Storm Front

by Robert Conroy

  “Now what, ladies?” he said affably. He considered the ladies his aunts, not his employees. He could talk to the women like adults and equals, not like the kids. Sometimes kids mocked him for his accent, although, he had to admit, not all of them. Many of the kids were real nice; it was just that they didn’t have much life experience. Certainly, they’d never rooted through garbage for their daily bread. If this snow was going to precipitate the crises he expected, kids would be useless.

  “I think we’re going to eat well,” one of the women laughed. “Thank God we’re in a place with all this food.”

  “Yeah,” said the other, “think about those places without food. It’s just a shame there’s so much cholesterol around here and I’m trying to watch my weight. There’ll be a lot of hungry people in a little while who’d like to have what we have.”

  Halavi did think about it. The snow was piling up rapidly and nothing was moving in the street outside. People had abandoned their cars, but no one was coming to the fast food places. The larger stores in the mall across the street had drawn them in. Halavi’s Burger King might have Whoppers, but the mall had furniture, more and larger restrooms, and, yes, restaurants. The malls would be much better places to wait out a nasty snowfall.

  “I feel sorry for the kids stuck in schools,” one of the ladies said.

  “So do I,” Halavi said softly. He’d had a thought.

  Halavi picked up his phone and made a conference call to the other fast food managers and then more calls to the nearby Starbucks, Tim Horton’s, and Panera Bread. He knew them all and the rivalry, while intense and serious, was also good natured. They all knew their success was mutually dependent, and, together, they were all extremely successful. After getting through a layer of jokes regarding fast-food pub crawls and dog-sleds at the drive-thrus, Halavi got to the point. They had food that was going to go to waste and the schools probably didn’t have enough to feed the children. How then were they to solve the dilemma?

  A whirring, whining droning noise interrupted his thoughts. Two teenagers on snowmobiles raced by, serenely confident in their vehicle’s ability to handle, even defeat, the growing piles of snow.

  “You see what I see,” he asked his fellow managers. Two of them did. “Now all we got to do is get us some of those things and find out where the food should go.”

  CHAPTER 13

  This time it was DiMona who sounded sleepy, a small fact that delighted Mike Stuart. “What’s the matter, beloved Lieutenant, were you sleeping?”

  “Yes, damn it. Las Vegas may never sleep, but I do. I’m losing my shirt and my wife is doing even worse. Tomorrow I’ll have a hangover and I haven’t even been laid lately. What do you want now? Has it stopped snowing so I can come home?”

  “No, and maybe it never will and I don’t understand why you went all the way to Nevada to piss away your money when we’ve got so many perfectly good casinos right here. Y’know, you could really save a lot of time by simply flushing your money down a toilet.”

  “Screw you, Mikey.”

  Mike grinned into the phone. “Actually, I’ve got a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why did you sic that nasty blonde television reporter on Chief Bench?”

  There was a moment’s silence, and DiMona began to laugh. “Gee, and here I thought I was being so sneaky.”

  “So you admit it? Hell, I was just guessing.”

  “Your guess was on target, Mikey. I did it and I’m proud. I called up a guy I know at her channel, told him about Bench and that he was a danger to mankind, and he said he was going to send her over since she lived only a couple of miles away and had access to a snowmobile. Obviously she made it and stirred up some shit, and ain’t that just wonderful.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  “Because beloved Chief Bench is a drunken incompetent son of a bitch who’s trying to force me to retire and now I nailed him good. Is that enough?”

  “Sounds fair, but first off, I thought you wanted to retire. I never heard anything about you being forced out. That’s news to me and maybe a lot of people, Joey.”

  “That’s ’cause the people who are screwing with me are pretending to be making like being gentlemen and keeping it quiet so I don’t sue them. I do want to retire someday, Mikey, I just want to do it on my terms and at my time. I still like my job and I like the people I work with, even you some days, so I’d just as soon not be out on my ass like some unwelcome party-crasher.

  “Bench wants me out now because I argue with him when he makes dumb decisions, and point out his many imperfections, one of which is drinking himself into a stupor on company time. Whenever we’ve had a crisis, he’s never been around. Why not? Because he’s always stewed. He’s got a lot of people fooled. He can sit in his office, or in the mayor’s, and make pontifical noises and not harm anybody. But tell me, when’s the last time you saw him at the scene of a crisis?”

  “Joey, this is Sheridan. We haven’t had that many crises.”

  “But we still have some, and we have a big one now, likely the biggest in Sheridan’s history. Remember when you met Maddy? Some bus driver had run over a kid and the whole thing made the evening news on all channels. So where was Bench? In his office fast asleep like a little kid taking a nap, or maybe a bear hibernating would be better. You were there at the scene since that’s where you met Maddy, and that’s where I was too, and I looked great on television, but Bench was nowhere to be seen.

  “And where’s he been since the snow started falling? This is when leaders lead and give us the wisdom of their experience. Instead, the city’s got you and, not to knock you since you’re working so hard and generally doing the right things, but weren’t there occasional moments when you would have liked to have someone to bounce thoughts off of?”

