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

by T'Gracie Reese

  “What?”

  “Go and eat lunch.”

  There is only one reason why one should not live in the charming and magical city of Lafayette, Louisiana, this being the traffic. Even at normal times of year, getting from one point to another is difficult, the original city planners having neglected to take into consideration the concept of the left turn.

  But there are very few normal times of the year, normal being an abnormal phenomenon for Cajun thinking.

  Rather, there is always a parade of some kind going on.

  Mardi Gras season, for example, always begins with Epiphany and worsens, so that by February fifteenth, one week before the day itself, traffic is almost intolerable. The city is paralyzed, its major streets cordoned by gray metal barricades that resembled modular prison cells.

  But it is not only Mardi Gras. There are late spring parades, early summer parades, fall parades: Car travel becomes impossible, each turning being met with flashes of blue squad car lights, as stern policemen, either on horseback or motorcycles, stare at drivers and make small circular motions with their hands, ostensibly suggesting another route to the grocery store or the bakery or the filling station or whatever…but signifying in actuality that the vehicle must simply stop and remain immobile until the parade is over.

  This is why Professor Narang suggested to Annette that she and Nina walk to The Olde Tyme Grocery.

  The Olde Tyme Grocery is one of hundreds of reasons why one should live in the charming and magical city of Lafayette.

  Food.

  The Olde Tyme Grocery was just an expanded shack, perhaps a half mile from campus.

  But it had a kind of splendor about it, just the same.

  One walked into a scene of chaos, tunneled through a constant crowd, bellowed as loud as possible either SHRIMP! or OYSTER! or CATFISH!

  …and then flattened oneself into one of the far shack corners like a hat rack until an echo-bellow approximating the order-bellow rolled through and over the crowd signifying that the sandwich itself was ready.

  There remained a bit of hand to hand combat involved in reaching the counter, paying the bill, getting the treasured grease soaked sack, and escaping into the balmy swamp air again—(tables existed at The Olde Tyme Grocery but were only available during those hours when the establishment was closed)—and going somewhere to eat the food.

  ‘Somewhere’ in this case was the alligator pond in the center of campus.

  Annette and Nina chose one of the metal benches separated by a sidewalk from the three-foot high metal fence separated by no more than a few reeds and a fallen tree from the four foot alligator, which, gray as the mud it was lying on, stared implacably and enigmatically at them as they unwrapped their shrimp po-boys.

  Nina wondered what to talk about first.

  She could talk about the huge battered shrimp that seemed to dwarf not only the buns that semi enclosed it but also all of the living wildlife-birds, fish, squirrels, turtles—that moved about the placid lake before them.

  Or she could talk about the wisdom of eating anything at all this close to a four-foot alligator, which, though admittedly not a ten-foot alligator, was still a good deal more significant than the four-inch pet alligator Nina’s parents had once bought for her in a pet store.

  She chose that for a time.

  “Don’t the alligators worry you?”

  Annette chewed for a while, closed her eyes, savored the sauce even as it was dribbling down her cheek, wiped herself clean with a brown napkin, and finally recognized that another being was with her on the bench.

  “What?”

  “The alligators.”

  “What about them?”

  “Aren’t they a little close?”

  “Close for what?”

  “You trust them?”

  Annette shook her head before taking another bite.

  “I don’t tell them any secrets, if that’s what you mean. How’s your po-boy?”

  “Good. Great, really. These shrimp are huge. I just mean…well, there are students passing by here. And little children. And pets.”

  “They don’t bother the gators.”

  “No, that wasn’t…”

  She continued to look at Annette, who, mystified, looked back at her.

  Finally, it was time to change the subject.

  “So what do we do, Annette?”

  “Eat.”

  “I know. But after that?”

  “After that, Nina, you take it easy. Go home. Sit by the ocean. You’ve earned a rest.”

  “But Aquatica…”

  “What’s going on out there is what’s going on everywhere in the deep-water industry. They’re cutting corners.”

  “So what will happen now?”

  Annette nodded:

  “Narang will happen now. Edgar, and you, have done a helluva thing by getting him this disk.”

  “He’s that good?”

  “He’s amazing, Nina. Do you know anything about him?”

  “No, practically nothing.”

  “Born in New Delhi but raised in London. Educated at Cambridge. Then Harvard.”

  “Why is he here?”

  “Because big oil is here. Right in Lafayette.”

  “He hates big oil?”

  A pause. Then:

  “He doesn’t hate big oil as such, Nina. He hates big oil and greed when they join up.”

  “Doesn’t that always happen? Isn’t that what you just said?”

  “Not exactly. There are fine people in the oil business, and Narang knows every one of them. From New York, to Washington, to New Orleans….he’s not a firebrand kind of guy, not a demonstrator who would get himself kicked off a rig. Right now I can promise you, he’s making calls.”

  She stood up, walked in a tight circle around the bench, and continued:

  “If I were to take that disc anywhere—LP, the police, the EPA, anywhere—I’d just get laughed at.”

  “Despite what’s on it?”

