The Breathtaker (7 page)

9

T
HE WIND
Function Facility was nestled in the subbasement of the Environmental Sciences Laboratory at Dryden Technical College in Montoya, Oklahoma. Charlie entered the bulldozer-yellow lobby and took a freight elevator down two flights, then wound his way through a series of gray-carpeted corridors toward the branching test sections—the tow tank facility, the missile launcher chamber, the wind tunnels. The air down here was chilly and dry, a strange hum emanating from the walls due to the building’s many generators.

“Watch your step,” Rick Kripner said as they entered the wind-tunnel section together. In his early thirties, Rick had the kind of stiffened stride that suggested a disciplined upbringing and a terminally distracted look. Like most science geeks, he collected pens the way a dog attracts fleas. They’d met twice before, and each time, Rick had been exceedingly friendly and knowledgeable about tornado preparedness, but he wasn’t the person Charlie was there to see.

“She won’t be long,” Rick said. “Ten minutes maybe. We’re doing a dry run-through.” He spoke softly as he patted his lab coat pockets, searching for something. “This way, Chief.”

They navigated a narrow passageway lined with pipes and electrical cables toward the back of the facility, where a huge constructed metal wind tunnel stood on twenty-foot stilts beneath the sixty-foot ceiling. Charlie spotted at least two other tunnels inside the warehouse-sized facility—the place was enormous—before he followed Rick up a white-painted ladder and into a glass-enclosed control room.

Rick took a seat behind the console and started fiddling with the control knobs. “Mind closing the door?”

Charlie shut it, and the hum grew instantly muffled. He took a seat in one of the cold metal folding chairs and looked around. The wind tunnel had observation windows all along its side, and he could see Willa Bellman quite clearly now through the glass. She was standing in the test section, tinkering with a scaled-down replica of a high-rise building. She wore an extra-small white T-shirt beneath the obligatory lab coat, black ballet-type shoes and khaki trousers with short silver zippers over each pocket and horizontally down each cuff. Unusual. He liked her unusual taste.

“Guess who’s here?” Rick said.

“Be right with you,” Willa answered without looking up, and Charlie realized that the two-way intercom was on.

“Take your time,” Charlie told her, his voice making a slap-back echo off the concrete.

Lithe, pretty, in her early thirties with porcelain skin and curious blue eyes, Willa had a head of coiling black hair and a bone structure so well defined she reminded Charlie of some rare breed of cat. Six months ago, they’d spent an entire afternoon together inside the field laboratory, discussing tornado emergency procedures. The field lab consisted of a 150-foot-high meteorological tower and a data acquisitions room, where they’d worked together in such close quarters he was able to memorize some of her smells—strawberry shampoo, peppermint breath mints, a mothball-tinged sweater so stiff it could probably stand on its own.

“I saw you on TV this morning,” Rick said.

Charlie nodded but kept his expression flat.

“Those people were murdered?”

“I can’t go into any details.”

“Yeah, I hear you.” He tilted back in his chair. “I don’t know how you do it, Chief, being around dead bodies all the time. I’d get queasy if somebody got a nosebleed.”

He shrugged. “Just part of the job.”

“Is this part of the job? You coming here?” He leaned forward. “Because I’d be happy to help out. If there’s anything you need to know about tornadoes, I’m your guy.”

Charlie was used to overeager citizens wanting to help. Glancing at his watch, he said, “So tell me about these wind tunnels.”

Rick nodded at the glass. “You’re looking at one smooth, sweet machine. Airflow’s created by a B-39 aircraft propeller housed inside the drive section there. Wind speeds can reach up to one hundred and twenty miles an hour, and we can replicate all sorts of atmospheric quirks… thermal inversions, air stratifications, you name it.”

Across the ten-yard divide, Willa was trying to shake the model apart, a growl rising in her throat. “
Arrghh!
Fuck!”

“Easy,” Rick told her. “We’ve got company, remember?”

“How’re those pressure taps responding?” she asked.

He typed a command into his computer. “The answer is they’re not.”

“Nothing?”

“Nada. Zip.”

“Jesus loves me,” she muttered under her breath.

Charlie smiled, hating the sensation of grease blossoming on his forehead. Six months ago. Why hadn’t he called?

“I’m not happy with these taps,” she said. “Not happy at all.” She made a few adjustments to the northern facade of the model, then heaved a frustrated sigh. “What’re we gonna do about this, Rick?”

“I dunno. Have Gordo redo them?”

