Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) (17 page)

The Geiger clicked leisurely. Snap...snap.

I returned my attention to the tracks. They grew spotty as the soil thinned and the floor showed its base rock.

Up ahead, the gullet split in two.

For a wild moment I couldn’t remember which fork Lucy had taken, which fork I need take, and I didn’t want to take the wrong fork and spend one extra second entombed in this suit in this place. The tire tracks were unreadable—Scotty and Lucy had made such a mess that it was simply hopeless. I was making a bigger mess with my own shuffling bug-suited feet.

I squeaked, “Left fork, right?”

“No, not right,” Scotty boomed in my ears, “go left.”

Something skittered in my beam. My heart lurched. A small naked form turned tail and disappeared into the left fork. Some kind of rat. So the air in that fork was rat-safe, anyway. Can rat teeth go through bug suits?

Bile came up into my mouth. I forced it down in dread of retching into my self-contained breathing apparatus.

And now my Geiger counter was growing chattier. I checked the rate chart. All was as Scotty said it should be.

Okay lady, just keep going.

I forced myself into the left fork, following the rat.

Following Roy Jardine. Had he worn a bug suit? Surely a veteran of the radwaste dump knew what to wear in here. I hoped, fervently, that he had ached and sweated and chafed. I felt no sympathy for him, none at all. I felt a sorrow for poor dead Sheila. And for the rest of us.

Up ahead, my headlamp beam caught on a roadblock of silver.

The cask seemed to fill the adit. It was the same make I’d seen at the crash site, and at the dump—that hefty tin can of a cask—and down here stuffed into the gullet of the mountain it looked monumental.

I heaved my weighted self to a stop. “I’m looking at it,” I told Scotty.

“Okey-doke. You got twenty minutes air left but you might wanna hurry it up.”

My Geiger chattered gaily. I checked the chart. All was as it should be.

I stood where I assumed Scotty had stood, at a telescoping-wand’s distance. I played my beam over the skin of the cask and saw what Scotty had seen: patches of dried mud, like the cask was molting. A dark gray mud. Not—just eyeballing it—the same species as the native soil around here. Not—a reasoned leap—acquired here. The mud was spattered across the lower reaches of the cask. I thought that over. Let’s say this cask was stored at the depot, until Jardine decided to bring it here. And in the process of loading it for transport maybe he spun the wheels of a telehandler or trailer in wet soil, and spattered the cask.

I wanted that mud.

I tucked Lucy’s tool under my arm and opened my belt bag, fishing for the specimen dish. I couldn’t tell a dish from a hand lens through this clown glove. Come on come on. You wanna limit your time. Just grab your dirt and go. Whatever I’d been fingering slipped away. I swallowed a curse. Scotty was listening. What if he told Walter I was stressed? And Walter’s already berating himself for letting me bully him into staying behind, and he’s got Soliano’s noblesse-oblige dogging him, and if there’s anything Walter hates more than letting himself down, it’s letting others down. He’s out there telling himself he feels just fine, and he’s never happy unless he can put his own eyes on the scene, and it’s not out of the question that he’ll bully Scotty into dressing him out and sending him in here to help.

I secured the specimen dish and set it on the ground.

I untelescoped Lucy’s tool and held the thing like a fishing pole, fishing for the spot just above the cask’s base collar where the largest mud patches clung.

The scoop banged against steel and it made a big sound.

And then there was a long moment when I didn’t understand, when I thought the sound came from my headset—Scotty banging his microphone into something—and then I thought I’d somehow dislodged a rat nest and it was rat turds spewing out. And then I focused on the yawning rip in the cask. Did I do that? With Lucy’s tool? And then I recoiled. The cask shat out beads, and beads geysered through the tunnel and spattered me and pooled at my feet and before I could backpedal out of their path, beads buried my booties.

I must have screamed.

Scotty yelped in my earphones.

I paid no heed to my ringing ears, to Scotty’s babble—I paid heed, rather, to my little Geiger counter that was clicking its fool head off.

I
prepared to step out of the shower but Scotty stopped me. “Lemme get those hard-to-reach places.” He had a long-handled brush. “Lift the suit.”

