She rasped, “Elvis fuckin Presley.”
“You act the fool.”
“Fuck you.” She grinned. “You all gonna get fucked. A real ranger-fuck. Enough play-dough for it.”
“What does this mean? Play-dough?”
Pria spoke. “Stuff to blast tunnels.”
Plastique. I recalled its effect on the cask in the borax tunnel. If there was enough explosive to reach us and the rangers, what did that mean? It’s nearby? Or maybe she just meant any of us who get too close. FBI, RERT, Sheriff, cops, geologists—we’re all rangers to her, we’re all fuckers trying to shut down her mine.
“Ms. Jellinek. I repeat. Where is this place?”
She shifted her bulk to point to her rear.
Pria turned for the door.
Chickie hissed, “Wait girl. I’m countin on you. Your daddy’s mine ain’t gonna pay a nickel. Fuckers won’t let it. This is our due.” She extended her hand. “I ain’t never hit you. Do it for me.”
“You’re acting stupid, Chickie.”
Chickie rolled onto her side and put her face in the bowl, dry heaving.
“Stop her,” Pria said, “make it stop.”
Hap said, “She’s going downhill, Hector. For the love of your soul let me stop it.”
Soliano brought his hand to his forehead, that gesture of his. “Mr. Miller, you have perhaps Pepto-Bismol in your satchel?”
“The cheapo generic. If she can keep it down.”
“Give it to her.”
Hap brought out a bottle. “Here you goes, Miss Chick, courtesy of Doctor Hap.” He put a pink tablet to her lips. “Tastes jess like bubble gum.”
Chickie took in the tablet.
“Give it a minute or two, Hector.”
Soliano checked his watch, then turned to me. “You wished to inspect the nails? While we wait.” He hiked a shoulder at the bed.
I did not know if Chickie was worn down by her ordeal or just trying to digest the tablet, but she watched dully as I knelt beside her with my kit. I opened a specimen dish and placed it on the bed. I told her I was going to scrape under her nails. Her eyes narrowed but she made no objection. I took her right hand. She had a wide flat hand and skinny forearm that brought to mind a ping-pong paddle. Her puffed skin felt tender as a baby’s. Her fingertips looked as though they might pop. The ragged nails sat deep within the reddened flesh. Scotty had scrub-brushed those nails but the decon left a thin line of dirt. Maybe old dirt, from her mine. Or maybe newer dirt. She’d been a busy desert rat, what with sabotage and theft, and maybe a telling grain or two stuck with her. Maybe not. But my fingers, as they say, itched. I chose the pointed file from my kit—a tool I’ve used to pry grains from a nail hole, mud from a knotted rope—and now, aptly, a tool made expressly for its job. I popped out a crescent of soil from her thumbnail.
Hap said, “Y’all makes a good manicurist, Buttercup.”
I glanced up.
He was examining Chickie’s hand in mine as if he’d like to draw us.
CHAPTER 34
The doctor had come and Hap had left. The rain had stopped. The shower and hoses and pump were gone. Out here on the lawn it looked as though nothing untoward had happened. Scotty and his team had disappeared, to the parking lot I assumed. Walter was nowhere to be seen so I guessed he’d claimed Chickie’s boots for analysis.
Ballinger was here, though, rooster-pacing the walkway. “She talk?”
Soliano shook his head and squatted in front of Pria, who sat against the wall hugging her knees. “Miss Weeks, help your mother by helping us. Tell her we agree to pay. Tell her you will watch out for her interests.”
Ballinger halted. “Pay?”
“Five minutes, Miss Weeks. To think. And then please I will need your help.” Soliano headed back to his room, saying to me as he passed, “Talk with her.”
I took in a deep breath.
Ballinger sidled close. “How much the old lady want?”
“One million.”
“Getting expensive.”
I glanced at Pria, to see if she’d caught that. Of course, she might not know that Ballinger was the radwaste dump manager, that his company had already been extorted once this week, that he himself had no authority to pay out any million of CTC funds. As if Soliano, for that matter, did. The FBI was, in the end, a bureaucracy and certainly a field agent—even one as hotshot as Soliano—was not allowed off-the-cuff to dispense one million dollars. It was a bluff. And the girl Soliano was trying to bluff might be a fourteen-year-old from the rez but I’d bet she’d been raised by her daddy and her Aunt Ruth on tales of promises and threats and bluffs from generations of government agents who said let me help you but first you help me.
