One Mile Under (34 page)

“Hold your fire!” Watkins shouted, coming out from the house, waving his arms.

Hauck lowered his gun. The names were familiar somehow. Then it hit him. The class action against the town he had read at Jen Keeler’s.

They were all part of it, too.

“Word was you were a little undermanned here and might need a little help.” Ben came up to Watkins and extended his hand. “We thought we’d lend a hand.”

They also brought ammunition and other weapons. Hauck figured by now RMM and Alpha knew about his visit to the DA. Kidnapping charges, along with attempted murder, wouldn’t exactly be the kind of publicity they’d be seeking now, enough to derail any merger. Tomorrow, they’d find out about the new class action suit. And once Global Energy learned of it, the sparks would fly. The guys at RMM had dug themselves a hole and they couldn’t let that just sit. Hauck thought he’d give anything to see Moss’s reaction to it.

The others stayed in the house and opened a few beers to settle their nerves. He sat up in the window, watching the road and the fields.

Could be anytime, Hauck decided. Maybe tonight. He sat back and settled his eyes over the dark fields.

But they’d come.

More likely tomorrow.

Wendell Moss leaned against the railing at the Trixie One well site. The reassuring
ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chung
of the pump bobbing at three-second intervals was as natural a sound to him as a hymn in church. The sound meant that product—either oil or natural gas—was being pumped back up the well. But, sadly, Trixie was on her last breaths. In the past months, her production had sunk beneath the economic costs of keeping her running. That was why the crew was down to two men who were sucking the last barrels dry and preparing the concrete mixture that would be pumped down the wellhead in a day, forever sealing it off. Moss wiped his forehead in the afternoon sun.

Ka-chung.

He lit a smoke and reflected that he’d basically given his whole life to RMM. He’d worked for them the past twenty-two years, straight out of what was known as West Texas State University back then, as a young geological engineer. He’d shuttled his family around to dusty hellholes more times than he could recall. Living in excuses for towns that barely had a Dairy Queen; at various makeshift communities in the Bakken up in North Dakota and the Powder Ridge Basin in Wyoming. Over the years, he’d gotten his hands so black from soot and oil he doubted he could ever clean them again. There was more oil in his veins, he always joked, than blood cells. He had started out on the clock, then salaried, then earned a few bonuses, which allowed him to buy a house in Midland for the first time in his life. And now with this merger he finally had enough vested in options and stock to make what even a happy wildcatter would call a killing. It was
his
wells that were delivering the cash flow to make it all happen. His babies, in the Wattenberg field. And now he saw it all slipping away. Because of some stupid kid on a river, and a farmer that had no sense. And no one was going to take that away from him. He’d earned it, every godforsaken penny. He flicked away an ash and looked at his rough hands. He’d given too much.

He wasn’t naturally a man with an urge for violence. Not like these Alpha boys. They’d do anything to get the messy work done. That’s what he paid them for. He went to church Sundays; sat in the stands Friday night cheering on his girls in soccer or his boy Blaine in football. Twenty-two years, he never hit his wife once, or even raised his voice in anger at her.

Yet here he was.

He could have stopped this all a long time ago, he reckoned, but he’d turned his head away at just the time he should’ve looked straight, and had trust in the people who knew how to handle this sort of thing.

Maybe too much trust.

Water—
Moss knew they could have trucked it in from any of a hundred different sources. Not as profitably perhaps, or as quickly, and that was part of what made the numbers look so sweet. They’d invested millions in that recycling plant. Bought off the fucking town. And no bunch of farmers in overalls and cowboy hats was going to take that away from him now.

It was too late anyway.

He heard the sound of the car coming up first, tires grinding over loose dirt and gravel. The dark blue Audi, winding up the narrow road through the chain link fence, came into view. Moss took a last drag. The car came around to a stop, kicking up dust, its sides grimy. Randy McKay stepped out. In a plaid shirt and khakis, he looked like any old guy who might be filling up at the next pump or in the checkout line at Kroger.

“There used to be a joke,” McKay said as he came up to him, “one wildcatter saying to the other, ‘Let’s go somewhere quiet we can talk and not be disturbed. How about one of your well sites?’”

