Badwater

29

Silence in the car as we continued up the hill.

Thanks to Hap, I was thinking food chain. Bats get contaminated, snakes eat bats, snakes carry the scourge as they creep along their way. What eats snakes? Hawks. And then they fly away.

Hap, in the rearview, had his phone open again.

The Cherokee jolted and I whipped my attention back to the rough road. A new groundcover sprouted among the creosote and sage — stone and tin. Stone foundations marked vanished buildings, stone cairns stood watch over pits and shafts, and you would have thought that tin was mined here, for the earth was rich with rusted cans. If Jardine wanted a mine handy to highway 95 he could have thrown a dart in any direction and hit one. But the fender soil said he kept going, and so did we.

Above the Town of Stone and Tin, the road entered a narrow twisting canyon and then we crested the Funerals and descended past another ghost town, smaller and sadder than the first. Walter rubbernecked.

Pria said, “If you go off this road there’s lots of mines.”

Is that what Jardine did? If he picked a mine on this road, one he could drive his offroader into, didn’t he risk some weekend warrior driving his tricked-up offroader into the mine for a little sightseeing? The soils would tell. If he came this way.

The road narrowed and it was no longer a road but cascades of sheeting rock. I wrestled the Cherokee to a stop. “Did we miss a turn?”

“No,” Pria said, “this is the way.”

I had to admit, Soliano was right, she knew this area like we did not.

“Chickie’s drove this,” she said. “It’s not that hard.”

So Chickie knows the way, too. I filed the fact in my expanding mental folder marked devil. I gripped the wheel. If Chickie, and presumably Brother Roy, could drive this astonishing excuse for a road then so could I. Walter watched me. I hit the gas and tires latched onto rock and lurched us forward, and as sweat cascaded down my flanks I understood why Jardine needed that high-clearance offroader with its beastly trailer.

We came to an exposure of Pliocene sedimentary deposits and I stopped, gratefully, to sample. While Walter explained to Pria that a few million years separated one layer from the next, the FBI checked their tires, and Hap headed for the canyon-wall shade.

I followed him. “Who were you texting?”

“Just checking messages.”

“I don’t think so. I think something’s going on.”

He leaned against the canyon wall. “Like what?”

“You tell me.”

He held my gaze, first time today. “It’s personal.”

I flushed.

He gestured at the ground. “Don’t let me interfere.”

“I won’t.” You can bet on it. “So, you know what we’re after here, right?”

He cocked his head.

“Nuclides from the dump leak are into the Death Valley flow system. Like you told us at dinner. And the nuclides are coming this way.”

“More or less.”

“Okay, yeah, the contaminant plume wouldn’t precisely follow the road, but if Jardine wanted to mimic the leak, this is the way he’d come.”

“I get it.”

I watched him. “You get what?”

“Here’s where he gets into the virgin.”

“How?”

“How should I know? He ain’t my homie, I’s jess the guy what frisks him.”

Hap suddenly sounded like himself. First time today. I said, “So give me a wild-ass guess.”

He pushed back his sombrero. “Haven’t got one, Cassie.”

It was getting tight.

The canyon squeezed steeply into a cavernous gorge and we funneled down into the narrows.

The rocks were tilted and pitted in somber shades of purple and green. I craned my neck to follow the walls upward to the spires that tortured the clifftops. In places, windows had eroded through rock, framing roiling clouds.

“Ghosts,” Pria said.

The road gentled and I gave myself over to reading the formations, and when the banded layers of the Bonanza King fully commanded the walls, I stopped the Cherokee.

Layer four.

Hap paced while we sampled, keeping watch he told us, on what I did not know because he did not bring out his meters, and then finally he halted in front of Dearing and Oliver, who were parked against the wall. “Good place for an ambush,” Hap said, loud enough to startle the agents and bounce an echo off the walls.

Ambush ambush ambush.

