The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  So it’s just a little bit of nuclear waste, Laura thought.

  She remembered seeing this on the news. She had seen pictures of protestors standing on the freeway bridge in Albuquerque, their signs taped to chain link fences over the underpass as the trucks passed underneath on their way to Carlsbad, New Mexico.

  The trucks going right through the center of Albuquerque. For that matter, they came through Flagstaff, too.

  Laura knew from her own experience that a lot of bad stuff—hazardous waste, dangerous pharmaceuticals, low-level nuclear waste—was sent over the roads every day. In fact, she had helped guard two shipments of hazardous waste last year. She’d been in one of the security cars that had leapfrogged from exit to exit, checking the area, then catching up again. When certain types of dangerous materials were being shipped by train or by highway, every member of the DPS throughout the state was on call.

  And that was what didn’t make sense about this scheme. There were too many safeguards. Hazardous waste was periodically checked, whether it was shipped by train, ship, or truck. Anything radioactive was escorted by at least two law enforcement officers and tracked by the Global Positioning System, TRANSCOM.

  “Where were these friends of yours going to park it?” Jon asked.

  “On the Colorado River.”

  The Colorado River, which supplied California, Nevada, and Arizona with their water. That gave her such a jolt she just stared at Shana.

  “It wasn’t that big a deal,” Shana said. “We weren’t going to hurt anybody.”

  Laura thought of Dan and Kellee Yates lying dead in their tent.

  Suddenly the piece of the puzzle, the one she had been waiting for, fell into place. Now she remembered who Jack Taylor was.

  32

  Normally, this was the kind of morning Mark lived for. Driving here in the suspended breath of dawn, tracking the pink glow of the rising sun over the Amargosa Mountains, the sun spilling over and spreading across the desert valley like an incoming tide.

  It seemed like a routine day, too, as he and Dell passed through the gates of the Nevada Test Site and drove over to the section of Area 25 he’d been to half a dozen times before. Parking in the lot and putting the sunshade up in the window.

  But this time the car they parked here was a junker Dell had bought for a couple hundred bucks. Mark’s new Ford truck was miles away in Kingman.

  Mark and Dell got out and walked toward Glenn Traywick, who was sitting on the tailgate of his truck having his breakfast outside a tall, corrugated-tin warehouse. A flatbed semi was backed into the mouth of the cavernous building. The truck bore the logo of the company Mark worked for, Fleet Trucking, so he assumed that was the truck they would be driving out.

  Guided by a Mobile Loading Unit worker positioned on a scaffold, a crane inside the building was in the process of lowering a fourteen-pack of transuranic waste drums into one of three Trupact-II canisters on the truck. The canisters,which Dell liked to call Trupact Shakurs, were tall and round, eight-feet around and ten-feet high.

  The drums were bunched into tightly packed cylinders of seven, one on top of the other, which gave the thing the effect of bundled dynamite. Which wasn’t far from the truth, if you thought about it.

  They were halfway to Glenn’s truck when Dell clapped Mark on the shoulder. “I’m gonna go talk to Teddy,” he said, and headed toward an office building to the left of the parking lot.

  Teddy and Dell played pool for money in the tiny rec room that had been set up for workers during the off-shifts. Mark didn’t like that, but what could he say? “Be sure to be back by nine. That’s when we’re leaving.”

  Dell turned, started walking backwards. “That’s two and a half hours away. Why’d you want to come out so early?”

  “Just want to make sure everything’s okay,” Mark said.

  He knew what his cousin was thinking, because he said it often enough: What a pussy. But Mark couldn’t help it. He’d been careful all his life, and wasn’t about to change now. He wanted to talk to Glenn before he left, and as it was he was cutting it close.

  As he approached, Glenn looked up from the bear claw he was eating, grinning. “Hey, kid. What’s up?”

  What’s up? His life was over as he knew it, that was what was up.

