Storm Front (9 page)
Authors: Robert Conroy
“Brandy, to be specific, although not very expensive. However, it’ll have to do. We beggars cannot be choosers.”
Maddy took a sip and then a swallow. She felt its warmth flowing through her. “Good. Where did you get it?”
Donna grinned. “From the back of a drawer in a large desk in the principal’s office.”
Maddy whooped. “Mrs. Felix drinks on the job? Is there anything else I should know?”
“Don’t be silly,” Donna laughed. “And don’t be so damned naive. She’s not the only one who thinks drinking very mediocre liquor isn’t a violation of church and state. She waits until the kids have gone before she has a nip.” Donna stood and took the empty cup. “Don’t go away, now. I’ll be back later with some more booze and we can have a girls’ party.”
* * *
Joe Mertz was convinced that his homeowner’s insurance rates had gone through the roof, no pun intended, because of the claim he’d made two years prior. Snow and ice had built up on his roof creating what people called “ice dams” and what he called “damn ice.” As a result, water had seeped through his roof, into his ceilings and walls, caused dry wall to buckle and paint to peel, ruined his carpets, and generally fucked up his day.
And that was only the beginning. Then he had to deal with the schmucks and crooks from the insurance companies and the bandits who did the actual repair work. In his opinion, he had been robbed blind. He just wasn’t certain precisely how.
If he could prevent it, he sure as hell wasn’t going to let damage from an ice dam happen again. This was his dream home, his trophy home, and he’d worked more than twenty years to get it, and so what if it was too big for just the two of them now that the kids were grown and gone? No snowstorm was going to take it from him. And so what if he was overweight and didn’t spend much time on roofs? Hell, he was an appliance salesman at a local retailer, not a roofing contractor. However, the pitch wasn’t all that steep and he could stand up there fairly easily. He’d done it before while cleaning out gutters and nailing down wind-blown shingles. Heights didn’t scare him. He would solve his problem. It was all part of the joy of being a homeowner, he thought sarcastically.
Mertz climbed the ladder to the roof and began to shovel the snow off. He was astonished at the volume of snow and how heavy it was. He congratulated himself on being smart enough to shovel it off before it caused a collapse, much less a leak, although it seemed like it was coming down as quick as he shoveled it. He also was smart enough to pace himself. It was exhausting work and he wasn’t a kid anymore.
He shoveled and pushed the stuff downward, letting gravity do as much of the work as possible. Each shovelful landed on the snow below with a satisfying whump. He was working up a sweat and working hard. It felt good. He wasn’t at all fatigued. Joe Mertz was not a man to sit back and let things happen. He was an action kind of guy, and he felt he was in charge. He almost thought he was on top of things, but that was just too lousy a joke.
Then he felt something in the roof shift beneath him. He froze, wondering just what had happened. He’d laughed at a contractor who’d told him, while repairing the earlier damage, that some of his roof might be rotten. He’d thought the prick was just trying to con him for some more money and he hadn’t gotten the suggested additional repairs done. After all, it wasn’t covered by insurance. Now he suddenly didn’t know if he’d done the right thing. The roof below him felt mushy.
“Gwen!” he yelled for his wife. “Come out here. Now, please.”
A moment later, his wife stood on the ground by the ladder. “What’s up besides you?” she joked.
“Feels squishy up here. Steady the ladder. I’m coming down.”
She nodded and grabbed the ladder. Her Joe was aggressive, but not stupid. Getting up was easy; getting down was the hard part. He always said it was like flying a plane—any fool could take off and fly, but landing was another story. Joe took a tentative step towards the ladder. It felt like he was on weakening ice and realized he’d made a big mistake by coming up and stomping around. Careful. One more step and he’d be by the ladder and safety.
With a crack, the roof opened and Joe’s leg disappeared into the void. Something hit him in the groin and he screamed. Something else jabbed into his leg and, as he fought off dizziness and nausea, he felt a warm trickle running down his leg.
“Oh Christ. Gwen! I’m bleeding to death.”
* * *
Mike Stuart signaled Petkowski to come into DiMona’s office. With the lieutenant gone, Mike had simply taken it over. It gave him a little privacy in an increasingly congested environment. Even though fewer people were abandoning their cars and crowding into the station and other city facilities, the buildings were filled with refugees.
“How’re you doing?” Mike asked.
The other officer looked like hell. Why not, Mike thought, after what he’d seen and gone through. The story of the car filled with dead people had become major news. It had even been picked up by CNN and Fox. If nothing else, it had scared some people into being conscious of the fact that they could die from suffocation.
