She knew the answer had everything to do with her and nothing with him, and she was tired of thinking about it. She’d had the same reaction to the last guy in her life. She stared up into the darkness and thought about him. Ron Grimaldi had showed up in town, bought her parents’ old house, and chased her around for two and a half years before she relented. He wasn’t her type, but at least he was something new.
Nine months of Ron was enough to take the newness away. Janie realized that women were just objects to Ron—props for his own self-aggrandized vision. She’d seen it in Vegas the few times they’d gone there together for a weekend. Ron with a cigar, wearing a suit, throwing around money like it was nothing to him. She knew she was completely irrelevant to him. It could be her or any one of a thousand cocktail waitresses on his arm or in his bed and it would make no difference to him. Which was why ending the relationship was so easy. For Ron, a relationship was merely having a convenient and consistent sex partner. However, Janie wanted to redefine what they were doing was fine with him.
But between his effortless and expensive carousing and his ability to pay cash for the house, Janie was left with a lingering question as to why he was in Nickelback at all. It couldn’t have been for the forklift job out a Monarch. In fact, he barely seemed to know anything at all about the oil business. The only answer that made sense was that he hadn’t come to Nickelback for the job; he had come there to hide.
It wasn’t until she had decided to stop seeing him that Janie finally asked him about it directly. Late at night, while reclining on his black leather couch in the house where she’d grown up—which she had lately begun treating more and more like her own again—she sipped her wine and just came out with it.
“You’re not really a forklift driver from Houston, are you?”
He hesitated for a second, staring at her from the other end of the couch. “Look,” he grinned, mulling it over, “the only reason I’ll tell you is because the statute of limitations has run. And because I trust you. But you can’t tell anybody. I mean, anyone.”
She agreed. “Who would I tell?”
He cocked his head from side to side, as if trying to shake the pieces of his story into some kind of order inside his head. Then he took a sip of wine and leaned forward to set it on the coffee table. “Okay,” he began, nervously, sitting on the edge of the couch, clapping his hands together a couple of times.
“I used to work for a family, in New York.” He grinned and shrugged his thick shoulders. “You know, the mob, whatever people call it.”
“I didn’t think you were from Houston.”
“I had an uncle in Houston. Owned a car dealership. That’s why I picked it. But anyway, I was an accountant.” He laughed. “You believe that? Really. Yeah, I’m a numbers guy. Gray suit. Green eyeshade. The whole deal. You laugh but it’s true.”
Janie sat up on the couch, holding two fingers over her giggling mouth. “You’re a bean counter?”
Ron raised his right hand. “Swear to God. Fordham University, class of 1984.”
“And you worked for a Mafia family? How does one get a job like that?”
“Ah, it just sort of happened. I had some friends who had some friends. That kind of thing. But it’s not what you think. I mean, I went to work in a business office, right in mid-town. There were five accountants, some lawyers, business managers. I mean, anyone off the street would have just thought this was a small consulting company—which it basically was. I mean, you wouldn’t believe how huge this business was. These guys were investing in everything. Tons of real, legitimate businesses. It’s just that, instead of investor money, they were all propped up by illegal money.”
Ron took a drink from his glass. He seemed to enjoy telling the story, as though he’d been practicing in his head, waiting to get it off his chest for years. “So anyway,” he went on, “I worked there for about ten years, got to know the ins and outs of all the accounting tricks they were using to hide money everywhere, and then I decided to take some.”
“You mean you embezzled from your employer?”
Ron laughed. “Yeah. It was all illegal money anyway. Drugs, gambling, whatever they were doing to get it. I figured, what the hell am I doing slaving away for a salary when these guys are making a fortune. So I started skimming a little here, a little there. Pretty soon I had a decent pile saved up.”
“And then you quit?”
“Yeah. I started to feel like maybe they were on to me, so I just disappeared. That’s how I ended up out here. I figured they’d never look for me in the middle of nowhere.”
“So why the job out at Monarch?”
“To make it look good, for one. I mean, I didn’t want people talking. But also, I realized after I left that I didn’t have enough to live on forever. I needed to make the money last. It’s already running low.”
Janie said, “Money’s a nice thing to have.”
“You’re telling me.” He leaned back into the couch. “It buys you freedom to do what you want. That’s why I need to figure out a way to make some more of it.” He swirled the wine in his glass and studied the color of the liquid in the lamplight. Then he said, “I’ve gotten used to a certain lifestyle that I don’t want to give up.”
Janie laughed, brushed the hair off of her forehead, and said, “I’ve gotten used to a certain lifestyle I’d be more than happy to give up. I’ve been trying to get the hell out of this town for years and I just can’t seem to do it.”
“Sounds like we have the same problem then.”
“So what’s the solution?”
Ron shook his head with eyebrows raised. “Hell, there’s lots of things a guy can get away with in the desert. The problem is picking one and getting it off the ground. That, and finding people you can trust to get the job done. I’ve got money to invest, but I don’t want to get my hands dirty.”
“I don’t have anything to invest,” she said, “and I don’t want to get my hands dirty either.”
