“Why are we here?”
“Headquarters. The FBI, in the dapper person of Hector Soliano, negotiated a sweet deal. A German here and there had to be relocated but otherwise all are happy — except the taxpayers footing the bill. Then again, they’ll never find out so all’s well.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“All in good time. Doctor Hap needs to make sure you’re up to it.”
“You’re a doctor?”
His eyes went flat. “You sound like my daddy.” He gave the IV bag a squeeze. “My daddy tried to send me to Harvard med school but damn, they didn’t want me. So I went to Podunk U and got me an EMT certificate. That’s Emergency Medical Technician, ma’am. That didn’t satisfy daddy so I went into the nuke biz and got me a health physics degree. I thunk daddy’d be impressed by all them alphas and betas and gammas under the supervision of his manly son. Daddy wudn’t.” Hap shrugged. “But hey, Milt was happy to hire a guy who can do radiation protection and, on the side, patch people up. You okay being tended to by a part-time EMT?”
I thought, Daddy sounds like poison. I said, “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” He took my hand and checked my pulse. He put a blood pressure cuff on my IV arm and pumped it up. He brushed the sticky hair off my forehead. Cool hands.
I let my heavy eyes close. The pressure cuff pinched. The sheet abraded my tender feet. My left hand stung. My skin felt sticky. I tasted grit. I didn’t care because I could summon enough saliva to swallow. I located an ache in my stomach that I identified as hunger. It was good to be alive.
There was a crash and I opened my eyes.
Hap held my arm steady. “Just thunder.”
Rain came in a rush, clattering so loud my ears rang.
“More on the way, Hector says. That is, Hector says the clerk at the front desk says. Hurricane off Baja California and we get the whiplash.” Hap fanned himself. “Cool us off.”
I wetted my lips. “There was a girl.”
He jerked a thumb. “Outside. Least she was, checking out the little bitty thongs on the ladies at the pool. Disapproving, I’d say. Methinks she is a Puritan.”
“Who is she?”
“She told Hector she’s an alien.” Hap held his nose. “In need of a bath.”
I smelled my own rank smell. “How’d she find us?”
“Took awhile to figure out you needed finding. We were at the talc mines way late, and when Hector couldn’t raise y’all on the cell he figured you were up some canyon but next time he tried he got a mite worried. So he called Furnace Creek and they sent a ranger out rangering but he didn’t find you on the West Side Road so he went on over to the Greenwater Road because that’s where you said y’all were going next. Ranger found somebody’d seen a car like yours, so we all thought you were up some canyon over there. We didn’t drag our sorry butts to Furnace Creek until after dark.”
“What about Chickie?”
“Miss Chick left her mine in a huff not long after you left.” Hap cocked his head. “Course, Milt left around about the same time. Went home to pack some necessities for him and me, shop for the others. Since it seemed we were gonna have a sleepover.”
“When did Milt get here?”
“Late. Gotta say, though, don’t see Milt as much of a suspect. Hasn’t got the imagination to bushwhack you.”
What it took was gall.
“Anyhoo, we all end up here at the Inn having a tailgate party, and a tip comes in — backpackers came across your car. So Hector dispatches some of his manly agents to find you.”
“What about the girl?”
“Right there, listening in. We did attract a little crowd. Best I can make out, she’s local and sees herself as Miss Alien Desert Rat and damned if she isn’t because she went out and beat the FBI to the rescue.”
I thought, bless her.
Hap checked his watch, then disconnected the IV and gently pulled the needle from my arm. “Feel okay, Cassie?”
Like I’d been resurrected. “You do good work.”
“Uh-oh.” Hap took my left hand. “Doctor Hap missed something.” He rummaged in his kit. He squeezed a worm of ointment on my cut palm. He studied it. “Make a cool sketch.” He gestured at a sketchpad sticking out of his kit. “I draw hands. Fact, I’ve drawn most of the hands at the dump. Get me some down-time and I gotta fill it. Did a real cool one for this deconner who blew out his gloves — little necrosis of the tissue.” Hap made a face. “But it made for a Jackson-Pollocky sort of avante-garde effect.”
“Like Roy Jardine’s face?”
“Not that avante-garde.” He bandaged my cut and released me. “Tell me, find anything out there afore you got bushwhacked?”
“No.”
“Heard about your loss. That’s a bitch.”
“Loss?”
