Storm Runners (25 page)

T
he next evening Stromsoe sat outside Frankie’s office at Fox News while she collected weather data and worked up her charts and tables for the night’s forecasts. Through the window he watched her download the National Weather Service five-hundredmillibar surface maps and consult the Doppler radar, giving them her usual careful scrutiny.

She looked up at him and mouthed one word:
rain.

He liked the hustle bustle of the news studio, the good-humored hurry of the people, the smokers’ conclaves in the parking lot, the pronounced facial changes of the newscasters when they went on and off camera.

It was Friday, and the fourth day in a row that he had driven Frankie to work, sat outside her office, loitered about the various locations as she broadcast her stories, then driven her home and slept with her. Since Tavarez’s promise of safety, Stromsoe had watched her even more closely than before. He watched her at work and at home, during errands, at the barn. At times it felt intrusive. But he knew Mike and he knew that Frankie was many miles from safe. At least that was what he had to believe. He enjoyed being around her, couldn’t hide it and didn’t try.

The pretty young receptionist called him “Mr. Stormso” and he could feel her eyes inquiringly upon him as he signed the visitors’ log each day. The misnomer made him think of the
corrido
in which he played the villain, the evil swine Matt Storm. Three different people had taken him aside to let him know how “happy,” “carefree,” and “together” Frankie had been lately, plainly implying it had something to do with him. Her producer, Darren, had asked to see his gun. The production staff fetched him coffee for a day, then offered him lunchroom privileges. They told him to always make a new pot if he poured the last cup, and to make it strong. They told him that Janice in makeup was the best coffeemaker, so if he wasn’t confident, get her to do it. Stromsoe felt large and out of place but accepted for what he was.

Frankie filed her first weather story of the day—just a more-to-come-later “teaser”—from outside the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park. The afternoon was chilly with a curt breeze off the Pacific and a pale gray sky above. She wore a tweedy trouser-sweater-and-jacket ensemble, vaguely English, which she had purchased by catalog and received two days ago in the mail. Stromsoe thought that all she needed was a bird gun and a dog to be ready for the hunt.

“Rain Sunday, or will it be Monday? I’m Frankie Hatfield in Balboa Park and I’ll have the storm schedule just a little later, right here on Fox.”

A few minutes later she delivered her first forecast story of the evening, which was aired live. She predicted rain by late Sunday night, with showers continuing into late Monday morning, followed by a clear, cool, blustery afternoon and evening.

“The National Weather Service is calling for up to one inch of rain for the city of San Diego, coast and valleys, but up to two inches in the local mountains. So it looks like our wet October is about to continue. Stay tuned and stay dry. Or go out and get wet. Either way works for me. I’m Frankie Hatfield, Fox News, and I’ll be back from the Gaslamp in less than half an hour.”

As Stromsoe drove her to the Gaslamp Quarter downtown, Frankie confessed that she wrote and broadcast only “about three hundred words a night.” Looking out the window, she told him that this number equaled approximately thirty Chinese cookie fortunes or “ten long-winded occasional cards.” She got a calculator from her purse, tapped away. A moment later she announced that she was paid “about three dollars and fifty cents a word—even for ‘a’ and ‘the.’ Am I overpaid?”

“You sign autographs and endorse the paychecks too. That’s two more words, per.”

“I make a lot of dough for writing fifteen hundred words a week. But I tithe very generously to my Fallbrook church though I almost never attend.”

“That’s called covering your bets.”

“No, no. I believe in Him. I believe in all that. Truly. I just hate standing up in a church and saying, hi, I’m Frankie, then shaking
hands with strangers. I didn’t go to church to see
them,
did I? Girls need privacy. Tall ones need extra. I wish there were still drive-in churches. I’d gas up the Mustang and go, never roll down the window except to get the speaker box in and out. Am I antisocial?”

“Overpaid and antisocial.”

“I knew it.”

She seemed to dwell on this. “I need two of me. One can broadcast and go to church, the other can stay in bed with you until noon every day, then collect the rivers of the world and work on the rainmaking formula.”

“I wouldn’t get much done,” he said. “If you didn’t let me out of bed until noon.”

“I know. You’ve got bad men to catch and people to protect.”

Stromsoe guided his truck down Fourth, following the Fox News van into a small parking lot.

