Voices of the Storm Read online

  He fumbled with a pair of tweezers and picked up the cylinder, placing it on a nubby mat under a nearby magnifier. He snapped on the light and she bent over it.

  “Notice the pitted anchor-points on the anterior. Have you ever seen anything like it? No, you haven’t. Never. And this hollow center, obviously a conduit for nutrient or bodily fluids, but unlike anything we’ve seen in any other species, anywhere.”

  She frowned as she stared, rotating the mat this way and that, using a probe to gently prod and turn the object. Finally she looked up, her expression carefully blank.

  “Well, of course I recognize this,” she said blandly.

  He looked devastated. “You…you do?”

  “Of course. Species Fastfoodia. Genus Drinking Straw. But I can’t tell, is it Mcdonaldiana or Jackintheboxia? Please,” she slapped the magnifier back towards him. “Enlighten me, Doctor.”

  He goggled at her, uncomprehending at first. Then his expression curdled into rage. “Why, you … you bitch.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Michael. A new species? We pick up crap like this off the desert floor every day. If it’s not some bit of human detritus, then it’s some skeletal fragment that’s been warped by the wind or heat. You know that.”

  He jerked away from her and put the straw-thing back on his display tray. “It’s nothing of the kind. Nothing like that. Look at this one.” He used the tweezers to pull up a larger claw-like thing, straight as a ruler along the back, angling into a curve with an almost geometrical abruptness as it swooped into a circular arc, razor-sharp along the inside edge.

  “Obviously avian,” she said, dismissing it.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “You know goddamn well there’s nothing in bird taxonomy that accounts for a claw like that. Not bird, not reptile, not mammal.” He looked up to glare at her, and for the first time Lucy could clearly see the rage in his eyes.

  What an ugly, ugly man, she thought. How the hell did he ever get this far?

  “Have you checked?” she asked, carefully controlling her voice.

  He gaped at her. “What?”

  “Have you checked? If it’s not a bird, at least not a local desert species, what about an exotic? What about some, I don’t know, parrot or macaw that somebody bought over the internet from a pet store in the middle of Africa, then dumped in the desert when it croaked?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he blustered, busily putting the claw under the holding clamps on his microscope.

  “What about simple birth defects of an indigenous species? Or malnutrition? Have you ruled that out? Or anomalous regrowth of an injury?”

  “No,” he said, staring fixedly into the eyepiece. “No, it’s not possible. Look at the ligature marks here. It must be where the muscles, or something like muscles, linked to the framework. And here, the fine cross-hatching, it’s as if a secondary element overlaid the substructure and–”

  “And what, a whole new species is more likely than a stray bozo-bozo lizard from Macadamia or a bird with a busted wing? Come on, Michael. Think.”

  He slammed the countertop as hard as he could. Glass and steel containers bounced and rang the length of the laboratory. “You always do that to me!” he said, sounding like a petulant child. “Always! I come up with a new idea and you piss on it, without even trying to give it a chance!”

  She stared at him. “Michael. Honey. That’s because you’re always wrong.” For a moment she thought of putting a comforting hand on his shoulder, actually trying to talk to this asshole, to reason with him despite the wild gleam in his eye and his absolutely absurd proposal. “Look,” she said, straining to be gentle, “I don’t know why you keep doing this. You have this schoolboy obsession with making The Big Discovery and becoming the Stephen Hawking of modern biology. But somewhere in there, Michael, you know the truth. Science isn’t like that. It’s hard work, and slogging, and incremental discoveries, not overnight fame and fortune.” She gestured helplessly at the claw-thing. “This isn’t going to do it, Michael. All you’ve got–”

  “Just look at it,” he said tightly.

  “Michael. All you’ve got is some weathered speci—”

  “LOOK AT IT, GODDAMN YOU!”

  She stared at him for the longest time. She forced herself to count to ten. “Okay,” she said, so quietly she could barely hear herself over the rush of water outside the window. “I’ll make you a deal.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll examine the specimen…and you tell me where you took the goddamn ATV.”

