’s say you have a visitor,” Nick said.
Danny wanted to ask him if it was Kelley, knew she already had the answer to that question—there was no way Kelley would dare return—and bit back further remark. She signed off.
There was nothing for it: She had to get over to the station, and the dickhead with the fireworks could meanwhile make his escape.
Danny was weaving through the crowd when Amy Cutter called her name. Over by the barber shop there was a petting zoo, as there was every year, with miniature goats and giant rabbits, several weird varieties of chicken, and Diggler, the pot-bellied pig that would (if you knew the magic words) shit on command. Amy, being the local veterinarian, was called upon to officiate over the squealing kids who chased the animals around the wire pens. Danny didn’t want to stop, but she also wanted very much to get some buddy time with Amy—a reassuring word would help a lot right now.
“You look like you just died,” Amy observed. “Love the key, though. It matches the gold in your teeth.”
Danny shrugged. “Kelley ran off, did you hear? With the Mustang.”
Bless her, Amy was immediately dismayed.
“She took the
Mustang
? It must be serious. Did she say anything? Or leave a note?”
Danny had forgotten about the note, too, in all the activity.
“Yeah, a long note. I haven’t read it yet.”
“Maybe she said where she went in it.”
“Not if she took the Mustang. She knows I’d hunt her down without remorse.”
Amy separated a kid from a struggling rabbit: “Okay, honey, bunnies can’t breathe if you squeeze their necks. Try this nice piggy, they don’t have necks. Danny, here. Now smile.”
Amy handed the rabbit to Danny, who didn’t smile, and there was a bright flash and the regional newspaper had its photo of the heroic sheriff with her Key to the Mountains and a cute bunny for the Fourth of July wrap-up edition next week. They could Photoshop the chili stain off Danny’s knee.
People congratulated Danny on the way down Main Street. It might have been gratifying, except by now she had been through too much to imagine any of these civilians had enough experience in life to qualify their opinions. A small boy pointed his finger at her and said, “peew, peew,” in imitation of gunfire. Danny was grateful to have made it past the gauntlet when she stepped through the doors of the Sheriff’s Station—and then she came up against a tan uniform of the highway patrol. A big trooper was at that moment ducking his head into his hat, so he didn’t see Danny until they collided.
“Pardon. Oh, are you Adelman?” he said.
He didn’t offer his name but it was on his chest tag, one of the five-year safety award pins:
Jordan Park
.
Although they moved apart, Danny’s nose was still full of his cologne. He kept close and dropped his voice to a whisper.
“Glad I ran into you, Sheriff. We got a situation I wanted to run by you. I drove up here to keep it off the radio.”
“I guess it’s important if you went half an hour out of your way.”
“It’s important.”
Danny nodded.
“Follow me,” she said, went through the partition into the back room, and held open the door to the ladies’ room.
“That’s who I told you about,” Nick volunteered from the radio desk.
“Thanks, Nick,” Danny said, meaning sarcasm, but instead coming off as uncharacteristically polite. “This is the one place I can get any privacy around here,” she said, and Park stepped past her into the inner sanctum. He needed to talk, and he didn’t care where he did it.
Anybody who has been in police work for more than a week is accustomed to the necessity of barging into the most private realms of strangers; without the slightest display of awkwardness at being in the women’s toilet, Park took up a position by the sink with his elbow resting on the top of the tampon-vending machine. He was a big man, Asian, with hair buzzed short. He tapped the knuckle of his forefinger against his chin, unable to be still. Danny could feel the energy fizzing off him. She leaned against the door and gestured for Park to speak. He took a breath and held it a moment, as if trying to determine where to begin.
“You haven’t had any weird incidents up here,” he said.
“No,” Danny replied. “I mean, weird how?”
“Started yesterday. My grandparents are in Korea. They called to tell me there was some kind of incident in Busan where they live, and there was all kinds of problems in Japan and China as well. In the cities. When I say yesterday I mean it was very early this morning for us, and now I can’t get through to them.”
“Is this a personal matter?” Danny couldn’t figure out why he was telling her these details.
“Haven’t you seen the news? Heard on the radio?”
Danny was ashamed to admit she’d been in a self-induced coma and hadn’t caught up with events. “The holiday keeps us pretty busy around here,” she said.
“Okay,” Park said, in the same way a man speaks before he jumps off a high diving board. “Okay. Well you know as much as anybody, probably. Fact is it’s all rumors now. If you haven’t seen the news, you haven’t missed much. They’re not reporting it. I mean they keep going to their reporter in New Delhi or wherever and there’s what looks like rioting and then they cut to something low-key, you follow? It’s like there’s a news blackout, but nobody told us about it.”
“Everything seems pretty cool around this area, though,” Danny said. “No more activity on the radio than usual. Maybe it’s only in Asia. Are you worried about your family?”
“If that was all I was worried about I sure as hell wouldn’t come crawling up this damn mountain,” Park said, irritated. Then he relented. “Nothing
personal, obviously. My boss told me to come up here. This community is on the Eisenmann Plan.”
