Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) (21 page)

“No.” Second comment of the day. In my rearview, he was studying it.

Well, we were betting Roy Jardine knew that road. If we were right, here’s where he left the pavement. Why he took this route was a matter of speculation but we speculated that he preferred to re-enter Death Valley by the back door, the route no ranger patrolled. Because he didn’t want company.

Neither did we. I was glad to have the FBI on our tail, instead of the devil.

Soliano had given us a new toy—a satellite phone—so that we could stay in contact while in the canyons. Walter used it to phone our escort and tell them we were about to go offroad.

I turned onto the fan road and the FBI followed. I stopped to sample the coarse-grained alluvium, layer two of the fender soil.

From here, Jardine’s itinerary led up the flank of the Funerals. So did ours. We crossed an old railroad grade, climbed gently, then dropped into the wide pebbly wash of the Amargosa River. Layer three—playa mud and sand. This time, we all piled out.

The FBI kept watch, submachine guns nodding.

Hap leaned against the Cherokee. Nothing for him to do until, unless we encounter something requiring a Geiger check.

While I sampled the soil, Walter resumed his lessons.

Pria stared at the dry riverbed. “You said we were chasing the water.”

“We are.” Walter smiled. “When this river floods, water ends up in Death Valley.”

I wondered if she’d get the significance of the river’s course. It runs through this desert along the eastern border of Death Valley, then cuts down to its southern tip—talc country—and thence takes a hook northeast to exhaust itself three hundred feet below sea level on the Badwater saltpan.

I pictured the dinner table last night, Hap’s spilled water taking its path along the wood grain and then over the edge. That had sent my thoughts along their own path: if Jardine was trying to nail Ballinger for the leak at the dump, maybe he was following the path of the leak. That path led down into the water table, and thence into the flow system that brings water into Death Valley. On the hydrology website I’d learned there are two major flow paths. One is the Amargosa River, whose riverbed runs somewhat in line with the radwaste truck route. It also runs close to Chickie’s mine. Maybe it had led Jardine there. Maybe he’d been scouting for a site to stage his attack. He’d certainly found a place to stash his equipment and a use for the talc. I wondered if Pria knew we had visited her mother’s mine.

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.

S
ilence 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.”

~

I
t 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.

W
e 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 windshield 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
.

W
hat 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.