Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) (2 page)

Walter looked at me, and I looked at him.

“You know, the cesiums and the strontiums...” Scotty bent to tape my rubber booties to my coverall legs. “And americium, plutonium...”

Hap Miller turned. “Also known as oh-my-god-iums.” His thin mouth turned down in a curbed smile.

I wetted my lips. “Just how hot are these resin beads we have out there?”

Scotty glanced up at me. “We’re not talking booties.”

Walter was watching me. He wore the solicitous look he used to throw at me when I was a kid doing scutwork in his lab and he’d take me out to a real crime scene, the look he’d wear when I’d signed on officially after grad school and the scenes became more gritty. The look he still gives me, when it gets truly nasty. Although it’s the geology that brings us to the crime scenes, often enough the evidence is lodged on a body—we’re not spared the impact of human mayhem. As for this case, it wasn’t courage I needed, just clear thinking.

Scotty took his tape and moved to Walter.

I threw Walter a look of my own. Two years ago he had a transient ischemic attack—a starter stroke, as his doctor bluntly put it. A sign of things to come if he does not knock off the donuts and pace himself at the scenes, and the risk grows with increasing age.

Walter rotated his wrists so that his gloves could be taped to his sleeves.

And this isn’t just another day at the office, is it?

“Okey-doke,” Scotty said when he’d finished taping Walter, “to be on the safe side you’re gonna used canned air.” He helped me, then Walter, into a tank harness and then passed us facepieces. “Kinda like scuba gear. Either of you dive?”

I said, “I’ve snorkeled.”

“Hey, that’s cool. Me, I surf. Learned on the swells at San Onofre State Beach.” Scotty dimpled. “In front of the old nuke plant.”

I noticed the Saint Christopher medallion around Scotty’s neck. Patron saint of surfers, as I recalled from my beach days at UCLA, worn to protect the wearer from harm.

“Last thing,” Scotty said, “we’re gonna slap dosimeters on you. Keep track of any exposure to radiation. Anybody asks for a reading, hold it up to the light and sing out the millirems.” He passed us the pen-like objects. “Clip it somewhere between the neck and the waist. Over the heart’s good.”

Easy to find my heart, since it was drumming. “We might be exposed?”

“No worry, procedure. We’ve metered the area you’ll be going into and it’s just low-level background rad.”

“Where are the casks?”

“Still rounding them up. But they’re in another area—not the one you’re going into. You don’t go near the casks. Even though they’re shielded, some gammas leak through. And this is a hot load.”

Hap Miller snapped a battery into his meter. “Hotter than you think, coach.”

“The name’s
Scotty
and what the hell’s that mean?”

“Means it came from a real nasty cleanup site, Scotty.”

I spoke. “How hot?”

Miller regarded me. “You eat salsa?”

I nodded.

“You like it hot?”

“Medium-hot. Is that some kind of health physics metaphor?”

“Should be. Resins, metaphorically, work like salsa. They come mild, medium, hot, and...” Miller blew on his fingers, “tripleX.”

“Christ,” Scotty said. He turned for the door.

“Well then, ever hear of Fukushima Daiichi?”

Scotty froze. Surfer dude whose waves just went flat.

Walter said, “The Japanese nuclear plant?”

“Yowza.” Miller nodded. “Plant that got hammered by the quake and tsunami. Reactors going Godzilla. Spent-fuel pools leaking.”

Scotty said, “What’s that got to do with this?”

“Frame of reference—for those who don’t eat salsa.” Miller gave me a wink. “Resins used to clean the Fukushima contaminated water were hot as can be.”

I said, faint, “And the resins we have outside?”

“That hot.”

R
oy Jardine stood frozen in the desert-night furnace and thought about his life.

It was a life of one crap job after another.

In his workaday career he had mastered the details of seventeen crap jobs, and on the eighteenth crap job the details tried to kill him.

So he’d taken job eighteen commando.

And look what happened. It had not gone as planned. In fact, things went way out of control. They had a saying for this, in job eighteen. Going critical. Things had really gone critical tonight and Jardine needed a new plan, fast. He was not good at this—thinking on the fly. He liked to chew on a plan for as long as it took. So after the truck crash he’d gone home to lay low. And he’d chewed. Two hours later he had a bellyfull of undigested plan. The problem, he’d realized, was making a plan in a vacuum. He needed to know what was happening.

