“No worries. There’s only two ways in and two ways out. Head south and you hit Prairie Home, and I’ll bet you a dinner at Lucy’s they won’t go that way.”
“Why?”
“Because everything else is north,” he said. “Head back to where the main road forks. We’ll hangout there.”
“We should be able to see them coming from there.”
“Yup.”
Ten minutes later Anna u-turned and looped the pickup around a low sand dune, positioning the vehicle so they could see the northbound spur of Kermit Highway as it came up from Prairie Home to the Sandman’s place. Ramage opened his window and got comfortable. The morning breeze was dry and smelled of sage with a faint tinge of gasoline. He took a pull on his coffee and waited.
Conversation was inevitable. What to say, and what not to say. Reveal this, don’t reveal that. He hated the dance, but the better he got to know Anna, the more he thought she was worth the effort, but what would she think when she learned about him?
“What’s up? Smells like something is burning in here,” Anna said.
Confusion knifed through Ramage—he didn’t smell anything. Then he recalled what the saying meant. Your brain overheating. “Just thinking.”
“I know. About what?”
“You. Me.” Ramage read the word Ford on the passenger floormat. “Us.”
“Us?”
“I feel like… like I owe you… an explanation. I don’t know why.”
“You don’t owe me anything, but…”
“But…”
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious.”
“Go ahead, ask your questions.”
She sighed. “Why is a nice guy like you alone? No family? No wife?”
“I had a wife. Joan was her name,” Ramage said. He knew it wasn’t enough, but baby steps.
“Annnnd? Where is she?”
“She’s dead.”
“Ramage. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pick a scab.”
“You didn’t, well, maybe you did, but I asked for it.”
She said nothing.
The silence stretched on, and he said, “She was killed in the line of duty.”
“A cop?”
“Secret Service. You remember that asshole senator, Mcully from Alabama?”
“Yeah, the guy that was almost assassinated? I remember that. An agent took the…” She pulled up short, realizing what she was about to say.
Ramage said nothing, and that was the end of the conversation.
Anna seemed embarrassed, and clearly, she was done with questions, at least for the present. Ramage was happy for it. Every word of his past brought pain. What he’d just told Anna was more than he’d said to anyone about his life in years. There was more he wanted to tell her. More she needed to hear. He hardly knew her, yet felt connected to her, like their meeting was more than random chance.
Anna leaned back in her seat and fell asleep, a thin stream of drool seeping down her chin. Most people didn’t look good while they slept, but it didn’t hurt her any. She looked more beautiful in the repose of sleep than she did awake.
A blue car went by at 8:30AM, then a red sports car, and three other normal vehicles. They were all traveling south, and Ramage figured they were heading to work at the compound.
Two hours and forty-eight minutes later a rolling dust cloud advanced up Kermit Highway.
“Anna.” Ramage nudged her.
“Hey.” She came awake, rubbing her eyes, then wiped away the drool with a self-conscious smile.
“Here comes candidate one.” Ramage lifted the binoculars and studied the truck. The dust made it impossible to see any detail, but Ramage kept looking anyway.
“I miss anything?”
“A few cars. Nothing special.” He described each car he’d seen, and when he got to the sports car, she stopped him.
“What make and color was the fancy car?”
“Red. Looked like an old Corvette.”
“That’s Piranha’s car.”
The truck was closer now and Ramage saw the driver and recognized the permanent scowl and round head. “Look’s like we hit the jackpot. Carl Jr. is driving,” he said.
The semi thundered by, black clouds pouring from its smokestack, engine growling, a trail of dust twisting behind it. The rig was a silver Peterbilt, and it looked old. There was no identification on the truck as was required by law, no company logo, no DOT numbers or hazard warning signs. The dump trailer was covered with a black tarp, and it whipped and snapped in the breeze.
As the truck past Anna said, “You’ll see that one in the book. I’ve seen it many times.” She put the truck in drive, but Ramage put a hand on her arm.
