The Grid

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The Grid Page 12

by Harry Hunsicker


  I thanked him and drove down a gravel road toward the boiler tower.

  The terrain was rolling, covered in native grasses that were dormant from lack of water, the color of dried sand. Most of the trees had been cleared from the site, allowing for an unobstructed view of the boiler and the surrounding equipment, as well as the small lake that served as a cooling source for the plant.

  The road forked at the entrance to the boiler compound, an area separated from the rest of the facility by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and an open gate.

  I took the road to the right, which led to the administrative office, a low metal building about three hundred yards away.

  A man in his forties wearing a plaid shirt and a hard hat stood by the visitor parking slot. He held a second hard hat in his hand.

  I parked.

  He walked to the passenger side, tapped on the glass, a cheerful smile on his face.

  I rolled down the window.

  “Chester Lewis.” He stuck his hand inside. “Plant manager here at McCarty Creek.”

  “Hi. How are you doing?” I shook. “Special Agent Jon Cantrell.”

  Chester didn’t say anything else. He glanced back toward the admin building a couple of times.

  “Let’s go inside where it’s cool and talk,” I said.

  He turned his full attention my way. “Inside?”

  I nodded.

  He looked back toward the building again.

  “You rather talk somewhere else?” I asked.

  He opened the passenger door, hopped inside the SUV. “Let’s take a spin, Special Agent Cantrell. I’ll give you a tour.”

  “Call me Jon.” I put the transmission into reverse, turned around.

  “How about we check out the boiler?” He pointed toward the tower. “That sounds like a good plan, doesn’t it?”

  I drove the way I’d just come. A few seconds later, we left the admin area and were back on what constituted the main road of the facility.

  “Maybe I could give you a little lesson on power plants.” He fastened his seat belt.

  “I need to ask you some questions first.”

  “There’s this talk I give to schoolkids,” he said. “It’s very informative.”

  “How come you wanted to get away from the admin building?” I asked.

  No answer.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” he said. “Great to be outside.”

  I didn’t argue even though the temperature gauge on the Suburban read ninety-six degrees.

  “Park over there.” He directed me through the gate leading to the tower, to a spot between two tanks at the base of the structure.

  I did as instructed, and we both exited the SUV. I put on the hard hat he gave me and followed him to a superstructure built as an outside layer on top of the boiler.

  Right by the boiler, the air was hot and humid, much warmer than ninety-six degrees. Heat radiated from the massive structure, and a whooshing sound made conversation difficult. What looked like dirty talcum powder coated all the surfaces.

  A freight elevator was attached to the outside of the superstructure.

  Chester pushed the Up button, and the doors slid open. We stepped into a square room with plywood walls and a faded sign that read SAFETY FIRST. The temperature was hotter still, like the inside of an oven. He punched the button for the top, and a few very long and very hot seconds later, the doors opened, exposing a metal catwalk at the crown of the boiler structure.

  We exited the elevator, and he directed me to a spot that was farthest from the boiler, an observation perch offering a view of the entire facility.

  Up this high, there was a breeze blowing, and the ambient temperature felt like the North Pole compared with the enclosed sweatbox of the elevator.

  “Great view from up here,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  I didn’t say anything, just stared at him.

  He pointed to the east. “That’s the Crockett National Forest over there.”

  A blanket of green as far as the eye could see, the texture appearing as smooth as velvet from this distance. In the other directions, the green was marred by gray strips of highways and brown patches of buildings.

  I decided to take a stab in the dark. I said, “Somebody leaning on you, Chester?”

  No answer.

  “Maybe telling you not to talk to the five-oh?” I asked.

  A gust of warm air ruffled his short-sleeve dress shirt.

  “The wife,” he said. “She’s in a bad way.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Ovarian cancer. The prognosis, well, it’s not looking real good.” He turned away, pressed both hands on the railing and stared out over the lake.

  “Sorry to hear,” I said. “That’s a tough road.”

  We were both silent for a moment.

  “You know how we make electricity here?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Steam,” he said. “The inside of the boiler—it’s a bunch of steel tubes about as big around as my thumb. Maybe one inch total on the outside by a hundred feet.”

  I looked back at the structure behind us. The exterior was aluminum paneling crisscrossed with various wires and conduit.

  “The tubes, they’re welded together to form a forty-foot square, which makes up the inside of the boiler, and are then filled with water,” he said. “At the bottom, we shoot coal dust into a flame. That boils the water, which makes steam that shoots out the top.”

  He pointed to a two-foot pipe wrapped in insulation. The pipe emerged from over our heads. It cut across the catwalk and then traveled down.

  “Sounds like everything’s under extremely high pressure.” I tracked the steam outlet to a large structure that looked like a rocket lying on its side.

  The structure was orange. On the top in large letters was the word Westinghouse.

  “That’s the turbine,” Chester said. “That’s what the steam turns to make the electricity.”

