Dead Sand

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Dead Sand Page 19

by Brendan DuBois


  “Too newsworthy,” Ron said. “My boss didn’t mind that much, but his boss, and her boss, raised holy hell, and since you were at the plant site the day before that F-bomb was printed and attributed to a utility official, and I was the only person to meet with you—my boss stepped in for me, said you were left alone in the visitors’ center for a while, could have talked to almost anyone.”

  “Nice history lesson,” I said, “but why this meet? Could have told me this over the phone.”

  Ron rubbed one hand over the thin brown hair on the top of his head. “I could have … a few years ago, but now…”

  The whole sense of him changed, seemed more cautious. “What’s up?”

  “Hunh?”

  “What do you mean, a few years ago?” I recalled something I had read back then and said, “The utility takeover. Four years ago.”

  Ron nodded. “That’s right. When we were locally owned, we had ties to the towns and the state capitals. Even the top guys and gals came from around here. When that Florida consortium took over, everything changed. Including the live-and-let-live attitude. There’s a real cutthroat attitude among some of the higher-ups about keeping track of and destroying one’s enemies—and that’s why I’m here.”

  “Because?”

  “Because you raised a stink and some folks are interested in you, and from second- and third-hand accounts, I’ve learned that they find you interesting because … you used to work for the Department of Defense, didn’t you?”

  “Some years ago,” I said.

  “That’s what got their interest. That you were at the Pentagon, and that they couldn’t learn any more than that. So consider this my apology for getting you banned from the plant site. Some folks with lots of money and sharp elbows are looking at you.”

  “Your odd apology accepted,” I said. “So that’s why you’re here, face-to-face, instead of talking over a phone. You don’t want somebody’s boss’s boss listening in to what’s going on.”

  “Hate to admit it, but you’re right,” he said.

  “Not often I get told that,” I said.

  He smiled. “You sound like my sister, Clara. Always sharp, always joking.”

  “Your sister the singer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Last time we talked, you said your sister was an up-and-coming singer, playing local clubs and halls. She still singing?”

  Ron frowned. “Sort of. She’s married now, kids, and she’s the cantor at the temple in Porter. She could have made it, but … well, let’s just say some of the people you meet in the local clubs would make sharks look like guppies. The bastards. You know, I always thought the proudest moment of my life would be to buy a CD of her music, to see her on one of those national television talent shows—but it never happened.” He glanced at his watch. “Sorry. Gotta get back to the plant. We’ve got another demo coming up soon.”

  “After yesterday’s battles, I didn’t think the protesters would be up for another round.”

  “They’re not,” Ron said. “It’s the Nuclear Freedom Front’s turn. They promise to do what their rivals didn’t do. Enter the plant site and shut us down.”

  “They sound confident.”

  “Yeah, they sound deranged, but that didn’t come from me.” He glanced at his watch again. “Anything else?”

  A number of anything elses were jostling for attention, but one came right to mind. “How many people have you got working at Falconer?”

  “Between full-time staff and contractors, about eight hundred.”

  “Out of those eight hundred, how many are avid hunters? Who use high-powered rifles?”

  “Not funny,” he said, his face set as he walked back to his Saab.

  “Wasn’t meant to be,” I said.

  “Whatever,” Ron said, opening the car door. “I’ll give you this, though. I do know that detectives from the state police have been talking to security, going through personnel records—looking for suspects. That’s it.”

  “Good enough,” I said. “Thanks.”

  * * *

  At home I put the groceries away, checked the mail, and looked over the copy of today’s Tyler Chronicle. There was a big story with photographs of the previous day’s demonstration, but since I had been there, I didn’t care to reread what I’d felt, tasted, and smelled. Instead, I looked down at the bottom of the page and saw the story I had been looking for. It had been co-written by Paula and the stringer, a woman named Melanie Reisinger.

  I glanced through the story. Falconer police and state police were investigating the discovery of a murder victim found in one of the stream tributaries in the southern part of the salt marsh, near where I had spent that long night flailing around.

  I sighed. The victim was one John Todd Thomas, twenty-two, a graduate student in foreign relations from Colby College. His father was retired from government service, one way of hiding his work with the Central Intelligence Agency. His mother was a high school teacher in Arlington, Virginia.

  John Todd Thomas. The young man who had escorted me to see Curt Chesak, and who had been gunned down by my adversary, whoever the hell he was.

  Cause of death was a gunshot wound.

  I folded up the paper, left it open to that page, and put it on the counter in the kitchen, where it would mock me every time I walked by.

  * * *

  A few hours later, I parked next to Uncle Paul’s Diner in Salisbury, Massachusetts, the community right across the border from Falconer. The diner was painted dark blue, with its name inscribed in yellow Gothic letters. Salisbury is about the same size as Falconer, but without the tax burdens of its immediate neighbor to the north or the tax benefits of having a multi-billion-dollar power plant in the backyard.

  I got out of my Ford and went into the diner. On the glass doors were various stickers and such, including one for the local Kiwanis Club, which met here every Thursday at noon. I was was struck by the reassuring and comforting smells of cooked food and grease.

