Other than Boone, of course. She was driving. They were in her yellow Datsun. They passed a green tin building half a block long: the loading dock for Kemco trucks.
“That’s where the trucks come out,” Boone said, pointing as they approached a graveled area to the left of the loading dock; a small brick building served as a clearing booth for departing trucks, of which there were none at the moment.
“Where do we watch from?” Crane asked.
“You’ll see.”
Opposite the Kemco plant, on the other side of the road they were driving down, was a flat open field; in the darkness it was hard to see how far the field extended. It resembled farmland. They’d passed several farms, within half a mile of the Kemco facility, on this same road; but this field wasn’t being used for farming, or anything else, though perhaps it had once been a dump site for wastes — the proverbial “back forty” used by many chemical plants — long since filled up and smoothed over.
There was room alongside the road to park, which they did, a quarter of a mile down from the truck loading area.
“Are we going to be okay, here?” Crane asked.
“Sure. Nobody’s going to think a thing about us.”
“Yeah, right. What’s conspicuous about sitting out here in the open like this?”
“It’s dark. Nobody’ll see us.”
“A car going by will see us. A truck.”
“Crane, one of the few nice things about the Kemco plant is it’s out in the boonies... and you know what people in parked cars out in the boonies do, don’t you?”
“I think I can guess, but I don’t know what it has to do with us.”
“If a car or a truck goes by, we pretend to be making out. Think you can handle that?”
“I suppose. But be gentle.”
Boone frowned at that, but it wasn’t a very convincing frown.
They sat and watched for an hour, saying very little, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. The plant down the way, from this distance, looked like a cheap miniature in a ’50s science-fiction movie. The longer he stared at it, the less real it seemed; yet at the same time, it struck him as being something breathing, something alive. It was the constant billowing smoke that did it, he figured.
Another uneventful half hour passed.
“I don’t know about this,” Crane said. “We haven’t seen a car or truck since we got here.”
“Crane, if we’re patient, we can catch them in the act. You got that? We can wait and watch for the sons of bitches who are hauling Kemco’s shit, follow them to wherever they’re illegally dumping it...” She paused to point at the Nikon SLR camera on the floor between her feet. “... take a few nice candid shots, and we got them.”
“And you’re sure this is going to happen at night.”
“It will probably be at night. They aren’t called midnight haulers because they work days.”
“It doesn’t look like tonight’s going to be the night.”
“It’s too early to tell. But tonight might be the night. Or tomorrow night, or the next night, maybe. This place turns out a lot of waste. We won’t have to wait forever.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“Take a nap. I’ll wake you if anything happens.”
“Don’t let me sleep more than eight or ten hours.”
“Crane, we only have to watch a couple hours a night. Between midnight and two, is all.”
“I still don’t know how you arrived at that.”
“I guessed, okay? But they would probably wait till after third shift went on at 11:30, and, if they’re going any distance at all to do the dumping, they wouldn’t want to get started any later than two.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Take a nap.”
“Okay.”
Crane got as comfortable as he could in the Datsun, with her in the driver’s seat. He was following her lead in this because he didn’t know quite what else to do; she had the information, the insights, he needed. So he was going along with her on this effort to link Kemco with “midnight haulers.” But it seemed to him ill-advised at best; and he didn’t want to think about what it was at worst.
This afternoon, at Boone’s, he’d listened to three cassette tapes — interviews with the wives of the three other suicide victims — and he’d found that, for a “journalist” who’d been working on a book for a year and a half, Boone had somewhat less than a professional interviewing style. She pushed her subjects, led them, tried to get them to help her make her preconceived points. (She had not interviewed any of the members of the Brock family — Mr. Brock being the man who killed his wife and two children and himself — as there was no one left to interview.)
Despite her lack of professionalism in interviewing, Boone was an amazing researcher and, from what he’d read so far, her writing style was considerably less hysterical than he’d supposed. Actually, it was a nicely understated style, getting her anti-Kemco points across convincingly. The Agent Orange section of the manuscript alone was devastating — her interviews with Vietnam vets were much more effective than those with Greenwood residents — and she may have been wrong in assuming the book could not stand on Agent Orange alone to find her a publisher.
He was halfway through the manuscript and would finish it tomorrow; but he would need days to absorb Boone’s file cabinet of data on Kemco’s adverse effects on the citizens of Greenwood.
She had cooked supper for him, and it was delicious: lasagna, his favorite. They — Crane, Boone, Billy — ate in the kitchen, a big off-white room with plants lining the windows. Her husband had been nice enough to leave her all the appliances, but then most of them were built-in.
“This is really good,” Crane told her, between bites.
“You sound surprised.”
“It’s just great. I hope you’ll let me help out on the groceries, while I’m here. And I can do some of the cooking, if you like.”
“You can cook?”
“Isn’t that kind of a ‘sexist’ question?”
Boone smiled. “What’s your specialty?”
“I’m glad you like Italian,” he said. “I do terrific spaghetti and meatballs.”
“Sounds wonderful. Only I’m a vegetarian.”
“Really.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
“Well, I noticed the lasagna was meatless, of course, but, then I fix it that way myself. I like it with spinach and cottage cheese like this.” He turned to the boy. “Are you vegetarian, Billy?”
“No!” the boy said. He was looking at his plate as he ate.
“I fix Billy hamburgers or tacos, when he wants,” Boone explained. “I don’t try to force vegetarianism on him. It’s not a religion with me.”
“Daddy feeds me steak,” Billy said. Still looking at his plate.
“Daddy can afford steak,” Boone told her son.
“How long are you going to live here?” Billy asked Crane, turning and looking at him for the first time. His expression was that of a prosecutor with an accused mass murderer on the stand.
“Just a little while, Billy,” Crane said.
“Daddy won’t like it,” Billy said.
“Daddy won’t know about it, either,” Boone said.
“I might tell him.”
“Not unless you don’t want to live with mommy anymore.”
“I might live with Daddy. If he’s gonna live here, I might.”
“Mr. Crane is my friend, Billy. He’s helping me work. He won’t be staying here long.”
“He better not.” Billy pushed away from the table. “Be excused?”