V
The cops almost missed him.
When they came, they nearly drove right by, which would have been fine with Hank. The Suburban was already past the wrecked Subaru when its brake lights flared up, bathing the dark roadway in a soft red glow. Hank watched the Suburban slow to a stop and couldn’t tell if they’d noticed his car as they went by or if it was the trail of fresh black skid marks that caused them to stop.
Whatever it was, they were stopped in the center of the road with their high beams glaring off into nothing. After a few seconds, the Suburban did a three-point turn. Its headlights swept wide across the desert, coming to rest on Hank, the totaled car, and the pile of smashed gear he’d gathered up.
They didn’t flip on the red and blues—Hank figured he didn’t look dangerous—they just pulled up on the side of the road and left the high beams on him. Hank squinted into the light and watched a shadowy figure get out of each side of the vehicle and come toward him.
“You alright?”
Hank couldn’t tell which one was talking. He stood and took a couple steps toward them and said, “Oh, I think I’m just fine.” He pointed his thumb back over his shoulder and smiled. “The car’s seen better days though.”
“I can see that.” It was the one on the right who was talking. The one who’d been driving. As they got closer, Hank could see that he was older and wore a star on his left breast pocket. It struck Hank as an odd bit of the old west, and he wondered briefly if these guys were really cops at all. Then Hank noticed that the young deputy had a flashlight out and was shining it on him, a useless effort in the flood of the high beams. That gave it away. They were real cops alright, sticking to procedure—if it’s nighttime, you use a flashlight, regardless—only a real cop, and a young one at that, would do something so pointless.
The sheriff looked to be around fifty—fit and tan—he stood far enough away to be out of Hank’s reach, but close enough to seem friendly. His posture was relaxed, but his right hand rested on his hip, just above his gun, the holster of which he’d unsnapped before he got out of the Suburban. Hank thought it was a pretty good act, and it told him the sheriff was an old pro. But the young guy just looked nervous. The beam of his silly flashlight wavered a little and gave him away. He was the kind of skittish young cop who would jump at the wrong thing, with the wrong guy, and turn a simple situation into something ugly, maybe even get himself killed someday.
Hank knew he needed to talk to the sheriff before the eager beaver found the leg in the car on his own. He said, “Man, I sure am glad you guys came along. I wasn’t sure what I was gonna do.”
“You lose a tire?” the sheriff asked.
“No, no, the car was fine. I was coming down the road about sundown and this damned coyote just ran right out in front of me. I hit it and it came through the windshield and, well, you can see how it turned out. I gotta tell you though, it’s the damnedest thing. The coyote, uh …” Hank gave it a pause. “Well, you should just see for yourself. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to disturb it. It seemed like a crime scene or something.” Hank shrugged and shook his head, giving them his best well-I’ll-be-a-fucked-monkey grin.
The sheriff said, “Billy, go have a look in the car.” The deputy darted off behind Hank and the sheriff asked, “What are you doing out here anyway?”
Hank barely had time to say “I’m a surveyor” before Billy started hollering in the background.
“Ah, goddamn! Chief! Chief! Jesus Christ, you gotta see this.”
The sheriff held his eyes on Hank for a long second, watching him, looking for signs of nervousness and not finding any. He saw Hank’s hiking boots, his rumpled slacks, and the thin mesh vest with all the pockets and zippers hanging loose over a T-shirt with a mountain printed on the pocket. The sheriff supposed the guy looked enough like a surveyor. But the way Billy was carrying on in the background, there was definitely something wrong.
“Well let’s go have us a look.” The sheriff motioned for Hank to go first. When they got to the car, Billy hung back, keeping an eye on Hank. The sheriff took the flashlight from the deputy and leaned in through the driver’s side window. “Jesus H,” he muttered, and tried without success to open the car door.
“Goddamn, Chief,” Billy said from behind them. “What do you think?”
