Ground Truth

by Rob Sangster

  As if responding to an alarm, a paunchy priest shouted at the girls and rushed through the gate in the altar rail. They back-pedaled, still gathering flowers. The red-faced priest snatched a hymnal from a pew rack and hurled it at the nearest girl. It struck her hard in the back. She stumbled but stayed on her feet. Even though all three fled down the aisle, the priest wasn’t satisfied. He called out to a younger priest near the arched entrance who blocked their way, grabbing the smallest child by her thin upper arm. Her pitiful bundle of flowers spread across the marble floor.

  Jack stood. “Let the girl go,” he called. The priest released the girl’s arm, but slapped her on the back of her head. Nose in the air, hands clasped at chest-level, he walked past the holy water font without a backward glance.

  Jack sat back in the pew and shook his head. “Unbelievable. He thinks that white cassock gives him immunity. Too damn many people in this world think they have immunity. Millions of Mexicans live in shacks while priests in places like this wear red velvet and guzzle vintage port. It’s disgusting.”

  “I agree, but can we talk about what happened in that Hearing room?”

  He turned in the pew to face her. “At the first sign the judge had been bribed to throw the Hearing in favor of Palmer Industries, I was ready to bombard him with evidence against Palmer to get it on the public record. That would make it impossible to stop Alvarez’s prosecution. That’s where I screwed up. Since Alvarez’s superiors had never interfered in this case, it didn’t occur to me that the prosecution would be in on the fix. Someone high up, maybe even cabinet level, yanked Alvarez off the case, and that wasn’t cheap.”

  He paused and let his anger strengthen his resolve as he thought about all that had taken place since he’d arrived in Mexico—including Juanita’s death and the poverty caused as much by greed as by circumstance. He looked at Debra and said, “By the way, I won’t be getting that corner office you mentioned, or any office at all. The second the judge swung that gavel and let Palmer off the hook, I quit working for Sinclair & Simms. Someone has to do something about Palmer. I’m that someone.”

  She frowned. “There’s more you haven’t told me, isn’t there?”

  “Well, I did leave out a few things.” He told her about his nocturnal visit to Guzman’s office and the mystery trucks. And about the carcinogenic incinerator exhaust and how Montana bribed the PROFEPA inspectors.

  “Oh my God. No wonder you—”

  But he kept talking, needing to get it all out. He finally finished with, “And not long after Guzman threatened his assistant, she was found strangled on the river bank.” He gave her the details.

  He saw the shock in her eyes, felt it in her silence. In her world, things like that couldn’t happen. “The poor girl,” she whispered.

  “Now you understand why I’m going back to Juarez. As soon as I get more proof, I’ll kick some ass. And it won’t be just Montana and Guzman. Arthur Palmer has to be totally involved, so I’ll go after him too.”

  She rolled her eyes up at the celestial murals overhead. “Let’s see if I understand this. Classroom professor who just got his own ass kicked thinks he can morph into James Bond or Rambo.” She returned her gaze to him. “Are you crazy?”

  “Not crazy. Motivated.”

  Easy to say, he realized, but the truth was that he had no training for going up against killers. The reasonable thing to do was walk away. No one would blame him. No one except himself. Sinclair had told him to get the job done, and that’s what he’d do. Just a different job.

  “Then I’m in too,” she said. “I hate what these people are doing, and I know more about Arthur Palmer than you do. I can help.”

  He laid his hand on her arm and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Help both of us by going back to San Francisco.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t do that. You remember that Sinclair told me to go to Palmer Industries to write some contracts. If I don’t, Montana will know something’s really wrong. That would definitely get his guard up.”

  He knew she was right. “Tell Montana you’re staying in close touch with Sinclair. Draft the contracts and get out. Don’t do anything to make Montana suspicious, and keep his damned hands off you.”

  She gave him a knowing smile. “I’ll congratulate him on how clever he was in outmaneuvering the PROFEPA lawyers. I can play that bozo Montana like a kazoo.”