“Matt, when you don’t work for me anymore, could you live with me anyway? You could take San Diego jobs. There’s plenty of bad guys for you to fight. I’ve got way too many acres for one person and the dogs like you.”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“I’ve felt your heart beating next to mine, so I know damned well you’ve thought about it.”

Stromsoe hated this conversation as any man would, even one uncomplicatedly in love. “You’re right. I don’t know, Frankie. That’s too far ahead.”

“Bah, humbug, dude. I just asked you to move in with me.”

“Let’s get through this first.”

“I was checking my status with you too.”

“Your status with me is off the charts, Frankie.”

“Time will tell if that’s true.”

Stromsoe turned off the engine and looked at her. “You recently lapsed virgins can be difficult.”

“I could get pissed off at that.”

“I figured you might laugh instead.”

She smiled and blushed magnificently.

STROMSOE FLEW THEM to San Francisco later that night, a surprise for which he had only somewhat prepared her.

He thought that a day in a city beyond the immediate reach of Mike Tavarez would be good for Frankie and good for himself. He was tired of guarding and thought she must be tired of being guarded.

Frankie played along with the surprise, pretending to relish the small mysteries of a one-day escape—what city? Warm or cool? Is there a river? When did you think of this? You’re a crafty little Mr. Man, aren’t you?—until he realized she wasn’t pretending. She was happy and playful and in his eyes unconditionally beautiful.

They stayed at the Monaco and ate expansively at the Washington Square Bar and Grill, which was recommended by the concierge. Their room was small and furnished with brightly striped wallpaper, a canopied and lushly pillowed bed, and brass accents and knickknacks. It was dizzyingly erotic and Frankie didn’t pull the “Shhhh…” sign off the outside of their door until noon.

While she showered Stromsoe downloaded to his laptop the audio of Choat and Cedros’s conversation up on the Owens River, forwarded by Dan Birch. He took it down to the lobby and sat by the fire and listened to it twice. Good stuff.
I want you to burn down
Frankie Hatfield’s barn with all her rainmaking stuff in it.
He called Choat’s home number—another trophy ferreted out by Birch Security Solutions—and had a brief conversation with the man.

Then he and Frankie took a taxi to Fisherman’s Wharf for lunch. Stromsoe was impressed by how much a tall, well-loved woman could eat. They drank Mendocino Zinfandel with the meal and Stromsoe gradually felt at one with the padding of the booth. He felt the desire to drink more but not to oblivion—nothing at all like he’d felt in Miami. His pinned bones hurt slightly in the San Francisco chill, and he was aware of places where nails had been removed, and his legs, in spite of the running he’d done since Miami, ached mightily in unusual places.

Thirty-eight years old and counting, he thought.

You are what you are.

Hi, Billy. Hi, Hal. I love you. I will always love you.

“You look relaxed,” she said.

“I could sit here for a week. Like a half-crocked Zen Buddhist.”

“Let’s. I’m not afraid to be lazy.”

She signaled the waiter for another bottle.

That night they had dinner at the restaurant attached to the hotel. Frankie wore a dress that she bought after lunch, a backless black velvet number with a criminally modest neckline above which a string of pearls moved in the candlelight. Stromsoe wore the same new suit he’d worn to Dan Birch’s office three weeks ago to be interviewed for a job involving a weather lady, remarking to himself on the great good fortune it had brought him.

After dinner they walked the busy streets around the Monaco. Stromsoe, a product of ordered suburbs, and Frankie, who grew up in languid Fallbrook, liked the way that contradictory things
in downtown San Francisco were packed in together—the theaters right there with the massage parlors, the antiquarian bookstore next to the adult arcade, the high-end restaurants and the hole-in-the-wall tobacco and newsstands. They watched as a tide of released theater patrons flooded the bums on the sidewalk, overcoats and scarves overwhelming the knit caps and cardboard signs. The war on poverty, Frankie remarked. The traffic lurched past them in a frantic parade and the woofers pounded from the youngsters’ cars and the shrieks of the bellmen’s whistles echoed up and down the streets. The city seemed hell-bent, self-important, and wonderful.

They stopped at the Redwood Room for dessert and liqueur. The menu said that the entire room—the bar, floor, walls, ceiling, and columns—had been constructed from the wood of a single redwood tree. Frankie was muttering something against loggers when she read that the tree was actually found in a river, toppled by a ferocious Northern California storm.

