Page 3 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

3.

Hanlon Tolifson walked to the end of what had been Route 13, a darkly auspicious number to some. Though he was not a superstitious man, he felt the digits appropriate, reminiscent of the election in which he’d won the mayoral race by 666 votes.

He looked down at the rushing torrent of water that had just sliced off the top of the levee as smoothly as a supervillain’s blast would have done in the apocalyptic movies his grandkids watched. It had been a long time since he’d been tested like this.

It wasn’t like when his wife passed. He simply had to be strong for his children and theirs.

And it wasn’t like fighting in county board meetings to win money for Hinowah.

Nor taking on parents who resisted the hiring of a gay teacher.

Those were moments you had to be strong. You stood up.

But this was a different kind of test. You met the challenge because there was something you wanted, something that moved you forward in life and you needed to prove yourself.

A test…

He looked back over his burg. An old mining town dating to the 1800s, Hinowah had been settled because of its silver, not because the topography represented a safe environment for its citizens. The place was as vulnerable as could be, a deep bowl surrounded by low hills to the north, west and south, the levee in the east. The earthwork, built more than a hundred years ago, was now a waterfall, twelve inches deep and thirty feet wide, pouring over the mudslide that had been the top of the levee, and into a grim retention pond. From there it gushed into a spillway that diverted the water around the village.

The spillway—a concrete chute ten feet wide and three feet deep—had not, in his decades as a resident, been a conduit for a single drop of water from the Never Summer. There was constant talk about breaking it up and putting a bike trail in.

Thank God for bad-tempered, unyielding and environmentally skeptical residents.

Hinowah was protected for the moment, but the flow was increasing as the waterfall ate away at the top of the remaining levee. He wondered how long it would be before the spillway filled to the brim and water invaded the town.

Tolifson was dressed in a long, bright yellow coat that was called, he believed, a sou’wester, as in “southwestern”—which was a wind or storm or something in New England, he thought, even though the outerwear’s name and that part of the country were in direct opposition. In this part of the state, given the annual rainfall, he had worn the outfit once in six years. The matching floppy hat looked silly, and he’d replaced it with an Oakland Athletics cap.

Tolifson was six two and weighed one hundred and seventy-three pounds, hardly imposing. But his eyes were keen and he had learned to identify and deflect BS without a hem or a haw. He was mayor by election and now police chief by default, as Hiram Folk had ended a twenty-one-year career to take care of his aging parents in Florida. A meeting of the town council had been planned to hire a new chief, either promoting one of the two senior officers—TC McGuire or Leon Brown—or hiring from outside. Résumés were currently being accepted.

And then there was the testing.

As a youngish widower—he was fifty-three—the job of running the only home inspection company in this part of the county had never excited him.

Then he jumped at the chance to run for mayor.

He won easily—by the devil’s sign margin—and he was good at being mayor. Fighting those fights and juggling what needed to be juggled came easily to him.

But still, there was a gap.

The something-missing stuff.

And so town procedures for selecting a new head law enforcer would be followed and candidates for chief would be interviewed and voted upon.

But he had decided that he himself might give it a shot, going after the job permanently.

He liked the badge. He liked the way people looked at him different. And, he had to admit, he liked the gun. (Tolifson never met a Hollywood Western he didn’t adore.)

He liked waking up every day knowing there’d be a new challenge.

There had even been a few crimes to investigate. A little meth selling, a little oxy selling, a domestic, a drunk teenager with his father’s scattergun.

And while he hadn’t been trained formally in any law enforcement school or academy, he was picking up tricks of the trade steadily, if slowly, from TJ and Leon. Even cute little Debi Starr, their traffic girl, offered some decent suggestions on occasion.

But now he was faced with an opportunity to move his cause forward.

The test: how he would handle the levee collapse. The disaster wasn’t really something that a police chief would deal with, being more in the realm of the fire department—Hinowah’s population of seventeen hundred souls did not allow for a civil defense or disaster relief office. But Tomas Martinez, head of the volunteer FD, as well as being town council chair, had no more experience in levee collapses than he did. Nor had Buddy Soames, the pumper truck operator and second-in-command at HFD.

And so the task fell to Tolifson.

He felt uneasy at first, but then kicked himself, thinking: The heck is the problem? Here’s your chance. It’s a test. Do a good job and the council’ll vote you in as police chief by a landslide (all seven of them).

So, step one: save the immediate victims, those on the road atop the levee when it collapsed. What might have possessed them to take that route when the Never Summer was nearly level with the road was a mystery, though to backtrack on other roads in this part of the state would have added over an hour to their journeys. Then too, while hardly a miracle of engineering science, the levee was an exceedingly large lump of earth and would appear strong enough even to handle the renegade waves.

In any event those in the three vehicles flipped mental coins and took their chances.

One, described as a young woman in a blue sports car, had apparently made it off safely.

The driver of the pickup behind her, Sheetrock maven Louis Bell, had resigned himself to death but had, with little effort it seemed, climbed out the window and waded to safety before the southern portion of the levee fully collapsed.

But some people had not been so lucky: according to Louis, the occupants of a Chevy Suburban—seemingly a family of four—had rolled upside down into the fierce gray river.

Had they drowned in the car by now? Had they forced open a door or rolled down a window before the electrical system shorted? Swimming in the river seemed impossible; they would have either died by drowning or being torn apart on the rocks.

But he was assuming they were alive.

And Police Chief Pro Tem Tolifson was going to do whatever it took to find them.

Pacing back and forth before the gushing waterfall, he thought of the family, the bloating spillway, the eroding levee, and his town.

And he thought, of course, of DRB.