  Beyond the turbine lay a series of high-voltage wires feeding into metal buildings, similar to what Whitney had pointed out at the switching station.

  “Steam by definition is under a lot of pressure,” he said. “By the way.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the steam, Chester.”

  “Oh.”

  “Those are transformers, aren’t they?” I pointed to the metal buildings.

  He nodded but didn’t speak.

  “The attack, Chester. Tell me what happened.”

  He looked off into the distance for a long moment, thoughts clearly churning in his mind.

  “I’m not supposed to talk about that,” he said.

  “According to whom?”

  He pursed his lips and stared at the canopy of trees.

  A few moments passed. Then he said, “Somebody shot one of the main transformers.”

  I surveyed the area, an easy task given our height.

  The tower and the turbine/transformer area were in the middle of a large open space, thousands of yards from the plant’s perimeter and any possible sniper location.

  “Do you know who?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  The closest structures or likely hidings spots were the administration building, which was located in a slight depression, and a lake house on a hill about a hundred yards past the admin building.

  “What’s that place?” I pointed to the house.

  Chester didn’t respond.

  “Is that where the shot came from?”

  He nodded, a slight look of displeasure on his face.

  “Is that part of the plant property?”

  He pushed himself off the railing and patted his hands, and a small cloud of dust drifted off into the air. I wondered what was in the dust, what kind of pollu
tants were produced by burning coal.

  “I don’t want to lose my insurance, Jon. Not with my wife the way she is.”

  “I hate to be a hard-ass, but I’m a federal agent and you kinda have to talk to me.”

  He nodded but didn’t speak.

  “I represent the government of the United States, Chester. If anybody threatens you for talking to me, there’s a world of hurt I can bring their way.”

  He took several deep breaths and said, “They told me it was a redneck who shot out the transformer. Told me not to worry about it.”

  The same story that Whitney Holbrook was peddling about Black Valley.

  “Who told you that?”

  No answer.

  “Was it Price Anderson?”

  His shoulders tensed for just a moment, and I knew the answer was yes.

  “Tell me about the lake house.”

  “Back in the fifties,” he said. “The man who started the company used it as a vacation spot. Great fishing right by the hot-water outflow.”

  The home was brick, overlooking the lake and a small dock. At the back there appeared to be a patio area with a barrel smoker and a couple of picnic benches. It was a pleasant setting.

  “Nobody comes out there much anymore,” Chester said. “Management uses it every now and then—fishing, I guess.”

  “Is there a record of who comes and goes?”

  “There’s separate access. From a different road. Requires a code.”

  “So someone could get in there without you knowing it?”

  He didn’t reply. After a moment, he nodded.

  “Someone who had the right code, one they got from management?”

  He started whistling softly, what sounded like the theme from The Flintstones.

  We were silent for a moment. Chester said, “You want to see the rest of the plant?”

  I shook my head. “No. I want to see the lake house.”

  - CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT -

  Sarah composes an e-mail to her daughter with her phone, even though by the time Dylan is old enough to understand the message, e-mails will probably be as relevant as cassette players.

  Dylan is in surgery, and Sarah wants to explain why things are the way they are, to help the child understand the reasons her mother can’t always be there.

  Also, Sarah wants to express her feelings in a healthy way, like that therapist in high school talked about after the incident with the baseball bat and the cheerleader who was putting the moves on Sarah’s boyfriend.

  Right now, everything is jumbled up inside Sarah’s brain, and maybe by putting it down in writing the confusion will be lessened.

  Maybe.

  She takes a long swig of her Bloody Mary and begins:

  Dearest precious Dylan:

  You have no idea how hard it is for me to see you lying in a hospital bed like that.

  If I could take the pain away from you I would. I wonder if your broken leg is somehow a punishment for what I’ve done or actions that other members of our family have committed. Whatever the case, you must understand that you are not to blame. You are pure & I hope you always will be.

  You don’t know yet about our family, about what we came from. There are dark things in our blood. I don’t know how else to say it. Every family has their secrets, but ours seems to have been burdened more than most.

  You asked if you would see Papa in heaven if you died, which amazes me, since he passed away five years before you were even born. I must have talked a lot of about him for you to want to see him that bad.

  He was quite a man, your great-grandfather. He grew up in the Depression, which you’ll learn about in school. Times were hard then & people had to do whatever they could to make a living. His own mother & father, my great-grandparents, died when he was just a boy. He lived on the streets of Texarkana for much of his childhood, a period of time he never liked to talk about, so I can only imagine the hardship and suffering he endured.

  But out of hardship comes strength, says the Bible (or maybe Shakespeare???), & he learned to survive & to make something of himself. He worked hard every day of his life & made a lot of money, providing a good life for his family. (When you’re older, you’ll hear people say Papa’s fortune was built on blood money, because of the way he started out. I suppose that’s true. A lot of the blood was his own, though.)

