But despite his opening one-liner, he didn’t seem to be enjoying himself right now.
“You look like hell, Harry,” Joe told him.
Benoit smiled tiredly. “Thanks. Been up most of the night. Not smart, considering what we’re facing today. This wasn’t supposed to hit till late morning. It’s six hours early. Now is when I was figuring for some shut-eye.” He paused to drink from his mug before adding, “Best-laid schemes.”
Joe caught his implication. “This really going to be bad?”
Harry gave him a serious look before suggesting, “They call these things ‘Hundred Year Storms’ for good reason, Joe. We’re on the verge of a world of hurt.”
* * *
Bonnie Swift looked out one of the windows of what had been evasively retitled the Vermont State Hospital. Built in the 1890s in Waterbury as the Vermont Hospital for the Insane, and chartered to address “the care, custody, and treatment of insane criminals of the state,” it was now a kinder, gentler place, in both name and practice. Bonnie had been an RN here for twelve years, and despite the ribbing she got from her outsider friends, she enjoyed both patients and coworkers.
Not that there weren’t times—frequently—when the two contributed to a Kafkaesque nightmare. Still, she had always enjoyed the offbeat, and what better place for that than a now politically correct loony bin?
Today, however, the tensions were coming from the outside, and the entire facility had been injected with an unusual camaraderie, as if the certifiably sane and those aspiring to that status had come together against some ominous threat.
Bonnie Swift leaned in close to the windowpane, blocking out the light behind her to better see into the surrounding gloom. It was midmorning, and yet as dark as dusk, with the sky uniformly heavy. She didn’t need a forecaster’s warning to know a natural train wreck when she saw it coming.
It wasn’t just the wind and rain she was considering. The remnants of the hospital were located at the rear of a sprawling state-office complex that had slowly overtaken the old hospital buildings as the patient population retreated from its 1,700 heyday to about 50 now. The campus—housing dozens of agencies as diverse as hers and the Department of Public Safety, across the driveway—even bragged of the totally renovated State Emergency Operations Center—one of the few in the country to be located above ground level. The upper-floor placement struck her as propitious, since the SEOC not only acted as the go-to place for all of the EOCs across Vermont, but the entire campus was situated on a floodplain.
She wiped the pane free of the mist from her breath. She couldn’t actually see the Winooski River. An earthen berm had been built alongside the lowermost parking lot, in a mainly psychological effort to keep the water contained. To her mind, it served the same purpose as drawing a thin curtain against the sight of a raging fire.
Waterbury, being so close to the capital, Montpelier, had been an overflow parking place for state facilities for decades—dependent on the fact for its financial vigor. But it bordered Vermont’s second-longest river, and despite the Winooski’s having overflowed multiple times—drowning twenty people in 1927—the town, along with the building Bonnie Swift was in, had slowly expanded to the river’s edge.
One of the doctors stepped into the hallway from his office and noticed her by the window. He had arrived from Boston a year ago.
“How’s it looking?” he asked. “We going to float away?”
She glanced at his smiling face. “I can’t say we won’t,” she said seriously. “The river surrounds us on three sides. Where we are hangs down like the udder on a cow.”
He turned to study her, struck by her tone of voice. “You don’t make that sound good.”
“I just hope our evacuation plan works,” she concluded, breaking away to return to her rounds. “Or that we even know where we filed it.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Leo? It’s me.”
Leo heard the tension in his older brother’s voice, and immediately tried putting him at ease. “It’s all good up here, Joey. Just rain. No bullshit. You wanna talk to Ma?”
He handed the phone to his wheelchair-bound mother, who was already reaching for it, a slight frown on her face because of his language. Not just the one crude word, he knew. Funnily, she had less of a problem with that than with his use of poor grammar.
“Joe,” she said in place of a greeting. “Leo’s correct. We are absolutely fine, up here on our little hill. Even the electricity’s still on.”
