Storm Front (3 page)

CHAPTER 3

The city of Sheridan was laid out in what looked a neat rectangle when shown on a map or on Google Earth. It ran two miles north-south and three miles east-west. A spur of Interstate 75 ran east-west along its southern border and carried increasingly heavy traffic into the rapidly growing suburbs. Much of that traffic was dumped north into Sheridan, where people either found homes or drove farther north to still other suburbs. Eighty thousand people, many of them affluent, lived in Sheridan’s new subdivisions. Despite economic downturns, the population had tripled in the last twenty years. While there were pockets of poverty and a number of just plain average people, the norm was a large new house on a large lot, or a large house on a disproportionately small lot. For many of Sheridan’s residents, these were trophy homes and they were willing to put up with long and inconvenient rides to and from work for the privilege of living in a quiet and safe place like Sheridan. There were a fair number of vacant houses because of the mortgage crises and a lot of homeowners were what the banks cutely called “underwater.” They owed more than their homes were worth on the market. Some of these people were as depressed as their property values, especially those who wanted to sell their houses so they could move elsewhere.

The last census showed that ninety-seven percent of the population was white, and two percent was Asian. Blacks and other minorities constituted the remaining one percent. Comedians called Sheridan a white ghetto, and a minister in Detroit called Sheridan segregated, but neither comment upset the residents very much. This was their new home and they liked it this way and many didn’t care if their homes were underwater. Sooner or later the ship would right itself.

Although considered a new suburb by those who were just discovering it, Sheridan had begun as a village in 1830. It was originally a farming community founded by Moravian Germans, whose descendants, until recently, exercised considerable influence in the community. What was now the center of the town had been little more than a disorganized trading post until after the Civil War, when the village leaders decided to name the place after General Philip Sheridan.

Sheridan’s population and growth remained flat, even stagnant, until World War II when the whole area industrialized. Later, when the war ended and people began moving from the cramped core cities like Detroit, suburbs began to grow and prosper. Still, it took decades for that growth to reach Sheridan. Many of the older families resented the newcomers, but accepted the inevitable. The newcomers now vastly outnumbered the old-timers. Providing some relief was the fact that the new people brought wealth when they bought the under-producing farmlands for houses and shopping. Of course, many of the newly rich farmers left Sheridan and moved to Florida with their booty.

The only decent north-south road was MacArthur Highway. With six lanes divided by a center median, it was the main connection with the freeway for the town. The other roads in the city were your garden variety four- and five-lane roads long overdue for expansion and improvement. MacArthur Highway was also overdue for some more lanes. Mike Stuart wasn’t certain he liked that idea. Traffic on MacArthur ran far too fast already, and more lanes would just make it an urban speedway. The city had several movie theaters, a number of restaurants and one good-sized shopping center at the confluence of the interstate and MacArthur. It housed a Macy’s, a Sears, Saks, and about two hundred specialty stores connecting the anchors in a covered mall. A smaller strip mall held a Wal-Mart and a local chain store, Sampson’s.

Sheridan’s municipal complex was located along the east side of MacArthur and was a campus of several buildings including the city hall, fire station, library, courthouse, and police station. While new, the buildings had Colonial exteriors, which made the place look as warm and attractive as municipal and administrative buildings could. Taxpayer groups thought the campus was overbuilt, but the city countered by saying it would grow and they’d need the facilities.

Inside the police station, Mike Stuart was acutely aware that he was in charge of the traffic division for the next few days. Lieutenant Joey DiMona normally commanded the division, but he was vacationing in Las Vegas. DiMona was fifty-eight and seriously considering retirement. An ambitious Stuart permitted himself to wonder if he could take over from DiMona. Certainly, the older cop was more than friendly and Mike considered him a mentor who might help the younger cop inherit the position. Realistically, Mike doubted it. DiMona’s boss was Chief Bench, who didn’t seem to like him very much. But then, Bench didn’t seem to like anyone except the mayor.