  Sarah pauses for another sip of her drink. She’s sitting by the beer taps in the bar across from the hospital, the place where Elias started the fight with the man in the Jiffy Lube shirt the night before.

  Fortunately, it’s just before lunchtime, so a different bartender is working and very few people are here.

  A shaft of light cuts through the gloom as the door opens and a man enters. He’s in his early thirties, but the years have been hard, as evidenced by the puffy face and dark circles under his eyes, both clearly visible even in the dim lighting. Lots of late nights and bad decisions have gone into that face.

  Sarah watches the man survey the room, deciding where to sit.

  He’s wearing a pair of khakis and a golf shirt with a corporate logo on the breast. Despite the fact that no one else is at the bar, he slides onto the stool next to hers.

  Sarah knows his type. He’s a salesman, no doubt, fast-talking and insincere. An expense-account Romeo.

  She’s pretty sure she slept with someone who worked for the same company, a man she’d picked up at a hotel bar in Tulsa. He’d been wearing a similar shirt.

  The guy next to her has on too much cologne, as well as a tacky gold bracelet on his right wrist, opposite a knockoff Rolex.

  Sarah ignores him, trying to focus on her e-mail. In the back of her mind, she wonders if she gives off some weird pheromone that attracts a certain type of person—traveling salesmen and functional drunks, losers and dim-witted fuckwads—men who shroud themselves in body spray and bad double entendres.

  She orders another Blood Mary, returns to the e-mail.

  Papa was a violent man, & I’m afraid I’ve inherited that tendency from him. Sometimes violence is . . . I’m not sure how to put this . . . like a glass of milk when you have an upset stomach—soothing.

  The salesman next to her orders a Dos Equis with extra limes. He speaks a little louder than necessary, glancing at Sarah as he talks to the bartender, trying to get her attention.

  Sarah returns her concentration to the e-mail:

  You will not read this until you are older and your leg is all healed. When that happens, maybe you and I will leave Dallas for a new life. Maybe we’ll go to New York or Europe. Wonderful things await both of us, if only we can break free from this godforsaken place. This I promise you, Dylan. I will not allow our family’s past to be inflicted on your future.

  The salesman squeezes a lime wedge into his beer bottle. Some of the juice sprays Sarah’s arm.

  “Sorry about that.” He hands her a cocktail napkin. “What are you working on so hard?”

  A wave of pressure builds at the base of Sarah’s neck, climbing its way up into her skull until her temples feel like they might explode.

  She puts the phone down and wipes her arm, pointedly not responding to his question.

  “So,” the salesman says, “you come here often?”

  Sarah can’t tell if he’s trying to be funny or not. Probably not.

  Usually she can keep under control the self-loathing that comes from sleeping around. Unless the clichés start to pile up. For some reason, those make it all seem so tawdry and senseless.

  The salesman leers at her, fiddling with his gold bracelet.

  Sarah’s heart rate slows. She’s in the zone, the sense of control making everything rosy. She’s got a lot on her mind at the moment—an injured child, a dead cop in a motel room in Waco, a maybe-dead lesbian serial killer named Cleo—so
the last thing she needs to be doing is making fuck-fuck eyes with some fruity-smelling loser. But what’s a pussycat to do when the mouse wanders over and starts swinging its little paws at you?

  “Boy, it’s hot in here.” She unfastens the top button of her blouse. “How about you buy me a drink, stud?”

  The salesman’s eyes open wide for an instant like he’s just realized he’s got a winning poker hand. He signals the bartender. “Another beer for me and whatever the lady is having.”

  Lay-dee. What an ass-munch. Sarah imagines she can actually hear the man’s erection growing underneath his no-iron khakis.

  The drinks arrive. Sarah wonders where the nearest hotel is.

  “You work around here?” The salesman drains half his beer in one swallow.

  “I don’t work.” Sarah runs her tongue around the rim of the glass. “I prefer to play.”

  The salesman’s eyes go wide again and stay that way.

  “What’s the fragrance you’re wearing?” she says. “Eau-de-fuck-me?”

  He blinks several times but doesn’t speak.

  C’mon, Sarah thinks. Am I gonna have to book the room myself and drag you to the bed?

  The thought makes her tired.

  The salesman takes another pull of beer, regains a modicum of his game. “Well, aren’t you a spicy enchilada?”

  “You want to get out of here?” she says. “Find someplace a little more private?”

  “Maybe we could finish our drinks first and, you know, talk a little.”

  The wind disappears from Sarah’s sails.

  “Oh, that’s sweet.” Her voice is tight and angry. “Like we’re on a date. Two normal people who aren’t in a bar in the middle of the day looking to hook up with whoever’s got a pulse.”

  Silence.

  Sarah takes a swig of her Bloody Mary. The throbbing in her skull is keeping time with the flicker of the TV over the bar. She should go back across the street and see her daughter. Not stay in this damn shithole, writing e-mails that will never be sent.

  “Hell, lady.” The salesman shakes his head. “How come you’re so mean?”

 

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