  “Yeah, well, just remember that the bozo is also a killer.” He was silent for a moment, then said, “He’ll ask about my reaction to what happened.”

  “I’ll say you were very angry and quit. I wasn’t really paying attention, but I think you mentioned sailing to Buenos Aires.”

  They watched a procession of boys and girls pass on their way to the stairs that led to the choir loft.

  “Don’t go anywhere near the Shipping & Receiving building,” he warned. “If Guzman comes to the Admin building, keep away from him. And never leave the plant with Montana. No impulsive stuff like last night.”

  “Look, I’m worried about you,” she said. “I’ll keep my head down, but if I have a chance to help I’m going to take it. And if Montana’s pecker makes him careless, I’ll make him pay big time.”

  There were no good options, but her attitude reassured him. “Montana will probably have a room reserved for you at the Rialto Hotel. I’ll call you there.”

  God, don’t let them put her in the El Presidente Suite. He hadn’t had the time, and certainly not the clarity, to sort out his feelings about both Ana-Maria and Debra, but he couldn’t stand the thought that Debra might sleep in the same bed he’d shared with Ana-Maria. He also knew instinctively that Debra wouldn’t be able to stand it either.

  BACK AT THE condo, they packed quickly and caught a cab for the airport. Now the real battle was about to start. By tomorrow afternoon, he’d be up on the ridge overlooking the Palmer plant.

  Even an expert might not have spotted the man who tailed them to the airport—and Jack didn’t.

  Chapter 30

  July 6

  6:00 p.m.

  JACK HAD KEPT a keen eye out for rattlesnakes from the moment he started the steep climb up the flat-topped ridge that served as the west boundary of the Palmer Industries site. Then he stepped over a log into some dry brush, and a creature exploded next to his foot, hissing and spewing gravel behind it like a drag racer. Twenty feet away it looked back and flicked its tongue, as if Jack might be a giant delicacy.

  A damned Gila monster.

  Jack’s heart rate dropped back toward normal. In the past half-hour he’d come to hate the creosote bushes that covered the gravelly ground and stank in the boiling sun. But this ridge was his best chance to study the Palmer plant as a whole.

  He’d worn tan twill trousers, a long-sleeve khaki shirt, and broad-brimmed canvas hat to blend into the landscape, but he was still a bird on the ground if there were any Palmer guards patrolling the valley behind him. The foliage was sparse, but there was plenty of undergrowth that could conceal an experienced guard. The only thing Jack had that resembled a weapon was a Swiss Army knife.

  When he finally reached the top of the mesa, he got his first close look at the mammoth, decrepit oil tanks he’d seen from the Palmer parking lot far below. They marched north in two rows ending where the mesa dropped off toward the border.

  He sat on a length of timber, pulled off his left tennis shoe, and dumped a shower of gravel. While sliding his foot back into his shoe he felt an itch on the back of his right calf. Reaching down, his fingers encountered something squirmy. He slapped at it then jumped up from the timber. A scorpion crouched in the dirt, poisonous wand cocked menacingly. Instinctively, Jack attacked, stamping on it again and again to make sure he’d killed it. Not a great start.

  He moved slowly across the flat top of the mesa, getting some cover as he passed between the two rows of tan
ks. He ran the last thirty yards in the open then scrambled on hands and knees to the edge of the mesa overlooking the plant. He scanned the ground closely, looking for scorpions or other poisonous critters, before stretching out full length to check out the complex of buildings a couple of hundred yards below. A steady stream of delivery vehicles rolled in and out. Maybe he’d get lucky and spot one of the mystery truck convoys.

  He saw right away that it wasn’t business as usual at the plant. In addition to the roving patrols, Montana had posted armed guards outside the entrances to three of the buildings, revealing the locations he most wanted to protect.

  Snap. He jerked his head around at the sound, but saw no one. He looked over the top of his reflective sunglasses. Still nothing. False alarm? He held his breath, listening for sliding gravel on the slope.