“Not yet. Give them a minute. Don’t want Carl Jr. to see us in his rearview.”
She nodded.
Ramage counted to thirty in his head, then looked over his shoulder. The truck was obscured by dust. “OK,” he said.
Anna eased the pickup out from behind the dune and swung around onto the road. The truck bumped onto the worn blacktop and she eased the old Ford up to fifty miles per hour and settled in. The day was in full swing, and the sun glared down, invisible waves of heat rolling over the plain.
Ramage pulled free his cellphone. No reception. “How am I going to reach you if we get separated?”
“Why would that happen?”
“A thousand reasons. I could get arrested. Trapped. I might need to take an opportunity we’re not aware of.”
“Like?”
“Slipping onto one of the trucks.”
She sighed the way a mother does when a child says something unrealistic. “Whatever. I’ve got a set of two-way radios. Dad and I use them to communicate when we’re working the ranch.”
“You’ve got them with you?”
She nodded. “Figured we might need them.”
They motored on, making no turns or stops. The truck’s rooster tail of dust cut across the plain, and Anna hung way back.
“Any idea where they’re heading?”
“Sure do,” she said. “There are three fracking wells up this way. Makes sense, right? They’re delivering sand.”
Ramage said nothing. His mind raced back to something he’d said the night before. “The boss’s kid hauls sand?” It did make sense on some levels. If you need something important done, don’t trust just anyone. If you want to keep a secret, let as few people know as possible. All this strengthened the idea that there was much more going on than sand delivery. That idea bothered him. He was taking in too much information and he needed time to think, let the pieces fall into place. Problem was he didn’t think he had all the pieces, not even close.
Thirty minutes later they made a left onto route RT181, and hills and arroyos appeared on the sides of the road. In the distance a dust cloud rose high into the sky, like a bomb had gone off. The plume blurred as the wind gusted and obscured the horizon.
The fracking site materialized out of the dust, still a half mile distant. A twelve-foot chain-link fence ran around the entire area, and a metal guard booth stood on the edge of the road. A white sign affixed to the fence read Higher Rollers, Inc. in large red letters.
“Get a little closer and pull over,” Ramage said. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes.
The silver semi slowed and inched through a crowd of people on either side of the entrance gate, and barely stopped at the guard booth as it was waved through. “What the hell are all those people doing there?”
Anna pulled off the road. “Protestors. Fracking is really bad for the environment, remember, and many socially conscious organizations schedule protests at each fracking site on a regular basis.”
Ramage saw armed guards, and people chanting and holding signs. “Shit.”
“Let me see.”
She stared through the field glasses for a long time, her forehead knitting. Then she laughed. “I knew it. Gypsy and Cecil are with the protestors.”
“Who?”
“Friends of mine.”
“More social justice warriors?”
“They’re more hardcore than that. Gypsy has been arrested six times, and Cecil did time in the Walls Unit over in Huntsville for helping sabotage the construction of an oil pipeline. You’d never know it by looking at her, but Gypsy is a Class A badass.”
Ramage kept his thoughts to himself.
Smoke rose from the site, metal clanked and boomed, engines whined and raced, men yelled, and the ever-present tinkle of sand scraping over sand rubbed Ramage’s patience like steel wool. The protestors complicated things. The armed guards complicated things more.
“Well, we need to rethink our plan, because we’re not getting in there. Not in the daylight,” Ramage said.
“You’re not suggesting we go in at night in the dark? What good would that be?”
“Not much.”
“Should we wait ‘til he comes out? See where he goes next?” Anna asked.
“Or we can go back and start again. Figure out a way to get me on in inbound truck. Many days in your log showed two trucks per day, and I’m no cop, but I think we broke an essential rule of investigation work.”
She looked at him and raised her shoulders and stuck out her jaw.
“We didn’t secure the chain of evidence, or some shit like that.”
Anna sighed. He was starting to like the sound. “What are you talking about?”
“Do we know, with one hundred percent certainty that the truck we saw driven by Carl Jr. was carrying sand?”
