The Breathtaker Read online

  “So tell me about the fifteenth,” he said. “Where were you on April fifteenth?”

  “Me?” Boone grew defensive. “Out storm-chasing.”

  “Here in Promise?”

  “No, man. I was way down south.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  “Is this gonna take long? ’Cause I’ve got math class.”

  “I promise to take only seven and a half minutes of your time,” Charlie said sarcastically. “Now, enlighten me. Please. Where were you on April fifteenth? C’mon. Gimme details.”

  Boone jammed his hands into his pockets. “There was this boffo storm system brewing, this big juicy squall line down around Burns Flat and Roll and Reydon. Down around there.”

  “Did you take anybody with you?”

  “No, man.”

  “Okay, now, that’s another thing. I’m not ‘man’ to you, see? I’m your worst nightmare. Whenever you address me, you say ‘sir.’”

  “Yes, sir,” he muttered.

  “Did you gas up?”

  He smoothed his hair with a grubby-knuckled fist. “Yeah, probably.”

  “Yes or no?”

  Boone eyed him with hostile boredom.

  “Hey, am I a brick wall over here? Am I boring you, Pritchett? Or were you just thinking? Oh, you must be thinking. I can smell something burning. Did you gas up?”

  His eyes grew menacing. “Yes, I said.”

  “How many times?”

  “Twice, I think.”

  “How’d you pay for it?”

  “What?”

  “Welcome to the twenty-first century. I stick my credit card into the slot, insert the nozzle and fill ’er up. What do you do?”

  “I paid cash.”

  “Okay, so we’ve narrowed it down. Now we’re getting somewhere. Next question, Einstein. Which gas stations did you stop at?”

  The boy shrugged. “I dunno. Shell, I think.”

  “Both times?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’d better be straight with me.”

  Boone muttered something under his breath.

  “What was that?”

  He gave a small defiant smile, and Charlie arrived in his face with such force that he stumbled backward. Charlie could see the carotid artery ticking away in his neck and wanted to rip it out. Standing before him was just another drug-addled kid from a splintered home who treated girls like Sophie with utter disrespect. Use ’em and abuse ’em.

  “I got this passion for severe weather,” Boone snarled. “So sue me! And keep your grubby hands off me!”

  Charlie could feel the old skin grafts tightening. He wanted to squeeze the boy’s throat until he turned various satisfactory colors. “Stay away from my daughter,” he said softly. “Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, I hear you.”

  “You hear, but do you understand?” His eyes narrowed. “She doesn’t need you messing up her life. She’s a serious person. I won’t let it happen.”

  An audible swallow.

  “And remember. I asked you nicely.” Just then his cell phone rang, and Charlie turned his back on the boy. “Yeah?” he answered irritably.

  “Chief?”

  He recognized Lester Deere’s voice immediately, that tortured white-boy grunt. “What is it, Lester? I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Oh God, I got something really important to tell you.”

  “What is it, Lester?”

  “My gun’s in my lap and I’m facing the door.”

  7

  CHARLIE WALKED into the bar, then paused to let his eyes adjust to the appropriate level of dimness. Lester was seated at a table in a far corner of the Howling Dog Saloon; his chair was turned sideways, and his gun was tucked into the waistband of his pants. That wasn’t so unusual. Most cops sat facing the door, since you never knew who or what was going to come charging through it. “Two coffees,” Charlie told the waitress, a leggy redhead with an attitude problem.

  When Lester saw him coming, he pressed his hands tightly to his head and said, “Careful, careful, don’t go losing it in front of the chief.”

  Charlie sat across from him and frowned. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “I’m in a very liquid state,” Lester admitted.

  “So I noticed.”

  “You Chief.” He pointed at his chest. “Me eighty percent Scotch.”

  “Okay, I’m buying. Clearly I need to work my way down to your level of stupidity.” He settled his elbows against the checkered oilcloth, figuring they’d probably speak elaborately for a while about nothing. Lester was holding his cigarette in that upside-down way preferred by most bad actors. The round table was small enough to hold hands across. The scarred, blistered bar was empty except for the waitress and the short, bearded bartender over by the cash register. There was a coral reef behind the bar—a lame attempt at a tropical motif, in conflict with all that dusty cowboy memorabilia.

