Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) (26 page)

“I see.”

Not yet you don’t. I said, “How about if he craps up the water supply for national park headquarters? How’s that for a symbol?”

“Of what?”

“The virgin.”

“Yes, I see.” Soliano swept a hand. “An oasis.”

No you don’t see. My tongue seemed to harden, down to its roots. “Do you know how hard it is to find
water
out there?”

“I have not had to look.”

I looked at Walter, whose jaw was working like he was sucking on a pebble.

“I see,” Soliano said, this time like he did.

“You see what?”

“The priceless.”

“Yes.”

“No,” Walter said, finding his voice, “he can’t hit the springs.”

I knew. We had a map that said he didn’t, that said the geology took his offroader only as far as point D, well upcanyon from the springs. But Pria changed my mind. Pria in her bath. The draining water had carved a channel through the purple shampoo slick that coated the tub bottom. That bathtub vision reminded me of the giant fan where Walter and I took shelter, and how floodwaters had carved a channel through the desert-varnished fan. Pria’s bath had left me a demonstration—the power of a channeled flood. I said, “Maybe he could hit the springs if he had a damn delivery system.”

Soliano said, “The flood again?”

“I hope you’re wrong,” Scotty said. His hand was at his neck, at the medallion. “Because if you’re right, we’re S-O-L.”

Soliano frowned.

“Shit-out-of-luck,” Walter translated.

“You gotta remember,” Scotty said, “they’re dewatered resin beads.”

I went cold. He’d never mentioned that.

Soliano’s frown deepened. “What are dewatered beads?”

“Dried out, for disposal. Locks in the rads.”

“Locks in? But I thought the beads were dangerous.”

“They are—nasty hot. But at least when they’re dry, they keep the nuclides from escaping.” Scotty’s face tightened. “Put the beads in water, they rehydrate.”

“And they do what?” Soliano asked. “When they rehydrate?”

“They swell. Maybe crack. Degrade.”

Walter said, alarmed, “Aren’t the radionuclide ions chemically bound to the beads?”

“Bond’s weak.”

“This means
what
?” Soliano asked.

“Means keep the beads away from materials that can break the bond.”

I got a sudden taste of the water in the hole beneath the mesquite. I thought, Badwater. It’s why they call that water bad—it’s saltier than the sea. But then all Death Valley water is high in sodium. Even an oasis like the springs has some salt. And that’s how he turns an oasis into bad water. I said, “Sodium breaks the bond?”

Scotty nodded. “Get the beads in this groundwater and they...”

“They do what?” Soliano asked.

“They release ‘em.” Scotty rubbed his rad-weathered face. “Every damn nuclide.”

And then, I thought, the nuclides raft away in the water, and the plants suck them up and the animals eat the plants and drink the water, and then the animals creep and crawl and wing their way out of Death Valley, carrying the radionuclides into the wider world.

I
t’s a
diversion
Hector.

Hector you’re not taking me seriously. Hector I’m not just an airhead female.

And then she’d made some sound that Jardine could not identify—since it was too risky to get close enough to watch he’d had to listen in remotely. And so he’d had to use his imagination. When the female geologist said
Hector
in that pissy tone of hers, and there had been that sound, Jardine imagined the female was stamping her foot.

He liked that. Hector’s ignoring her and she’s just so pissy about it. What she needs is a good spanking.

He saw he was still twisted up about the female. He thought he’d taken care of that. He wished he could take care of it the right way. Her and him in a meadow. Out in the open. He didn’t mean out in the open where people could watch, he meant open like no shame. She’d have grass in her hair because they’d been rolling around.

Instead of the meadow he’d had to embarrass himself in the privacy of the mine.

So
excuse
him for making fun of her now.

He needed to remember who had truly loved him. Jersey. And look what he’d been forced into. A dude could love his dog and with a heavy heavy heart put his dog in a safer place. A dude could do the hard thing when he had to.

He took the pistol out of his pack.

The timetable was speeding up.
Watering Hole
was a great victory. Put the fear right inside them. Pinned them down at the Inn. Jardine didn’t know how much time this diversion would buy him. Going on what he’d overheard, plenty. Hector, you’re an idiot. Your people are idiots. I outfoxed you all. My pickup sat in the parking lot half the night and half the morning before you found it. Took you half an hour to find the tank. Take you hours to check out all the vulnerable points in the water system. Hector, you’re an...