“See?” she said. “Behind every good thing there’s a river.”

“Next time we’ll go to a river you haven’t captured,” said Stromsoe.

“I’ve never seen the San Joaquin up by Mammoth.”

“Neither have I.”

“I love you, Stromsoe.”

“I love you, Frankie.”

“I can’t ever be Hallie and Billy.”

“I know.”

“But maybe…who knows?”

He brushed a dark curl from her forehead. “Yeah. Who really does know?”

T
he sky was bowed with clouds when their jet touched down in San Diego on Sunday, Halloween morning. Frankie had spent most of the hour flight craning her neck at the starboard window to watch the storm front lumbering in from the northwest.

“It’s big,” she said. “It’s awesome.”

Stromsoe saw the excitement in her face. She photographed the clouds with the same tiny camera she’d used to shoot John Cedros while he shot her.

When she was finished with the camera Stromsoe scrolled back through the images of Cedros. He was pleased that the young man had shown the courage to wear the wire on Choat. Stromsoe hadn’t
thought that Choat would be foolish enough to burn down someone’s property, but he’d also seen the disregard for consequences in his eyes just before Choat had slugged him in the face. This kind of self-granted privilege was a quality shared by nearly every psychopath and violent felon that Stromsoe had ever met, and by several men he knew who were very powerful and had never done one hour in a jail.

They met Ted at the barn. He wore a twelve-gauge shotgun over his shoulder in a sling improvised from leather belts and plastic ties. At his side was a western holster with a prodigious revolver in it. The holster tip was tied to his thigh like a gunfighter’s.

“You kinda scare me,” said Frankie.

“I know what I’m doing.”

She hugged him, the shotgun protruding crosswise between them. “Ted, you’re a true sweetheart,” Frankie said.

“They can’t fool me twice.”

Stromsoe said nothing but in all his years of law enforcement he had never seen anything good happen to a civilian carrying two guns.

He heated cans of stew while Frankie and Ted—shotgun unslung and propped by the door—huddled over surface maps and the real-time weather-station feed coming in from the San Margarita Reserve. NOAA radio babbled on in a stream of static out of San Diego, the meteorologist calling Lindbergh Field
Line
bergh Field while the Weather Channel played silently from a TV atop one of the refrigerators in which Frankie stored her secret potions.

AN HOUR LATER they set off in Ted’s pickup truck, Ace and Sadie whining with excitement and a sprinkle of rain hatching the scents of sagebrush and wild buckwheat from the hillsides around them. Stromsoe noted that they now carried twelve five-gallon canis
ters rather than the usual eight. Ted had installed a gun rack against the rear cab window which now cradled the shotgun and its cobbled strap. Frankie gripped Stromsoe’s knee with a strong hand.

“It’s going to take,” she said. “It’s going to take this time.”

“Did you tighten up the suspension ratios?” asked Ted.

“Yes,” said Frankie. “But that’s all I can say.”

“That’s all I need to know,” said Ted.

At tower one Stromsoe helped Ted get the three heavy canisters onto the platform so that Frankie could activate the solutions. The copper-chlorine smell was clear but not overly strong. This time, it was Stromsoe who climbed the towers and hauled up the containers. Ted wanted both feet on the ground, he said, and Stromsoe noted with respect that Ted never stopped looking around, scanning the bushes and the dirt roads and the hillsides for any sign of Mike Tavarez’s hired killers. Stromsoe’s .380 was on his waist, secured by the Clipdraw, exactly where it had been nearly every waking moment for the last three weeks.

Then Stromsoe climbed down and Frankie climbed up. He handed her the heavy red toolbox, which clunked to the platform with a rattle of steel.

“I think the world of you, you big lug,” said Frankie. “But you know the drill.”

Stromsoe walked nearly to the truck and turned his back while Frankie tended her formula. He heard the clicking sound of a lighter, then the soft ignition of propane. Ted stood guard on the road, the shotgun sling resting over his shoulder.

As before, Stromsoe heard the sound of liquid hitting liquid then the banging of a hard object side to side inside the canisters as she stirred the brew. The copper-chlorine smell weakened.

But unlike before, Stromsoe not quite accidentally wandered to a
position that framed Frankie perfectly in the side mirror of Ted’s truck. The second time in a week, he thought, that a side mirror had come in more than handy.

