The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  The trailer, unfortunately, had no fenders. Walter made do with the tires.

  ~ ~ ~

  We came out of the tunnel with our little ice chest packed with samples and told Soliano we’d need a few hours in our makeshift lab to build a soil map.

  Hap was stretched out in the shade. “Map?” He lifted his sombrero. “Where y’all going?”

  “To hell.” Chickie spat. She sat on the tailings heap. She’d claimed to have no knowledge of what was stored in her unused tunnel, and there was no evidence linking her to Jardine. No probable cause for Soliano to detain her. Still, she remained, keeping watch on her mine.

  Walter said, mild, “Hell is not on the itinerary.”

  I presumed not.

  “Jardine left a trail,” Walter said. “We’ll be following it.”

  Soliano looked at his watch. “Good. Alert me before you leave. My agents and Mr. Hemmings’ team will be expanding the search around here. We must select a place to rendezvous, at the end of the day.” He thought. “We will establish headquarters at park headquarters—Furnace Creek. Check in at the ranger station.”

  We were huddling like high-school freshmen to exchange cell phone numbers when I reminded myself to ask Scotty if he could spare a couple gallons of Wal-Mart water for our field trip.

  CHAPTER 13

  Roy Jardine had a problem.

  There was hot cargo in the bed of his pickup, and his pickup was registered in his name, and that was not being incognito.

  Last night, sitting at home in his Lazy-boy, he had wrestled with the problem of the resin cask. After the showdown with Beltzman, after things went critical, he had decided the safe thing was to leave the cask where it was, in the talc mine. Then this morning, Jardine had gone undercover at the dump to do recon—and that turned out to be a real smart decision. He’d learned what the enemies were up to. He’d had a bad moment when Mister FBI questioned him, but he’d played that real cool. The real danger was the geologists with their talc-sniffing noses.

  That changed everything. He’d barely had time to get to the mine and recover the cask.

  But he’d aced it.

  And then he had to decide what to do with it.

  He couldn’t deliver it for use in the grand mission because he needed the trailer rig, and that loser Beltzman had crippled it.

  This cask was an orphan now.

  Orphaned cask. New enemies. The math was clear. The only thing that wasn’t clear was how and when he would use it against them. Until that became clear, he needed to store it.

  So here he was traveling this two-lane road with a hot cargo, checking the rearview mirror so often his neck hurt. Nobody on this road but jackrabbits. And him. He checked the rearview. The cask rode low because he had loaded it on its side so it would look incognito under the tarp. He was proud how he’d improvised. He’d used a lead curtain from the supply box—and the curtain had grommets! And he had bungee cords in his toolbox! And voila, as snooty people say. And the tarp did more than just shield the cask. He’d filled the pickup bed with talc, for more shielding, and the tarp kept the talc from flying away. Tarp and talc, two layers of shielding. In job eighteen redundancy was a lifesaver that he’d taken to heart. He would have liked to stay dressed out—triple redundancy—but that wouldn’t be incognito.

  Where he was going, he had to look normal.

  He needed a safe place to store the pickup and its cargo and then he needed to rent a car. He needed to do these two things without drawing attention. The best place to do this, he’d decided, was Las Vegas.

  He took jackrabbit roads when he could. When he hit the highway he drove the speed limit.

  When he reached Vegas all went smoothly. The clerk at the self-storage warehouse didn’t give a crap what was under the tarp. The clerk at the Hertz didn’t give a crap who he was, didn’t notice that his name was fake because he’d planned weeks ago that he’d need a cover and he’d spent time on the details of the perfect fake ID.

  How about that. The skills of his eleventh crap job—clerk at the DMV—turned out to be useful all these years later.

  After leaving Vegas he tooled along the highway riding high. Incognito in his crap rental car, with his ponytail tucked up under the Budweiser ball cap he’d bought at the Rite-Aid. He’d be at his hideout in a few hours and when he got there he’d treat himself to a sponge bath.

  He made a call on his cell phone. Nothing new, he was told. Call me when there is, he said. He hung up; it was illegal to talk on the phone while driving.

