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

by T'Gracie Reese

  They opened the locker and took out of it a big black oil-glistened automatic, which Liz examined, thoroughly, cocking and uncocking it, checking its chamber.

  “Loaded, well oiled, and ready,” she said, quietly.

  “You know how to use one of these?”

  She nodded.

  “Combat zone coverage.”

  “Afghanistan?”

  “Flushing.”

  In five minutes, they were back in the boat.

  “Never doubt that a small group of dedicated women,” began Nina, “can change the world.”

  “Indeed,” added Liz, “that’s the only thing that ever has.”

  “All right, ladies,” said Penelope, starting the boat’s engines, “let’s go fishing.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: BACK TO AQUATICA

  There was a small chop for the first two miles out, but otherwise the sea was calm. Nina and Liz sat on cushions in the bow of the rectangular craft, while Penelope steered from the back.

  “I think,” said Nina over the roar of the outboards, “that we must have missed something all along.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t pin it down. It’s just…what he said…”

  “What who said?”

  “It’s not important. Or maybe it is. I’ve just got to piece it together in my mind.”

  She then turned and shouted back to Penelope:

  “Penn, do you think they’ll let us board?”

  Penelope shook her head and answered”

  “Either they’ll have to let one of us come up, or they’ll have to send somebody down.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ll be out of gas by then.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I’ve only taken on enough gas to get us out there. Rule of the sea, though; they have to help us.”

  No one had anything to say to that.

  The boat plowed on.

  At the five-mile mark the skies began to darken.

  At seven miles it began to rain.

  Penelope reached under a tarpaulin to get slickers out. The three of them put on the rain gear, and, at that point, something moved under a second tarpaulin.

  “What was that?” asked Liz.

  “I don’t know,” Penelope answered, but…”

  Before she could finish, the tarpaulin seemed to rise by itself.

  It then slid off to one side, revealing Hector Ramirez.

  “Hector!” shouted Nina.

  “Oh my God!” shouted Liz.

  “----!” shouted Penelope, forgetting, for a moment, her rule about avoiding obscenities while fishing.

  “Hector what are you doing here?”

  “I know you are going out to the boat, to do something important. Something that is to do with Edgar.”

  “But you can’t…”

  “So I follow you tonight on my bike. I know you do not see me. When you leave the boat…”

  “For beer and guns,” whispered Nina, remembering the five minute interlude when The Sea Urchin was empty.

  “…when you leave, I sneak on.”

  “You got something over,” Nina said quietly, “on Ms. Bannister.”

  “We have to take him back,” said Liz.

  “We can’t, Liz. We don’t have time. We’re going to get there at seven as it is. If we double back now…”

  ‘Okay, okay, I understand.”

  “--------!”

  “It’s all right, Penn. We don’t have a choice.”

  Finally Hector spoke:

  “Sometimes, Senora…”

  “I know. I know. “

  Then she smiled:

  “Sometimes a man is needed.”

  And they sailed on.

  They reached Aquatica at ten minutes before seven.

  The massive rig loomed even larger than Nina had remembered, since they came up below it now, and not from above, as she had done before.

  The rain was harder now, but it had not become completely dark, and they could be seen easily by teams of orange-clad men lining the rail.

  “Ahoy below! Who are you?”

  “Sea Urchin!” shouted Penelope in reply. “We have some people who need to come aboard!”

  “Can’t allow that! No security check!”

  Damn, thought Nina. Maybe this is not going to work, after all.

  “Get Sandy Cousins!” she shouted as loud as possible. “Get Phil Bennington. I know both of them!”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Nina Bannister.”

  This caused a furor among the men who had heard it. Some laughed, some cursed, some gestured.

  “It’s nice,” said Nina, quietly, “to be famous.”

  “What do you want out here, ma’am? Do you still think we’re going to blow up?”

  Laughter.

  If only you knew, thought Nina.

  She could see now that there were helicopters hovering everywhere, some waiting while others landed to disgorge white dinner-jacketed men and gown-clad women.

  “The best and the brightest,” said Liz.

  “Nina!”

  She looked up, at the rail directly above them.

  Thank God.

  Sandy Cousins.

  “Nina, what in hell is going on?”

  “We need to come up!”

  “We got a call from the airport. One of the lawyers says you’re…”

  “I know, I know. It’s all kind of crazy, Sandy.”

  “We’re not supposed to let you on board!”

  “Sandy, you’ve got to trust me! You’ve got to trust all of us!”

  “I don’t have the power to…”

  And then Phil Bennington appeared beside her at the rail, saying:

  “I do have the power. It may cost me my job later on, but…all right. Come on up. We’ll send the platform down for you. You can moor your craft on the side of Aquatica. Then you can ride the platform on up.”

  “Thank you! Thank you so much!”

  “I have no idea what’s going on here, but…well, I don’t propose to leave three women and a young boy in a driving rain in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.”

  And in this way, Nina, Liz, Hector, and Penelope were taken aboard the Aquatica.

  A little over an hour, if they were correct, before the vessel blew up.

