Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series)

by Toni Dwiggins

  Walter stood behind Pria, pointing upfan to the crest of the Funerals. “That’s the water we’re chasing today.”

  That’s the other flow path into Death Valley. That’s the one we’re betting on.

  Hap looked where Walter pointed. I wished I could read Hap’s face but it was shadowed by the huge sombrero.

  Pria sighted uphill. “Water goes downhill.”

  “So it does,” Walter said. “Then how do you think water crosses the Funerals?” He gave her time to knit her brows and then he took a chisel from the field kit and stuck it into the ground. “Wiggle it.”

  She knelt and wiggled the chisel. Star pupil.

  “You feel the give?” Walter asked. “Where the chisel finds a crack in the soil? Way down beneath us is an aquifer. It’s a big tub of water that flows through cracks in the underground rock. And because Death Valley’s elevation is the lowest in the region, that’s where the water goes.”

  “Look out!”

  Pria dropped the chisel. We spun around.

  The two FBI men were backpedalling. The trim black guy named Darrill Oliver now morphed into that primal stance that needs no interpretation, and the blocky sunburned guy named Hal Dearing was grabbing Oliver’s gun arm. Oliver shook him off.

  “What is it?” I said, “what’s wrong?”

  Dearing jerked his subgun toward the scrub brush. “Snake.”

  Walter recoiled.

  “King snake.” Dearing hissed, then grinned. “I happen to know they’re harmless but my bro here thinks they bite.”

  Oliver lowered his weapon, a flush darkening his obsidian face.

  Walter threw Oliver a look, fellowship of the phobic. “Good eye.”

  The scrub brush shimmied and a thick banded shape disappeared down a hole.

  “Should have shot it,” Hap said. “Snakes eat bats.” Third comment of the day.

  29

  Silence in the car as we continued up the hill.

  Thanks to Hap, I was thinking food chain. Bats get contaminated, snakes eat bats, snakes carry the scourge as they creep along their way. What eats snakes? Hawks. And then they fly away.

  Hap, in the rearview, had his phone open again.

  The Cherokee jolted and I whipped my attention back to the rough road. A new groundcover sprouted among the creosote and sage—stone and tin. Stone foundations marked vanished buildings, stone cairns stood watch over pits and shafts, and you would have thought that tin was mined here, for the earth was rich with rusted cans. If Jardine wanted a mine handy to highway 95 he could have thrown a dart in any direction and hit one. But the fender soil said he kept going, and so did we.

  Above the Town of Stone and Tin, the road entered a narrow twisting canyon and then we crested the Funerals and descended past another ghost town, smaller and sadder than the first. Walter rubbernecked.

  Pria said, “If you go off this road there’s lots of mines.”

  Is that what Jardine did? If he picked a mine on this road, one he could drive his offroader into, didn’t he risk some weekend warrior driving his tricked-up offroader into the mine for a little sightseeing? The soils would tell. If he came this way.

  The road narrowed and it was no longer a road but cascades of sheeting rock. I wrestled the Cherokee to a stop. “Did we miss a turn?”

  “No,” Pria said, “this is the way.”

  I had to admit, Soliano was right, she knew this area like we did not.

  “Chickie’s drove this,” she said. “It’s not that hard.”

  So Chickie knows the way, too. I filed the fact in my expanding mental folder marked devil. I gripped the wheel. If Chickie, and presumably Brother Roy, could drive this astonishing excuse for a road then so could I. Walter watched me. I hit the gas and tires latched onto rock and lurched us forward, and as sweat cascaded down my flanks I understood why Jardine needed that high-clearance offroader with its beastly trailer.

  We came to an exposure of Pliocene sedimentary deposits and I stopped, gratefully, to sample. While Walter explained to Pria that a few million years separated one layer from the next, the FBI checked their tires, and Hap headed for the canyon-wall shade.

  I followed him. “Who were you texting?”

  “Just checking messages.”

  “I don’t think so. I think something’s going on.”