  He drove all the way into Death Valley, just another tourist in his cheap rental car, and he parked at the Ranch motel in Furnace Creek in plain sight with all the other rental cars. From there, he had a long hike ahead of him. His nerves were strung tight until he cleared the settlement and disappeared into the canyons.

  He hiked up to a ridgetop for good cell reception and phoned again. It rang and rang. Okay, that just meant no privacy to answer his call. How obvious was that? He’d try again in five minutes.

  It sure was hot. He opened his pack and selected a foil bag but he couldn’t tear it open with sweaty fingers.

  He got out the Buck knife.

  He tensed, waiting for a vision of Jersey to rise up and hurt him. He should have buried the knife along with his dog. But he’d had the knife longer than he’d had Jersey. It was a clip-point hunting knife that he’d bought the first time he went camping. He’d gone alone, seventeen-year-old kid setting out from home, seventeen-year-old man when he returned. He’d hunted and skinned a squirrel for his dinner. He’d whittled a stick to roast marshmallows. He’d cut rope to hang his food away from animals. It was a useful knife.

  Jersey wouldn’t mind if he kept it.

  He knifed open the foil bag and tapped out a handful of pink chunks. He ate them all at once. Hideous. Tasted nothing like strawberry. Tasted nothing like ice cream. But he began to cool off. He understood this was a mental thing—the words on the bag carried their own power. Ice cream. Even freeze-dried cooled him, a bit.

  He’d live on kibbles if he needed until his grand vision was fulfilled.

  He checked his watch. Four minutes gone. He decided waiting the full five would be obsessive. He called.

  It was answered on the first ring. What took you so long?

  He didn’t want to sound worried. He said, real cool, “I was eating ice cream.”

  A muffled sound. A laugh.

  He ignored that. “What did they say?”

  They know who you are.

  He went rigid. “How?”

  You fucked up.

  “You don’t want to address me that way.”

  Get real.

  Roy Jardine maintained a frigid silence.

  You there?

  He should make some smarty joke but he couldn’t think of one so all he said was, “Keep me posted.”

  He shut the phone. He picked up his Buck knife and held it blade out—not that anybody was going to storm the ridge but no harm in the practice. The knife calmed him. So they know. So what? They’ll never find you, Roy. You’re a shadow. You’re ace. You’re going to sit here and finish your ice cream and wait for the next call and then you’re going to ground, at Hole-in-the-Wall. You’re really an outlaw now, Roy Jardine.

  He straightened his back.

  He wondered what the female geologist thought about him now. Females could get swept off their feet by outlaws—look at Etta Place and the Sundance Kid. That wasn’t just a movie. That was in the history books. He closed his eyes. He’d worked side by side with the female, partners almost. Close enough to smell her. Sweat, sure, but something else. Some kind of female shampoo. Strawberry?

  He put a chunk of strawberry ice cream on his tongue.

  And now the female smiled at him and he smiled at her and offered her real strawberry ice cream and then suddenly it was Jersey, and not the female, begging him, and the stuff in his mouth turned back to paste.

  His phone rang.

  He opene
d his eyes and answered the call.

  Guess what they just found?

  “I don’t guess. Just tell me.”

  He listened—at first not understanding—and then finally when he understood he bent over and vomited up strawberry chunks.

  What’s that sound? You there? Say something.

  He couldn’t. He was too sick to talk. He wiped his mouth, heartsick.

  This is bad, you get it?

  He said he’d have to call back. He said the signal was breaking up.

  It was Roy Jardine who was breaking up. He couldn’t believe they could figure out stuff like that. From dirt under the fenders?

  He rested his head on his knees and when his insides stopped crawling he put himself back together. It’s not a real map, he told himself. It’s dirt. They’d have to be magicians to follow that dirt. His head swam. His grand vision was flickering like one of those desert mirages. If he didn’t do something his vision was going to disappear.

  He said, out loud, the geologists are not magicians.

  But you have to make sure. Put on your thinking cap, Roy.