  Mike had an uncomfortable thought. “Joey, are you saying that the family who died in their car might be alive if Bench had been functioning as a real chief? Or that we might have caught those two killers at the motel instead of having them get away? I find that hard to swallow.”

  “Nah, nothing anybody could have done was going to change a thing in those cases, but are you confident that everything that could have been done had been done? At the very least, Bench’s intoxication left you one important person short, didn’t it? And that meant one less person checking cars or backing you up at that motel.”

  Mike agreed. He and Detective Hughes had been left to fend for themselves, and the numbers of people available for support had been, and remained, limited. Now he did wonder if better leadership might have helped.

  “And, Mike, it’s going to get much worse before it gets better, because it’s going to go beyond the snowfall.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember I said the FBI was investigating our beloved mayor? Well, chew on this. Years ago, the mayor’s construction company low-bid on a number of major development projects in the city and got them. The bids were extremely low, but Carter still managed to make a ton of profit and gave some of it to charity so everybody thought he was a good guy as well as being a real canny businessman. Hell, he even got some awards for being so damned smart and civic-minded, but there’s another reason, isn’t there?”

  Mike thought quickly. “Oh, Christ, he chintzed on construction and materials, didn’t he?”

  “Bingo, bunky. At least that’s what the Feds think. Y’know, I don’t know nothing about building stuff, but let’s say you just pound in six nails per foot of wood instead of nine like the plans and city code requires, or maybe you use a lower grade of lumber or metal struts a little cheaper and farther apart so you can have fewer of them and you can save a fortune. Or maybe you put inferior materials into the cement. Of course, the buildings aren’t as strong as they should be, but that’s okay since nothing’s happened to them in years so they must be strong enough, right? It just proves that the legal standards were too strict. And now all those crappily made buildings are piled up with more than thr
ee feet of snow, aren’t they? Bet you can hear the roofs creaking right now, can’t you?”

  Mike instinctively looked to the ceiling. As if he was in the room with him, DiMona laughed. “Don’t worry. The police station is built like a fortress and not by Carter’s boys. Same for the rest of the city hall compound. They were all built to last. But there are maybe fifty buildings in Sheridan that Carter and his cronies put up and God only knows how safe and sound they are. Oh, if you’re wondering about the building inspectors, we only had one at the time and he was busy with residential work and didn’t know much about commercial stuff anyhow, so the job was outsourced to a company that the Feds now think had connections to Carter.”

  Mike had visions of buildings collapsing onto shocked and horrified inhabitants. It wouldn’t be anything like the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, but people could still die or be injured. With all the snow, it would be like an avalanche hit them. “Joey, I should know what buildings might be in danger. Do you have a list?”

  “No, damn it. I’m on vacation, remember? Tell you what, in the morning I’ll call my contact at the FBI and one of us will fax you the list.”

  Mike was handed a note and he stood up quickly. “Joey, you do that and I’d appreciate it. I’ve got to go, my friend. There’s a big fire on Winston Street.”

  One more crisis, Mike thought after hanging up. He was thankful that his parents were safe and out of town, and that Maddy was in a place that was also safe at Patton Elementary. He gently kicked Petkowski in the ribs, let him swear a couple of times, and told him to get his outdoor gear on. They had yet another problem to solve. Too bad they didn’t have a real chief of police, Mike thought.

  * * *

  Wilson Craft enjoyed his job. After more than thirty years taking shit in a Chrysler assembly plant, even a relatively clean and modern one, the opportunity to be in an open and sunny environment filled with kids and intelligent adults was like a dream.

  Forced into early retirement by a plant closure following Chrysler’s bankruptcy, he’d applied for the job of maintenance man in the Sheridan schools, got it, and found that the pay, along with his Chrysler pension, more than compensated for his lost income. Better, the work wasn’t at all difficult compared with what he’d been doing in the past. In a little more than a year he’d be eligible for full Social Security, which meant a hard decision on whether to continue his maintenance position or take the government money that, after all, was his in the first place. Or, he could wait a little while longer and do both. Since the work wasn’t all that hard and the money was good, he was leaning towards continuing to work.

  His new job had brought him a divorce and a girlfriend. His wife of twenty years had left him shortly after he’d left Chrysler, and his friends said it was in desperation at the thought of spending all day with him. Wilson knew better. She’d had a couple of affairs before and he’d caught her having sex with a neighbor. Worse, it was another woman. He never wanted to see her again. Thank God they’d never had kids, because he wouldn’t know how to explain to them that mommy was a lesbian.

  Wilson thought he was actually enjoying life for the first time. Some people disapproved, but screw them. It was his life, after all.

  Sometimes he felt sorry for the teachers and other staff. Working in an automotive factory was far from fair, and layoffs and job loss were a regular possibility, especially if you worked for Chrysler. But for teachers and other government workers, it was a shock. Government jobs were supposed to be layoff proof but it wasn’t working out that way. Michigan was supposed to be recovering economically, but few could see it. Property values were way down, which meant less money in property taxes which then meant less money for schools. The teachers hadn’t had a raise in years. Wilson hadn’t either, but he was used to that crap. Fortunately, Sheridan was both affluent and growing, which meant that layoffs had been few and selective. He was concerned that his job might be outsourced. Again, there was nothing he could do about it, so why worry?

