I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and walked over to the truck to pull a pair of gloves out of the back. I didn’t trust bats. Even dead ones.
We worked our way down the last of the tall towers. It was a long walk. I noticed that the harvest was uneven. Some towers had a dozen victims below it; others had nothing.
“Is it always like this?” I said. “Some towers kill more than others.”
“Almost always, Sometimes all of the dead are found at just a few towers and nothing at the others. But there’s no pattern. The next night it may be almost even. We’ve been keeping track for two years now and I can’t find a pattern in any of the deaths or numbers. Except they go up during migratory times, and down in winter.”
“You count these every day?”
“Well, not always me personally. But someone in the group does it. Every day. Then we post it on the tote board.”
“Tote board?”
“Didn’t you see it? It’s right where you turn to go to the wind ranch office. It has daily tolls of bats and birds and a running total of the year’s dead. We used to put weekly photos in the local paper, but ...”
“But?”
“It went bankrupt.” She paused and smiled. “Not that one had anything to do with the other.”
Erin laid out the harvest and began separating it into birds and bats. The bats all looked similar, but there was a wide variety of birds, from warblers to predators.
“Isn’t that a golden eagle?” I said.
“Yes, a young one. We forward a report to Fish and Wildlife, along with any threatened species we might find here. The eagle is then sent to one of the reservations. Native Americans are the only people who can legally possess an eagle or its feathers, you know.”
I didn’t, but nodded anyway. I pulled two bats out of the pile. “What about these? They don’t look like the same species to me.”
Erin glanced over at them. “They’re not. The one on the left is a Brazilian free-tail bat. The other is a Mexican long-nosed bat, an endangered one. Set it aside over by the eagle, would you?”
“What do you suppose killed them—broken necks?” I waved at the pile of dead fliers.
“Usually. Except for the bats. Most of them just appear to die, and we don’t have the money for necropsies, so ...”
“I know someone at the University in Las Cruces who might do a couple for you. Can I take a few?”
“Sure, just wait until I get my count.”
I offered to drive Erin and her bundles of casualties back to where her truck was parked and she readily accepted. I walked back to get my truck while she rested.
“Where do you take these bodies?” I asked on the drive back toward the wind ranch entry.
“I used to take out the threatened species and send them to Fish and Wildlife, and dump the rest on Albertson’s front yard at night. But he just had his gardener dispose of them. Now one of the ladies of the group takes them and buries them in her flower gardens.”
“Must be a big garden.”
“Lots of flowers too. She says it’s a form of recycling.”
“How about your relationship with Albertson? Antagonistic?”
Erin thought about it, then shook her head. “Started off that way, but now I produce my PR about how many birds he’s killing, and he produces his PR about how much he’s spending to avoid killing the birds and how the buildings in Albuquerque kill a thousand times as many as his turbines do. Sort of a standoff.”
“Does he do anything specific to avoid killing the birds—reflectors or something?”
“No. He takes credit for the slower speed of these new turbines. Says the biggest one only rotates at twelve revs per minute and any dumb bird can see it coming.”
I thought about it for a moment. “The fan blade on that is about four hundred feet long; that means the tip of those blades would be traveling at about a hundred and eighty miles per hour. Pretty hard to dodge that, I’d say.”
“You sure about that speed?” Erin was already writing it down. “We’ve been trying to get Albertson to put whistles on the blade tips to scare off the birds, but he says it would keep people awake.”
“Anybody actually live out here?”
“A few people, ranchers, Albertson, and the maintenance men he hires.
Security is here all night—could interrupt their sleep, I suppose. But not many people, no. Oh, there’s one of the ranchers now—that man running over to the right. Wonder what his hurry is today.”
I saw a lanky, gray-haired man in oil-stained jeans and cowboy boots loping off through the columns of the shorter towers. He was obviously fairly old, but making good time.
Erin leaned to see the destination of the runner. “Where is he running to?”
