The Weatherman Read online

  Rick Beanblossom stepped into the elevator. “Hey, Weatherman, looking pretty nasty out there.”

  Dixon Bell shook off the fear and filed the premonition. “Hell of a storm coming. We’ll lead with it.” A cold pause. “If I ever get up there.”

  “No,” Rick warned him, dampening his spirits. “We’ll lead with the murder.”

  They rose through the air together on this hot and sticky June day, news and weather on their way to work. Two veterans of Southeast Asia: one Marine grunt with the Navy Cross but no face, and one Air Force officer with a scarred face but no medals.

  Congested cumulus clouds shadowed the tower now. The sickly yellow sun was still peeking through one southwest window. The wind was spitting mad. Fat raindrops attacked the blue-tinted glass. But in the newsroom it was crunch time, and few cared about the weather. Tempers were shot—especially the temper of the five o’clock producer. Dixon Bell hustled through the newsroom and up to Chris Mack’s desk. “Chris, how y’all fixed for live shots?”

  Chris Mack looked up from his computer and checked the big round clock. The minute hand was inching toward the top of the hour. “We’ve got two today— one from the parking ramp and a traffic shot from the chopper.”

  “Great. I need one minute at the top. Gotta tell Bucky.”

  “About what? We have a murder.”

  “We’ve got weather.” Dixon Bell headed for the assignment desk.

  The burnout rate for news-show producers is about one every fourteen months. Studio light bulbs last longer. Part of the problem comes when they spend nine hours putting together a thirty-minute broadcast and a weatherman blows in literally at the last moment screaming he needs one minute at the top. Few stomachs can weather it. Chris Mack chased after Dixon Bell, show script in hand. “One minute? No way. You’re getting worse than sports. We have a murder.”

  “We have a severe storm.”

  If times like this gave producers heartburn, they gave Gayle Banks, the assignment editor, an adrenalin high. She was jokingly referred to as Gayle the Ghoul. Breaking news stoked her fires. The worse the news, the higher she got. “We’ve got severe weather? Where?”

  “On top our heads in about five minutes.”

  Gayle poked her head into the closet space behind her, the dispatcher’s shack. “Where’s the storm?”

  The producer was dumfounded. “There’s been no storm warning. We’re under a watch.” He looked out the window. “The sun is still shining. We’ll go to you after the murder. We put the new reporter on it. She’s nervous enough as it is.”

  “A third of all severe storms arrive undetected,” the Weatherman informed him. “Let’s not make this one of them. I’m going to issue a warning.”

  “You’re crazy, Dixon. Only the National Weather Service can issue a severe storm warning.”

  “I’m not waiting for those clowns.” He pointed his finger at Gayle. “Get on the radio and tell Bucky to get south of the Minnesota River and keep his nose to the southwest.”

  “C’mon, he’s covering the backup on 394.”

  “It’s for his own safety, damnit.”

  “It’s a little more than a traffic shot,” Chris Mack protested. “We’ve got a whole piece tracked on traffic problems out there. It’s great. Andrea voiced it.”

  The sprawling newsroom was split-level. On the larger, lower level, where they were arguing on the run, was the news-gathering operation. On the smaller, upper level were the news set and the control room. There the bright lights came up. “One minute,” the floor director shouted.

  “Give me thirty seconds at the top.” Dixon Bell leaped up the stairs and bounded across the set. Weather Center 7 was buried behind it.

  The producer shouted after him. “No seconds at the top!” He turned to Gayle, squeezing his brow. “This is crazy.”

  “He hasn’t been wrong yet,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah, but a warning?” Chris Mack looked around. “Where’s our holierthan-thou news director?”

  “His asthma,” Gayle said. “He went home wheezing up a storm.”

  “Thirty,” the floor manager shouted.

  Chris Mack shook his head. “Okay, let’s do this. Murder at the top, then right to weather. But he’d better not issue a warning or there’ll be a shitload of trouble.”