  Within a matter of minutes, they had been dried off, offered coffee, and led through smiling crowds ever farther toward the bowels of the rig.

  “We need to go,” said Nina,” to the control room.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Phil Bennington. “We’re breaking security right now, by even having you on board.”

  “All right. Where can we go?”

  “Nina,” said Sandy. “You’ve got to tell us. What’s happening here? They said you were making some awful row at the airport, talking about explosions again. Are you both crazy? Haven’t we been all through this?”

  “Just find us a room, Sandy. And get your Tool Master there.”

  “Tom? Tom Holder?”

  “Yes. And you probably want the head of security, too. He needs to hear this. Get Brewster Dale in the room.”

  “But I don’t know where they…”

  “I’m not insane, Sandy. Neither is Liz here. There’s something you’ve got to hear. And you’ve got to hear it soon.”

  Sandy nodded reluctantly and said:

  “All right. I’ll try.”

  And she did.

  The room was small but well insulated. It contained a round table.

  Within five minutes, the people Nina had named were seated around the table.

  They could have been seated at a board room in the Bay St. Lucy town hall.

  At twelve o’clock, Phil Bennington. Two o’clock, Tom Holder. Four o’clock, Brewster Dale. Six o’clock, Liz Cohen. Eight o’clock, Nina.

  Penelope and Hector were somewhere else, being fed and shown the hospitality of Aquatica.

  There was a clock on the wall behind Bennington.

>   Seven thirty.

  “All right, Ms. Bannister. Ms. Cohen. We’ve pretty much done as you asked. The people you wanted are all here.”

  “And,” said Brewster Dale, his face even ruddier than ever, “it has been done at great expense to my good name. Why, they’re going to have my head back in Lafayette for even allowing you two to be brought up on board. Why, you can’t go around shouting ‘bomb’ like that! Not in a crowded airport. And certainly not on Aquatica!”

  “Yeh,” interjected Holder, leaning forward. “All the blokes think you’re both crazy! Talkin’ about a bomb that way! That’s a thing we don’t joke about, bombs!”

  “But,” said Nina, quietly, “there is a bomb.”

  Silence in the room.

  “I think,” said Bennington, starting to rise, “we’ve all had about…”

  “Do you know,” she continued, “what semtex is?”

  More silence.

  A dreadful kind of silence.

  Except for the ticking of the clock.

  Seven thirty-five

  Finally, Holder.

  The Tool Master:.

  “Aye, lass. Every driller knows what semtex is.”

  “It’s in your drilling tubes.”

  Sandy:

  “What?”

  “There is plastique in your drilling tubes.”

  Bennington:

  “That’s impossible.”

  Nina:

  “From your central control panels, can you check the density of the cement in each tube?”

  Holder:

  “Yes. Of course we can. We have to be able to…”

  “Check segment 642C tube number 4. Then check 789D tube number 2.”

  Everyone in the room was looking at her now.

  Finally, someone asked:

  “How do you know all this?”

  She ignored the question and said, simply:

  “You have maybe half an hour to check those tubes. Then they’re going to blow up.”

  Holder looked at Bennington and said:

  “I’ll go and do it, Chief, if you want me to.”

  But Nina interrupted:

  “Not so fast. Just wait a second. Tool Master.”

  And, as she finished speaking, she reached into her purse, put her hand around Edgar’s phone, flipped it open, and pressed the ‘call’ button.

  Silence.

  Then a buzz.

  From the coat pocket of Brewster Dale.

  Now everyone was looking at him.

  Including Nina.

  “Answer your phone,” she said, quietly.

  Buzz.

  Buzz.

  The staring continued. Dale showed no expression at all. Finally, Phil Bennington asked:

  “What’s going on here?”

  “Your Tool Master,” Nina said quietly, “is not your Tool Master.”

  Bennington:

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  Nina continued to look at Dale:

  “All your quotations were wrong.”

  Sandy leaned forward, but Nina ignored her, saying:

  “Pouring whisky is like burning books,” is not from Intruder in the Dust. It’s from The Hamlet. All the rest of them are wrong, too.”

  Finally, Dale bowed, slightly:

  “My compliments, Madam.”

  She shook her head.

  “It bothered me a little bit while you were making all those mistakes. The quotes were always accurate, but you had them coming from the wrong books. At first, I just thought, oh let it go, he’s an amateur scholar. Then finally I realized: no lover of Faulkner would have a character from The Sound and the Fury saying something that only the narrator from A Rose for Emily could possibly have said. Or misquoted Flem Snopes, who speaks in a voice all his own. Or failed to give credit to Boon Hoggenbeck for saying “Unless you’re ashamed of yourself now and then, you’ve not honest.”

  “Again. My compliments.”

  “You never read Faulkner at all. You couldn’t have. You just went to Wikipedia and memorized ten or so quotes. I did it myself today. They’re right there on the screen. The problem is, Wikipedia doesn’t attribute the quotations. It doesn’t say where they came from. So you just found a list of Faulkner’s novels—there’s one of those in Wikipedia too—and memorized them. Then you put a novel with a quote. Just at random.”