Jardine stopped himself. “Stop it Roy.” Don’t count on hope. Count on a good plan. And practice.

He put the pistol in the holster. The holster sat low on his skinny hips. That’s the way gunslingers wore it. Looked ace. Yeah—the ponytail and the shirt and the jeans and the boots, and now the holster with the pistol butt sticking out. If only somebody could see him. Dudes, females. Any females. They wouldn’t even notice his face.

He held his hand loose, near the gun butt. One, two, three...

Hector was saying something in his earbuds about the pipeline. Hector was asking somebody where all the access points were. Hector obviously never held a crap job like plumber’s assistant.

Jardine listened to the ignorance. He wondered if anybody was going to find the little radio transmitter he’d planted last night in the scrub brush near the water tank. Didn’t matter. He’d heard plenty. He smiled.

One, two, three... Slap the butt, close his hand, draw—and now the gun was in his hand and he was aiming it at the tin can. It was already full of holes. Not much of a stand-in for a live target but it made the point. Firearm’s a serious weapon. He wished he had one of those FBI shooters but what he had was plenty. He liked the pistol because of the holster—he could admit that. He liked firearms in general better than the knife but the knife was in his pack for a reason. Redundancy, the lesson he’d learned in job eighteen. Never count on one layer of safety.

A lesson he’d give that Bastard Ballinger.

The female was talking again and Jardine got sucked in again. She sounded worried. Jardine was glad that cad Miller wasn’t there to tell her to get naked in the shower or something. Miller deserved a lesson in manners. A lesson he was going to get.

Lessons. Jardine needed one right now about the female. He needed to remember that she was coming after him. He needed to remember why. She was doing her job. She was doing it so good she was dangerous. So was the old fellow. That’s what he needed to remember.

Because he had come to the Grand Finale. Nothing must interfere.

Jardine ripped out his earbuds and holstered his pistol. He had things to do. He had to go check on the progress of the trigger event, in preparation.

Stage One of the mission, at the borax mine, had been
The Trial
and Ballinger was found guilty.

Stage Two was going to be the mission climax. The Grand Finale. It would be a full and deserved punishment. The name for Stage Two said it all:
Death Penalty
.

W
e sat with the engine running at the mouth of the parking lot. Walter snapped off the satellite phone. “She’s taken her aunt’s truck.”

Relief hit me. “Where’d she go?”

“Aunt Ruth won’t say.” He grunted. “Perhaps because a fourteen-year-old is behind her wheel.”

“You taught me to drive when I was thirteen.”

“That was in the Von’s parking lot.” He looked out the window. “That was then.”

And this is now. Now I’m the designated driver. He cleared his throat and, for a micromoment, there was the chance that he’d ask me to swing the wheel to the right—downfan to the Timbisha village, down to interrogate Ruth Weeks and give chase to Miss Alien Underage Driver—but he simply said “shall we?” I swung the wheel to the left onto highway 190, upfan to go to work.

The highway took us past the Inn and up into the trough cut by the Furnace Creek Wash, and as the Black Mountains closed in on our right and the Funerals reared up on our left, I shifted my worry to what lay ahead.

“W
hich spring,” Walter asked, “would your flood target?”

My flood? I let that pass. My theory, after all.

But I’d fact-checked my theory on the map and plotted the line of springs that extends for nearly a mile. I glanced, now, at the riparian outposts along that fault line. “Maybe he’s not targeting just one. All he has to do is hit the alluvium. So some of the beads go directly into the springs and some go into the gravel—both here and upgradient—for a later round.” I wiped the sweat off my neck. “The gift that keeps on giving.”

“If we knew which spring, we could work our way upcanyon from there.”

“Oh.”

We reached the turnoff and I nosed the Cherokee off highway 190 onto the ragged road up the fan. As we entered the canyon mouth, I peered up the wall at the reddish mud and cobblestones caught in the declivity some twenty feet above. Some flood that had been.

Walter was looking too. He phoned the Park Service doppler radar guy for an update and learned that the precipitation pattern had not changed since the last call, in the parking lot.