“Some things you never get over, Mike, and maybe it’s better you don’t. Christ, I’m being philosophic. I must be getting old. Bottom line, I think I’m okay. I’ll have nightmares, but I’m kind of used to that after what happened to my niece. But it does kind of make me wonder why I wanted to become a cop in the first place.”
Keep him talking, Mike thought. “So why did you?”
“The cool uniforms, of course. And you get to carry a gun, get to ride a motorcycle, and it really impressed the chicks. At least I thought it would. Then I realized it was the Marine Corps uniform they really liked.” He laughed harshly. “Nah, I became cop because I ruled out just about everything else. Didn’t want to work in a factory, didn’t want to work in an office, couldn’t sell stuff worth shit, so that left either the military, delivering mail, or becoming a cop. Being a cop won out. Sometimes I still wonder if I should have done the factory thing. I needed a job. I’m not the altruistic type.”
Mike nodded sagely. “You chose wisely, my friend. You are a damn good cop. The fact that things still get to you means that you are human, even if you don’t always look or act it.”
Petkowski chuckled, this time genuinely. “Don’t make me laugh. Now, why the hell did a bright guy like you enlist? And please don’t tell me you wanted to make like Batman and save the world from evildoers. I’ve seen too many people motivated by altruism and watched them go down the toilet when they realized their efforts weren’t going to add up to squat.”
Mike smiled inwardly. Actually, that’s exactly what he’d felt in the beginning of his police career, except that he wanted to help the victims and punish the criminals. It stemmed from a carjacking in which his mother had been mugged and another incident when a great-aunt had been beaten and raped. The old lady never quite recovered and had died a few years later. She used to brag about living in a town like Detroit, but she’d died in a nursing home completely unable to remember her own name. If he ever did become a lawyer, he would be a prosecutor, not a defense attorney.
For a while, he’d been a good hater, but the years on the Detroit force taught him the futility of that, and the move to Sheridan’s Police Department had further softened his attitude. Now he liked to think of himself as almost human, too.
“I didn’t know you knew the meaning of altruism,” Mike teased. “Nope, I wanted to impress chicks, too. Actually, I made the same kind of process of elimination you did. Funny, but a lot of people choose careers on the basis of what they don’t want, rather than what they do want. All I knew was that I wanted to be involved in the law, and now I am. Is this the end? Hell, I don’t know. Ask me five or ten years from now.”
“Any cops in the family?”
“An uncle,” Mike said, “And a good guy. Kind of a role model, I guess, along with my dad. My dad is a retired accountant and my mom was a teacher. One of my brothers is in commercial real estate, and the other is a veterinarian.”
“But being a cop in Sheridan isn’t your life’s ambition, is it? I get the feeling you aspire to greater things.”
Mike nodded. “Maybe I do. I came here because they were hiring and it looked like a nice place to learn after spending some interesting combat time in Detroit. I’ll have my master’s in a few months—if it stops snowing, of course—and then I’m thinking of going to law school. After that, who knows? Maybe I’ll get a better job in a bigger town, or a job in corporate security.”
“Or how about a run at politics?” Stan teased. “Or maybe you won’t be a prosecutor. Instead, you’ll become a high-priced defense attorney and get all the bad guys off while hard-working cops like me bust their balls arresting them and trying to get them convicted.”
Mike laughed. “Well, hell, I didn’t take a vow of poverty. Or celibacy, for that matter.” He thought quickly of Maddy and wondered what she was doing. He’d called her a couple of times and knew that she’d gotten herself stuffed in the snow for the second time. He told her he wanted to rub her body to help it warm up and she hadn’t said no. Of course, he was miles away.
It was getting on in the evening and Mike wondered where he was going to sleep, or if he’d even be able to sleep. The floor was covered by a layer of commercial carpeting, which was only slightly softer than a rock, but it might have to do. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. There were literally hundreds of refugees in the buildings, and they would be sacking out on cold and unforgiving tile, which was marginally better than sleeping on an office chair.
“Can I sleep with you tonight, Mike?” Petkowski said in falsetto and blinked with mock coyness.
Mike laughed. “Sure can, sailor, pick a spot of floor and don’t fart. God, I hope it’s a quiet night. We’re the only ones left in here, right now.”
A quiet night following a miserable day. Five people dead in a car, one woman had bled to death from a deer accident because EMS couldn’t get there in time, and an old man had suffered a fatal heart attack in the snow at St. Stephen’s Church. The pastor had gone out looking for him and dragged him in from the cold. CPR hadn’t worked and, again, the EMS techs had difficulty getting there, only arriving when it was far too late.
