Fallout

by Mark Ethridge

  The rain had become heavier and fog filled the valleys. A huge outcropping of bare rock loomed ahead, covered in hand-painted declarations of devotion, the Greek letters of various fraternities, the graduation years of high school classes and ten huge white block letters that cut through the gloom: “Jesus Saves.” Josh wasn’t a church-goer but decided a prayer for Katie couldn’t hurt.

  The emergency flasher and the fog combined to envelope the road in an aura of milky blue as Allison steered through the slick switchbacks, rock walls on one side, cliffs on the other. Josh thought back to the incredible scene in the hotel room. Dorn a pervert! He told Allison it was hard to believe.

  “Not for me,” she said. “He stayed in our home one night when I was fourteen. He tried to feel me up. My parents told me I was imagining things. Until today, I wasn’t sure.”

  The beginnings of a trail of mistreatment, Josh thought. He was beginning to understand. “Why did you let me ask him for help?”

  “I didn’t want to ruin the chance he might help Katie.”

  Allison’s attention shifted rapidly between the road and the rearview mirror. “Someone’s behind us,” she said. Josh swiveled for a look.

  The headlights drew to within a car length. Allison slowed and edged close to the rock face. The car pulled along side. It was a BMW. Vince’s. He was at the wheel. A man Allison didn’t recognize was in the passenger seat. Her eyes returned to the road.

  “He wants you to pull over,” Josh said.

  “Should I?”

  Josh was torn. If Allison was right, Bludhorn knew something about Katie. Maybe this was Bludhorn returning the cat. On the other hand, he was the attorney for the plant. The plant was evil. The DVD and the kidnapping—if it was that—of Katie were not acts of reasonable, compassionate men. “Keep going. We have to find Holt.”

  Allison punched the gas, sending a spray of gravel down the hillside. The BMW quickly pulled back alongside. She glanced over. Bludhorn was waving frantically for her to stop. Should she trust him or should she not? Allison tried to read the eyes of her husband before she looked back to the road.

  Bludhorn leaned on the horn. Allison looked again. The passenger raised a pistol. Disbelief registered in her ex-husband’s eyes. She knew instantly that this was far more than even he had bargained for. Bludhorn was many things but he was not stupid when it came to his own self interest. An accident at the plant, even with a big fine, even leading to shame and bankruptcy, was one thing. A murder rap with a life sentence was something else. Not even Vince was willing to risk that. But his people were. His people were out of control.

  Allison hit the brakes. Bludhorn swerved sharply to the left, deflecting the gunman’s aim. The Wagoneer’s side window exploded, showering them with glass. Allison shrieked. The Wagoneer’s back end fishtailed dangerously. Then the Jeep straightened out with a shudder.

  Josh looked behind them. The sharp turn to the left on the wet road had put the BMW into skid. Tires screeching, it careened at top speed toward the cliff. Flaring brake lights turned the fog a baleful red. The shriek of rending metal and the whipcrack of snapping trees split the air as the car swept over the edge.

  Allison brought the Wagoneer to a quick stop. They got out and rushed to the cliff’s edge. The BMW rested partially submerged upside-down in a shallow creek bed, engine running, steam rising from its radiator.

  They watched for a minute, too stunned to speak. Gradually Allison’s heart stopped pounding. “Dial star H-P for the Highway Patrol,” she said.

  Josh did as he was told and handed her the phone.

  “It’s Doctor Allison Wright,” she told the dispatcher. “I’m on my way to the Recovery Metals plant. Two miles short of the entrance. Two men in a BMW just went over the cliff. One of em’s my ex, Vince Bludhorn. The other one’s armed and dangerous. He just shot out my car window.”

  They returned to the Jeep. Allison steered the Wagoneer onto the gravel road that defined the plant’s perimeter. Holt’s shack emerged from the gloom. A pickup truck sat out front. Josh couldn’t restrain himself. He jumped out of the car and sprinted toward the shack. Allison put on the lead apron she’d brought from the clinic and followed.

