“I mean.” She shrugged. “Isn’t that how it is? The hero gets sidetracked with another quest before he can reach his goal?”
“I didn’t really have a goal tonight,” he said. “Just dinner and heading home. Do you play a lot of video games?”
“I wouldn’t say a lot. I play a few, several times over. I adore the Uncharted games.”
He snorted. “I saw that movie.”
She sniffed. “Don’t judge a game by a movie. The games are a lot more fun.”
“But those kinds of games, don’t they kind of lead you through? You make the choices for the characters, sure, but they still lead you to the same end. I don’t understand the appeal.”
She pulled her legs up on the seat and folded them in front of her. “That’s what I find kind of reassuring, actually. I can mess up, and as long as I fix my decision the next time, improve my skill, the character will have a better outcome.”
He nodded. “I guess that makes sense. Too bad life isn’t like that.”
“Tell me,” she said, heartfelt, sitting back.
“So I want to hear more about storm chasing.” He’d been thinking about it a lot since he left her in Tommy’s hands. “How many years have you been doing it? How often do you go out? What do you do the rest of the year?”
“Well, we try to get a tour out every week. Sometimes they’re three days, usually five. We have a much better chance of catching a tornado on a longer tour. We do that from April until June, but then the season is pretty much over, so I go back to work and my sister works at the storm center. But nothing compares to being on the road chasing storms. There’s nothing like it. Have you ever seen a tornado?”
He tensed despite himself. “No. Not really a fan of storms, to be honest.”
She nodded, without judgement. “I know a lot of people like that. To me, I love the wildness.”
“No do-overs when you make a mistake, though.”
“I’m more careful than you’d think, especially since I have so many people to worry about.”
“I’m sure you are,” he said. He hadn’t meant to imply otherwise. “How bad are these storms supposed to be tomorrow? They’re hitting in the afternoon?”
“Yes, our plan was to meet them closer to San Angelo as they come down from Colorado and hit the moist air coming up from the Gulf. I think the biggest threat to your town would be hail, but Hailey was concerned some of the town residents might not know it’s coming and might need an alert. What do you think?”
He inclined his head, squinting through the windshield. “I think the residents are a lot more aware of the weather than she thinks. But we might send a few patrols around to the outlying areas that don’t have the reception that other places might. I’ll keep it in mind for tomorrow.”
“She said something about the town having a flood siren.”
He grunted, not wanting to discuss the reason for that addition, too little too late. That, and the new graded road, the culvert that kept the water draining under the road instead of over it in case of another gully washer—all that was too little too late. “The sound carries, but not out to the farthest reaches. I’ll let dispatch know tonight, and they can set up an alert. Most people have phones, but like I said, we don’t have the greatest cell coverage.” Maybe a closer cell tower was the next thing the town needed to add to keep the residents safe in a storm.
“So where do you live?”
“A newer neighborhood on the outskirts of town, one of the neighborhoods they built when they thought the oil boom was going to come farther south. When it didn’t, well, I got the house for a good price.”
“That is always good. Broken Wheel is nicer than many of the towns we’ve been to.”
“Yeah, it’s been a group effort to improve the place, maybe get people to come here to visit, maybe to live. Sofia must have been over the moon when y’all pulled up needing rooms.”
“Who’s Sofia?”
“The woman who owns the motel. She’s a friend of mine, also.”
“I guess in a town this small, most people are friends?”
“Yeah, that’s mostly true. And we went to high school together.” Survived hell together, but he didn’t mention that.
“I guess, too, that people who stay in a town this small don’t have a lot of employment options, so they start their own business? Like Hailey?”
“Yeah, she came down with the same idea as they people who built my neighborhood. This area was going to be a part of the boom, and she was going to capitalize on it. That didn’t really pan out for her, so we’ve been working to keep her in business. Another friend owns the diner—inherited it, really, when the original owner retired. And two more friends are renovating the spaces over the shops on the squares for apartments….good point. I guess I never thought about it that way. I’m the only one who went to work for an established employer.”