I didn't know how to get through to her. Maybe if I'd practiced on other kids, but I'd been pretty much tied up in my own angst, which kids could smell on me like bad cheese, and this kid more than any kid I'd ever run across made my head want to explode. But minutes were passing and Soliano was waiting. I said, “I’m sorry about your mom, Pria. I know you’re upset.”
“I want Grandfather.”
“Grandfather’s busy looking at your mother’s boots so we can find out where she went. Where she got into the radwaste. You don’t need Grandfather.”
Pria got up, leveling on me a look of closeup hate.
Just that quickly, I flipped. I became Soliano’s creature. “You know what, Pria? You can save us the trouble. You get your mother to tell us where the stuff is and we can send the experts to clean up the mess.” I waited. I was not reaching her. “What you have to do, Pria, is go in there and tell her she’s going to get what she wants. And I can’t tell you she is. So you’ll be telling a lie. And that sucks. Believe me, I work with a man who will cut out his tongue before he’ll tell a lie—unless it’s going to prevent a greater sin. You know, like murder? Or like crapping up your desert? Once this stuff gets loose, you know, it hangs around. You know what a half-life is? That’s the time it takes for half of a radioactive element to decay—to throw off half its radioactivity. So let’s see, Scotty says we’ve got cobalt-60 in the resins. Nasty stuff. Got a half-life of five and a half years.” I realized I was doing a Hap on her. Well sure worked on me, sure got me reviewing my radionuclides table. “Or maybe you’ve heard of plutonium-239? Hangs around a little longer. Gives up half its radioactivity every twenty-four thousand years.” I waited. “Let’s put it this way. How about your water? You want it to stay happy? Then get in there and tell your mother whatever she wants to hear.”
Her black eyes went flat.
It began to rain again, thunderstorm loud, as if I’d called in special effects. Water please, lord, and make it hard and loud.
Ballinger spoke. “Look here, I can maybe arrange for the company to pay a reward. You know, if everything turns out. If we get the material back.”
I doubted that. He can’t have much credibility left with CTC. And if word of his diddling Jardine’s paperwork hasn’t yet reached them, it will in the end. So what’s Ballinger doing? Helping out Soliano? And then, quid pro quo, Soliano helps out with his ethical and legal dilemmas?
Ballinger said, “Not a million, but...” He seemed to calculate. “Thousands?”
Pria shook her head.
I said, “No? No, you won’t help? No, it’s not enough?”
“Her,” Pria said. “She wants the money now.”
“Look, she knows we don’t have a sack of money under the bed, that’s why she got you into this. She thinks if we make a promise to you we’re more likely to keep it.” Yeah, and I’ve got a treaty for you to sign, too. “So you have to decide if you want to help us or not. I know you don’t want someone else getting contaminated.”
She compressed her mouth. The ultimate daughter decay product.
“What do you want, Pria?”
“I want you to leave me alone.”
Alone alone alone. The word buzzed in my head, like we were back up the echoing canyon, an echo of me, stiff-necked teenage me with my m
om—you don’t care, you hate me because I’m alive and Henry isn’t, leave me alone alone alone. Good job, Oldfield. And now you can tell Pria to go to her room.
She was already moving. She started down the walkway toward Soliano’s room.
I said, startled, “You’re going to help?”
“I’m going to the rest room.”
She was heading toward the main building—the lobby—not Soliano’s room. I reached in my pocket and brought out my key. “Use mine.”
She looked at the key as if it were crafted of cobalt-60. She looked out toward the lawn, and the walkway that led to the lobby. Raindrops bulleted onto the concrete, and bounced. Her face closed. She took on an almost crafty look. Another echo. I nearly put my key away. She snatched it before I could.
~ ~ ~
I turned my hopes from the girl back where they belonged, to the geology. I found Walter in our lab examining a plug of boot soil under the scope. He grunted. I knew that grunt—an expression of interest, if not quite satisfaction.
