Page 4 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

4.

DRB.

Tolifson’s nickname for the athletic blond woman who had arrived in town a mere forty-five minutes after the levee had collapsed.

The initials stood for Disaster Relief …And a B word he had never uttered aloud and had thought only with regard to a few individuals, all well-deserving of the designation.

“Look.” She was pointing to the base of the levee.

A dozen residents were recording themselves as the waterfall flowed down the mudslide into the spillway. Two kids were skipping rocks over the retention pond, which was, oddly, more appealing now than it was in its typical shallow, scum-covered state.

Tolifson ordered, “Debi, call whoever’s in the fire station and have them shoo those folks off.”

DRB didn’t seem to think “shoo” was strong enough. She said, “Announcements need to go to the media and cell provider alert system.”

The woman and her associate—a trim man named Eduardo Gutiérrez—had arrived in Hinowah with such authority that Tolifson had initially thought she was law, until he recognized their tan SUV as a commercial rental, not an official vehicle. Hair in a taut ponytail, wearing a forest-green baseball cap, orange-brown Carhartt jacket and black rainproof pants, DRB had announced that she did disaster response for a living and happened to be nearby. She would take the lead now and then stay to assist, when teams from the county and state arrived.

As DRB watched—schoolmarm-like—Tolifson placed a call to the Olechu County Fire Service, which ran the civil defense system. It was making emergency broadcasts about the collapse and potential flooding of the town and he told the dispatcher who answered to add to the warning that no one should take selfies—

“No, no, no,” DRB said sharply.

He turned, frowning.

“The minute you say that, they go out and start taking selfies.”

How was he supposed to think of that?

“Tell them to say it’s too dangerous to approach. They’ll be buried alive. That gets people’s attention. I’ve used it before.”

It certainly got his. Tolifson was morbidly claustrophobic.

He relayed the information and the OCFS dispatcher said he would get the announcement out, and they disconnected.

“The county responders, state? What’s the status? They should be here by now.” DRB was nodding to the three tents, set up to house about a dozen emergency personnel.

Tolifson explained that he’d spoken to the county earlier. All available men and women were stacking sandbags around Fort Pleasant, the county seat, which sat at the juncture of the Never Summer and the Little Silver Rivers, around fifteen miles south. As long as the levee hadn’t come down all the way, he’d been told, Hinowah would have to wait.

DRB’s glare signaled she did not like this news, and he thought: It wasn’t my decision…

The wind then upended a stake and Debi leapt into the task of securing it once more.

“Call them.”

“Call them?”

“The head of the county. Who is that?”

“The head?” Tolifson repeated again.

“Of the county,” DRB snapped back.

“The whole county?”

She sighed in response.

Tolifson continued, “Prescott Moore. But he’s probably pretty busy…”

Her look was withering.

“I want to see him.”

“See him?” the mayor asked.

“Virtual’s fine. Zoom, FaceTime, Teams.”

“Well.”

“I can do that,” Debi said. “Did it just the other day with Sheriff Barrett.”

Tolifson waved toward her. At least he wouldn’t be on record as distracting a very busy county supervisor at a time like this.

In five minutes, Debi had propped her phone up and he and DRB were on Zoom.

“Han.” The slightly paunchy, pale man, around fifty years of age, pushed his glasses up his broad nose. His tone was that of an overworked senior government official. “What’s up?”

DRB interrupted, identifying herself by name.

A pause from the other end of the call. “Well, hello, miss. Uhm. Have to say it’s pretty busy here.”

Tolifson said, “Don’t doubt it, Pres, but we were—”

DRB fired off, “We need responders here now, in Hinowah. A dozen at least.”

“And who are you exactly, miss?”

“I run a private disaster response company. I was nearby and came to assist.”

“I see. And you’ve had experience at this sort of thing?”

“You want my creds?” DRB was as exasperated at Moore as she was with the mayor himself. It gave him a bit of comfort to have the abuse spread out some. “It’s wasting time. But if you have to know, the Jenkins Canyon blaze, the Stoddard Petroleum oil tanker spill, the San Diego Westland’s fire, the Harkins Bay bridge collapse…and a nuclear incident I can’t talk about. And if you were about to ask, I’m not charging for my services. Now, I was saying we need people here immediately. Minimum a dozen. And sandbags. I can start with fifty tons. But I’ll need more pretty soon.”