  On either side of me were booths, and in front of me was a long wooden counter with round stools; beyond that was the kitchen area. Off to the left, at the back of the diner, was Felix Tinios, sitting by himself, and he nodded at me as I went closer. Two booths beyond Felix was Joe Manzi, also sitting by himself, and in the booth behind Joe were two heavyset men wearing the nylon jackets of the New England Trade Union Council. One of the two men I recognized as being the unsuccessful gatekeeper from the other day at the fishing cooperative, the one who had tried to keep Paula and me from going inside.

  Joe stood up, extending a hand, which I shook. Despite the reputation he had for being a champion of the working class who had it pretty easy, his hand was strong and rough. His face was bright red, his dark hair slicked back, and he was solidly built, with wide shoulders that seemed to take up most of the booth.

  “Cole? Lewis Cole?” he asked, his voice a bit raspy.

  “Yes,” I said, “and thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

  He looked past me for a second, in the direction of Felix. “Well, you come with a good recommendation. I’ve trusted Mr. Tinios with a lot these past few weeks, and if he says you’re okay, then you’re okay.”

  I pulled out my reporter’s notebook and said, “That’s nice to hear, but whatever happens, don’t blame Felix.”

  The smile was still on his face, but there was a suspicious look about his eyes. “You think this isn’t going to go right?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Just want to be prepared.”

  “Hah,” Joe said. “Just like the Boy Scouts.”

  “Sure. Like the Boy Scouts.”

  So I started off slow and polite, asking him all the basic questions about his upbringing, his work in the trade unions, and how he got to be head of the New England Trade Union Council. He answered them with the practiced ease of someone who was used to being questioned and had ready-made answers for everything.

  Well, I thought, most everything …

>   “Can I ask you some questions about the violence?”

  “What violence?” he asked with an innocent tone of voice.

  “Ah,” I said, looking down at my notes. “A few days ago I was at a rally, at the Yankee Fisherman’s Cooperative. Saw you talk there for a bit before a couple of antinukers jumped up and started protesting. Last I saw, they were getting hammered by some of your fellow union members.”

  I could hear murmuring from behind Joe’s booth, from his two companions, but Joe didn’t seem to mind. “That might be your memory. I just remember that they were interrupting a meetin’ that they had no right to interrupt. They were disturbing the peace, they were interfering with our peaceable right of assembly. They were the ones who started it, not us.”

  “Still, they were beat up, weren’t they?”

  More murmurs from behind Joe. “They were jostled around some, but yeah, maybe they got tuned up a bit. Why not?”

  “Why not let the cops handle it?” I asked, pen still in hand.

  “You were there, right? You know how crowded it was. Besides, it was our place, and our time to speak. What, we should have waited five or ten minutes for a couple of cops to work their way through the crowd to get up onstage? Let those clowns have the floor? Why in hell should we do that, then?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe a little waiting would show a willingness not to go to the fists right off the bat.”

  He leaned a bit over the booth’s light orange tabletop. “Look. Unions and their brothers and sisters didn’t get here, and get what was owed them, by being nice, by lettin’ people step over them, talk over them. Okay? They did it by voting, by organizing and yeah, sometimes, by doing a little direct action. Maybe that was wrong. I’ll admit it. But you know what? Since those creeps got tossed out in the parking lot, roughed up a little bit, maybe them and their friends will think twice about crashing a gathering like that and trying to take over the stage.”

  I looked at his sharp eyes and said, “You folks really don’t like those activists, do you.”

  He snorted. “Here’s a story for you, and how come this story never gets out in the paper? Hunh? Who are those protesters out there, anyway?”

  “They’d say they’re just concerned citizens, that’s all,” I said. “Petitioning their government and their neighbors.”

  “Hah. Citizens. I’ll tell you who they are. High school students or college students. Or dropouts. Or senior citizens with their brains a bit scrambled. Or professional leftists or people who just love to join each other for a party and a good time and to tell each other how much they miss Vietnam or Woodstock.”

  I said, “I saw some of them yesterday. They were getting tear-gassed, shoved around, pepper-sprayed. Didn’t look like a party. Or a good time.”

  “So you say,” he said, “but on the news, it looks like a ragged band of losers. And you know what?” Now his voice was getting heated. “Let’s say you’re one of my union brothers, a guy trying to raise a family. You’ve been on welfare for six or eight months, or living off whatever savings you got. Or you’re a union sister, a single mom, trying to raise a couple of kids on your own. Then you get word from your union hall. If a couple more federal agencies just sign off on a couple of permits, then, boom, the hiring is going to start up again.”

  I said, “I think I know where this is going.”

  “Maybe you do, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. They get word that hiring is gonna start, good jobs at good wages. Maybe they don’t have a college degree, but they’re smart where it counts, in their craft, whether it’s welding or painting or carpentry. Then just as the news gets good, the Russkies act like the idiots they are, the feds get cold feet, and these pampered high school and college kids come out of the woodwork, ready to march around, smoke dope, and get laid at night in their tents. One big fucking party. And if the second unit gets canceled, they can go home and tell their trust-fund moms and dads how special they were, while thousands of workers out there across New England look to see when their food stamp eligibility runs out.”

