Con Law (14 page)

‘Because of the water?’

‘Because of the jobs. Fracking brought jobs to Marfa, Professor, good jobs for good ol’ boys. When you got a family to feed, you don’t worry about a little arsenic in your drinking water.’

Nadine’s eyes got wide; the sheriff chuckled.

‘Look, Professor, I don’t want to drink frack fluids either, but I’ve never heard anyone complaining about contamination. And trust me, folks would call us—hell, we’re the only thing resembling authority in Presidio County. Damn near four thousand square miles we cover.’

‘Nathan said he had proof.’

‘Find it.’

He replaced the letter inside the envelope and flipped it across the desk to Book.

‘In the meantime, I wouldn’t go waving that letter around town, Professor. You’re threatening a lot of people’s jobs. Folks around here don’t abide outsiders stirring up trouble.’

‘Not the first time I’ve heard that.’

‘I don’t want it to be the last time.’

The two men regarded each other for a long moment.

‘May I see the autopsy report?’ Book asked.

The sheriff grunted again, which apparently was a basic form of communication for him.

‘Well, you see, Professor, there wasn’t enough left to autopsy.’

‘Fire got real hot, I expect.’

Book, Nadine, and the sheriff stood in the impound lot on the northern edge of town. The prairie stretched in front of them all the way to the Davis Mountains. Nathan
Jones’s pickup truck—or what was left of it—sat before them on the dirt ground. The vehicle had been cut nearly in half and burned down to the steel frame. With Nathan Jones strapped in his seat. Book could hear his screams.

‘Figure he fell asleep.’

‘The rumble strip didn’t wake him?’

Rumble strips ran along the shoulders of most Texas highways, grooves cut into the asphalt that cause a vehicle to vibrate if the driver veers out of his lane. Intended as a safety feature to alert inattentive drivers, they were dangerous to motorcyclists. Book always took care to avoid rumble strips while on the Harley.

‘Apparently not. He must’ve been running ninety, ninety-five. Got sleepy, lost control, ran off the road, slammed into a pump jack on the passenger’s side. Impact split the vehicle, ruptured the gas tank, knocked the pump jack loose. Between the oil and the gas, must’ve been one hell of a fire. Damn lucky the wind was down, or it might’ve burned half the county to dirt.’

The sheriff grunted.

‘Bad way to go,’ he said. ‘Course, there ain’t no good way. I got photos from that night, if you want to see them.’

‘No, thanks.’

Book wanted to remember Nathan Jones as the law student he knew, not as a charred corpse.

‘Where’d this happen?’

‘East of town, north side of Highway Sixty-seven, just past the Marfa Mystery Lights Viewing Center.’

Every evening the hopeful gather at a man-made rock structure nine miles east of Marfa on the south side of Highway 67. When night falls, they stand at the low rock wall and face south. They stare out beyond the runways of the old Marfa Army Air Field and into the dark desert toward the Chinati Mountains, focused on an area known as Mitchell
Flat situated between the Marfa and Paisano passes.

They are hoping to see the lights.

Since 1883 when a young cowboy reported seeing mysterious lights between the passes, the ‘Marfa Mystery Lights’ have drawn tourists from around the country to that very spot. A few see the lights—red, green, orange, or yellow balls—hovering above the land, darting back and forth, even giving chase—but most do not. But that does not dissuade more tourists from coming. For ninety years, the mystery lights defined Marfa—until Donald Judd moved to town.

The Viewing Center sits on the south side of Highway 67. Nathan Jones died on the north side. Book slowed the Harley and made a U-turn. They rode slowly along the shoulder until they came to a spot where a wide swath of the tall prairie grass had been scorched bare, as if a wildfire had swept across the land. He stopped and cut the engine.

‘He ran off the road here.’

They got off the Harley and followed the tire tracks across the burnt earth. Small pieces of debris from the vehicle littered the ground. The wind blew strong from Mexico.

‘Veered off at an angle, then the truck slid sideways, hit the pump jack.’

They stood at the pump jack. It had not yet been repaired. Book could play out the scene in his head like a movie, Nathan Jones driving this dark road late at night, getting drowsy, falling asleep then jerking awake when the truck left the smooth asphalt and hit the rough ground, panicking, yanking hard on the wheel, the truck sliding sideways, slamming into the pump jack, exploding into flames … screaming.