“And I checked the generator.” Leo shouted. “A-OK.”
“How are you faring down there?” Joe’s mother asked him.
“Personally? Fine,” he reassured her. “The house is out of harm’s way, and I’ve been keeping myself busy and mostly dry. That may be about to change, though.”
“Flooding?” she asked.
“Yeah. It started with a few basements a couple of hours ago. Now we’re getting whole neighborhoods underwater that haven’t seen that in half a century. West Brattleboro is getting really creamed—all those low-lying housing developments. The Whetstone has turned into the Colorado, and quite a few residents have refused to move.”
“That’s terrible,” she said with feeling. “Will you be able to help?”
“I think so,” he told her honestly. “There are swiftwater rescue teams here from as far away as Colchester. They never even got to staging—just went straight to their first assignments. So far, no deaths have been reported. But it’s early yet,” he added grimly, “and we’re hearing that, closer to the Green Mountains, towards Wilmington, Wardsboro, and places like that, they’re getting hit much harder. Route 9 is cut in a couple of spots. Roads and bridges are going out all over. What are you hearing from around you?”
“Much the same,” she answered. “Mostly, it’s been just wait-and-see—or listen, in our case.”
“Leo’s store is okay?”
“As far as we know.”
She heard some noise on Joe’s end, in the distance, and he said in a slightly more rushed tone of voice, “Gotta go, Mom. Take care of each other and I’ll try to call later.”
“Don’t worry about us, Joe. Be careful out there.”
“Love you,” he said, a fraction of a second before the line went dead.
She merely smiled sadly and pushed the DISCONNECT button.
* * *
Caspar Luard looked glumly out the window of the cruiser’s backseat, uncaring of the watery sheets greatly limiting visibility. He was too lost in his own misery to give a damn about some rain. Rained too goddamn much in this state anyhow. That was one of the reasons he’d tried to rob that gas station—to get the hell out of Vermont. Assuming he’d had enough left over after buying himself a little peace of mind. That’s what he liked to call the various substances he put into his system to distract himself: peace of mind.
He glanced at his lap and squirmed a little, trying to get comfortable on the hard plastic seat. They could’ve put him in a regular car, or even the van they normally used for prisoner transports. It’s not like he was going to throw up. He’d never done that in a cop car yet. He adjusted the chain that ran around his waist and interconnected with his handcuffs. At least they hadn’t locked his hands behind his back. That hurt like hell.
In the front seat, beyond the plastic and metal mesh divider, the two transport deputies weren’t so distracted. Nor were they ignoring the weather.
“You wanna tell me why we’re out here?” said the passenger, a deputy sheriff for five months by now.
“Give it a rest, Al,” said the driver, not receptive to casual chatter. The windshield wipers were on their highest setting, and yet at split-second intervals, he lost sight of the end of the car’s hood, along with the road ahead. On average, it wasn’t as bad as that, but they had a good half hour to go before they reached the prison in Springfield—their customer’s home away from home. And then they’d have to go back out into this mess, probably to guard some washed-out bridge.
&n
bsp; “I’d like to,” Al continued complaining, waving his hands around, “except here we are, right? Why couldn’t they’ve just put this jerk in holding overnight? Answer me that.”
“Don’t know, Al.”
“The PD just didn’t want to be bothered. That’s why. All hands on deck; can’t spare the manpower; special circumstances. Like the Sheriff’s Department’s not busy, too? We got guys all over the county, right in the middle of this shit storm, drowning right where they’re standing, and the great Bratt PD can’t house a single loser in their nice, dry basement? Please.”
The driver didn’t answer. The wheel between his hands was growing mushy, as the puddles they hydroplaned through grew in depth and number. He slowed down further. He was already taking back roads, instead of the interstate, from Brattleboro to Springfield, in the hopes that visibility would improve and the chances of skidding decline. Now he was beginning to doubt that any choice would have made a difference.
“Al,” he said shortly. “I need you to shut up.”
