by George Wier
“Nice office,” Dr. Hague said. “I’ve been thinking of going into private practice and getting one of these old homes myself.”
“I recommend it,” I said. “Except I don't own this one. My partner owns it. In today's market one of these would go for a cool million. Maybe more, but no less.”
The night outside my window seemed crisp and electric, as if something were waiting to happen. A cool wind blew. I had my window open a few inches and the breeze sighed through the papers on my desk, lifting and ruffling them.
“As far as I know,” I said, “there are several types of radiation.”
“Yeah,” Dr. Hague said. “There’s beta, gamma, delta. You know, they always sounded to me like college fraternities.”
I chuckled.
“Nasty stuff, though, radiation,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, and thought about a girl I’d once cared a great deal for who had died of cancer from over-exposure to radiation of a kind. But first, it had driven her insane. Not that she had been completely right in the head to begin with. “You got an idea at all where that old, um, man came from?”
“Not a clue,” he said, but then his eyebrows pursed with the slightest of frowns.
“You have a thought there?” I asked.
“Uh. Nothing, really.”
“Come on,” I said. “Right now even ‘nothing’ is something.”
“Well,” he sighed, and leaned back in his chair, grasped the gnarled armrests in his large hands. “I seem to remember hearing something around a month ago. Oddly, it was while I was having a beer at Sonny’s. Something about...”
“Yeah?”
“Trying to place it,” he said, seeming to peer at the papers on my desk, but actually looking hard at that inner world we call ‘memory’.
I waited.
“There was this guy,” he said. “Young fellow. Stopped by for a drink on a Saturday evening. I like to go to Sonny’s on a Saturday night sometimes, while the rest of the bikers are away. There’s this girl there I like to talk to—or actually, there’s this girl there I’m trying to get the attention of. Not too bright, probably, but man, what a body! Anyway, I was there when this kid comes in. He’s so young that Pud cards him. I’d never seen Pud do that before.”
“Pud’s the bartender?” I asked.
“Yeah. So Pud cards the kid and the kid is old enough to drink and so Pud pours him a beer. ‘Sonsabitches’, that kid keeps saying to himself under his breath. He takes a table not far from mine and I’m only a little distracted from Libby, who is wearing this tank-top number with no bra. Man, that girl is what you call ‘perky’, if you know what I mean.”
I laughed.
“Anyway, he says it again: ‘Sonsabitches.’ Finally, I say something to him about it. He tells me he just got fired.”
“Go on,” I said. “Don’t stop now.”
“He was working at this new place out in the country. Something about ‘diagnostic technology’ or something or other. They fired him without notice. No severance. Nothing. Security just up and escorts him from the building without so much as an explanation or an apology or a ‘go to hell.’”
“People are losing jobs all over,” I said. “It’s the economy.”
“Yeah,” he said, but the way he said it left about a football field worth of disagreement.
“So what about it?” I asked.
“Nothing, really. Only the way all this happened, the way he was just suddenly there getting carded and the way he was so upset, seemed to me to indicate that it had all gone down just minutes before. And let me tell you, I don’t know of any technology business, diagnostic or otherwise, within twenty miles of Sonny’s Place.”
“You tell the Feds any of this?” I asked.
“Naw. Didn’t remember it until just now when you asked me.”
I thrummed my fingers on the desk. I thought of Penny babysitting my kids until I got home. I thought of Julie and little pinched-faced Michelle in a hospital room. I looked across my paper-strewn desk and saw a few bills that needed paying and a stack of files that badly needed my attention.
“Dr. Hague,” I said, “are you up for a late night ride?”
He grinned.
“I was born being up for one.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It was a ‘dark-of-the-moon’ night, as the old-timers used to say. I had the heater on in my Mercedes and the window cracked, and a blend of heat from the floor and the cool from the night air made for a comforting combination. My headlights picked up a rabbit at the roadside that quickly scurried for cover as if the devil were after it. Traffic was slight along the narrow, winding highway.
We passed Sonny’s Place so quickly I almost didn’t see it in time, the place was so dark. We craned our necks back for a moment.
“I think there’s some kind of truck parked in the lot,” Bert said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Feds,” we said in unison.
“Jinx, you owe me a coke,” Dr. Hague said.
We continued on and I slowed. There was the occasional turn-in to a ranch or road-side homestead complete with mailbox and reflector.
About two miles on we came to the T-intersection of a numbered county road intersecting with the main highway.
I slowed and eased us off to the right and down the even narrower dirt road. Dust-laden and bare branch-work arched overhead, making for a long, gently downward- sloping tunnel.
“Spooky,” he said, “but kinda cool.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. He was right. Out in the hinterlands, the metropolis of Austin a mere rumor, the night and the quiet closes in on the lonely driver and gives the blood the slightest of chills. The night can sometimes seem full of hidden and unfelt influences just beyond the limit of sight.
“It’s got to be around here somewhere,” Dr. Hague said.
We topped a bare hill and went around a hairpin turn and down again.