  “Base to Skyhawk 7.”The producer’s final orders produced lightning in one of the best news junkies in the business. For Gayle Banks, the rush to get information on the air was another kind of rush as well. As Chris Mack raced to the set to brief his anchors, Gayle began barking into the microphone, ordering pilot Bob Buckridge and Skyhawk 7 into a new position. She shouted into the dispatcher’s office, “Any storm damage, I want locations right away.”

  The dispatcher scanned the radio chatter. “What storm?”

  Gayle whirled around and screamed as politely as she could at photographer Dave Cadieux, “You take a camera up to the roof and don’t come down until you’ve got tape of Dorothy’s house disappearing over the rainbow.”Then she was back on the mike. “Okay, we’ve got a big change here and it’s tricky—back-to-back live shots on the same horn in section one. Minivan three, we’re going to open with you at the parking ramp. Then we roll tape of the dead babe, plus your beam to edit one. As soon as Beth throws it back to the studio, you power down. Bucky, as soon as that happens, you power up. We need at least fifteen seconds in between. We’ll use that to intro Dixon and the weather. Then we toss it to Skyhawk looking for clouds—big, ugly clouds. Then, Bucky, you might have to fly your ass back to 394 for section three. All photogs on the air, stand by to chase weather.”

  “Ten-four,” came the crackled answers.

  Gayle pushed the microphone away and turned to her interns, whose mouths were open in awe. A big smile crossed her face. “God, I love this shit!” The rain was stop-and-start now, coming in bursts. Bob Buckridge, the pilot they called Bucky, flicked his cigarette out the door over the western suburbs. He watched the white butt twirl through the dirty showers, through poisonous smog, and into the traffic jam on Interstate 394. This new billion-dollar freeway was no more efficient in rush hour than a dirt road.

  Buckridge was used to being jerked around. This was television. So he wasn’t surprised when they ordered him south of the river at the last minute. But he was concerned. The idea came from weather. It wouldn’t be the first time Dixon Bell had outguessed the National Weather Service. “Sometimes that guy gives me the creeps.”

  “You don’t like Weatherman Bell?” Kitt asked.

  “I love the guy, but sometimes . . . He’s from the South, you know.”

  No place is hotter on a hot day than inside an airborne helicopter. They flew with the doors off. The rain splashing in felt good. Their headsets were on so the thunder was only a rumble in their stomachs. Buckridge was undeterred by the weather. He tuned in ATIS—Airport Terminal Information Service—and listened to the latest reports. Still only a watch; no warnings. Visibility was good in three directions, and home was to the east, the small downtown airport on the Mississippi River in St. Paul. Thunderstorms were localized. He was confident he could outmaneuver any weather. Besides that, Clancy Communications was not cheap. The station had purchased a five-place-interior JetRanger III, one of the safest single-engine aircraft made. Skyhawk 7 was painted boldly on the side in red, white, and blue. As he flew over stalled traffic on the ground, he knew he was ten times safer up in the air.

  “Bell say he in Saigon when it fall.”

  “So he says. Air Force Intelligence. I can imagine what those creeps were up to.”

  Seated to Bucky’s left was his friend in war and peace, Kitt Karson. Vietnamese soldiers assigned to American units were all called Kit Carson. Kitt had been Bucky’s door gunner, one of the few Vietnamese trusted enough to serve on a Huey. “I follow you anywhere, Bucky. Let’s fly.” And fly they did, from Qui Nhon to Pleiku, from the Mekong Delta to north of Da Nang. In war Buckridge was good. Cocky good. A hot dog. “I don�
��t go down.” Through two tours of duty and two thousand missions they flew the slicks that brought the grunts to the enemy. When the call came, they returned to the landing zone, often under enemy fire, and lifted out the survivors, the wounded, and the dead. And though their ship took its share of hits, they never went down. “Beanblossom doesn’t like the weatherman, does he?”