  He leaned against the canyon wall. “Like what?”

  “You tell me.”

  He held my gaze, first time today. “It’s personal.”

  I flushed.

  He gestured at the ground. “Don’t let me interfere.”

  “I won’t.” You can bet on it. “So, you know what we’re after here, right?”

  He cocked his head.

  “Nuclides from the dump leak are into the Death Valley flow system. Like you told us at dinner. And the nuclides are coming this way.”

  “More or less.”

  “Okay, yeah, the contaminant plume wouldn’t precisely follow the road, but if Jardine wanted to mimic the leak, this is the way he’d come.”

  “I get it.”

  I watched him. “You get what?”

  “Here’s where he gets into the virgin.”

  “How?”

  “How should I know? He ain’t my homie, I’s jess the guy what frisks him.”

  Hap suddenly sounded like himself. First time today. I said, “So give me a wild-ass guess.”

  He pushed back his sombrero. “Haven’t got one, Cassie.”

  ~

  It was getting tight.

  The canyon squeezed steeply into a cavernous gorge and we funneled down into the narrows.

  The rocks were tilted and pitted in somber shades of purple and green. I craned my neck to follow the walls upward to the spires that tortured the clifftops. In places, windows had eroded through rock, framing roiling clouds.

  “Ghosts,” Pria said.

  The road gentled and I gave myself over to reading the formations, and when the banded layers of the Bonanza King fully commanded the walls, I stopped the Cherokee.

  Layer four.

  Hap paced while we sampled, keeping watch he told us, on what I did not know because he did not bring out his meters, and then finally he halted in front of Dearing and Oliver, who were parked against the wall. “Good place for an ambush,” Hap said, loud enough to startle the agents and bounce an echo off the walls.

  Ambush ambush ambush.

  FBI submachine guns swung upward and we all tilted our chins but I saw nothing on the clifftops but Pria’s ghosts.

  By the time we pushed on downcanyon, the clouds had congealed.

  We stopped to sample an exposure of trilobite trash beds because we had fossil fragments in layer five.

  And then we came to the end of the line. Point D, for destination.

  As we piled out, I brushed close to Hap and said, “Actually, here is where he got into the virgin.”

  Hap gave me a tight smile.

  Well, somewhere around here—it was a very big neighborhood. Layer six was a sandy shaly zone that extended a good long stretch of the main canyon and pouched into offshoot sides that mostly dead-ended within a few hundred yards. We sampled two dozen sites and then called it a day.

  “Was ready an hour ago,” Dearing muttered, trudging to the FBI jeep.

  Oliver eyed Walter’s bulging field pack. “Get what you need to track the rat down?”

  Walter said, “If not, we’ll get more.”

  “Good man.”

  Rain caught us on the way out, drops bulleting the roof of the Cherokee. The thin canyon soil began to saturate and I fixated on the ominous ledge of mud plastered twenty feet up the wall. Last place I wanted to be, right now, was pinched in this narrow gorge.

  ~

  We exited the canyon, and I exhaled.

  We exited onto a modest shallow fan, unlike the giant on which Walter and I had been marooned.

  As we bumped downfan, thunderclouds gathered themselves and headed east. The sun angled in through the wi
ndshield to steam us. It steamed raindrops off the Cherokee’s hood and the alluvial gravel beneath its tires.

  I took note of a steaming jutting outcrop. I waited for Walter to start up again with the lessons. Look Pria! You notice a difference between that layer of rock and the gravel it sits upon? Where could that rock have come from? Well Grandfather, she says—knitting her brows—I’d say that’s where a thrust fault is exposed. That’s my girl, says he.

  We reached the toe of the fan, and highway 190.

  We’d traveled 190 yesterday, to Twenty-Mule-Team canyon. Turn left onto the highway right now and we’re almost there. Real convenient, I thought, for Brother Roy to transport a cask from Point D to the borax mine.

  I turned the Cherokee right, heading for the Inn. Back to the barn.