The gunmetal sky had not changed, either.

I slowed, and the FBI behind us slowed, and we turned into the branching side canyon where we’d sampled yesterday and turned up the telling chalcedony. Point D. From here, we’ll be entering an unknown neighborhood. From here, we’ll be following the soil Walter extracted from Chickie’s boots.

I said, “Want to call Hector and let him know we’re here?”

“Let’s wait,” Walter said, “until we have something to say.”

Instead of: you’re wasting your time, Hector. Thing is, we couldn’t prove that. If we hadn’t lost a day to sabotage and wandering in the desert, we might have found our way here earlier and maybe Jardine wouldn’t have had the chance to pull that stunt at the Inn. But he did. And Soliano’s now busy with the target at hand. So don’t call unless we can offer him another.

I had a mining map and red marker in my pack. Soliano had its twin. Within a two-mile radius of Point D, there were eleven mapped mines and uncountable prospects and glory holes. We call Soliano when we cross a mine off the list. We call Soliano when the evidence or the Geiger counter says we’re there.

And then we get out of the way.

Of course there’s always the hope Soliano will call us first with good news—that he has cracked Chickie, or the ninjas have found Jardine hiding in the bushes at the Inn and Soliano has sweated the location of the mine out of him.

Otherwise, we’re on our own.

W
e stopped midway up the dead-end canyon, arbitrarily choosing the spot. Point D soil extended the length of this little draw. Evidence said Roy Jardine’s offroader rig had parked in here, and so did we. End of the line—by vehicle anyway.

I stowed the sat phone and Geiger counter in my pack and shouldered it.

Walter stowed the field kit in his.

Dearing slung the strap of the FBI sat phone over one shoulder and wrestled his submachine gun over the other, wincing as the strap caught his sunburned neck.

I said, “Try some aloe vera on that sunburn.”

Oliver nudged Dearing. “Sucks to be white, hey bro?” He slipped on his own subgun like it was a ceremonial sash.

We began the steep climb up the northern side of the canyon to the ridge above, to get the lay of the land.

The land, far as I could see, was riven by a tangle of steep canyons and skinny ridges. In the afternoon sunlight—pencil-thin shafts breaking through the smothering cloud layer—it was a shadowland.

O
liver and Dearing watched our backs while we put our noses to the soil.

Weathered quartzite and schist. Consistent with some elements of the soil in Chickie’s boots—and in the glop from the trailer’s tires. Inconsistent with other elements. I wished the boot soil had shown distinctive layers, like the offroader fender soil. Then we could have said: she walked hither thither and yon in these boots, picking up soils as she went, and we are most interested in the outer layers. But boots are like tires, not fenders, and the soil they pick up gets mixed with the soil already lodged there. We couldn’t say if the minerals we were tracking had been acquired in the last couple days on her way to and from the mine where she got the beads, or a month ago tramping through quartzite and schist on her way to and from the local tavern. We couldn’t even say that the quartzite was acquired the same place as the schist.

We were analyzing on the fly, armed with hand lenses and Walter’s encyclopedic eye for minerals.

The one unique mineral in the boot soil—a lucky find—was a silvery flake that Walter had ID’d as sylvanite, a telluride sometimes found in conjunction with the heavy metal ores. We were hunting a mine with a streak of telluride in its veins but first we had to find our way there via quartzite and schist.

As I pocketed my hand lens I was struck on the cheek by a pellet of rain. Within moments the ridge soil was cratered.

I phoned the radar guy.

T
he rain ceased. I looked up at the sky—where blue met the black leading edge of the next wave of thunderstorms—and I wished it would make up its mind.

Oliver and Dearing covered the mouth of a tunnel while Walter and I sifted through the soils around the one-stamp ore mill.

We crossed off another mine and reported in to Soliano.

I
stopped. “What’s that down there?”

Walter glanced down at the cars.

We were threading our way up the narrow spine of the ridge. It ran easterly and dropped precipitously on each side down to narrow canyons. To the left was Disappointment Canyon, as we’d named it after striking out at the one-stamp mill, and to the right was the canyon we’d named Cherokee where our vehicles steamed dry in a passing blaze of sun.