So he’d gone out to reconnoiter.

He’d driven back close to the crash site and pulled off the road onto the desert hardpack. Then he’d crept up a little knoll and raised his binoculars to scope the site. Hells bells, the place was swarming. Everybody was masked and hooded but he imagined their faces. Their expressions. Serious.

He liked that.

For the first time since things went critical, he recaptured his grand vision. He came alive. If he had not been afraid of being heard, he would have howled.

Footsteps sounded.

He froze. The sounds were at a distance. That gave him hope. At a distance, in the dark, he’d look like a post. The joke was, Roy Jardine was so skinny that if he turned sideways all you’d see was his shadow. As a matter of fact, Shadow was his nickname. He’d earned it on job number three, refrigeration mechanic, shadowing his supervisor’s every move in order to get it right. He’d once read up on his personality type and diagnosed himself as borderline obsessive-compulsive. No sidewalk-crack counting or anything. Just a need to master the details.

The sound came closer and now he identified it. Claws on hardpack dirt. Coyote. If it started to bark he’d howl in relief along with it.

He found he’d sweated through his shirt.

He plucked the shirt away from his ribs. He swiped the back of his neck, lifting aside his ponytail. It was a thick black snake that made people ask if he was part Indian. He wasn’t. He’d grown the ponytail on his first crap job—one-hour photo clerk—to look like he was in on the joke. He’d kept it because females liked to braid it and dudes noticed it instead of his perfectionism. And after the incident on job eighteen it gave them something to look at instead of his face.

Shadow, the long lean dude with the outlaw tail.

Go for it, dude.

He knew what he had to do. Recover control. There was already a plan in place: the grand vision, the mission, a long careful time in the making with attention paid to the details. And it was still an excellent plan. But now he needed to make adjustments, adapt to the new situation. He told himself: you can do that, Roy. What happened tonight changed things. You have new enemies. The cops are in it now. They’re going to try to stop you. Don’t let them, dude.

I won’t, he promised.

He hooked his thumbs in the loops of his jeans and strolled back to the pickup.

He turned on the engine, revving it. That sounded ace.

But as he drove onto the highway he worried that somebody might have heard and he lectured himself for being cocky and even though he saw no other cars he made himself sick on adrenaline.

He’d overreacted. As he drove past the crash site nobody came to chase him. He was just another drive-all-night roadie going about his business.

He tooled along highway 95, riding high now, and he gave himself another lecture. Listen Roy, you’re doing good. You’re incognito for now but very soon you’re going to step out of the shadows. They won’t call you Shadow, then.

He pressed his shoulders against the seat. He felt his chest swell. He’d heard of people doing this, being thrown out of their comfort zone and growing stronger. That’s what he was doing right now: growing into his destiny. He was like the outlaws of the Old West who start out being ordinary dudes going through their crap days and then some villain kicks them in the comfort zone and they turn into outlaws. Not low-down outlaws. Outlaws with a mission.

He suddenly wondered if he should have a hideout. Just in case.

Yeah
.

He knew just the place. It was already set up for the mission but there was plenty of space he could make his own. He liked that so much he decided to name it. He put on his thinking cap. He was a bit of a history buff and since he was now an outlaw he wanted to name the hideout after a famous Old West outlaw lair. It came to him:
Hole-in-the-Wall
. That’s where famous outlaws like the Wild Bunch had their base of operations. That wasn’t just in the movies, that was a real place, up a narrow pass, hidden in the rock, impossible for the enemy to approach without being seen. Jardine’s hideout was like that. If the enemy got on his tail, he’d make a stand at
Hole-in-the-Wall
.

The Long Lean Dude was back in the saddle.

Getting ready to take on the enemy.

He’d never counted sidewalk cracks but now he counted his chances.

S
cotty Hemmings led the way out of the van, touching his neck where the Saint Christopher medallion hung beneath his suit. Walter followed, adjusting the tank harness belt where it cut across his belly.