  Lester gazed at Charlie for an excruciating moment. He’d once been good-looking, but then something had happened, and within a relatively short span of time he’d gone all paunchy and soft and unkempt. Two-day beard growth. Squinty, bloodshot eyes. “I liked being a football player. I really did, Chief. I loved the challenge, you know? The game, the uniform, the attention, the girls. So what do you do for an encore? What do you do afterwards?”

  “I dunno, Lester. You wanna hand me the gun?”

  When he didn’t respond, Charlie turned toward the waitress and, raising his voice above the punishing level of the Lynyrd Skynyrd playing on the jukebox, reminded her, “Two coffees, miss?”

  She gave a curt, disinterested nod.

  “Near Miss,” Lester corrected him.

  “What’s that?”

  “She was just telling me how she nearly lost her life in the storm, so I’m calling her Near Miss.”

  “Yeah, I get it.” Drinking. He didn’t like it. It reminded him of the leather belt with the metal buckle. He snatched the rest of Lester’s drink and knocked it back—Scotch, short, no ice. It burned going down. Yum. Ah. Now I really hate myself. “All gone.” He set the empty glass back on the table in front of Lester’s amazed eyes.

  “Hey… you made my drink disappear.”

  “Gimme the gun.”

  Lester stared at him.

  “You’re a good cop, Lester. Go home, sober up and get your fanny back on the job.”

  “I wanna ask you something.” Deep squint lines radiated from the corners of his eyes due to years of walking the beat under a hot sun, just like the rest of them. His medium-length blond hair was shiny. He sprayed it with shiny stuff. Such desperate measures to regain his lost youth—gel, hair spray. What was next? Mascara? A tummy tuck? On the table between them was an unlit candle in a red glass globe and a silver cardboard dish of peanuts—the greasy, salty kind Maddie always used to say were bad for him. Charlie popped a forbidden peanut into his mouth; it tasted crunchy and oily going down.

  Lester thumped on the table with his fist, making the peanuts jump in their cardboard dish. “Fuck, Chief. I’m tryin’ to tell you something, but you aren’t even listening.”

  “Are you gonna be nice and cooperative now?”

  He sat poised as if ready to spring, his eyes rheumy from too much lonely contemplation. “I had all the advantages and now I’m miserable. I lost everything I ever wanted. You think your life is gonna be a certain way, Chief… you believe it’ll always be that way, you don’t imagine it could ever change. But then, years later, you find yourself in a totally different place from where you’d started.” He signaled the waitress. “Hey, another Scotch over here! Chop-chop!”

  “Chop-chop yourself.” She glowered at them.

  “Just the coffees,” Charlie said.

  “. . . Near Miss.”

  “Give it a rest, Lester.”

  It was quarter to one in the afternoon. Charlie wondered if he should call Willa and tell her he was going to be a little late. The bar smelled last-Ch
ristmas stale. The fish tank didn’t have any fish in it. It was a Howling Dog tradition—if you were too drunk to scoop your car keys out of the murky water, then you were too drunk to drive home. A couple of piranhas might raise the bar a little, Charlie mused.

  The waitress brought their coffees over on a tray, white ceramic cups chattering on their wafer-thin saucers. “Three-fifty,” she said, hand on hip.

  “Oh, nurse! I’ll have the ziti with vodka sauce…”

  “Just ignore him,” Charlie said, sliding out his wallet and handing her a five. “Keep the change.”

  Her attitude softened a bit. She set Lester’s empty glasses delicately down on her lacquered tray and walked away.

  “Is it true?” Lester was listing to the right now.

  “Is what true?” Charlie asked, losing patience fast.

  “The rumor.”

  “What rumor?”

  “The rumor you jumped out a three-story window when you were a kid. Because, I mean, anything over twenty-five feet, Chief, you’ve got maybe a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. Anything over twenty-five feet is like… suicidal.”

  Charlie wiped his hands on a cocktail napkin. “I’d stay out of the deep end of the bar if I were you, my friend.”

  Lester poked his finger threateningly in Charlie’s face. “I’m just curious. What’s the big deal?”

  He felt a sickly anger brewing in his brain. “We never had this conversation.”