I pulled it up so that the leg wrinkles smoothed out, like I was hiking up a pair of sagging pantyhose, and Scotty scrubbed. Water was pumped from a RERT van up the ridge, and the hose connected to a PVC-pipe frame, and a nozzle rained the water down on me, and it pooled at my feet in a bright yellow catch basin that looked like a blow-up wading pool. I concentrated fiercely on the ludicrousness of this scene, of a toy shower stall outside a mine adit in the desert, of me in my bug suit being scrubbed down by Scotty in his suit. Some kind of kinky scene for hazmat fetishists. I focused on the soapy water that sluiced off my suit into the catch basin, on the hose that pumped the contaminated water out of the shower and down the ridge to the waste tank in the van.

“Raise your arms.”

I complied, numb, so Scotty could get at the hard-to-reach alphas and betas, but it was what he couldn’t get at, what my bug suit couldn’t keep out, that kept me sweating.

I saw Walter, who had come to the edge of the decon corridor and was staring at me like I was from Mars. Soliano touched Walter’s elbow and said something I could not hear over the hiss of my tank.

“Damn you,” Walter said.

I heard that. But I didn’t blame Soliano for the exposure because I would have chosen to go in no matter what he said, and so would Walter, because there was the chance we could get a jump on locating the rest of the radwaste—although that chance had been blown to dust—and I knew Walter would not be blaming Soliano if Walter were the one standing here being deconned.

Scotty moved between me and them, blocking my line of sight. He shut off the water. He went over me hood to boots with the Geiger and this time, unlike his frisk before the shower, the counter relaxed. I relaxed too, a fraction. Scotty opened my hood and removed my facepiece. I sucked in sweet hot air. He disconnected the regulator and took the tank off my back. I felt so light I could float away.

He doffed his own breather. “Doing okay?”

I nodded and turned my face to the sky, to the low brutal sun, and for a moment the solar rays on my liberated skin felt simply like a beachy summer afternoon.

“Okey-doke,” he said, “we’re gonna peel you outta that suit.”

I said, “Do I have a problem?”

“About?”

“Gammas.”

He said, grim, “Puppies throw off some gammas.”

I shifted in my two-ton suit. “Any lead in this? Like the dentist’s bib?”

“Can’t wear a suit with enough lead to protect against gammas, and still move.”

“What’s my dosimeter say?”

“Says you picked up some gammas. And I’m real unhappy about that. Rules say a civilian shouldn’t be exposed to more’n a hundred millirems a year—above and beyond the background dose.”

“How safe’s the dose limit, Scotty?”

“Depends what you mean by safe.”

“The numbers they put in the equations. That correlate millirems to likely effects. Hap says it’s a guess.”

“Hap’s a clown.”

“So you trust the numbers?”

“Gotta have
some
guideline.” He shifted. “Anyway, we go by alara.”

“What’s alara?”

“A-L-A-R-A. As low as reasonably achievable. It means, let’s not take the dose limit as a goal. Let’s lowball the exposures. If we can.”

But we hadn’t.

“Hey Cassie, what you got...there is nothing to worry about.”

He didn’t say ‘no worry.’ I didn’t like ‘there is nothing to worry about.’ It was too formal for Scotty. It sounded like it came from some manual: there is nothing to worry about so long as exposure is kept below the dose limit. I glanced at the scowling RERT crew, preparing to start the cleanup of Jardine’s mess. “What about them? How’s ALARA let them go in there?”

“ALARA for us isn’t the same as ALARA for you.”

“Jesus Scotty, you’re made of the same stuff I am.”

He reddened. “Look, nobody on my watch goes over their set limit. I time them. Keep track. That’s why we have dosimeters. Somebody gets close to dosing out, I’m gonna limit their exposure. It’s real simple.” He looked down at my boots. “Time equals dose.”

It had taken me, I calculated, about five seconds to ID the resin beads as not rat turds, and run.

He squinted, although the sun was not in his face. His skin crackled around the eyes. He looked weathered—surfer dude soaked too long in the brine, in the sun, soaking up too many cosmic rays. Surfer dude in hazmat that doesn’t protect against gammas, that doesn’t protect against the revenge-soaked unpredictability of a man with access to the rads. He said, finally, “We follow the rules best we can.”

“I know you do.”

He absently touched the good-luck medallion at his neck, then saw me looking. “Hey, we’re not gonna have you sucking up any more dose.” He peeled off my gloves and dropped them in a plastic decon bag. “I mean, it’s cumulative.”

