Thicker Than Blood

by Penny Rudolph

“Is it safe to come in?”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “The side pedestrian door was open. Put that gun away. I’ve seen what you can do with it.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess. You forgot we were going fishing.”

  333

  The lake seemed to pulse with the reds and yellows of the rising sun. A breeze filled the water with ripples, tossing Rachel’s hair back from her face, which was studious with concentration as she added one more weight to her fishing line.

  Her Honda was perched on the road above them like a white bird. They had left the Mustang in the garage when Hank had discovered its spare tire was flat.

  “You look like you’re examining the findings in a project that could win you a Nobel. No self-respecting trout is going to dive that far for his dinner.”

  “Who wants trout?” She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “Water’s too warm for good trout.”

  Hank’s line snagged on something just beneath the water. It whiplashed when he yanked it free, sending the hook sailing toward shore where it imbedded itself in the cuff of his pants. Reddening a little, he began the process again.

  Rachel took a chunk of cheese from her pocket, molded a wad of it to her hook, then sent her line gracefully snaking across the water until it slipped beneath the surface with hardly a sound beyond the purr of the reel.

  “This isn’t your first fishing trip,” Hank said.

  “Not exactly.” A lizard scurried across her foot and disappeared into the coarse grass.

  He gave her a quizzical grin. “Hey, this is a day of escape. Why so solemn?”

  “I really shouldn’t have come. Too much to do. And I’m getting careless. I could have sworn I locked that door last night.”

  Rachel picked her way across a dozen feet of scrubby plants and sat down on a rock thinking she wasn’t organized enough to make time for this sort of thing, she didn’t need it, and she’d rather be at the laundromat so at least she’d have clean clothes for the week ahead.

  Hank was surveying the lake, which lay like a glowing gem beneath the luminous sky. “Isn’t this gorgeous?” he called.

  She held up a hand to block the sun. “You come here often?”

  “Not lately. Too busy.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “The reservoir? Coyote.” He traipsed through the scrub and sat on the rock next to hers.

  “Busy doing what?” she asked.

  “Figuring out how to squeeze a little more water out of thin air.”

  She watched a fish break the surface, snatch an insect and disappear, leaving a ring of ripples. “Why do we need more water?”

  “Guess you weren’t here fifteen, sixteen years ago.”

  “Nope.”

  “Real serious drought. Landscapers went broke. Santa Barbara had ships in the harbor desalinating water. San Diego was panicky. Half of what InterUrban does is guard against drought, find more water before someone else snaps it up.”

  An insect buzzed at Rachel’s ear. She swatted it away. “Like who would grab it?”

  “Environmentalists, for one. They want to turn half the state into wetlands. We’d have real happy birds, but the people wouldn’t fare too well.”

  “And other cities?”

  “San Francisco gets all holier than thou about their rivers, and ecology, and Nature. But a hundred years ago they dammed up a valley in the Sierra. If they hadn’t, there wouldn’t be any San Francisco. Nobody talks about that.”

  Rachel’s line jiggled. She stood, peering at it intently, but it had gone still. She sat down again. “So who’s the bad guy?”

  “No one, I guess. Just not enough water.”

  A large bird dropped onto the water, sending ripples radiating in every direction. Rachel thought it was a heron.

  “Farmers get their water cheap because the Feds wanted to jump-start agriculture in the thirties,” Hank said. “If ag water dried up now, the farmers would be looking at instant bankruptcy. Mostly they’re on our side because we’ve got the population, meaning the votes.”

  She gave him a crooked grin. “I grew up on a farm in the delta. All we worried about was too much water taking out the levees.”

  Hank watched her lean back on the rock and raise her face to the sun. “So you’re a farm kid?”

  She caught his glance. “I don’t get much sun. The garage is pretty dark. Yes, a farm kid.”

  “Then you must know about the snarls in the delta.”

  “Not a lot. Farmers don’t talk business to kids.”