  “Beanblossom doesn’t like anybody.”

  “Oh, no, he likes me.”

  “How much do you think he’d like you if you stopped feeding him stories on the Vietnamese community? Or if you lost contact with your friends in the old country? You’re just another source to him.”

  When Saigon fell, Kitt made his way through the jungle to a Thai refugee camp. Finally safe from the Viet Cong, but not from the neighboring country that didn’t want him, he wrote to his old friend Bucky, now five years back in the States, and asked for help. Bob Buckridge flew to Thailand and fought red tape with more passion than he ever had shown fighting the North Vietnamese army. Using TV news as a weapon, he threatened bone-headed bureaucrats and befriended publicity-seeking politicians. This war he won. He brought his door gunner back to Minnesota and armed him with Sony’s latest Special Lens. Now it was only camera angles they shot, and their only rescue attempts were steering overheated commuters off overcrowded freeways.

  Buckridge swung Skyhawk 7over the southern suburbs of Edina, Eden Prairie, and Bloomington, staying seven hundred feet above the ground. The beauty of the connecting lakes and the layout of sylvan parks slid by beneath him. He crossed the Minnesota River, then circled back and tipped his nose to the turbulent southwest. It had been a long time since he had seen such a haunting sky. The pilot set his microwave antenna for the live shot. Raindrops exploded on the Plexiglas skewing the freeway scars and housing tracts below. “When I was a kid,” he told Kitt, “that was all woodland down there. It was beautiful then. Developers—they’re worse than napalm.”

  “But you live down there.”

  “Load up.”

  Kitt hung up his headset and checked the cables. He tuned in the monitor in front of him. He mounted the camera on his shoulder and pointed it out the door at the ugliest cloud he could find.

  The eerie green sky was narrowing—mean, swirling cells growing thicker every second. The rain turned heavy again. Hail ticked off the Plexiglas.

  The show began. Bob Buckridge could hear the schlocky music, then the chitchat of the newscast in his ears. He was hot, and wet, and bored. He lit another cigarette and looked over at the face of Andrea Labore, now flickering on the monitor: an angel’s face in a hellish sky. He blew smoke at her. “Throw it to me, you bimbo, so we can get the hell out of here.”

  Meteorologist Dixon Bell angrily fastened the battery pack to his belt, clipped the microphone to his lapel, and plugged in the earpiece. He threw on his coat, straightened his tie, and shot a dirty scowl over at the control room where producer Chris Mack was sitting. He stepped up to the weather podium, a big 7 pasted to the front. It was just a few feet from the anchor desk, and precious few feet from Andrea Labore. Even a storm couldn’t wash her from his mind. She was the most attractive woman he had ever known. He watched her take her place next to anchorman Ron Shea. In an awkward but necessary move she stuck her hand far down her blouse, exposing her bra strap. She pulled the little microphone through and clipped it above her breasts. She straightened her blouse and brushed back her hair. She smiled over at the Weatherman, a nervous smile. The floor director cued the talent. They were on the air.

  In the beginning one man could sit at a desk and read the news, the weather, and the sports. But in today’s high-tech world of rapid-fire television it took three or four people of mixed gender just to tell one story. Video Ping-Pong.

  When the music faded away and the red light came on, Ron Shea stared into the camera and read the headline. “Today the FBI released its national crime survey. It showed the number of Americans victimized by a violent crime rose last year . . . up three percent from the previous year.”

  Next, Andrea Labore read a line. “While those statistics say the Twin Cities is still among the safest urban areas in the United States . . . they also say violent crime is up here . . . especially homicide.”

  Then Ron Shea got to the point before going to the live shot. “That dire warning came too late for a thirty-two-year-old Minneapolis woman. Her body was discovered this morning in a parking ramp just a few feet from this very newsroom. Police believe she was strangled after leaving work yesterday. The newest member of our staff, Beth Knutson, is live at the murder scene. Beth?”

