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

by T'Gracie Reese

  …to speculate on all of these reasons why she would not have sex tonight or any other night in her future, when she was joined at the table by Annette, who undoubtedly would have sex tonight…

  She wore a black dress bare on one shoulder, red hair glistening in whatever meager yellow light was dispensed by a precariously hanging single bulb, small cigar swinging at the end of an immensely long arm…

  “The beer came,” Nina said.

  “Good. Now…look across the room, over there, leaning against the bar. See that oily-haired on muscly guy?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s my boyfriend. Wait. I’ll go get him.”

  Annette crossed the room, accosted the man she had been speaking about, embraced him quickly, laughed, embraced him again, kissed him lightly…

  …and after two minutes or so, was back with him.

  “This is Guidry,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  And so, for a time, Annette and Guidry talked about fishing while Nina simply listened.

  Pierre Boudin, happy as a pig-clam, worked his hall. He brought them two more bottles of beer—ok, so they weren’t quite ready for more beer, but they would be––sat with them, agreed with them, laughed with them, folds of flesh rolling and tangled torso-growth sprouting in the warm, fetid air.

  …until, the beer-clock above the bar inching its way to seven o’clock, they rose and made their way toward the dance floor.

  It looked different now. The single melancholy saxophone player had disappeared, swallowed by the swamp upon which this entire precarious enterprise floated. In his place, still not attracting a great deal of attention, were scattered musicians, none of whom seemed to know each other, all of whom seemed unaware of their surroundings. A fiddle appeared, was scratched, then tuned, then set aimlessly aside. A bass joined it, huge, burnished, immovable, more like a piece of bedroom furniture than any possible musical instrument; and there, as much smaller as it should have been than the bass was larger…was the heart of the band, the box accordion.

  Annette watched the Red Stick Ramblers set up like she would have watched a mother give birth.

  Her eyes glittered, black and shining, star-scattered rhinestones on the strap of her dress.

  “How long,” whispered Nina, “have you known Guidry?”

  Annette stared back at her for an instant.

  “What?”

  “How long have you known Guidry?”

  “Oh. What time is it now?”

  “It’s seven o’clock.”

  ‘”Then—five minutes, I guess.”

  Nina could find nothing to say for a moment, and finally stammered out:

  “I thought you two were a couple.”

  Annette nodded, impatiently:

  “We are. Now. Remember how I told you I discovered men in my mid twenties…”

  “…and never looked back.”

  “That’s’ right, ma chere, that’s right.”

  “And you’re not looking back now.”

  “Not a bit of it.

  Nina knew nothing to say.

  Finally, she tried to stammer something out, but nothing came.

  “What? What is it, Nina?”

  “Annette—it’s just—it all seems so inappropriate. I mean—one of your classmates is dead.”

  “That’s right, Babe. He is. He is dead.”

  “I mean—how can you just go dancing?”

  Then, from somewhere in the collection of half rooms that were nothing like an actual building, a clock started chiming.

  Bong. Bong…

  The Red Stick Ramblers belted out:

  “GEAUX GEAUX GEAUX de GEAUX GEAUX GEAUX!

  MEAUX MEAUX MEAUX de MEAUX MEAUX MEAUX!

  And Annette shouted back at Nina:

  “How can you not?”

  The music pounded and throbbed and wailed and squawked and dipped and soared and cried and always tailed off in its plaintive syllables of “oh oh oh, de oh oh oh,” spilling out into the sweating air with five vowels and an ‘x’.

  The dance floor, Nina estimated, was fifteen feet square.

  There were now eleven thousand people on it.

  Where had they come from?

  True, there had been customers, lag-abouts and stragglers, disreputable types scattered about this trail of rooms furnished like an alley…but nothing like this!

  Annette had disappeared, sucked into the dance quicksand that was heaving and boiling so close to the musicians themselves that dancers, their heads cocked back and eyes boring straight up into heaven, had to neck-jerk slightly to avoid fiddle-bows jabbed into earrings.

  “May I?”

  A man was standing just before her with an arm outstretched.

  He looked…

  Oh, hell, what did it matter how he looked.

  “Do you wish to dance, Miss?”

  “Sure.”

  She took his hand, felt herself being led forward, albeit, coincidentally and irrelevantly, backwards…and bathed in the dance as she would have in the ocean swell of a beach.

  There was no room on the dance floor, and there was everywhere room.

  It was, perhaps, his skill in guiding them; or it was the massed radar of the beings around them, who, like a cloud of bats, emitted and received in return navigational force waves operational only in fields of rhythm.

  He held her closer to him, palm pressed firmly against her back. At that moment, she did not so much reconsider going to bed with him, as to postulate for the first time going to bed with all of them. They could every one…all of the bodies large and small, bespectacled and red haired, glamorous and wizened, mammal and near-reptilian…all sleep exhausted, some time far later in the night or early morning, in a bed of reeds and mango peelings, snoring out, like a huge multi-limbed Cajun bear, the muted syllables:

  All bad things, all evil deeds, disappeared.

