“How’s it going?” Keenan asked.
“Slow as molasses.” The tall man took a sip from his thermos and then wiped the back of his glove across his thick, white mustache. “No easy way to do this even in the best conditions. But this is just nuts.”
“Why not wait till morning?”
The foreman shrugged. “Guess they figure it’s gonna snow half the day tomorrow anyway, so we might as well get started.”
“I don’t know how you guys are keeping up with the downed lines,” Keenan said. “I’ve responded to calls about three of ’em already. They’ve all had the juice cut off pretty damn quick after we locate them, but just getting to them must a bitch, considering what a bang-up job Public Works is doing with the plowing.”
The foreman laughed, rolling his head back with a snort of disdain. “Those fucking guys. Don’t get me started. You know they’re all somewhere drinking whiskey and laying bets on who’ll take down the most mailboxes.”
Keenan chuckled. “You’re not kidding. I saw three of the trucks in the BJ’s parking lot.”
He didn’t begrudge the plow drivers their breaks. They would be cleaning up after the storm for a long time. And he understood the temptation to take it easy, knowing how few people would be out on the road tonight.
But I’m out here,
Officer Keenan thought.
And I’m not the only one.
“You getting a lot of calls tonight?” the foreman asked.
“Enough,” Keenan said. It had been quiet at first, but in the past two hours the calls had come more frequently, all of them concerning downed power lines.
“Well, stay safe.”
Officer Keenan wished the man the same and rolled up his window, tapping the accelerator. He felt the tires spin for a second, kicking up snow before they found purchase. His fingers ached just from the grip he had been keeping on the wheel since he’d started his shift and he wanted his soft, warm bed. More than that, he wanted this night to be over.
A burst of static came over the radio and the dispatcher’s voice filled the car. “Coventry Control to Car Four.”
Keenan picked up the radio. “Car Four, Winchester Street.”
“Car Four, we have a call from a Jill Wexler, Seventy-five Kestrel Drive. Her fifteen-year-old-son, Gavin, went sledding with two others. The boys were sleeping over the Wexlers’ and snuck out. The woman thinks they went out to the viaduct behind Whittier Elementary. The father—Mr. Wexler—is out looking for them.”
“Car Four responding,” Keenan said.
He hit the pedal and the car slewed a bit until he righted it, keeping the nose straight ahead. If the kids and Mr. Wexler were out behind the Whittier school, all would be well, but if they weren’t, the dispatcher would send a BOLO to all cars with descriptions of the missing. Normally the department wouldn’t react so swiftly, but in the middle of a storm like this they were more concerned with safety than protocol.
The fastest way to the Whittier school would normally be up French Farm Road, but it was so steep and narrow and the side streets such a mess that he was sure he would have trouble getting to the top. Instead he took a longer route, past the Greenwood condo development and along the curving slope of Greenwood Avenue, which took him on a long climb to the parking lot for the baseball field behind the school.
A two-foot-high snow wall had been left by the plows, blocking in the parking lot. Keenan swore and pulled over, flicking the blues back on and killing the ignition. He peered into the storm, barely able to see twenty feet across the snow-blanketed field. The wind rocked his car and he thought again of his warm bed.
Then he remembered Mrs. Wexler, waiting at home for her husband and son, and the parents of the two other boys out there—
idiots,
he thought, but teenage boys all had a little idiot in them—and he got out of the car. Pulling his hat down around his ears and slipping his hands into heavy gloves, he slammed the door and climbed over the wall of snow, blue lights swirling around him.
He was breathing heavily before he’d made it fifteen yards, laboring through snow already calf-deep and struggling to see where he was going. Thick flakes slipped down inside his collar. The wind knocked him around and snow stung his cheeks, but every six or seven steps he’d feel a lull in the wind and the thickness of the blizzard would diminish just enough for him to make sure he was on the right track.
Whittier Elementary sat on the bald crest of a hill, ringed by trees. Wind sheared across the top of the hill, slicing over the baseball field, but Keenan kept going, promising himself an enormous coffee as soon as he could lay hands on one … and after he had smacked Gavin Wexler and his two idiot friends in the head.
“Stupid kids,” he whispered, bending into the storm.
