Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series)

by Toni Dwiggins

  The vehicle parked beside it was another beast entirely.

  Half forklift, half crane, all business. It had a telescoping crane boom with its grappling arms wide open, as if for a hug. Slotted into one side were attachments: hooks, fork tines, a scoop. It had pneumatic tires with deep treads. It looked like it could go anywhere.

  Arrayed against the mine wall were open crates of protective gear. Gloves, booties, suits, silvery tarps.

  Hap whistled—surprise, marvel. “Lookee here. Boy’s got his own setup.”

  Soliano eyed Ballinger. “This equipment is from your facility?”

  Ballinger gaped. “Knothead helped himself to the store.”

  One thing I knew for certain—Roy Jardine was in no way a knothead. Or, despite the events of last night, a screwup. This setup showed a level of competence that put me on high alert.

  Soliano made a slow survey of the room. “I believe we have found the place of the swap. Mr. Ballinger, tell me how it is done.”

  Ballinger jerked. “Me?”

  “Easy Milt,” Hap said, “Hector just wants you to role-play. Pretend you’re Roy.”

  “No friggin way.”

  “If you please,” Soliano said. “You know this equipment, Mr. Ballinger. I wish your perspective.”

  Ballinger gave Soliano a cautious look, then a nod.

  “And so. You steal a cask, bring it here—perhaps in your blue Ford pickup. And here you fill it with talc, using this...forklift?”

  “Telehandler,” Ballinger said sourly. “Roy could’ve.”

  “Very good. So now you have a cask of talc. Meanwhile, your partner Ryan Beltzman approaches on the highway—that is the radwaste truck route?”

  “That little twerp,” Ballinger said, “he was in on it?”

  “Difficult to make the swap on your own, yes?”

  “Wouldn’t know.”

  Soliano’s face incised into a smile. “Let us put it all together. It is late night, little traffic, so Mr. Beltzman pulls just off the highway so the transponder will not show anything odd. And there he waits. Can you deliver the talc cask to him?”

  “Sure I can.” Ballinger’s chest roostered out. “I mean, Roy can. Telehandler holds the cask like a baby. Drives like a dream. Go right out that tunnel down to the highway. Set the talc cask on the flatbed, pick up the resin cask.” Ballinger warmed to it. “I’d do it remote for the hot load—telly’s remote-operable. Then drive it back up here and set the resin cask in that trailer. Trailer’ll handle it.”

  Soliano was nodding. “And then what?”

  “Then the twerp takes the dummy cask with the shipment to the dump, and the knothead takes the resin cask wherever he friggin takes it.”

  “The depot, we will call it. Where would you site the depot?”

  “With that rig,” Ballinger indicated the offroader-trailer, “I’d be going somewhere off in the wild.”

  “What would you do when you got there?”

  “Unload the friggin cask. With a telly. Remember, knothead stole two of my telehandlers.”

  Soliano kept nodding. “And then?”

  “Come back here.”

  “Ah yes. Ready for the second swap, when the time comes. Last night. Which, to your dismay, went wrong.”

  Ballinger snorted. “Maybe I’m not such a hotshot.”

  “More than a mistake, I think. You, or your partner, shot out the tires. To stop the procedings, yes?”

  “Why I’d do that?”

  “Cold feet? Change of plans?” Soliano flipped a hand. “In any case, there follows the chase—Mr. Beltzman in his truck, Mr. Jardine in his pickup.”

  Soliano, I noticed, had just switched to calling the perp Jardine, instead of putting Ballinger in that role. Ballinger seemed to notice too.

  “And then,” Soliano said coolly, “we come to the end of the scenario. The crash, the shooting.”

  “Almost,” Ballinger said, easy now. “Then Roy comes into work this morning. That’s just nutso.”

  Maybe, I thought. But Jardine had learned something at work, hadn’t he? He learned he was leaving tracks. In talc. I’d made that plain enough, letting him know who was the geologist and who wasn’t.

  “If this scenario is correct,” Walter said, “where is the resin cask now?”