Following a brief stretch of roadway lined with dirt driveways and a stand of mailboxes huddled close together for company, we traveled through a dense patch of forest with a wide, deep creek nestled between two steep hills. After the creek the headlights picked up a sign at the roadside just before a wide, paved entryway:
CTDT
Authorized Personnel Only
“That sounds lovely,” Dr. Hague said.
“Yep,” I agreed. We drove on past, topped another hill and pulled off to the side of the road where I killed the engine and let silence and darkness enwrap us.
“It's about a quarter of a mile back there, I’d say,” Dr. Hague stated, and I got the implied message: 'we've gone far enough'.
“Yep. You up for a hike?”
He laughed. “Again, I was born ready.”
*****
As we walked through the night I told Dr. Hague about the newest edition to my family.
“What are you doing on an old dirt road in the middle of the night, then?” he asked, laughing.
“Probably should have my head examined,” I told him and he agreed with me. We both kept on walking, anyway.
Half way down the long hill into the valley with the creek and entrance to CTDT—which in my mind I was calling ‘Central Texas Diagnostic Technology’—I thumbed on the small flashlight I’d taken from my glove box. I pierced the dense undergrowth on our left with the light. Just past the thicket, a good ten yards, there appeared to be an open clearing with what might be a well-maintained lawn.
“I think this stretch is part of it,” I said.
“CTDT?” Dr. Hague said. “Probably.”
“How well do you get along with barbed wire?” I asked him.
“We’re old friends,” he said.
And that settled it.
*****
A word on trespassing: one shouldn’t do it. In almost all cases it’s completely ill-advised. The problem was that I had learned early on in life how to turn off the alarm bells in my head. Some people don’t have an alarm setup like that to begi
n with, and these people we call ‘criminals.’ You could take the narrow view and easily say that all acts against the letter of the law are, by definition, criminal. Most anybody would. But I’ve always seen it that such an act taken against a criminal isn’t necessarily criminal in and of itself. For me, criminals shouldn’t have any rights. I know a number of purest attorneys who would disagree with me whole-heartedly, but then again that crowd is, to a man (or in some cases, woman) feeble when it comes to sticking one’s neck out.
Besides, I was only looking. So sue me.
We made it through the barbed-wire none the worse for wear, although it took awhile. It was slow going through the brush. I kept the light down to the ground and used the periphery of it to avoid snags. Bertram Hague followed close on my heels as I passed one pushed-aside branch after another back to him so he wouldn’t get himself swatted in the teeth. There’s a skill to walking through heavy brush, one that had risen to an art-form with me going back to distant childhood. And there’s an etiquette to it as well when you’ve got a buddy traipsing along with you. I observed all the formalities.
At the edge of the lawn I clicked off the light. We waited in the dark while our eyes adjusted to the dim starlight.
“There’s a light back there through the trees across the way,” Dr. Hague whispered. “Dead ahead.”
I saw it. Sodium arc lamps maybe a quarter of a mile away, maybe further.
“Yeah,” I whispered back. “You said something about security before. There’s probably a guard shack and a gate somewhere. Probably even another fence.”
“Yeah. But I doubt there’s any motion-detectors or surveillance cameras in these woods.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Too many deer to set them off. Stuff like that works for about two weeks until everybody gets tired of hearing the alarms and finally disconnects them.”
“Bad for the deer, good for us.”
We walked back up the hill under the edge of the forest and then due east again, away from the road.
“There’s something funny about this meadow,” Dr. Hague said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think it’s a golf course. Executive privileges, and all that. I doubt the employees use it.”
We found the guard entrance road and further on the guard shack that we both knew would be there. It’s always been interesting to me how and why people will guard the strangest things. There’s even an equation for it: what is most heavily hidden and guarded is usually what is most reprehensible and worthless from the start. When I was growing up as a kid in a small East Texas town, we didn’t even bother to lock our front door at night. I suppose times have changed, and not necessarily for the better.
The guard shack was the standard wooden-box-with-a-door-and-windows model. There was a large head inside there. From sixty or so yards away the guy appeared to be either asleep or reading a paperback novel. Dr. Hague thought the guy was asleep, but I leaned more toward the novel theory. He didn’t move for several minutes, but as soon as we started forward again he stood up and stepped outside the shack.
We waited again. A light flared. Cigarette break.
A good cigarette can last ten minutes. This guy sucked his down to nothing in three and then popped back inside the shack and propped a paperback book up at eye level. Hey, sometimes I’m right.
We took to the woods again and made our way around the shack until we came to a twelve-foot high chain-linked fence. Sodium arc lamps lit up a huge pasture area. There were cows out there in the pasture, black silhouette humps that cast long shadows from the far-away parking lot and building.
“Some set-up,” Dr. Hague said.
“Yeah.”
“We going in there?”
“I dunno,” I said. “So far all we know is there’s a place called CTDT that has a nice golf course, at least one guard, has two fences, and runs cattle so it can get an agricultural tax break.”
“My thought, too,” he agreed.