Al looked at what was going on through the windshield as if for the first time, and then stared at his colleague. “Jesus, Tom. Are we gonna make it?”
* * *
Bonnie Swift stood at the halfway point on the stairs, speaking gently and clearly to each passing patient. “It’s okay. Just a bit of water. The second floor is fine. Turn right at the top. Stay calm. Stay calm.”
One of her favorites came into view, Carolyn Barber, nicknamed “the Governor” by her own preference. She was, as usual, looking stunned and wide-eyed, as if having just been startled awake.
“Hi, Governor. Everything’s okay. Just take a right at the top, keep with the others.”
But Barber stopped and studied her closely, from about four inches too close for comfort—a habit Bonnie was used to. “It’s wet down there.”
“Yes, it is,” Bonnie said quietly, taking her elbow and steering her toward the next step up. “It’s raining very hard and some of the water is getting inside. Nothing to worry about. That’s why we’re going upstairs.”
Carolyn Barber paused a bit longer, watching her, before finally nodding. “It’s wet,” she repeated, but allowed herself to be directed.
One of Bonnie’s colleagues appeared from below after five more patients filed past.
“Everyone out?” Bonnie asked.
“All the patients are,” the other woman confirmed. “Maintenance is wrestling with the utility panels and computer servers. They said the automatic door locks might short out, so we should keep an eye open. They said Richardson better distribute some keys and man the doors so we can override the system if necessary. Also, we should start distributing flashlights.”
Bonnie made a face. “Good luck with the keys. He may not even know where they are. It’s been years.”
The two of them walked up the rest of the stairs and followed the patients down the hallway. The lights flickered, switching to the eerie backup units placed along the ceiling, and suddenly the fire alarms all went off, accompanied by a woman’s gentle and deliberate voice intoning, “Code Red. Code Red. Please proceed to the nearest emergency exit,” again and again, in an endless loop.
“Damn,” Bonnie muttered, covering her ringing ears. “This’ll make things better.”
Ahead, the line had stopped at one of the electronic doors. She sidled along the wall to get to it quickly and keep the group moving, but when she reached it, she found that it had automatically locked after allowing several patients through, separating them from their handlers.
“Shit,” she whispered to herself, her head beginning to pound from the bells and horns. She quickly slid her pass card through the lock.
Nothing happened.
She looked back and called out. “Jenn. Did the maintenance guys say they’d be fooling with the locks?”
“No. Like I said, just that there might be glitches,” Jenn shouted over the noise from the rear.
“That was really rude, what you said,” a woman nearby told her severely.
Bonnie ignored her and tried the lock again, to no avail. She peered through the mesh-wired glass door into the hall’s extension. Amid the pulsing red lights, she could just make out three people wandering away, including the Governor.
She pounded on the door to get their attention, wondering where the staffers were at that end of the building. Two of the three patients turned around, and she gestured to them to return. However, Carolyn Barber only stiffened slightly, as if caught in the midst of some mischief, before cutting left and vanishing through a doorway.
It was the back staircase.
Bonnie yelled back at Jenn. “Punch in the alarm. One of them’s in the stairwell.”
It wasn’t an actual alarm—which wouldn’t have been heard in any case—but a series of red phones located throughout the facility, programmed to trigger a complete lockdown, just in case one of the patients made a break for it.
Bonnie expected to hear the sound of the alarm—a mechanical clicking, echoing throughout the building like oversized dominoes striking each other in turn.
But there was only silence from the door beside her.
“You do it?” she asked in a loud voice. The line between them was becoming restive with people covering their ears, shouting, and beginning to react to the wall-to-wall wailing. Bonnie didn’t like how things were developing.
“It won’t take the code,” Jenn announced. “It’s dead.”
Bonnie hit the intercom button on the box beside the frozen door—a backup system to connect her to security.
There, too, nothing happened.