  OH OH OH, de OH OH OH!

  “You a good dancer, Miss!”

  “Thank you!” she shouted to the six faces closest to her.

  All of them smiled back.

  Saturday morning.

  Seven thirty, AM.

  It was a little, dilapidated house and Nina loved it. What was this place where the strange Annette Richoux lived, and to which a taxi had dutifully returned her around midnight? A bungalow? No. A cottage? That would be putting an optimistic spin on the thing. It was literally no more than an outbuilding, a something that would have passed for slave quarters if slaves had existed at the time of its construction. It contained only one large room, partitioned by half walls and dotted here and there by what passed for a tiny kitchen, a questionable bathroom, a bed nook––and, at her first glance, it was semi-coated by badly peeling grey paint, seemingly bought as surplus from the German army.

  Tucked away in the forest—well, all right, it wasn’t exactly a forest, but everything here in the swamplands, only some miles from the huge Atchafalaya Basin…everything in this coastal Cajun marshland seemed only a live oak, only a cypress spear away from what could have easily been called a swamp…tucked away in this near forest, with a crumbling red-brick wall separating it from the lane, and a delightfully dilapidated off-green swinging gate allowing entrance to the yard-patch––

  …tucked away just far enough from the sight of those few students who might be passing en route to the mile distant campus…

  …it looked exactly like what her own bungalow would have been, had it been surrounded by a swamp and not fronted by an ocean.

  “So, you sleep ok, Nina?”

  She was sitting beside the bed, having accepted a cup of tea.

  “Best night’s sleep I ever had,” she replied. “I was dead tired.”

  “Well, darlin,’ you looked good out on that dance floor.”

  “I was just jumping around.”

  “That’s all dancing is.”

  “I don’t know…the rest of you made it look better.”

  “Well, we were
born here. Or close by, anyway.”

  “What time did you get in, Annette?”

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Where is Guidry?”

  “Where is who?”

  “Okay. I get it.”

  “Here. Want a beignet? I got ‘em at Poupard’s Bakery when I was driving back, about five. That’s the best time. They’re fresh.”

  She did want a beignet. Then another.

  Sugar was getting everywhere.

  It did not seem to matter.

  “I had a good time last night, Annette. I really did.”

  “You deserved it. You’ve been through some stuff.”

  “I guess so.”

  Silence for a time. Then:

  “Nina, I can’t tell you how much everyone in the department thought of Edgar.”

  ‘”He had that effect on people.”

  “I hated it, that he got hired by LP.”

  “Why?”

  Annette shrugged:

  “Writing about oil companies…big oil companies…is what I do. I don’t like them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re frauds. They claim to understand what they’re doing. But they can’t. The whole damned thing is too big. The depth of the wells, the complexity of the operation—there are too many people involved. Too much chance of a mistake. A lot of mistakes. And then all hell breaks loose. It breaks loose, and they can’t put it right again. And everything dies. Hell, we don’t even know how long the dying goes on.”

  “And this is what you write about?”

  “Hope to make my career about it. Even though it’s sure to hold me down.”

  “How?”

  “When we go onto the campus, you look around you.”

  “At?”

  “The buildings. Especially the geology building.”

  “What will I be looking for?”

  “The money that built them.”

  “Which comes from?”

  “Big oil, baby. Big oil.”

  “So they don’t like you because you don’t like them.”

  “It would never be admitted. But that’s the way it is.”

  “They hired Edgar anyway.”

  “They have money. They need engineers now. Half the young people in our department are already under contract, even before the ink is dry on their diplomas. Hundred and twenty thousand.”

  “What?”

  “One hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. Starting salary. They spend two years on the rig, then they start up in the company.”

  “Edgar had his family to support.”

  “Yes, he did. So there wasn’t much of a choice about the matter.”

  “No. Guess there wasn’t.”

  Pause.

  “You want another beignet?”

  “I’ve had plenty.”

  “Well. The dancing is over then. You know what we need to do, Nina.”

  “Yes.”

  “So. Let’s go meet Professor Narang. And look at this mysterious flash disc of yours.”

  Within ten minutes, they were walking into DeGolyer Hall, which, Nina ultimately realized, housed all offices belonging to the geological sciences. Then there was a stop at the departmental office, another at Annette’s office—small and crammed with books lying around like refuse—and finally they were opening the door of a larger viewing room, with computers hooked to overhead projectors.

  “My esteemed Ms. Bannister!”

  Professor Daruka Narang beamed at her.

  He was standing behind a podium, looking up at the two of them as they entered.

  It was a classroom meant for perhaps two hundred students, almost empty now except for the three of them.

  “Dr. Narang?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  He was a small man, immaculately dressed. He had a perfectly trimmed goatee, which shone black against his olive skin.

  He gestured broadly:

  “Come. Both of you, come down. I have some tea here. Could I offer you a cup of tea?”

