Authors: David Vinjamuri
“How long ago was this?”
“Two weeks ago. On a Wednesday night.”
8
I heard a little crunch of gravel and a whistle of air a split second before I saw the cherry-red cro-moly pedal wrench speeding toward my forehead.
It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it almost did. I’d driven for over an hour to make the dozen-mile trip from the CC Farm in Boone County to the Big Ugly Body Shop in Spurlockville. At one point I could have sworn the British lady on my GPS app said “You can’t get there from here.” The Big Ugly wilderness area was between the body shop and the CC Farm, so I had to skirt around both it and the Hobart Mine site to get back north before cutting west.
I hit a brick wall with the grizzled owner of the body shop, who claimed there was no Ethan Wright on payroll. In spite of his vehement denial, I’d already spotted the banged-up red Dodge dangling unceremoniously from a tow truck in the corner of the parking lot. Wright must have hit something going off the road, because it looked like the Ram’s rear axle was broken, and one of the wheels bent inward at an extreme angle. I thanked the owner and walked out the glass door to take a look around back.
As I stepped around the side of the building, that wrench flew at my head from nowhere. I ducked and it hit the brick façade of the body shop building. Little Boy Wright’s chubby, oversized fingers were wrapped around the wrench. He was wearing a Pennzoil cap and green coveralls, and was exactly the size Sheriff Casto described. Unless the body shop had some sort of NFL internship program, I’d found my man.
As chips of red brick dusted my head, I pinned the wrist holding the heavy wrench with my right hand before Little Boy could pull back to take another swing. I pivoted to the left, bringing my left hand up under the big man’s elbow. Then I yanked his arm away from the wall, twisting Little Boy’s wrist as I turned. His whole body followed, stumbling as he tried to keep his wrist from breaking. He took two awkward steps before running smack into the side of the building. His nose broke against the red brick and blood started flowing. Before he could recover, I raised my left leg and stomped down heavily on the outside of his right knee. Big guys put a lot of strain on their joints, so that’s where they’re weakest. Little Boy screamed when my boot drove through the side of his knee. I didn’t know if I’d done any permanent damage, but he wasn’t getting up.
A second man, shorter and leaner than Little Boy, came flying around the corner. He was pulling a gun from his pocket, an old police model Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver with a long barrel. I grabbed the wrench from Little Boy’s limp hand and swung it quickly, bringing it down hard on the second man’s wrist before he could level the gun at me. He screamed in pain and the revolver dropped but did not discharge. I grabbed the broken wrist, and the thin man screamed again. While he was distracted, I pulled him forward by that wrist and slammed my fist into his solar plexus. He doubled over, gagging. Then I hit him hard at the base of the skull with the side of my fist and he dropped.
I waited for a few seconds to see if anyone else would join Little Boy and his friend, but nobody came. I picked up the .38, swung out the cylinder, ejected five rounds into my palm and tossed them into a bush, then dropped it.
“Let’s start again,” I said as I turned back to Ethan. “I know you’re Little Boy Wright.”
“So?”
“So why did you try to put me in a ditch this morning?” I asked, kneeling over him. He was holding a greasy rag to his nose, stemming the flow of bright red blood. His head was tilted back against the brick wall and his leg was extended out stiffly away from him.
“Come a little closer and I’ll tell you,” he said, clenching his free hand. Little Boy had seen his share of fights. He was the kind of guy who clocks you with a beer bottle before you notice he’s getting angry. Even if I’d broken his nose and hobbled him, he was not defeated. He was no more likely to talk to me than he had been a minute earlier. Sometimes with amateurs, you can put them down hard and they’ll open up while they’re still in shock. Not true for Little Boy.
I did lean in toward him, but as he raised his fist, I tapped it with the cro-moly wrench and it dropped. Then I pressed the wrench against his knee and he moaned, tried to stand up and failed.
“Who told you to follow me?”
“I don’t know.”
I pressed harder with the wrench and smacked Little Boy’s fist with the flat of my left hand as he lashed out at me. He shook the injured hand as if it had been stung.
“That fucking hurts,” he said.
“Not nearly as much as getting run off the road,” I pointed out.
“You ran me off the road, dipshit.”