“Or running from—” I began, just as two towers, one on either side of the path I was driving blew dust, dirt, and concrete chunks from their bases and began to fall. Following the thunder of explosions, a huge dust cloud and its burden of gravel and shattered concrete bits enveloped the truck, I spun the wheel, stood on the brake, then gunned the engine again to try and outrun the debris, or at least get out from under the falling towers.
Then I ran into another vertical tower.
As the gravel quit falling and the wind blew the dust cloud away, I asked Erin if she was hurt. She said no, so I got out and checked the damage. The truck had some new wrinkles in the front, but I couldn’t see or hear liquids dripping nor could I smell gasoline. I turned to the towers. Two were down, one completely flat across the gravel path, and the other held up at a slant by a rotor blade buried deep in the ground. A third tower leaned far over, as if checking on its fallen comrades. At least a dozen other towers’ rotations were slowing. I figured a block of power had been lost.
Erin was out of the truck, shading her eyes with her hands and looking in the direction the old cowboy had been running. “Did you see Tom again? He didn’t get hurt, did he?”
“Doubt it. He was much farther than we were from the blast. Could he have set off the charges?”
“Oh no, not Tom. He’s an old-timer around here. He even leases out some of his grazing land to Albertson for his towers. It’d be like he was blowing up his own money. Though, come to think of it, I did hear that he wasn’t happy with the leasing arrangements.”
“How not happy was he?” I waved a hand at the debris.
“No, not that unhappy, but serious enough for him to hire a lawyer, and for an old pinchpenny like him that’s—”
The second set of explosions came from the far western end of the field. I could see the dust rising and three towers were doing their slow motion fall.
“That’s close to the office building, maybe we should ...” Erin trailed off as I took her arm and led her to my truck.
In four-wheel drive we bypassed the downed towers and found the path again. As we approached the edge of the wind ranch, we could see the towers on the ground, and again, a number of adjacent towers winding down. One of the towers had fallen across an old, battered pickup on the road leading to the office building. I thought the truck was totaled. The tower had shaped it into a V. I could see an arm slowly moving in the cab of the front half of the V.
I got out. “Got a cell? Good. Call 911 and tell them to be sure and send an ambulance along with whatever else they’re sending out here.”
Then I ran to the pinned pickup, slid under the tower where it pressed the crew cab portion toward the ground, grabbed a claw hammer from a burst tool bag, and went to work removing the windshield.
The driver was now unconscious and so covered with blood I couldn’t tell anything about his age, condition, or race. He was pinned by the steering wheel. I lay flat on the hood, and using my shirt and the totally inadequate first-aid kit from the crew cab, I began patching, wrapping, and staunching what I could. When the first-aid kit was empty, I tossed it into the foot area on the passenger side. It made a dull clunk.
I glanced over. The tin box had hit a very old and faded canva
s-and-leather carryall. Sticking out of the bag were some very old and faded sticks of dynamite. No wonder the guy got caught by his own bomb, I thought. Stuff that old could go off with a strong wind gust. I began to sweat. Slowly I slid back off the hood, trying not to impart even a tremble to the vehicle that had just been smashed flat by a two hundred and something foot steel tower. To hell with rationality, I thought, that dynamite is old, old, old.
I slid off the truck hood and tiptoed away from the wreck. At about thirty feet away I met Albertson and a crew coming in.
“The guy in there—he do it?”
“Odds are he was involved,” I said. “Got any hazard tape or rope in those tool bags?”
“What? I don’t know, Joe, got any hazard tape in there?”
Joe dug into his tool bag and pulled out a hank of black and yellow rope from it. “This ’nough?”
“Not even close. Tell you what, you stand right here and keep every person, animal, and bird away from that truck.”
“Hey, hey there. I own this operation,” said Albertson. “Who do you think you are to give orders to my people?”
“I’m the one who knows how big the bomb in that truck is.”
