from choir practice over at St. Tommy’s Cathedral.”
“And you can’t find ‘em?”
“No, not a thing. Oh, we found the van, all right. It was abandoned about six blocks from Holy Covenant, right at the edge of Bethany. It was sitting in about a foot of standing water, one of those flooded streets. Not enough to conk it out, though. Just sitting there, doors all wide open like that nun and her girls got out to look at something and never got back in.”
Mitch swallowed. Yeah, it was building now. There was no doubt of that. The worst of it in the flooded areas, but progressing along with the water into the rest of the city.
Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “You been hearing any of this weird shit about some funny rain falling?”
“Yeah, that one’s been passing around since the explosion out at Fort Bullshit.”
“Anything to it?”
George was slow to answer. “I don’t know, maybe. We had a couple uniforms over in Crandon today got exposed to something. They took ‘em over to St. Mary’s. Word has it they’re flying ‘em to the burn center down in Madison. Least that’s what’s being said.”
Mitch swallowed down something dry in his throat. He’d seen those two cops. Only place they’d be flying them would be to a morgue drawer. There was absolutely no possibility they had survived that yellow rain. None.
Tommy looked over at him and then looked away real quickly.
George blew smoke out of his nose. “We’ve had nothing but weird shit for days and it seems to be getting worse. I’m guessing people are just panicking…but there is some bad shit coming down out there, boys, that’s for sure. We’ve had more than one cop suffer a nervous breakdown in the past forty-eight hours.”
“Why? What did they see?” Tommy asked him.
He just shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’m figuring it’s plenty bad.”
Mitch noticed how he did not meet their eyes when he said this. He was probably lying or just concealing something and you couldn’t really blame him; cops were supposed to quell panic, not create it.
“You don’t have any kids, do you, Tommy?”
“Nope. Not a one that I know about.”
George licked his lips and looked around. It seemed like he wanted to say something, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. “I guess…I guess that if you did, I’d tell you to pull them out of the city for awhile until things cool down.”
“Because of the rain?” Tommy said.
He shook his head. “No…not really. I don’t know. Just that there’s been a lot of crime. You got gangs of…of people out there that are pretty desperate. That’s all I’m saying.”
Mitch took the opening. “Yeah, I’ve heard there’s some weird ones out in the storm. People are saying some of ‘em look kind of funny, like maybe they’re-”
“Crazy or something,” Tommy broke in.
“Sure, lunatics. Some people just went nuts with what’s going on and others…well, there’s some mad shit out there, boys. Really mad shit. You just never know what you might run into out there. You just never know.”
Mitch was going to press it, ask what sort of things they might run into out there, but he didn’t have the heart. George Lake looked-as they said when they were kids-screwed, chewed, and barbecued. But Mitch was willing to bet he knew some things that he wasn’t about to put into words, at least not with a couple civilian johnnies. He believed George when he said some cops had seen things that made them suffer nervous breakdowns. He was willing to bet they’d seen things that had not just unhinged their minds, but turned their hair white. Maybe all the cops didn’t know what was going on here or refused to believe, but many of them did. And still they were out there, trying to reign in the madness and restore some sort of order. You had to hand it to them for that. That took guts.
“No, if I was you boys,” George said, “I’d beat those streets for your girl. We’re stretched pretty thin here. If you find her, then wait for daylight and get out of the city for a few days. If you don’t find her by dark, well, just hole up for the night. She’ll probably be doing the same somewhere else. But I’d get inside before dark.”
“Why’s that?” Mitch asked him.
George looked uncomfortable. “Just dangerous out there with the storm. And after dark…well, it could get a little wild out there after dark.”
Tommy said, “Well, I got a four-ten in the rack of my pick-up. I’m thinking that’ll be enough.”
But by the look in George Lake’s eyes, you could see he wasn’t so sure about that. “I’m just saying, you should get in by dark, that’s all.”
“She’s my kid, George,” Mitch said. “I just can’t leave her out there missing.”
George stubbed his cigar in an ashtray next to a green, peeling bench. “There’s gonna be lots of kids missing out there tonight, mister.”
17
Tommy drove over to East Genessee, which had become something of a bedroom community for the city. There had been lots of urban renewal there as the yuppies had flooded in with their minivans and modular homes.
Like Pennacott Lane getting devoured by Main Street and the University, Genessee had been similarly gobbled up through the years. It had worked pretty hard to erase its industrial past. Gone were much of the factories and machine shops that had marked its heart when Mitch was a kid and with them had left the saloons and strip joints, the sandwich counters and rows of seedy railroad hotels and freight yards where the bums used to live in their shacks. What was left were blocks and blocks of urban blight…empty storefronts and failed businesses, boarded-up dance halls and pool rooms, deserted tenements awaiting the wrecking ball. Those manufacturing plants and tool- and-die shops that still stood were gray, grim, and abandoned behind high chainlink fences, their sprawling parking lots sprouting weeds where once hundreds of cars were parked. East Genessee, like much of the city, had lost jobs by the hundreds in the past twenty-five years. Most of them had been sold overseas by the big corporations and their politico pals.
They could call it outsourcing all they wanted to, but when you put a guy in office and he allowed jobs to be shipped down to Mexico so that corporations could make obscene profits, then it was just a dirty shame. Rape was rape no matter what fancy tag you hung off it.
They passed through the remains of the industrial graveyard and then property values began to shoot up and you had lots of nice parks and schools, thriving business sectors, blocks upon blocks of ranch houses and prefab mansions. Things started to sink back the other way as you entered the surviving older sections of Genessee that sloped down towards the river. Where there had been but four or five inches of rain in the streets of yuppieville, down here where the old saltbox and two-story framehouses stood, there were a couple feet of standing water washing down the lanes. But it was no problem with Tommy’s Dodge Ram which was jacked so high you had to jump up into the cab anyway.
“Looking for four-oh-three Wilbur,” Mitch told him. “That’s where Lisa Bell lives.”
Tommy pulled onto Wilbur Avenue and studied the house numbers in the rain. It was still coming down, but not excessively. He moved the truck along slowly, leaving a foaming wake behind him that slopped into flooded yards. A few people were moving up the drenched walks in raincoats. They did not look as the truck passed.
“If I wasn’t seeing people,” Tommy said, “I would have thought this whole neighborhood was deserted.”
And there was that feeling, Mitch knew. He saw a few cars parked in the streets and a few more in driveways, but nowhere near the amount of vehicles you would have expected. There was that same feel you got here as you got over in the empty industrial sector, that sense of desertion and abandonment. While over there it was easy to see why, here…well, it was like driving through a ghost town and wondering what exactly had depopulated it.
Tommy said, “There it is.”
He touched the brakes a little too quickly and the truck jerked.
