Chapter 15 - The Fleet Arrives
Clara was still monologuing to her twenty thousand live viewers when the low, rumbling vibration began. It wasn't thunder. It was the deep, hydraulic growl of six forty-foot city transit buses turning the corner of Maple Street in tight military formation.
The lead bus, a heavy-duty maintenance and towing rig, pulled directly up to the curb, blocking Clara’s white Mercedes coupe against my hedge. The doors hissed open with a loud burst of compressed air.
Out stepped Frank Kowalski—sixty-two years old, built like a brick warehouse, wearing his high-vis union windbreaker with the brass transit pin gleaming on his lapel. Behind him stepped twelve retired and active bus drivers, mechanics, and line inspectors. Every single one of them had worked with David.
Clara spun around, her camera wobbling as she captured the wall of men in uniform descending onto the sidewalk.
*"What is this?"* Clara squeaked on the live stream, stepping backward into my rose bushes. *"Excuse me, this is private property! You’re obstructing a legal court appraiser!"*
Frank didn't look at her phone. He pulled a yellow union clipboard from under his arm and stepped directly into her camera frame, filling the screen with his weathered, mustache-framed face.
"City of Maplewood Public Utility Right-of-Way Ordinance Section 14," Frank announced in a voice that didn't need a microphone. "We’re conducting an emergency subterranean structural inspection of the transit corridor easement running under this property. All unauthorized civilian vehicles are parked illegally in an active work zone."
"You can't do this!" Clara shrieked, dropping her phone slightly as the appraiser she had brought scrambled back toward his car. "My father is Richard Montgomery!"
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"Yeah, we know Richard," Frank said, leaning down so his face was dead-center in her live broadcast. "Tell your daddy that Local 589 has been waiting twenty-five years to talk to him about the rebar density under the downtown junction. And tell him that Eleanor Vance isn't paying for your caviar tastes with David’s blood money."
The live stream suddenly froze. Clara had cut the feed, her hands shaking so violently she dropped her French-manicured phone onto the damp sod.