  But now, he was genuinely worried. The electricity was out and he had a bunch of squirrelly kids and sometimes equally squirrelly teachers to worry about. First, he had to convince them that no one was going to freeze to death. Wilson’s father used to bore them with stories about how he slept in an uninsulated and unheated attic in a frame house in Detroit and never suffered anything worse than the sniffles. Bull, Wilson thought. Of course he suffered, but his old man had a point. The temperature in that attic rarely went below freezing and the temperature in Patton Elementary wasn’t going to come anywhere close to it. It just wasn’t that cold outside and the snow piling up was actually acting like an insulator. Eskimos lived in ice houses, didn’t they? All the people had to do was stay bundled up and close together, and they’d be nice and warm. Well, sort of.

  Fortunately, most of the teachers had brains, especially Donna Harris and Maddy Kovacs. He thought they both were good-looking and intelligent women who had knockout bodies, although Harris could shed a few pounds. He smiled at the thought of bagging either or both. Maddy might be younger and firmer, but Donna Harris exuded something that was positively carnal. All she’d have to do was crook a finger and he’d come crawling, drooling, in her direction.

  Forget it, he thought. It wasn’t going to happen. Neither woman would be interested in what to them must seem to be an old fart. And besides, he had a girlfriend who satisfied him. He laughed internally at his idiotic daydream, although he did wish that the Kovacs chick would loosen up and enjoy life a little more. Maybe the cop she was dating would make it happen for her. Wilson hoped so. Indecent thoughts or not, he genuinely liked and respected both of them.

  The teachers and kids had abandoned the gym for the hallway between the classrooms. Smart move. It got a second layer of walls between them and the outside and it got them into an area smaller than the gym where body heat could be conserved. Some of the students and teachers remained in classrooms where they felt more comfortable. It was their call. If somebody really got cold, they could go into the furnace room. The furnace was still on, which made the room warm, but the blower wasn’t working since it needed electricity. Mrs. Harris had told him she was thinking of doing a rotation of people in and out of the furnace room. The woman had a brain as well as a body. No wonder her husband smiled a lot. He wondered if Mr. Harris satisfied Mrs. Harris. Mrs. Harris would take a lot of satisfying. Maddy Kovacs, on the other hand, was a different story. Although very friendly and personable, she struck him as a little cold.

  Wilson Craft, however, was worried by the possibility of suffocation in the school. He’d heard the radio reports of death in cars and elsewhere, and was deeply concerned that it could happen at Patton. As the snow piled up, normal ventilation sources were being covered. Opening the trap door to the roof wasn’t possible because of the snow piled up there, and forcing open the outside doors would generate too much wind in the hallways where people were gathering, although he would do that as a last resort. He’d worked hard all day shoveling snow away from the doors so they could be used as emergency exits should the need arise. He was exhausted from the effort.

  That left cracking open a bunch of windows in such a manner as to move the air without freezing the occupants. After working hard all day and night, he’d come to the reluctant conclusion that he was out of shape. It surprised him. What the hell—he’d given up smoking a decade ago, and he’d been watching his diet to the point that he’d lost ten pounds and his cholesterol level was dropping dramatically. Maybe he should have exercised like his doctor had bugged him to. He made a mental note to start when this emergency was over. He had a treadmill in his basement that was gathering dust.

  Wilson Craft moved the ladder to the window in the now empty gym. He climbed the half dozen steps to the top where he could reach the latch and open the window. He tugged and swore. It was stuck. Nothing was going to be easy today. He pulled again and felt the muscles strain in his back.

  Craft was stubborn and p
ulled again. As he did, his back twisted, and he lost his footing and began to fall. He kept one arm on the latch until his shoulder separated and the pain became too much. He screamed and let go. His arms flailed and he tried to grab the ladder. His efforts knocked it away. He landed on his head with a crack that went unheard in the empty room.

  As his world spun in red circles, he thought it was funny that everything was so disconnected. He couldn’t feel his arms and legs. And why didn’t he hurt?

  * * *

  There was a strange similarity in the way houses were constructed in many parts of Sheridan, and with the way they were built in older sections of Detroit and other major cities. In Detroit, there frequently weren’t driveways or garages, and any rear way access was through the stinking garbage-filled alleys in the back. The houses were small, often with only two bedrooms, and equally often only a couple of feet from their neighbors. The houses were generally wood frame, which meant that a fire could travel from one to the other with ease.

  In Sheridan, the houses were larger and filled the lots that were as small as the builders could get away with. Smaller lots meant more lots, and more lots meant more houses sold and that meant more profit. The houses had garages, minimum two-car and usually three, and boasted brick facades. But usually only the facades were brick. They were still essentially frame homes built with an abundance of wood. As with their poorer relations in Detroit, they were still uncomfortably close to their neighbors.

  The fire at the Cunningham residence on Winston Street quickly devoured its source house and moved on to others. The fire department arrived within minutes of the alarm, but only in the form of two men on a snowmobile that carried a short length of hose and a ton of frustration. By the time Mike and Petkowski arrived on the scene, the flames were roaring incongruously through the billowing snow.