Besides, Mike was much too young. He might have to wait until next time, or move on to another city. If he wanted to move into the management hierarchy, and he did, he felt he would have to forego a degree of job security. Too bad. He liked Sheridan. He wondered if Maddy would come with him if he moved too far away to commute. Her family was a few miles south of Sheridan and she was close to them.

Mike also liked being a cop. His career choice had been a mild disappointment to his parents—his father had been a college English instructor and his mother a nurse—but they were pleasantly surprised when they found out that many cops starting out nowadays were college graduates. As in many professions, the educational requirements had increased significantly. Of course, Mike’s rapid rise to sergeant had further worked to change their minds and they became proud of him. They now lived in a condo in Arizona.

Mike forced himself back to reality. He had four one-man squad cars on patrol this morning. There should have been at least one more, but absentees and unfilled openings because of budget issues kept the numbers down. For a moment he thought about asking other department heads for manpower, but decided against it. They had their own staffing problems and, besides, he was supposed to solve his own problems like a big boy. There was only an hour or so before the morning rush was over. He would hold his breath and hope for the best. At least the weather was still acceptable. Not great, but acceptable. A little wet stuff never hurt anyone.

According to the computer-generated chart and the GPS monitoring system, all four cars were in service and moving. Even, he laughed silently, his buddy, Corporal Stan Petkowski, also known as Stan the Prick by some citizens for all the traffic tickets he gave out. Some drivers he’d ticketed thought Stan would give his mother a ticket, while others doubted he was born of humans.

Mike knew better. A few beers after work with the short, squat cop had brought out the story. Petkowski’s fetish for ticketing bad drivers began one evening a few years ago when he was helping remove horribly mangled dead bodies out of a particularly awful two-car wreck in which a Chevy wagon had been broadsided by a pickup truck. He’d been stunned when he found that one horribly mutilated and decapitated corpse was his niece, a likeable and lovely eighteen-year-old college freshman with the whole world before her. The accident had been caused by a drunk in the truck who had blown by a stop sign. The drunk was dead, which Stan thought was mild justice. The son of a bitch had been driving with a suspended license for an earlier drunk driving conviction. If he’d survived, Stan thought he might have killed him and enjoyed it.

After that, Petkowski suffered no one who ran red lights or stop signs or intentionally endangered others, regardless of whether they were sober or drunk. Mistakes and inexperience he could tolerate, but not intentionally dangerous or careless driving.

A symbol on the chart was blinking red. It was on northbound MacArthur and a little ways north of the police station. “What’s this,” Mike wondered.

“Water main break,” came the answer. “Engineers say it’ll be fixed before rush hour.”

“Hope so,” Mike muttered.

The area was one of a number covered by surveillance cameras, so he was able to check it visually. It was already a mess. Even with all three lanes open, the northbound rush was a real bear. Closing one would have traffic backed up for miles. Now, with much lighter traffic than would occur later, the computer said the backup was still almost a mile. This Mike didn’t need. He decided to send Petkowski over to see how things were working out. It was beginning to snow and that was another complication he didn’t want. Like he could do anything about any of it, he thought. The city and the county would have salt trucks out and that was all that could be done.

Then he wondered what Maddy was doing.

* * *

Wally Wellman arrived at TV6’s studios a little after nine that morning. The fine mist had changed to wet, soggy snow, punctuated by nasty gusts of wind.

“I was right,” he announced to the staff. “It is snowing. Wally Wellman is never wrong. You may thank me profusely on bended knee or send money.”

He got the expected hoots and the finger from his coworkers, grinned, and walked over to his producer, Ron Friedman. He and Friedman had worked together for more than a decade. The much younger Friedman had helped Wally through his grief by keeping him very busy.

“Now can I tell the world it’s going to snow?” Wally asked. “And maybe snow a lot?”

“Anyone with a window already knows that it’s snowing,” Ron responded. “Besides, the National Weather Service just predicted maybe an inch and that doesn’t warrant an end-of-the-world announcement. You’re still the Lone Ranger when it comes to that prediction and the big boss is still pissed at you for that prediction a while back.”