  We passed the crumbly white travertine I’d noticed yesterday, bearding the Funerals fan.

  “Look Pria,” Walter said, pointing out his window, “where it’s white.”

  I knew it. He couldn’t resist.

  “Those deposits,” he said, “are from old dry springs.”

  “Aliens used to camp there, Grandfather. There was water then.”

  I just had to join in. “Look further, Pria—at all that mesquite. There’s water here now.”

  “Well yeah. Like, bighorns drink there?”

  Well duh, like this is only the second time I’ve been on this road and I didn’t see any bighorns yesterday. All I saw now was a covered flume paralleling the highway. Aliens built that, I thought. Aliens to the desert.

  “Mr. Miller,” Pria said, “it’s not nice to keep texting when people are talking.”

  The car went thick with silence and then Hap gave a rough laugh. “You’re right. Can’t come up with a good reply anyway.”

  I heard the snap of his phone shutting.

  I pulled off the highway and shut down the engine and kinked in my seat to look Hap in the eye. “What the hell is going on?”

  He met my gaze. Second time today. He opened his phone and thumbed the keypad and passed it to me. “Message came just after we left the Inn.”

  I read the text, at first not getting it, then I passed Hap’s phone to Walter. He read, and after a long hesitation, he passed it on to Pria. Because it’s sure not nice to exclude her.

  She read, scowling. “Is this from the bad guy?”

  Who else? I thought. Still, we’d be wanting Soliano to trace the message—to the resender in Bulgaria or maybe, this time, directly to Roy Jardine’s phone. I wondered how Jardine had gotten Hap’s number. From the dump directory? Or the online white pages, easy enough. Or maybe he had Hap’s number on speed dial.

  Hap might not be Jardine’s homie but it looked like Hap had, somehow, come to Jardine’s malignant attention. He’d texted: You’re on my list now, Doc Death.

  30

  What Roy Jardine admired about C4 plastique was its risk-to-bang ratio. No risk, big bang. Dudes can handle it. Dudes can roll it into a ball and hit it with a bat. He’d heard somebody tried that once. It made a lousy baseball.

  Add a blasting cap and it made an explosive.

  He’d learned to use it in crap job number nine, road demolition. The plastique was ace but the work was hot and dirty. At least he hadn’t had to work dressed out.

  He was in full hazmat now.

  He opened his pack and took out the stubby sausage. It was wrapped in cling wrap, like cheese. Cheese—he must be hungry. He was so sick of freeze-dried. When this was all over he was going to find himself a trucker’s diner and order sausage and eggs with cheese melted on top. His stomach roared.

  He looked around, in case his gut sounds made him miss the sounds of somebody approaching. That was not obsessive. That was careful. It was two-thirty a.m. Friday but he would not count on the dark or the night. He would keep his eyes and his ears wide open. The new audacious Roy Jardine was audacious in vision but he was not a fool.

  He was at a stage where the risks were coming at him fast.

  Yesterday afternoon, the risks came way too close. He’d been up on the ridge above the canyon, as usual, keeping watch. He’d hoped the geologists wouldn’t recover enough to do their job. But they did. And they came with a whole party. Miller the cad. Some girl—who was she? And two FBI men—what else could they be?—with FBI submachine guns. If Jardine had had one of those weapons he could have opened fire right then and there.

  He had his Buck knife and his pistol. Not a fair fight.

  Watching, he’d gotten distracted again with the female. Look how she paid attention to her details! Even though she was tracking him, he had to admire her. In fact, he’d wanted to have her. He could admit that. He wanted her to admire him but even if she didn’t he still wanted to have her. He’d even have her right down there in the dirt. By the time the enemy left the canyon he was all tangled up. Worried about being tracked, retreating like a dog to his hideout, thinking about the female so much that he got way ahead of himself. In the privacy underground he’d had to abuse himself to get her out of his head and that was humiliating.

  But it worked.