  He put it on. And the answer came.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Look,” I said, “do you see something moving out there?”

  Walter looked up from the map in his lap and peered out his window.

  We were driving north on the West Side Road—so named because it hugged the western side of the long Death Valley basin. Forty miles since we’d left the talc mine and the only moving thing we’d seen was the occasional car. And that was across the saltpan from us on the Badwater Road, which hugged the eastern side of the basin.

  But it wasn’t a car I’d seen out on the saltpan. It was something else.

  “I suppose,” Walter said, turning back to his map, “I’ve missed it.”

  Walter was breaking my heart. If he couldn’t drive, he was going to be of use navigating.

  As if we could get lost driving this road through open desert.

  The basin floor swept before us, south to north, like an unrolling carpet of sand and salt. Where it rolled off into the far horizon, I thought I could see the curve of the earth. To the west and east the basin floor met walls of fault-scarped mountains—the view so wide I could see the floor tilt.

  What I couldn’t see, now, was that thing on the saltpan. Nothing moved out there.

  Well, the earth shimmied as heat boiled up.

  I checked the gas gauge. I asked Walter to check our cell phone signals. I glanced at Scotty’s water jugs in back. There’s a reason they named it Death Valley. There’s a reason nobody’s out and about, not in a Death Valley summer.

  I’d been here only once before, and that was in the spring. My scout troop came to see the wildflowers. Fourth grade, pre-Walter, pre-geology. The only geological samples I’d got were sand in my boots and dirt in my sleeping bag. I’d been more interested in the Boy Scouts in the next campsite. A mental picture formed of little Hap in a scout uniform, all knobby knees and big bandana. Very cute. A mental picture formed of big Hap, all lean angles and a backdoor grin. I blinked. What am I doing?

  Walter said, “What did it look like?”

  “What?” Oh, my thing on the saltpan. “I only got a glimpse. Just a...shape.”

  “A mirage, dear.”

  “No, it was moving.”

  “Temperature turbulence makes the image vibrate. And you superimpose your own thoughts upon it.”

  My thoughts had just been on Hap and I didn’t see Hap vibrating out there now. So what was I thinking of five minutes ago, when I first saw the shape? The thing that’s been in my mind, upfront or lurking, since I saw the drawing on the radwaste truck last night: the running man. I tried, now, superimposing that stick figure on the shape I’d glimpsed on the saltpan. Heat rays shimmer down like fallout and the stick runs and the salt underfoot crackles like a carpet of resin beads. No. What I’d seen was something else. Something creeping. I almost wished it was my stick. He seemed, now, an old friend. Don’t worry, old stick, we’ll find the missing beads and see them buried and no scumbag’s going to unleash them on you. So you can stop running. Sit down. It’s hot out there. You must be tired.

  “Of course,” Walter said, “the scientific explanation doesn’t capture the charm of a mirage.”

  Charm? All right. I said, “When were you last here, mirage-watching?”

  “Eons ago.”

  “Back when the desert was a lake?”

  “Before that. Back in the Precambrian.”

  “Cool. You do predate the dinosaurs.”

  He smiled.

  I smiled, and relaxed into the Death Valley summer.

  The road curved to round the apron of an alluvial fan, a fan so perfect it drew an ahhh from Walter. Rainwater washes earth out of the mountains and the debris comes to rest at the canyon mouths, fanning onto the valley floor. Here’s the heart of Death Valley: a mammoth basin, faulted and dropped deep below sea level, bordered by knife-ridged mountains which spill their guts, here and there, in coquettish fans.

  It is a huge bathtub. Things flow into it. Nothing flows out.

  I began to think about water.

  Water wet the soils that spattered up and pasted themselves beneath Roy Jardine’s offroader fenders.

  We’d spent a good three hours in our makeshift lab in Scotty’s RERT van with our noses in the fender soils, trying to patch together the layers. Some layers were defined. Some weren’t. The soil map at this point was a roughed-in outline. Our map, actually, resided in specimen dishes in the little ice chest in the back seat.