  He glared at her. “I didn’t take it anywhere.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “I didn’t take it anywhere important. Just…out for a drive.”

  “Without permission.”

  He stared at her.

  “After what happened last time.”

  Still nothing.

  “When you know that another complaint or insurance claim will cause the liability coverage for the whole fucking installation to be withdrawn.”

  “It was nothing, Lucy. Really.”

  “No trespassing? No property destruction? No assault?”

  “No. It was nothing. Now will you look?”

  She put her hands up. “Fine. Fine.” She bent over the microscope and looked through the eyepiece, adjusting it automatically. “You know I’m not going to see anything worth… wait a minute. Wait a minute.”

  She bent over more intensely and finely adjusted the focus. “Did you see the striations on the side here?”

  “Where? Which ones?”

  “These, these here. Complex. Delicate. Almost like…like writing. My God, Michael, look at this. It says “MADE … IN … JAPA–”

  He shoved her away from the microscope and got in front of it, as if protecting his precious discoveries.

  “You’re a fucking moron,” he said. “A fucking idiot. I give you the find of the fucking century, and you ridicule it like everything else.”

  Lucy wanted to rip his greasy little head right off his shoulders. Where was that celestial Frannie-voice now, she wondered. And would it say, Walk away, walk away or do it do it DO IT!

  She clenched her fists so tightly she could feel her stubby nails digging into her palms. “I told you never to take the ATV again. I told you it was a terminatable offense. And not one week later, as soon as my back is turned–”

  “Fine,” he said. “Fine, fire me. You’ll be the laughingstock of the field, of the world when I release this information, when everybody sees–”

  Her cell phone rang. Michael stopped short and stared at it, offended that anything, even an inanimate object, would dare to interrupt him. He tried again.

  “I mean it,” he said. “I dare you to–”

  It rang again.

  She gave him a perfectly bland smile. “Pardon me,” she said. “Important call.” She plucked up the phone and clicked it on. “Yes?”

  “Fair warning,” Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson whispered in her ear. “The cops are here.”

  “Here?”

  “Right outside. I saw the flashers.”

  “Is Fender still here?”

  “Afraid so. At least it looks like just one guy, kind of big and handsome in an old sort of way.”

  Sheriff Peck. She’d bet a buck on it. “Thanks,” she said, and turned back to the moist and arrogant scientist. “Well, congratulations, Michael. You’ve managed to bring the cops down on us again.”

  “What?” he said, still sounding offended. “Where?”

  “In the lobby. Come on.” She turned without waiting for a response and was halfway through the door before she turned back to look at him. She was secretly rather pleased with how he looked: like a small, hairless animal caught in a trap. “Oh, and before we go,” she held out her hand, “the keys.”

  His hand went involuntarily to the pocket of his lab jacket; his jaw started to tighten.

  “Don’t argue about it, Michael. Just give me the keys to the ATV.”

  For one moment she didn’
t think he was going to do it. Then, almost in slow motion, he pulled the keys from his pocket and handed them over.

  “Thank you. And Michael, please, please keep this in mind. If you give me one ounce of shit about this, ever, I will gladly have that police officer take you out back and shoot you into tiny little pieces. Are we clear?”

  His back straightened at that. He stripped off his flesh-colored latex gloves and joined her in the hallway. They didn’t speak a word to each other as they walked back to the lobby.

  Sheriff Peck was already having a low, intense conversation with Cindy and Fender. Cindy was wringing her hands and ready to cry; Fender was goggling. Rebecca, meanwhile, stood well to one side, leaning in the doorway that led to the Admin wing and watching the cop with an expression made up of equal parts wariness and disdain. It was an expression that Lucy had seen before, and not only on Rebecca, but on black men and women of all ages, whenever there was a cop in sight.

  “…meeting tonight?” Peck was saying to Cindy as they entered from the laboratory wing.

  “Yes,” she said. “You bet.”

  “’Cause you should,” he told her, clearly not listening to her answer. “You really should.”

  “I have kids, Sheriff, I’ll be there for sure.”

  “Terrible thing,” Fender chimed in. “Totally sucks.”