Stuart had several teams of police and volunteers continuing to patrol the city on snowmobiles. On the positive side, the number of calls to the 911 center across the hall had dropped to almost nothing. It was a small blessing, but they’d joked that the storm had kept all the drunk drivers out of their cars, and most people had given up trying to shovel the snow, which cut down on heart attack runs. The same with thefts, although everyone in the department wondered where the two killers had gone. Not far, was the worried consensus.
There was a tap on the doorway and Thea Hamilton, the 911 supervisor, stuck her head in. “If you guys are the reserves, you’d better saddle up. Some guy just went through his roof and thinks he’s bleeding to death. He’s only a couple of blocks away and you’re the closest.”
Both men jumped up and, in moves now practiced, got into their cold weather outfits.
So much for a quiet evening,
Mike thought. At least he didn’t have to sleep with Stan.
CHAPTER 8
Mike and Stan laid the ladder against the Mertz house and climbed up it as quickly as they could. It had fallen to the ground when Joe Mertz went through the roof. The victim’s wife was being held and comforted by a neighbor woman. Mrs. Mertz was sobbing and looked at the two cops with gratitude.
On the roof, Joe Mertz’s head and shoulders were covered with a thin layer of snow and he was groaning. With only half his body protruding, it looked like someone had planted him in the roof as an obscene decoration. His eyes were open, but it didn’t appear that he was comprehending very much. Mike and Stan crawled to him on their bellies, as if they were on thin ice, and hoped the roof would hold their distributed weight. They reached Mertz and quickly checked him for vital signs. They figured he was going into shock as well as maybe bleeding to death. Mike jerked on some soggy plywood to widen the hole in the roof so he could see what had happened while Stan tried to hold Mertz steady. Both were nervous. They had zero confidence in the roof holding three people if it had collapsed under the weight of one.
Mike took a deep breath and stuck his head into the enlarged hole. A piece of plywood had split and was driven into Mertz’s thigh. Bad news was that the piece of wood was attached to a larger piece that was still connected to the roof.
Damn it,
Mike thought. How to get him out of there without killing him was the question.
Mike managed to slip his arms down into the hole and tie a crude tourniquet around Mertz’s leg. It didn’t stop all the bleeding, but it did slow it down. But how to get the victim out and down with that piece of wood in his leg? And how much blood had the victim already lost?
“Officers, you need help?”
The mustached head of a middle-aged man wearing a ridiculous ski cap appeared at the top of the ladder. “Not unless you’re a doctor,” Mike snapped. “Otherwise please get down and let us do our jobs.”
The man beamed happily. “Good, because I am a doctor. My name is Scarborough and I’m a gynecologist. Guys like him aren’t exactly my specialty, but I think I can be useful.”
That said, he slid over and onto the roof and plunked down a gym bag. He crawled on his belly like they had and checked on Mertz. He seemed blithely unconcerned about the structural integrity of the roof. “Not bad,” he said of the tourniquet. “Good of you not to try and remove the wood. That might have started him bleeding more. I don’t think he’s cut an artery, but we do want to be careful.”
Mike said nothing about the gratuitous but well intended advice. Both he and Stan had experience and training and knew how to handle stabbing victims. The doctor took some things from the gym bag, leaned down into the roof cavity, sliced Mertz’s pants, and gave him an injection. Mertz groaned and swore at the indignity, and then went silent.
Dr. Scarborough continued to check Mertz’s vital signs. “I just gave him a sedative to keep him calm and not get in our way while we get his worthless butt out of here. Last thing we need is him thrashing like a whale while we try to get him out of this stupid situation. He’s a good neighbor, although somewhat of a doofus. Thinks everybody’s conspiring against him. Personally, I think his wife’s a saint for putting up with all his crap.”
Scarborough crawled back to the roof edge and yelled something down. A few moments later, another man handed him a tool and Mike grinned—it was a battery powered saw.
“Everybody hold him steady and don’t let him fall father through,” Scarborough said. “And let’s try not fall through ourselves. I’m going to cut the wood in his leg away from the roofing.” The saw buzzed and whined, and then Joe Mertz was free. They pulled him onto the roof and laid him flat.
The doctor checked the wound and again decided against pulling out the piece of wood from his thigh. It looked like he’d been struck by some kind of spear or arrow. Better, it looked like the bleeding had entirely stopped.