  Glenn took a sip from his styrofoam cup of coffee. “There’s coffee up at the office, you want it.”

  Mark was in no mood for coffee. It would go right through him, and he was feeling queasy enough as it was. But there was a kind of thrill, too, as if someone had tugged on a little thread in his groin. Not a carnival ride feeling exactly, but the excitement was catching.

  He was about to change his life. And maybe that was just what was needed.

  Glenn’s face was pink in the early morning light, and he squinted and tugged down the brim of his Glenn Electric cap. “You might as well relax. You’ve got a long time before you go.”

  “I just wanted to go over it with you one more time. To make sure we’re on the same page.”

  Glenn slid down from the tailgate. “Sure. Why not?”

  Mark started for the truck.

  “Son, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” Glenn said. “That’s not your truck.” He started walking around the big warehouse. Mark followed, feeling the way he often did around Glenn, like a little brother trying to keep up.

  “There’s your truck,” Glenn said.

  It was another Fleet truck. The only difference was, the three canisters lined up on the flatbed were closed up now, the tops looking like close-fitting French berets, little buttons on top.

  Glenn said, “We did it early, so I could do the inspection work myself.”

  The inspections had been the trickiest thing, Mark knew. As a supervisor with MLU, the Mobile Loading Unit, Glenn Traywick often oversaw the four-step process and sometimes did it himself. “It’s all taken care of: the assay, headspace gas sampling, glove box exam, radiography.”

  Mark knew there were four steps, but didn’t really understand what they were except in the most general terms, so he took Glenn’s word for it. He just drove the trucks. “Seems like a lot of work to me, considering they’re supposed to be empty.”

  “Well, people around here like to make sure. Let’s go over this one more time. Where are you headed?”

  “Texas A&M.”

  “Which one?”

  “Come on, Glenn, I’m not stupid.” But he added, “College Station. Outside Waco.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Mark and Dell were supposed to be carrying empty canisters to Texas A&M, where an MLU team would load the nuclear waste into the Trupact II canisters from their lab there. It had been just luck—or Glenn’s finagling—that they had three empty waste casks here at the Nevada Test Site, because otherwise they would have gone out of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant at Carlsbad. This was, after all, a WIPP project.

  The casks themselves were reusable. Because they were going out marked empty, there would be no police escort. It was the only way something like this would work.

  Mark felt a flutter in his stomach as he looked at the tall casks. “Which one is it?”

  Glenn walked up to the canister immediately behind the cab and rapped on it. “That’s the one.”

  Mark flinched. He didn’t really like the idea of pounding on one of those things, even though they were supposed to be damage-proof. He’d never gotten used to towing this stuff, but he had done it, because this was the last time.

  A month in Kingman, keeping a low profile with Dell, and then he’d go to Indiana to be with his daughter Sarah. And Rhonda couldn’t say anything about it, not if he was willing to relocate to be near his daughter.

  And so that was what he thought as he looked at the tall canister, which seemed to swallow the light of the beautiful Mojave Desert morning. Think of the end game.

  Glenn checked his watch. “You might as well go get yourself some breakfast, maybe play a video game or something. Get your mind off it. I’ve got to
get going myself. Have to be in Salt Lake by this afternoon.”

  He turned to leave.

  “Glenn?”

  “What?”

  Mark could tell he was annoyed, but he plunged ahead anyway. “What about the checkpoint at the border?”

  “Uh-huh. Don’t worry about it.”

  “But—”

  Glenn looked disappointed in him. “Look, if you don’t want to do it, we can send Dell out by himself.”

  It took Mark right back to the days when he was in high school, and he went along for the ride just to be part of things—always the fifth wheel. He remembered the time Jimmy Hollings had taken them all for a ride in his new Camaro, got it up to a hundred miles an hour, and there he was, sitting in the back, keeping his mouth shut but desperately wanting to scream at the top of his lungs, “You’re gonna get us killed!” He had survived that night, but the stupid thing was, the next time they asked him if he wanted to go, he went. Now he’d been offered a chance to get out, which would have been the common sense thing to do. But he heard himself say, “They won’t send Dell out alone. You’d have to get another driver.”