  “The things that are on it are not that obvious. It takes a world class physics person to see what their long term effects are going to be. That’s Narang. Nina, he will get Aquatica fixed, if anyone can.”

  “And for the time being?”

  “I don’t think there’s an immediate danger. A month down the road, maybe two months. But it won’t happen. Narang won’t let it.”

  “I just feel like I should…”

  “What you ‘should,’ ma chere, is fly back home. Go out to eat. Let us handle it from here.”

  “Will you keep me updated?”

  “Of course we will. Don’t expect to see any big splashy news stories, though. Everything will be kept very quiet. And besides, the things that are going to happen…increased viscosity tests, heightened awareness of various density parameters…these things don’t make the big headlines anyway. But don’t you worry. They’ll be getting done.”

  “So you think I…”

  “Should go back to Bay St. Lucy, feeling good about the whole thing. When does your flight leave?”

  “Two fifteen.”

  “Great. I’ll take you to the airport.”

  “I feel like I should at least say good-bye, express my appreciation to Professor Narang.”

  Annette smiled and shook her head:

  “If either one of us walked into his office right now, he probably wouldn’t even know we were there. That disc you brought him is like a bone for a dog. He’ll be thinking about nothing else for the next few days and weeks.”

  “Well, then…”

  “Well then, thank you, Nina. I thank you, and maybe the whole gulf coast needs to thank you. Now let’s catch your flight to New Orleans.”

  The flights back were as uneventful as those coming had been.

  On both legs, though—Lafayette to New Orleans, New Orleans to Bay St. Lucy—she was surrounded by a pleasant, comforting, golden glow.

  The glow might have emanated from a small amount of alcohol, since she allowed herself a glas
s of cold, dry, Chardonnay on each flight.

  Or it might have come from a bit of smugness, of self satisfaction.

  This was not English literature. This was engineering. Physics. Chemistry.

  Areas about which she knew nothing at all. And from the time she had set foot on Aquatica with Hector, she had felt silly, guilty, and out of place. She was intruding in a billion dollar industry, when she should have been staying in her little beach front shack, petting Furl and taking her morning walks along the beach.

  And yet, and yet…

  She had done something good.

  Something was wrong, something so complex that she might never understand it.

  And now it was going to be fixed.

  She told herself, as she watched the sun go down and finally got a glimpse of the airport lights at Bay St. Lucy, that she would never hear anything more about Aquatica, and that everything would be all right.

  And about both of these things, she was to be proved completely wrong.

  INTERLUDE

  He had long since forgotten what bar he was in.

  There were so many in the quarter. All he knew was that he had studiously avoided the known tourist spots—Pat O’Brien’s, The Napoleon House, The Olde Absinthe—simply on the off change that he might be seen.

  But he would not be seen.

  He had been too careful.

  The plan had taken months to perfect, but he had overlooked no detail.

  And tomorrow—today, actually, since it was almost 3 AM—today, in little more than seven hours he would be on a tramp steamer heading to Hamburg.

  A day or so in that festive German port city, with its sailors’ quarters and legalized prostitution, then on to London.

  London with money.

  He knew a woman there. She had no idea that he was coming, and she would probably be shacked up with someone. But she would be glad to see him.

  She always was.

  And as for his days on the Aquatica, the work he had done there…

  …that was all in the past.

  So that when the fruition of that work actually took place, he would be half a world away.

  Such were his thoughts upon paying his bar tab, tottering his way drunkenly along whatever semi-deserted street—for streets in the Quarter are never completely deserted—finding the key to the apartment door, slipping it into the lock, and turning it.

  Click.

  Sleep would be good.

  He had never been able to sleep well on the rig.

  But he had escaped the rig.

  And all the gibberish, the ‘once in, never out;’ malarkey…

  That was to be proven wrong, once and for all.

  He was, upon thinking about it, not at all convinced that such a character as The Tool Master really even existed.

  He pushed open the door and stumbled inside.

  Ah, the bed, waiting there for him.

  “We don’t,” came a voice behind him, “encourage desertion.”

  He thought about turning around.

  And that was the last thought he ever had.

  CHAPTER NINE: BEING COMPLETELY WRONG

  The following morning Nina received an invitation.

  It was the kind of thing she might ordinarily have turned down, preferring instead to get back into her routine of beach walking, Furlcurling, shackcleaning, and gift shop managing.

  But these had not been ordinary days for her.

  These had been days of deep melancholy mixed with utter confusion.

  She had been dealing either with things she did not understand at all, or things she found completely depressing.

  And so when Tom Broussard arrived on her porch at a little after ten AM (she had just brewed a new pot of coffee and was sitting on her deck watching a bright green plastic dragon try to strangle an eight year old boy in the surf, much to the boy’s—and his parents’—delight), when Tom, Bay St. Lucy’s favorite pornographic novelist, announced that he and his wife Penelope were planning a small overnight camping trip to one of the offshore islands and Nina should come along…

  …she accepted without reservation.

  Nor was she wrong to do so.

