Storm Front

by Robert Conroy

  “Maddy, where the hell are you?”

  It was Donna Harris. Maddy stood and could barely see Donna standing in the doorway only fifty feet away. “I’m looking for Tommy.”

  “Get back in here. He’s inside.”

  In disbelief, Maddy stumbled through the snow back to the doorway. “What?”

  “Yeah. He went out but then saw how difficult it was and returned. The girl who got you didn’t know that. She only saw him leave and ran to get someone.”

  “Shit.”

  Donna laughed. Maddy looked like a drowned rat and felt worse. Her wet hair lay limp and her face was red with cold. “Don’t cuss in front of the fucking students.” There were no students around the doorway.

  “Shit, fuck, bitch,” Maddy said, half crying and half laughing in relief. She started to shake again from the stress, the relief, and the soaking cold she’d endured. “I’m going to quit teaching and join the circus. Obviously I have a future as a clown.”

  Donna took her by the arm and pulled her inside. “You look like hell. Go back to the furnace room and dry off. Again.”

  * * *

  The voice on the phone had a heavy, hammy, and throaty Italian accent. “Am I speaking to the distinguished sergeant of trafficology, the honorable Michael Stuart? The same man who has the hots for my job?”

  Mike laughed into the phone. “That is the worst Godfather imitation I have ever heard, most honorable Lieutenant DiMona.”

  “Hey, how can it be phony when I’m so genuine an Italian gentleman?”

  It was good to hear the voice of DiMona, the thirty-year veteran of the force, and a man who was both Mike’s boss and friend.

  “So, Mikey, I’m sitting here playing with myself and watching CNN and seeing how you’ve managed to fuck up the place in such a short while without my steadying hand to guide you. In fact, most people say you need to read the directions tattooed on your cock every time you masturbate.”

  Mike laughed. “I love you too. So come home and put me out of my misery and fire me. Where are you anyway?”

  “I’m still in Lost Wages, Nevada, and pumping money into the local economy. My arm’s sore from jacking off one of those old-fashioned slot machines that I prefer to the newer models, so I thought I’d call you and find out what the fuck is going on.”

  Mike updated him on the situation, beginning with the totally unexpected snow and continuing with the motel murders and the dead people in the car on MacArthur.

  “How’s Petkowski taking it?” DiMona asked.

  “Badly. He’s reliving that accident that killed his niece and he feels guilty that he didn’t check that car sooner. What makes it worse is that it was almost within sight of the station.”

  “Keep him busy so he doesn’t have time to think about it.”

  “Easier said than done, Joey. But he is out checking on other cars. Maybe he’s double and triple checking them, but you’re right, at least he’s busy.”

  “Good. Now, what the hell were you doing at the motel with Hughes when you should have been organizing help for people in cars?”

  Mike winced. He’d been asking himself that same question. What were his priorities? “Hughes asked for me to help and I know that’s a cop-out answer, no pun intended. I didn’t think it would be right to say no. After all, I did have a little training in SWAT tactics in Detroit, which put me ahead of a lot of other people.”

  “Me included,” DiMona admitted grudgingly. “Life is full of bad choices and you did what you had to. What about the little pricks who killed the Kelloggs?”

  “Hughes has some prints and they’ve been sent in. Maybe one will hit.”

  “You know, what you’re telling me about all the snow-covered shit hitting the fan makes retirement sound real good. You really want my job, Mikey?”

  Mike laughed. A few days ago he would have jumped at the chance. “I don’t think I’m ready,” he admitted, and then wondered if he would ever be.

  “Right. You’re not ready. That’s why I want you to take my phone number and call me anytime, anyplace. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “For starters, though, remember two things. Chief Bench is a drunken incompetent, and Mayor Carter is a crook. Other than that, they’re cool. Hughes is good people and so are a lot of others. I presume, however, that a lot of the other brass isn’t going to make it in.”

  “We’re working on it, but some live so far away.”

  The department had two other lieutenants. One had called in sick earlier, while the second lived more than twenty miles away. He was trying to get there, but his appearance was growing more unlikely with each minute. Chief Bench ran a sloppy ship, which meant that the “sick” lieutenant had probably been at his lake cottage, working and preparing for the arrival of spring.

  “Well, as the old saying goes, you play the cards you were dealt, not the ones you wish you had. Y’all go now and have fun and don’t fuck the place up much more than you already have.”