  Hank scratched his nose. “Nasty stuff brewing up there. The delta’s a mess. Terrible water quality for one, an earthquake could turn the whole thing to jelly, for another. And most of the water for us beggars in the bottom third of the state—where most of the population lives, I might point out—comes through the delta.”

  She closed her eyes. The sun felt warm on her eyelids. “Guess I knew that. Just never bothered to string it all together.”

  “More political intrigue over water than anything else you could name. Eighty percent of people in the state never think about it. For the other twenty percent, it’s like a religion. Fire, brimstone, the works.”

  A fish flipped out of the water and splashed back in.

  Rachel said, “I’ve missed that sound, fish plunking around in water.”

  “When did you leave the farm?”

  “Oh, years ago.”

  “Family still there?”

  “Nope.” She sat up, unable to be still for too long.

  “Miss it?”

  A frown skipped across her face. “Like childhood, I guess. You miss the smallness of that world.”

  Something about her posture warned him not to ask more.

  A dog began to bark—a big dog, from its sound. Rachel’s gaze swung toward the sound. In the distance, a big flat-roofed building crouched against an equally flat mesa. The sun exploded off the roof in little bursts that hurt the eyes. She gave a self-conscious sigh. “I never knew the water business was so complicated.”

  Hank moved his eyes to the water, folded his arms over his knees and rested his chin on his hand. “That’s exactly why I love it. Ask Charlotte, sometime. Her father was a power behind building that aqueduct.” He poked his chin toward a broad concrete ditch that seemed to run clear to the eastern horizon. “I’ve heard he knew both Roosevelts and was in on some sort of skullduggery.”

  “Skullduggery?”

  “Hardly a day goes by that someone isn’t hatching another plot about water, and I don’t know about half of them.” Hank shuffled a foot clad in a scuffed rubber lace-up boot against the dry earth.

  The heron, if that’s what it was, rose, splashed clumsily on long legs for a few feet across the water, and took off.

  “What do you know about Charlotte Emerson?” Rachel asked. “Interesting that a woman chairs a utility where most everybody else who’s anybody is a good ol’ boy.”

  Hank glanced at her.

  “Present company excluded, of course. But I know who drives those cars in the fleet.”

  “In this business, water may be at least as thick as blood,” Hank said. “But blood matters. Don’t ask me why, but it does.”

  Rachel gave a wry smile. “Come to think of it, with good old boys it usually does.” An insect buzzed at her cheek. She slapped at it. “Charlotte’s family was in the water business?”

  “I guess you could say the Emersons are the Kennedys of the California water industry. Big thinkers, big plans. Big roles in state politics, especially when it came to water.” Hank dug around in the red canvas shopping bag he had packed, took out a thermos, poured some lemonade into a paper cup, and held it out. Rachel had to move to his side to take the cup.

  “Came?” she asked, settling back on her rock.

  Hank looked puzzled.

  “You said came. Past tense.”

  “Most of them died pretty youn
g. Her father was killed in the wreck of a private plane. Her husband drowned while rafting on the American River. About a dozen years ago, her son was shot while hunting.”

  “Good God! So she was the only one left to carry out their plans.”

  “Not exactly. Charlotte never much subscribed to their plans. But she wasn’t above using the Emerson name.”

  “How does her thinking differ?”

  “She seems to think this urban sprawl will suck us into a black hole if something isn’t done to curb it.”

  “The men thought urban sprawl was good?”

  “Well, it wasn’t as bad then,” Hank said. “And you can’t exactly say that business and development and a good economy are terrible.”

  Despite the sun that blunted the desert’s features as it heated the rock where she sat, Rachel wrapped her arms around herself.

  Hank walked over, put the back of his hand against her arm. “You cold?”

  “Of course not.”

  His finger lightly traced a line down her arm.

  She drew away and gave him a long look. “You aren’t going to go squishy on me, are you?”

  “Squishy?”

  “You know, waking up in the middle of the night. Cold showers. I don’t want that.” She hugged her arms to her chest. “I don’t need it.”