As the words sunk in, the crowd began to move back, away from the mild-looking guy with the good tan wearing a windbreaker with no shirt, who was talking about bombs.
Albertson cleared his throat, said softly, “I’ll just go call them to send along a bomb squad. If they’ve got one.” He hurried away toward the office building, his cell phone forgotten in his right hand.
By late afternoon Albertson’s crew and a Public Service Electric Company crew from Tucumcari had isolated the damaged towers and reset the breakers on the tripped towers. Albertson’s crew and the grid dispatcher were in the process of putting the generators back onto the grid. Six towers were out of commission, and would remain so for the near future. Albertson laughed and said he had plenty; they’d still easily meet their planned output.
The Fort Sumner Fire Department, the closest thing around to a bomb squad, borrowed one of Albertson’s ravines and moved the bag of old dynamite into it with long, long ropes. Then they spent a quarter hour or more shooting into the bag with a rifle until it finally went up with a satisfying roar. The man who fired the final shot won a case of beer, which he shared.
The driver of the crushed pickup was finally extricated and his wounds professionally treated. They were fairly serious, but he was still breathing. The Santa Rosa police put him into a hospital room, under guard. He had not said anything, not even his name, since I had found him.
“Can you get me an appointment with this fellow Tom’s lawyer. I don’t think we’ll find Tom too easily.”
Erin looked at her watch, said, “Wait,” and wandered off chatting into her cell. When she came back, she said, “He’ll see you at eight tomorrow, but promises nothing. What sort of job are you doing for Albertson anyway? Bombs, lawyers. I’ve never seen Albertson back off from anybody before.”
“I’m sort of an efficiency enhancer. Now, where can I take you to dinner? You help me, I help you.”
She smiled. “For efficiency’s sake, in which of our nearby cities are you staying?”
“I was thinking of staying in Fort Sumner. It’s a few miles closer, for efficiency’s sake.”
She thought for a moment. “It’s okay, I guess. It has a couple of motels, both are the Billy-the-Kid-slept-here style. And there is a truck stop with a sixty-four-ounce steak challenge.”
“Where shall I meet you in Santa Rosa?”
“Check in at the Caprock Bed and Breakfast, just up 91 North toward the State Park, and I’ll pick you up at eight, give or take.”
Dinner was the most authentic Mexican food I had eaten since I last got lost in Mexico City. Erin turned out to be a delightful dinner companion, with a broad knowledge of world events, with just enough twist on her view of them to be stinging and funny instead of bitter or mocking. I, in turn, contributed to the ambience by not talking shop. I didn’t even ask her what cowboy Tom’s surname was until the evening was wrapping up.
“Brown,” she said. “Tom Brown. And thank you for not teaching me a new career. You’d be surprised how many men think their jobs are utterly entrancing.”
“Perhaps they have nothing else to talk about.”
“That would be sad.”
“Yes. It is ... would be. But maybe I, too, was about to run out of interesting conversation.”
“Well, start building some more,” she said as I paid the bill. “You didn’t say how long your contract is—or much of anything else, but I’m sure we can find time for me to show you that I can cook as well as discuss world events.”
I smiled as we walked toward her car. “I’ll get right on extending the contract to cover that. Just as soon as I work on some new dinner conversation.”
The lawyer’s name was Damme, which I felt was appropriate. He welcomed me in, and seated me facing east, into the rising sun framed in the window behind him. I took out sunglasses and put them on. I stared at Damme and saw a middle-aged man with white hair carefully cut at his jaw line and framing a face brown, wrinkled, and holding two wise brown eyes. He wore western-style clothing. The jacket hung open just enough to see folksy red suspenders covering up some of the embroidery on his shirt.
Lawyer Damme looked at me. He could see himself. Twice. Once in each lens of my mirrored sunglasses.