“Han? You reading me? Ten-four.” The radio on his hip clattered. Tomas Martinez was heading the search party of six volunteers looking downriver for the missing family.

“Tomas, let’s not worry about codes, okay?”

The truth was, Tolifson didn’t know the codes anyway. Well, 10-4, sure, but that was from Blue Bloods .

“Fine.”

“Where are you?”

“Two miles and change south of the levee.”

“Anything?”

Why bother to ask? He’d have said, wouldn’t he?

“No. But, Lord, the depth’s got to be twenty, thirty feet here. No, more! Swear to God. Hard to spot anything.”

The Never Summer was relatively clear under normal circumstances. Now, it had churned up curtains of mud. You couldn’t see three inches below the surface.

“We’re moving, but slow.”

For miles the banks of the river were similar to where Tolifson now stood. Steep rocks and thick pine, most of the trees alive, some dead and gray. Tough going for the search team, plodding along on the banks, with their chain saws, axes, ropes and medical gear.

Martinez was continuing, “We ought to get a boat—”

“Boat? In that current? We’d end up rescuing you . Keep going as best you can.”

This seemed like a good response to the police chief test: try to save the victims but not at the expense of your men’s lives.

People’s lives. Two women volunteer firefighters were in the party.

Something else to keep an eye on.

Martinez said crisply, “Ten-four…Sorry, can’t help myself. I’ll check in later.”

“Okay.” Tolifson disconnected and stared at the turbulent waters, wondering who the family was, where they’d come from and where they’d been going.

Had the SUV floated? Was it stuck somewhere, in one of the many caves or a shaft of an old silver mine from the 1800s, most of whose entrances they had no way of sealing off? (And those that were sealed sometimes got unsealed—by idiotic teenagers who went exploring and weed-smoking and sex-having just for the thrill of it.)

He glanced down again at the town.

His town.

Yes, the family was important but he could hardly imagine what would happen if the rest of the levee went. If so, the crushing flood would be horrific.

“Han? Help here?”

He turned away from the breached highway and walked to a grassy area atop the northern hillside, the highest point in town. It was the municipal park; fifteen feet above the levee and therefore the perfect site for a disaster response command post. The voice belonged to petite and pert and somewhat-round Debi Starr, in a brown Public Safety uniform, under a translucent rain slicker. Her trooper hat was protected too—with a clear plastic covering that the men, only them, of course, called a rubber. She was muscling a tent into position, fighting against the ornery wind. Debi was the most recent addition to the police force, a teacher for the county laid off in recent cuts. She joked that she was a “patrol officer third grade” since that was the class she’d taught at the town’s elementary school. “Not a lot of difference between the kids and the motorists, except the youngsters were easier to catch and didn’t give you quite so much crapola.”

Not a real cop, but no matter—the city needed ticket revenue and she was good at the job.

Also, it was helpful to have a gofer. Coffee and packages and batteries…and putting up command post tents on high ground. Two were already open; he joined her to tug up the poles of the last tent, against a wind that kept turning the direction of the rain from vertical to horizontal. He grabbed and pulled, while she pounded stakes into the ground with solid, and accurate, thwacks of a steel mallet.

He and Debi then pulled two six-foot-long fiberboard banquet tables out of the back of her pickup, along with folding chairs. Her husband, Jim, managed Sierra Restaurant and Catering. They served damn good food, put together events at the last minute and did it for a song. “These were for Edna Zale’s baby shower.” She looked up. “Got the shower part, but no babies.”

Setting up the tables, kicking the legs into place and sending globs of mud flying, Tolifson said, “You bring the cute tablecloths? Moana? Nemo?” Thanks to the grandkids he was getting an education in what was culturally relevant.

“Ha.”

He eyed the tight switchback leading from the village in the valley up to the CP.

No sign of DRB.

A bit of relief.

He knew it wouldn’t last.

Debi now eyed a stake straining against the rope. The tent was like a sail. She picked up the mallet and thwacked some more.

As she did, she glanced his way with a concerned look on her pretty, round face.

“Any word on the family in the SUV?”

“No. Tomas and the crew are about two miles south. Nothing.”

“That’s harsh—kids, Louis was saying.” She was the young mother of twins.

Another pickup appeared, slightly less spattered than the others. Marissa Fell washed her vehicle every other day. Polish was involved too. The paste kind, which few souls on earth now used. It was largely how she ran the administrative side of the police department, clean and orderly, everything in its place, if not spit shined.

Climbing out, the solid, curly-haired woman zipped up her blue quilted parka.

“I got ’em.” Her eyes danced Tolifson’s way, then took in the levee. “How’s it holding?”

“No idea.”

From the backseat of her Silverado, she collected wires and power strips, and Tolifson a gas-powered generator. Marissa had also brought paper towels. Tolifson started to wipe down the table. Debi took over. And when they were dry-like, she ran the cables to the generator and fired it up.

Marissa said, “Ruth’s manning nine-one-one. She’s just telling everybody who calls we’re on top of the situation.” Her troubled eyes were on the white torrent of the river’s surface and the cascade. “But seeing that? I’m not so sure…”

Tolifson nodded at the tents. “Might be safer up here.”

She snorted a laugh. “Have the landlines. Can’t run a police department via mobiles and Zoom.”

“Suppose not.”

“What a day. What a day. You holding up?”

Haven’t failed the test yet, he thought. “So far…”

They shared another glance, then Marissa climbed into the truck, made a three-point turn and headed down the hill.

Tolifson was startled by a woman’s voice from behind him, snapping, “Mayor. There are people taking selfies, right under the breach! You really need to get on top of this.”

His lips grew into a tight line.

DRB was back.