The Breathtaker Read Free Page A

watery squawk as dirt flew into his eyes.
    He couldn’t see. The front door was open, leaves and shredded debris whipping into the house. “Hello?” He squinted up in anxiety, blinking away the tears. Who was this person? A rescue worker? An intruder? The thought pulled at his stomach.
    Blind, he was fucking blind.
    He took a quick, sobbing breath as the owner of the sneakers stepped boldly into the house, crunching over broken glass. Then the door slammed shut with a
thunk.

1
    P OLICE CHIEF Charlie Grover was surprised to find Main Street’s stately granite buildings still standing, their dimpled windows and variegated roofs intact. Back at the station house, he’d thought the sky was falling, but now he could see with his own eyes that downtown had withstood nature’s fury. The air hung wet and still, and with his high beams on, he could make out the muck and debris the tornado had deposited everywhere like Christmas tinsel—long strands of videotape draped over tree limbs, black cables slithering across the road, insulation dust swirling through the air.
    He was shaken up pretty badly and wanted a drink. He hated himself for drinking. He’d promised Maddie on her deathbed that he wouldn’t touch the stuff ever again, but he had. Not with a vengeance. He wasn’t a full-tilt, fall-down drunk, but he needed a drink now and again. And really, now was as good a time as any. Less than thirty minutes ago, a harmless-looking milky white F-1 on the Fujita scale had dropped down out of the sky over Promise, Oklahoma, and quickly transformed itself into a quivering black F-3 that’d zigzagged over open country south of town, wreaking selective havoc. According to reports just coming in, the damage path was ten miles long and nearly a quarter of a mile wide. Charlie was on his way now to coordinate whatever rescue efforts might be necessary and assess the damage. Through the static and crackle of his police radio, he could hear Patrol Officer Tyler Drumright’s hoarse, urgent voice: “. . . the roof is gone… we’ve got a home with no interior walls left standing… Chief? Are you there, Chief?”
    He picked up the hand mike. “Go ahead, Tyler.”
    “I’m at the Black Kettle subdivision. We’ve got a fifty-eight-year-old with chest pains, and no ambulance in sight.”
    “If he stops breathing, start chest compressions. The paramedics are on their way.”
    “We’ve got lots of stunned and bewildered residents suffering only bumps and scrapes.”
    “Hang in there, buddy, you’re doing great. I’ll be there in five.” He dropped the mike back in its retainer and had a flash of his baby sister, for some reason. His baby sister in her crib. Little Clara Grover had died thirty years ago at the age of two. He remembered her lying in her crib and gazing up at him with those enormous green eyes of hers.
    Forget, forget…
    This tornado had him reeling. A million things to do, and he was the guy in charge. Under the uniform, he was afraid. He tried to reach his daughter again and got the busy signal. The phone lines were jammed. He took a deep breath, confident that sixteen-year-old Sophie was okay. The tornado hadn’t traveled that far north, but he needed to be sure. Just needed to hear her sweet voice, her smug indifference.
“Oh Dad, I’m fine. What’s wrong?”
    He squeezed the wheel, drawing into himself. Life could take everything from you. So scared, dammit. That anxious fire in the pit of his stomach. Loved ones snatched away in the dead of night. Unfair. He rotated his shoulders, the pain shooting up the left side of his body like a trail of fire ants. It was the ancient miasma of burn scars and skin grafts that was causing all the discomfort. He’d felt that dull throbbing ache on the scarred left-hand side of his body ever since this morning, the cramps in his muscles and aches in his joints that usually portended foul weather. He should’ve known about the severity of this storm—his joints had