‘Nathan Jones died right here.’

The young man who had saved Book’s life had lost his own life at the very spot where Book now stood. They remained quiet for a time. Then Book turned back to the
highway. Nathan had come off the road a long way.

‘He must’ve been going really fast.’

‘Like James Dean,’ Nadine said.

They rode a hundred miles in silence.
Nadine didn’t ask to go home or complain that she was hungry. They rode east through Alpine then turned north and descended from the high desert plateau and onto the plains. The mountains disappeared behind them and were soon replaced by pump jacks as they rode above the great Permian Basin oil field where vast Texas fortunes had been made during the boom and lost during the bust. The land lay flat and bare and depressing, inhabited only by cell phone towers and power lines and thousands of black-and-yellow pump jacks, their horse heads bobbing up and down rhythmically, as relentless as the wind but more profitable, ten strokes pumping one barrel of black gold—and at $100 a barrel, it was black gold—up from the depths of the earth. The foul smell of the oil industry clung to the landscape like wet toilet paper. Nadine yelled over the engine noise and the wind.

‘What’s that smell?’

‘Money.’

They came upon Odessa from the south; the view was no better from the north, east, or west. The town was nothing more than a glorified oil camp inhabited by one hundred thousand people. Oil fed them, clothed them, transported
them, and sheltered them. Oil was their past, their present, and their future. Oil was their hope and their fear. Oil was their life.

‘Yuk.’

‘Don’t say yuk, Ms. Honeywell. That oil subsidizes your education. A lot of those pump jacks belong to UT. The school has made about five billion dollars so far from this field.’

‘Then why do they keep raising my tuition?’

Refineries, low-rent motels, and strip joints occupied both sides of the highway; one sign touted ‘Joe’s Steakhouse and Fabric Free Entertainment.’ Only a few pickup trucks sat in Joe’s parking lot. Either Joe’s steaks were lousy or his sign too subtle for Odessa; the strip joint next door offered ‘Totally Naked Gals,’ and its parking lot was packed. Drilling rigs and casing pipes were stacked high on frontage lots, awaiting the next well hole to be punched into the earth. Eighteen-wheelers and pickup trucks crowded the lanes adjacent to the Harley; tattooed arms hung out the windows and hard-looking men gazed down at them. Book had visited inmates at the state penitentiary on several occasions; these men’s eyes told the same story: they were doing hard time.

‘Why’s the land so bare?’ Nadine asked after they had cleared the city limits.

Much of the land looked like a moonscape. No trees, no brush, no grass. Just gray dirt.

‘Salt water, from the oil wells. Back in the old days, they pumped the salt water into unlined evaporation pits. The salt water seeped into the ground, killed the vegetation. That was thirty or forty years ago. Nothing’s ever grown back, probably never will.’

‘Place makes me want to throw up,’ Nadine said. ‘Why do people live here?’

‘Jobs. When you don’t have a job, you’ll live anywhere for a job. Do anything for a job. You hear politicians on TV talking about the working class? This is it, Ms. Honeywell. High school educated workers. Most of their jobs were
outsourced overseas for cheap labor, but the oil is here so these jobs are still here.’

‘I don’t want to live here.’

‘You won’t have to. You’re educated. But never forget what these people’s lives are like. Never forget that these people need jobs, too.’

Book accelerated the Harley east on Interstate 20 toward Midland as if trying to keep pace with the train running on the tracks that paralleled the interstate. A vulture circled overhead.

‘Most people make an appointment.’

‘We were in the neighborhood.’

‘You were in Marfa. I get the paper.’

From a distance, the buildings of downtown Midland seemed to pop up out of the prairie like yucca plants. Midland was known for oil and gas and George W. Bush. He had grown up here. When he left the White House for the final time, his first stop back in Texas was Midland; twenty thousand locals turned out to welcome him home. Then George W. retired to Dallas.

Thomas A. Dunn had also grown up in Midland. He left for college and law school at UT then returned home for good. He was now sixty-three years old and the senior partner at The Dunn Law Firm, which employed one hundred thirty lawyers and maintained offices in Midland, Lubbock, Amarillo, and Marfa. From a corner office on the twentieth floor, Tom Dunn oversaw a legal empire that spanned West Texas. He was an oil and gas lawyer, and West Texas was oil and gas country. The Permian Basin covered seventeen counties and seventy-five thousand square miles; an estimated thirty billion barrels remained to be extracted. It was a very good time to be in the oil and gas business. Or a lawyer to the oil and gas business. And Tom Dunn was all business, the kind of lawyer who probably had sex by the billable hour. Book didn’t know Mrs. Dunn, but he felt a twinge of sympathy for her nonetheless.

