Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4)

by T'Gracie Reese

  Then she half smiled and half frowned, as, almost subconsciously, she whispered the words of the song she had always, being an ocean dweller, revered:

  Eternal Father, strong to save,

  Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

  Who bid’st the mighty ocean deep,

  Its own appointed limits keep.

  Oh hear us when we cry to Thee,

  For those in peril on the sea!

  Going down the landing ramp of the helicopter would have been like walking into a windstorm, except the winds were coming from straight over her head and howling vertically rather than horizontally.

  She could not decide what battered hardest upon her senses: the constant motion of the tarmac beneath her as the rig moved in the waves; the shouting of everybody who was run-walking around her; the noise of the propeller blades fifteen feet above her head; or the dazzling array of colors, huge red tunnel here, orange pipe here, yellow oil derrick there, and underlying everything and overarching everything, the blue of the sea and the identical blue of the sky.

  “Over there! Over there! That way, Nina!”

  She was bending almost double as she walked, terrified of being decapitated by the rotor blades, although she knew quite well that they were spinning at least twenty feet above her head.

  “There! Through there! Watch out for the cranes! The crane operator has probably the most dangerous job on the craft. A supply boat is unloading now, and the ocean chop is pretty strong. The crane offloads huge containers of machine parts that may weigh as much as a ton. Once a few weeks ago one of the containers almost swung into a departing helicopter. It was pretty scary! Come on though—everything looks clear now!”

  Sandy hooked an arm beneath her elbow and led the way through a churning crowd of orange people arriving on the rig and orange people leaving it.

  “Over here! Come this way!”

  Figures everywhere, all of them wearing yellow construction helmets, all of them shouting through cupped hands.

  They made their way along, out of range finally of the fierce copter downdrafts, able to smell the wind off the churning waves that surrounded them, able finally to stand upright and breathe deeply.

  “My God,” she found herself whispering, for no other reason than to express the other worldliness of it all.

  Too loud, too bright, too unstable and rocking, too far removed from her little stable coffee and beignets world.

  “My God.”

  What would Furl have made of all this?

  “Welcome to Aquatica!”

  This from several people, all smiling and waving to them.

  And now they were off the landing pad altogether, the derrick soaring like the oil well that it, of course, was. Two hundred feet into the sky, just thirty yards in front of them.

  She found herself, still arm linked with Sandy, who would have been only slightly taller than herself, had she not been elevated some two inches by what seemed like black combat boots, shined to a mirror polish.

  Between the orange jump suit, the huge dark green sunglasses, the bright red scarf around her neck, and the yellow helmet, there was little of an actual woman to see. And now Sandy had donned plastic work gloves the same color as the jump suit.

  Nina might have been listening to an erector set.

  “Come this way! Let’s get you inside!”

  The prefabricated being in front of her turned abruptly, waving as she did so, and strode off over a tangled mass of multicolored cables, finally disappearing for an instant into the two-foot wide opening that separated the outer rail of the Aquatica from a gleaming blue-metal building to their left.

  They made their way along, gamely, going single file now.

  “Down here!”

  They could see the pumping, downward motion of an arm, ten feet in front of them.

  This, Nina would later recall thinking, is the most orange place I’ve ever seen. It’s like a huge University of Texas Homecoming Oil Rig.

  She bent her head again, and now was on a narrow stairwell heading down into what was darkness for three steps, and then became lighter.

  “Through here. We’ve set up a meeting room for you and Hector!”

  “Fine.”

  Sandy left and the two of them followed.

  They climbed the stairs, turned right down one corridor, went up another short flight of stairs and were on deck.

  The churning of huge compressors rocked the air around them. Beyond the rail and trailing down to the left were huge brown octopus arms, each one a tube at least five feet in diameter.

  Nina remembered the figures she had been quoted: ten billion cubic meters of natural gas; eighty million barrels of oil.

  Per day.

  The immensity of the thing.

  “What about that cable—the silver one? It looks different.”

  Sandy nodded:

  “It is different. It doesn’t carry oil or gas. It connects to an electric generator on the mainland. We get our electricity through it.”

  They squeezed through another opening. Pipes and valves surrounded them and orange-clad figures scurried everywhere, taking readings, checking gauges. While beyond the rails, and fifty feet down, the giant tentacles spread out from the ship and disappeared in the green blue immensity of gulf waters.

  “You see, Aquatica prides itself on being a very green pumping mechanism. Most stations burn some of the oil they pump out of the fields down below in order to create their own electricity. That’s all right but it spews hydro-carbons into the atmosphere. That’s where we get global warming. We’re trying to fight against that. Oh, here, turn right and go up that ramp.”

  They did so.

  “Now—that door in front of you, lift that handle and push.”

  Nina was the first in line and so she did so.

  A stateroom lay before her, perhaps thirty feet square, darkened by green curtains and viewed impassively by mural paintings of ocean scenes.

  In the middle of the room stood a central oak table, upon which a coffee service had been set.