  Peck’s attention snapped to him. “What do you know about it, my friend?”

  Fender’s eyes got big and he took a step back. “Nothing, Sheriff. Not a thing, you know that.”

  Peck focused on him like a cougar fixing on a quail. “I don’t know anything like that, Fender. But I know you’re not coming to the meeting tonight, are you?’

  Fender started shaking his head before the cop stopped talking. “Heck, no, Sheriff. No way.”

  “’Cause you have no kids, my friend. You have no family. You have your tacky little trailer way out here on the edge of forever, and you have no business bothering the decent people of this town. It’s none of your concern.”

  Fender was almost pleading. “Shit, your honor, come on, you’ve rousted my place twice already and you didn’t find a thing! You got no reason–”

  The Sheriff was almost nose to crooked nose with the long-haired man. “Oh, I have reasons, my friend,” he said, still staring him down. “I have good reasons. But I don’t have to tell you about them, now do I?”

  Apparently the phrase ‘probable cause’ hadn’t made it into his vocabulary quite yet, Lucy mused. “Here we are, Sheriff Peck,” she said loudly, stepping forward to pull the cop’s attention away from her trembling neighbor. “What can we do for you?”

  Peck took his time. When he did face her, his eyes had lost some of their hardness, and his smile was professionally bland. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said, “but I had a few questions. For both of you, as it happens.”

  Lucy was surprised in spite of herself. “You two have met?” she said, looking at the Sheriff, then at Steinberg, then back at the Sheriff again.

  “A couple of times,” the Sheriff said mildly. “Nice friendly chats.”

  “Yes,” Steinberg said, as if he had swallowed a turd. “Friendly.”

  Must have been about the last ATV incident, Lucy thought. She had been under the impression that it had never gone beyond a simple traffic ticket. Now... Steinberg had dealt with the Sheriff himself? And more than once? Yet again, and not for the first time that day, Lucy wondered how much she had missed while working all alone up in her lab, mourning for her lost love and generally hating the world.

  “Okay,” she said, recovering. “That’s fine. I’m glad you’re here in any event.”

  He raised a well-trimmed eyebrow at that. “Really?”

  “Yes. You take care of your business first, then I have something important to talk to you about before you go.”

  “Oh… kay,” he said, sounding strangely hesitant. Lucy thought maybe he wasn’t used to talking to such decisive women, or maybe he couldn’t imagine any business more important than his own. Either way, he seemed almost relieved to focus his attention on the other scientist in the room. “Dr. Steinberg,” he said.

  Michael regarded him, smirking.

  “The ATV,” he said.

  Michael continued to smirk.

  Peck sighed deeply. “All right, if that’s the way you want to play it…” He pulled a small notebook from the breast pocket of his sharply ironed shirt and referred to it with a barely noticeable squint. Lucy wondered how he managed to keep that crisp crease in his clothing in the midst of a major storm. She also wondered how long it would be before the good Sheriff broke down and got himself some reading glasses. “At approximately 2:30 this afternoon, a silver BMW was forced off a private driveway connected to North Ridge Road. The driver subsequently lost control, rolled down an embankment at high speed, and collided with a rocky impediment causing serious injury to the driver and the destruction of the vehicle.”

  Lucy said, “Jesus Christ!” and turned to Steinberg. “Michael?”

  Michael shrugged. “Impediment, Sheriff Peck? You gave your officers Word-A-Day calendars as Christmas gifts, didn’t you? Admit it.”

  Peck didn’t react. “Victims and witnesses identified a bright red off-road vehicle as the reason the BMW left the road in the first place.”

  “Astonishing,” Michael said.

  “To my knowledge, this facility has the only bright red ATV in town.”

  “Again, remarkable coincidence.”

  Peck sighed again and put the notebook away. “Look, son–”

  Steinberg’s expression twisted into an ugly new shape. “I am not your son,” he said with all the venom he could muster.

  Peck’s eyes narrowed. His jaw tightened. “No,” he said, “you’re not. Because if you were my son, you little prick, you wouldn’t talk to anybody like that unless you expected to get your head busted, and you sure as shit wouldn’t talk to a police officer that way.”