  * * *

  Raines and Tower found it ridiculously easy to break into people’s homes. Just find a place without a home alarm sticker or a barking dog, drive the snowmobile behind the house and out of sight, and park it. Then break a window, reach in and unlock the door, and the place was theirs. After that, their great ideas just fell apart.

  There were a lot of cars in garages, and a number of liftable items in the houses, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. They could only take what they could stuff in their pockets or carry on one snowmobile. Jimmy Tower had run his snowmobile onto a fire hydrant and ruined it. So they concentrated on finding and taking cash and small jewelry. While there was sufficient jewelry, there was little cash. They concluded that the people in Sheridan lived off their credit cards, which, of course, they carried with them. After breaking into three houses, they’d concluded that Sheridan was an affluent but surprisingly cashless society.

  They’d been listening to the radio and the television in their latest house and had heard Wally Wellman’s urgings for all neighbors to be good neighbors and help each other out. This was the last thing they wanted at this time. The idea of some do-gooder coming to the door and checking things out horrified them. Raines made it a point to keep lights off and the noise down when they were in a house. Neither man liked this, but what were their choices? Even if they knew where to go and how to get there, they couldn’t drive their one surviving snowmobile far enough to safety.

  Raines checked their findings from this nice colonial house and added it to the others. All together, they had less than two thousand dollars in cash and a few bits of really decent jewelry for their efforts. The cash wouldn’t get them far, and the jewelry was useless without someone to sell it to. Nor could they continue to skulk indefinitely. They had to do something to get away from this snowbound burg. The snow would stop and they had to be prepared.

  But how?

  Tower was getting restless. Dark empty houses spooked him, reminding him of nights in the prison. Maybe they should take a chance on one that was occupied? That might give Tower some fun if the occupants were female. Not a chance, Raines thought. They would stick with empty places.

  * * *

  Only a few years earlier, Sheridan and the surrounding area had consisted of farmland and small patches of woodland. It had looked tame enough, but the area had supported a number of animals that the average person would consider wild. These included fox, woodchuck, raccoon, and skunks, along with omnipresent squirrels, field mice, possum, and shrews. Also, there was the occasional coyote whose howling livened up an otherwise dull evening and who occasionally ate cats and small dogs. Wild birds also abounded, with hawks that fed on the smaller animals and birds. Non-predatory birds included pheasants, herons, ducks, and geese in great numbers.

  When the farms began to evolve into subdivisions and strip malls, the creatures of the wild had a limited menu of choices: adapt, move, or die. Some, like raccoons, found attics, garages, and garbage cans to their likin
g, while many birds ate seed at the feeders put out by people who enjoyed watching them. Others, like ducks and geese, were protected by law. Ducks, at least, were migratory, while many geese wintered over, feeding where they could and defecating copious amounts of green matter wherever they wished to the disgust and dismay of the residents. The geese especially liked golf courses; golfers hated them.

  The coyotes were ungodly smart and almost impossible to catch. Nor could they be shot since firing a weapon in a subdivision was both dangerous and illegal.

  The strangest adaptation belonged to the deer. They existed in uncountable numbers in parks and golf courses, as well as in less developed areas. Statistically, each year there were several thousand car-deer collisions in the metropolitan Detroit area causing a number of human deaths and injuries. Other than cars, the deer in Sheridan had no known predators.

  Sheridan, being newer and with a city plan that called for a lot of green space, saw “wild” deer frequently. They ate flowers, vegetables, and shrubs, and where homeowners were kind, waited patiently in backyards for handouts. The deer existed smugly in a kill-free zone.

  Ben Goldman had retired from a stock brokerage in New York. Just a few years before retirement he’d been transferred to what many New Yorkers perceived of as the barrens of the Midwest in an effort to get him to resign. It didn’t work. As Ben Goldman said to Harriet, his wife, he wasn’t stupid enough to toss away a good pension when he could tread water in a Midwestern Siberia for a couple of years. Harriet would remind him that he was mixing metaphors, but he didn’t care.

  Then the Goldmans found that they liked it in Sheridan. The people spoke English, didn’t eat their young, and best of all, the cost of living was so much lower than in New York. They wound up with three times the house at half the price. Ben and Harriet thought they’d gotten the last laugh on Ben’s so-called friends at the brokerage. Other essentials, like food, wine, and clothing, were also far less expensive than New York. They loved it.

  Also, they were nowhere near New York when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and murdered a number of their friends and associates.

