The Breathtaker by Alice Blanchard

these thunderheads right over me… and I remember thinking at one point, ‘Wow, look at all those leaves flying around.’ Only they weren’t leaves, they were tires or tree limbs and shit. Then I saw this car doing doughnuts across a field… and I’m thinking, ‘Holy fuck. This is it. This is how I’m going to die.’ I must’ve hit a hundred. I took the Shepherd Street exit, that’s how I got here.”
    “So you turned around and drove back here?”
    “East on the 412. I got off at the Shepherd Street exit and saw this mess. I stopped and tried to help. Thought I could…” He shook his head, his soft-lashed eyes full of regret and of something else. Something Charlie couldn’t quite put a finger on.
    “You knew the Peppers, right?”
    He gave an abrupt nod. “I heard about Jake Wheaton,” he said. “I’d like to be in on the interview.”
    “Mike and I will handle it.”
    “I’d like to be there,” he insisted.
    “We’ll see.” Charlie patted him on the back, deciding to set his questions aside for now. “Make the day count.”
    “Where’re you off to, Chief?”
    “To talk to a wind expert.”

9
    T HE WIND Function Facility was nestled in the subbasement of the Environmental Sciences Laboratory at Dryden Technical College in Montoya, Oklahoma. Charlie entered the bulldozer-yellow lobby and took a freight elevator down two flights, then wound his way through a series of gray-carpeted corridors toward the branching test sections—the tow tank facility, the missile launcher chamber, the wind tunnels. The air down here was chilly and dry, a strange hum emanating from the walls due to the building’s many generators.
    “Watch your step,” Rick Kripner said as they entered the wind-tunnel section together. In his early thirties, Rick had the kind of stiffened stride that suggested a disciplined upbringing and a terminally distracted look. Like most science geeks, he collected pens the way a dog attracts fleas. They’d met twice before, and each time, Rick had been exceedingly friendly and knowledgeable about tornado preparedness, but he wasn’t the person Charlie was there to see.
    “She won’t be long,” Rick said. “Ten minutes maybe. We’re doing a dry run-through.” He spoke softly as he patted his lab coat pockets, searching for something. “This way, Chief.”
    They navigated a narrow passageway lined with pipes and electrical cables toward the back of the facility, where a huge constructed metal wind tunnel stood on twenty-foot stilts beneath the sixty-foot ceiling. Charlie spotted at least two other tunnels inside the warehouse-sized facility—the place was enormous—before he followed Rick up a white-painted ladder and into a glass-enclosed control room.
    Rick took a seat behind the console and started fiddling with the control knobs. “Mind closing the door?”
    Charlie shut it, and the hum grew instantly muffled. He took a seat in one of the cold metal folding chairs and looked around. The wind tunnel had observation windows all along its side, and he could see Willa Bellman quite clearly now through the glass. She was standing in the test section, tinkering with a scaled-down replica of a high-rise building. She wore an extra-small white T-shirt beneath the obligatory lab coat, black ballet-type shoes and khaki trousers with short silver zippers over each pocket and horizontally down each cuff. Unusual. He liked her unusual taste.
    “Guess who’s here?” Rick said.
    “Be right with you,” Willa answered without looking up, and Charlie realized that the two-way intercom was on.
    “Take your time,” Charlie told her, his voice making a slap-back echo off the concrete.
    Lithe, pretty, in her early thirties with porcelain skin and curious blue eyes, Willa had a head of coiling black hair and a bone structure so well defined she reminded Charlie of some rare breed of cat. Six months ago, they’d spent an entire afternoon together inside the field laboratory, discussing