The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(29)
It was a school. “Oh f*ck,” he said.
“Daddy! You owe me a dollar!”
“Sorry Annie. I’ll get you later, okay?” The street was choked with ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks, and in his rearview mirror he saw something that looked like it might be a SWAT truck rolling after him. The building was old and faced with brick, and he saw that the sign out front read BILL HENDERSON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. He wanted to laugh. Henderson’s plane had evidently crashed on the property of the elementary school named after him, but the sight of two or three hundred children milling around on the front lawn stopped him from finding it funny. “Fuck.”
“Daddy!”
“Right. Sorry. It’s just. Okay.” He tried calling Fanny again, but once again, it went to voice mail. He pulled the car to the side of the street, angling it in next to a police cruiser, and then just sat there for a moment considering his options.
“Daddy?”
He sighed. He didn’t really have any options. He’d never even seen the director of the agency before, except on TV when he was going through congressional hearings. If Mike f*cked this up, he was going to find himself transferred out of Minnesota and working the ass end of the worst posting in America, wherever that was. He looked back at Annie and saw she was staring at him, waiting for an answer. “It’s my boss,” he said, though he didn’t really think he could explain to her. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t leave Annie in the car, but if he didn’t get out of the car—he couldn’t ignore a direct order from the director of the agency—he wouldn’t be living near Annie anymore anyway. “Okay. Okay. Okay. Let’s do it,” he said. “How do you feel about helping me out today, sweetheart?”
Annie shrugged, but she got out of the car when he did. She tagged along as he walked past the spectators and the gathering camera crews, kept with him as he held out his badge and ducked under the yellow tape that had already gone up. He turned the corner of the building and stopped with a sudden surge of relief. “Thank. Fucking. God.”
“That’s three dollars now, Daddy.”
He glanced at Annie and then looked back at the field behind the school. The building was untouched, but there was a deep gouge in the dirt on the soccer field behind the school, starting from one goal and reaching almost all the way to the other, where the thick beam of smoke spiraled from a bundled mess of metal. There was a crew of firefighters hosing down a small section that was still burning and seemed to be giving off the majority of the smoke flooding the sky, but two other trucks already seemed to be packing up, and the ambulance crews, as far as Mike could tell, were just standing around. If there had been children playing on the field when the plane hit, it would still have been a circus of fevered activity.
A uniformed policewoman walked past them. Mike stopped her. “No kids?” he asked.
“Nah,” the woman said. “I guess they’d just gone inside for lunch or something. According to one of the teachers, they missed being out there by about three minutes. The people on the plane weren’t so lucky. Not much to do but hose it down and clean it up.” She looked down at Annie and gave a little smile. “What’s up with the munchkin?”
“She had a fever last night, so no school for her. I was going to take the day off and make it a daddy day,” Mike said. “You know how it is, though. Sometimes you don’t have a choice about working. Tried calling the ex-wife, but . . .” He stared at the cop.
She figured it out. “Nope. Sorry, man. I’m on the clock, and I can’t play babysitter, especially for a suit.”
Mike shrugged. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“Actually, it’s some kind of sexist bullshit.” She glanced at Annie again. “Sorry about that honey.”
Annie shrugged. “Daddy swears a lot.”
“Not that much, honey.”
“You said the F word three times already.”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Sorry.” He looked back at the cop. “And you’re right. I probably wouldn’t have asked a man. Not cool.”
“I don’t like it, but I get it,” the cop said. “Good luck with it all. You might not want to take her too close to the scene. It’s, uh, it’s maybe not age appropriate.”
“Grisly?”
“Half the plane disintegrated, and what’s left has been worked over by the fire.” She started to walk away but then stopped and touched Mike’s arm. “Try one of the ambulance crews. Look for a short, thick blond woman. Tell her Melissa asked if she could lend you a hand. At least until your ex-wife shows up.”
Mike nodded and made a beeline to the ambulances, Annie’s hand in his. It turned out that the thick blond woman was the only female among the EMTs. Mike went through his song and dance about Annie having to stay home from school because she’d had a fever the night before and how he had to work unexpectedly, but he might as well not have bothered: at the mention of the policewoman’s name, the EMT lit up with a smile and beckoned Annie to come sit in the ambulance. “I’ve got a daughter about her age,” she said. “We’ll hang out. You cool if I give her a little bit of candy?”
Mike would have been cool with a whole bunch of candy if it meant he didn’t have to take his daughter into the wreckage. He texted Fanny to tell her that Annie was hanging with the EMTs and added the address again in case she missed it on the earlier voice mail. By the time he was ten steps away from the ambulance Annie had gum in her mouth and was playing a video game on the woman’s phone and lounging on a gurney as if it were a couch.