A pause. “Well, I can’t really help you out. Like I was telling Mayor Tolifson.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a question of allocation of resources. Hinowah’s one of a dozen towns in the county and—”

“Are any of them on a collapsing levee?”

Ouch.

“Not yet, no, but Fort Pleasant’s between two rivers and it has a population twenty times bigger than Hinowah. We have to go with priorities.”

DRB held up her phone screen, on which appeared a box.

Time Elapsed from Initial Collapse: 1 Hour

She said solemnly, “Hinowah and everybody in it’s living on borrowed time. Every minute that goes by means we’re that much closer to the whole thing collapsing.”

The man’s eyes shifted. He didn’t seem to care for the dramatics. “You know, Han, I have an interest in helping you. I’ll do what I can.” He looked up and had another conversation they couldn’t hear. “I’m sorry. I should go. I’ll be back with better news when I know more.”

The screen went dark.

DRB scoffed, tucking away her phone with its countdown clock still visible. He wondered if she’d make it her screen saver. She muttered, “What did he mean ‘an interest’?”

“He used to live here,” Debi said. She pointed to a two-story house in an overgrown, untended yard not far from the levee. “Moved to Fort Pleasant after his wife passed last year. He still owns the place. Wouldn’t want to see it washed away, I’m guessing. So it’d be hard for him to hold off on help.”

Tolifson added, “And he owns the biggest mortgage brokerage outfit in town. That’s right in the path too.”

But Prescott Moore’s sad personal history and commercial connection to Hinowah were clearly matters of only marginal interest to DRB. She was focusing now on her associate Ed Gutiérrez, who stood fifty feet away, on the shattered edge of the northern side of Route 13, aiming his phone toward the waterfall levee with an app open. It was measuring “situational erosion”—how fast the stream was eating away at the remaining top and sides of the levee. He looked toward her and shook his head.

“It’s dissolving the levee faster than we thought.”

Debi was staring at her, the mallet poised motionless in her hand.

DRB said, “We need to evacuate.”

“ What? ” Tolifson brushed raindrops from his cheeks.

“Now.”

“All of Misfortune Row?” Tolifson was pointing to the low-lying strip of the village beside the spillway.

“No,” DRB said, absently scanning the levee once again. “The entire valley. The whole town.”

His snort of laughter was the wrong response.

She glared.

“But…” Where to start with the challenges? he thought.

“Mayor. This town is one big cereal bowl, just waiting to fill up to the brim.”

“But the spillway. It’s moving water around the town.”

“For now. It won’t last, and if the levee goes, it won’t mean a thing. I want the town empty ASAP. We need your people going door-to-door. That search team from your fire department, looking for the SUV that went into the river?”

“They haven’t found…”

“Of course not or we would have heard. Not my point.”

B…

“Pull the team back, all except one.”

“I’m not going to do that. It’s a family.”

She blinked at the response. “I know it is. You told me. We have to make choices in this line of work. Four people against a thousand. The math is easy.”

DRB strode to the nearest tent, relocated the stake Debi Starr was pounding into the ground and said, “That’s loam. You want clay. Computers?”

Debi fixed the stake and glanced at TC McGuire’s pickup plodding up the hill. Debi nodded. “TC does our computer stuff. That’s him now.”

McGuire climbed out and pulled on a rubber-protected hat. He was dressed the same as Debi—in a brown Hinowah Public Safety uniform, though his rain shield was a clear poncho. It was a souvenir from a concert, the Kiss Tribute Tour. He was a big man who could glare you down with the best of them. Fearless too—he’d climbed into a burning Jeep to pull a drunk driver out of the wreckage. He was also knowledgeable about the law, and was the front-runner for the chief position. Apart from himself, of course.

If Tolifson came through this test and took the job, he would be most troubled about passing over McGuire, who he knew was also hoping for the spot. But in Tolifson’s opinion McGuire lacked “vision,” though he wasn’t sure exactly what that meant in the context of being chief of a small town like Hinowah. “Computers?” DRB encouraged in a mutter.

Tolifson told McGuire to hook them up and get online.

“Will do.” The officer took two laptops and Verizon jetpacks from the backseat and booted the units. As he did, he glanced at the river and said, “We may have a break. They say the rain’s going to let up by noon.”

