The Grid (13 page)

- CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT -

Sarah composes an e-mail to her daughter with her phone, even though by the time Dylan is old enough to understand the message, e-mails will probably be as relevant as cassette players.

Dylan is in surgery, and Sarah wants to explain why things are the way they are, to help the child understand the reasons her mother can’t always be there.

Also, Sarah wants to express her feelings in a healthy way, like that therapist in high school talked about after the incident with the baseball bat and the cheerleader who was putting the moves on Sarah’s boyfriend.

Right now, everything is jumbled up inside Sarah’s brain, and maybe by putting it down in writing the confusion will be lessened.

Maybe.

She takes a long swig of her Bloody Mary and begins:

Dearest precious Dylan:

You have no idea how hard it is for me to see you lying in a hospital bed like that.

If I could take the pain away from you I would. I wonder if your broken leg is somehow a punishment for what I’ve done or actions that other members of our family have committed. Whatever the case, you must understand that you are not to blame. You are pure & I hope you always will be.

You don’t know yet about our family, about what we came from. There are dark things in our blood. I don’t know how else to say it. Every family has their secrets, but ours seems to have been burdened more than most.

You asked if you would see Papa in heaven if you died, which amazes me, since he passed away five years before you were even born. I must have talked a lot of about him for you to want to see him that bad.

He was quite a man, your great-grandfather. He grew up in the Depression, which you’ll learn about in school. Times were hard then & people had to do whatever they could to make a living. His own mother & father, my great-grandparents, died when he was just a boy. He lived on the streets of Texarkana for much of his childhood, a period of time he never liked to talk about, so I can only imagine the hardship and suffering he endured.

But out of hardship comes strength, says the Bible (or maybe Shakespeare???), & he learned to survive & to make something of himself. He worked hard every day of his life & made a lot of money, providing a good life for his family. (When you’re older, you’ll hear people say Papa’s fortune was built on blood money, because of the way he started out. I suppose that’s true. A lot of the blood was his own, though.)

Sarah pauses for another sip of her drink. She’s sitting by the beer taps in the bar across from the hospital, the place where Elias started the fight with the man in the Jiffy Lube shirt the night before.

Fortunately, it’s just before lunchtime, so a different bartender is working and very few people are here.

A shaft of light cuts through the gloom as the door opens and a man enters. He’s in his early thirties, but the years have been hard, as evidenced by the puffy face and dark circles under his eyes, both clearly visible even in the dim lighting. Lots of late nights and bad decisions have gone into that face.

Sarah watches the man survey the room, deciding where to sit.

He’s wearing a pair of khakis and a golf shirt with a corporate logo on the breast. Despite the fact that no one else is at the bar, he slides onto the stool next to hers.

Sarah knows his type. He’s a salesman, no doubt, fast-talking and insincere. An expense-account Romeo.

She’s pretty sure she slept with someone who worked for the same company, a man she’d picked up at a hotel bar in Tulsa. He’d been wearing a similar shirt.

The guy next to her has on too much cologne, as well as a tacky gold bracelet on his right wrist, opposite a knockoff Rolex.

Sarah ignores him, trying to focus on her e-mail. In the back of her mind, she wonders if she gives off some weird pheromone that attracts a certain type of person—traveling salesmen and functional drunks, losers and dim-witted fuckwads—men who shroud themselves in body spray and bad double entendres.

She orders another Blood Mary, returns to the e-mail.

Papa was a violent man, & I’m afraid I’ve inherited that tendency from him. Sometimes violence is
 . . 
. I’m not sure how to put this
 . . 
. like a glass of milk when you have an upset stomach—soothing.

The salesman next to her orders a Dos Equis with extra limes. He speaks a little louder than necessary, glancing at Sarah as he talks to the bartender, trying to get her attention.

Sarah returns her concentration to the e-mail:

You will not read this until you are older and your leg is all healed. When that happens, maybe you and I will leave Dallas for a new life. Maybe we’ll go to New York or Europe. Wonderful things await both of us, if only we can break free from this godforsaken place. This I promise you, Dylan. I will not allow our family’s past to be inflicted on your future.

The salesman squeezes a lime wedge into his beer bottle. Some of the juice sprays Sarah’s arm.