  The trip proved everything she had hoped it to be.

  She arrived with her Vespa at the dock around six PM, helped Penelope and Tom load the two tents they would be taking, as well as a small supply of rations (fish were to provide the major portion of what was to be eaten, and these fish would be caught later), lugged some of the coolers of beer onboard (the hosts were taking a thousand cans of Schlitz and a six pack of light beer, half of which were for Nina)—and then settled into her cozy stern niche as The Sea Urchin, Penelope’s squalid and efficient little fishing boat, bravely attacked the incoming tide and threw itself and its crew against a series of waves tinged gold by the setting sun.

  An hour and a half later, they had caught five whitefish. These Penelope dutifully cleaned while Tom built a driftwood campfire. And now they were sitting on the beach of DuBois Island, a place virtually unknown by tourists for the simple reason that it contained nothing of interest save dunes, scrub brush, and isolation.

  So for a while they simply talked of this and that—why various members of the Democratic Party should be shot for what they were doing to the country, why various members of The Republican Party should be shot for what they were doing to the country—the last brutal murder Tom had planned and executed by typewriter, the number of pieces the corpse had wound up in and where they were by Chapter Six…

  …and other such conversational morsels.

  …which they chewed over along with the fish, while two of their party guzzled beer after beer and the other of their party drank a beer.

  One, which lasted an hour and a half.

  And then a second, which lasted until bedtime.

  The stars, Nina could remember thinking, as she drifted off to sleep with the unmistakable aroma of sea air and tent fabric filling her nose, were superb.

  And that, then, was the way her night had gone.

  Absolute perfection.

  No coulees, no corpses, no computer disks, no oil rigs, no incomprehensible data…

  ...just the exquisite kind of an evening that those people who live on the sea coast can experience whenever they want, and that everyone else in the world cannot.

  The following morning was just as good.

  They awoke at first light of course, Nina feeling a slight twinge of dizziness from her two cans of light beer, Tom and Penelope feeling no effects at all from their two hundred cans of actual beer. The air was deliciously cool. They combed the beach, noting the sand crabs, quivering bits of unidentifiable marine life, and white/pink ribbed shells that lay in dark, hard-packed sand; and they rekindled the fire, poking it a bit, prodding at the hissing coals, and blowing on various sides of driftwood teepee until it had begun to crackle again and could prove a satisfactory base for the beat-up old coffee pot they had brought along.

  They ate a ‘b’ breakfast.

  Bear Claws beignets and bagels from Bagatelli’s.

  A day old, perhaps, but who cared?

  And so Nina was, for a time, cured.

  The events of the previous week had been no more than a dream.

  She felt this way, at least, during the boat ride back to Bay St. Lucy.

  She felt this way for the entire afternoon, as she puttered around Elementals, shifting pots and paintings and ferns and tea services for absolutely no reason, and selling something now and then…

  ..and she felt this way for most of the early evening, during which she apologized to Furl for leaving him unattended, and fried in her favorite little skillet two of the filets that had been given to her by Tom and Penelope.

  She even felt this way as, at approximately nine PM, she began to read her Dorothy Sayers.

  It was, in fact, all the way until ten minutes after nine—Lord Peter was just exiting the Bellona Club—when the cell phone buzzed, that she stopped feeling this w
ay.

  “Hello?”

  The buzz on the other end sounded far away.

  She wondered how she could differentiate near and far buzzes.

  Weren’t all buzzes the same?

  There was no time to speculate about this, because a voice had now embedded itself in the buzz, or, she mused, embuzzed itself.

  “Am I speaking now with Ms. Bannister?”

  “Yes?”

  “Ms. Nina Bannister, of Bay St. Lucy?”

  “This is she.”

  “This is Professor Daruka Narang calling.”

  Oh shit, she thought.

  So much for remote islands, campfires, and sleeping under the stars.

  “Yes, Professor Narang?”

  “I am calling you because…well, because a somewhat difficult situation has arisen.”

  Of course a ‘difficult situation’ had arisen.

  What had any of them expected, if not for that?

  “All right. Tell me.”

  “I completed this morning a thorough examination of the materials which you supplied me with.”

  “Okay.”

  “The situation at Aquatica is quite serious; perhaps more serious than I might have conjectured upon a first glance at the available data.”

  “How serious is it, Professor?”

  “We may be talking about something quite imminent, and something quite large.”

  “An explosion?”

  “Yes, and one which would involve many fatalities on the rig itself. Also, given the amount of oil and gas involved, the environmental aspects would be absolutely devastating. Unprecedented, I would say.”

  “My God.”

  “Yes, it is indeed quite serious. Which is why we have come to the matter of my calling you.”

  “What can I do?”

  “You have done much already, my dear Ms. Bannister. But there may remain a more difficult challenge still.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I shall. You must understand that my normal path of action in a situation such as this would be somewhat subtle. I would make specific contacts and offer specific recommendations. Certain scientists and engineers, certain specialists familiar with the problems particular to the offshore drilling process…”