  She shook her head:

  “I don’t know what your name really is. But, whoever you are, did you really think you could misquote William Faulkner to a high school English teacher––IN MISSISSIPPI?”

  The man who had pretended to be Brewster Dale shook his head.

  “I apparently underestimated you, Ms. Bannister.”

  Nina shook her head.

  “You underestimated Faulkner. You might try reading him sometime.”

  “I shall. I certainly shall.”

  A recording was playing on Nina’s cell phone:

  “The number you have called is not available. Your call has been forwarded to an automatic message system…”

  Etc. etc., etc.

  “You may hang up, or….

  “I’m going to leave you a message,” she said.

  Then into her phone:

  “You killed Edgar. He thought you were a security officer. We all did. In fact, somewhere back there in time there probably was a Brewster Dale. And he probably did like Faulkner. And he probably did work in security, even maybe for Louisiana Petroleum. But he’s dead now, isn’t he?”

  And then, magically, the southern accent of the man sitting across from her disappeared. The gracious glint in the laughing eyes hardened. And the back stiffened as the man in the white sport jacket leaned forward slightly and said:

  “Yes. That man is dead. He was, unfortunately, in the wrong place. And at the wrong time.”

  Tom Holder leaned forward also:

  “I’d like to bleedin’ know what’s going on here! You’re talkin’ to me about bloody semtex..”

  “It’s exactly where I said it was,” Nina continued. “And it’s going to blow up in….”

  She looked at her watch.

  “Fourteen and a half minutes.”

  “My God,” said Phil Bennington, “we’ve got to get it out of there!”

  Nina shook her head:

  “No you don’t. Not right now, anyway.”

  Then she looked back at the man who had been known as Brewster Dale:

  “It’s not going to blow up,” she said, “until you detonate it, is it? That’s how plastique works. It gets detonated by a remote control device. ”

  The man nodded:

  “You’re a very perceptive woman.”

  “Just a little slow. Like Edgar was. How did you kill him?”

  “That hardly matters now, does it?”

  “No. No, and I pretty much know anyway. He thought you really were a security officer. You met him somewhere in Bay St. Lucy. You got him to drink something, maybe a little coffee from a thermos. The drug you put in it made him groggy, but he was still able to swallow the whiskey you poured down him against his will. Once he had passed out you took him to the coulee and put him in it, face down in the water. He must have drowned in a minute or so.”

  “An admirable sleuth you are. I did wonder though: how were you able to penetrate our little ruse?”

  “Annette Richoux came by and told us.”

  “Did she now?”

  “No. But somebody who had pretended to be Annette Richoux did.”

  “How naughty of her.”

  “She’ll be dead too, in a week or so, I guess.”

  “Well, disloyalty always has its price.”

  “As does blowing up Aquatica. Who’s paying you? And how much?”

  The figure smiled an ice smile and said:

  “Oh, that would be telling. And we don’t tell. But alas, tempis fugit. Time flies. I must have leave to check the full message you left me.”

  So saying, he opened his sport jacket pocket, reached in,
and pulled out a smart phone, which he laid on the table in front of him.

  “That’s the detonator, isn’t it?” asked Nina.

  “Just another ‘app.’ Camera, detonator…it’s a useful device. I have another useful device though…”

  He reached into the other side of the jacket…

  …and produced a small, black, oil-shiny handgun, which he levelled at Bennington.

  “I’m now in the rather difficult position of dealing with the five of you.”

  “You are going to leave Aquatica on the next helicopter, aren’t you?” asked Nina, surprised at how calm she was, given that a gun was being levelled at her.

  That had never happened before.

  Surprising.

  The Robinson Affair. The Reddington murder.

  No gun being levelled at her.

  But there it was, nevertheless, the end of its barrel a small metallic circle moving slowly around the table as the man holding it got slowly to his feet.

  “Yes. It is unfortunate. But I must miss the gala.”

  “The rest of your ‘crew,’ the ones who helped you plant this stuff…they’re already gone.”

  “The ebb and flow of talent. Some are already out of the country. It’s a shame. They won’t be able to see the explosion. And quite a sight it will be.”

  He was now backing toward the door of the room.

  “So what,” asked Sandy, ashen-faced, “are you going to do with us? Just leave us here while you go flying off?”

  The man shook his head.

  “No. That would not be the best course of action.”

  “He’s going,” said Nina, again astonished at her own calmness, “to shoot us.”

  “No!” Sandy screamed.

  “How are you going to get away with that?” said Bennington.

  A shrug.

  “There will be five shots. Please don’t worry; every shot will be perfectly on target. None of you will know what hit you. Then Brewster Dale will run out onto the deck, calling for help. While help runs into the room going one way, he will be making his way against the current of humanity, going the other way.”

  “Then you,” said Nina, “will make your way down to the landing pad, commandeer a helicopter while the pilot is not in the craft…”

  “I am, it is true, a man of man skills, helicoptering being one of them.”

  “How far from Aquatica will you be when you press the detonator switch? Just curious, you understand.”