Half an hour later we heard a door slam and footsteps pounding and, distinct, a curse. Dios mio.
We went out to investigate and saw Soliano loping toward the parking lot.
CHAPTER 35
The blue Ford pickup stood alone at the far end of the parking lot.
It was washed clean. The body rain-washed, the fenders scrubbed. There was no mud to sample; Walter didn’t even open the field kit. Scotty pronounced the vehicle not contaminated and put away his meter. Soliano didn’t need to call in the plates because he’d memorized Roy Jardine’s license number.
Now we just stared.
What got to me was the hose. The pickup was parked beside a planter box and a coiled hose. I pictured Jardine pressure-washing under the fenders, in the tire treads. No worry, then, that the geologists would build themselves a soil map. Hosing made sense. What didn’t make sense was that he’d taken the time to neatly coil the hose after use. That, I found creepily obsessive.
Walter broke the silence. “This truck wasn’t here yesterday when we returned from the canyon.”
I agreed. “So it arrived sometime in the night.”
“Or this morning.” Soliano checked his watch. “Prior to Ms. Jellinek’s arrival.”
We looked, as one, down the parking lot to the white pickup in the yellow hot zone. Suited RERTs were examining Chickie’s truck. FBI agents, Sheriff deputies, and park rangers milled—all keeping well clear of the coned-off zone.
The action was down there but the mystery was up here. Scotty voiced it. “So where’d Jardine go?”
One by one, we turned to scan the red tile rooftops and the reddened hills behind the Inn. Nothing out of the norm, or what had become the norm. Clouds had bunched again, though, throwing down fat shadows.
I had another question. I moved for a closer look at the tarp covering Jardine’s pickup bed. It looked like one of the silvery drapes I’d seen in the talc mine ‘garage.’ Leaded, no doubt. I dredged up the scenario we’d spun, how Jardine learned at the dump—courtesy of my bragging—that I could follow the talc trail, how he rushed to Chickie’s mine to get the resin cask. I expanded it now: he couldn’t just drive off with the cask visible and unshielded. So he covered it with the lead tarp. And off he went. And ended up, finally, here. With a tarp, but no cask. I studied the tarp. Where it puckered, rainwater pooled. That said it had rained since the cask was removed. Not much help. It rained last night. It rained this morning. It’s been raining on and off since we got here. He could have ditched the cask anytime in the past three days—although if he was going to ditch it then why take it to begin with? I wetted my lips and asked the obvious. “Where’s the cask?”
Soliano yanked on the driver-side door handle. It was locked. He withdrew his pistol from his waistband holster and with the butt-end smashed the window. He unlocked the door and climbed inside. He rooted around, and when he finally swung out of the truck he was unrolling a sheet of paper.
We gathered around.
It was a map—a schematic—and you had to study it a moment before recognizing the razor-thin lines and sharp angles and precise arcs as a water distribution system. At the top of the diagram was a water storage tank. A pipeline ran downhill, to the Inn, to its bones, its framework, its pipes and faucets and inflows and outflows, its sinks and toilets and tubs and showers, its pool, its lawns, its sprinklers, its stream-cut gardens and water-rich palms.
A post-it note stuck to the map said $10 million—water water everywhere.
~ ~ ~
Water water everywhere. What if he’s already contaminated it?
My mind raced, inventorying. Water in the glass on the lawn table this morning. Hap drank it. I drank it. Was it bottled? Wouldn’t they serve something like Evian at a place like the Inn? But earlier, breakfast in the room, Walter and I drank coffee and they surely didn’t use Evian to brew the coffee. And before that, a quick shower, water on my lips. And then brushing my teeth. My stomach curdled.
The others, too, looked glazed, looking inward, thinking back, reviewing—what’d I have for breakfast, what’d I have to drink, where and when and in what circumstances have I come in contact with the water over the past twelve hours or is twelve long enough? How long do I need to work backward?
What if the water’s not happy?
Soliano recovered first. He was on his cell. “The water main. Shut it off.”
~ ~ ~
“We have the target,” Soliano told the small crowd he’d assembled. “Proceed on the assumption that it has been hit. If it has not, assume that it will be hit, if not now, then one minute from now.”
“Hit how?” a baby-faced agent asked.