  His eyes narrowed a little, seeming to appraise her statement, but not answering it.

  “Look,” she said, “I don’t mean to be crass or anything, but I’ve run through enough men to know the romance thing ain’t for me.” She rummaged through the canvas bag, withdrew two sandwiches, and tossed one to Hank.

  He caught it and shrugged. “My word on it. No squish.”

  Sitting in sun so bright it hurt her eyes, eating a limp sandwich that didn’t taste that great, Rachel had a powerful urge to leave and wished she weren’t stuck here with no polite exit. The silence began to sink under its own weight.

  She cast about for something meaningless to say. “Did you like Jason?”

  Hank stared at her a moment. “Can’t say I liked him,” he said finally. “But things have been ragged without him. There was an air of absolute certainty about Jason. Like even God wouldn’t argue with him.”

  “But God did.” And God had won. She took another bite of sandwich. She wasn’t sure why she blurted the question, “You think his death was accidental?”

  The sandwich paused halfway to Hank’s mouth. “That’s what they say.”

  “Suppose I told you I found something that.…” She was looking past him toward the pond. “Your bobber went under!”

  Hank turned and charged toward the rock where he had propped his fishing pole.

  Rachel could hear the reel unwinding. She watched him grab up the rod and her mind fixed on whether to tell him about the tie tack.

  She didn’t notice the noise until it seemed to explode around her, bearing down on her like a runaway truck. She spun around, but nothing moved among the scraggly shrubs and rocks; then she saw it. And the noise stopped abruptly, as if her eyes had silenced it.

  The small plane was very low. For a moment it seemed to aim straight at Rachel.

  Hurling herself into a patch of coarse brown grass, she hunched against a rock and shaded her eyes to peer at it.

  The plane, wiped clean of most of its markings by the direct sun, crossed over the road on a long downward diagonal. It tilted, then seemed to right itself and rise a little before it disappeared behind a scattering of boulders.

  A sharp crack was followed by a second crunch, like an axe through metal. Then nothing.

  “The pilot!” Rachel sprinted across the empty road toward the rocks. She skirted a Joshua tree and topped a rise.

  Just the other side of a steep, brush-filled arroyo, the plane lay like a dead bird, its mouth open to the sky. She jumped to the bottom of the cleft, clambered across, and dug her toes into the clay walls to climb the other side.

  The plane’s bubble-type canopy had been thrown back as though some giant child had been playing with it. One of the broad wings—surely too big for the relatively small body—had bent, forming a knee on which the rest of the plane leaned in sideways supplication.

  Where was the pilot? Was he hurt? Had he jumped? Been thrown free?

  A sudden gust of hot wind pushed Rachel toward this flotsam that had fallen from the sky. Her foot landed on a protruding stone and she teetered, ignoring the pain that shot to her knee. No smoke. No sign of fire. The air was eerily still. No birds, no insects, no sound at all.

  She grasped one of the rungs welded to the body near the crippled wing and pulled herself up. The cockpit was empty. Where’s the pilot?

  Hank emerged from the arroyo shouting, “Is he hurt?”

  “Not here,” she called.

  None of the nearby rocks or brush were tall enough to conceal a body.

  Hank pulled himself up on the wing. “Must’ve been thrown clear,” he grunted.

  Rachel’s eyes skimmed over the desert to the road, but nothing between the plane and the glassy glare of the pond moved.

  “Hello!” Hank shouted. “Pilot?”

  “Maybe he was thrown behind the seat.” Rachel scrambled into the cockpit.

  Something icy trilled its way up her right arm. The cargo that had slewed into a jumble. Dark brown shards of broken glass were strewn everywhere. And there was no mistaking what had spewed from some of the garishly colored broken cartons.

  “Not likely to be a shipment of cornstarch headed for a bake-off,” Rachel muttered.

  Nor were the bricks that had tumbled out of red, yellow, and black boxes labeled Double UO Global likely to be building material.