“The ice chest. Your soil map. Walter’s been having a cow about that.”
Me too.
“Cheer up. Start again, right? Go get more dirt off that rig?”
He’s asking if I can? Why’s he so interested? I thought, suddenly, just because Chickie and Ballinger left the mine early doesn’t make them the only ones with the opportunity to bushwhack us. Jardine could have done it himself, if he knew where we were going. Who knew our plans, at the mine? Just about everybody. Hap certainly; he’d been the one who first asked. Or it could have been one of Soliano’s agents who overheard, and phoned Jardine. Not Soliano himself, though, I couldn’t buy that. But what about Scotty, or someone from Scotty’s team? Good God, I was getting paranoid. Yeah, but paranoid’s good.
Hap put away his band-aids. “From now on, take care out there.”
“Sure.”
“I’m not talking bushwhacking.”
“So I’ll wear a dosimeter. That what you’re talking about?”
“You know what you are? You’re like every other pragmatist who figures the odds. I’m trying to keep you out of the doodoo and you’re thinking odds are you won’t step in any.”
“I understand odds.”
“You’re not listening. Story of my life. Hey, you know Homer? Homer Simpson, works at the nuke plant?” Hap wore a new T-shirt. He stretched it to show off the caption: Trust Me, I’m Here to Help. He sighed. “Nobody listens. I tell everybody I gotta frisk them slow so the reading’s accurate and everybody bitches because they’re under the gun to get stuff done. So I say sure, let’s turbo-frisk, and you can take some home to the kids.”
“I get your point, Hap.”
He wouldn't stop. “And you know what’s the real hoot?”
I shook my head.
“The numbers. Any idea how the experts came up with theys numbers?”
“What numbers?”
“Numbers that say you got a so-and-so chance of getting cancer, or a scratch on the DNA. They don’t rightly know what dose is gonna do it. So they take a guess. And that’s where they get the numbers they feed into the equations.”
“Will you please stop?”
He seemed to recoil. “Shore thang.” He unhooked the empty IV bag and folded it around the needle and neatly coiled the tubing. He dropped the package in a wastebasket and tied off the plastic liner. He moved to me, at last, and eased the pressure cuff down my sticky arm, catching the hairs. “Sorry.”
“It didn't hurt.”
“Then sorry about the lecture. I do go on and on.”
“It's not that.”
“Bad breath?”
I laughed. “No. It’s just…a long story.”
He took off his watch and cocked his head.
“Starts with my grandmother.”
“Don’t it always?”
I laughed again. “Okay, you asked for it. She — my mother’s mother — was at NTS way back when they were doing the atomic tests. Nevada Test Site. I’m sure you’re familiar with it.” Of course he was; NTS was almost next door to the dump. “She was a reporter, which was a big deal for a woman back then. Just for the local rag but since local was Vegas, covering the tests was local news. And it was always a big party. I mean, people went to the hotel roofs to watch the mushroom clouds. So when my grandmother gets sent to the test site to cover the story, she wants to make it entertaining. She stations herself in one of the phone booths and does a you-are-there report. She’s dictating as the bomb goes off. The concussion knocks the booth over and shatters the glass. And my grandmother is lying on the ground, cuts all over, the blast wave blowing dirt in her face — and she doesn’t miss a beat. The receiver’s still live so she keeps reporting. She just lies there in the fallout and talks on the phone. Scoop of a lifetime. My grandmother dined out on that story for years. My mom told it around our dinner table. I thought it was exciting, until I got bored with it. And then my baby brother was born with hemophilia. That’s when your blood won’t clot and… Well I’m sure you know.” Of course he knew; he must have learned it in EMT school; might need to tend a bleeder. “Since hemophilia is a genetic disorder, my folks tried to figure out where it came from. But there was no family history of it. So that kind of left the mutagenic factor. We figured Grandma got zapped. No way to prove it, but… She only had one kid — my mom. My mom had three kids. Fifty-fifty chance she was going to pass on that damaged gene each time. My older brother got a pass. My younger brother didn’t.” Poor little Henry, bleeding into his joints, bleeding out, bleeding all over my homework. “That’s when my mom learned she was a carrier. Women don’t express the trait, they just carry it and pass it on. We don’t know about me — there’s no definitive test to determine my carrier status. Only sure way to find out is to have a kid.” I shrugged. “So that’s why I got bitchy about your radiation lesson.”