  “I know of somebody. Might slow us down a little, but we’ll still get out today. Thing is, you’ve got to make up your mind. Then we can come up with an excuse.”

  “I’m going,” he insisted. “I just want to know what’s ahead of us.”

  “You’ve got to trust me, Mark. There aren’t going to be any problems at the border. You’ll sail right through. You’ll see.”

  Mark wanted to say something else, like the fact that the state inspectors at the California border were equipped to do the same tests Glenn had done this morning. Like, how many people were involved in this anyway?

  But he kept his mouth shut. He just watched as Glenn strode briskly over to his truck, climbed in, and peeled rubber out of there.

  As if he wanted to get away from here as fast as he could.

  Dana Ivory was cruising the Cottonwood Cove marina parking lot in the Security cart, thinking that the job couldn’t get much better. It was a beautiful morning here on the Colorado River and there weren’t many people up and about yet, the water a deep blue. It would be nice to be in a boat out on the lake, but this was almost as good. He even got a little breeze, although it would be a hot one later.

  He drove slowly along the rows of cars, motorhomes, and campers, looking for anything unusual. He had a sharp eye and had already busted a couple of teenagers smoking pot in this very parking lot.

  He’d just started up the last row along the fence when he saw it. “What have we here?” he said to himself, although he knew exactly what it was. His cousin had owned a car just like it in the seventies, same color even; it had been the coolest car around.

  The 1973 Dodge Challenger coupe had been backed in to the fence, a little apart from the other cars—probably to protect that lime green finish. Dana, who was something of a stock car enthusiast, knew he was looking at a twenty-thousand-dollar set of wheels: power bulge hood, twin air scoops, rally wheels, black R/T stripes on the side and hood, immaculate vinyl top which had to be original. From the front it looked like a shark.

  He got out for a better look. Walked around it, aware that if anyone saw him, they’d see his appreciation and recognize that this was a guy who knew his cars.

  There was a white decal on the back window—a spike-headed kid with a devilish grin, and underneath in Gothic lettering, the words: THE MEAN GREEN.

  The Mean Green. Cool name.

  He squeezed between the back of the car and the fence, came up along the driver’s side. To his amazement, he saw that the driver’s side window was open, the keys in the ignition. What kind of wingnut would leave a twenty-thousand-dollar classic car like this out in a parking lot with the keys in the ignition?

  He would have to call it in. The car probably belonged to a guest who had come in late last night, maybe from a party, maybe had a snootful and couldn’t remember he had left his car exposed to whatever predatory asshole came along.

  Lucky for him I’m here.

  He leaned in to look at the interior, checking to see if there was an alarm, but saw no flashing lights. Then a strange thing happened. One minute he was looking in through the window, and the next, he was sitting in one of the sleek black bucket seats, his hand on the key with the purple rabbit’s foot key fob.

  Just crank it over once.

  He looked around. Nobody in the parking lot that he could see.

  The key’s in the ignition. What do you expect, you leave a car like this with keys in it? Just kick it over, see what we’ve got here.

  He settled deeper into the bucket seat, his foot hovering over the accelerator. He took a breath, pressed his foot gently down, and turned the key. The Challenger’s powerful engine roared to life. He let up on the accelerator and it dropped to a throaty, comfortable rumble, reverberating off the fence, filling the whole marina with its sweet, perfect melody.

  The closer they got to the new port of entry a few miles inside the California state line, the worse Mark felt. The inspection station on State Route 127 had been erected specifically to monitor the waste trucks going from the Nevada Test Site to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant site in New Mexico. Mark and Dell had been through it many times in the last three months, but this time their load did not match the manifest.

  He hoped Glenn was right about the inspectors.