She looked back at Jenn and put up her hands, trying to keep her expression mildly bemused for everyone’s sake.
But she was closer to panic than that. Controlling a bunch of patients in a locked corridor was not a great challenge. But they’d just abandoned a rapidly flooding basement—which was where she suspected Carolyn Barber was now headed, no doubt seeking the familiarity of her room amid the confusion. And the people down there had no idea who she was or what to do with her. There was any amount of trouble she could get into, including finding a way outside through the suddenly compromised security system.
Bonnie began struggling to get back from where she’d come, hoping the other stairwell was still open.
* * *
“You’re up, Joe,” Harry told him as Joe hung up the phone on Leo and his mother.
“What’ve we got?” Joe asked, relieved to be put to use at last. Almost everyone else had been chest-deep in this mess for hours by now—handling washouts, accidents, calls for heavy equipment, stranded people, failed wires, fallen trees, and more. He and the rest of his team had been all but sitting on their hands, at most helping with computers, manning the phones, or keeping the coffee coming.
Benoit was still holding a phone at his ear. “West Bratt. Report of looters breaking into an abandoned trailer.” He handed Joe a slip of paper with the address.
Joe took the slip, looked over at Sammie Martens, who merely said, “I’ll get Les and Willy,” and headed toward the door.
“Meet you at the parking lot entrance,” he told her.
Two minutes later, the four of them paused at the glass doors, watching a deluge so complete that it seemed to be pouring from a battery of fire hoses.
“Damn,” Lester Spinney said quietly. “That’s really coming down.”
“That the best you can do?” Willy groused.
“I think it’s cool,” Sammie said wondrously.
Joe glanced back at them. It was rare that they all four set out on a job together. They were an independent bunch, paid to be so, divvying up the workload to get it done efficiently and thoroughly. They were veteran specialists and considered among the best in the state.
Joe had also known them for a very long time—certainly Sam and Willy, who’d been his detectives when he headed the Brattleboro squad. Lester came from the state police, whose erstwhile investigators populated most of the VBI’
s ranks nowadays. But with Lester, too, Joe had undergone an arc of experiences that few other coworkers got to share with their colleagues. This was a team forged by fire, who’d literally worked to save each other’s lives on occasion. Sam and Willy even lived together, and she’d recently given birth to a baby girl—a miracle to most who knew them, if only because so few could believe that any woman would get that close to Willy Kunkle.
“We’re not gonna drown any less if we stand around here,” Willy commented now, pushing against the door’s handle. “Might as well get it over.”
He preceded them into the rain as the others adjusted their raincoats. Willy, typically, hadn’t bothered donning one, knowing that there was no true protection in these conditions, and not wanting to add another layer of wet clothing to his burden.
Joe realized he was right, of course; he was about so many practical matters. Once a sniper in the military, Willy had learned to live with discomfort, and as a recovering alcoholic with a crippled left arm and an attitude problem, he’d also learned to cope with adversity—if not hypocrisy, dishonesty, or laziness. The man had the zealotry of a convert there, and cut nobody slack—especially himself.
They sloshed over to the SUV parked fifteen feet away, the weight of the water heavy on their shoulders. Spinney, true to his generally upbeat demeanor, began laughing—his head back like Joe earlier—standing tall and frighteningly skinny. “Geez Louise, why not just wear swimsuits? This is crazy.”
He had a point. By the time they slammed the doors from the inside, the windows were fogged with their own humidity. Joe fired up the engine and adjusted the air-conditioning to improve their visibility.
Slowly, they left the parking lot, entered Grove Street, and began driving toward West Brattleboro, beyond Interstate 91.
“Tell me we’re not heading for a cat up a tree,” Willy said sourly, sitting in the front seat and staring beyond the ineffective windshield wipers, the vehicle feeling more like a boat than a car.
Joe took Sammie in with a quick look over his shoulder. “You didn’t tell him?”
Three Can Keep a Secret Page 2