  Josh got to the truck and froze. Blood trickled down the running board and swirled into a puddle of rainwater. His friend and employee Jimmy Mayes lay curled up on the front seat, his life draining to the floor.

  Allison rolled Mayes over. His neck had been slashed but she found a faint pulse. Allison couldn’t believe he was alive. “We’ll get help,” she promised.

  “He can’t hear you,” Josh pointed out. “He’s deaf.”

  Mayes’s eyes flickered open. He lifted his right hand, began signing. “Poison metal. In the lagoon,” Josh translated. “They’re gonna bulldoze it.”

  “They can’t!” Allison said.

  Josh got the picture. The radioactive tide would flood Betheltown lake and be on its way to the Ohio River and Winston’s water supply.

  Mayes signed again. “He says we don’t have much time.”

  Allison stroked his forehead. “Who did this to you?”

  “Those who defiled my ancestor. Who stole land. Who poisoned creatures,” Josh translated.

  Josh signed a question. “Why throw the fish? Why not go to the cops?”

  Looking in Mayes’ eyes was like watching two candles burn down. Allison knew he had only seconds left. His fingers twitched, signed, “Sacred. No Move.”

  And then the candles sputtered out. Before Allison could save him. Before Josh could even say he was sorry. If he and Allison hadn’t been so hot on the trail of the plant, Jimmy Mayes might still be alive.

  Josh removed a piece of paper from Mayes’s pocket and unfolded it. It was a final proof of the Friends of Chief Cornstalk ad.

  Allison laid Mayes’s head back on the seat. “What do you think he was saying?”

  “Betheltown’s sacred ground. I think he was afraid that going to the cops would lead people to discover the Remaining. The people who never left when the plant came in would be forced to leave.”

  “Why do you think Mayes was here at the shack? Did Holt kill him?”

  The idea had already occurred to Josh. If Holt had killed Mayes, there was no longer any question whether the chief was one of the good guys or the bad. He wasn’t just a tool of the plant, he was a murderer. But Josh wasn’t ready to convict him yet.

  “I don’t think so. If Holt killed Mayes, why leave him here? I think it’s just as likely Jimmy was attacked—probably by one of Vince’s out-of-control plant goons—and came to Holt’s shack, thinking it was the closest place he could find help.”

  “But where’s the chief?”

  Terrified of what he might find, Josh eased open the shack’s door and turned on the light. The place was empty. Chief Holt’s police uniform hung on the back of a chair. Allison noticed the radio’s glowing dial. She turned up the volume and The Cincinnati Reds post-game show filled the small room. The Reds had won. The radio was replaying the call of the walk-off homer.

  The sound of ash on horsehide stirred something deep in Josh’s consciousness. He dialed his voice mail and replayed Katie’s message, listening this time not to the voice but for ambient noise—for clues to Katie’s whereabouts. The recording was so brief that he had to listen to it four times before he was able to isolate a sharp crack at the end of the recording, followed by the static.

  He played the message for Allison. “The last noise sounds like the start of a CB radio transmission,” she said. “You know that funny noise when they first push the talk button? Could she be with a trucker?”

  Josh played the message again. Allison was right about the static. But the only trucker he knew was dead. Who else used radios? He played the message again. CRACK!

  That was it. The sound of a sharply hit baseball. Followed by static from the beginning of a C
B radio transmission, like that from a police radio. “Katie was here,” he concluded. “With the chief. While the ballgame was on.”

  They were getting close. He was equally elated and scared to death.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Josh scoured the perimeter road for any clue that might lead to Katie but even his own footprints were immediately obliterated by the downpour. “Katie!” he shouted again and again, his words dying in the pounding rain.

  Allison scrambled up the berm to get a view of the lagoon. More drain hoses had been added. Radioactive water cascaded down the hill toward the rain-swollen lake. She felt so helpless. Everything—finding Katie, preventing the cesium-filled lake from overflowing—depended on their ability to find Chief Holt.

  Provided Holt was on their side. If he wasn’t, Katie was in the hands of a killer facing the same horrible fate as Jimmy Mayes. And even if Holt was on their side, it was game, set and match unless he could persuade the plant from draining the lagoon or at least summon more powerful authorities to stop it on their own. Saving Katie and saving Winston lay in the chief’s hands. He could be their best hope or their worst nightmare. They had no idea which. She took a deep breath and tightened her lead apron.