“Only because you’re not a very good driver, Little Boy. Who sent you?” I poked him again.
“I don’t know. Fuck off.”
I saw that I wouldn’t get anything out of him. I patted him on the chest gently and straightened the lapel of his quilted jacket.
“Maybe you should stick to body work,” I suggested.
* * *
I pulled the GTO over on the shoulder of the road, under the bony limbs of a beech tree a quarter mile from the body shop. I stopped just around the first bend, just out of sight of the brick building. I opened the glove box and pulled out a small AM/FM radio, the kind that can be hand-cranked if the batteries are gone. This particular radio received an extra channel. I popped open the battery case to toggle an unmarked switch, then fooled with the antenna a bit and suddenly I was listening to Little Boy as he swore while trying to revive his friend. The device I planted on him did not record and only broadcast a short distance, but it looked exactly like the type of RFID security tag that retail stores place inside clothing. When he discovered the bug, Little Boy probably wouldn’t know it for what it was.
Three minutes later, Little Boy made the call I’d been waiting for. I heard him flip open his cell phone, dial and wait. He spoke and I knew immediately that he was talking to an answering machine or a voicemail box. “It’s me. We tried to do what you asked, but you didn’t tell us the guy was some kind of stunt driver. He totaled my fucking truck. Then he found my shop and broke my fucking knee. So I’m keeping your damn money and I’m damn well done now. Don’t fucking call me again.”
* * *
“Someone down here is nervous about what I might uncover, but I have no idea if it has anything to do with Heather Hernandez,” I said to Alpha.
“Yes?”
I filled him in on my visit to the Reclaim camp and CC Farm, ending with a description of my encounter with Little Boy Wright.
“I trust you left him alive?”
“Yes, but he won’t be walking soon. I don’t think he or his friend will cause a fuss, though. Wright made a call from his mobile phone to the person who hired him at 21:17 Zulu. Do you want me to work through the Sheriff to get the number?” There’s a fairly significant federal law called
posse comitatus
that prevents the military from acting on U.S. soil, but there are also ways to get around it.
“We’ll handle it on this end,” he replied without hesitation.
“Could you also see if you can find any information on Anton Harmon?”
“The boyfriend?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well. Why do you think you were interfered with?”
“Someone wants me to stop poking around, but I don’t know if it has to do with Heather or the mine protest. I was leaving the Reclaim camp when I picked up the tail. On the other hand, I’d bet there were a lot of angry parents visiting that camp today and it’s hard to imagine all of them getting the same treatment. So it’s possible that whoever set this up drew a bead on me yesterday—at the hospital or when I was drinking with the miners.”
“I was under the impression that you don’t drink,” Alpha observed. The barest hint of amusement colored his tone.
“Not much, sir. I wanted to see if I could get an idea of why the Reclaim activists were attacked. It hasn’t done the mine any good at all. My initial thought was that some of the miners took their own initiative, but I’m not so sure.”
“And now you wonder why someone would try to discourage your efforts?”
“Right. The Sheriff asked me for help with his investigation, by the way,” I added.
“He did?” Alpha sounded surprised, and he had a great deal of experience dealing with local authorities.
“He’s a little out of his depth.”
“Given what you’ve seen so far, it might be a good idea to assist the Sheriff, to ensure his cooperation if nothing else. We’ll arrange an appointment for you to meet with Mr. Paul, the director of the mine, tomorrow.” I imagined Alpha with his reading glasses again and found myself torn. Part of me wanted to discover why someone would beat up a bunch of naïve kids, but another part of me just needed to find the girl and get the hell out of West Virginia.
“Right. I asked for that, didn’t I? Let’s see if we can get a bead on Anton Harmon first, though, sir. If we can’t locate Heather through him, I’ll visit the mine.”
9
“Shouldn’t you be a vegetarian?” I asked Roxanne as she bit into a hot dog with unconcealed glee.