  I was scribbling so fast that my hand nearly cramped. He paused, his face even more red, and I knew he was losing patience with me, so I had just one more thing to ask him, which I had the feeling would set him off like a vial of nitroglycerin dropped from the top of a building.

  “You’ve made a good point, about how your workers don’t particularly like the activists,” I said. “When it comes to the shooting of Bronson Toles, did—”

  Surprise of surprises, he didn’t explode, or try to throttle me, or stomp out. He just held up a callused hand and said, “Sure. Easy excuse. Pin it on the nutso union guy. Look, Lewis, there’s a hell of a lot of difference between roughing up a couple of college kids who jump up on your stage and try to interrupt a news conference and blowing off some character’s head. What the hell would that gain us? Nothing, that’s what. In fact, the state police came by and some detective, Italian guy…”

  “Renzi,” I said. “Detective Renzi.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. He talked to me and my leadership council about the shooting, and I said, have at it. Here’s a membership list. Talk to anyone you want. Anybody gives you grief, talk to us and we’ll bring ’em in to talk to you. We don’t have anything to hide.”

  “So did the state police do just that?”

  He said, “Talk to the cops. I don’t want to say anything to screw up their investigation. But c’mon, think about it. What kind of benefit would it be if it happened that one of our brothers whacked that antinuker? You think if one of my guys got arrested, that it would be a good thing? Hell, no. It’d just piss off the antinukers and anybody who was on their side. Plus, it’d also piss off those folks that are on our side, like the businesses lining up to get the contracts if the licensing goes through. So if that’s what you’re driving at, Mr. Cole, that one of our guys shot down that antinuker, forget it.”

  “You sound pretty confident,” I said.

  “Confident, sure,” he said, “but hell, not one hundred percent. Maybe somebody out there with a grudge against Toles, or a score to settle, or something to do with the unions and protesters, some nutcase, okay. I’ll give you that. But we’re a pretty tight-knit group, Mr. Cole, and I can almost give you a one hundred percent assurance we had nothing to do with Toles getting killed.”

  I wrote some more in my notebook, and he said, “That’s it, isn’t it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He grinned, leaning back against the fake wood seating. “All those polite questions earlier, about me and where I grew up, and my first job, and my first union elections, that was just a setup. The real meat of what you were looking for, it was all about Bronson Toles getting murdered. Right?”

  “I like to be thorough,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Joe replied, looking at his wristwatch, “and I like being prompt for my next meeting. So if you’ll pardon me, we’re done here.”

  “I guess we are,” I said, folding my notebook shut. “Thanks for your time.”

  “Good luck in whatever the hell it is you’re doing,” he said, and behind him I saw one of his two companions making a call on his cell phone. I walked out of Uncle Paul’s Diner, with Felix Tinios glancing at me with a bemused look on his face, gathering up his coat, ready to do his job, as I was wrapping mine up.

  I got into my Ford Explorer, started her up, and backed out onto the street. It was dusk, and my plan was to head back home to Tyler, look at my notes, and write something vaguely interesting and noncontroversial for Denise Pichette-Volk down there at Shoreline.

  That was my plan.

  Funny thing about plans. They often don’t take other people and interests into consideration.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I traveled north a bit on Route 1, the traffic sparse at this time of night, and up ahead were some flashing amber lights. I saw a pickup truck with the logo of the Salisbury Public Works Department straddling the road, with a man in a reflective orang
e vest directing me off to a side road with a flashlight with an orange cone at the end of its lens. I made a turn to the right, down a country road with no streetlights and not much in the way of houses. I’d driven about a hundred yards when a car pulled out and got in front of me. Right about then, glancing at my rearview mirror, I spotted a set of headlights behind me, accelerating.

  Then I braked, for the car in front of me started slowing down just as the one behind me kept on speeding up, and in about fifteen seconds—and about the time I recalled Joe Manzi’s buddies had been working their cell phones—I was boxed in. The car in front of me, an old Chevrolet Impala with a dented trunk, slowed down, as did the vehicle behind me, a dark blue Ford pickup truck, and then I had to hit the brakes hard as the Impala in front of me and the Ford behind me came to a stop.

  Despite what was going on, I had to admire their technique. I unzipped my jacket, waited.

  The Impala’s door opened, and a man came out carrying a tire iron. He came up to me, and in my side view mirror, I saw another man get out and come in my direction, also carrying something.

  I rolled down my window. Their second mistake of the evening. They should have flanked me, on either side of my Ford, because I wouldn’t be able to keep my eye on both of them. This way, coming at me on the same side … they just made my task that much easier.

  I decided to open the door and get out.

  Yes, their first mistake of the evening was forcing me over.

  * * *

  I stepped out, and the man in front called, “Did we tell you to get out, asshole?”

  “I guess you didn’t,” I said, and he said, “Damn straight,” and with a sharp blow of the tire iron, he smashed my left headlight.

  I turned and saw that the other guy approaching had a baseball bat in his hands, and I recognized him as the unsuccessful gatekeeper from the other day. He called out, “I knew you was going to be trouble the moment I saw you, back at the fishing co-op, you asshole.”

  I said, “Then you’re a perceptive fellow.”

 

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