The sheriff turned to face Hank, disregarding his deputy’s question, and looked him over one more time. Then, without explanation, the sheriff handed the flashlight back to the deputy and walked off into the darkness, out into the road, following the trail of skid marks, switching on his own flashlight as he went. The night seemed to swallow him, so that all Hank could see was the crisp circle of light bouncing in the darkness as the sheriff traced the tracks of the accident. Some forty yards behind the suburban, the flashlight stopped and settled on a single spot.
The sheriff crouched down in the road at a place where the skid marks had already started. There was a spatter of dried black liquid between the two tire tracks. He turned around slowly, bringing the flashlight in a wide circle back toward the Suburban and the stranger and the wrecked car. He paused again. Fifteen feet further he could see the sparkle of bits of broken glass. He stood and walked to them. There were only a few, but they were the small, oddly geometrical pieces left behind when safety glass shatters from a high impact. Something had been hit in the road and gone through the windshield of a car. The skid marks told the rest of the story. The evidence would be too hard to fake, and why would someone fake it anyway? So the real questions were: whose leg was in the car, and where did the coyote find it?
When the sheriff returned, his expression seemed different, less suspicious and more perplexed. Hank watched him go around and inspect the front of the car. As he leaned over, the sheriff asked casually, “Surveyor, eh?”
It caught Hank off guard. No one had spoken for several minutes. “Uh, that’s right.”
“What are you doing out here?” The sheriff stood and came back around to look in the driver’s window again.
“Out here to do some mapping of the Egg Rock Basin.”
“Oil company?”
“Excuse me?”
The sheriff pulled his head out of the window and looked back over his shoulder at Hank. “You work for an oil company?”
“Oh, no sir, I’m out here on a project for the University of Tennessee. Taking measurements for the geology department.” Hank smiled and looked over at the pile of broken equipment. “I was only planning on a few days, but it looks like my plans have changed.”
The sheriff smiled. “You don’t sound like you’re from Tennessee.”
“Grew up in Brooklyn. But I work in Knoxville now.” Hank nodded as he said it and hoped like hell the sheriff didn’t have family there.
“That’s gotta be quite a change.”
“Oh, it is. But houses are cheaper and the traffic’s better. Quality of life, you know how it is.”
“Sure. Lots of folks leave the big city for the quiet life. Happens every day.” The sheriff stood and wiped his hands together, as if trying to get dust off of them, then put his hands on his hips and smiled. “Well, there ain’t much we can do tonight. Everyone’s gone home or gotten drunk by now.” The sheriff turned to the deputy, who’d been standing in one spot for five solid minutes. “Billy, get yourself some gloves and a plastic bag and fish that leg outta there. Goddamned scavengers will have it gone by morning.”
Billy hesitated a second, as if debating whether the sheriff was serious, and then ran off toward the Suburban. The sheriff stuck out his hand. “Sheriff Mickey O’Reilly.”
“Hank Norton.” Hank stuck out his hand, telling himself the sheriff didn’t look Irish. They shook and the sheriff looked over at the pile of gear.
“Well, looks like you need a ride into town.” Mickey raised his eyebrows and smiled, “We got us a real nice new motel.”
VI
Doctor Theodore Ross looked exactly like a scientist.
Victor
watched him fidget in his chair as people filed into the conference room and waited for the meeting to begin. In his brown pants, white shirt, and yellow tie, with his hair gelled solidly in place and his glasses halfway down the bridge of his nose, Victor imagined that Ted Ross had been transported to Southern Petroleum from an early 60s high school science film as a result of some bizarre experiment gone awry. That they were there to talk about radiation made the image all the more appropriate. Victor smiled and gave Tom Crossly an elbow.
“What?” Tom turned and looked down at Victor’s elbow.
Victor whispered, “Check out this Ross guy.”
“What do you mean?”
Kevin Marshall, the Chief Operating Officer of Southern Petroleum, came in with three note-taking assistants before Victor could answer, and the room clamored to silence. Marshall took his seat at the head of the conference table, drummed his fingers on the table a couple of times, and watched the last few stragglers fumble with notepads and laptops and briefcases. When the room was completely quiet, Marshall looked over at the head of research and development and nodded. “We ready?”
