Terror at the Fair

Chapter Forty

I walked the entire mile-long stretch of Deadwood Central track, then retraced my steps along the route in the opposite direction. I can’t say what I was looking for now that I had located the area where I thought any mischief might take place, but I felt maybe, just maybe, I might find some evidence along the way of the rails having been tampered with. I saw nothing amiss, however, and I went home to Oak Park, unsure of my plan for the next day. As it turned out, much of August fourth would be taken up by unexpected events.

Before I left home the next morning, I reached into the kitchen drawer when Catherine left the room and pulled out our one and only flashlight, slipping it into my suit coat pocket. As I rode into the city on the Lake Street Elevated, I noticed giant black clouds stacking up in the skies far to the south. These were darker than any rain clouds I had ever seen. I walked into the pressroom at the fair a few minutes before nine to hear my phone ringing. As usual, it was Hal Murray on the city desk.

“Snap, we’ve got a big one, a huge fire in the Standard Oil refinery down in Whiting. Whatever you’ve got working right now at the fair, postpone it, cancel it. We’re throwing a whole team into this. I’m looking to you to find human interest angles, the kind of stuff you do best.”

“Okay, I gotcha. What’s the plan?”

“Doherty’s getting ready to drive down there, and you’re right on his way. Hold on.”

He bellowed across the local room to Jim Doherty, a longtime general assignment reporter. “Hey, Malek’s going to ride down with you. Here, I’ll put him on the line so you two can work out the arrangements. Then I want you out the door and headed south before I blink twice, got it?”

“Okay, Snap,” Doherty said into the receiver, “you’ve had yourself a long enough vacation at the train fair. It’s time now for a real story. Where do I pick you up?”

I told him the main entrance, at 23rd Street, and he said he’d be there in ten minutes, fifteen tops. I called Catherine’s number at the Oak Park Library to let her know the score. She wasn’t at her desk, so I gave the message to a co-worker and went to the front entrance where, thirteen minutes later, Doherty’s rusty prewar gray Studebaker lurched to a stop, its brakes complaining loudly.

“Let’s burn some rubber,” he yelled as I hopped in and we screeched off, heading south on Lake Shore Drive and then city streets, destination: Whiting, Indiana, which lay just across the state line from Chicago’s East Side, as it is known to its residents.

The black smoke towering ahead of us obliterated the sky. “Christ, it looks like the end of the world,” Doherty said in awe. “I got no idea how close to this we’ll be able to get.”

“Jim, I’ve got a feeling we’re going to be told just how close we can get.”

“Yeah, and maybe even that’s closer than we want to be. This nightmare apparently started right around dawn, from what I’ve been told. Murray’s phone call roused me out of bed early. I wasn’t supposed to start today until noon.”

“I assume we’ve already got somebody there, right?”

“Thomis, and I think Gowran, too. And one or two photogs as well. Snap, it looks like this is going to be something that one day you can tell your grandchildren about.”