  Down below, some of the trucks delivering hazardous waste were being routed to Shipping & Receiving, others straight to the incinerator. Outbound trucks stopped for fuel, but none resembled the mystery trucks Ana-Maria had described. He crayfished back from the edge, saltbrush scratching his arms. Sweat stung his eyes.

  Near the end of their last meeting at the law school, Sam Butler had told him it was time to get his hands dirty in the real world. Well, that time had come. He’d made the tough climb because he was determined to crack open Montana’s shell, to spill the guts of his rotten scheme.

  He lay there in the still-hot sun for long minutes, examining and evaluating what was going on below. Other than the extra guards, nothing stood out, nothing suspicious, certainly nothing that would nail Montana. Regretfully he admitted he might as well head back to the motel in El Paso and figure out how to get around the plant guards.

  He didn’t want to go down from the mesa the way he’d come up. If he’d been followed, they could be waiting to ambush him on the original route. Looking for another way down, he picked his way through scraggly tangles of weeds between the two parallel rows of giant oil tanks. When he reached the last pair, the eleventh and twelfth, he had a clear view down to the flatland between the base of the hill and the U.S. border. On the far side of the border were Sunland Racetrack and the gringo world. He looked back at the tanks in two rows longer than a soccer field.

  He pressed both palms against tank number twelve and extended one leg behind him, then the other to stretch his hamstrings for the climb down. In front of his face, a foot-square plate was welded to the tank. The first line showed the tank’s capacity. Below that it read, “Hecho: 1958.”

  Uh oh. Built in 1958. It must be decades beyond its safe life span. Next to the plate a more modern sign read, “Out Of Service.” He saw the same message on other tanks. The oil company, PEMEX, must have considered them too dangerous and abandoned them.

  On impulse, he rapped the side of number twelve. A solid “thunk” returned. Not what he’d expected. It certainly didn’t sound empty. He walked across to number eleven. His rap produced a hollow “boing” followed by a soft internal echo. He tried both again. The difference was unmistakable. He tried number ten. Another “thunk.” The result was the same for every other tank. All except number eleven sounded full.

  It couldn’t be petroleum. No way PEMEX would have left this much behind. It could be water, but that seemed unlikely. But could it be hazardous waste?

  Back at number twelve, he gripped the spokes of the metal valve wheel and tried to wrench it to the left. It was frozen. He picked up a plank, rapped the valve several times then stuck the plank through the spokes for leverage. Standing to one side, he twisted slowly until yellow-green fluid dripped out. He spun the wheel in the opposite direction to cut off the flow. He wrinkled his nose at the vile smell, like hydrogen sulfide but worse.

  Even if Montana was temporarily storing liquid biochemical waste here until he moved it to government facilities, these tanks had no secondary containment system. Only a jackass would take such a risk.

  According to the records Jack had seen, transporting liquid hazardous waste to a government facility was one of Palmer’s biggest expenses. But was it really? Palmer profits were sky-high. Maybe this wasn’t temporary storage at all. Montana could be using these tanks to store toxic waste permanently, covering that up by reporting phantom expenses.

  If one of the old tanks ruptured, it would send a lethal brew on a relentless journey to the groundwater below. Thousands of people who lived below the ridge and two million residents of Juarez and El Paso wouldn’t know what had hit them. This was a catastrophe in waiting.

  Moving cautiously to the other side of number twelve, the side more exposed to plant workers below, he saw immediately how the tanks had been filled. Four parallel trunk line pipes rose up the ridge from the plant and culminated in a low metal building between tanks six and eight. From there, a network of pipes, each about a foot in diameter, followed orderly paths to the twelve tanks. He’d noticed the pipes as soon as he’d reached the mesa, but they hadn’t meant anything then. Now they did. They were how PEMEX had pumped oil up to be stored in the tanks. The building’s door was padlocked.

  To get a closer look at the metal building and avoid the line-of-sight from below, he crawled up and over a mound of freshly-turned earth that stretched like a mole track along the row of tanks. Everything else on the mesa looked untouched for years, yet this was a clear sign of recent human activity.