  We looked, as one, at the telehandler with its open arms empty. We’d seen the talc cask at the crash site. More than seen. So that meant the resin cask was here, last night, snuggled in the telly’s arms like a toxic baby. So at some point Jardine came back to retrieve it? I figured I knew when: while we were shopping and eating and going about our business in Beatty. I said, chilled, “Jardine got the jump on us.”

  Hap whistled again. “Boy’s got cojones.”

  “That he has.” Soliano regarded Hap. “And what does a boy with cojones do with this cask?”

  “My turn to be Roy?” Hap shuddered. “Depends on his motive. Who knows? That boy’s brainpan is beyond my ken.”

  I said, “What about the drawing on the radwaste truck?”

  “You asking,” Hap said, “what if the boy unleashes the beads?”

  I nodded.

  Hap ducked.

  ~

  We had no idea where Jardine had gone from here. We had no soils from his blue Ford pickup to trace. So Walter and I went to the offroader rig: here was something we might be able to follow. Find the depot where he stored his toxic babies.

  Walter opened the field kit.

  Soliano herded the others out, promising to return with his trace analysis techs. I doubted they’d have much more luck here than they’d had at the crash site. Jardine was surely equally fastidious in here. Protocol, certainly, to wear protective clothing when you’re playing swap with radioactive waste. And even when you panic. I could see Jardine—couple hours ago? Spooked, rushing, but protocol says you suit up first. I hoped, fervently, that he’d worked up a nasty sweat. I no longer pitied him, with his sad face. I wanted to put him away, down deep somewhere where the sun don’t shine. I wanted to find his toxic cargo and see it buried where it belonged and it damn well didn’t belong running around on little cat feet out in the environment.

  I yanked open my field kit and spilled half the contents.

  Walter looked. “Focus, dear.”

  I inhaled, exhaled. That Zen thing.

  We set to work. Walter began with the trailer and I took the offroader.

  The treads of all the tires were ripe with dried mud but that didn’t set my heart racing. Oh, we’d likely be able to ID it but there’d be no way to tell in what order the mineral components had been acquired. With every rotation of the wheels, the tires would have mashed the stuff, mixing the new with the old.

  I decided to start on the fenders, where there should be something worth having. Tires mash soil but they also kick up glop onto the underside of fenders, which preserve and protect, one layer after another. I squatted at the right rear fender and shined my flashlight deep underneath. It was lovely. I made three cuts then slid my scalpel down to the metal and pried out a fine wedge of soil. I placed it gently in the specimen dish so as not to spoil the sequence of deposition.

  The trailer, unfortunately, had no fenders. Walter made do with the tires.

  ~

  We came out of the tunnel with our little ice chest packed with samples and told Soliano we’d need a few hours in our makeshift lab to build a soil map.

  Hap was stretched out in the shade. “Map?” He lifted his sombrero. “Where y’all going?”

  “To hell.” Chickie spat. She sat on the tailings heap. She’d claimed to have no knowledge of what was stored in her unused tunnel, and there was no evidence linking her to Jardine. No probable cause for Soliano to detain her. Still, she remained, keeping watch on her mine.

  Walter said, mild, “Hell is not on the itinerary.”

  I presumed not.

  “Jardine left a trail,” Walter said. “We’ll be following it.”

  Soliano looked at his watch. “
Good. Alert me before you leave. My agents and Mr. Hemmings’ team will be expanding the search around here. We must select a place to rendezvous, at the end of the day.” He thought. “We will establish headquarters at park headquarters—Furnace Creek. Check in at the ranger station.”

  We were huddling like high-school freshmen to exchange cell phone numbers when I reminded myself to ask Scotty if he could spare a couple gallons of Wal-Mart water for our field trip.

  13

  Roy Jardine had a problem.

  There was hot cargo in the bed of his pickup, and his pickup was registered in his name, and that was not being incognito.

  Last night, sitting at home in his Lazy-boy, he had wrestled with the problem of the resin cask. After the showdown with Beltzman, after things went critical, he had decided the safe thing was to leave the cask where it was, in the talc mine. Then this morning, Jardine had gone undercover at the dump to do recon—and that turned out to be a real smart decision. He’d learned what the enemies were up to. He’d had a bad moment when Mister FBI questioned him, but he’d played that real cool. The real danger was the geologists with their talc-sniffing noses.