Who cared what the big boss thought? He was the guy who wanted to eliminate Wally’s job. “Yeah, but I think it’s going to snow a lot more. Like at least six inches.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a thick front that’s going to be right over us if it continues on its present heading, which, may I remind you, is the opposite of what everyone thought was going to happen with that snowfall last week.”

“Including you,” Ron said.

“Including me. I was wrong. So sue me. Look, the storm is a thick one, it’s loaded with moisture, and the winds are picking up. It’s gonna slam right into the cold front and produce tons of heavy white snow.”

Friedman leaned back in his chair and gazed at a spot in the ceiling where the plaster was peeling. “Can’t do it, Wally. We looked like fools last week when everyone, including you, was calling for a massive storm. Hell, schools were closed in advance and businesses called it a holiday. Then nothing happened. Yes, I know, we got a couple of inches, most of which is still on the ground, but nothing like the Sky Is Falling prediction we made. Besides, you can’t go out and contradict the big guys in the government without something concrete to back you up. Sorry, but six inches is too speculative. Y’know, we had a bunch of phone calls complaining about you after the last Friday’s half-baked prediction where you said that the other guys might all be wrong.”

Wally laughed. “At least that proves someone was watching the show. Now, will you let me go on at ten and say there’s a possibility of between two and three inches?”

Friedman ran a hand through his thinning red hair. He had forty minutes until ten. TV6 and Wally also provided the weather for a Classic Rock FM radio station that was owned by TV6. A ten o’clock announcement would reach a lot of people. By that time a pattern might be developing. Freidman was torn between his duty to announce weather problems and the desire to not look like a fool any more frequently than was necessary in his profession.

What he saw did not help him make up his mind. The charts and the satellite photos showed a gigantic mass of clouds heading towards the northeast. He’d been working with Wally for long enough to understand the possibilities. Most of the storm was dumping massive amounts of rain in Ohio as it veered eastward. However, if the thick edge of the storm rolled over Southeastern Michigan, it would collide with a colder air mass and that could mean a good deal of snow. The storm’s speed was picking up and another hour would put it right over the area, if it really decided to go in that direction instead of east towards oblivion.

Could, would, might. “Damn it,” Friedman muttered, “isn’t anything black or white around here?”

“How ’bout the two guys in the mail room,” Wally said wickedly.

“See me at ten,” Friedman finally decided. “And I’m going to schedule you for sensitivity training because of that remark.”

* * *

“It’s snowing,” yelled one of Maddy’s students and the others chimed in.

“Yes it is,” she responded with a degree of exasperation. It was yet another interruption in a math lesson that was not going all that well in the first place, partly because her mind was elsewhere. Mike Stuart was consuming her thoughts, and some of them were disconcertingly carnal.

She tried again. “After all, this is Michigan and it is winter. Please don’t act like you’ve never seen snow before.”

“Will we be going out for recess?” a group of voices chimed in. There was a school prohibition against snowball fights and neither teachers nor parents liked to pull playground supervision if the weather was rotten. Maddy could almost see the mud oozing in the playground and visualized with horror her students romping in a combination of mud and snow, and dragging the slimy mess into her classroom. Maddy loved teaching, but she did not relish the thought of trying to impart knowledge to a score or more mud-covered devils. And their parents would be annoyed if she returned a score of filthy kids to them.

“Probably not,” she said to a chorus of moans. She stood and walked to the window. The snow was beginning to come down in thick, gobby flakes. It was already difficult to see across the street and it was sticking. The school had the option of cancelling recess if the weather was bad. If it was cancelled, the good news was that the kids wouldn’t be muddy; the bad was that they would be hyper from not having the chance to run around and work off the energy that kids had in abundance.

Maddy went to one of the room’s computers and clicked on the Internet. She hit the weather button and was assured that there was a possibility of snow showers with perhaps an inch accumulation. She looked again out the window. The snow was getting heavier and the wind was blowing it. It really was quite a dense snow shower. If it lasted too much longer, the one-inch accumulation would arrive in only a few minutes.