  Already spooked about scorpions, digging bare-handed into the soil made his skin crawl, but he had no choice. About six inches down, he uncovered something shiny. He scooped away until he’d exposed a fat section of new glazed ceramic pipe. He cleared several more feet of its length before stopping. No point going farther. His eyes could follow its low profile as it continued north in a straight line.

  He scrambled back between the rows of tanks and pushed north through the underbrush. Slow down. Don’t make a mistake. He stopped behind tank twelve. The mound continued another fifty feet where it turned right at a 45-degree angle and headed down the steep mesquite-covered hillside.

  The thought of moving closer to the guards at the plant made his edgy nerves shout at him to get the hell back to his car. He needed to think about what he’d discovered, what it meant. But everything he had on Montana was based on deduction. Without more hard facts, no official would take him seriously much less enter the Palmer site to search. This ceramic pipe led to answers he had to have. Follow it or quit. It was that simple.

  First he had to take samples of the foul stuff in the tanks so he could have it analyzed. He looked around for something to use as a container but found nothing. Sitting on the gravel next to tank twelve, he took off his tennis shoes and socks and then put the shoes back on. The socks could work as sponges. He gradually opened the valve and let the slimy goo drip onto one sock.

  Different tanks might contain different chemicals, so he needed more than one sample. He checked the valves on other tanks until he found one that would turn. As he eased the valve slightly open, the intense odor made his eyes smart. Squinting, nostrils pinched closed, he let the thick fluid drip onto the next sock. Now what? He couldn’t carry the stinking socks down the ridge. There was nothing unless . . . he took off his broad-brimmed canvas hat and dropped the socks into it. He still needed more samples, so he took off his T-shirt and used the Swiss Army knife to hack it into four pieces. After he soaked each piece, he added it to the hat. It was a totally unscientific way to collect samples, and some of it would co-mingle, but it was all he could do.

  Adrenaline pumping, hat at arm’s length, he followed a Cat track probably made by the crew that had installed the new pipe. Before he’d gone fifty yards, he slipped on a leaf-covered patch of shale, landed hard on his butt and slid downhill. Jamming one shoe against a tree trunk stopped his slide. Nothing broken . . . unless . . . he checked his pants pocket to see whether his digital camera was intact. No problem.

  After the slope leveled out, the barely-conceal
ed ceramic pipe continued into a grove of scrub trees less than a hundred yards ahead. He could sprint across to the trees, but moving fast would attract attention. He crouched and edged forward in slow motion, hoping he’d blend into the landscape until he ducked into the grove.

  Suddenly, not far ahead, a motor started up followed by several voices. Damn it! When was he going to catch a break? Heart hammering, he ducked from bush to bush until he spotted where the pipe ended abruptly at the edge of a clearing.

  A dozen yards in front of him six workmen muscled a section of pipe into line. Another stood by, ready to cement it to the section behind it. Farther away, dozens of sections were stacked, enough to extend the pipeline into the center of the clearing.

  Bit by bit he made sense of what he saw. There were three clusters of equipment, each at a separate corner of a triangle about twenty-five yards on a side. A pipe led from each of the three corners into what might be a large pump in the center of the triangle. The ceramic pipe coming from the mesa was heading straight for the pump. It looked like the piping could be operational very soon. He pulled out his camera, took several furtive shots and stuffed it out of sight.

  This equipment didn’t look like anything PEMEX would have used in the oil business, but he’d seen rigs like this on farms near Sacramento: water well heads and pumps. That figured. When PEMEX built this plant it would have been far outside Juarez city limits so they needed wells to supply water.

  If the pump in the center directed water from the wells to the plant, there had to be a main line leading in that direction. To check that out, he edged a few yards to a new vantage point. Beat-to-hell sections of pipe lay on the ground disconnected and pointing in random directions. The line to the plant was clearly out of commission, and there was no replacement pipe in sight. There was no connection from this site to the plant.