S
cotty had taken my place in the shower, vigorously going after his own hard-to-reach places. I thought, it’s old news to Scotty. He’s done it before. He’ll do it again. Get contaminated. Decon. Rub the medallion for luck, or grace, or habit. Go on his way.

Lucy had disappeared into the adit.

Walter had gone to fetch me a chilled soda from one of Scotty’s ice chests.

Hap joined me, clutching his EMT kit. “Probabilities, Buttercup.”

“Not now, Hap.”

“Don’t knock it. The radiation track is all about probability—whether or not it hits the cell. Odds are it didn’t. You’re not your grandma.”

I glared at him. How about just: chin up, Buttercup?

He knelt and opened his kit.

My scalp prickled, like I’d spent a day at the beach and come back with sand in my hair. I watched Hap—the top of his sombrero, his red-freckled hands rummaging in the kit. Probability, what means the cancer lottery. Probability, what means the genetics lottery. Step yourself right up and take a guess. Youse might win or youse might lose but no worry Buttercup. Nobody knows how to score anyway and you won’t find out how y’all did until somewhere down the road apiece.

Hap stood, opening a pill bottle. He held it out to me.

“What is it?”

“Good old ibuprofen. Ease up those sore muscles.” He passed me his water bottle. “Sorry I can’t offer a nuke-dodgem pill.”

I took the pill and washed it down.

“And next I prescribe a long hot shower.”

I glanced at the yellow stall.

“Back at the Inn.” He grinned. “A real shower where you get naked and use soap. Soothe them aches and pains.” He added, kindly, “You have had one piss-poor day.

R
oy Jardine was a happy man.

He lay on his belly on a ridgetop, binoculars to his eyes and earbuds in his ears, watching the aftermath at Twenty-Mule-Team Canyon. He wanted to savor every last moment.

Three hours already on his belly, monitoring
The Trial
. The arrival. The dressing-out. That female with the purple hair—was she supposed to be ace? And then the going in and out, one after another. Right past the little hole Jardine had bored into the ground to hide the microphone. Oblivious. And then there’d been the payoff.

He just wished it hadn’t been the female geologist who got caught. He’d expected it to be one of the hotshots. If he’d had his choice, it would have been that Bastard Ballinger who went in—that was the original mission plan—but he understood the hotshots had no reason to send in Ballinger. Even if they had reason, Ballinger was a dirty coward.

And evil.

The Trial
had proved that today. Ballinger was convicted. Today, everybody found out what kind of murdering coward Ballinger was.

And Ballinger’s problems were just beginning.

Jardine estimated that Stage Two could commence within a day or so. He wished he could be more precise but he had to wait for the trigger event. If it triggered sooner rather than later, he’d send another email, move up the deadline. Meanwhile, he’d wait. And he wouldn’t be waiting alone. The enemy was waiting along with him.

And if the enemy threatened, there was that cask in Vegas with their name on it.

He was riding high now on a day of great success but he had learned his lesson about riding high. Keep watch for surprises. The geologists were the ones he really had to keep an eye on. Still, after today’s events, how many surprises did they have left in them?

He’d have to make a phone call soon. He needed information.

He was suddenly bored with the flunkies down below. He scooted back from the vantage point and got up, stretching his stiff self. He packed his gear. He planned, when he got to
Hole-in-the-Wall
, to treat himself to the freeze-dried Shrimp Creole for dinner. A celebration. He would eat outside on that hidden outcrop and watch the sunset.

He left the ridge and headed upcanyon. The chances of meeting anyone here were tiny because this was a rough and remote canyon, not in the guidebooks.

His mind raced ahead of his feet.

After the female again. All in all, he guessed the female getting crapped up was a good outcome. Make her stay out of mine tunnels in the future. But he sure hoped she hadn’t sucked up much dose. He was embarrassed, now, about how he’d reacted watching her in the decon shower. He’d wondered what she’d look like in his shower at home. He’d buy her strawberry shampoo and that girly soap. Maybe even get in and soap her up.

The canyon narrowed. He felt a breeze. He looked up. Clouds were coming in fast.

He thought about what Miller said to her, the sneaky way it sounded in the earbuds:
I prescribe a long hot shower
. Getting naked. That took some real nerve. Jardine couldn’t see their faces but he was sure Miller had leered when he said it. Miller was a cad.