FBI submachine guns swung upward and we all tilted our chins but I saw nothing on the clifftops but Pria’s ghosts.

By the time we pushed on downcanyon, the clouds had congealed.

We stopped to sample an exposure of trilobite trash beds because we had fossil fragments in layer five.

And then we came to the end of the line. Point D, for destination.

As we piled out, I brushed close to Hap and said, “Actually, here is where he got into the virgin.”

Hap gave me a tight smile.

Well, somewhere around here — it was a very big neighborhood. Layer six was a sandy shaly zone that extended a good long stretch of the main canyon and pouched into offshoot sides that mostly dead-ended within a few hundred yards. We sampled two dozen sites and then called it a day.

“Was ready an hour ago,” Dearing muttered, trudging to the FBI jeep.

Oliver eyed Walter’s bulging field pack. “Get what you need to track the rat down?”

Walter said, “If not, we’ll get more.”

“Good man.”

Rain caught us on the way out, drops bulleting the roof of the Cherokee. The thin canyon soil began to saturate and I fixated on the ominous ledge of mud plastered twenty feet up the wall. Last place I wanted to be, right now, was pinched in this narrow gorge.

We exited the canyon, and I exhaled.

We exited onto a modest shallow fan, unlike the giant on which Walter and I had been marooned.

As we bumped downfan, thunderclouds gathered themselves and headed east. The sun angled in through the windshield to steam us. It steamed raindrops off the Cherokee’s hood and the alluvial gravel beneath its tires.

I took note of a steaming jutting outcrop. I waited for Walter to start up again with the lessons. Look Pria! You notice a difference between that layer of rock and the gravel it sits upon? Where could that rock have come from? Well Grandfather, she says — knitting her brows — I’d say that’s where a thrust fault is exposed. That’s my girl, says he.

We reached the toe of the fan, and highway 190.

We’d traveled 190 yesterday, to Twenty-Mule-Team canyon. Turn left onto the highway right now and we’re almost there. Real convenient, I thought, for Brother Roy to transport a cask from Point D to the borax mine.

I turned the Cherokee right, heading for the Inn. Back to the barn.

We passed the crumbly white travertine I’d noticed yesterday, bearding the Funerals fan.

“Look Pria,” Walter said, pointing out his window, “where it’s white.”

I knew it. He couldn’t resist.

“Those deposits,” he said, “are from old dry springs.”

“Aliens used to camp there, Grandfather. There was water then.”

I just had to join in. “Look further, Pria — at all that mesquite. There’s water here now.”

“Well yeah. Like, bighorns drink there?”

Well duh, like this is only the second time I’ve been on this road and I didn’t see any bighorns yesterday. All I saw now was a covered flume paralleling the highway. Aliens built that, I thought. Aliens to the desert.

“Mr. Miller,” Pria said, “it’s not nice to keep texting when people are talking.”

The car went thick with silence and then Hap gave a rough laugh. “You’re right. Can’t come up with a good reply anyway.”

I heard the snap of his phone shutting.

I pulled off the highway and shut down the engine and kinked in my seat to look Hap in the eye. “What the hell is going on?”

He met my gaze. Second time today. He opened his phone and thumbed the keypad and passed it to me. “Message came just after we left the Inn.”

I read the text, at first not getting it, then I passed Hap’s phone to Walter. He read, and after a long hesitation, he passed it on to Pria. Because it’s sure not nice to exclude her.

She read, scowling. “Is this from the bad guy?”

Who else? I thought. Still, we’d be wanting Soliano to trace the message — to the resender in Bulgaria or maybe, this time, directly to Roy Jardine’s phone. I wondered how Jardine had gotten Hap’s number. From the dump directory? Or the online white pages, easy enough. Or maybe he had Hap’s number on speed dial.

Hap might not be Jardine’s homie but it looked like Hap had, somehow, come to Jardine’s malignant attention. He’d texted: You’re on my list now, Doc Death.