  He’d cleared his mind and considered his situation. He’d lost his breathing room but he couldn’t hurry things up. The trigger event had not yet come and he could not launch Stage Two of the mission without it. What he needed now, he saw, was to throw something big at the enemy. And he had that something big waiting in storage at Vegas. He got to work. He’d sat at his makeshift desk with his notepad and pencil for hours and when he got up he had a detailed plan. It was—no reason to be modest—brilliant.

  It was also risky.

  First had been the risk of hiking down to the Ranch and getting into his rental car. It was almost midnight Thursday by then and the only people around was a couple arguing about if they should complain about the torn screen door in their room, and they hadn’t cared about him. The next risk came in driving to Vegas. That went good too. The next risk, parking at the self-storage and driving away in the pickup, had given him a headache. All that adrenaline. But it went good. Driving back with his cargo had been both scary and exciting. Every time he’d seen headlights—five times—he’d nearly died. Every time the headlights disappeared, he’d howled.

  When he’d turned onto the service road behind the Inn, he’d actually prayed.

  When he’d backed his pickup right up to the target, he’d gone calm. That was a surprise. Here was the biggest risk of all. Him out here in his suit. No way did he look like a post. And when he’d unhooked the lead-curtain tarp in the bed of his pickup, the cask stood out like it wanted to be seen. It was mostly buried in talc but even some tourist who didn’t know a cask from his ass would look at that and say what the hell? Jardine remained thoughtful. Anybody came along now, he’d have to use the knife. He’d already used it to cut through the polyvinyl of the target and it lay blade-open on top of his pack.

  He returned his attention to the plastique. He unwrapped it. He moved to the bed of the pickup. His next moves had to be fast, to keep his exposure down.

  That’s the way he’d done it back in the borax mine—attaching plastique to the cask in that dark cramped tunnel. Fast fast fast.

  That’s the way he moved now. First he attached the plastique to the cask and then he stuck the blasting cap into the plastique. Fast fast fast. Next he ran the wires to the detonator. Then he got in the cab and turned on the engine, cringing at the noise. He pushed the lift button. He got out to watch the pickup bed rise—he wouldn’t miss this sight for a million bucks—well yes he would but nobody was offering. He watched the talc spill out. He watched the cask tumble out and hit the target. He moved to the detonator and pushed the button. There was a muffled sound, far quieter than the engine noise.

  The great thing about the target was that the noise of the explosion was muffled and the concussive effect was increased.

  He wished the female could be here to watch with him. He wasn’t ashamed to think about her now. She would see his handiwork and even though she wa
s working with the enemy she would be impressed, and that was enough for him.

  Of course, the whole point of this target was to surprise the enemy. He pictured them, right now, sleeping like they didn’t have anything to worry about. They didn’t have a clue. Come tomorrow, they would find out that the Long Lean Dude could strike right in their own backyard.

  Even though this operation was not part of the primary mission, he thought it was worthy of naming. He put on his thinking cap and then he took it right off again. The name came to him that fast: Watering Hole.

  He edged close for one last look. He thought the beads in the water looked like fish eggs.

  31

  Friday morning dawned bright and clear and hot.

  Three days ago I’d seen dawn break at the radioactive waste dump.

  Now, over a room-service breakfast, Walter and I began our fourth day. We’d nearly finished analyzing the soils we collected in yesterday’s journey. We’d worked through a room-service dinner until midnight and then we’d slept and then at dawn we put our eyes back to the scopes.

  And now, under the twin lenses of the comparison scope, I reached Point D.

  The layer-six samples we’d taken in the canyon had slight variations and there was one in particular that stood out. It contained a yellowish chalcedony that matched the yellowish chalcedony of the fender soil. Hue for hue, chroma for chroma, a dead-on match according to Walter’s Munsell color chart.

  With some reverence, I moved the Point D specimen dish to its place at the end of the line of dishes I’d laid out on the coffee table. Then I slouched in the wicker chair to admire the map we built. It took us from the talc mine all the way to the echoing depths of a funereal canyon and then it branched into a side canyon and came to an end.