As I squeezed past Hap Miller, who did not give me an inch, he grinned. Not the same species as Scotty’s good-natured smile. It was a toxic grin, as though Miller had leached up a few too many contaminants.

“Hold on,” Miller told me, “you look a mite stressed. Allow me to send you forth with the health physics blessing.”

I paused.

He used his meter probe to outline a cross over my chest. “In the name of alpha, beta, gamma, and
holy
neutron, go with low dose.”

“Okay.”

“You know dose? Amount of radiation absorbed. Potential for damage.”

Yeah, I knew dose. I said, “Thanks for the good wishes.”

He put on his facepiece, adjusting the head straps, electrifying his curly red hair. “Ladies first,” he said, indicating the door.

O
utside the van, Miller set off on his own course and I joined Walter and Scotty.

“Listen up, folks,” Scotty said, “like I said in the van, there’re places you
can
go, and places you
can’t
go. Up ahead, where it’s roped, is the hot zone. Zone runs alongside the road, waaay uphill. Some areas have been metered and okayed—like the area we’re going into, where the truck is. We’ll call that Area One. The area you’re
not
going into is uphill of that, where the crane’s working—Area Two. That’s where the casks got thrown. Questions?”

Only one: what’s the weird thing you’re saving up for us? I held my tongue. We’d find out soon enough.

“Okey-doke,” Scotty said, “let’s mask up.”

We fitted our facepieces and raised our hoods and opened the regulator valves and the air flowed. We headed up the road to the crash site, where Hector Soliano awaited us. Masked-up now, like us, features obscured, like ours, he was nonetheless readily identifiable by his height and his ramrod FBI posture.

Scotty led the three of us through the control point into the hot zone.

Spotlights showed a path already tramped by other feet in the muddied soil. I felt bulky, moving with a truly odd gait in my rubber booties. I carried the field kit in my balloon-tested hand. I scanned Area One for stray casks. Nothing. Nothing but desert, no worry, just the everyday naturally occurring background radiation emitted by the native soil and rock, to which I never give a thought unless I’m doing a chem analysis for a soil profile.

We came to the truck.

It was a flatbed tractor-trailer. In essence, a delivery truck. But for the lead shield between the cab and the trailer, it could have been delivering refrigerators. The battered rig had come to rest on its right side, belly facing us, wheels painfully skewed. I pictured it rolling, shooting refrigerators out the top as it tumbled.

Soliano gathered us. “I will first explain what we know.”

His voice came tinny over the speaker in my facepiece. I had to ignore the hiss of my air tank and my own Darth Vader breathing.

Soliano continued. “The vehicle is owned by Alliance Freight. Alliance reports that it was following the correct route, according to its transponder. It was en route to the CTC waste repository, five miles ahead off highway 95.”

Highway 95 was just visible, the dark strip that bisected the desert.

“Skid marks indicate the hijacker forced the truck off the highway, onto this road. Tire marks take the vehicles farther uphill, where the truck went over the edge. The trailer portion took the brunt and was breached, scattering its cargo. The truck continued to tumble downhill and came to rest here.”

I looked uphill, where the truck had gouged something of a bobsled run.

“Footprints suggest the hijacker left his vehicle and followed on foot.”

“Hijacker, singular?” Walter asked.

“A single series of prints, which we attribute to the hijacker.”

“On what basis?”

“Location. Direction.” Soliano shrugged. “The scene is difficult—everyone who left a print was wearing protective booties. Including, presumably, the hijacker, since there are bootie prints around his vehicle tire marks.”

“Hijacker, male?” I asked.

Soliano waved a hand—the default assumption. “Hijacker, homicidal. The driver has been shot.”

I gazed up at the dented cab. “Maybe the intent was homicide, not hijacking.”

“The intent reaches beyond homicide.”

So now we came to it.

Soliano led the way to the back of the trailer. I steeled myself for something hideous—there were things beyond murder that qualified—but the first thing I noticed on the crippled back panel was the standard radiation placard. Black fan-bladed symbol in a yellow triangle, RADIOACTIVE in black. The only thing unfamiliar to me was the red Roman numeral III and the number 7. So okay, we rank our soils, they rank their rads.

I thought, there’s nothing weird about a rad symbol on a radwaste truck.