“I am sick and tired of waiting around for Gordo to get his act together! There’s at least a hundred taps missing. I wanted this to be as precise as possible.” She picked up the model and shook it.

“Careful. You could lose an eye with that thing.”

She released the tower and, kicking off her shoes, crossed the floor in her stocking feet. “This is fucking futile!”

“Temper, temper.” He switched off the two-way intercom and leaned back in his seat. “She’s a perfectionist. Her data’s solid, but it slows the whole process down. It wouldn’t matter, except that we’re on a tight deadline with this one particular grant. I can just hear Jacobs now. ‘Vat d’you mean, she didn’t complete ze test?’ ” He patted his pockets again. “Where are you, keys?”

“Jacobs?” Charlie said, watching Willa exit the test section and descend the metal ladder. She’d left her shoes back inside the wind tunnel.

“Yeah, Professor Jacobs. The guy who runs this zoo.”

Willa burst into the control room, eyes alert, cheeks rosy. “Oh, hi,” she said. “Hello, Chief.” She shook his hand. “Long time no see.”

“Charlie,” he corrected her.

“Okay, Charlie. Ha. My friend Charlie the policeman.” She gave him a wide, wry smile, then tossed a leather briefcase on the console table. “Do me a favor, Rick?” she said, pulling out a messy stack of folders. “Finish these missile impact stats for me? I’m falling so far behind it ain’t pretty.”

He leaned precariously back in his chair. “Only if you’ll cover for me on Friday.”

“Yeah, absolutely.”

“Deal?”

“Friday.”

He took the folders from her—quite a bit of material—and cradled them in the crux of his arm.

“Missile impact stats?” Charlie repeated.

“We’re testing a new line of product,” she explained. “We get clients coming in here all the time, wanting certification for their aboveground tornado shelters and safe rooms. This one’s called Schott Industries…”

“More like
Schitt,
” Rick muttered.

“Yeah, exactly. You are so witty today.” She laughed, then gave Charlie such an earnest look his heart skipped a beat. “Seriously, this product should never go on the market, Charlie. It’s supposed to protect consumers from every type of wind hazard known to man, but I swear to God, a mouse could fart on it, and
poof.
”

“Feminine, ain’t she?” Rick said proudly.

“We’re basically the last line of defense.”

“There you are, you weasels.” Rick scooped his crowded key chain off the console. “Right in front of me.”

“Where’re you going?” Willa asked him.

“I’ll be in my office, in case anybody’s interested. Eating my tuna sandwich, buried under a mountain of paperwork.”

“Quit pissing and moaning,” she said. “You get Friday off. Oh, I almost forgot! I need those by five, that okay?”

“Yeah, it’s doable.” He turned to Charlie. “Nice to see you again, Chief.”

“You, too, Rick.”

Rick left the control room, and suddenly they were alone together. There was a brief but noticeable awkwardness between them, which she handled lightly and he handled heavily. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He stuffed them in his pockets, then tipped back in his chair until it bumped into the wall.

“Want a cola?” She twisted her curly black hair into a French knot, stray tendrils clouding her ears—ears as curved and pearly as the inner wall of a moon shell. “We call it our antisleeping tonic around here.”

“Yeah, I could use some of that.”

She opened the minifridge, scooped out two aluminum cans, popped the tops and handed him one. Their fingers touched, briefly, and he realized that her eyes were gray, not blue. As gray as dusk, without any specks or highlights. He figured a person could get seriously lost in those dusk-soaked eyes.

“I was there yesterday,” she told him. “In Promise.”

This nudged him back to reality.

“I was chasing garbage storms up north when I stopped for gas and could barely open my door against the wind.” She shivered and cinched her lab coat tighter. “I could feel that icy chill that told me I was north of the cold front and needed to get south enough to feel that strong southern wind on my face. To see it collide with the cold front. I got there just in time. It had a classic barber-pole appearance. I’d guess it was an F-3. There was F-3 damage, for sure.”

“Yeah, it was pretty bad.”

“We heard about the murders. What a terrible day you must’ve had.” She nodded with a gentle warmth. “How’s your daughter?”

“Fine, thanks,” he said. So she remembered their conversation from six months ago? That was promising.

“My mother died when I was twelve,” she said. “That can be tough on a girl.”

“She’s handling it pretty well.”

“Trust me, Charlie. She’s not.” Except for her eyes, her face was still. “So what brings you here this morning?”

“I’ve got a few weather questions for you.”

She frowned and slunk way down in her chair. “Shoot.”

