Whirlwind

“We have confirmation that tornadoes are cutting across the metropolitan area. We have casualties and destruction.” Laneer glanced at his notebook. “We’ve got people going to Arlington, Grand Prairie and Lancaster.”

Laneer pointed his glasses at Kate.

“I want you to get to Wildhorse Heights, to the Old Southern Glory Flea Market, south of LBJ and Hawn. It got hit. New York wants everything we’ve got and they want it fast, people. Stand down from all other assignments. There is only one story today. Let’s get on it.”

4

Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas

Kate took the elevator down to the building’s parking garage.

She hurried to her car, a 2007 Chevy Cobalt that started with a rattle, reminding her that she had to get it to the shop one of these days. She reset her mileage counter then keyed the flea market address into the GPS on her dash.

Newslead’s bureau was in Bryan Tower. The flea market was about twelve miles southeast.

She switched on her hands-free speakerphone and wheeled out of the garage. Her wipers swept at the rain as Chuck’s orders echoed in her head.

“Get us the facts, the heartbreak and the heroes.”

Kate got onto the expressway with her stomach tightening, as it always did whenever she’d rushed off to a breaking story. No matter how many tragedies or disasters she’d covered, Kate never got used to it.

No reporter did.

You never knew what you were heading into. But it was up to you to pull a story out of the chaos, to make sense of whatever was unfolding and to do it as a clock ticked down on you. And if that wasn’t enough pressure, Kate knew that she and her two competitors would be judged by their performance on this story.

The prize was a full-time job.

She adjusted her grip on the wheel as she worked through traffic.

I’ll do whatever it takes, she vowed to her daughter’s snapshot on the visor as the radio news broadcasted tornado updates, confirming: “A large number of fatalities,” shifting Kate’s thoughts to the victims and their families. She did not want to land a story, or a job, at the expense of someone else’s pain.

I didn’t mean it that way. Forgive me.

She glanced at the few sparkles Grace had shed from her homemade card onto the passenger seat when she’d taken her to her friend Courtney’s birthday party, a few days before she’d left for Texas.

It was nearly two weeks ago but it seemed like a year.

In her rearview mirror Kate saw Dallas’s skyline, the Bank of America Plaza, the Renaissance and Comerica towers and the Fountain Place prism, all blurring in her rain-streaked rear window.

Would Dallas be her new home?

As the wet road rushed under her car, she considered her life and where she was headed with it. She was a twenty-nine-year-old single mother with a six-year-old daughter. From the beginning, Kate and Grace had been on their own. Grace’s father had never been in the picture. Kate had been a loner most of her life. Her mother and father died in a hotel fire when she was seven years old. After the tragedy, Kate and her little sister, Vanessa, lived with relatives then bounced through foster homes. Two years after her parents’ deaths, she lost Vanessa in a car accident.

Kate’s radio beeped.

“We have confirmation that powerful tornadoes have touched down in Lancaster and Wildhorse Heights. We have reports of fatalities and widespread devastation. This could be one of the worst storms ever....”

Kate took a deep breath and concentrated on her driving when her phone rang with a call from Chuck Laneer.

“Where are you now?”

“A little over halfway.”

“Do you see any pockets of damage?”

“No, nothing but black clouds and rain where I am.”

“We need to move on this.”

Kate passed a line of slower vehicles. As neighborhood after neighborhood rolled by she checked her GPS constantly. She was somewhere at the southern point of Kleberg when the squeak of wipers on the windshield signaled that the rain was letting up.

The sky was clearing.

The area was flat, nearly treeless, but it appeared undisturbed. She saw an aging roller-skating rink, an auto auction yard, an ice-cream stand—but no indication of damage.

None.

Fearing she’d missed a turnoff, she consulted her GPS again. Where was the flea market? It should be here.

Her phone rang. Chuck again.

“Kate, where are you...what’ve you got?”

“Nothing so far.”

“You should be—”

“Chuck, you’re breaking up!”

“—we’re hearing that the Saddle Up Center in the market got—”

When the call died, she tried calling Chuck back, but she’d lost the connection.

Traffic ahead was slowing into a stream of brake lights as troopers and sheriff’s deputies were merging two lanes of southbound traffic into one to keep a clear path for emergency vehicles. Kate got into the single slow lane, which soon crawled to a stop.

In the expressway’s grassy median she saw a large upside-down neon sign for Sanchez Restaurant—Fajita Special Today; she saw a partial splintered wooden structure that may have been a roof, then a crumpled van on its side. Cars had pulled over to aid the van’s passengers. Two solid lanes of traffic flowed in the opposite direction. Kate had to do a double take on several pickup trucks. They were loaded with bleeding people being tended to by others.

Oh, my God...

Then her rearview mirror flashed with wig-wagging emergency lights as she heard the siren of an ambulance, no, three ambulances, coming fast behind her in the emergency lane, followed by an SUV painted with the colorful logo of a radio news station.

Kate’s traffic line was inching along. She had to get to the scene.

She bit her bottom lip and made a decision.

When the radio news truck passed, she wheeled her car into the emergency lane and followed it. She traveled for about a quarter mile before reaching a roadblock at a U-turn. Several marked police cars were parked there. Officers were turning traffic around to the lanes moving northbound.

Sheriff’s deputies waived the ambulances and news truck through southbound, but a big trooper in a raincoat stepped in front of Kate’s car, pointed at her, commanding her to stop. Then he leaned into her window.