  “We know you might not be too hungry, given the job you’ve been asked to do. But the pastry chef made croissants and scones. We’ve also have coffee and tea. If you want to sit down and just have something to keep you going…”

  And, as they seated themselves, had coffee poured for them, and watched the pure butter melt in pastries that would have done Bagatelli’s proud, she struggled to make sense of the reality that surrounded her, as opposed to the presuppositions she had brought out to Aquatica.

  Horribly cramped quarters, sweating shirtless men, depth charges….

  World War I submarine movies.

  How stupid your are, Nina!

  And there was also a stereotype in her mind of the ruthless oil barons who must have created these rigs in order to plunder the environment and ruin the world’s supply of fish and wildlife.

  That was not what she was seeing.

  She was seeing an environment where everyone they passed seemed to work in teams of two, checking and double checking to be sure that nothing had been missed.

  Where giant signs saying ‘Be Safe!’ seemed to be everywhere.

  “Ms. Bannister? Hector Ramirez?”

  They stood, and Nina noticed that a line of people had formed between them and the door.

  “Yes, I’m Nina. This is Hector.”

  “And so very nice to meet you two indeed; I’m Tom Holder. I’m the Tool Master on the rig.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  He was dressed exactly as all the other workers; orange jump suit, yellow helmet, sunglasses.—but he was much larger than everyone else. He was also completely bald, and, with glittering eyes, he looked menacing indeed.

  Somehow the cockney accent added to this air of threat, and was not completely belied even by his broad smile.

  “We ‘preciate you’re coming out, we really do! Everyone here on the rig thought Edgar was a first rate bloke.”

  “I can s
ee that,” said Nina.

  And the line continued.

  Various sizes of people, various accents…for, she learned, if Aquatica recruited mainly in Southwest Louisiana, that did not mean all of its workers were Cajuns.

  “Man, we were bros. We hung tight, you know?”

  “El mejor Amigo. Mejor.”

  “I had, I think you say, inwited him. Yes, yes, inwited. To visit me in Germany. In Hannover. I think he would have liked it there.”

  And on.

  And on.

  The line of people who had conspired to kill Edgar Ramirez and who were attempting to get rich at the expense of the earth’s welfare continued to snake its way along.

  This could not be true, Nina found herself thinking. These are gracious and highly professional people.

  And yet….

  …and yet…

  Edgar was dead. And in no possible stretch of the imagination could he have gotten drunk and stumbled into the coulee.

  No, he had been frightened.

  Of something he had seen out here.

  It just did not make sense.

  He had come into Bay St. Lucy from his two week shift out here.

  Frightened.

  Of what?

  Finally, it had become, somehow, twelve o’clock.

  “There’s one last stop, if the two of you don’t mind. Before we go to Edgar’s room.”

  “We don’t mind,” said Nina.

  “We need to go on over into the control room. Phil Bennington is rig director. He asked me to bring you by.”

  “Sure.”

  “So, if you’ll follow me…”

  They did so, leaving the room by a far entrance, and struck as they looked down by five huge torpedo-like growths that seemed to sprout from Aquatica’s hull and extend down toward the surface of the ocean.

  “Life boats,” said Sandy.

  “Those are life boats?” Nina found herself asking. “They look like dark red okra pods, but two hundred times bigger.”

  Sandy smiled.

  “They’re specially designed. They’ve got to be able to withstand a fall of twenty feet into the ocean.”

  “They’re not lowered?”

  “No, they’re exploded out from the ship. If an emergency happens, there might not be time for a lowering. They’re also fireproofed and insulated, so they can navigate in and through a burning oil slick for half a mile.”

  “You don’t use them a lot, I hope.”

  Sandy shook her head.

  “We have them. That’s the most important thing. Here, though. Turn right, go up these stairs, then left. That’s the control room.”

  They did so, then entered something out of a James Bond movie.

  Control panels were everywhere, as were huge tv monitors showing every room on the oil rig.

  “Phil? Here are Ms. Bannister and Hector, Edgar’s brother.”

  A red-haired man with dancing blue eyes crossed the room, beamed at them, and shook their hands.

  “Thank you both for coming out. Welcome to Aquatica. I’m Phil Bennington, rig master.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I’m going to miss Edgar. He was one of the best I ever worked with.”

  “It will mean a lot to his mother that you said that.”

  “Tell her he was the best, and that his rig boss said that.”

  “I will.”

  “Look. On these monitors you can see every area in the rig. All workers have micro chips in these clips around our necks. Two hundred and fifty-three people. They’re all out there now, all accounted for. Well, I’ll promise you: Edgar knew every one of them. Sometimes we would scan the monitors, just to be sure everyone was in the right place. If Edgar didn’t recognize someone, he would ask. It was important to him.”

  And so, on it went.

  Finally, they were through.

  And five minutes later, they were following Sandy Cousins down the corridor that led to Edgar Ramirez’ room.

  Individual rooms for each worker.

  Carpeted halls leading from room to room.