So he watched her stir and add small amounts of something from a shiny chrome can that she kept in the red toolbox. She measured the liquid in a standard kitchen measuring cup, and made some kind of entry with a stylus on a small silver keypad. Then she stirred again. After working on a thick, black rubber glove, she then lowered a small object into the canister and brought it back out. The object looked like the chlorine tester that his neighbor used on his swimming pool back in Santa Ana when he was a kid. He watched Frankie add something from a dropper, then shake the tester, then bring it up to her face for a reading.

She poured more liquid from the chrome can into the measuring cup, poured a little bit back out, held the cup at eye level, then emptied it into the canister.

The blue light almost instantly appeared above the top of the big can. It cast a blue tint on her face as she put on the glove again and stirred. Wisps of pale blue gas began to rise and the altered smell, ethereal and indescribable, came to Stromsoe’s nose in a moment. He watched Frankie watch the smoke, the blue light playing off her throat, her head back and her face to the sky as if to measure its rate of climb.

“Three canisters per tower now?” Stromsoe called back over his shoulder.

“Lucky number,” said Frankie. “We’re going to build another tower starting next week. If we want consistent results we need to cover some sky.”

“I can’t ID that smell,” he said.

“No one can. This stuff hasn’t been named yet.”

BY FOUR O’CLOCK they’d finished up at tower four and by five-thirty the rain was falling harder. They sat in the back of the pickup and passed around Ted’s mostly gone bottle of Scoresby. Frankie wore the old fedora, which Stromsoe had seen her spraying with a waterproofer before setting out, and now the water ran in undeterred streams off the brim of it and bounced off her legs in silver comets.

Stromsoe heard and felt the rain accelerate, something like the sound of a jet revving, followed by an ambient heaviness as the volume of water increased until it was roaring against the truck and churning up the ground around them in multitudes of small explosions.

Though outfitted in their tailored raincoats, the dogs looked woefully at Frankie and tried to bend their heads away from the direction of the onslaught but it was coming down almost straight.

Ted pulled at his slicker, trying to get it to stay in place over his holster and revolver. He wore a waxed canvas cowboy hat with a tightly rolled brim that funneled the runoff wherever he was looking, in this case at the gun. He gave up on the slicker and squinted up the road in the direction they had come.

“Take a walk with me, Stromsoe,” said Frankie. “Pardon us just a minute, Ted. We’re okay.”

Frankie splashed out of the truck bed. The dogs followed without enthusiasm. Frankie led the way down the road then up a hillock from the top of which they could see all the way back down the valley to the barn. The air was gray around them and gray above, no difference in shade whatsoever. We are the rain cloud, she said. Then she took off her hat and faced the pouring sky. Stromsoe did too. He closed his eyes and thought a prayer for Hallie and Billy and
Frankie as he listened to the rain pounding his face and shoulders and he also heard the higher-pitched slapping sound it made on the dogs’ modified plastic ponchos. He opened his eyes to see Ted in the distance not quite looking on, shotgun in hand and the rain jetting off his hat.

“We should get back,” he said, watching her eyes open and come back into focus.

“I know.”

They trudged back with Ted and decided to sit in the truck a little longer but they only had time to pass the bottle once when the rain shifted into an even higher gear and the water seemed to be solid around them.

“Jeezy peezy,” said Frankie.

They climbed into the cab and set out. The truck tires sank in the mud, so Ted put it in four-wheel and still had to rock it out. It jumped free and the back end came around and the dogs slid across the bed, paws out, through the lake of water and the red toolbox slammed the bed wall. The wipers hacked rapidly back and forth, providing snippets of visibility.

“Eee-haw,” said Ted.

“Take ’er easy, cowboy,” said Frankie.

Ted tried to straighten the truck but the angle was too sharp and the tires dug in again. Stromsoe could feel the vehicle lower. He jumped back with the dogs to improve the weight distribution but the tires sank deeper. He got Frankie to help him push on the tailgate, the two of them working side by side and away from the spinning tires, but the mud still blasted into them while they grunted and heaved and the truck finally climbed out. They clambered back into the cab looking like minstrels in blackface. Halfway to the barn they watched a section
of earth detach from an adjacent slope and, sagebrush and lemonade-berry bush and boulders still in place, slide to a stop on the road in front of them. It was four feet high.