  “Jesus,” Hank whistled softly behind her. “What a pay-load.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  A small carton with no markings had rolled toward the cockpit, spilling tiny white crystals through a triangular puncture. Rachel picked it up, screwed her sun-dazzled eyes shut, then opened them again to stare at the box.

  Hank said, “Looks like sugar.”

  “Right.” Rachel lifted her eyes to Hank’s. “And the pilot’s Mother Teresa. No wonder he didn’t stick around.”

  “And we’re tramping around like ducks in hobnail boots begging to be shot,” Hank said. “Get out of there.”

  The carton in her hand forgotten for the moment, Rachel backed hastily out of the cockpit.

  In almost perfect unison, she and Hank leaped to the ground, stirring a jackrabbit that broke cover and raced with them toward the arroyo.

  They scrambled down one wall and up the other, still running, the soft sand sucking at their feet until, air harsh with heat drying their lips and whipping their lungs, they reached harder earth near the road. A few yards away their fishing poles still rested undisturbed where they had left them. In the distance, the dog was still barking.

  Hank ran toward the poles.

  “What if he’s watching us?” Rachel’s words tumbled out so fast they slurred together. “Leave the rods. Let’s get out of here.”

  Picnic leftovers spilled from the canvas bag as Hank yanked it up and in unison they ran toward the white Honda, which huddled forlorn and unprotected a quarter-mile away.

  She dug the keys from her jeans pocket and jammed one into the trunk lock.

  Hank stowed their gear and started to close it.

  “Wait.” She dropped the carton inside and slammed the lid shut.

  With a spray of gravel, the little Honda squealed into action. Rachel whipped the car around to double back toward the hard road and didn’t let up on the gas till a spine-jarring jolt nearly sent both their heads through the roof and three thumps came from the trunk.

  She glanced at Hank. “First time I’ve wished I had a cell phone.”

  “Left mine at home. Peace and quiet and all that.”

  “So where’s the nearest public phone?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest.” His face was the color of putty. “You often drive like this?”

 
“Only when I have to.” Rachel down-shifted as the road turned to caked dirt and passed through an arroyo, then sped up again. “That plane was chock-jam full. We need to call the sheriff,” she said over the engine roar.

  “Might be nice to be alive when we find a phone.”

  “Funny they use such gaudy boxes,” Rachel said. “Red and yellow, with black cats yet.”

  “I guess they figure no one will look for contraband in such a blatant package.”

  The road widened and met the main highway. Rachel sped right. A small sign said Wilson’s Summit, a large one said Texaco. The gas station was white stucco gone dull with dust.

  An attendant stood in the doorway watching. Hank opened his window and shouted, “Phone?”

  Eyes between the shaved head and dust-colored coveralls glared. The man’s face was sunburned the color of ripe tangerines above a neck as thick as a bulldog’s. He jerked his chin toward the other side of the building, then winced. The sunburn must have hurt.

  Rachel bolted from the car, ran to the booth at the side of the building, and dialed 9-1-1, but the number didn’t ring. She dug a solitary quarter from a nest of pennies in her coin purse, dialed 0, and the operator patched her through to the local sheriff’s office. “I need to report a plane crash,” she told the deputy who answered.

  “Mmmm?” The voice on the other end sounded sleepy.

  “Can you take the report?”

  “Mmmm.”

  She described the downed plane, the spilled boxes, but not the contents. They could find that out for themselves. “We looked for the pilot, but never found him.”

  The voice, more awake now, wanted to know, “Where, exactly, did this happen?”

  “Across the road from a reservoir.…Hang on a minute.” She slid open the door of the phone booth and called to Hank, “What’s the name of that lake?”

  “Coyote Reservoir.”

  She repeated the words into the phone.

  “That all?” The deputy sounded like he was losing interest.

  “Guess so.”

  “Name?”

  She told him, spelling it out.

  “We’ll look into it,” the deputy drawled as though desert plane crashes were reported six times a day.

  “That was comforting,” Rachel muttered as she hung up the phone.