She stared at him like he was crazy.
The crowd of protesters got louder. “Rape the planet, rape the future, rape the planet, rape the future…”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Anna said, “How do you plan to get on the truck? Jump on it Indiana Jones style?”
“I’ve got a plan.”
Anna started the pickup, turned over the wheel and spun the truck around. The tires squealed on the blacktop and kicked up dust and sand.
Sand. Ramage was starting to feel like sandpaper, constant grit on his skin, in his eyes and ears. His chest hurt where a dark bruise marked the spot Piranha had kicked him with the toe of his boot. Ramage was certain he cracked a rib. He hoped it didn’t heal before he had a chance to see Carl Jr. again, because every spike of pain reminded him of what he was going to do to the man.
Chapter Thirteen
When they arrived back at their stakeout spot behind the dune along Kermit Highway Ramage’s cell phone buzzed and vibrated. The screen lit up and one power bar showed along with two blue boxes with white letters. One said missed call from Rex and the other said Rex has left a message.
“Shoot,” he said. “What day is it?”
“Thursday.”
“Great. Excuse me a moment.”
Ramage got out of the car and moved to a safe distance so Anna couldn’t listen in. He hit the message button and listened to Rex’s baritone voice asking why he hadn’t checked-in. He called and got Rex’s voicemail. He said everything was fine, nothing to report, and clicked off. He knew that wouldn’t satisfy his quasi-parole officer, and he expected to receive a call from him a second after his message was received.
Ramage had no idea what would happen if he stopped calling Rex. It wasn’t like he was on real parole. Would Rex look for him? Not the time to find out. He called Rex back and left another message, explaining the cell coverage in his area was bad. When he was done, he got back in the car.
With the morning rush-hour over, the road was quiet. In the distance to the east trucks rolled up RT181 toward the action, leaving dust trails.
Anna broke out two ham sandwiches and bottles of water and the two companions ate in silence. Ramage liked that Anna didn’t need to talk all the time. That was one of the world’s major problems. Everyone always had to be talking, jabbering their opinions, making their point, elbowing for position. He thought ninety percent of what people said was bullshit.
At 1:19PM the second semi rolled out of the compound and up Kermit Highway. This one was a beat-up Mack, and it hauled a silver dump trailer with a black tarp covering the top. Same as the first rig.
“OK, here we go,” Anna said.
She started the car and rolled out onto the road, heading east toward the fracking sites. They’d gone two miles when she pulled over.
Ramage jumped out. “See you later. Don’t worry about me if you don’t see me come out of the site. I’ll catch up with you later.”
She handed him a radio. “In case there’s no cell service.”
He nodded.
“Take care, Ramage.”
“You to.”
Ramage turned his back on her and left the road. On their way back from the fracking site, Ramage had spotted a shallow arroyo along the road. He headed for it, and when he reached it, he got to his knees, then laid flat on his back, hiding within the narrow slice in the ground. He lifted his head to check on Anna.
She’d done exactly what they’d discussed. The pickup was parked across the east bound lane, and she stood in the center of the road, white rag in hand, waiting to flag down the driver of the semi.
He laid flat when he heard the roar of the approaching eighteen-wheeler.
The sky was blue, not a cloud, and the scent of sagebrush and shinnery oak filled the air, a dull sweet and sour that always made Ramage think of his mother’s beef stew.
Air brakes chirped, and the truck coughed and wheezed as the driver downshifted. The sounds made him think of Big Blue and his Christmas trees. He missed driving, the open road, not having to talk to people.
The truck came to a stop with a squeak of brakes and Ramage heard the pop and crack as the driver put the rig in park. A door slammed.
“Hi, OK, thank you so much for stopping. I’m scared out here alone and I don’t know anything about cars,” Anna said in a voice he didn’t recognize. It sounded like she was trying to mimic a California surfer girl, but instead sounded like a five-year-old whose been told they’re going to an amusement park.
The guy coughed, and said, “Yeah. What happened?”