  Like many city people, they loved the deer. In the Goldmans’ extensive and unfenced back yard, Bambi lived. In fact, lots of Bambis hung around.

  On this night, the company included a young deer, a buck with four small points defining what might become a quality rack of antlers if the deer kept out of traffic long enough. He was hungry and confused. Winter is the killing time for deer as much as the hunting season, and many deer died of natural causes, mainly starvation. Cold killed the grasses, and snow covered what remained. Only the hardy survived even a mild winter, and this had been a harsh one. The storm was simply one more blow to the deer population.

  This buck was gaunt and ached from near-starvation, and he was exhausted from plowing through the snow. He dimly recalled getting food from a feeder near a home and went snuffling towards it. It was empty and he banged it around in frustration and then rooted through the deep snow in the area to see if anything had spilled. There was nothing.

  Somehow, he understood that the food came from the houses, and the buck took a handful of tentative steps towards the intimidating dwelling. Even though deer had been around people for decades, they were still wild animals and there was but a minimal level of trust between deer and human. The house was a large, alien thing, and only his overpowering hunger gave him the strength to approach it.

  As the deer ventured onto the patio, two things happened. First, the dog next door, a German shepherd named Adolf, saw the deer through the snow from a second-floor window. The dog barked ferociously and the sound carried. Second, Harriet Goldman chose that moment to turn on the patio light, even though there was plenty of outside light. Confused and frightened, the deer whirled and launched himself into some snow-covered patio furniture. Now frightened beyond reason, the deer lurched towards what he perceived as greenery. It wasn’t. He’d seen the ficus plant and Norfolk pine in the Goldmans’ family room.

  The deer smashed headfirst through the doorwall, sending snow and glass flying. It had a fractured skull and a broken leg and was dying, but it didn’t know that. It only knew that it was in agony and terrified.

  Instinctively, from where she had just sat down, Harriet Goldman jumped up and screamed. The deer focused in on the sound and lashed out with its head as it crumpled to the ground. Two small antlers rammed themselves into her thigh and stuck for a moment. The dying deer shook its head to free itself, tearing the flesh on Harriet’s thigh. She screamed and fainted at about the same moment the buck died.

  Ben Goldman ran to his wife’s side just in time to catch a flailing hoof to his mouth. He spat out teeth and fell beside his wife. Blood gushed from her leg and he nearly fainted from his own pain and the sight of such mutilation. The flesh was shredded and her leg bone was visible. He whipped off his belt and tried to fashion a tourniquet. Then he grabbed the phone and frantically called 911. They said they’d respond as quickly as they could.

  Ben looked at his wife’s frail and unconscious body. The color of her skin was ashen and her breath was shallow and irregular. Blood still seeped from her leg. He tied the tourniquet tighter and it pretty much stopped. Then he began to wait for the sound of sirens.

  * * *

  Donna Harris slipped into the furnace room where Maddy sat naked, wrapped in a couple of blankets that more or less covered her.

  “Shut the door,” Maddy snapped.

  “What? Afraid Mr. Craft will see you?” Wilson Craft was the maintenance man and the furnace room was his office. He had been booted out so that Maddy could dry off, and he thought her predicament was hilarious.

  “No, he’s sixty and harmless. I’m afraid some of my students will look in and see something they shouldn’t.”

  “Then keep your legs crossed and that blanket around your shoulders. Besides, Mr. Craft at sixty is far from harmless. I have it on good authority that men that old and older can and do get it up every now and then.”

  Maddy giggled. “What good authority?”

  “Mrs. Severson. She and Mr. Craft have been having an affair for some time now.”

  “Oh my God, and nobody told me,” Maddy wailed in mock dismay. Mary Severson was the food services supervisor and unhappily married. Craft was a widower who’d taken early retirement from Chrysler before latching on as a maintenance man in the Sheridan Schools. She thought the two were always friendly, but never realized it went farther. She must have been blind, she thought.

  “At any rate, Wilson is busy shoveling snow from the doorways. It occurred to him that any need to evacuate this building would be hindered if snow blocked the exits.”

  “Never thought of that,” Maddy said. “A fire and a panic would be a tragedy. I underestimated him.”

  “So did I, although Mary Severson says she never did. Here, take some of this.”

  Donna handed Maddy a plastic coffee cup. She sniffed and looked up, surprised. “Liquor?”

  “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 cre
ating 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.