He paused to orient himself and felt the ache of the cold settle into his fingers. The school was to his right. In a momentary lull, he saw the black stripes of the power lines that marched across the hill behind the school, and turned left toward the far corner of the field. A chain-link fence was supposed to keep kids away from the viaduct that ran down the hill in that corner, but in the winter it was the greatest place to sled. Young Joe Keenan had been there with his own idiot friends dozens of times, but they’d never done it in a blizzard at one thirty in the morning.
A voice came to him on the wind and he looked up, peering through the snow at nothing. The cold cut deeply despite his jacket and hat and gloves, but he forged ahead, wondering if the raging wind and whipping snow had played a trick on him, if the sound he’d heard had come from some other direction. Half-a-dozen steps more, and he found his answer—a dark silhouette staggering toward him, straight ahead.
“Hey!” Officer Keenan shouted. “This way!”
Stupid. The guy was already heading this way. But maybe he needed to know he wasn’t alone.
He heard the voice again, though it sounded different this time. A soft, chuffing whisper. Yet it confused him because it came not from ahead but behind and to his left. The wind drove harder, thickening the white curtain in front of him and obscuring his view of the figure in the snow.
The storm playing tricks on me,
Keenan thought.
But then the whisper came again, so close it seemed to be right at his ear, and he felt something snag on his jacket and turned with a shout, reaching for his gun—stupid because he had gloves on.
He stared into the storm, not breathing, heart booming inside his chest, waiting for a lull in the gale. When it came and the snow fell straight down for once instead of whipping sideways, he saw nothing. No one was there. And yet that whisper lingered in his mind so vividly that his heart still thundered and he took short, nervous breaths. His thoughts rushed back to earlier in his shift and whatever had made the scratches on his car.
“Hello?” a voice called.
Spinning around, he saw that the silhouetted figure had come nearer. Keenan saw a bulky green jacket with a hood, but the face was in darkness until he swung his flashlight up. The blizzard played havoc with the beam, but he could make out the man’s basic features and the frantic terror in his eyes.
“Sir, I’m a police officer. Are you hurt?”
Keenan flashed the light in his eyes again, waved it back and forth, and wondered if the guy was in shock.
“Are you Mr. Wexler?” he asked.
The guy blinked. He looked around as if he’d lost something and then fixed his gaze on Officer Keenan.
“I’m okay. It’s the boys. You’ve gotta help the boys,” Wexler said, his voice rising from numbed to frantic in the space of a handful of words.
Wexler grabbed Keenan by the wrist but the officer yanked his arm away.
“Please, sir, just show me where they are.”
The man nodded his head and then just kept nodding it as he turned back the way he’d come.
“This way,” he said. “Hurry. I thought … my cell phone didn’t work, maybe the storm, and I thought I’d have to go all the way home and then … please!”
Wexler struggled through the storm and Officer Keenan followed, more certain with every step that they were headed for the chain-link fence at the corner of the ball field that led down onto the viaduct … to the narrow slope that Keenan and his friends had grown up referring to as Meatball Hill, after the time Frankie Matos had gone flying off the side and into the trees and torn up his knee so badly it looked like a raw meatball. That was both the danger and the allure of the place. If you screwed up and went off the side, the viaduct dropped off at a rough angle for a good ten feet, all covered with trees.
They reached the fence and Wexler started to climb over.
Keenan grabbed his arm. “No, Mr. Wexler. You need to stay up here and watch for more help to come.”
Whatever waited for him at the bottom of Meatball Hill, Keenan figured if he needed to call it in, it would help to have Wexler at the top to flag EMTs or other officers as they arrived.
Taking a deep breath, the icy chill drawn inside him, he scaled the gate at the top of the viaduct, balanced precariously a moment, and then dropped down on the other side. When he landed in the snow he went down on one knee, grabbing hold of the chain link to keep from falling. This sort of thing had been a lot easier when was fourteen.
Keenan tried to peer down the narrow hill. Through the maelstrom of white he vaguely made out the electrical towers that marched across the shoulder of the hill below, where the viaduct leveled out. Meatball Hill was about eighty feet in length—not as long as his memory had imagined but just as steep as he’d recalled. The deep snow around his feet was trampled by the bootprints of several kids and the viaduct was striped with the paths of sleds.