“That’s a problem then. You’ve got to bring something to the table to get a cut of the deal.”
Ron grinned at her, sipping his wine. Janie realized at that moment that they were talking about doing something illegal. Forming an honest-to-God conspiracy. Why didn’t it bother her? Was getting involved in crime really this easy? Maybe it was. How hard could it be anyway? She was smarter than most people. And besides, it would feel great to get the hell out of town, especially if she could make a real score beforehand—something to give her a nest egg for her new life. She’d love nothing more than to leave this one-horse town behind, before Monarch shut down and killed the place completely.
Then she thought, wouldn’t it be nice to get some revenge on the oil company in the process? And almost as soon as she thought it, she said, “You really don’t know anything about the oil business, do you?”
He shook his head. “Not a damned thing.”
“Well if you’ve got money to invest, I’ve got one hell of an idea.”
And just like that, they went from lovers to partners.
Janie glanced back over at Hank and exhaled. No man was going to save her, she knew that. But still, it was fun to think about from time to time. A stranger riding into town. A whirlwind romance. A completely new life opening up. Girlish fantasy, certainly, but what was the harm in that? The only downside was that it got boring after a while. And potentially depressing, too. Luckily, Ron had given her a way to take care of her problem herself.
Slowly, she brought her legs from beneath the covers and sat up along the edge of the bed. She could feel her clothes on the floor with her feet and she stood and gathered them up, slipping her legs into her pants, throwing her shirt over her bare breasts. She felt beside the nightstand for her purse and stuffed her panties and bra into it. She slipped into her shoes, then lingered at the door for a moment, planning how to open it without making noise.
Out in the cool air, she paused at the railing along the second floor walkway and stared out across the dese
rt and up into the night sky. Everything was black except the stars, which were only just beginning to fade with the coming day. It would be another hour before the sun began to rise and swallowed them with its overwhelming light.
She descended to the parking lot and listened to the heels of her clogs on the asphalt. The clicking was loud against the silence. She hugged herself, rubbing her arms for warmth as she hurried across the street. She walked down the half block to the Golden Dragon and turned down the driveway to the small parking lot in back where she’d left her car.
She heard a motor coming up the street and turned to look behind her as it passed. The old Dodge Dart went by on the street. It was her brother and Eli, sitting stone-faced and silent in the front seat. She wondered if they’d gotten any sleep.
XVII
Tom thought the whole idea was silly.
He was walking along the loading dock, fanning the ground with the Geiger counter, trying to learn to use it without losing his balance. It wasn’t like a metal detector because it had the box that had to be carried along with it and the box was just heavy enough to throw him off if he tried to walk and wave the thick wand around at the same time. It took practice to get it right, so Tom was out in the intake yard giving it a whirl. He would eventually be looking for hot spots in the desert along with a team from the lab, so he figured he’d better look like he knew what he was doing. The last thing Tom wanted was to look like a fool.
The intake yard is basically a giant parking lot with stalls like a gas station, except that oil is pumped out of the trucks as opposed to into them. About twenty trucks at a time could be offloading. Trucks pulled in, got hooked up, and sat for forty-five minutes while the oil got sucked out of them. The drivers hung around in a room off the end of the loading dock they jokingly referred to as the lounge, which held a television, a few ratty couches, and an endless supply of coffee. Tom Crossly stood near the entrance to the Lounge, turning the dials on the box and avoiding the curious looks of the drivers as they came and went.
“Some kind of tester or something?” one of them asked.
Tom just smiled and nodded. “Something like that,” he replied, as the single bits of static clicked in his ears. With the headphones on, he figured he wasn’t obligated to engage in conversation and he kept his head down to indicate that he wasn’t to be disturbed. He felt silly, but the yard was the best place to get away from the office where at least the people he normally worked with wouldn’t see him.
He picked up the unit and started down the stairs off the dock and onto the asphalt lot. He paused at the top, letting another guy come up first. The young man with the shaggy hair and stained clothes smiled at Tom and bounded up the stairs and passed him. Just as he did, the headphones exploded with a loud burst of static. Tom jumped and tore the headphones off. He looked down at the meter on the box. It was normal. He listened in the headphones again. Normal. Just a few isolated clicks in the silence. Tom tapped the side of the box and looked around, as though someone was playing a joke on him.
He put the headphones back on and was about to dismiss it when the same young man passed him going down the stairs. The Geiger counter erupted again. But this time Tom glanced down at the meter in time to see the needle spike upward. Tom watched the kid bound over to a dilapidated tanker truck and retrieve something from the cab. Then the kid came trotting over again. Now Tom was ready.
This time he busied himself with the box, looking like he was distracted but holding the wand out to get a good reading when the kid went by. As the kid approached, Tom heard the clicking grow rapid and then rush into a static roar as he went by. Then it dropped off and quickly returned to normal.
Tom watched the kid go into the lounge, get a cup of coffee, rub the sleep from his eyes, and take a seat in front of an old television running an episode of Oprah. When he figured the kid was distracted enough, Tom picked up the box and walked swiftly to the old truck. He ducked around behind, so the truck was between himself and the lounge, and could already hear the static roaring in the headphones, even before he got them all the way on his head and tried to take a measurement.