A pair of small binoculars had appeared in DRB’s hand and she scanned the west side of the village. She was saying absently to McGuire, “It’s not the rain. It’s the melt . Record snowpack in the mountains from November fourteenth through January twenty-fourth. Record heat in the past four days. And that’s only going to get worse.”

“Oh.”

Tolifson was thinking again—evacuate a whole town?

How?

His phone hummed. Marissa Fell. “Hey,” he said, picturing the woman hunkered down at her desk back in the Public Safety Office.

“Han. Just heard from the Army Corps of Engineers. They’re sending a team. One that specializes in flooding.”

“Thank God. ETA?”

“They just said soon.”

He thanked her and turned to DRB. “Looks like Prescott Moore came through after all. He must’ve called the army engineers.” He found himself eager to defend the local government.

“Who’s in charge, the engineers?”

“Uhm, I’ll get a name.”

He called Marissa Fell back. She couldn’t remember the name. “A sergeant. A woman.”

He relayed this to DRB, who nodded. “All right. She got the number, I assume.”

After posing the question he said to DRB, “Not exactly.”

Her reaction was “Ah.” The neutral sound nonetheless was thick with displeasure. He guessed it meant, Either you got the number or you didn’t. What’s the point of hedging?

Debi said, “City’s been talking about getting landlines with caller IDs for ages. Just doesn’t end up in the budget requests.”

DRB said, “Might want to think about that.”

Yes, Mother.

McGuire announced he had the computers up and running. DRB ordered, “Map of the area. One that’s got topography with elevation. All roads, paved or not. And I’m not talking Google. I want state survey maps.”

“I’ll get it,” McGuire said with a who-the-hell-is-this glance to Tolifson.

DRB’s binoculars now scanned Misfortune Row. “South side of the spillway.”

McGuire nodded like he got it but he didn’t.

“I want to blow it from twenty feet past the levee to that big oak tree there.” She was pointing.

“You mean…”

“The oak. The big one!”

“No, you mean, ‘blow’? With…explosives?”

A glance his way. “Whoever did your public works did a crappy job with the levee and a good one with the spillway. But it’s not made for this volume. It’ll start to overflow. You’ve got an hour before the water reaches that power substation.” She pointed to the large metal shack bristling with wires. “Maybe less. We need power for as long as we can. Communications, medical. I know a demo man but he can’t be here in time. It has to happen now. So? You have any dynamite?”

Tolifson was about to say, Not on me, but knew that DRB would not appreciate the slightest hint of humor.

McGuire said, “There’s the mine.”

“Well, it’s private. We can’t just use civilians like that.” Tolifson was frowning. “Not with explosives. Can we?”

Ed Gutiérrez had joined them. “What mine?”

Tolifson explained that the Redding copper mine was a mile or so west of town. Most such mines were open pits but this was a traditional shaft mine and used explosives to break up the rock at the face, deep underground. Every couple of weeks you could hear the warning whistle then feel the thud beneath your feet.

Apparently DRB believed that one could use civilian explosives with no problem. She said, “I want a dozen sticks of dynamite, with a weight strength of at least sixty percent. Make it eighteen sticks. Gelatin would be even better.”

Tolifson was pausing. DRB glanced and he lifted his phone. “I’ll see.”

“And rock drills too. With fresh bits. You’ll burn through them fast but tell the owner or manager, whoever you’re calling, you’ll reimburse him the cost. It won’t be much.”

Easy for you to say…

Tolifson called the mine and got through to Gerard Redding.

The gruff voice: “Hanlon. I heard about the levee. What’s going on?”

He explained about the partial collapse and said the rest of it was holding for the time being. But they needed some explosives to divert runoff.

A pause. Redding asked, “From us?”

“From you, from somebody.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Han. I don’t do that myself. I use an outside company.”

“You have dynamite or something called gelatin there?”

“No. When we’re blasting, the company comes in, sets the charges and blows it, then leaves. Takes with them what they don’t use.”

“Thanks. You safe there?”

“I shut down. Got some volunteers sandbagging the perimeter fence. Man, I want to keep water out of the shafts. If it’s more’n two or three feet, I can say goodbye to the pump bearings. What’re the odds the whole levee’ll give?”