“Sorry about that.” He hands her a cocktail napkin. “What are you working on so hard?”

A wave of pressure builds at the base of Sarah’s neck, climbing its way up into her skull until her temples feel like they might explode.

She puts the phone down and wipes her arm, pointedly not responding to his question.

“So,” the salesman says, “you come here often?”

Sarah can’t tell if he’s trying to be funny or not. Probably not.

Usually she can keep under control the self-loathing that comes from sleeping around. Unless the clichés start to pile up. For some reason, those make it all seem so tawdry and senseless.

The salesman leers at her, fiddling with his gold bracelet.

Sarah’s heart rate slows. She’s in the zone, the sense of control making everything rosy. She’s got a lot on her mind at the moment—an injured child, a dead cop in a motel room in Waco, a maybe-dead lesbian serial killer named Cleo—so the last thing she needs to be doing is making fuck-fuck eyes with some fruity-smelling loser. But what’s a pussycat to do when the mouse wanders over and starts swinging its little paws at you?

“Boy, it’s hot in here.” She unfastens the top button of her blouse. “How about you buy me a drink, stud?”

The salesman’s eyes open wide for an instant like he’s just realized he’s got a winning poker hand. He signals the bartender. “Another beer for me and whatever the lady is having.”

Lay-dee.
What an ass-munch. Sarah imagines she can actually hear the man’s erection growing underneath his no-iron khakis.

The drinks arrive. Sarah wonders where the nearest hotel is.

“You work around here?” The salesman drains half his beer in one swallow.

“I don’t work.” Sarah runs her tongue around the rim of the glass. “I prefer to play.”

The salesman’s eyes go wide again and stay that way.

“What’s the fragrance you’re wearing?” she says. “Eau-de-fuck-me?”

He blinks several times but doesn’t speak.

C’mon,
Sarah thinks.
Am I gonna have to book the room myself and drag you to the bed?

The thought makes her tired.

The salesman takes another pull of beer, regains a modicum of his game. “Well, aren’t you a spicy enchilada?”

“You want to get out of here?” she says. “Find someplace a little more private?”

“Maybe we could finish our drinks first and, you know, talk a little.”

The wind disappears from Sarah’s sails.

“Oh, that’s sweet.” Her voice is tight and angry. “Like we’re on a date. Two normal people who aren’t in a bar in the middle of the day looking to hook up with whoever’s got a pulse.”

Silence.

Sarah takes a swig of her Bloody Mary. The throbbing in her skull is keeping time with the flicker of the TV over the bar. She should go back across the street and see her daughter. Not stay in this damn shithole, writing e-mails that will never be sent.

“Hell, lady.” The salesman shakes his head. “How come you’re so mean?”

Sarah drains the glass. “I’m not a lady.”

The salesman doesn’t say anything. Sarah feels her face get hot with anger and alcohol.

“I was just making conversation,” the man says.

“You were trying to fuck me.” Sarah’s voice is matter-of-fact.

The salesman doesn’t speak. He looks at her strangely.

“It’s okay.” Sarah touches his arm. “I was trying to fuck you, too.”

The salesman shifts his weight, leaning away from her slightly.

“This guy tried to fuck me yesterday,” Sarah says. “I had to shoot him.”

The salesman’s face turns white.

“You ever shot anybody?” she asks.

The salesman begins to shake.

“Don’t worry.” Sarah notices his distress. “I’m not gonna shoot you. I didn’t bring my gun.”

The man pushes away his unfinished beer. He throws a twenty on the bar, slides off the stool, and hoofs it to the exit.

Sarah watches him go. What the fuck? It wasn’t like she actually pulled a gun on the guy. She returns to her e-mail, anger and frustration swirling around in her stomach along with all the booze.

The bartender scoops up the money and the beer bottle. He says, “Everything okay?”

Sarah nods, orders another Bloody Mary, wonders if the bartender knows where she might score some coke. A little pick-me-up would be good about now.

Her thumbs hover over the letters, but nothing happens. The words have disappeared from inside her, replaced by a dark emptiness.

She closes the e-mail and logs on to the website where she arranges meetings with her horndogs, the one where she met RockyRoad35. One of the features of the site is a notification system that tells you when someone else has been viewing your profile.