“I don’t know what the Eisenmann Plan is.” Danny was already feeling off-kilter; this conversation was rapidly making it worse. She felt sick. She sat on the lid of the toilet, her elbows on her knees. Park wiped sweat from his upper lip.
“Me neither, until this morning,” he said. “It’s some kind of Cold War nuke evacuation plan, okay? Based on the idea of radio communications being disabled. Anyways, according to the plan, individual officers are supposed to spread out to any designated evacuation community and tell you all about it.”
“All about what?” Danny muttered. “Tell me what’s going on.” She wanted to take a nap. Or have another drink.
“If something like what’s happening overseas happens in Los Angeles,” Park said, “you’re going to inherit a hundred thousand displaced persons. Forest Peak is on the designated community list.”
Forest Peak was at maximum capacity with a thousand or so tourists in the street, and they would almost all be gone by midnight. A hundred thousand people, stuck in town indefinitely during an emergency? There wasn’t enough shelter to house them. Not even if thirty people moved into every structure in town. But that wasn’t what had shut down Danny’s mind. It was the broader implications of the thing.
Was
there actually an emergency, and the powers that be had decided not to mention it? And the emergency plan was what, fifty years old? Did nobody learn a thing from New Orleans? And how could Park and his superiors possibly think a break in the 24/7 news cycle from someplace on the other side of the world meant impending disaster in the local area? Or did it?
Park was clearly working with an incomplete set of facts. He was low-ranking, so he got this kind of assignment without being told much. Danny’s temper was heating up rapidly.
“So they sent you up here with next to no information except what your Grampy said? What the hell do they expect me to do about it?”
Park was perspiring freely. Danny waited for an answer, although the answer was obvious: Nobody knew what the Eisenmann Plan meant anymore. Or at least, certainly not Park.
“You can call my supervisor—”
“Will it help?”
“Maybe with specific stuff once there’s more information from the government. There’s three regions. We’re the Western Region. Information gets relayed somehow.”
Danny was fully awake now. “What I mean,” she said, clipping her words, “is not how the plan works, but what are we supposed to do? Are we on terror alert status? Is this a security emergency? A safety emergency? Bad weather? Did Iran launch nukes at us? They didn’t activate this plan thing just because your grandparents called.”
“I don’t know anything else, and neither does my command,” Park said. “I’m here telling you what I can, because that’s the first part of the plan. After that none of it works anyway. Used to be they’d drive a fleet of trucks up here in advance of the situation, loads of blankets and canned ravioli, right? No such trucks anymore. So it’s just me, telling you.”
Danny twisted the golden key on its ribbon. “Can you tell me anything about what happened in Korea? Or why it could happen here?
“No,” Park said. “That’s what rattled my cage. The lieutenant tells me, ‘Drive up to Forest Peak and tell them to be aware there might be a need to shift populations around per Eisenmann,’ and that was it. I had to look up what Eisenmann was. Connected that with what my grandparents said. My grandmother told me people were running and screaming down the street like
Gwoemul
was on the block, but there wasn’t anything there. There wasn’t an explosion or people with guns or anything. It was simple panic, for no apparent reason. If that’s what’s been happening everywhere…”
He ran out of words and his shoulders drooped. He picked at the decal on the front of the tampon machine, unaware he was doing it.
“Okay,” Danny said. “I guess you did your duty. You told me there might be a situation, and if there is, there used to be a plan to deal with it, and good luck. Well I got a situation here, as it happens. I don’t have enough deputies to handle the crowd as it is. So unless you’re in a hurry to get back, I could sure use the extra uniformed presence. Can you stick around another three-four hours? By then I can call down the hill and if I learn anything, I’ll let you know right away.”
Park let out a long, gusty breath. Danny had thought he would resist staying an extra minute after he discharged his duty in this remote corner of nowhere—but in fact, he was relieved.
“Please,” he said.
“Welcome to Forest Peak,” Danny said, and they went out together into the back room, where Nick glanced up from some paperwork at the radio desk. He seemed intensely interested to know what was going on, but knew better than to ask. At this moment, a boy charged into the waiting area.
He hollered, “There’s a dead guy!” bent double, and threw up in the potted plant by the door.
Weaver was eating soft serve ice cream. Patrick never touched the stuff. Weaver seemed to be happy, and the watchfulness he’d developed earlier had faded away.
For once, in this reassuringly hick town with its simple pleasures, Patrick was content. They’d both seen the lady sheriff go Rambo up there on the back of the flatbed truck, and this had furnished them with conversation for several minutes. Nothing relaxed Patrick more than someone he didn’t know making a fool of themselves. It diverted his self-ridicule. He even felt like Weaver was his old approachable self again.
“I should get Rachael Ray up here next year,” Patrick said.
“Do you know her?”
“She was the little bitty brunette I introduced you to at the party.”
“Who was the tall guy, again?”
“Nathan Fillion.”
“He’s hot.”