  I said, “Let’s talk about the itinerary.”

  Walter grunted, unhappy with the thinness of the itinerary.

  “So,” I said, “Roy Jardine starts up his offroader rig and...”

  As if Walter could, after all, resist. “Well. The first layer says he proceeds along the dirt road, or roads, near the talc mine. And then a break—pavement.”

  I waved a hand at the West Side Road. “Or an oiled road.”

  “Keep your hands on the wheel, dear. Yes, a hardpack surface. However, he could have driven a few miles, or hundreds of miles, before leaving the hardpack to pick up layer two. Coarse-grained alluvium suggests he drives upon an alluvial fan.”

  “So somewhere in the Basin and Range.” This was all Basin and Range country, valley and mountain, on and on like waves from the Sierras to the Rockies.

  “Today we’ll confine ourselves to Death Valley, considering the proximity of the talc mine. And it fields a few lovely candidates.”

  I nodded. I was liking Death Valley more and more.

  “Now,” Walter settled happily into it, “layer three narrows Jardine’s trail a smidge. It’s fine-grained alluvium, playa mud and sand. Hence, we have him crossing a riverbed or a canyon wash.”

  Water. I nodded.

  “Layer four is more forthcoming. A grayish soil, weathered I believe from a Cambrian marine dolomite.”

  “The canyon we’re heading for? One of your candidates?”

  “The closest.”

  “And layer five?”

  “Layer five, layer six...” He grunted. “We need more time.”

  I was feeling it myself. Time. Jardine killed his partner. He was on the run. He might still have the resin cask with him. “So why’s he heading up your canyon?”

  “There are mines.”

  Of course. He based his swap in a mine. Makes sense that he chose another mine to hide his stolen radwaste. A mine would provide the shielding. Surely, he would think about shielding. I pictured him, his scar, his long horsey face. So sad. So sick.

  I shook him off. Focus on the itinerary. I had my own reservations, beyond the sketchiness of the map. Oh, we’d been meticulous, if rushed, in analyzing the soils. But something didn’t sit right. And I couldn’t put my finger on it. Like our map had an unconformity, a crucial missing piece. Like the road had been cut and below was an abyss.

  Walter cranked up the air-conditioning to
freeze.

  I punched the outside-air-temp button and the reading showed 119 degrees. The sun was trending westward toward the Panamint Range alongside us. Sink, I urged it. But then, of course, we lose our light.

  Walter said, “Up ahead. How about that?”

  A massive fan spilled from the Panamints. There had to be a canyon up there but it was not visible from down here because the fan looked to extend a good two miles from toe to head and rise several hundred feet.

  I stopped the car and we got out. The heat slammed me. Chilled by Walter’s freezer, I thought I was going to crack.

  We were at the intersection of two stitches in the basin floor: the West Side Road and the rough route angling up the giant fan. I knelt and scooped samples of the alluvial deposits. If we were on the right track, they’d match the evidence dish marked Layer Two in the ice chest.

  “What’s that?” Walter suddenly said. “You hear something? A car?”

  I listened. Nothing. I scanned the West Side Road, officially closed in summer. Nothing.

  “I’m certain I heard a car,” Walter said.

  I’m seeing things, he’s hearing things. Well, my young eyes may have 20/20 vision but Walter’s old ears have never plugged in an iPod. He hears like a twenty-year-old. We’re both certain.

  But all was silent and still.

  Even so, I couldn’t resist another look at the saltpan. I noted the channel that drained our canyon into the basin, curving like a sidewinder’s path. No mysterious shapes out there. Nothing moved but the ground, liquid with heat.

  I turned back to the Blazer, liquid with heat myself.

  “Did you check the radiator,” Walter asked, “before we left the mine?”

  “Did I?”

  He said, “It’s the driver’s responsibility.”

  “It’s always been you who takes care of the car.”

  “Always been?”

  Yikes. You nag somebody out of the driver’s seat, you better take on the rest of the job. Forget mirages. Pay attention to the real threats, like an overheated car in the desert. I gathered my dignity and went to open the hood.