  Josh was down to hope. Sharon gone. The News gone. Katie gone. Only hope to hang on to. Only hope and Allison.

  He refused to believe he would never see his daughter again. He arrived at the top of the berm simultaneously with the odor of diesel as the motor on a piece of heavy equipment rumbled to life. A bulldozer driven by a man in work clothes crested a hill a quarter mile away and crawled toward the lagoon.

  “This is it,” Allison said. “We’re too late.”

  Chief J. P. Holt watched the bulldozer advance from the perimeter road. He was tired. Tired of being a puppet. Tired of being a slave to his addiction, to his bookie, to Bludhorn and the bullies.

  It was time to just say no. No to Viggy. No to another bet, to another drink. No to the plant.

  He would still owe them money—almost $50,000 by now—but he would no longer grovel for loans, no longer do things that increasingly were against his nature, against the whole idea of public service. He would reclaim the man he had once been.

  The man he had been before the beaning.

  Only two people knew it had not been an accident. His coach—a bully very much like Bludhorn, Holt saw now—had told him to fire a high, hard one right at the batter’s chin. Payback for an earlier homer. Something for the batter to be afraid of, something that hurt.

  He had said yes. He had not expected the kid’s eye to pop out. He’d not even expected to hit the kid, just to brush him back. But no matter. He had said yes to the bully. It had ruined his life, ruined it far worse than the life of the kid he had blinded.

  He would not say yes to bullies again.

  Holt walked into the path of the bulldozer and extended his palm like a traffic cop.

  Until that moment, Josh, transfixed by the dozer, hadn’t even seen the man. Even then, he wasn’t sure he could believe it. Allison spoke for both of them. “Good Lord!” she said. “That’s the chief!”

  The bulldozer driver waved Holt out of the way.

  Holt recognized the driver. One of the goons. He wanted no mistake about his intentions. He widened his stance and held up both hands now. He had never expected to get in as deep as he was, but they were mistaken in thinking he did not have limits. You did what you had to do. Sometimes, drawing the line was what you had to do.

  The dozer kept coming.

  The greed of these people was obscene. And kidnapping the girl. Beyond belief! Now, they intended to bulldoze the lagoon. Based on what Allison Wright had said on his voice mail, that was something he just couldn’t let happen. He had lived here all his life. This was his town. They’d not poison it on his watch. He stood his ground.

  The bulldozer closed to within thirty feet of the lagoon.

  I should have known, Holt thought. I should never have thrown the pitch. I should never have bet. He cursed his weakness. He would not be weak now. He’d called for help. He hoped it was on the way.

  Allison watched in horror. “It’ll stop, won’t it?”

  Josh stared frozen. Could it end like this, with Katie still missing? He thought his fear of death had ended with Sharon’s. He thought he’d seen the worst it had to offer. There were times he had wished for it for himself because death would end the pain. But his daughter—missing. That was almost worse. Please, God, don’t let it end here, he prayed.

  The bulldozer picked up speed.

  The dozer was on almost him. Suddenly, Holt knew. These people were responsible for Old Cheese Face. They were willing to take a child. They were willing to kill him. The dozer was not going to stop. Holt heard the grinding of gears as the driver lowered the blade.

  Safety lay six feet to the left. Holt planted his foot and sprang but the wet ground gave way. His feet went out from under him and he hit the ground hard. Holt clawed desperately toward safety as the descending blade passed over his head.

  Josh tried to shield Allison but neither could avoid seeing the lower half of the chief’s body disappear beneath the churning treads in a mist of blood. Allison felt sick. There was no way the chief could have survived.

  Holt regarded his situation with a sense of detachment. He found it interesting that he should still be alive, face down in the mud, when he existed only above the hips. He was amused that the plant would never get its $50,000. He was very curious about what would come next. He did not feel pain, he felt aware. Perhaps, the feeling was peace.