“Shit, guys,” said Ted.

“Use the brush off to the right,” said Stromsoe.

But from the dead stop the tires dug into the mud again, and again Stromsoe and Frankie got out and pushed while the truck threw mud back at them. Then, without warning, Ted put the truck into reverse and Stromsoe pulled Frankie out of the way just a second before the truck leaped backward out of the rut and landed left tire then right tire, hard, which launched the dogs in a poncho-wrapped blur. They hit with yipes. Ted emerged from the cab cussing and apologizing.

Stromsoe drove from there, using the roadside brush for lift and keeping the truck way down in first gear. He ground up a rise, made the crest, then looked down at a low spot in the road that was nothing but a red muddy river now, frothing with gravel and plants and sticks.

He could make out the barn by then, a quarter mile out, blurred to a basic barnlike shape by the downpour.

“Let’s just walk it,” said Ted. “Leave the truck here on high ground.”

“The flash flood is too strong,” said Stromsoe.

“I agree,” said Frankie.

“We got to get somewhere,” said Ted.

“This is it,” said Stromsoe.

“No guts, no sausage,” said Ted. “That barn is warm and dry.”

“Don’t you even think of wading that river,” said Frankie. “When the rain lets up we can cross. These things end as fast as they start.”

“I lived in Tucson for five years,” said Ted, seemingly to himself.

Stromsoe put the truck in park, set the brake, and turned the key so the engine went off but the wipers and defroster were still on. The barn blipped into his vision twice per second. Despite the defroster the windshield fogged up, so he wiped it with his hand. They managed to get the dogs into the cab.

“The barn sits near the riverbed,” said Frankie. “It’s a low spot, and flat.”

“Naw,” said Ted. “You can’t fill the San Luis Rey that fast.”

“Look,” she said. “There’s already standing water.”

Impossibly the rain came harder. The water jumped a foot into the air when it hit the truck hood in front of them but Stromsoe couldn’t make out a single drop—it was a solid body of water, like something poured from a gigantic bucket. It was deafening.

“Whoa,” said Ted.

“Man,” said Frankie.

“Maybe should have stayed with two buckets per tower,” said Stromsoe.

“Maybe,” she said.

In brief flashes of visibility Stromsoe saw the water rising around the barn. One minute it looked four inches deep at the door. A minute later it was a third of the way up to the lock.

Ace shook off and the cab filled with wet dog mist. Sadie shook off next. Stromsoe used his fist to clear the windshield again.

Then he saw the barn quiver, as if hit by a bullet. Then the roof buckled and some of the side boards splintered outward. The old building looked as if it were trying to shrug something off. Suddenly it lit up inside as if a single large orange bulb had been turned on.

“No,” said Frankie.

Stromsoe saw what happened next in staggered images separated by the wiper: a dull
whuuumph,
a burst of black lumber, the roof gone, the flaming guts inside, an orange inferno, a shower of black rubble and books and paper and furniture and a TV falling back to earth, the fire pausing as the rain cascaded down, the fire struggling, the fire low, the fire out except from the chemical containers littered about like wounded dragons belching flames and smoke against the rain.

The dogs looked out the window matter-of-factly.

“My things,” said Frankie in a soft voice. She sounded far away. “Charley’s things.”

They watched in silence for a while as the chemicals burned and the rain pounded out the last of the embers in the roofless barn. The explosion had brought waves to the standing water, chopping the surface into little peaks that gradually wobbled back to raindrop-riddled flatness. It seemed to be boiling around the blackened sofa and the facedown TV.

HALF AN HOUR later the rain stopped. Sunlight powered through big cracks in the clouds and they could see the torrents of runoff coming down the gulleys and washes to join up with the swollen San Luis Rey on its way to the ocean.

“That had to be five inches,” said Frankie. “I wonder what everybody else got.”

“I hope there is an everybody else,” said Ted.

“We can sit or walk,” said Stromsoe. “But we won’t be driving this thing for a while.”

They couldn’t get close enough to the barn to go through the
remains. The water was two feet deep and fast, and gave no sign of abating soon. Frankie stood knee-deep in it, shooting pictures, feet spread for balance as the current shoved against her. She fished a book from the flood, and what looked to Stromsoe like an old album of weather maps. She shook her head and waded unsteadily back to him.