‘Saw you at Nathan’s funeral,’ he said.

‘He worked for me. Nathan was a good young
lawyer, billed his quota every month without complaint.’

‘What’s the quota for young lawyers these days, Mr. Dunn, so I can tell my students?’

‘Three thousand hours a year.’

Nadine gasped. ‘OMG.’

Dunn chuckled. ‘A common reaction among our new associates.’

‘That’s what, two hundred fifty billable hours a month?’ Book said. ‘Doesn’t seem realistic.’

‘Reality is, Professor, I start billing when I wake up in the morning and stop when I fall asleep that night. I’m always thinking about my clients. And that’s what I’m paid to do: think.’

‘It’s easier once you can rationalize it, isn’t it?’

‘Much.’

Book had met many senior partners at many large law firms; when they visited the school, the famous Professor Bookman was always part of the dog-and-pony show, a circus act to attract endowments. Senior partners were more Wall Street than Main Street, more businessmen—every senior partner he had met had been male—than lawyers. Perhaps the law was just a business these days, and lawyers were in the business of buying and selling the law. Some firms boasted thousands of lawyers and billions in revenues. Billable hours were inventory, and young lawyers fungible commodities. Book had never regretted his decision to forgo the private practice of law. He hadn’t gone to law school to be a businessman. He had gone to be a hero like his dad, but wielding the law instead of a gun.

‘So you rode four hundred miles on that Harley to investigate Nathan’s death?’

‘With me on the back,’ Nadine said.

‘That’s not why I came.’

‘Newspaper said that’s why you came.’

‘Nathan wrote a letter to me.’

Book handed Nathan’s letter to Dunn. He sat down
behind his desk, put on reading glasses, removed the letter from the envelope, and read. Book pulled out the funeral photo and circled Dunn’s face, as he had circled the faces of all the other locals they had met. He then surveyed Dunn’s office. The same interior decorator must design every law office in America, or at least every one he had been in. The furniture, the rugs on the floor and the art on the wall, even the photos scattered about seemed to be from a stock lawyer template. Perhaps lawyers were comforted by conformity, soothed by sameness, as they fought boredom and billed hours. Book could not imagine himself in Tom Dunn’s chair. Dunn removed his glasses and exhaled heavily, as if he had just learned that his wife was cheating on him; or worse, that she had embezzled funds from their joint bank account.

‘Nathan wrote this?’

‘He did. I’ve learned that Billy Bob Barnett was the client he referenced.’

‘Professor, I don’t know what Nathan thought he found, but it wasn’t evidence of groundwater contamination. Frack well holes are encased in redundant layers of steel and cement. Billy Bob doesn’t cut corners with his drilling.’ He chuckled. ‘Hell, Billy Bob’s a walking Aggie joke—he’s too dumb to be a crook.’

‘But he’s rich enough to hire your firm. How much does he pay you each year?’

‘That’s confidential, Professor.’

But he couldn’t restrain a thin smile.

‘Eighteen million last fiscal year.’

‘That buys a lot of loyalty from a lawyer.’

‘Part of the job description.’

‘Nathan said in his letter that he brought your client’s contamination to your attention.’

‘He didn’t.’

‘Wonder why he said he did?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘May I look in his office?’

‘You know better than that, Professor. Client
confidentiality.’

Tom Dunn stood and walked to the window. He was a tall, gray-haired man who seemed as hard as the land. He gestured at West Texas beyond the plate glass.

‘See all those pump jacks pumping oil out of the ground twenty-four/seven? You know what that means around here, Professor? Jobs. Midland–Odessa, we’re booming again. One hundred and fifty thousand producing wells in the Permian Basin. Thirty-six billion a year in revenues. That pays a lot of wages to a lot of workers. But not that long ago those pump jacks were still, the wells shut in, workers sitting idle, oil field equipment rusting on the side of the interstate. Old wells and low prices, couldn’t produce enough oil to make economic sense. Billy Bob changed all that.’