  That changed everything. He’d barely had time to get to the mine and recover the cask.

  But he’d aced it.

  And then he had to decide what to do with it.

  He couldn’t deliver it for use in the grand mission because he needed the trailer rig, and that loser Beltzman had crippled it.

  This cask was an orphan now.

  Orphaned cask. New enemies. The math was clear. The only thing that wasn’t clear was how and when he would use it against them. Until that became clear, he needed to store it.

  So here he was traveling this two-lane road with a hot cargo, checking the rearview mirror so often his neck hurt. Nobody on this road but jackrabbits. And him. He checked the rearview. The cask rode low because he had loaded it on its side so it would look incognito under the tarp. He was proud how he’d improvised. He’d used a lead curtain from the supply box—and the curtain had grommets! And he had bungee cords in his toolbox! And voila, as snooty people say. And the tarp did more than just shield the cask. He’d filled the pickup bed with talc, for more shielding, and the tarp kept the talc from flying away. Tarp and talc, two layers of shielding. In job eighteen redundancy was a lifesaver that he’d taken to heart. He would have liked to stay dressed out—triple redundancy—but that wouldn’t be incognito.

  Where he was going, he had to look normal.

  He needed a safe place to store the pickup and its cargo and then he needed to rent a car. He needed to do these two things without drawing attention. The best place to do this, he’d decided, was Las Vegas.

  He took jackrabbit roads when he could. When he hit the highway he drove the speed limit.

  When he reached Vegas all went smoothly. The clerk at the self-storage warehouse didn’t give a crap what was under the tarp. The clerk at the Hertz didn’t give a crap who he was, didn’t notice that his name was fake because he’d planned weeks ago that he’d need a cover and he’d spent time on the details of the perfect fake ID.

  How about that. The skills of his eleventh crap job—clerk at the DMV—turned out to be useful all these years later.

  After leaving Vegas he tooled along the highway riding high. Incognito in his crap rental car, with his ponytail tucked up under the Budweiser ballcap he’d bought at the Rite-Aid. He’d be at his hideout in a few hours and when he got there he’d treat himself to a sponge bath.

  He made a call on his cell phone. Nothing new, he was told. Call me when there is, he said. He hung up; it was illegal to talk on the phone while driving.

  He drove all the way into Death Valley, just another tourist in his cheap rental car, and he parked at the Ranch motel in Furnace Creek in plain sight with all the other rental cars. From there, he had a long hike ahead of him. His nerves were strung tight until he cleared the settlement and disappeared into the canyons.

  He hiked up to a ridgetop for good cell reception and phoned again. It rang and rang. Okay, that just meant no privacy to answer his call. How obvious was that? He’d try again in five minutes.

  It sure was hot. He opened his pack and selected a foil bag but he couldn’t tear it open with sweaty fingers.

  He got out the Buck knife.

  He tensed, waiting for a vision of Jersey to rise up and hurt him. He should have buried the knife along with his dog. But he’d had the knife longer than he’d had Jersey. It was a clip-point hunting knife that he’d bought the first time he went camping. He’d gone alone, seventeen-year-old kid setting out from home, seventeen-year-old man when he returned. He’d hunted and skinned a squirrel for his dinner. He’d whittled a stick to roast marshmallows. He’d cut rope to hang his food away from animals. It was a useful knife.

  Jersey wouldn’t mind if he kept it.

  He knifed open the foil bag and tapped out a handful of pink chunks. He ate them all at once. Hideous. Tasted nothing like strawberry. Tasted nothing like ice cream. But he began to cool off. He understood this was a mental thing—the words on the bag carried their own power. Ice cream. Even freeze-dried cooled him, a bit.

  He’d live on kibbles if he needed until his grand vision was fulfilled.

  He checked his watch. Four minutes gone. He decided waiting the full five would be obsessive. He called.

  It was answered on the first ring. What took you so long?