  He unsnapped his holster and took out his gun with his right hand. He used his left to lever his torso from the mud.

  The dozer sliced into the berm and backed off for another run.

  It was getting harder for Holt to see. The Recovery Metals logo on the goon’s uniform was out of focus. He knew he did not have long. He raised the gun.

  The logo became a catcher’s mitt. He knew what to do. He blotted out all else and squeezed the trigger.

  The bulldozer’s engine roared.

  The blade rose above the cab. The driver slumped in the seat, blood spreading from a single hole in his back. The dozer climbed the bank until it was almost vertical, lurched to the left and flipped over on its back, treads churning like legs on a centipede.

  Josh’s heart thumped against his chest. He and Allison ran to where Holt lay. The lower half of his body looked like flattened hamburger. Allison felt for a pulse. She didn’t see how he could still be alive. He was, but he didn’t have long.

  Josh knelt beside the chief. “Where is she?” He lifted Holt by the lapels. “Where is my daughter?”

  The chief’s eyes rolled back. Pink spittle bubbled from his mouth. Allison touched Josh’s arm and shook her head. Josh knew Holt was gone and with him, the last link to his daughter. Or had he been mistaken about the noise? Had his overactive mind played tricks on him?

  Despair overwhelmed him. The nightmare that had begun with the lost Pulitzer and continued with Sharon was not over. It had once again turned real. Mayes was dead. The chief was dead. Dorn was corrupt. Everything he had hung on to—his newspaper, his town—was about to be wiped out. Maybe he could rebuild from all that, but not without Katie. Without Katie, why would he want to?

  Allison knew what he was feeling. The people at the plant were ruthless killers willing to poison the earth for eons. And all for a buck. But even that didn’t matter against the fact that the trail to Katie had been lost. She loved the girl as much as she had come to love Josh. She put her arm around him and held him close.

  Allison picked a pair of steel-rimmed glasses from the mud and handed them to Josh. “Chief Holt saved us. I have to believe Katie’s okay.”

  Josh wanted desperately to believe, but he was cursed. He couldn’t recall the last time his optimism had been rewarded. The chief
had performed heroically at the end. But had his conversion from the dark side come soon enough?

  An ambulance arrived, then a van from the West Virginia State Environmental Defense Team. The regional health director emerged from a sedan. The director was nicely tanned.

  A couple of state police cars parked on the perimeter road along the woods behind the lagoon. Josh and Allison were heading over to report Katie’s disappearance when something large, long and heavy dropped from the sky and landed with a thud in front of them. Josh could read the lettering on the duffel bag in the gloom: Camp Kanawha. Katie’s legs dangled from a limb twenty feet above.

  Josh’s heart felt like it would burst with joy.

  He snatched her from the trunk before she finished shinnying to the ground and gave her so many kisses he didn’t even try to count. Allison wrapped her arms around them both.

  When they had stopped crying, Allison took Katie and asked her some questions in private. “The chief did her no harm,” she reported.

  They were making their way back to the Wagoneer when a state official stopped them. “One of you Allison Wright?”

  “That’s me.”

  “We have some questions for you and Mr. Gibbs.”

  Chapter Sixty

  Sirens had given way to the hum of gasoline generators powering banks of portable lights by the time Josh and Allison finished answering the authorities’ first round of questions. Allison volunteered to remain at the plant to work with the growing army of state and federal authorities, not including, Josh noted, the FBI. Holt’s deputy drove Josh and Katie home in a patrol car.

  It was 11 p.m. when they walked into the kitchen. Josh remembered Katie could have nothing after midnight. He warmed the lasagna. Katie wolfed down two helpings—“better than camp food,” she mumbled—and started on the plate of Allison’s oatmeal cookies. She opened the first of her notes. You are a star!

  Josh listened with delight to the stories from camp—about the games, the goals, the coaches, the electives, but mostly about the other girls, her camper friends. His heart melted when she unfolded the huge “Good Luck, Katie” poster they’d given her at the last camp fire—along with the award for best camper. He wanted to ask about the boyfriend but decided that could wait until later. There’d been enough excitement for one day.