The sleds,
he thought, frowning as he remembered the other dangerous element of Meatball Hill—the gate at the bottom. The fence down there was a twin to the one at the top, chain link with a double-door gate, framed with metal piping. In order to sled down the viaduct, you had to be willing to bail out at the bottom and let your sled hit the gate, but Keenan remembered staying on too long several times, so that his momentum took him skidding along the snow into the fence.
“Shit,” he whispered to himself, his hands and face growing numb. Then he raised his voice to be heard over the storm. “Did one of them hit the fence, Mr. Wexler? Are there injuries?”
“Yes,” Wexler replied, his voice strangely clear amid the roar of the blizzard. “It’s Gavin. And not just…”
Keenan had whipped off his glove and slipped out his radio. As soon as he hit the button a burst of static filled the air. A squeal came from the radio, loud enough to blot out anything else Wexler might have said.
“Coventry Central, this is Car Four,” he said. “Come in.”
He started down the hill, listening to the radio hiss and pop, but he’d taken only five steps when he realized that Wexler had stopped in midsentence and hadn’t said more. Worried that the guy might be collapsing in shock, Keenan turned to check on him, but saw no sign of the man.
“Mr. Wexler?” the officer called as he struggled back to the gate.
He peered into the storm and shouted the man’s name again, scanning the frozen baseball field—or as much of it as the storm allowed him to see. A fresh burst of static came from his radio and Keenan jumped, startled. He lifted the radio and hailed Dispatch again, even as he stared into the driving snow. There was nowhere for Wexler to have gone. Nowhere he could have gone, at least not fast enough that Keenan wouldn’t have spotted him.
“Wexler!” he shouted.
No answer.
Until one came, but this was not the voice of a grown man. A younger voice, frantic and plaintive, cried out from the bottom of the viaduct, calling for help. Keenan swore, glanced once more at the void in the storm where Wexler had just vanished, and turned to stumble, march, and slide down the steep slope of Meatball Hill.
The radio kept crackling. He tried calling in again and heard a snippet of words among the static but nothing he could make out clearly. The storm was interfering with everything.
Twenty feet from the fence, snow frosting his coat and sticking to his face, Keenan barely made out a pair of figures on the ground.
“Hello?” he called.
“Here!” a voice came back. “Right here!”
Exhausted from fighting against the brutal wind, Keenan staggered toward the two boys, one of whom knelt in the snow, cradling the other in his lap. The upright boy was a skinny little guy whose eyebrows were rimed with snow. He wore a wool pea coat and a scarf pulled up to cover the bottom of his chin and he gazed at Keenan with pleading eyes.
“Help him!”
Keenan stood over them, studying the unconscious boy, whose head lolled alarmingly to one side.
“What happened?”
“He tried to help Gavin,” the skinny kid said, his voice cracking with emotion.
Keenan frowned. “Neither of you is Gavin Wexler?”
“I’m Marc Stern. This is Charlie Newell,” the kid said. “Gavin’s…” His face crumpled into grief and horror. “Gavin’s over there.” He nodded toward the gate, only another ten feet away.
Keenan stumbled over and nearly tripped on a small figure in a gray-and-blue winter coat that lay mostly covered beneath at least an inch of snow. Even as he bent to brush some of the snow away, he smelled the stink of burnt flesh and he froze.
“No!” skinny Marc Stern cried. “Don’t touch him! It might not be safe!”
Keenan backed away, glancing around to take in the scene, and then he heard a spark and a pop and he understood it all. He craned his head back to look up at the power lines that ran perpendicular to the viaduct, crossing the path just on the other side of the fence at the bottom of Meatball Hill. A long black line hung from one of the towers, and about fifteen feet to his left it draped across the top of the fence.
A sizzle and hiss reached him and he saw a little shower of sparks come off the fence where the power line had fallen on it.
He didn’t want a better look at Gavin Wexler’s burnt corpse, and he didn’t have time for one. He hurried back to the other boys and dropped to the snow beside Charlie. He felt the boy’s wrist for a pulse but it was weak if there at all, so he checked Charlie’s neck and found his heart still beating.