“I need to know if a storm-chaser can predict with any accuracy when and where a tornado’s going to touch down.”

She frowned. “If we could predict exactly where a tornado was going to drop, it wouldn’t be half as fun. That’s why we’re called chasers, Charlie. We love the action. We love the game.”

“So it’s a guessing game?”

She tilted her head to drink, Adam’s apple jutting like the whitened knuckle of a flexed finger. “Meteorology’s an imperfect science, but Mother Nature will drop a few clues. For example, the more organized a storm, the more likely it is to become severe. And since tornadoes often accompany severe weather, you make that your first goal. To find yourself an organized storm.”

“How would I go about doing that?”

Her face fell into relaxed lines. “You get up early and listen to the weather forecast.”

“That’s it?”

“No.” She smiled. “Next you’d go on-line and check out the computer-model forecasts. You’d study the analysis charts to see how the air patterns have set up. Then you’d check out the satellite pictures and radar images and create your own forecast.”

“How, exactly?”

She settled her limbs on the plastic arms of her chair, hands dangling, fingers curled under. Cat’s paws. She was relaxed as a cat around him. “Okay, back to basics,” she said. “You need three things to create a tornado, Charlie. Sufficient moisture, dynamics to lift the air, and jet streams to help create rotation. Any truck stop nowadays will have a table phone where you can hook up your laptop and download all sorts of weather information. Anybody can go on-line and check out the surface and upper-air patterns, but you have to know enough about weather to make sense of it. So you review the hard data first. Then you assess the sky with your own eyes once the chase begins.”

“Okay, so let’s say I’ve got my preliminary forecast. Then what?”

“Then you position yourself under a severe storm and wait.”

“Just wait?”

“You stay. You watch.”

“And? What am I looking for, exactly?”

She giggled. “You say ‘exactly’ a lot.”

“I do?”

“Yeah.”

He smiled.

She smiled. “Wall clouds. Towers. Anvils. You’re looking for instability, motion, rotation. Sometimes the sky’s so hazy you can’t see your own hand in front of your face. Other times, there are so many boundaries out there it’s almost impossible to decide which way to go. You could make a case for any direction. But if you get lucky and spot something interesting, then you plot an intercept course.”

“That’s what Captain Kirk always says.”

She laughed. “Am I confusing you?”

“A little.”

“You know nothing about this stuff, do you?”

He shrugged. “My father took me chasing once. It was an unmitigated disaster.”

“Unmitigated?”

“Fiasco.”

“What happened?”

“We painted ourselves into a corner. Floods, lightning, hail. We were critically low on gas with an extremely violent storm approaching.”

She smiled. “Sounds like fun.”

“Yeah, right. A whole barrel of monkeys.”

“What’s his chase vehicle?”

“A gray Loadmaster pickup truck, circa 1951.”

Her eyes lit up. “Always with the cowboy hat? White hair? One of those die-hard chasers who just dispense with the technology and go on sheer gut?”

“You know him?”

“I’ve seen him around, yeah.” She smiled and caught her lip between her teeth. “I admire crusty old codgers like him. Some of the best chasers I know forgo all the bells and whistles and just follow their noses.”

“What about you?”

“Me? Nah. I like bells and whistles.”

Sparks. Definite sparks. It scared the hell out of him. “So what got you started in this field?” he asked, his palms beginning to sweat.

“I grew up in Texas. Red dirt, sandstorms, the whole bit. There wasn’t a whole lot to do in our little town. Just church, matinee movies and storm-chasing.”

“So you got bit by the bug early on, huh?”

“I admit it. I’m an adrenaline junkie.”

“Do you chase often?”

“Every chance I get.” She continued to smile warmly at him. “Basically there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules, Charlie. Storm-chasing’s an art form.”

He sloshed his cola around in its can, not wanting to leave just yet. He wanted to ask her out, but he was more than a little nervous about it. Some people were repulsed by his scars. He could see it in their eyes. He didn’t want to see it in hers. Back at the station house, he’d occasionally roll up his shirtsleeves and use his scars to intimidate street punks, breach their comfort zones; but with women, you never knew. He’d had a few brief love affairs—if you could call them that—after Maddie had died, drunken encounters with barfly secretaries and middle-aged department store clerks. Stumbling back to their place; a nervous fumbling of buttons; whiskey-soaked breath. And each time, he couldn’t wait to get out of there. It bothered him that he hadn’t called them back afterward, not even out of common courtesy. He didn’t want to be one of those jerks.