The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

“I want to.”

  “So do I.”

  Laura thought about Traywick’s demeanor. He’d clearly wanted a deal. The thought of spending the rest of his life in prison had to be daunting, although he did not show much.

  He could just as easily be lying.

  Hard to tell.

  They would know, at some point soon, if it was a lie. Right now the people at NTS were double-checking their transuranic waste canisters, making sure all of them were accounted for. They had people crawling over all of them, doing tests, checking them for radiation. There were a slew of things they could do, she’d been told. The other truck, the one that had gone ahead, had already been checked out. Its load was intact. All three canisters were radioactive.

  She pictured Glenn Traywick’s face. He had seemed preternaturally calm, matter-of-fact. Hands clasped in front of him, waiting for the signal to talk. His lawyer clearing his throat. “Go ahead.”

  A big pause. Like he was setting up a punch line. And what a punch line it was.

  “I never switched canisters.”

  Laura not quite understanding. Watching his lips move, not getting what he was saying.

  Jon stiffening beside her, at full attention. “What are you saying?”

  “I thought Burdette might do something—guy’s crazy as a shithouse rat. I didn’t trust him, so I decided not to switch canisters.”

  Jon said slowly, “You’re saying there is no transuranic waste in those canisters?”

  Glenn Electric, the bill pulled down over his red forehead. “That’s what I’m saying.”

  The room quiet, almost a void, as they considered this.

  “He doesn’t know?”

  “Nope. Nobody knows.” He paused. “Except the five of us here.”

  When they were up, Traywick stowed in the seat behind them, Jon tried Peltier. He got Jordy Benteen, who must have been answering Peltier’s cell.

  “I’ve got good news.”

  “You just saved money on your car insurance?” Jordy deadpanned.

  Jon laughed. “Better than that.”

  He told him.

  “Empty?” demanded Peltier as he came on the line. “Are you shitting me, Service?”

  “Glenn Traywick never switched the canisters.”

  “How do you know that for sure?”

  “Well, I guess we don’t. Yet.”

  “What’d he tell you?”

  Jon went into chapter and verse. How Glenn Traywick didn’t trust Bobby Burdette, thought he was a loose cannon. Thought that if he were cornered, he might do something dangerous. Since the object of their scheme was to scare the public, just having one of those trucks in their possession would be enough to do the job. They would make all the cable news networks, and they would achieve their goal: to prove how dangerous moving trucks of transuranic waste was, how easily they could be hijacked. They didn’t need to endanger people any more than they had to. They just needed to make their point.

  Traywick had told them he loved fishing the Colorado River. He would never take a chance that it could be destroyed for generations.

  Never. On that point, he was adamant.

  Peltier said, “That would explain how they got through the California Port of Entry.” His voice wary.

  “Empty canisters, just like on the manifest.”

  “Hard to believe, though.”

  Jon said, “We should hear soon. There are only so many Trupact-II containers, and now every one of them’s been accounted for.” He added, “We’ll talk some more when we see you.”

  “What?”

  “We’re bringing Traywick. Just in case Burdette wants to talk to him.”

  “What do you mean we’re bringing him? Who’s we? You’re not bringing that woman, are you?”

  “Can’t not bring her. It’s her helicopter.”

  Jon Service ended the call and grinned at Laura.

  44

  Bobby Burdette had gone to another level. Maybe his molecules really had rearranged. Whatever it was, he felt serene, like it was meant to be. He wondered if soldiers felt like this when they met the enemy. Probably they didn’t have time to think at all. But he did.

  Maybe it was more like facing execution. Every sense heightened. Every feeling like a razor cutting into you. Feeling everything. Really living, for the first time.

  Two of the helicopters up above were for him. On this day, he was the most important person in the world. What he did in the next few hours would change the US economy, let alone Las Vegas and this godforsaken desert.

  Imagine, Las Vegas turned into a ghost town. A fence around it to keep everyone out. All those pricey resort casinos bulldozed back into the earth. And he was the one who held that potential in his hands.

  It was up to him. Everybody else out there in their black outfits and fancy SUVs with their radios, high-powered rifles, and helicopters—all of it was just window dressing.

  As he talked on the phone with the hostage negotiator, he saw himself from the outside. He was in complete control, even having a little fun with the guy. Saying one thing and then another—contradicting himself. Telling him the most amazing stories. How he saved his sister from a crazy killer when he was just four years old. How he was a paratrooper in the Army. Stuff they could check. Total bullshit.

  He saw his picture on the news. Hoped they didn’t use his mug shot from his stint in prison. He saw them poking into his past, talking to his mother, the neighbors. He always was quiet.

  “It’s not worth killing yourself for,” the negotiator said. “You agree on that, don’t you?”

  “You have a point.”

  Enjoying this.

  “Look, here’s the bottom line. Nothing’s happened yet. If you think about it, all that’s happened is you’re sitting in that truck, you haven’t done anything—”

  Suddenly, he heard another voice. “Let me have that.”

  Interesting. Bobby viewing it from his serene place, where he felt like he was riding on a pillow, and at the same time, the adrenaline was rushing through his veins—two distinct feelings at once.