  He didn’t want to sound worried. He said, real cool, “I was eating ice cream.”

  A muffled sound. A laugh.

  He ignored that. “What did they say?”

  They know who you are.

  He went rigid. “How?”

  You fucked up.

  “You don’t want to address me that way.”

  Get real.

  Roy Jardine maintained a frigid silence.

  You there?

  He should make some smarty joke but he couldn’t think of one so all he said was, “Keep me posted.”

  He shut the phone. He picked up his Buck knife and held it blade out—not that anybody was going to storm the ridge but no harm in the practice. The knife calmed him. So they know. So what? They’ll never find you, Roy. You’re a shadow. You’re ace. You’re going to sit here and finish your ice cream and wait for the next call and then you’re going to ground, at Hole-in-the-Wall. You’re really an outlaw now, Roy Jardine.

  He straightened his back.

  He wondered what the female geologist thought about him now. Females could get swept off their feet by outlaws—look at Etta Place and the Sundance Kid. That wasn’t just a movie. That was in the history books. He closed his eyes. He’d worked side by side with the female, partners almost. Close enough to smell her. Sweat, sure, but something else. Some kind of female shampoo. Strawberry?

  He put a chunk of strawberry ice cream on his tongue.

  And now the female smiled at him and he smiled at her and offered her real strawberry ice cream and then suddenly it was Jersey, and not the female, begging him, and the stuff in his mouth turned back to paste.

  His phone rang.

  He opened his eyes and answered the call.

  Guess what they just found?

  “I don’t guess. Just tell me.”

  He listened—at first not understanding—and then finally when he understood he bent over and vomited up strawberry chunks.

  What’s that sound? You there? Say something.

  He couldn’t. He was too sick to talk. He wiped his mouth, heartsick.

  This is bad, you get it?

  He said he’d have to call back. He said the signal was breaking up.

  It was Roy Jardine who was breaking up. He couldn’t believe they could figure out stuff like that. From dirt under the fenders?

  He rested his head on his knees and when his insides stopped crawling he put himself back together. It’s not a real map, he told himself. It’s dirt. They’d have to be magicians to follow that dirt. His head swam. His grand vi
sion was flickering like one of those desert mirages. If he didn’t do something his vision was going to disappear.

  He said, out loud, the geologists are not magicians.

  But you have to make sure. Put on your thinking cap, Roy.

  He put it on. And the answer came.

  14

  “Look,” I said, “do you see something moving out there?”

  Walter looked up from the map in his lap and peered out his window.

  We were driving north on the West Side Road—so named because it hugged the western side of the long Death Valley basin. Forty miles since we’d left the talc mine and the only moving thing we’d seen was the occasional car. And that was across the saltpan from us on the Badwater Road, which hugged the eastern side of the basin.

  But it wasn’t a car I’d seen out on the saltpan. It was something else.

  “I suppose,” Walter said, turning back to his map, “I’ve missed it.”

  Walter was breaking my heart. If he couldn’t drive, he was going to be of use navigating.

  As if we could get lost driving this road through open desert.

  The basin floor swept before us, south to north, like an unrolling carpet of sand and salt. Where it rolled off into the far horizon, I thought I could see the curve of the earth. To the west and east the basin floor met walls of fault-scarped mountains—the view so wide I could see the floor tilt.

  What I couldn’t see, now, was that thing on the saltpan. Nothing moved out there.

  Well, the earth shimmied as heat boiled up.

  I checked the gas gauge. I asked Walter to check our cell phone signals. I glanced at Scotty’s water jugs in back. There’s a reason they named it Death Valley. There’s a reason nobody’s out and about, not in a Death Valley summer.

  I’d been here only once before, and that was in the spring. My scout troop came to see the wildflowers. Fourth grade, pre-Walter, pre-geology. The only geological samples I’d got were sand in my boots and dirt in my sleeping bag. I’d been more interested in the Boy Scouts in the next campsite. A mental picture formed of little Hap in a scout uniform, all knobby knees and big bandana. Very cute. A mental picture formed of big Hap, all lean angles and a backdoor grin. I blinked. What am I doing?