“Let’s go,” I said, and dug my fingers into the wire. It was after I was half-way up that I realized I hadn’t checked to make sure it wasn’t electrified. Julie would kill me if she knew about it. I wasn’t about to tell her a thing.
In two minutes we were both on the ground inside the fence.
And after that, things got interesting.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ten feet past the fence I saw the wire. This one was definitely electrified. The cattle would have made mincemeat of the hurricane fence had there not been a hot wire, and fences can be expensive. A single strand of wire about two feet off the ground had the faintest of tinges of light reflecting from it, like spider’s silk.
“Whoa there,” I said. “Wire.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
We went over it, gingerly, and slowly made our way across the meadow. Soon the breathing of the cattle was the only counterpoint to my beating heart.
There was a clatter off to our left some fifty yards off. I turned to look and saw headlights spearing the gate as it slid back on its tracks. A truck. Big one.
Dr. Hague and I squatted, trying our best to look like just another hump. There were no tall weeds or hills to hide behind, but we hunkered as low as we could near the black bulk of an enormous bull. But not too near.
The truck passed on by and I slowly stood.
“Bill,” he said, “we’re going to have a helluva time explaining ourselves when they find us.”
“Who says they’re going to find us?” I asked.
“Me,” a voice said, and both of us jumped.
The black silhouette stepped forward.
“Patrick?” I asked.
“What the hell are you doing here, Bill? It’s trespassing.”
“Uh, Dr. Hague here invited me,” I said.
“Oh. Then that makes it perfectly legal,” he said.
“You followed us,” I said.
“Yep. It was pretty easy, too. You almost caught me when you pulled over, though. I had to back up pretty quick when you got out and started walking back.”
“Dr. Hague, this is Deputy Patrick Kinsey. He likes to mess around with people’s heads. Patrick, meet Dr. Bertram Hague.”
They shook hands in the dim light from the complex.
Close by a cowed mooed.
“Couldn’t agree with you more, Daisy,” Patrick told the cow.
“How’d you follow us through the brush in the dark?” I asked Pat.
“Night vision googles,” he said, and flopped what felt like a cold fish into my hand.
“High tech,” Dr. Hague said.
“Standard ninja issue,” Patrick said.
I put the goggles on and turned to Patrick. “You’re not in uniform,” I said.
“That’s because this is unofficial,” he said. “And while my badge does say ‘State of Texas’ on it, let’s just say I’m here to protect a couple of Austin locals who might be in over their heads.”
“You got permission, didn’t you,” I stated, not as a question.
“The local constabulary knows I’m here. Called in a favor, you might say. A couple of fellows I know are busy looking the other way.”
Dr. Hague chuckled. “Are we going to do this?”
“I think so,” I replied.
*****
The night shift is a different world. Anyone who has pulled the graveyard for any length of time will tell you that quiet, darkness, sleeplessness and vitamin deficiency become the order of the day—or rather, night. It is a lot like living in an unreal world with it’s own internal laws. I’ve done more than a few graveyard shifts, particularly back in the ancient of days when I did a brief stint as a Sheriff's deputy. For me it was like living in a Mother Goose-like world where all the characters were drunks, thieves, and other cops, often with the line of demarcation between each about the width of a look in the other direction.
The guy loading up the truck inside the shipping-slash-receiving dock of CTDT looked sleepy, bored, and stoned all at the same time. Th
e trucker, himself a potbellied and grisled fellow in his late thirties, stood with his fat arms crossed. He looked even more bored than the loader, if that were possible.
“What the hell is all this stuff, anyway?” the truck driver asked. I could hear him from twenty feet away, even over the clickety-clack of the diesel engine.
The shipping clerk stopped his laden hand-truck in mid-step, rolled his eyes and handed the trucker a clip-board, then got the thing in motion again.
“Bunch of bullshit,” the trucker said.
“That bullshit pays your salary,” I said, and stepped out where they could see me plainly. The trucker started as if he’d been stung and nearly dropped the clipboard. The shipping clerk poked his head around the edge of the truck and regarded me.
“You don’t need to know what you’re hauling,” I said, “beyond the fact it isn’t dangerous.”
The trucker hmphed at me.
“Who the hell are you?” the clerk asked.
“You ought to look more closely at who signs your goddamned paycheck,” I said.
He swallowed and disappeared inside the truck.
“You got a problem?” I asked the trucker.
“Uh. No sir.”
I motioned to Patrick and Dr. Hague. They stepped out.
I took the stairs up the side of the loading dock like I owned the place, stopped beside the trucker, took the clipboard from his hand and scanned it. My confederates stepped up beside me and peered down at the clipboard.
“Mm-hmm,” I grunted to myself.
“Does it check out?” Patrick asked, doing his job of keeping the game going.
“I dunno,” I said. “Depends upon if what it says here,” I thumped the page, “is actually in there,” and pointed into the ill-lit confines of the truck. The clerk emerged onto the shipping shop floor, his hand-truck empty.
He stopped.
“Look,” he said. “All I do is load what Sue hands me to load.”
“Of course,” Dr. Hague said.
