The Breathtaker (15 page)

8

A
FTER NEARLY
twenty minutes of chasing turkey towers and transverse rolls, those slowly spinning horizontal tubes of air, they veered off the highway and turned down a bad state road, where the car made plenty of noise and smoke, each new jounce setting Charlie’s teeth on edge. The butt of his gun kept poking into his rib cage, and his eyes stung from staring too long and too hard at the sky. The front seat was littered with road maps and laminated phone lists, a first-aid kit and a laptop computer. The backseat was a jumble of packing quilts, flashlights, duct tape, binoculars, photography equipment and bug repellent.

“So how come we got stuck with this jalopy?” he asked Willa, whose shoulder-length black hair was tucked behind her ears, those beautiful pearly white ears of hers.

“Are you kidding?” she said, eyeing him sideways. “You want a vehicle you can run into the ground.”

“Is this thing capable of warp speed?”

“You know, Charlie, your
Star Trek
jokes are starting to get a little tired.” She grinned at him.

“Cut me some slack. I don’t get out much.”

“Engine’s fine, it just needs a whole new car wrapped around it.” She scanned the sky. “Hm. Broken strato-cu. Hazy. Mushy tops. Nothing to write home about.”

The ’82 Ford station wagon with its mismatched doors was roomy inside, if a bit musty-smelling, and had about 175,000 miles on it. Pings pimpled the veneer, and the beige body was covered with contagious-looking rust spots. All sorts of expensive-looking equipment was mounted on the dash—radios, scanners, GPS receivers, a video camera on a Morganti mount.

She followed his gaze. “My wallet hurts whenever I think about the money I’ve spent on this stuff. But I come from a long line of gadget lovers.”

“So this is your car? Not the lab’s?”

“Hey, don’t knock it. I’ve had six chase-mobiles in the past seven years, Charlie. They last me about a season.” She slid him a look. “Guess that’s longer than some marriages.”

“You divorced?”

She shrugged. “He was my meteorology professor. I was young and stupid. Looking back, I realize I was more impressed with him than in love with him.”

“Still friends?”

“Ha. Next question.” She pointed with a manicured nail painted purply red. “Look over there, Charlie. See that cap, that very strong cap? See how the linear cloud base curls into a cumulus tower with a rounded end?”

“Yeah.” They hit another rut, and the top of his head grazed the disintegrating roof padding. “Ow.”

“This could get fairly interesting.”

They took off in a belch of exhaust. The sky was the color of wet cement, and the dew point was in the upper fifties—a good thing, she kept telling him. The NOAA weather radio had promised explosive development somewhere in central and northwestern Oklahoma today, but so far this chase ride consisted of following a bunch of clouds, watching them pinch off and dissipate, and then following another bunch of clouds. During their occasional pit stops, Willa would call up computer readouts and radar reports inside the accompanying Doppler van that Rick was driving—a brown Doppler van with ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES LAB stenciled on one side. They’d lost track of him five minutes ago.

Now the weather radio interrupted with another update: “A tornado warning has just been issued,” said the tired male voice over the crackling speaker, “for north-central and northwest Oklahoma this afternoon…”

“Ah. Sounds good and bleak.” She tossed him the rumpled road map. “Okay, Charlie, you’re the navigator. We need to avoid all the dirt roads and dead ends, keep our escape routes open.”

“Escape routes? You never said anything about escape routes.”

She glanced at him. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you. I’m really good at this. Sit back and relax.” She wore ivory-colored overalls and a black pullover sweater, and her wool clogs kept slipping off the brake pedal.

“What do we need escape routes for?”

“Hey, a lot can go wrong out here. Flash floods, hailstorms, downed power lines, that sort of thing. What’s the quickest route to Lawton?”

He squinted at the map. “You wanna take… um… your next right.”

She stomped on the accelerator. At the cloverleaf entrance ramp, they hydroplaned back onto the highway and sped past trucks with their air brakes roaring in a swirl of diesel fumes. The car felt sluggish against the wind. He didn’t know what to think about Lester’s revelation. It put him squarely in the category of “persons of interest.” They’d have to have him in for an official interview now, and he should probably take a polygraph in order to eliminate himself as a suspect. Charlie didn’t think Lester Deere—foolish as he was, lost as he was—was capable of anything like murder. Then again, half an hour ago, he would’ve laughed at the very thought of Lester and Jenna Pepper having an affair. You thought you knew your friends, but you didn’t know everything about them.

