“A case with contingency fees ... limited when you're taking on the government ... twenty-five percent recovery ... lots of property work around this area ... trust lawyer ... be glad to recommend someone with a better...” Slick mumbo-jumbo legalese.
As soon as they could, they thanked him and left the law offices, once again going forward three paces and going back four.
“The more we learn about this thing, the less we know,” Royce said.
“You're not just realizing that, are you?” They laughed mirthlessly. “Let's hear some good ideas."
Royce shook his head. “Um..."
“Me too.” They went to a phone and did their thing. Mary was first. It seemed to Royce as if she'd been on the telephone for a very long time, and most of it was listening.
“Listen,” she began, as soon as they were back in his vehicle, “you know Jimmie and Lurene Gallagher, don't you?"
“Uh-uh."
“She's with the welfare office here, and Jimmie works on the county road crews. They live out by the land project. Alberta Riley heard that they had a run-in with the Ecoworld people. Jimmie Gallagher's dog was rolling around in some garbage they dumped out by the construction site, and the dog died. They got all crazy about it because they were afraid Jimmie's little boy might have played with the dog and got some of it on him."
“What kind of stuff—something radioactive?"
“Pardon?"
“What kind of garbage?"
“Oh! I don't know—poisons, I think. Anyway, they went to Marty Kerns, and he said he couldn't do anything—naturally. They were supposed to go to the EPA about it. And they had an inspector come look at it, but he wouldn't do anything either. He said it was the Gallaghers’ fault for letting their dog run loose. Apparently the little boy is okay, but they're really mad about it."
“Where was this garbage?"
“It was at the edge of the Poindexter farm—just over the property line on Ecoworld's ground. They're throwing chemicals and stuff out there, I guess."
“Let's go look at it."
“Okay. We could try. If it's still there. I don't know what we'd learn that the EPA guy doesn't already know, but—"
“Where did Alberta hear all this stuff, did she say?"
“Her hairdresser."
“That figures.” In a small town the local hairdresser is the rough equivalent of “60 Minutes.” He should have known.
“Royce, wouldn't we have a chance of finding out a lot more by concentrating on getting inside that office out there? Couldn't we create some kind of a diversion and try to get it while—"
“Mary, those guys aren't doughnut-gobbling rent-a-cops we saw. I recognized the weapons they were carrying. The riflelike thing is called a Steyr AUG. It's a specialized assault weapon. This one was silenced and had a night-action scope on it. That's the sort of modification they use on a countersniper rifle. The other guy had what looked like a Heckler & Koch MP 5. This is serious, major-league armament. They've probably got another team asleep nearby—maybe in the office or the tool trailer. Two on, two off—revolving shifts, maybe—so they don't get tired. Working ‘em four out of eight hours and then a new set of teams comes in.
“We could create a diversion. Let's say we'd rent the services of a crop duster and he'd make believe like he was strafing the office—okay? Make a whole gang of noise. The guy with the Steyr would pop a 40-mm MECAR rifle grenade attachment over the muzzle, and if that didn't work, they've probably got a Stinger missile in the office. It'd be a diversion, all right."
“What are we gonna do?” she asked in helpless tone.
“Whatever we can. Come on, kid. Let's go see if we can figure out what Jimmie Gallagher's dog got into.” He turned the ignition key and they headed across the river, behind an old clunker with “UT” and “Go Vols!” stickers on the bumper, replete with a fake license plate in the rear window reading, “I M 1. R U 1 2? O, I C, U 1 2 B 1!"
Royce realized it had been a good while since he'd packed his sinuses with nose candy. He passed the UT car on the Missouri side, getting in back of a dirty truck whose mud flaps warned about his wide turns. On the back of the filthy truck the moving finger had writ: “FUQ IRAQ.” Everywhere you looked, there was a joker waiting.
The vista was bleak and cold, with wintry tendrils of cirrocumulus woven through the pale gray sky. Intermittently clinquant glitters of sunlight flashed on the grimy windshield. There was corn stubble to the left, remnants of milo stalks to the right, and a muddy brown stretch of tractor and combine turnrow between.
They saw the garbage dump and the newly erected concrete construction work at about the same time. The concrete foundations were now complete over the three-hundred-acre building site, and many walls were already up. Near the southeastern edge of the property there were areas that already wore thick ceilings of reinforced concrete. The interiors of these sections appeared to have had their doors and passage entrances boarded up. A pair of guards could be seen in the distance.
Here, far away from the new construction, impedimenta and refuse from Ecoworld had been dumped unceremoniously into a kind of landfill hole, and hastily covered with earth. Here, it seemed, a pack of dogs had decided to dig for buried treasure, and Jimmie Gallagher's dog had been one of them. He'd been one dumb pup to wallow here.
Royce parked and they walked to the center of the unearthed garbage and trash pit, shaking their heads the minute they got out of the vehicle. The smell was incredible.
“My God!” Mary whispered.
“Yeah.” The guards could not see them where they'd parked, and the landfill was below the slope of a bordering tree line. “You know what I keep thinking?” he said to her, sotto voce.
“Hnn?"
“Jeezus!” He saw the first of the containers. A group of colorful outer shells giving a tessellated, almost coherent pattern to the mosaic of industrial trash.
“What is it?"
“Hazardous materials—see?” He swallowed. Everything he saw only confirmed what he'd been about to say to her.
“I—” She was fighting to make sense out of this. The lettering was government-style yellow stenciling.
“When I said toxic waste—” It stuck in his throat. His mind was racing. Hydriodic acid. Potassium compounds. Sulfuric acid.
“Come on. Let's go.” He had to pull her away from the landfill.
“Toxic waste. You mean radioactive stuff? Plutonium and—” She had partially shut down. Too much information. Sam. Ecoworld. Poisons. Her system had reached Data Overload.
“Come on, Mary, move,” he said, in a voice that was several decibels louder than he meant it to be.
He was more scared than the night Happy had braced him, just easing into the ride, not slamming the door, waiting for Mary to get in, waiting for the dude to come around the nearest trees with his Steyr AUG, waiting to learn what the first 5.56-mm round would do when it tore through the door, the bullet tumbling from the expanding gasses and the punch through metal. He had a shotgun in the pawnshop—talk about being prepared! The car sounded as loud as a jet engine when he started it, and no time was wasted getting in the wind.
“What?” She demanded.
“It's a fucking drug lab!"
“Why—what makes you think that?"
“Believe me. I know. That's what those bastards are doing out here in Nowheresville—they're fixing to cook up ice."
She was trying to re-join the conscious. She felt as if her brain had fallen asleep.
“Schmeck. Crank. Crack. Ice. Something very potent, maybe.” He shook his head as he drove. “I could never figure it out. I could never see it. It's a fucking lab! Probably the biggest ever built. Imagine—the scale of the thing. And they've brought in all the chemicals and stuff and walled it in, see, so later there's no problem starting to cook the junk. You've got guys unloading tools, pouring concrete, taking supplies off trucks every day—who's going to suspect anything if you go ahead and fill your lab? No wonder they've got armed guards."