“I don’t know. It’s not looking good.”

DRB interrupted bluntly, “Mayor? Explosives.”

“No, he doesn’t have any.”

Another neutral yet damning “Ah.” Then: “Does he know where to get some? In the next twenty minutes?”

Tolifson posed the question.

Redding said, “The company we use is in Eureka. I’ll give you the name, but it’ll be three hours to get here. And you know there’re regs. You need permits. Inspections.”

“Okay.” Tolifson was going to push back if DRB gave him any trouble. He said firmly, “No. Nobody close.”

She shrugged. The gesture he took to mean: It’s your town I’m trying to save.

He thanked the miner again and disconnected the call.

She looked over at the levee, standing with her hands on her hips.

“Let’s get that evac underway. Are those searchers—the ones looking for the family—on their way back?”

A reminder that he hadn’t yet done anything about it. Stepping away, getting a bit of shelter under a tent, he gave a chill smile and placed a call to Tomas Martinez.

“Got a woman here, runs a disaster response company. She needs your people back to evacuate the town.”

“It’s that bad?” Martinez asked.

“Lookin’ that way. One person can stay on the search for the family and the SUV. But everybody else back.”

“One person? Who decided that?”

Tolifson only repeated, “One.”

“Okay. I’ll keep at it. And send the rest back there.”

After disconnecting, Tolifson walked up to DRB, who was looking over the map on the computer. She announced, “For the evac center we should use Hanover College. It’s on high ground and has room for the entire village. Those needing shelter, at least. The younger, the healthier can stay in their vehicles for the time being. And it’s got an ROTC department, and those kids love to volunteer in these situations. Can you call them and set it up? News like that comes better from locals.”

“I guess.”

“Now. I’ve called a sporting-goods chain and got them to deliver a hundred tents.”

“They’ll just do that?”

“Publicity. You’d be surprised. I’ll need you to find vehicles to transport people who don’t have cars or can’t drive. Any in-patient medical facilities in the town itself?”

“No.”

Debi said, “But there are in-home care residents.”

“We’ll have to make sure they’re taken care of. What’s your physical civil defense warning system?”

Tolifson said, “Physical?”

“For the residents who aren’t online or watching The Price Is Right .”

Tolifson and McGuire looked at each other. The mayor said, “Only the siren, I think. Right?”

McGuire nodded.

“Which is for what?”

Tolifson said, “Tornadoes. I think the switch’s at the fire station. You want to let it rip?”

She blinked. “Well, we hardly want to do that now, do we? Send people into their basements when they’re facing a flood? Get all town vehicles with loudspeakers. I need the announcement to say, ‘Everybody has to get to the college immediately. And tune in to the local station and any online newspapers for details.’?”

McGuire asked, “Uhm, what would those details be? I mean, exactly?”

“The orders—and say that, quote ‘orders’—are to evacuate to the college and bring only cell phones, chargers, computer if they want, one change of clothes, medicines. That’s it. Absolutely no weapons.”

Tolifson scoffed. “No guns? This is rural California. That’s going to be tough.”

“The order,” she said firmly, “is—”

“No weapons. Got it. What about food?”

“You really want people debating whether to bring tomato or beef barley soup?”

His face burning, Tolifson said, “No food.”

“And get a copy of the evac order to the big mobile service providers so they can send it out on the text alert system.”

“?‘Copy of the order’?” he asked. “There’s something I should get official, from the state?”

“No. You don’t need legal language.”

Looking at the waterfall, smooth, fast, glistening, Debi said, “All my days, never seen anything like this.”

DRB said, “Last time the Never Summer was this high was in nineteen thirty-eight. But back then the levee was a foot higher and two wider. Nobody’s done anything about the erosion since then.”

Damn. The woman sure did her homework, no arguing with that.

A glance his way. “So, that evacuation?”

“The thing is, don’t some authorities need to declare an emergency before issuing an order?”

“Exactly right. Under Government Code Section 8630.”

Silence.

“Well…”

“Oh, that’s you , Mayor. You’re the authority. And in the announcement, make sure to add that under the code anyone who violates the mandatory evacuation order can be fined up to one thousand dollars and imprisoned for six months.” As she scanned the levee once more she added, “Be sure to add the prison part. It gets people’s attention as good as burial alive.”