Page 8 of South of Nowhere

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 disasterrelief 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’tknowthe codes anyway. Well, 10-4, sure, but that was fromBlue Bloods.

“Fine.”

“Where are you?”

“Two miles and change south of the levee.”

“Anything?”

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