“It just stopped. I was driving along and it just… stopped.”
“Why didn’t you pull to the side of the road?”
“I tried, but the wheel got very hard to turn.”
“Power steering goes out when the vehicle isn’t running. Pop the hood.”
That was Ramage’s cue.
He lifted himself just enough to see out of the arroyo. The guy had his head buried under the hood, and Anna had positioned herself between Ramage and the man. He got to his feet—not fast, but not slow—and walked to the back of the truck. He peered around the trailer and the driver still had his head buried in the engine compartment.
A large metal handle on the face of the door opened the trailer so the sand could be dumped, and Ramage used it as a step. He climbed the back of the trailer, being careful to make no noise, and dropped over the lip.
He landed face first in sand. Ramage brushed himself off and spit sand, then Army crawled to the front of the trailer. He listened hard, but he only heard mumbled voices and couldn’t understand what was being said. Several minutes past before the pickup roared to life. Three more minutes as Anna gave the driver her phone number and agreed to take him to dinner as a thank you. Questioning the Sandman’s drivers was part of their plan.
The semi rumbled to life, the brakes chirped, gears clicked, and the truck lurched into motion. Ramage went to the back of the trailer and stuck his hand over the tarp with his thumb up, then sat with his back against the warm metal of the trailer’s side.
One thing was now certain: the Sandman was hauling sand. The clock in Ramage’s head started ticking. He had roughly half an hour before the truck arrived at the wellhead and he was dumped from the truck along with the sand.
He went to the center of the trailer and started digging. It took twenty minutes, and he didn’t hit the bottom of the trailer, but he dug deep enough to rule out anything
large hidden in the sand.
The driver downshifted, and the truck bucked, and Ramage’s hole caved in, burying him to the waist. The semi growled as it slowed, air brakes singing. The truck came to a stop, and Ramage heard, “OK. Go aheee.”
He fell forward into the sand as the truck jumped back into motion. Ramage smiled. Whoever was at the semi’s wheel was a worse driver than him.
A metal gate closed with a clang.
It took him the better part of five minutes to free himself from the sand, and the truck had stopped again and was idling.
Ramage stood and lifted his head above the tarp. Smoke and dust filled the air and men moved about like ants, carrying hoses, couplings, and containers of chemicals. Metal squeaked and thumped, air hissed as pumps moved water, and the thunder of engines was everywhere. No trucks were on line behind him, but a group of workers stood talking ten feet away.
He grabbed the lip of the trailer, pulled himself up, and slipped over. He hit the ground hard, and air rushed from his lungs as he rolled beneath the truck and pretended to examine the rear axil. If asked, he’d say the driver had heard a noise and he was checking it out. He glanced around. Nobody was shouting, men weren’t running toward the truck. The business of extracting drips of crude oil from stone continued.
The pop of the clutch and the rumble of the truck’s engine gave him five seconds warning. He rolled right, away from the group of men, vaulted to his feet, and casually walked away. Don’t hide. Make noise. Act like you’re in charge.
The site was much smaller than it looked from the outside, no more than five acres. A huge metal superstructure rose into the air above the drill head and pumps. Men fed hose into a giant spool that threaded through the superstructure and into the wellhead. Pumper trucks stood by, waiting to supply the water and chemicals necessary to frack the shale.
The white Mack truck backed toward a pile of sand that rose higher than the fence. He had no idea how much sand was needed per drill site, but it looked to Ramage as though there was plenty of sand waiting to be injected into the ground.
A shovel leaned against a porta poddy with a hardhat resting on its end. Ramage looked around, saw nobody watching, and put the hat on his head. A metal identification plate screwed to the blue plastic of the porta poddy read Portable Thrones and gave a Prairie Home address and phone number. Ramage took a picture of it with his phone and continued walking, nobody paying him any attention. Why would they? There were armed guards at the gate, and everyone inside was supposed to be inside, theoretically.
Quick Sands: A Theo Ramage Thriller (Book 1) Page 8