Sarah’s profile has been viewed eleven times this morning alone, all by the same person.

RockyRoad35. A dead man.

- CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE -

Chester gave me a tour of the lake house, a three-bedroom home built sometime in the 1950s.

The walls inside were wood-paneled, floors covered in brown shag carpeting. The furniture was old and dusty. The air smelled like mothballs and fried onions.

There was nothing in the closets or any of the drawers except hangers and roach droppings. The kitchen cabinets contained a handful of glasses and plates that looked like they were from the set of
Leave It to Beaver
.

We wandered out to the back patio, which offered an elevated view of the boiler area, maybe four hundred yards away.

Not a slam-dunk shot like at the Black Valley substation. But not difficult either. Certainly doable.

“How many other Sudamento plants have lake houses?” I asked.

Chester shrugged. “I don’t really know. Maybe three or four. The plant managers, we don’t ever use them.”

“Who does use them? People from the home office?”

“I guess. Doesn’t seem like anybody is out there very much.”

“Your security people,” I said. “Do they regularly check on this place?”

Black Valley’s cooling lake had a lakefront house, too, much smaller than this one, more of a shack. But the attack hadn’t technically occurred on the plant premises. Maybe whoever was responsible had scoped out the plant from the lake house and then decided to strike the substation from the ridge behind Thompson’s farm. An unoccupied home on or near the premises would make a great staging area for an attack.

“They’re supposed to,” he said. “But you know how that goes.”

“What did the police say?” I asked.

“Police?” Chester cocked his head. “Here in McCarty?”

“So who investigated?”

“Sudamento sent some people from the home office.”

“Price Anderson?”

“He was one of them, yes.”

“And what did the Sudamento people say?”

Chester stared at the tower looming over the horizon and belching steam into a cloudless sky.

“Something about a rifle range being nearby. They said the bullet probably came from there.” He paused. “We were only offline for a couple of hours.”

“So nobody official came out here at all, did they? No police or federal investigators?”

He shook his head. “And there’s no rifle ranges anywhere close.”

I stared at the boiler.

“Mr. Anderson. He told me that his people would take care of everything,” Chester said. “He told me that since the damage wasn’t too bad, we shouldn’t call the police.”

I nodded but didn’t reply.

“He said he’d already talked to the federal authorities about the situation. Said that if we get the police involved, then the newspapers might find out and that would hurt Sudamento’s stock price.”

I gave him my best blank stare.

“We didn’t realize there’d been an attack at first,” he said. “The heat readings on one of the units spiked, so I shut down the boiler and called the home office, like we’re trained to.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I followed the proper procedures.” He crossed his arms.

“How much Sudamento stock do you own, Chester?”

Overhead a pair of mallards glided toward the lake, wings cupped.

“Not much,” he said. “Just our entire retirement account.”

The retirement account for Chester and his cancer-stricken wife.

I walked around the patio, examining different angles and possible shooting positions. On the other side of the house was a gravel parking area that led to a dirt road.

I walked back to where Chester stood by the barbecue grill.

He pointed to the boiler. “Three transformers at the base. You see them?”

I peered into the distance. From four hundred yards away, the complex was an impenetrable mass of tubes, scaffolding, tanks, and wires. After a moment, I recognized the metal structures he’d pointed out from atop the boiler. Each was about the size of a large van.

“The shooter hit the heat sink on the one closest to us,” he said. “One shot only.”

“And that made the whole plant shut down?”

He nodded. “The juice had nowhere to go.”

I stared at the three transformers. The shot would have been relatively easy. The gunman probably used the barbecue as a rest, sat in one of the patio chairs. Whitney was right; the attack was a dry run, a probe. Taking one plant offline wouldn’t hurt the grid that much. They wanted to see what would happen if you shot a transformer.

“Fortunately, we had another unit on-site,” Chester said. “They cost about three hundred thousand dollars each.”

“How long would it have taken to get one here if you hadn’t had a backup?” I looked at my watch. It was coming up on noon. I needed to go see the old drunk from the VFW hall.

Chester shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Take a guess.”

“Six months maybe.” He shrugged. “They come on a boat from China.”