Toni Dwiggins
Badwater
“Before outsiders changed our valley, it was described in the names of the places that were important for our survival here. Many are the names of springs. If the Manly Party, who traveled across our valley in 1849, had known our stories and trails, they would have found water, and Tumpisa (“red rock”) might not be known as a Valley of Death.”
1
There was something odd about the figure coming down the dark road and I was not going to be happy until I could put my eyes on the details.
Walter, stowing the donut bag in his field pack, had not yet noticed.
Uphill of the figure, emergency spotlights cracked the deep night and more could be seen. Big vehicles clogged the road. Adjacent to the road, yellow rope zoned off a large chunk of desert where a tractor-trailer lay on its side. Well uphill of the crash was another roped and spotlit area, occupied by a hulking crane. What was the crane doing off on its lonesome?
I refocused on the figure. “Somebody’s coming. A man, I think. But odd.”
Walter looked, straining to see. “You have young eyes.”
“It’s more a question of what jumps out at you.”
“Cassie, what jumps out at me in the dead of night belongs in the realm of bad poetry.”
I smiled. He would know.
“However,” he said, still peering, “that is an odd gait.”
That it was, perhaps due to the muddied condition of the road. I glanced at the sky, where a cloud roof glowed faintly beneath a hidden moon. Summer thunderstorm — local, wherever precisely local was. It had been clear twenty minutes ago in Mammoth, our home base in the Sierra Nevada mountains. We run a two-person lab called Sierra Geoforensics and what we do for a living is read earth evidence at the crime scene. We’d headed for this scene truly in the dark. The FBI sent a helicopter but provided few details. We’d flown east from the Sierra and crossed another range, which meant we’d passed from California into Nevada, then bellied down to the dark desert.
And here we waited, speculating. All too often, the geological evidence at the scene gets overlooked. This time, though, the FBI considered it urgent enough to bring us by chopper, and that impressed me deeply.
The oncoming figure, I now decided, was bulky. And yet tall.
“Ahhh,” Walter said, “I know that walk. That’s an old man’s gait.”
My heart gave a squeeze. In the dark, Walter could charitably be described as craggy. In the brutal light of day, his face is eroded — compressed by the forces of the years and folded by the weight of the job. Not that I’m keeping watch. I linked my arm through his. “Yeah, you predate the dinosaurs.”
“At times I feel I do.” Walter’s voice was night-thin.
He was looking for me to argue the point but my attention now fixed hard on the approaching figure. We watched in silence as the man came fully into range and the details became apparent. It was not age that slowed his gait. He wore a bulky white hazmat suit.
I suddenly felt a little naked out here.
The man drew up. “Mr. Walter Shaws? Ms. Cassie Oldfield?” He had graying hair in a salon cut and a beaky face with aristocratic lines. Middle-aged, tops. “I am Hector Soliano with the FBI. We spoke earlier by telephone.” The voice had a faint Spanish accent.
“Yes, a pleasure,” Walter said, “and you should have informed us that we would need to suit up.”
“When we spoke, there was no need.”
“And now?”
“A precaution.”
A vein began to throb in my neck.
“Mr. Soliano,” Walter said, “I don’t guess well. Not on four hours sleep. A cup of coffee would help. Barring that, I would like to know what the devil is going on.”
Hector Soliano gave a curt shrug. “And I, who have had three hours sleep, would wish to know this as well.”
Walter’s eyebrows lifted.
“On the surface,” Soliano said, “an attempted hijacking. A shooting. And that is not the worst of it.”
And it’s like pulling teeth, I thought, for the FBI to share details with non-agency people. Even the worst details. I said, “And?”
“And it is best you see for yourself. But first I am most anxious to have you suit up.” Soliano started up the road.
We fell in.
Walter said, “Where, precisely, are we?”
We were, as best I could tell by the castoff of emergency lights, on an alluvial fan leading into the hacked-up foothills of a gaunt range that loomed above.
“We are just off Nevada state highway 95,” Soliano said, “southwest of the town of Beatty. A passing motorist saw ‘something funny’ and notified the Beatty sheriff, who investigated and notified federal responders. I came out here and determined that we wanted a forensic geology consult. We have you on file. I am told you are worth your fee.”
Walter grunted. We are, we’re here, let’s go put our eyes on the scene.
As we tramped up the road we topped a small rise and got a better view. The truck appeared to have tumbled down an incline and come to rest in the desert scrub.
Walter said, “We’ll want to begin with the tires.”
“Begin with the driver,” Soliano said. “We must know where the driver has been.”
I found a smile. “He’s been somewhere without the tires?”
Soliano said something under his breath in Spanish.
On the road directly ahead was a big white van, lettered RERT, and Soliano led us toward its open door.
I asked, “What’s RERT?”
“An acronym…” Soliano touched his brow — the difficulty of acronyms in a non-native language. “With the Environmental Protection Agency.”
My attention jumped back to the spotlighted crash scene, which was well uphill of us and the white van. Suited figures had now come into view, poking around the scrub brush near the truck. The figures wore hoods and masks and air tanks.
Soliano snapped his fingers and turned to me. “R-E-R-T. Radiological Emergency Response Team.”
I nodded, as if I’d suspected as much. Perhaps I had. Some kind of fateful junction — if I’d believed in fateful junctions. I believe in probabilities. Someone shows up in a hazmat suit and the odds are not all that long that the toxin in question is radiological. But that really is some kind of fateful shit.
Walter leaned in close and said, low, “You pack some courage in your field kit?”
I said, evenly, “When have I ever lacked courage?”
“When have we ever had a case classed radioactive?”
In my dreams.
2
Scotty Hemmings held open the top of the coveralls as if he were holding an evening coat.
I’d already got the suit up to my waist but it was cramped quarters inside the RERT van and the material was stiff. I wormed into the arms and then started to pull on a latex glove.
“Whoa Cassie,” Scotty said, “inflate it first. You don’t want a blown-out glove.”
No, I didn’t want that. I listened intently to Scotty Hemmings, wishing to dress exactly as the RERT chief dressed. He had an easygoing air with looks to match — shaggy blond hair and a big square dimpled smiling face — and we were already on a first-name basis. But there was nothing laid-back about his instructions. Walter, I noticed, was taking exquisite care in the assembly of his own suit. I blew my gloves into fat balloon hands and checked for leaks.
Scotty handed me rubbery overgloves. The bar-code sticker said Wal-Mart.
The RERT chief shops discount? I took a closer look at the equipment racks. Indeed, much of this stuff would be at home in Walter’s garage: brooms, shovels, hoses, portable vacuum. Some belonged in an anal-retentive kitchen: fancy scrub brushes, bottles of sodium carbonate and trisodium phosphate. And then there were the defensive items: suits and tanks and probes and meters, the only one of which I recognized was a Geiger counter.