  To be fair, Glenn had been right about everything else. He had gotten Mark and Dell the job with Fleet Trucking easily. He had supplied their fake identities, and despite all the warnings about how scrupulous the DOE was about background checks, both he and Mark had sailed through. Glenn was someone you could trust, and Mark always felt better when he was around. But he wasn’t around now, and here was another hoop to jump through.

  He tried to calm himself by looking at the desert. To most people, the Mojave desert was as barren as a moonscape, but to Mark there was nothing more beautiful. He loved the subtle colors of the mountains, which ranged from black to plum to five shades of blue to purple to pink. The light seemed to shift like a kaleidoscope as the day went on. He loved the road, loved the open space. Now he tried to fill his eyes with the stark beauty—the alluvial fans that spread out at the base of the mountains and froze into place, biscuit-colored, dotted with sage, saltbush and creosote. More colors: silver, gray, and olive green. He had spent a lot of time around here looking for rocks on the high mountain passes in Death Valley off to the west, the Funeral and Amargosa mountains.

  He had studied this area—the geology, the biology, the history. He knew what he was looking at. From an early age, he’d always been the kind who wanted to label things. His ex-wife said he was anal retentive about it.

  He knew, for instance, that this area was all basin and range. He knew what the denizens were and the makeup of the rocks. He had found rocks in the mountains near his home, stones he had cut and polished and made into earrings and bracelets and necklaces for Sarah.

  This place was one of the loneliest on earth. The only signs of man were the power lines marching across the landscape from Boulder Dam and the black ribbon of road ahead of them, which at this time of day dipped in and out of the dead zone where mirages melted the road and blurred separate peaks together and pulled them back apart like taffy.

  Indiana would be nothing like this.

  Something wailed inside him. He’d already put his lapidary equipment into storage. He might never get back here to retrieve them—he knew that.

  And he’d already returned his desert tortoises to the government. That had been the worst.

  But he would see Sarah grow up. He would start a new life. And he, himself, would be different after this.

  “Here we are,” said Dell .

  Mark had been through the inspection process probably thirty times in eight states, but today was different. He felt as if something full and viscous were blocking his throat. How would he act? He wasn’t good at deception, never had bee
n. He kept reminding himself that Glenn had paid the guy off, but what if there was a last-minute change in personnel? What if this was a trap?

  His heart started to pound. His stomach felt like it was snarled in piano wire, cutting the top part of him off from the bottom. He felt like the top half of him could float away if he didn’t watch out.

  I’m going to blow it.

  They drove into the truck lane.

  The state inspector wore a dark blue uniform and matching baseball cap, and sunglasses like Bobby Burdette’s. The desert sunlight bounced off his badge.

  Despite his fears, Mark was expecting to be waved through. Glenn had always been right before, and he’d put his faith in that.

  But it didn’t happen. They were directed to park over on the right.

  His breathing got shallow. His hands were sweating, and beads of perspiration ran down his face.

  He wondered if he would ever see Sarah again.

  “Stay cool, man,” Dell said. “I’ll do the talking.”

  Dell looked cool. Twenty-eight years old and he acted like nothing could hurt him, like he was a super hero or something. He was the coolest liar Mark had ever seen.

  Dell handed the inspector the clipboard with their itinerary. Mentioned casually that, as the guy could see, the casks were empty, on their way to Texas A&M. Even joked about it. How he thought Texas was “bigger than shit, but no better.”

  Mark thought that was a little much.

  Still, it looked like they would be waved through.

  But the inspector surprised them by asking them to get out of the truck and walk over to the trailer while they did a Level One inspection and checked the load with a radiation detector for leaks.

  This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen! They’d know, the minute they got to the first canister behind the truck cab.

  As he and Dell waited on folding chairs in the shade of the trailer, Mark wondered what it would be like to be handcuffed, taken away in a squad car, booked.

  In this post 9/11 world, he knew they would throw the book at him.