“Trixie’s given it up with the best of them. Now don’t go raggin’ on her. See this …?” Moss took out the new class-action suit that had been delivered to him today.

Lifting his shades, McKay unfolded it and looked it over. He scanned the first couple of pages and shook his head and sighed. “Thought we had this all put to bed.”

Moss took a drag and blew it out. “It’s not just the suit. The suit we could settle in a day, if we’d wanted. Hell, it was all just a matter of money anyway. Just didn’t seem right to have this kind of thing lingering in the face of a merger. But it’s no longer just the suit, is it now?”

“No.” McKay shook his head. “It’s not.”

“It’s about saving our damn hides. I heard from the grapevine this sonovabitch Hauck went to visit the state’s attorney today in Greeley. He told them about what happened at the Falls. Littlejohn says if the girl comes forward with this, his hands’ll be tied. Our fingerprints are all over this mess, Randy. It’s all there in black and white.”

McKay handed him back the suit. “I know.”

“This could sink the merger, if it comes out. Hell, this could sink the whole damn company. It’s time to end it. Both of them—him and the girl. And this time, make sure the job gets done right.”

The Alpha man nodded. “I know what you need me to do.”

“I hope you do.” Moss glared at him with sagging but unmistakable eyes. “Tonight. Before she goes to the DA. Before she goes on record with what she knows. They talk, and it doesn’t matter how much oil we pump out of the damn ground. We’re both gone.”

McKay nodded. He put down his aviators and headed toward his car. “I’ll be in touch.”

“By the way,” Moss called. “We’re closing Trixie up for good tomorrow. Lots of concrete being pumped down. Tons and tons of it. I suspect, no one’ll know if something was buried in there for a thousand years.”

“Thanks for letting me know.” McKay started the Audi up, and drove away without a wave.

Moss looked back at the well.
Ka-chung. Ka-chung.
Goddamn water, he spat on the dry soil. He flicked his butt to the ground and stamped it out with his shoe. Two-thirds of the planet’s covered in it, and this is the one godforsaken place we bid it up a hundred times what it’s worth.

Wade pushed the tray across to his son, Kyle, at the VA hospital in Denver. Three years earlier, Marine Specialist Kyle Dunn’s supply truck had driven over an IED in the Helmand Province in Afghanistan, blowing off his right leg and arm, rupturing his spleen, puncturing his kidney, and rattling his brain against the sides of his skull like ice in a blender. A diffuse axonal trauma in the brain forced him to have to relearn everything from taking a step, to feeding himself, reciting the alphabet again, or even taking a piss. Pretty much everything he knew how to do as a five-year-old.

He was doing well, the doctors claimed. He could now speak sentences and align numbered blocks in order and pick up a fork, a huge step from where he was a couple of years ago. But, truth was, he might require care for the rest of his life. Wade generally made the drive down on Sundays to visit. He and Kyle’s mother were long divorced and she sent him money whenever she could, off in Florida and working on a cruise ship somewhere.

“C’mon,” Wade said, “take some of this soup. You best eat something, son.”

Kyle shook his head and pushed Wade’s arm aside. “Not now. Not hungry, Dad.”

“Okay, okay. Maybe the nurse will have some better sway with you,” Wade said.

Once, Kyle had been a handsome, athletic boy, all-state in wrestling and head of the Why Not? Society, a volunteer group in Pitkin County, who won a full ride to CU in Boulder. But he dropped out after his freshman year to sign up with the Marines. His own little Pat Tillman.

But like with Tillman, who put his NFL career aside to sign up with his brother, it all came crashing down. Though Kyle managed to survive.

The prognosis was hopeful, but slow. Agonizingly so. And costly. The VA paid for most of it. But what if he was never able to walk or live alone again for the rest of his life? Or if he couldn’t hold a real job ever again, which seemed likely?

Then there would be all the supplemental things. Like an aide to live with him when he got home. Wade surely couldn’t. And a customized van to drive, so he could get around. And a home that was retrofitted for his needs. And people to continue to help him speak; and head doctors so he could tell them about the horrible images swirling around in his brain that caused him to just turn away in midsentence and stare into space for hours.

Who’d cover that?