“I still don’t think an artery was severed, but I’m not going to take a chance,” Scarborough said calmly. “I’ll pull the wood out when he’s on the ground. I’m also afraid that too much jostling could cause the wood to shift in his leg and do some real damage, maybe even find that artery, so we’ll have to be extra careful moving his worthless carcass.”
Mike nodded. “You’re in charge, Doctor. Let’s just get him and us down from here before the roof collapses some more.” Now there were four people on the roof and it appeared to be holding. Maybe Joe Mertz had found the only bad spot on it.
They tied a rope around Mertz’s chest and gently lowered him over the edge and down the ladder. Petkowski went before him to cover and steady the victim as they went. Petkowski and another neighbor laid Mertz on a blanket on the snow while Mike and the doctor clambered down as quickly as they could. They made no effort to cover the hole in the roof. That would be somebody else’s problem.
Dr. Scarborough looked at the snowmobile Mike and Stan had ridden and shook his head. “No way you’re going to get him to a hospital in that, are you?”
“Not likely,” Mike said. Several neighbors had gathered. An EMS team was pulling up on their own snowmobile. It was dragging a sled with supplies that, Mike guessed, could be used to transport a victim if necessary.
Scarborough shrugged and looked at Mertz, who was unconscious and snoring softly. He nodded and grinned at the two cops. “He should be okay for now. Despite his fears, he wasn’t bleeding to death. Still, he could have died if you two hadn’t gone up there. You saved his life.”
Mike grinned. “Same holds for you, Doctor. Not bad for a gynecologist.”
“I did some time in an emergency room, although it was a couple of decades ago.” Scarborough sniffed, “Some things you never forget. Now I have to get him indoors so I can perform some kitchen table surgery. Then EMS can take him to the hospital on that sled.”
“You need help?” Mike asked.
“Just getting him in. After that, your EMS people can assist me. This should be interesting,” Scarborough chuckled. “As a gynecologist, I never see men patients. I wonder if I’ll cut out the wrong thing. If I do, I’ll just reduce his bill.”
Mike and Petkowski were soon on their way back to the station. Joe Mertz was shot full of Tdap and morphine and was having happy dreams. Doctor Scarborough and the EMS crew had removed the splinter, cleaned the wound, and sewed it up. Mertz would live. They decided they would not transport him by sled, but they would get him to a hospital for a better checkup when the weather got better. A couple of other neighbors had covered the hole in the roof with fresh plywood and a tarp. Everything was under control.
“Hey, Mike,” Stan called from the rear seat.
“What?”
“We just won one, or hadn’t you noticed?”
Mike smiled. He was cold and tired, but Stan was right. They had done good work and it felt even better. “You’re right. The bad guys don’t win all the time, do they?”
* * *
Thea Hamilton was one of the few black people working in Sheridan’s city offices, and nobody was quite sure how she’d first gotten the position since she’d been around for almost forty years. Maybe it had been part of an affirmative action program, or maybe she was simply more qualified than the other applicants. Anybody who might recall was long since dead, quit, or retired. The city of Sheridan certainly had nothing to regret about her hiring. She had served them well.
For at least twenty of those years, she had worked as an EMS technician and prided herself on the number of lives she’d saved. She’d been saddened by the ones who died, but she rarely let it get to her. She’d always been satisfied that she’d done her absolute best and if God said that wasn’t good enough, then so be it. She was deeply religious and would not argue with a higher power. But she would argue with everyone else.
Arthritis, encroaching age, and a bad back had forced her to give up making ambulance runs. This frailty came as a shock to both Thea and her coworkers. She was six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds. Most thought she was indestructible, but she wasn’t. Instead of feeling sorry for herself, she applied for and became the supervisor of Sheridan’s 911 call center. When she got the job, another surprise emerged. Somehow, along with being a single mom raising three children and working full time, she’d gotten a liberal arts degree from Saginaw Valley University by taking off-campus courses, which put her light years ahead of her competition for the job.
Recently, Thea had been giving retirement some serious thought. But when she did, she wondered what she’d do with her time, especially since the kids were fully grown and her new husband wasn’t. She liked her work and needed it to get away from Bert. She loved him dearly, but he’d retired a couple of years earlier and no way was she ready to spend all day with him and the stupid television shows he insisted on watching. She hated reality TV and he loved it.