The head of R&D stood up, looking nervous, like he never had to deal with people normally, let alone speak to an entire room full of them. “Uh, yes, thanks for coming everyone.”
Victor rolled his eyes and leaned over to whisper to Tom, “Like we’re doing this guy a favor.”
“As I’m sure you all know,” the head of R&D went on, “we believe we have a minor leak in one of our lines.” A projector threw an image on a screen representing Southern Petroleum’s various pipelines and collection points. It covered much of Southern California with an array of lines on the map radiating outward from the Long Beach refinery. The man stood in front of the map with a long pointer, the image from the projector covering his body. He pointed at the map with the pointer.
“Now we first noticed the problem at the collection point here, just outside of Rancho Cucamonga. This center represents the intersection of three lines: the Coachella line, which starts in Indio; the Bakersfield line; and the Monarch line, which starts in Nickelback. Now each of these lines is responsible for transporting the oil from the various independent oil wells in the surrounding area down to the Rancho Cucamonga point, where it all goes into a larger line and makes its way down to Long Beach to the refinery here.” He traced the routes with the pointer, showing the flow of oil, like tributaries dumping into a larger river.
Then he said, “The folks in Rancho Cucamonga have calculated that they’re losing roughly twelve to twenty thousand gallons a day, and have been for nearly two weeks. This figure is determined by adding up the gallons input at the beginning of each of the three lines and subtracting out the number of gallons that arrive at the Rancho Cucamonga facility.”
The projector switched off and the head of R&D collapsed the pointer into a one-foot rod. He cleared his throat and continued, glancing at Marshall to gauge how it was going. “Now, we’ve had some planes fly over the routes that these lines run, looking for spots on the ground that could be a leak, but so far nothing obvious has come up. This could be attributable to a number of factors. Often the pipe is buried deep enough that a leak wouldn’t necessarily reveal itself on the surface, at least not right away. In many places, development has crowded over the pipeline such that the surface is obscured completely, and in other areas, such as around Bakersfield and Nickelback, the flatness of the terrain and the absence of landmarks makes it difficult to ascertain from the air exactly where the lines run.”
Marshall cleared his throat and all of the heads at the table turned simultaneously to look at him. “Now,” he cut in, “I’ve spoken to legal about this and, just among the people in this room, we’re in some serious shit here. They’ve told us to stop sending oil through the lines until we figure out where the leak is. The last thing we want to do is poison some groundwater and end up in a major lawsuit. Of course, as of today we’re still sending oil through, the way oil prices have recovered, we can’t afford not to. We’ve already cut all the corners we can and laid as many people off as we can, and our stock is still near its fifty-two week low. So as of now, we’re still pumping oil. But damn it, we’ve got to find that leak before we have a leak around here and the story finds its way into the newspapers.”
Everyone around the table nodded and took notes and mumbled to each other about how finding the leak sounded like a really good idea. Victor smirked and shook his head. He’d heard the same kinds of ridiculous speeches at the Bureau—now look, boys, what we really need to do is bring the crime rate down!—brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Victor had seen a million Kevin Marshalls and they were all the same: officials talking endlessly about nothing at all, making careers out of pointing out the obvious. It was the Victor Joneses of the world, the guys in the trenches, the guys putting it on the line who got shit done. But it was the hot, blathering winds flowing out of guys like Kevin Marshall that people paid attention to.
As usual, there was more, and Marshall went on. “I want everyone in this room to know that we’re doing everything we can to find it. That’s the story I want everyone to communicate. If someone asks about a leak, we need to make it clear that we have not yet confirmed that there is a leak, but we’re doing everything we can to ensure the safety of the community.” He slapped his hand on the table for emphasis and then looked up at the head of R&D. “Tony, you had an idea?”
