Storm Runners (12 page)

T
he three of them sat in the beach chairs in the bed of the pickup truck, the plastic ponchos efficiently shedding the raindrops. The dogs were outfitted in the same gear, with the hoods bunched behind their necks and the tails of the ponchos trimmed for their shorter bodies. They squinted into the rain with the air of veterans. Ted came up with a pint of Scoresby that slowly made the rounds.

Stromsoe looked up at the tower in doubtful wonder. Frankie’s secret brew had been percolating for an hour now. The tops of the five-gallon canisters were still glowing a light blue color as the last of the gases sputtered and hissed and climbed into the air, then wriggled
into the sky like smoky embers. Before the rain had started, he’d been able to watch the vapors rise up a hundred feet into the air, but now Stromsoe could follow them only a few yards before they vanished into the wet dark.

A few minutes later the containers rocked and shuddered and the blue light dwindled out. They sat smokeless and silent, no more interesting than empty paint cans.

“What’s your forecast?” Ted asked. “Unaccelerated.”

Frankie was already nodding. “I came up with half an inch. NOAA says half an inch. UCSD says half an inch too.”

“I’m liking this,” said Ted.

“I want double at towers one and four,” said Frankie. “Maybe even triple.”

“Don’t get your hopes too far up.”

“What are hopes for?”

Stromsoe sat with Sadie’s gray muzzle on his leg, feeling the rain hit his poncho. His shoes and socks were soaked. For the first few minutes the rain was light, then it almost imperceptibly gathered force until the drops were springing off the bed and roof. Stromsoe listened to the growing volume of it against the metal and the ground.

Frankie sat next to him with her feet up on the bed side and the rain streaming off the brim of her fedora. Her work boots were heavily oiled and shed the rain.

Ted was on the other side of her, cupping a smoke in one hand and wobbling the Scotch bottle on his knee with the other.

“That’s the most beautiful sound on earth,” said Frankie. “Don’t you think?”

“Chet Atkins,” said Ted.

“And you, Matt?”

“I like how it roars on the truck.”

“I like how much time it took to get here,” said Frankie. “It’s a closed system, you know—and it’s hundreds of millions of years old. We could get hit by a water molecule right now that evaporated up from the Atlantic a few million years ago, rained down in Egypt thousands of years later, ran with the Blue Nile south to Ethiopia, then perked down into the ground. Later it came up in a village well and somebody used it to water a barley plant, so it evaporated again and got swept up by a front that dumped on Bangkok, then it ran off into the South China Sea. Then it wobbled along the Tropic of Cancer over to the North Pacific, where it became part of the ocean for a few million years before the northeast trade winds led the currents all the way to this front off California. Where our little molecule rose up, found a particle, and became a raindrop that hit a dog lying in the back of a truck.”

Silence then, except for the rain.

“Which dog?” asked Ted.

Frankie backhanded his leg.

“Wow,” said Stromsoe. “That’s a mouthful, Frankie.”

“Or not,” she said. “Every drop has a different story.”

She pulled the bottle from Ted, took a small sip, and handed it off to Stromsoe.

“God
damn
I’m happy right now,” she said.

“You’re a cheap date, Frankie,” said Ted.

“That’s me. Two sips of Scotch and I’m good to go. And I know I’m verbose. It’s bad. I just love this stuff.
This.
”

She stood up and jumped off the side of the truck bed to the ground. Ace and Sadie took the smart way, off the tailgate.

Stromsoe watched her walk out into the chaparral, raise her face and arms to the sky.

“She got straight A’s at UCLA,” said Ted.

Stromsoe dropped out of the truck, his landing padded by his rain-swollen shoes and socks. He walked over to Frankie and the dogs, stopping not right next to them but nearby.

“What?” asked Frankie.

Stromsoe couldn’t remember being at a simple loss for words in many years.

“Looks like rain,” he said.

BACK IN THE barn office Frankie and Ted pulled the rainfall data off the tower sensors while the dogs sprawled on the red braided rug in front of an electric heater. Stromsoe made instant coffee, took cups to the scientists, then pulled up a chair with the dogs.

He listened to the rain hitting the tin barn roof overhead, an amplified clatter that sounded much wetter than the lessening slant of drops visible against the yard light outside the window.