Conscious that she was doing what she thought was right, she never took crap from her coworkers, most of whom were white. She especially disliked white hypocrites who pretended to be pro-black, whatever that was, and who emphasized their point by trying to talk jive or ghetto. Thea did not live in the ghetto, physically, psychologically, or emotionally. Thea considered herself an equal opportunity person—she didn’t take shit from anybody regardless of race, gender, age, or religion.
Thea strode forcefully into Mike’s office and slammed the door behind her. “This is bullshit, Sergeant Michael Stuart. You are nothing but incompetent white, honky trash!”
Mike leaned back in his chair and grinned. “I love you too, Thea. And saying white and honky in the same sentence is redundant.”
Thea sat down heavily. “I’ll redundant your ass if the snow causes me any more problems.”
“Oh, yeah, like I can make it stop.”
“I wish somebody would, Mike. I just lost another one.”
The outburst was over. Anger and frustration were subsumed. “What happened?” Mike asked softly.
“A lady died. Can you believe it? She was gored in the leg by a deer and she bled to death on the floor of her very own house. Two firemen got there and managed to stop the bleeding, which wasn’t too difficult since most of her blood was all over the place, but she died about five minutes later.”
Mike shook his head sadly. He’d already heard the story from Stan, but didn’t think it was time to mention it. “They didn’t have any blood with them, did they?”
“Of course not. How do you carry blood on a snowmobile unless it’s already inside you? Naw, they were okay to set a leg or do some rough stitching or perform CPR, but they had no blood to give her. They even considered a direct transfusion, but none of them was her blood type. Damn, how do you get killed by a deer in your own home in the middle of a city? It’s the dumb things like this that really get to me. Damn it all!”
She stood and smiled a little. The tirade was over. “As always, Mike, I am truly sorry for having dumped on you.”
Mike smiled. “As always, Thea, you are very welcome and feel free to do it anytime. My turn’s next.”
Thea took a deep breath. It was time to change the subject. “At least I am thankful I have enough staff to work things.”
Sheridan’s 911 call center was small, but there were always at least two people on duty at all times. That way, it would not be left unattended when somebody had to go to the john, or more than one call came in. There’d been two plus her when the snow started and that was proving more than sufficient.
“At any rate,” Thea added, “it’s otherwise been a slow day. A lot of accidents, but all fender-benders and no injuries. A couple of heart attacks and one pregnant woman worrying about going into labor, but I’ve got them covered. A couple of people got hurt on their roofs, but you know all about that. Also, no crimes, excepting your two murders, which I suggest you solve fairly soon.”
“They aren’t my murders, madam; I had nothing to do with them. My hands are clean. I am not a crook,” Mike said, doing his best Richard Nixon imitation.
Thea sat back down and sighed. “You know what I mean, Mike. At any rate, how’s your love life? How’d it go with dinner yesterday with those other teachers?”
For reasons hard to define, Mike had been confiding in Thea as well as Petkowski. A lot of people confided in Thea, who never breached a confidence. “It went really well. Nobody asked me to fix a ticket, or how to avoid a ticket, or how many miles over the limit you can go before getting a ticket. We just talked about stuff. It made me realize that cops and teachers have a lot in common.”
“Come again?”
“Really. Cops rally around the badge and are suspicious of anyone who isn’t a cop. If you’re not a cop you really can’t understand what’s going on, and what it’s really like to be a cop. Same with teaching. A teacher’s enemies are the students, the parents, and the administration. In short, anyone who isn’t a teacher or married to a teacher is the enemy. All of those other people are trying to second guess the teacher, just like civilians are always second guessing cops. At any rate, Maddy’s friends are nice people. I think I scored some points.”
“That’s very profound,” Thea said. “But then, bullshit often sounds like it is.”
“You’re right as usual, but there is a kernel of truth in it.”
“Maybe, just maybe. Are you any closer to figuring out what Maddy’s hang-up is?”
Mike shook his head. “All I know is that it happened while she was in college and involved a guy, and he was probably a boyfriend. She was betrayed and hurt and she hasn’t worked her way through it, even though it’s been several years. It must have been more than the standard now ex-boyfriend dumping her crap for it to have hit her so hard. I think she’s in love with me, but just not ready to admit it or to make a commitment.”
“What’s your guess? Date rape?”
“Possible. Maybe a combination of things. I just wish she’d open up with me. I just don’t know and it frustrates me. I want to help her, damn it.”
“Does it bother you, the fact that she might have lived with a guy?”
Mike thought about the number of women he’d had sex with. Although it wasn’t a large number by some people’s standards, he had long ago given up any thoughts of taking a vow of celibacy.