I cringed. I said, “So you bore Collier a grudge.”
“Yeah. Flipped him off real good behind his back.”
“So the SFP was an accident?”
“Isn’t that what Milt said?”
“He said the DA dropped the charges.”
“She did, indeed. Still, I did get me a new nickname around the plant. And daddy would have liked that one.” He waved at the sky. “Nothing wimpy about Doc Death, eh daddy?” He straightened. “Whoops, I’s looking the wrong way for daddy.” He rolled face-down, into a dead-man’s float.
Goosebumps broke out on me. I wondered if it had been what he said, just one little eff-up after another and nobody’s to blame. He couldn’t have planned it because somebody else smudged the work order, somebody else transferred the fuel assembly to the wrong place, somebody else did a survey of the work area with an erratic meter. But somebody else wasn’t reading the surface monitor. He was. He could have sabotaged it. He could have delayed his warning. Just takes a few seconds, when a diver gets too close to recently discharged spent fuel. Opportunity knocks and he answers, like encountering somebody who’s humiliated you on the edge of a crowded platform and the train’s coming.
I got out and went for my towel. I heard him come up onto the pool deck with a grunt. I heard his wet feet slapping the concrete behind me.
I heard him start up again.
“And that’s why I’m here with y’all in Death Valley. Isn’t that something? Chain reaction. I get smeared at the nuke plant, but that’s okay, I’m sick of being a house tech anyway. I hit the road and take on temp jobs, only the life of a road whore isn’t so hot, and besides my deadly nickname keeps catching up. Then good ole Milt comes to the rescue. Milt didn’t mind my checkered past. Fact, he was glad to get somebody who wasn’t shooting for a job at the nuke plant. See, everybody who’s anybody wants to work at the nuke plant. Them boys and girls at the nuke plant is so full of theyselves they think they pulled the rods on the sun.”
I felt his wet arm go around my shoulders. I ducked away and wrapped in my towel.
He crossed his arms. “I’m like those unstable atoms. Start out at the nuke plant doing my business, get spent, end up buried at the dump.”
“You could leave.”
“Where’d I go?”
“I don’t know. Go flip burgers. Go to art school.”
“Yeah.” He turned to go.
I hadn’t meant it to sound so harsh. “Wait.”
“Yeah?”
“What’s so wrong with keeping people safe?”
He cocked his head. “About a minute ago you were thinking I’m a killer.”
“You didn’t specifically deny it.”
His face tightened, visible even by the castoff lights of the pool. “Cassie, you think I’m going to kill somebody because he makes me look like a fool?” He looked at the sky, then back at me. He produced a brief grin. “Hell, I make me look like a fool six days a week.”
I laughed.
“Take a break on Sundays. Wait and see.”
Maybe I will, wait until we’re not hunting a madman with a lethal stash, wait until we’re done here — if we’re done here by Sunday — wait until we’re out of this liquefying heat that’s making my head swim, wait until Sunday to figure out what I think about Hap Miller.
He uncrossed his arms. “Sunday’s four days away.” He moved closer and anchored my chin with his thumb and forefinger.
Startled, I froze. Maybe not startled.
He leaned in and kissed me. His lips were silky, like mine, tasting of alkali. I dropped my towel. We crowded together, sealing the hold of our mouths. His hands went down to the hiked-up border of my too-small swimsuit. He slipped his thumbs beneath the elastic. My attention jumped there, to the pressure points of his thumbs. He fitted his hips into mine. For a moment, for one long moment in which my heat flared, I stayed planted in place, and then I intertwined my fingers in his and tugged his hands free.
He pulled back. “You no like?”
Oh yeah, I like. I adjusted my suit.
He expelled a breath like it was a spout of water.
I found my own breath. “Can we just back up a bit?”
“Ain’t never no way to go but forward.”
“Okay.” My heartbeat ramped up again. “Sunday’s still coming up.”
“That it is.” He picked up my towel and handed it to me. “Thing is, Buttercup, I’m near spent. Had one fiasco marriage, got a woman I visit now and then. Fraid I gave you the wrong impression here. I’m not looking for a sweetheart.”
I said, after one more long moment in which to cool back down to stone, “Afraid I’m not looking for a roll on the pool deck.”
28
Field day.
The morning sun already savaged us. I slumped against the Jeep. Walter shifted, sweating, stirring up dust. Soliano wiped his brow.
Pria hugged herself, fixing her hopes on her aunt.
The small gray-haired woman with the sour face — Ruth Weeks — was on Soliano’s cell phone. She listened with a tight mouth.
I expected the answer to be no.
It was surely a no-looking kind of place, of dusty trailers and adobe cabins, and the only thing good I could say was that it seemed temporary. I looked across a short stretch of desert to a wall of palms and tamarisks and caught a glimpse of green green grass. A small white ball flew above the trees and I imagined a curse in German. I turned and squinted uphill at the Inn, which docked at the head of the fan like a cruise ship in palm-green water. I turned back to this sad outlier of the village of Furnace Creek and thought, everybody around here has water to spare, but them. Even their mesquite looks thirsty.
Ruth Weeks returned Soliano’s phone like it was contaminated. “Jackson says you’re one of them.” She eyed our borrowed Park Service vehicle, a Jeep Cherokee offroader. “His car. He’s responsible.” She shifted her lawn chair so that it faced her mobile home, giving us the back of her head.
Pria bounded to the Cherokee. It will be fun.
Walter slid into the front passenger seat as if by choice, and I took the wheel as if by default, and Pria piled into the backseat beside Soliano.
I drove past the sign at the end of the dirt road — Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, and below that, Radio 91.1—and Walter reached for the radio and Pria said, “You won’t get nothing. It’s Thursday. You could try tomorrow.”
Soliano, in my rearview mirror, nodded as if he’d known. Maybe that’s the way it was where he grew up, stations on and off the air unpredictably so all you can do is shrug. Shooting victims in the road and all you can do is wait for them to die. Soliano was on Pria’s wavelength. He’d made his pact with her earlier when he found her waiting outside his room. Undoubtedly looked at his watch. No time, and here’s Miss Desert Alien who knows this area like none of us could know it, who volunteers her services. Dios mio, this is her homeland. What can one do? Refuse the offer?
Well—Walter had said to me on the way to the parking lot—she’s nearly fifteen.
I’d been twelve when he first took me into the field.
I hit the asphalt and and took the road back up the fan and dropped Soliano at the cruise ship and picked up our escorts, two FBI agents in another Park Service offroader.
Our third escort, Hap, took Soliano’s place in the backseat beside Pria.
Something was wrong with Hap.
He didn’t ask why we were heading for talc country. He made no dire warnings to take care out here. No yak, no Buttercup-baiting.
No apology for last night at the pool. Then again, he’d been frank about what he wanted last night. Brutally so. It was me who’d been slow on the uptake. I really should paste a warning label on my forehead: romantically needy but touchy as hell. It seemed like a dream now, anyway, in the brutal light of day. The night, the stars, the heat. Fantasyland.