  And in fact he was standing beside a small table with a makeshift tea service on it.

  They descended the steps.

  “Thank you so much for letting me come, Sir.”

  “No. It is our pleasure. Has Annette been gracious to you?”

  “She has indeed.”

  “I took,” said Annette, “Nina dancing.”

  “Wonderful! Wonderful! Please—take a cup of tea. There is sugar here, if you wish.”

  “Thank you.”

  It was so strange, thought Nina. Tea. Dancing.

  And the memories of Edgar.

  But she drank, and chatted, and talked about the flight into Lafayette…

  …and went through all the common courtesies with this man, as though the three of them were celebrating the queen’s birthday at some salon in London.

  Finally though, after she had said some words about her own identity, and what Bay St. Lucy was like, and what Edgar’ family was like…

  …after the three of them had completed the pleasantries expected of them.

  The work at hand was ready to begin.

  She produced the disc, which she had been carrying in her purse.

  Annette inserted it into one of the computers.

  Another computer began buzzing, and finally the screen behind the podium broke into bright illumination.

  Professor Narang, horned-rimmed glasses on now, fingers crawling over the keyboard like the legs of a tarantula, became immersed in the data filling the air and covering the walls around them.

  And there was a mass of data.

  The same data Nina had seen on her own computer, which now seemed woefully inadequate.

  But the figures on the screen changed as the speed of Narang’s typing increased.

  Now there were graphs—line graphs, bar graphs.

  Now there were lists of names, rosters, departmental flow charts.

  Then numbers again, and letters in some kind of code.

  And this went on.

  Two minutes.

  Five minutes.

  Finally, Narang began whispering at the keyboard, and, from time to time, the ceiling of the room as he threw his head back, attempting, it seemed, to get his breath.

  Finally, he looked at Nina and asked:

  “Do you see this?”

  Nina shook her head:

  “I see, but I don’t understand what I’m looking at.”

  “All right. Follow the pointer. This is not easy. But it is all here.”

  “What is?”

  “You must simply look…”

  The moving cursor:

  Narang:

  “These figures are from Tuesday, May 2, a bit over a month ago. The well has reached a depth of 13,293 feet below the sea floor. The final string of production casing from the wellhead at the sea floor to total depth has been put in the hole, and cemented in place.”

  Nina understood none of this, but it had a kind of haunting quality about it, and she could not take her eyes off the figures sprinkled over the screen before her.

  “The well plan calls for fifty one barrels of cement. Look…look here: this graph shows that they have used only twenty-three barrels. This will be in no way sufficient to ensure a seal between this 7-inch production casing—do you see it on the chart?––and the 9 and 7/8-inch protection casing they had put in before.”

  The professor was immersed in his subject now, and his eyes could be seen glittering behind the lenses of his glasses.

  “Now please watch, Ms. Bannister. Mud has been lost to the reservoir while drilling the bottom portion of the well. This is the phenomenon which we generally refer to as ‘lost circulation.’ It usually indicates good reservoir quality, an interval of lower pressure or both, and can result in an enlarged wellbore or “washout.” This is important—exceptionally important––because it might have been difficult to create a good cement seal between the casing and the formation. It also would have bee
n impossible to ensure the effectiveness of the cement seal without running a cement-bond log.”

  Silence for a time, save for the humming of the computers and the projectors.

  “All right. We shall proceed. It is now four days later. The cement that they did pour contained—and you can see that in the spectrum analysis over on the second chart there––a nitrogen additive to make it lighter so that it would flow more easily and better fill the area between the casing and the lost circulation-washout zone. That might make some sense, but surely they must have recognized that it also lowered the cement’s ability to make a good seal, and cause gas from the reservoir to dilute the viscosity of the cement.”

  A door opened.

  Someone looked in, and asked if the three people in the room needed anything.

  They did not.

  The door closed.

  More:

  “The next day. They have waited about 20 hours for the cement to dry. Oh my heavens––they are displacing the drilling fluid in the wellbore and riser with sea water. Sea water is much lighter than drilling mud so there is going to be less downward force in the wellbore to balance the flow of gas from the reservoir.”

  And so it went.

  Narang spoke primarily to Annette, who nodded, obviously understanding what to Nina was simply gibberish.

  But clearly something was wrong on Aquatica.

  Finally, lights went up in the room.

  “What’s going on out there?” asked Nina.

  “Oh a great deal. And none of it very promising. But I can promise you, dear Ms. Bannister, that you have done a very good thing, and a very brave thing, by bringing me this disc.”

  “It was just a thought of mine. Edgar’s phone. If I could find it, I would know who he was trying to call.”

  “And a brilliant thought it was.”

  “Can you do anything with this information?”

  “Oh yes, oh yes. I can first decipher it, calculate the extent of damage that has already been done, make certain projections—and then begin contacting the right people.”

  “Great. But…I feel like there is probably something I should do.”

  “There is, dear lady. There certainly is. And you are going to do it with Annette, right now.”