“We’re following a slow-moving storm front ten miles to our southwest,” Willa said. “Seventy dew points, moving north by northeast. I’m plotting an intercept course. We’ve got to find a southern road to get behind the storm.” She cast him a sidelong glance. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“No regrets?”

“Are you kidding? I’m loving this.”

She smiled and said, “So tell me about Maddie.”

He glanced at her, decided she was serious. “She was honest and unpretentious.” Like you, he thought. “One day without warning, she fainted. I thought it might be heatstroke and drove her to the hospital. On the way over there, she started to nod her head. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she said, over and over, to lots of different questions. It scared the hell out of me. I pulled over and called an ambulance. I thought she might be having a stroke and needed a paramedic quick. She couldn’t remember her name. She kept fumbling with her purse and wallet, looking for her ID.”

The sky was full of chaos and contrast, but he wasn’t seeing it; instead, he saw Maddie fumbling with the clasp of her purse, everything tumbling out onto her lap.

“She couldn’t remember her name,” he repeated, feeling the echo of his former shock. “I followed the ambulance, and as they wheeled her inside, she said, ‘How nice of you to take the day off from work and bring me here.’ ”

“I’m sorry.” Willa’s voice was rich with sympathy. “I lost my mom when I was twelve, and it looms so large in my head… but that’s nothing compared to what some people have had to endure. I feel a little selfish bringing it up, like I’m the only person on the planet who’s ever known trouble. Hey, I survived. It toughened me up. In a way it helped, you know?”

They drove along in silence for a while; then, through a break in the clouds, Charlie caught a glimpse of the towers. A dramatic cloudscape loomed before them, spanning the entire 180 degrees of horizon. The towering cumulus clouds rose up like the dust from an exploded A-bomb and gave him pause. He felt humbled. It started spitting rain. In a matter of seconds, a thick driving rain pummeled the car, obscuring their view.

“I can’t see shit,” Willa said in a tense voice. “We need a southern route. Charlie?”

“Oh. Right.” He unfolded the road map and tried to pinpoint their position. “Hold on a sec…”

“Anything?”

“Wait…”

“Charlie?”

“Take your next… left,” he guessed.

What the map indicated to be a paved road turned out to be a poorly maintained dirt road where the slopes had washed out in winding gullies. Willa slammed on the brakes, and they skidded until they hit something hard, the Ford bouncing back several feet upon impact. They sat for a stunned instant while the rain beat down around them and fog wafted in through the windows, curling up in their faces like cigarette smoke.

He half expected her to curse him out for leading her the wrong way, but instead, she just laughed and said, “You okay?”

“Yeah, I think so.” He rubbed his sore jaw. He’d bitten his tongue hard enough to draw blood. The rain was blowing in sheets against the car. “Whatever we hit wasn’t on the map.”

“This is Oklahoma, Charlie. Plenty of things aren’t on the map.” She snatched a rain slicker out of the backseat and drew it on, then shot out of the car and did a quick inspection of the vehicle, while the rain held them in its chill, silvery embrace. Bright shimmery raindrops spiraled down in the headlights’ glare, as if the sky were shedding all its elements. She opened the door and said, “My muffler’s come loose. Lemme fix it real quick.”

He got out to help. “What’d we plow into?”

“Tree stump.” She looked into his face the way a woman sometimes looks at a man. “No biggie. My tailpipe gets knocked off at least twice a year. You should know that about me, Charlie.”

He laughed and said, “This road is soup.”

The front bumper was crumpled like an aluminum can. She grabbed a roll of duct tape out of the back, and he stood around helplessly while she taped the muffler to the undercarriage of the car. The mud kept sucking the clogs off her feet. When she was done, he helped her up.

“Like my father used to say, ain’t nothing that a little sandpaper can’t fix. Whatever that means.”

He kissed her.

She seemed surprised, rain streaking down her face. “What was that?” she asked.

“Presumption. Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m very selective about who I take on a storm intercept with me.” She threw her arms around him and kissed him back, her lips sweet and soft and needy.