  Better than the best pot in the world.

  “Burdette, we know something you don’t know,” the voice said briskly.

  “And what is that?” Smiling inside.

  “Your friend Glenn double-crossed you, buddy. You’re not sitting on any transuranic waste. Those canisters are empty.”

  For a moment he felt the good feeling flying up beyond his grasp. Grabbed at it, like the string to a kite.

  “You’re lying,” he said.

  “Glenn Traywick’s on his way. He can tell you himself.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “It’s the truth. You’ll see that. Look at the SWAT team. The whole game has changed. They want to take you out and now there’s no reason not to.”

  He squinted through the windshield at the SWAT team, the cars. They looked no different to him, but for the first time, he felt a hairline crack in his confidence. “I don’t believe you.”

  “We’re not gonna wait long now. You can talk to Traywick, and if that doesn’t work, you’re toast.”

  Bobby hit END.

  Prick!

  They were trying to mess with his head. What an obvious lie. He should have been prepared for that.

  Traywick wouldn’t do that.

  Would he?

  Bobby didn’t know Traywick well enough to be sure. It didn’t make sense, though. It had to be a trick.

  But he could feel it in his gut, a kind of tiny wailing sound, like someone calling from the bottom of his soul. Asking him if he’d done all this for nothing.

  45

  Laura had been relegated to the back of the unit. She could see the truck, but that was about it.

  All the units were far enough back from Burdette’s truck that damage from even a big explosion would be minimized. If it was just an explosion. She hoped Glenn Traywick had been telling the truth.

  Bobby Burdette had heard what Glenn Traywick h
ad to say.

  There was no reply.

  Calls to his phone were left unanswered.

  It had been an hour since the last time they tried. She knew that Peltier was about at the end of his patience. The sun was sinking like a bloodshot eye below the western mountains, turning them pinkish-purple.

  What was he doing in there?

  The wind swatted at her like an angry cat. Hopefully, when the sun went down the wind would die out.

  She leaned against one of the vehicles, her back bothering her. Thirsty, tired, sweaty, her eyes watering from the wind. Her back starting to ache. She had put lip balm on her lips probably five or six times since she’d been here, but it didn’t seem to do any good.

  Did Bobby Burdette believe them?

  She had no way of knowing.

  The hostage negotiator had taken to using the megaphone, but there was no answer.

  It was quiet except for the wind. When the sun went down it would be cold, too. Someone had set up lights, which made things eerier, the shadows stretching out along the road. It felt like a stadium. And this was the sport.

  Peltier pacing back and forth, looking at his watch. Suddenly he stopped, looked at Handley, the negotiator, and made a cutting motion to his throat. He strode over, took the megaphone.

  “Bobby Burdette, throw out your keys and come out, hands on your head. Come out now!”

  No reply.

  “If you don’t come out now, we will take you. I have a sniper on you. Throw out your keys! Do it now!”

  Silence. The truck standing there in the glare of the high-intensity lights. Immovable. Light flaring off the windshield, making it opaque. Impossible to see in.

  “Throw out your keys! Do. It. Now.”

  Laura was aware of an almost imperceptible movement among the SWAT team, like a breeze through a cornfield. And then, stillness.

  “Bobby Burdette—”

  The rest of Peltier’s words were drowned out in the explosion.

  46

  The shock stayed with Laura long after the debriefing, which took them well into the night. The memory still raw, the way they cleared out—fast—a panicked rear guard action. An orderly retreat. There would be cleanup, but not by them. There would be crime scene investigation, but not by them.

  The incredible media circus.

  The hours at the FBI headquarters in Vegas. All of them, including Peltier, seemingly lost and trying to focus. Shocked. Peltier’s arrogance gone. And through it all, the scene kept replaying itself in Laura’s mind. She had seen the detonation before she had heard it: the almost incremental rise of the truck’s hood in slow motion, lifting up along with the top of the cab, starting to settle into new, less-familiar lines—before disintegrating into spouts of shooting flame and boiling black smoke, an oily miasma filling the red-stained sky. The sound deafening.

  Debris raining down, all of them enveloped in smoke. Laura’s first panicked thought was also the one that stayed with her: What if Glenn Traywick had lied?

  And another question: What could they have done different? That was the big question, and one that had no answer.

  For Laura’s part, she thought there was nothing they could have done to make it turn out differently.

  Bobby Burdette’s big moment had come, and he had not flinched from it. He’d had his chance at immortality, and he took it.

  Everything she had been told about him this long day backed up that hypothesis.

  Laura boarded the DPS helicopter just before dawn, weary to the bone. The word that had come in from the cleanup crews was good. There were small traces of radioactivity, but nothing commensurate with a tank of transuranic waste. But even so, the fear had worn itself a path into Laura.

  Flying back in the pure pink light of dawn, the desert floor warming to the sun, the shadows deep, the land below them like a nubby blanket of sage, Laura could see the trucks, the tankers, the men in white suits and masks, the piles of white plastic bags. Working their way through the charred ruins of the Fleet truck and the Trupact-II containers.