I said. “Mr. Tom Brown was seen leaving an explosion site yesterday. I was an eyewitness. He was moving right along and had what appeared to be a large oil stain on his Levi’s. I could describe him as appearing furtive, or perhaps just in a hurry. He could have been leaving the scene of a crime, or maybe he was taking a shortcut through the wind ranch. He could have looked guilty, or maybe he looked startled at the noise and dust the explosion caused. I’ll have to think about it some more before I report it. Or not.”
Lawyer Damme sighed. “You not nearly as nice as Erin said.”
“When I have a job to do, I like to get right to it.”
“And your job is what? Messin’ up old Tom Brown?”
“My job is finding out what’s going on at the Lamancha Wind Ranch and smoothing it out so it works better for everyone. Everyone who deserves it. I think it could help to know what the problem is with the leases out there.”
“So you come on all hard nosed? And why ask about leases?”
“Up to this point all Tom would need a lawyer for is leases. And I didn’t push until you tried the window trick. It doesn’t work with everyone.”
“I see that.” Lawyer Damme went to the window and closed the blinds. I took off the mirrored glasses and put them away.
Damme sat down and looked at me for a minute or two. “You gonna make a stink about this if you don’t get some answers?”
“Probably.”
Damme steepled his fingers and looked at them instead of at me. “Suppose you signed a contract to lease out your land so someone could generate variable amounts of money off it. How would you set the contract worth?”
“A percentage of the money produced sounds fair,” I said. “And probably a base rate so the leased object doesn’t just sit there, paying nothing while it’s not being used by the money producer.”
“Close enough. Now, what would you base the percentage on?”
I thought a moment. “Basing it on what the buyer of the product pays should get to a fair value.”
“And if the buyer didn’t pay a fair value, or anywhere close to it?”
“Doesn’t make sense: Nobody wins except the product buyer. How do you continuously sell something for less than it’s worth?”
Damme was smiling now. “Yes, how would you do that?”
“Okay, the producer sells, at an extremely low price, the product to himself and pays the contract percentage—now a very low price—on that transaction to the owner who leased it out, then resells the product to the final buyer at the going rate. He keeps the difference. Th
e lease owners get shafted.”
Damme leaned back, smiling. “You sure you’re an honest man? You seem to have a knack for this sort of thing.”
“I learn from those I work with, for or against.”
“Well, that’s what’s happening. Lamancha Wind Ranch leases about half of their land from owners for three percent of the total generated from the turbine built on that site, plus a nominal thirty or forty dollars per site as a base rate. Then they sell the power to a division of a wholly owned subsidiary—say Energy Distributors, LLC, for an extremely low price, say five percent of its true value, and that’s what the owner of the lease gets—a small fraction of what they negotiated.
“Energy Distributors, LLC, then resells the power at the going grid price and the profit is returned to the mother company, Lamancha Wind Ranch, which spreads the profit around among the losers and winners within their own company and subsidiaries to make it—overall—an average profit-making company. Just a little spin on the rig Enron was pulling in the gas market some time back.”
“It can’t be that simple. The owners of the leases wouldn’t stand still for it.” I stood and began pacing.
“There are seventeen people who have leased sites—land—to Lamancha. Tom Brown is the only one who has tried to break the contract.”
“Okay. Why?” I examined the law degrees hanging on Damme’s wall. He had been a lawyer for a long time.
“We’ve been in a drought for five years now, and with global warming looking like a problem that’s come to stay, we expect more dryness. These ranchers would rather get a little bit of something out of currently useless land than hand feed and water their cattle just to break even. A lot of them commute to work at various businesses around the counties now. Hell, a couple are even on Albertson’s maintenance teams.
“Tom, on the other hand, is too old and too much a cowman to change. Besides which, he leased out too much of his grazing land to this company and had to market his cattle or let them starve. His only salvation is to get a reasonable price for his leases—then he can keep his life. Until the next schemer comes along, anyway.”
I shook my head. “You’re a lawyer. You know people. You’ve got the whole thing right here. Book, chapter, verse, and perps. Why haven’t you blown the whistle?”
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 01/01/11 Page 23