“Well I’ll be goddamned.” Tom waved the wand along the side of the truck’s tank and listened to the static raging in the headphones like a radio between stations with the volume cranked. When he took the wand away and walked off a few steps, the static faded away. Then he turned back, walked toward the truck, and the roar returned. He repeated this a few times and then stood there, dumbfounded, slack-jawed, watching the side of the tank as though it might do something mysterious. Then, when he realized he might be attracting attention, Tom was overcome with panic and rushed off to find Victor.
Victor wasn’t hard to find. He sat lethargic in his office with his back to the door, staring out the window at the pipeline dropping over the hill toward the ocean. He could hear Tom running down the hallway and turned to face the door as Tom burst in, ruddy faced and sucking wind.
“Where’s the fire?”
Tom sagged forward, hands on his knees, catching his breath and trying to speak. “I was out in the lot,” he gasped. “With the Geiger counter.” More deep breaths. “This guy came in to offload and he walks by me and sets the damned thing off. Then he walked by me again and set the damned thing off a second time. So I go over by his truck, and sure enough, either he’s packing plutonium or he’s got a load of this tainted oil. I tell you, I couldn’t believe it. That counter just went crazy.”
Five minutes later they were out in the yard, talking to the shift boss, watching the scraggly kid mill around the lounge, waiting for the oil to finish pumping. They got the information for the account the kid was representing: The Headbanger Oil Company. Cute name, given the looks of the guy driving the truck. The address was a P.O. Box in Barstow, but the funds were wired to a Wells Fargo outpost in Nickelback. They knew the kid had to be from Nickelback anyway because that was the only place Ted Ross had made it to in time for the kid to pick up a load and drive it down to Long Beach.
Victor watched from the window of the shift boss’s office, a snarl on his face. “I can’t believe the dumb son of a bitch just waltzed right in here. Can’t fucking believe it.”
The shift boss was flipping through a file full of accounts. “New account. Says here they just started delivering a couple weeks ago. Only a few prior shipments it looks like.”
“Well they won’t be making any more, that’s for damned sure.” Victor took a swig of coffee from a Styrofoam cup and grimaced. “But for God’s sake, keep fucking paying them for their deliveries until we nail them. The last thing we want to do is tip them off that we’re on to them.”
Victor paced around, beside himself with excitement. He wanted to charge out there and lay the guy out, but that would spook him. He knew he needed a better plan to catch them cold and figure out how the hell they were getting the oil from the Monarch plant. It was the opportunity he’d been waiting for. A sting. A chance to do some real work for a change. A reason to get off his ass and do something. Stop staring out the window, throwing pencils at the ceiling.
Finally, when the kid was about done and ready to leave, Victor turned to Tom, who stood quietly, studying a string hanging from a button on his shirt, and said: “We’re gonna nail these fuckers.” Then he snatched the Geiger counter from Tom as he went out the door and said, “I gotta get a closer look at this kid.”
He crossed the yard in a clumsy but deliberate manner, aiming for the kid and his antique truck. When he was nearly there, he called out to him, trying to act befuddled. “Excuse me. Headbanger?”
The kid looked at him, confused, and then glanced behind him at the next truck over. Victor spoke up again. “You the driver for the Headbanger Oil outfit?”
“Yeah.” The kid just looked nervous. Victor wanted to yell gotcha! at the little fucker, but he held himself back. He was a professional, after all.
“Sorry to bother you, but this’ll only take a minute.” Victor set the Geiger counter dow
n and fished some papers from his shirt pocket—a grocery list of things to pick up on the way home and an e-mail joke about a guy stuffing his scrotum in a ball washer at a golf course. He studied them for a moment and then glanced back up at the kid. “The records show you’re a new account. Is that right?”
“Uh, yeah. That’s right.” The kid acted like he had to think about it. Practically giving himself away. He was looking really nervous now. Victor smiled.
“Well, we got all these damned environmental regs we gotta follow. And one of them is we have to take an exhaust measurement on all the new trucks that come in on the new accounts. You know, with the air quality problems and all. If you wouldn’t mind starting her up, all I need is about a minute around by the tail pipe.”
“Sure thing. Hate to get you in trouble with the tree huggers.” The kid smiled this time. Trying to be Mr. Laid Back. Trying a little too hard, Victor thought.
“Shit son, you got no idea.” Victor spat on the ground and nodded, laying it on heavy. “I tell you what, if it ain’t one thing it’s another around here. Shit, you’d think we were selling stuffed spotted owls or something. Anyway, just fire it up and I’ll be out of your hair in just a minute.”
The kid hopped into the cab and Victor went around back, taking a wide birth and slipping the headphones on. He fiddled with the knobs and switches on the box until he could hear the bits of static clicking away, slow and steady. As he got close to the truck he heard the individual clicks crescendo into a solid wall of buzzing noise. It was almost too much to listen to. The whole truck was contaminated. He lingered for a minute to make it look good and then walked around to the driver’s side of the cab.
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