He thought of a trip he’d taken with Hallie and Billy down to Costa Rica one year to see a live volcano and collect seashells. They got caught in a thunderstorm on the Arenal volcano and Stromsoe had found an old sheet of corrugated tin that he held up as shelter. They sat for a while and watched the big boulders and molten lava heave forth from the cauldron in the distance while the rain thundered down on their roof. Stromsoe had felt particularly strong at that moment, captaining his little family on the journey of life, protecting them, showing them a good time.

Now, a lifetime later, he shuddered.

“It’s going to be a while,” said Frankie. “Don’t feel like you have to wait around in wet shoes. I’ll call you first thing in the morning if you want.”

“I’ll just sit here if you don’t mind.”

“There’s sandwich stuff in the fridge.”

“That’d be good.”

BY MIDNIGHT THE rain had stopped, though Frankie said there was probably another cell out there swirling in.

“Come on in here, Matt,” she called to him from the office. “I’ll walk you through this part.”

Stromsoe stood next to Ted and looked over Frankie’s shoulder as she went online and collected the NOAA rainfall data. Then she linked on to the Santa Margarita Ecological Preserve Web site for real-time downloads from their weather stations. She paused on a camera feed from the Santa Margarita river gorge. In the scant moonlight the runoff pounded over the smooth rocks of the old riverbed. Frankie quietly murmured. Then she clicked off, printed some pages, and highlighted certain numbers with a yellow marker. She said the state and county figures wouldn’t be available until morning.

Then she collected the data from the four towers. Stromsoe and Ted stood and watched over her shoulder as the information was relayed to her computer.

What looked to Stromsoe like several tables of difficult-to-understand statistical information took her just seconds to read and digest.

“Gentlemen,” she said quietly.
“We just tripled what a rainstorm gave everyone else!”

She stood up, knocked over her chair, and flew into Ted’s open arms. The dogs hustled over to participate. She slapped her uncle’s back, then released him and turned to Stromsoe.

She offered her hand and he shook it.

“This is more than excellent,” she said.

“Nice to be here for it,” said Stromsoe.

“You brought the luck,” she said.

“That doesn’t sound very scientific,” said Stromsoe.

“What science says is that we have to repeat our results time and time again,” she said. “This could be some of your good luck. This could be an aberration. It’s a beginning. We have to make it work predictably, reliably.”

“Not right now we don’t,” said Ted. “It’s pushing one in the morning.”

“Celebration at my house,” said Frankie.

She righted her chair and sat down in front of her computer again. She leafed through the pages she’d printed, checking the numbers, shaking her head.

Then she looked up at Stromsoe with one of the nicest smiles he’d ever seen.

THE CELEBRATION DIDN’T last long. Frankie brought out thick dry socks for the men, traded her work boots for enormous sheepskin lounging boots, and got a fire going in the living room. They pulled the sofa closer to the flame and sat three across, close like children. Ted poured three Scotches, a light one with water for Frankie. The dogs were there too, asleep and stinking of wet hair.

Frankie told Stromsoe about finding her great-great-grandfather’s
laboratory in the old Bonsall barn, how the first time she walked into it she knew it would be hers someday, the smells and the books and the chemicals still in their containers and his mountains of notes and formulas and experimental data. It had been very difficult to find—most of the Hatfield relatives assumed it was long gone. They’d never laid eyes on it. And the published lore that she had unearthed over the years stated—unconvincingly, to Frankie—that Charley had set fire to the lab before he was run out of San Diego for creating too much rain. She was sixteen when she’d found his old laboratory. She said that opening the barn door was opening the rest of her life. She would study weather and accelerate moisture. She was surprised that the other descendants of Charles Hatfield were not particularly interested in the barn or the formulas. To her it was like losing interest in finding the Holy Grail or Noah’s Ark. She told Stromsoe that she’d seen the dumb Burt Lancaster movie
The Rainmaker
and wished they’d have shown some of Great-great-grandpa’s scientific side rather than his dreamy hustler’s side.