“Radioactive material, either in a cask or loosed. You will divide into teams, each team consisting of my agents and RERT members who will monitor for radioactive traces. You will search every nook and cranny of the Inn and its grounds—most specifically, the water system.” Soliano addressed the baby-faced agent. “Andre, you will coordinate, with the concomitant objective of locating Roy Jardine.”
Andre scowled. “What if he’s poofed?”
“His vehicle is here,” Soliano snapped, “so you will proceed on the assumption that he has not poofed.”
Andre moved.
Soliano said, “Full ninja.”
My chest thumped.
Soliano was on the phone again. “Secure the annex. Every room. No person goes in, no person goes out.”
The teams fissioned. Soliano and Walter and I made up our own team, with the object of doing a room check.
~ ~ ~
There was no one in sight on the annex walkway but Special Agent Hal Dearing, a sunburned monolith with a peeling nose and a Sig Sauer in hand. Nobody’d come out, he said. Not since the doctor came and Hap Miller left, about an hour ago. Miller, whom Dearing would trust about as far as he could throw him, had said he was going for a walk.
“Going for a walk where?” Soliano said.
Dearing shrugged.
Soliano phoned Andre and told him to put out a BOLO for Hap Miller.
Be On the Lookout—that one I knew. Try a lounge chair somewhere, I thought, or the sauna room. I looked at the lawn, at the table where Hap told me a couple of hours ago that he’s staying put, safe and sound here at the Inn. Only, looks like the Inn is Jardine’s target. I doubted Hap would appreciate the irony. Then again, maybe Hap knows the Inn is the target. Maybe he’s in on it. Maybe that’s why he left.
Soliano brushed past Dearing and opened the door to his room.
I glimpsed, inside, a doctor in hospital scrubs with a saddlebag gut, adjusting the IV that fed into Chickie’s inert arm.
Soliano moved to the next room and banged on the door. “Mr. Ballinger!” He tried the knob. “Milt?” He drew his pistol and broke the window. He looked inside then spun on Dearing.
Dearing’s sunburn radiated. “Didn’t know he wasn’t in there.”
I said, “What about Pria? I gave her my key.”
Walter shot me an incredulous look.
Dearing went purple. “Nobody came out of nowhere.”
I looked around. No Hap, no Milt, no Pria. No Roy. Empty lawn, empty walkways, empty rooftops. Everybody’s poofed.
We took off. Walter went for his room and I stopped at mine. I knocked, then Soliano shouldered me aside. He banged on the door and shouted “open up,” as if Pria had barricaded herself inside, as if Jardine were holding a gun to her head or a glass of water to her lips. Before Soliano could bring out his gun and break my window, Walter opened my door from the inside. He had to have come through the adjoining door that linked our rooms into a two-room suite.
I said, “She’s in the bathroom.”
Walter and Soliano stood aside.
I opened the bathroom door. She was not there but she oh-so-clearly had been there. Even as I shifted to allow them a look, I could not take my eyes from the bathtub with its porcelain scummed almost to the tiled rim.
She’d taken a bath.
Shit.
“Where is she?” Walter asked, eerily calm, as if there were some logical progression from the tub to the place she would naturally go next. To Soliano’s room? All scrubbed for her mom, only to find her mom sedated by the paunchy doctor? And so she went elsewhere.
I hoped for that.
Soliano was on the phone, trying to reach Aunt Ruth.
Walter said, brittle-calm, “She had to have left through my room.”
He led Soliano through the adjoining door. I stayed behind. I figured they’d find the sliding door unlocked that led from Walter’s bedroom out to the tiny veranda that had so impressed Hap, and bordering the veranda they’d find a stone wall that any one of us but Walter could scale on the first try. And on the other side of that wall they’d find the walkway that led away from the main walkway where Dearing stood useless guard. Which was why Dearing in all honesty could say nobody came out of nowhere.
She’d left unseen, but had she left alone?
I braced a hand against the doorjamb. How would Roy Jardine know she was in my room? How would he know who was in what room? And if he did, why not go into Soliano’s room and take care of Chickie, who knows what he does not want told, along with the doctor who is trying to save her life?
The Forensic Geology Box Set Page 38