A stroke of lightning snapped to the ground less than a mile away, and he drew back with his hand still on her shoulder. “Phew, that was close.”

“We’d better get moving.”

They shot back into the car, and she quickly turned it around. They took a paved road as straight as a paper cut, where the trees were dark and wet, their leaves waxy green in the relentless driving rain. Through a small hole in the cloud cover, Charlie could see compact bubbles and aquamarine interstices lacing up through the cauliflower tops. He glanced at the gas gauge—half-empty.

“Tornado on the ground!” the radio sputtered.

He searched the sky but saw nothing.

“Lots of nice structure, no confirmed tornadoes,” Willa said. “Do you see anything, Charlie?”

“No.”

“This must be the Invisible Vortex, then, ’cause there ain’t no tornadoes around here.”

The cloud towers that had been so visible for miles abruptly collapsed into an overcast haze. Willa checked the frequency indicator on her ham radio and scooped up the mike.

“Rick?” she said. “You still with us? I sense we’re really getting into something.”

“Make sure you stay on the south side as it intensifies,” he answered in a burst of static.

She keyed the mike. “Inflow winds are strong. Lightning’s getting closer. They’ve been under warning for two hours now.”

“I’ve got a wall cloud sitting right in front of my face. Keep heading south. Doppler radar in Amarillo detects a vortex signature at a range of about sixty miles. You’ve got another terrific upper-level system with winds packing one hundred and fifty knots approaching from behind. Looks like we got a twofer, Bellman.”

A warning signal broke the squelch of the NOAA radio. She dunked the mike back in its retainer and turned the vehicle around again, the tall grass bending underneath the front bumper and springing back up as they sped over it. “This time we’ll approach the storm from the clear air mass behind the dry line,” she said. “Better visibility that way. Okay with you?”

“Like I’m gonna disagree.”

She smiled. “You can disagree with me anytime you like, Charlie. I don’t mind.”

He grinned at her, and they drove through the center of another benign little prairie town, past a dreary stretch of dilapidated buildings that harbored the kinds of country stores you could buy just about anything in, from snuff to beer to hunting licenses. Beyond the jagged rooftops, the gunmetal-gray sky bubbled like something simmering on a back burner.

“See that right-flank overhang to our southwest?”

He gave a hesitant nod.

“The rear-flank convection’s beginning to mask the Cb tops.”

“Cb?”

“Cumulonimbus. Clouds showing strong vertical growth in the form of mountains or huge towers topped by an anvil. What’s generally known as a ‘thunderhead.’ ” She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know which one to pick. Looks like the second storm further south has mesocyclones in it. We’d better get back on the 277.” She waited a beat, then said, “Charlie?”

“Oh, that’s my job.” He picked up the map, its surface tacky to the touch. The car was making that weird rattling sound again. “You sure this thing is safe?”

“About as safe as any chase-mobile can be.”

He looked at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Considering that the most dangerous place to be during a tornado is inside your car?” She shot him an amused glance. “Not safe enough.”

“Jesus, that’s reassuring.”

“Welcome to my world.”

“Remind me to take you on a ride-along one of these days.”

Darkening clouds dripped down into showers, and the sky took on a ragged look. The heady sweetness of fresh damp dirt filled the car. Fat cumulus clouds towered higher and higher, pools of warm and cold air colliding, and a saucer-shaped overcast hung suspended along the horizon like a glorious threat. Soon they entered another dense curtain of rain and were instantly enveloped in humid, buoyant air. They hydroplaned past a highway sign that said “Welcome to Splitback, Oklahoma, Pop. 2,830.” On the outskirts of this mustard seed of an outpost, they spotted a weak funnel cloud dangling beneath the ominous-looking rotating cloud base. It snaked its way down into the ground and drew up a curtain of red into the air—the legendary red dust of Oklahoma.

Now a local radio station transmitted a warning. “Take shelter immediately! A tornado is reported to be on the ground.”

Hovering over the green fields less than three miles away, the ropelike tornado crossed the long straight road ahead, then gracefully lifted up into the air, becoming just a “funnel” again. Charlie held his breath. The air sizzled with energy. Illusion was a real risk—which way was it headed?

The radio meteorologist said, “Believe me, folks, you should take shelter now! These storms can kill.”