Wade knew that, he’d lived his life in the wrong. He’d crossed the line. Not once. Many times. The Watkins boy was just one example. He was a lot like Kyle. Athletic. In the prime of his life. And then there were those people up there in that balloon—the terror they must have felt as it burned up around them and all came crashing down. He never really actually knew what was going to happen to them; he was only told to look the other way and handed a big, fat envelope of cash. When he looked at Kyle, sometimes it made it all seem okay. The things he’d done. Easier to swallow.

“Come on, what do you say we check out the Rockies …” Wade picked up the remote clicker. Kyle liked watching baseball. He could watch anything he didn’t once play, which caused him too much pain. Wade flicked on the TV and found the channel. “Look, De La Rosa’s pitching. He’s good. You like him, right?”

Kyle nodded, the inkling of a smile. “Good r-run,” he said, then stared vacantly.

“
Run?
” Wade questioned.

Kyle thought about it a little longer, screwing up his brow, then turned to Wade. “E-R-A.”

“That’s good, Kyle. Good. Yes, he’s got a mighty fine earned run average. He does.”

Wade’s cell phone chimed. He pulled it out and took a look at who it was. There was no one he really cared to hear from these days.

His stomach dropped. He’d prayed he’d never hear from this person again. But inwardly he always knew it never was over, once you stepped over that line. He let it ring several times, and thought about just letting it go to his voice mail and pretending he had gone away somewhere. For good. Like maybe Africa.

“I’ll be back in a second, son,” he said to Kyle, and stepped out into the hall. He put his back against the wall and answered. “Chief Dunn here.”

“Bet I’m the last person in the world you were hoping to hear from,” the caller said, with a smirk in his voice that cut through Wade like a knife through butter.

“Yes, you could say that’s true. What do you want?”

“We need you to do something. And you’re still on the payroll, Chief.”

“You already made me do something,” Wade said. “And I did it. You’ve got no cause to keep calling me.”

“You think you got all that money just to look the other way like some mall cop. Or put a few photos under lock and key in your desk drawer? You know more than anyone how your son has that private room and all that fancy attention up there. And you better not forget why.”

“I can’t talk. Not here,” Wade spat back under his breath, smiling briefly and waving familiarly to one of the doctors as he passed by.

He wished he had the balls to just hang up and tell them to go fuck themselves. That the debt was paid. But he knew very well that the debt was only beginning, and that, down the line, he would need all they promised him. And anyway, these weren’t exactly the kind of people you said those kinds of words to and hung the phone up on.

“Go ahead, hang up if you want … It can all go away in an instant. All the specialists, that fancy van you got lined up for you. Poof! Gone. Is that what you want to happen, Chief?”

Wade squeezed his fist into a ball, but didn’t say a word.

“Didn’t think so. So if I were you I’d put away the big, brash attitude that doesn’t get you anywhere, and just listen. Comprende …?”

“What is it you need? I destroyed those photos like you asked.”

“That was only Part One, Chief. Part Two is that I hear your stepdaughter’s come back home …”

“Is she? I didn’t know.” Just the sound of Dani’s name sent a spasm through his bowels. He flashed back to what Hauck had warned him. And he didn’t seem like a man to be trifled with either. “I haven’t spoken with her. She doesn’t check in with me.”

“She knows things, Wade. Things that could be very problematic for us. Problematic for us all. Because if we go down, you go as well. Just as hard. You know that, right? In fact, they might be more interested in you than any of us. Greedy small-town cop who had to sell himself and his office out.”

Wade sucked in a breath and chuffed back, “I know that.”

“So she needs to be dealt with, Wade. And you’re our man in Havana, as they say …”

“Dealt with?” The grinding in his stomach worsened. “Dealt with how?”

“C’mon, Wade, you’re a smart guy … How’d you get to be chief? Just that it has to be done. And soon. Tonight. Tomorrow. You understand. I don’t care how. Just that’s it’s done. This is what it is. Don’t matter whether you like it or not. You have to find a way.”

Wade felt as if some huge gristmill was grinding his insides into powder. This is what he always knew would happen, the moment he saw that money hit his account. The moment Dani first came in to see him, telling him how he had to get involved …