“He sold sewing machines most of the time he was rainmaking,” she said, yawning. “He never made any real money at it. But he always wore nice clothes, a tie, and a good hat. The movie should have been more…I don’t know, more something…”

A moment of quiet, then, as the fire burned and popped and Ace’s legs twitched in a dream of pursuit.

Then Frankie Hatfield’s head lolled onto Stromsoe’s shoulder and she was out.

Stromsoe looked over at Ted, who sipped his Scotch and looked into the fire. “Par for the course,” he said. “Frances can’t drink more than a thimbleful and stay upright.”

Stromsoe sat awhile. Ted made another drink and sat on a chair not so close to the fire.

“I checked you out through the Web and your boss,” said Ted.

“Good.”

“Learn to shoot with one eye yet?”

“I’ll find out soon,” said Stromsoe.

“I wondered about the two years in Florida.”

“Lost.”

“I figured,” said Ted. “I might have done the same.”

“It’s nice to be back.”

Ace whimpered and his legs kept twitching.

“A guy named Choat at the L.A. Department of Water and Power tried to buy her out of the rainmaking formula,” said Ted. “My theory is, if you follow up on this Cedros fellow, he’ll lead you back to DWP.”

“I have and he did,” said Stromsoe. He told Ted about tracking Cedros to the DWP. “Did Choat threaten you?”

“Oh, no, not at all. Very civil, in a hard-ass kind of way. He offered Frankie seven-fifty a year and all the support staff she wanted, so long as her procedures and formulas belonged to DWP. Said she could set up shop on any DWP land in the state, and they own thousands of square miles and rivers and lakes and mountains. Three-quarters of a million bucks a year! She turned him down. It drove Choat bugshit that we might have our hands on a moisture accelerator that worked.”

“How did Choat know about this?” asked Stromsoe.

“He’d been agitating her and other Hatfield descendants for years, off and on. Always poking around, looking for the barn, the formula, his papers, whatever. Just staying in touch. When he got wind that she’d found the barn, he was all over her.”

Stromsoe thought. “Cedros was his threat,” he said.

“Sure,” said Ted. “Shake Frankie up. Take her picture. But I also think he broke into the barn one night. There were footprints, and some of the files were laying out. Like somebody was looking for something.”

“The formula.”

“Yup. You’re signed on for a month, right?”

Stromsoe nodded.

“If Choat sent Cedros, Choat’s ass is in the wind,” said Ted.

“Not if Cedros keeps his mouth shut. He didn’t say anything about Choat. He says he stalked Frankie because he likes the way she looks.”

“A jury could believe that,” said Ted.

“I almost did,” said Stromsoe.

They watched the fire burn. Outside the breeze came up and a shower of raindrops hit the roof then stopped.

“I don’t think this DWP stuff is over,” said Ted. “Choat made my scalp crawl, a quality few men have. Maybe you need to apply some pressure. If Cedros is protecting Choat, there might be a way to pry them apart. Cedros can’t be happy about the charges.”

“You think like a cop,” said Stromsoe.

“I’m just a weatherman. Though I did shoot down some planes over Korea in ’51.”

“I might be able to make Cedros see the light,” said Stromsoe. “If he rolls on his boss, we’ve got what we need.”

“I like the sound of that.”

“Frankie might have to call Birch Security, make it clear to Dan that she still wants me on the job. When a stalker goes to jail and gets charged, that usually means the PI is done.”

“She already did that,” said Ted. “Actually, I made the call myself.
She thought it would look better coming from a man. Frankie tends to worry. Sometimes she worries too much, and she begins to see herself as hysterical. Which of course makes her hysterical. Gets even more worried.”

Unworried, Frankie started snoring.

“There’s been a reporter calling her,” said Ted. “From a local paper. Frankie asked me to put him off, so I’ve been giving him the runaround.”

“Good,” said Stromsoe. “Let him find another story.”

Stromsoe got up without waking her and arranged her on the sofa with her head on one of the pillows. He found a throw blanket by the fireplace and covered her.

“Something I don’t understand,” he said. “If the Department of Water and Power had a way to triple the rainfall, would that help them or hurt them?”

“Help them, I guess,” said Ted. “Help everybody.”

“Then why didn’t Frankie let them finance the research, get rich, and make rain for the world?”