  They were clear. Dixon Bell noted the bad weather on the monitor. He had three minutes. He turned back to the weather center.

  Throughout the remodeling that took place after Clancy Communications bought the station, the weather department had begged for a southwest window. But the promotion department wanted the weather center visible from the set, so weather ended up on the opposite side of the newsroom with a window looking northeast, worthless for spotting oncoming storms. Still, Dixon Bell made sure what viewers saw on the set was not all facade. He laid out computers, radar screens, and a digital weather station so he could work while the anchors blabbed away. Though it was highly functional, it did get encased in glossy, painted plywood and mood lighting, yellow-orange, the hue of fire.

  The Weatherman checked the digital weather station. The temperature had dropped six degrees. The barometric pressure was 29.55 inches and falling. The wind was gusting up to forty miles per hour.

  Dixon Bell was disgusted. With the millions of dollars TV stations spend on weather equipment, you would think they and the National Weather Service would generously share information and happily coordinate their efforts. Doesn’t happen. The Weatherman picked up the phone, pushed the memory button, and the battle was on. “It’s on Doppler,” he scolded through clenched teeth. “It’s coming off the computers. And it’s on your instruments. You’re just not reading them right.”

  “Don’t pull that crap on me again, Bell,” came the bitter voice on the other end. “We’re in a watch. I’m watching the same thing you’re watching. The radar doesn’t indicate any kind of rotation, hook echo, or comma-shaped signal on the edge of the cloud. Nor have we had one single call about damaging winds. All we need is one spotter to call us.”

  “I’m calling you.”

  “Do you see a severe storm?”

  “Yes! In my mind a see one hell of a storm!”

  “In your mind? Oh, that’s wonderful. Let me tell you something, Bell. We don’t appreciate one bit your going on TV and contradicting our forecasts day in and day out. As for warnings, I’m going to warn you . . .”

  That’s when he heard it, or thought he did. It was an electronic hum coming from the monitors—a frequency so low it was barely discernible. Dixon Bell gently hung up the phone. He looked into the studio. Nobody noticed anything wrong.

  The Weatherman checked his barometer. Pressure was dropping dramatically—29.51, 29.48, 29.45. The temperature was down two more degrees. He stuck his face in the radar screen. Still nothing.

  The Weatherman reached behind his monitor and yanked out the cable. He punched up Channel 13 and darkened the screen to black. Then he punched in Channel 2. It was flashing brightly, on and off. Lightning strikes nearby. Then it happened. The screen glowed bright white and stayed that way. Dixon Bell was out of his chair in a flash.

  News was rolling tape. One of the murder victim’s co-workers was telling the reporter what a saint she had been. “She was the most caring person that you could imagine, always trying to make the world a better place for women. It’s inhuman that she would be victimized like this.”

  The Weatherman ducked behind the camera operators, leaped down the stairs, and shot across the newsroom to the southwest window. The sky had blackened and a rain-free cloud base was showing its face—a scarred, tormented face with a tail cloud extending off to the north. Classic tornado storm structure. Then tripleflash li
ghtning bolts set fire to the sky and Dixon Bell’s attention was drawn to the parking ramp roof, and for a split second he saw the spot where a woman had been murdered. Then it was dark again and thundering.

  Reporter Beth Knutson signed off and threw it back to Ron Shea.

  Shea thanked the new reporter for having braved the weather and welcomed her to Minnesota. He tossed it to Andrea.

  Andrea read a line about the record homicide rate and threw it back to Shea.

  “We’re going to have more on this very unusual murder a bit later in the broadcast, but now I understand we have some severe weather breaking out there. For that we’re going to turn to Weather Center 7 and meteorologist Dixon Bell. Dixon?”

  The Weatherman was back on the set, thundering with certitude. “Ron, this is tornado season, and that’s what we’re talking about here—a tornado. The skies above us right now are screaming it, and the time to seek shelter is now, not later. Let’s quick go over the rules.”