“Uh, well, it wasn’t actually my idea, sir, it was Doctor Ross who came up with it.” Tony tapped Ted Ross on the shoulder and smiled sheepishly. Marshall was giving him a look that said, you poor son of a bitch, that’s why you’ll always be stuck in middle management, you’re too damned honest to steal other people’s ideas.
Ted Ross stood up as Tony sat down. He scratched behind his neck and spoke slowly. “Yeah, uh, one of the things we thought about doing was placing radioactive isotopes into the delivery stream and tracking the migration of the radiation until we isolated the affected area.”
The room was silent. Eyes blinked on blank faces. Ted Ross looked around the table and wasn’t sure what to say next. He couldn’t say it any clearer than that. In the awkward silence, Victor suddenly felt sorry for the guy and cut in. “What he’s saying is they can put radiation in the oil and then measure the radiation in the ground along the pipeline and, wherever you find a buildup of radiation, you’ve probably found the leak.”
“So what, we’re talking about pouring nuclear waste through our pipes?” Marshall laughed. “That sounds nuts to me.”
Ted Ross shook his head slightly. “Uh, actually, we’re talking about miniscule trace amounts of stable radioactive material, just enough to really stand out from background radiation so you can distinguish the oil from everything else below the surface.” There was silence again. “It’s perfectly safe. It doesn’t harm the oil or anything else. Once the small amount that comes in from these three lines is mixed with other oil at the refinery and processed, the radiation level will not be noticeably different from background radiation.”
Victor could tell the silence in the room was irritating Ross. But Ross continued, “Look, when all of the independent wells out there in Indio, Nickelback, and Bakersfield pump their oil out of the ground and bring it to the collection points, there’s already radiation in it. Everything has radiation in it. If you turned a Geiger counter on in this room, it would pick up radiation. We’re talking about adding a small amount to it so that it has just a little more than normal, that way, wherever we find an increase in the radiation level along the line, we’ll know that’s where an excess of oil has stockpiled and that’s where the leak is.”
Marshall hesitated for a moment. He wasn’t the kind of man who liked to defer to people on things he didn’t understand. But Ted Ross looked like a guy who knew what he was talking about. Finally, Marshall said, “Well, as long as you can assure me it’s safe. I can’t imagine the news stories if something like this got out—radioactive oil contaminating the ground
water—or some such nonsense.”
Marshall leaned into the table and rested his elbows on it. He looked around at the faces and paused until they were all staring back at him. After a few seconds of shaking his head, he said, “Well, if this is safe, then I guess go ahead and do it. Do we need to hire somebody to do something like this?”
“No sir,” Ted Ross responded, “we can do it in-house.”
Marshall pushed himself back from the table and stood. “Well, Doctor Ross,” Marshall grinned, “I hope you like the desert, cuz I want your ass out there tonight.”
VII
Fucking coyotes.
That’s all Eddie Gates could think when he heard about it on the local radio report. He slammed his hand on the narrow kitchen table and sent a wave of coffee sloshing over the edge of the cup and onto his plate of toast, soaking the bread. “Motherfucker,” he mumbled, lifting the cup off the table and trying to contain the spill with the edge of his other hand.
Eli came in from the hallway, barely awake and scratching at his wild hair. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me, man. It’s the news. The radio said some asshole was driving in on the south road last night and ran into a coyote.” Eddie forgot about the coffee and stared at Eli, waiting for him to ask what else. The coffee worked its way to the edge of the table and began running onto the faded yellow linoleum.
Eli shrugged, “So what?”
“So what? I’ll tell you so what. Apparently the coyote this guy hit was carrying some guy’s fucking leg.” Eddie raised his eyebrows, like a mime faking laughter. “Now how many bodies do you think are lying out there in the desert right now?”
“I dunno. Twenty?”
“This shit ain’t funny.” Eddie got up and snatched a dishtowel off the counter and tossed it on the puddle of coffee, then sat back at the table. His elbow stuck to something when he leaned his head on it. “This goddamned place is a fucking mess.”
$200 and a Cadillac Page 3