“Ha!” She slammed her hand down on a cornucopia of fruit illustrated on the vinyl tablecloth. We sat in a booth at the M&R restaurant on the outskirts of Hamlin. “The environment may be worth saving, Mr. Herne, but this cow was a fair sacrifice.” She chuckled again at her own joke, repeating it under her breath before turning serious. “We do try to eat organic and locally grown foods at Reclaim, but it’s difficult. The staple of the West Virginia diet is junk food. Diabetes in this part of the state is rampant. This is a guilty pleasure, but it’s justified. The West Virginia hotdog is as valuable a contribution to our national gastronomy as Po Boys or Baltimore Crabs with Old Bay.”
I e-mailed Roxanne after stopping back at Sheriff Casto’s office to ask him for information on Anton Harmon. I was still trying to solidify a picture of Heather in my mind. On the drive to West Virginia, I’d imagined a sheltered suburban girl looking to rebel and find meaning in a noble struggle. But the real woman I was learning about was more practical and sturdier than my caricature. She took to the routine of both the camp and the commune, and had no problem with hard work, though there was also a flaw, a weakness. I believed Christina at CC Farms when she talked about the character of Anton Harmon. The fact that Heather’s two friends and Roxanne had left Harmon out of the conversation when we’d discussed Heather had to be significant.
Roxanne may not have known Harmon well, but in so small a camp she surely knew something useful. And as it was looking more likely that I was going to need to visit the mine, I thought I would ask her about that, too.
“You’ve been demonstrating in front of this mine for months now,” I said. “Have you ever met the guy who runs it?”
Roxanne smiled. “Jason Paul is an interesting fellow. He has red hair and freckles, and he’ll look like he’s eighteen until his hair is grey. He’s not from around here, you know,” she continued. “He grew up in Ohio and went to the Colorado School of Mines. Then he worked on a big mine site in Wyoming—North Antelope I think—and skip-hopped his way up the corporate ladder out west. When Transnational Coal bought Hobart, they brought him in to run things. He was a dark horse pick. Hobart is the largest mountaintop removal site in West Virginia and it’s the first complete operation he’s ever managed.”
“You know an awful lot about him,” I remarked, surprised.
“Determine the enemy’s plans and you will know which strategy will be successful and which will not,” Roxanne intoned.
“Many intelligence reports are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain,” I countered.
Roxanne laughed. “Mine was from Sun Tzu—what about yours?”
“Carl von Clausewitz.” I smiled.
“The problem with environmentalists,” Roxanne observed, “is that we don’t think like generals.”
“I’m going to guess you haven’t met very many generals.”
“Ha. True, true. My point is that most of us spend a lot of time thinking about the things these conglomerates are doing and how we can thwart them. We’re not very good at anticipating how they’ll respond to our actions. I made that mistake with Jason Paul.”
“How so?”
“Well he was very gallant at first. The day after we set up in front of the mine entrance, I got a note with an invitation to have lunch with him in the company dining room. He was exceptionally polite, almost courtly,” she said.
“That’s interesting. Why did he ask you to lunch?”
“It was a show of power. He wanted me to see his expensive suit, his Caribbean tan and the china he eats off every day. When a barracuda flashes its teeth, you don’t mistake that for a smile. Paul flattered me. Then he asked a lot of questions and acted very interested and compassionate. He fed me a bunch of platitudes, half-truths and outright lies about mining. Told me that we were an important part of the democratic process and that he’d defend our right to express our opinion.”
“And then?”
“As he was escorting me out, he asked me very carefully not to break the law. He said that he had a fiduciary duty to the company’s shareholders and as long as we didn’t stage any illegal protests, he’d make sure we were treated well.”
“Was there an implied threat?”
“I didn’t think so right then. He said it regretfully, as if it was something he had to put out there because of his position. As if he’d never act on it.” Roxanne stopped and turned her gaze to a mural on the wall by our booth. It showed a kitchen counter jammed with cooking tools.
“But there was some trouble this summer, wasn’t there?” I prompted.
Roxanne nodded. “We arrived here not long before Paul, so we’d barely gotten established before he started running things. I have pretty good media contacts, so I figured I could get some press down here. I knew once they got a look at the mine, we’d get coverage. But nobody came. A friend told me some high-level pressure was being applied. So we changed tactics and planned a passive resistance event for July. We blocked the path for those enormous dump trucks they use to haul away the backfill from the mountaintops. When they stopped, we took over two of them. We held work up for about a half day at the site until they arrested us and hauled us off.”