  “Just answer the question, Chief. C’mon… didja jump from that high a height? Huh? What is it, a national secret or something?”

  Charlie sat there observing the sluggish tick of Lester’s pulse, like two unborn animals behind the paper-thin skin of his temples. Lester was a natural-born loser, a coward, one of those towel-snappers who grew booze-brave after three or four drinks. He didn’t seem to understand that Charlie didn’t give a damn who he was related to.

  “How come we never talk?” Lester said, rising up on unsteady legs. “How come you don’t like me?”

  A stale liquor smell wafted toward Charlie, and all the horrible memories along with it. Macho posturing, incoherent ramblings. He focused on Lester’s twitching mouth.

  “Give me something, Chief.”

  “Sit the fuck down.”

  “So?” Lester sat hard in his chair, his shadow growing taller on the wall behind him. “Didja? Huh?”

  Charlie sat very still.

  “Didja or didn’t you jump, you dumb motherfucker?”

  Charlie grabbed him by the collar to stabilize him, then punched him squarely in the nose.

  Lester flew backward, blood spurting everywhere, and pressed his hands to his face. “Oh my God… oh God, what’d you do that for?” He stared at Charlie in disbelief.

  Charlie examined his hands wrapped around the delicate porcelain coffee cup, his knuckles beginning to swell.

  “Christ, I’m bleeding!”

  Charlie handed him a handkerchief. “Do you know what a full-thickness burn is, Lester?”

  The younger man stared at him with moist, unblinking eyes as he pressed the handkerchief to his nose.

  “It’s dead skin all the way down to the subcutaneous fat layer. When I arrived at the hospital that night, my skin was burnt to a crisp. I was leaking fluids all over the bed. They had to give me fourteen IV bags just to keep me alive. You could easily pull the hairs out of my burnt flesh. My left arm was stretched so tight they had to make a foot-long incision in the skin in order to keep the blood flowing properly. Any minor infection could’ve killed me, if the pain didn’t get to me first. Then came debridement. That’s just a fancy term for scraping, cutting and peeling away the dead skin.”

  “I’m gonna be sick.” Lester teetered over and vomited onto the floor, and Charlie forgot to move his feet in time.

  “Aw shit.” He fetched a couple of cocktail napkins from the table and daubed at his ruined shoes. Some of the pinkish vomit pooled down between the laces and into the eyelets, where he’d probably never find it again.

  Lester sat rocking back and forth, clutching his stomach, while the bartender came over and sprinkled green sawdust on the floor.

  Charlie glanced at his watch. It was closing in on one o’clock. He had an appointment he didn’t want to miss. “Give me the gun, Lester.”

  “I don’t even want it. Here.” He handed it over, and Charlie made sure that the safety was on. “I had an affair with Jenna Pepper,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I had an affair with Jenna Pepper.”

  Charlie could feel the shudder all the way down to his toes. It was so unexpected he was speechless.

  Lester looked as if he were bleeding internally. “Rob never suspected a thing. She’d find some excuse to sneak out of the house. She was gonna leave him. He was emotionally abusive, you know. Played mind games. They stopped having sex. She called him the Dufus. She felt like a prisoner in her own home.”

  “Lester…”

  “I could tell she was trouble with a capital T almost the instant I set eyes on her. I should’ve stayed away, but she made me feel so goddamn good about myself, you know? I could be strong around her. I could be brave. All those things.”

  It came in a rush: Lester was the first officer at the scene; he’d had blood on his hands; he was right-handed; he was an avid storm-chaser; now there was motive. Shoe size? Looked like tens maybe.

  Charlie stood up. “Get your hat.”

  “What for?”

  “Stand up. I’m doing you a favor.”

  Lester faltered to his feet. “You were gonna find out about it, anyway,” he slurred. “Mike says they’re doing a DNA test. I had sex with her the night before. That’s my sperm inside her.”

  “Anything you say I could end up using against you. Do you understand?” Charlie grabbed him by the arm. “Come on.”

  “Where we goin’?”

  “I’m taking you home.”

  “Yeah, but… what am I supposed to do now?”

  “Go home,” Charlie told him firmly. “Sober up and get yourself a good lawyer.”

  8

  AFTER 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.”