  Little sound at all except for the ventilation motors overhead and the soft sounds of music coming from closed doors to their left and right.

  Sandy had reached the door and was unlocking it.

  She swung it open inwardly.

  The room that looked back at them could have been any dorm room, but a little nicer and with no beer cans;

  “All of the rooms are like this,” Sandy was saying. “We have two hundred and fifteen people on board at any time. Everybody gets an individual room with a tv and stereo system.”

  “Now: We’ve left these baskets here so you’ll have something to put Edgar’s things in. Also, on the table, there’s a vase of flowers for…well, we put it together ourselves. If you could, we would like you to take it to Edgar’s mother, brother, and sister. That is, if you don’t mind doing it.”

  “We don’t mind,” said Nina.

  The three of them had begun to enter the room when a fourth figure approached, walking briskly up the hallway.

  “Ms. Bannister?”

  Nina turned.

  The man walking toward her looked the epitome of a southern gentleman. His hair was wavy and so well coiffed that he might have been a character actor. With his ruddy face and twinkling eyes; he could have been the perfect Mississippi/Louisiana plantation house owner except for the absurd bright orange pumpkin costume he wore.

  “Ms. Bannister?”

  “Yes, I’m Nina Bannister.”

  “Brewster Dale here. Ah have the honor to be in charge of security for Aquatica.”

  She could have been listening, she told herself, to Foghorn Leghorn.

  “And this is the young Mr. Ramirez?”

  Hector nodded.

  “A great loss for all of us, Sir. My condolences. You must be suffering greatly. All I can say to you is—well, I can quote the bard as I always do. He said: ‘Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain’.”

  “The bard?” asked Nina. “Did Shakespeare say that?”

  Brewster Dale shook his head.

  “My only true bard is Mr. Faulkner, Madame.”

  Sandy smiled:

  “Brewster is our scholar out here on Aquatica. He knows everything there is to know about William Faulkner.”

  And Dale would have blushed, has his complexion not been so red as to render doing so impossible. Or at least undetectable.

  “I flatter myself as being somewhat knowledgeable on the subject. At any rate though, I’m sorry to have to bother both of you at what I realize must be an extremely difficult time. But we do have some rather tight security precautions on Aquatica.”

  “What kind of precautions? Surely Edgar wasn’t stealing anything.”

  “No, no, I’m absolutely certain that he wasn’t. A young man of sterling character, absolutely sterling.”

  A shake of the head:

  “But the problem is as follows:. we are using some very advanced techniques out here. I’m not sure whether you have ever heard of ‘industrial espionage?’”

  “Only in books.”

  “Well, the concept exists outside of books, too. There are a great many competing companies that would like to have a look inside what we’re doing out here. Companies in the oil industry. It has happened in the past that employees—especially engineers with advanced degrees—have downloaded advanced programs to personal computers, and sold the contents of those computers for a good deal of money. Not everyone has read Mr. Faulkner’s line: ‘I say money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it.’ from Intruder in the Dust. So it is my job to make sure they have no way to spend it, and I accordingly build in various mechanisms to protect us from this kind of thing, but even at that, we do not allow personal computers to leave Aquatica without some of our people checking them out first.”

  “I see.”

  “Once again, we should never wish to i
mply that young Edgar would do anything like I just described. But if he has a personal computer, I do need to check the files.”

  “I understand.”

  They entered the room.

  There was a single, neatly made bed, and, bolted high against the wall, a television set.

  Against one of the walls stood the six foot tall metal locker.

  “When Edgar came home,” Nina said, “he left the key to his locker in his room. Hector gave it to me. I’ve got it here.”

  “That’s good,” said Dale. “Otherwise we would have to break the lock and force the locker open. If you want to go ahead and open it…”

  Nina stepped forward, taking the small, glistening key from her pocket.

  Metal rasped against metal; there was a small ‘clang,’ and the door of the locker swung upon.

  The locker was completely empty, except for two things: a small poster of a nude woman on an equally nude beach, and, lying on a shelf perhaps three feet off the floor, a black laptop computer.

  “Well,” said Nina. “Edgar was a man.”

  There were smiles throughout the room.

  “Most lockers out here,” said Sandy, “have posters like that inside them. Except for the women’s lockers. We have pictures of naked men.”

  More smiles.

  Brewster Dale lifted the computer gently from the shelf, turned, took it to the writing desk that sat beneath a window, unwound a power cord, and plugged the prong into an outlet socket.

  The screen lit up, flashing with a dozen or so icons.

  “Can you get into Edgar’s files?” Nina asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “The young man was required to register his password. I have it.”

  His fingers rattled on the keys. Finally, he said:

  “I want to change places here, so the light from the window comes in over my shoulder. There don’t seem to be too many files here. Maybe, if the rest of you want to pack the clothes and personal belongings, I can be done with my work in only a few minutes.”

  He moved, then looked wistfully out of the window and quoted his favorite author again:

  ‘“Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...” I do love the novel Light in August.”