Soliano used his flashlight to illuminate a hodgepodge of tire tracks. He pointed out two sets: the smaller vehicle on the tail of the larger vehicle. And then, farther uphill, the road took a hook and the larger tracks veered wildly over the edge. I pictured Ryan Beltzman fighting the wheel, losing. I pictured the tailgating hijacker. I assigned a gender, male. Not that it really mattered.
What mattered was the gleam of intent in his eyes.
His tire tracks continued to a wide spot and turned around. Here, he got out of his vehicle. Three distinct bootie-prints, marked by orange cones, led over the edge. Two had been casted and lifted. I sampled the third, and then the tire tracks. Some telling mineral might have transferred. A long shot. It was the mud on Ryan Beltzman that was going to tell the story, if I could read it.
Soliano, waiting at the road edge, called me over. He’d made a discovery. He pointed his flashlight down where the slope wrinkled into a small ravine. There were more bootie prints, these coming up the slope.
We decided to go down and have a look.
At the ravine, I was mentally comparing the size of the prints to those up on the road, and declaring them a match, when I stumbled and peered at the uneven ground under my own booties and thought, what’s this?
“Hey,” I said.
Soliano aimed his light.
I got a better look now at the stuff on the ground, the bone-white ashy trail that led down the ravine, and then Soliano painted his light along the white trail — downhill to a tangle of scrub brush where a cask was nearly concealed like an overlooked easter egg — and it seemed to me that when this cask was thrown free it must have cracked like an egg upon impact and spilled its contents, rolling downhill until caught by the brush. As the alarm was going off in my head I seized on what Scotty had said — he’d said beads, resin beads not ash — but I thought, radwaste gets incinerated too doesn’t it?
Scotty had said, back in the van, that a cask cannot fully shield the radwaste. And if a lead cask can’t stop all the gammas, and the stuff was now under my feet, how much protection did my protective clothing give?
Not enough.
5
Old horror-flick scenes reeled through my brain.
Lab-coated scientists with Einstein hair pouring the wrong flask of purple liquid into the wrong vat. Repentant scientists — the victims usually being scientists who repent too late, or vapid pretty girls — writhing while their skin blisters and their pores ooze purplish blood. Tiny mutant monsters flailing in incubators. Post-apocalyptic landscapes stripped of vegetation — not unlike the landscape I stood in — while legions of giant insects stride across land that has been bequeathed to the quickly adaptable.
I watch too many dumb movies.
Scotty Hemmings bounded up. He had a meter in one hand and a pancake-shaped wand in the other. “Stand still,” he snapped.
I’d been running. Lumbering. I halted. Sweat cascaded down my flanks.
I glanced around. Soliano was coming to a halt nearby. We had nearly reached the road and if someone hadn’t stopped us we would likely have kept going to put another stretch of distance between us and the spill. Suited figures were converging on the area. A figure with binoculars jammed against his face plate was shining a spotlight across the slope to the ravine. Two others, down below, shined lights on the cask in the scrub brush.
I turned back to Scotty. “You said…”
“Hang on a sec.”
Long as you want.
He began at my feet, tracing my boots with the wand.
I stared at his bent hood, my heart hammering.
He shook his head and stood.
“Scotty?”
“Stand straight. Feet apart. Arms out, palms up. Stand still.”
I complied, straining to hear the Geiger counter. Was it crackling? Was it screaming bloody murder?
Scotty skimmed the probe along my body. He did my arms first and then jumped to the top of my head, zigzagging across my face, then switchbacking down my torso. He took his time, agonizingly slow, and he was stone silent and everyone, I noticed, was stone silent. Soliano, a silent statue like me, was being metered by a suit with the RERT logo.
“Turn around,” Scotty told me. “Feet apart. Arms out.”
I turned. Two suited figures were nearby. I identified Hap Miller by the yellow tape on his tank with his last name in black marker. He was monitoring one of the CTC workers — in his health physics capacity, I assumed. Miller spoke, loud enough to break the eerie silence. “Enlighten me, Chung, why you came charging into a contaminated zone before it’s been stabilized?”
The worker extended his middle finger. “Wasn’t roped.”
“You’re living proof,” Miller said, “that Mama Chung slept with a jackass.”
And then all was quiet again. I listened to the voice in my head going over every wrong step until I thought I would scream. I wished Scotty would speak. Anything at all. I turned my head and said, “How’d you get into this business?”
“Stand still.”
I froze.
He was silent for so long I thought he wouldn’t answer, then he did. “Was a lifeguard at San Onofre, beach in front of the nuke plant. Back before it closed. Plant had a spill and RERT showed up. Lifeguards in hazmat. I thought cool job, no sharks.”
“Just rads, huh?”
“Huh.” He said no more so I shut up. I’d gotten used to the hiss of my air and the wheeze of my breathing and I listened to that until he banged me on the shoulder and said, “No worry.”
I turned fully to face him. “So I’m not…?”
“You’re not crapped up.” He was reading his meter. His frown showed through the mask. “But I gotta say this is real weird. We gotta figure this out real fast. I mean, this stuff should be hot and you walked right through it and I didn’t get any reading off your booties.”
“Scotty!”
We turned. The guy with the binoculars approached, signalling. Scotty took the binocs and for the first time turned his attention to the spill. He yelled, “Shine another spot!” A second spotlight hit the spill, turning the white ashy powder even whiter.
“That’s not resin beads,” Scotty said. “What in hell’s going on here?”
6
I stood at the edge of the newly-roped hot zone but in truth I’d already crossed over.
There is a line, in working a case, that separates the professional from the personal and in most cases I’ve worked the personal seeps in here and there. A victim who looks like a guy I dated in high school. A microwave in the kitchen at the scene that is the same make as the microwave in my kitchen. And that’s fine, that familiarity, that human link. That’s fine unless the personal balloons to blot out the professional and gets in the way of doing the job. When I’d stepped in what I thought was the shit fifteen minutes ago the personal had swelled nearly to bursting.
I needed to get back on the safe side of the line. I needed to find out what I’d stepped in. Put a name to that white ashy stuff, objectify it, and get it the hell out of my personal space. And so I waited while the hazmat professionals secured the scene so Walter and I could take our turn.
Hap Miller was out there, taking charge of the CTC dump property in the scrub brush. Miller metered the breached cask and called out “not hot,” shaking his head like he did not believe it.
I had a clear view of the cask. Ashy stuff spilled out near the lid. Looked just like the stuff I’d stepped in earlier, uphill in the ravine. The stuff trailed from the ravine down to the cask, where it had come to rest in the brush. I pictured, again, the radwaste truck tumbling down this hill, shooting out casks. This cask must have been breached upon impact, trailing white ash as it tumbled.