“Now, that is a long story. I’ll trim.” Her voice, enwrapped in that lovely Southern accent, was low. The word sultry came to mind. “I wanted to — yes, see the world — so I joined up. Did a couple tours in Hawaii and California. Met a boy, also from Birmingham. After our hitches, we went home, got married. Yeah, ‘hitched!’ That didn’t work out... Not his fault. I’m a tough person to live with.”
The confession amused him. It seemed almost like a warning.
“I wanted to stay in security. A job recruiter told me about an opening at Harmon Energy. I liked the product, liked Marty’s mission — helping save the poor. So. Here I am. Sorry you asked, aren’t you?”
“Think you trimmed just right.”
A car passed at speed — and she was well over the limit. The Acura SUV had tinted windows. A problem?
Nilsson said, “It’s good.” Her eyes had been following the car’s trajectory too. “Any threat would have presented by now.”
More miles rolled by: brown and flat. Shaw had grown up surrounded by mountains.
“When my friend Tom called about the job, I thought ‘Ferrington’ was familiar. Something in the news. Crime, I think.”
“The corruption cases Marty was talking about?”
“No, violent.”
“Oh, the Street Cleaner? Serial killer.”
“That’s it.”
“Few years ago, somebody was shooting street people — a homeless guy, tweakers, a woman in the sex trade. Mostly around Manufacturers Row.”
Shaw remembered those people he’d seen around the riverwalk, after the S.I.T. operation.
She added, “Still an open case. Whoever it was, was smart. Cleaned up afterward. You ever work a case with a psycho?”
Shaw called them “jobs” not “cases” but felt no need to explain. “Once. Killed four women. Brilliant. Medical student. The police caught him but he got away. Vanished completely. After a month, the county posted a reward.”
“You found him?”
“I did.”
“How?”
“Staked out plastic surgeons.”
She gave a laugh. “Smart.”
Shaw’s eyes were drawn to a gaudy yellow billboard.
It was one of a dozen lawyers’ signs decorating the highway.
Another sign was:
Someone had climbed to the bottom of the billboard and spray-painted:
She noticed his gaze.
“Kick in the teeth,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“Ferrington survived the downturns. You catch that, Colter?”
“Plural.”
“Yep. The city was the iron capital of the Midwest a hundred and fifty years ago.”
The Range Rover was automatic but she used the steering-wheel paddles, which was manual transmission light, not real shifting. Still, it was more fun than just using your right foot and it let you tach into the red.
“Ferrington was never a pretty city. But it was grand. It was alive. It had more factories and rail yards than any city in the state. The hotels were as fancy as anything in Memphis or St. Louis.”
“But then,” Shaw said.
“But then. Iron was out and steel was in. That meant Gary and Pittsburgh and New Jersey were the new meccas of industry. And after that, China and Japan. Recently things started to look up. Some outfits saw cheap real estate and bought up some of the old buildings — Marty’s company, a chipmaker, and there’s a government contractor makes some parts or another for the Defense Department, nobody knows what. Amazon was considering a distribution center on Route Eighty-four. That got everybody excited. Things were looking up.”
“And the tooth kick?”
“The water. Nobody knew how polluted the old factory sites were. When they cleared acreage for the redevelopments, it unearthed the toxins. The Kenoah’s worse than the Ohio, the Tennessee and the Ward Cove.”
“What’s it polluted with?”
“Quite a cocktail. Coal tars, heavy metals, aromatic hydrocarbons, MTBE.”
Shaw shook his head.
“Methyl tert-butyl ether. Never heard of it either, but all you have to do is read the Daily Herald for the past six months and you’ll learn enough to get a degree in chemistry.
“And the companies looking our way were reading all about it too. Like that billboard? United Defense? They were going to be hiring fifteen hundred people on two campuses. Now it’s on hold, and probably not going to go through. Same with American Household Products. That hire was going to be eight hundred.”
Hence: Asshat...
“They going to reassess when the cleanup’s done?”
Nilsson said, “It’s not like washing cars, you know: goes in dirty and comes out all buffed and shiny. It’s a slow process. CEOs don’t want to gamble their shareholders’ money — and their own bonuses — that the same thing won’t happen next year. Here we are.”
She skidded the SUV to an abrupt stop in a gravel parking lot in front of Mitchell’s. The pub and attached inn were both rustic and quaint, with dark wood siding and forest-green trim on windows and doors. A flagstone path snaked lazily to the entrance.
Nice place, Shaw reflected. An objective assessment; he was not one for atmosphere. As long as there was a local beer on tap and something substantial to eat — burger or steak — the place would do. Also, he hoped for relative quiet.
After they both did subtle security scans of the area around them, Nilsson and Shaw walked to the door. He was encouraged to see a sign.
In his travels Colter Shaw liked to sample local brews.
That satisfied his first wish, and the second was likely to be granted too, judging from the smell of grilling meat.
They climbed the three stone steps to the porch that fronted the inn, and as they did, their shoulders brushed. They shared a glance. Shaw was reaching for the door handle when Nilsson’s phone chimed. She carried two. This was an iPhone. The other was larger and more complex, maybe satellite. Nilsson read the text.
Her lips tightened.
“It’s Marty. I have to go into the office.” She looked up. “He asked for you too.”
18
“That was mean.”
Piloting the 4Runner west from Ferrington at just over the limit, Allison Parker glanced at her daughter, who sat knees up, in the front seat, looking at her computer.
“What?”
“Daddy’s tire.”
Parker turned back to the road.
As they’d hurried away from the house, without the iPad, Parker had skidded onto Cross County Highway and sped up, but then — to her horror — she had seen a white Ford F-150 parked curbside and empty. She braked hard. Yes, it was Jon’s — she knew the dings and scrapes. Looking around, she didn’t see him. He’d be at the house about three blocks away. She had only minutes. “Stay here,” she’d ordered. “Do not get out.”
Parker had jogged to the truck, looked in the bed for something she could slash the tires with. Nothing. So she’d unscrewed the air nozzle cap and with a twig bled the air out of the right front. Thought about the left but decided it was too risky to stay longer.