  The containers were intact. Bobby’s explosives, it seemed, hadn’t made a dent in them. They lay like beer kegs after an all-night party, scattered on the desert earth’s surface.

  Not enough explosive to do the job. Bobby Burdette must have known that.

  When Laura got to Flagstaff, she checked into the motel, closed the drapes, stripped off all her clothes, and crawled under the sheets. She did not wake until late that evening.

  She was hungry, but when the food came at the same coffee shop she’d eaten at before, it didn’t look good to her. Looking down at the steak and potato (“watch out, the plate is hot” ) she called her house and got her machine. Needing to talk to Tom after what had happened. Still seeing Bobby’s truck disintegrating, then turning into a missile.

  No one there to pick up. This was the third time she’d called and left a message.

  When her cell phone rang a few seconds later, she felt almost giddy. “Tom?”

  “Uh, no. This is Brandon. Brandon Terry.” Dan Yates’s roommate. “You wanted to talk to me?”

  Laura swallowed her disappointment and asked him a few questions, more to wrap things up than anything else. He had little to add to Steve Banks’s account of the day Dan and Kellee left for Las Vegas.

  “There’s nothing that stands out?” she asked wearily, feeling like a broken record. How many times had she asked that question?

  “I can’t think of anything …”

  “Well, thanks for—”

  “A friend of his showed up later that day. Is that the kind of thing you mean?”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know, I was just getting ready to go to class. Quarter of eleven, maybe?”

  “Which friend was this?” Laura picturing thirty-eight-year-old Bobby Burdette, all swagger and dark sunglasses.

  “I don’t know. Probably someone he knew from class.”

  Class?

  “Can you describe him?”

  “He was my age—”

  Laura straightened. “Your age? What did he look like?”

  “Just your average guy. I do remember he was upset, though. Really mad he missed Dan. You could tell he was pissed.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t know. He was just upset. The way he acted.”

  “Did he give you a name?”

  “He did, but I can’t remember it.”

  Laura asked him a few more questions, but he couldn’t think of anything else.

  A kid looking for Dan. It could mean nothing. Probably meant nothing. But she’d give a great deal to know who it was.

  47

  The ophthalmologist was cute. Not good-looking—cute. He was in his mid-thirties, and had an open, friendly face. His brown hair flopped in a bang over his forehead as he scooted around the darkened room on his little rolling chair, his quickness and the lab coat reminding her of some long-ago movie starring Groucho Marx.

  He asked her to recount the last couple of instances when her vision went haywire. She did. A stickler for detail, she even told him about the ice.

  “Ice? Oh, for those circles under your eyes.” He had been looking at her chart on the low table by the door. Now he zoomed across the space between them, looming up close to her face, his eyes searching. Shining a light on her face. “You know, we can fix that.”

  “What?”

  “Just a little snip here and pull this tight—it’s a simple operation.”

  Laura felt something shake loose inside her. If he was talking plastic surgery, the prognosis couldn’t be that bad.

  “I used to do that kind of work, but now I’m strictly ophthalmology But I know a good guy who could do it. Let me know if you want his name. Insurance doesn’t cover it, though …” He tapped the chart against his knee, thinking.

  She wanted to scream, What’s wrong with my eyes?

  “You probably want to know what’s going on.”

  Duh.


  “You’ve got ocular migraines. It’s obvious—it’s either that or a brain tumor.”

  “I don’t have a brain tumor?”

  He shook his head. “Not likely.”

  He told her about ocular migraines. They were like migraines, but instead of giving her headaches and nausea, they caused a halo effect around her vision. “Harmless, but a pain in the ass. Stress brings them on, so if you can eliminate stressors, you’re home free.”

  How simple it sounded. Eliminate stressors. Right.

  “Also, if I were you, I’d stop using ice. No wonder you got ocular migraines—you must have frozen half your cranium.”

  Laura had made the appointment from the Tucson airport and gone straight there. Debated going home, but there were too many things she had to do, so she drove back to DPS afterward.

  Richie gave her the bad news as soon as she came in.

  “The shell cartridge doesn’t match Bobby Burdette’s shotgun.”

  “He had other guns.”

  “None of them were 12-gauge.”

  “He could have ditched it.”

  Richie nodded. “But that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Anyway, the dirtbag’s dead, so it’s a moot point.”

  “Swell.” She walked to her desk. Five or six “While You Were Out” slips sitting there waiting for her. She looked through them all, hoping one of them was from Tom.

  No such luck.

  She sat down, feeling oddly disconnected. From the place, from the other detectives, from the world. At least her eyes were all right.

  She closed said eyes now, feeling disoriented. That familiar tightness in her chest. The need to know what was going on with Tom, needing to pinpoint the source of bad feelings rising up in her throat. Maybe it was just what she’d seen: Bobby Burdette’s truck rearranging itself in the air over the Mojave.

  She sat there for a few minutes. Remembering the billboard she’d seen on the way to the airport in Flagstaff this morning: CHOOSE LIFE.

  The people who paid for the billboard were referring to abortion. But it made her think of Bobby Burdette. He’d had an image to protect; he’d seen himself a certain way. She thought that picture of himself was more important to him than the reality.