  A cold blue current slithered down Lucy’s back. She took a step forward. “Now, hold on, hold on, let’s–”

  Peck’s hand came up fast, so fast that for a moment, Lucy wasn’t sure if he had a gun in it. He didn’t. All he had was a finger pointing straight up from a canted elbow in a “wait one moment, let me finish my point” gesture.

  “I’ll get to you in a minute, Doctor,” Peck said without looking at her. “Let me finish with this one first.” His eyes never left Steinberg, whose smirk was beginning to falter.

  “Did you take the ATV out today?” he asked, very steadily.

  Steinberg cleared his throat and darted a look at Cindy, then at Lucy. “No,” he said, and looked away.

  “You want to try that again?”

  More boldly: “No,” he said. “I’ve been working in the lab all afternoon. Since lunch. Which I ate in my office.” He smirked again, a ghost of his original expression. “Chicken salad.”

  Peck’s head swiveled to face Cindy Bergstrom. She seemed to jolt when he looked at her, as if he’d touched her with a live wire. “You agree, Cindy?”

  Christ, Lucy thought, does he know everybody here? Okay, the Bergstroms had been in town a long time, and he’d been Sheriff for a thousand years, so, fine, he knew a lot of people, but still …

  Cindy looked at her desk, at the floor, at the walls, everywhere but at Peck. “Yes. I mean, yes, sir. Um…”

  “He was here all afternoon?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “And the ATV stayed right where it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have no idea how it got all muddy and warm, just sitting there in the rain?”

  Shit, Lucy thought. So she wasn’t the only Junior G-Man in town.

  Cindy’s eyes got big as golf balls. Lucy could see white all the way around. “No,” she said in the tiniest voice imaginable.

  “I don’t even have the keys,” Steinberg said defensively. He managed to pull Peck’s gaze away from the receptionist; Cindy almost collapsed the ins
tant she was released. “Doctor Wonderful there keeps them on her ample person at all times.”

  This time Peck did look at her. Into her, with his head tipped forward, his high prominent brow shadowing ghostly blue eyes. He looked at her without a word, as if to say, So now you’re going to join this monkeyfuck?

  Shit, she said to herself. Shit shit SHIT. This was the last of it. This was the end. When the Oversight Committee heard of this – and they would – they were certain to pull the plug. Or worse yet, they’d leave the facility right where it was and get somebody else to run it, somebody who didn’t let psycho employees run people over, somebody who hadn’t spent seven years kissing ass and playing the game, and the last year pissing people off.

  Great fucking choice, she told herself. Do the right thing – turn the little maniac over to the cops so he would finally get what was coming to him…and lose the facility. Or do the wrong thing and cover his pimply ass one more time, to save the Station. And, incidentally, herself.

  Like it was even a contest.

  She fished the keys out of her pocket. “Right here, Sheriff. Only one set, and I have ‘em.”

  “And you’ve had them …?”

  “All day. Since Monday, in fact. Maybe there’s another red ATV in town after all. Tourists or visitors. Somebody who came over the ridge to raise hell.”

  He stared at her. And stared. And stared. Then he shook his head and turned away. “Frankly,” he said, sounding truly disgusted, “I don’t have time to deal with this right now. I’ll be back when the storm breaks. You all stay in town ‘till then, won’t you?” He stopped and looked over his shoulder, straight at Michael Steinberg. “Won’t you?”

  Steinberg smirked one more time and added a shrug. “Where would I go?” he said. “After all, I work here, don’t I?” he gave a sidelong glance at Lucy. She felt her stomach flop like a dying fish.

  The Sheriff was already halfway to the door before Lucy realized he was leaving. She quick-stepped to follow him, moving as fast she could without actually breaking into a run. Damned if she was going to run after him like some eager schoolgirl.

  She caught up with the sheriff inside the entrance. The sky outside had darkened even more as the hidden sun began to set. The rain was thick and dull as molten pewter, coming down harder than ever. Everything, including the palms and the succulents, even the carefully cultivated California poppies, looked ancient and lifeless in the dying light.