“Let’s get things cleaned up and get our guys out of here. I want them here tomorrow just in case Prichard wants to talk with any of them,” he said with a dismissive air, looking down to some paperwork on his desk. Hector and Lynn got up and left the office.
Rob knew he’d have to document the cause of the failure to protect the plant. That meant paperwork now, and a lot more later. This was far from over. There would be a lot of fallout over this, and he had to be ready to deal with it.
He didn’t like that Prichard brought in Nick to do this evaluation. He took pride in his security force and what he believed they could do. As far as he was concerned, this was his power plant to protect and defend. He knew how to best do that and didn’t need some outsider coming in and making him look bad.
He let out a weary sigh. He was getting too old for this shit.
CHAPTER 8
It was just before midnight when I rolled out of the plant and headed back into town. The security staff usually ran drills on swing shift, between 4 p.m. and midnight. It was after the day shift staff went home, so the number of people roaming around the plant would be at a minimum, with only operators, a couple of maintenance technicians, and some chemistry and radiation protection techs to get in the way. They didn’t want to hurt anyone and preferred to run the drills when the plant was mostly deserted. They also didn’t want others to see how they responded to an assault on the plant. It was best to avoid prying eyes, watching or documenting their response strategies, trying to impress a wife or girlfriend by making some entry on Face Book or Twitter.
I was heading to The Tavern for a beer and a chance to decompress and check my e-mail. Every town has an out-of-the-way bar where only the locals go, and Willits was no exception. It didn’t take me long to find it.
The Tavern looked like it had seen better times, though that was debatable. It probably looked like this when it was new. It was a ramshackle place, with a rusty tin roof and a dirt parking lot. The neon sign out front did actually light up and was on when I arrived, but the glass was broken in one corner, and the remainder was dirty and discolored from the heat of the bulbs and dust from the parking lot. It looked like it had been there for thirty hard years.
The Tavern was located off a side road that you could easily assume led to some commune off in the woods where self proclaimed ‘artists’ or bikers set up camp for themselves. Parked out front was an old step-side, short-bed Chevy, paint faded by years in the weather and few attempts to clean or wax it. It was hard to tell if it belonged to a patron, the owner, or was abandoned in place. Alongside it was a nondescript four-door sedan with an Avis license plate cover, screaming ‘rental’. To the locals, this car might seem out of place — trucks, motorcycles, and old cars are more the norm — but I was used to traveling and seeing rental cars wherever I went, so seeing one here didn’t register with me as being unusual. That would prove to be a mistake.
Besides being a remote location and one not likely to be frequented by anyone who might recognize me, it was one of those spots that actually got cell phone reception in this sleepy backwater community. I thought it odd, really, that regardless of how much people who lived in the backwoods shunned technology, everyone seemed to have a cell phone. They all wanted the perks of the society they so often criticized, but they didn’t want to support that same society with their taxes or their time. Many certainly didn’t want to join the military and fight for it. That used to bother me more than it does now. Now I just write it off as ignorance or narrow-mindedness. I actually didn’t want to make a call, but I wanted to check my e-mail on my iPhone, and I could do that while I had a beer.
I had my choice of tables, which wasn’t unusual for that time of night. Other than a middle-aged, slightly bored-looking waitress, nobody appeared to pay much attention to me as I walked in. I wanted to just decompress for a while. Beer sometimes helped that. I didn’t sleep particularly well anymore. Survivor’s guilt, I think they call it. Others call it purging my demons. All I knew was that I just wanted a beer.
I expected to see leather jackets, beards and long hair, blue jeans, footwear that used to pass as boots, tattoos, piercings, and yellow teeth… on both the men and women. So it was surprising to see two guys dressed casually in jeans, sport shirts, and hunting jackets, in a corner near the bar, at a table with a red-checkered plastic tablecloth, nursing a couple of beers of their own. They weren’t exactly dressed like locals, and if that was going to cause a problem for anyone, the two looked like they couldn’t care less. But then, there weren’t enough people in The Tavern to care. It was late and most of the locals didn’t come out for a beer or a burger at this time of night.
Despite their casual manner, the two men looked up and took notice of me after I sat down. My guess was they belonged to the rental car, which meant they were passing through, but from where and to where, I didn’t know. More to the point, I didn’t care. They apparently had been in there for a while and appeared to have a good buzz going. So long as they stayed on their side of the room, we wouldn’t have any trouble.
I picked a table where I could sit with my back to a wall, and got out my phone while I waited for the waitress to come over.
“Hi, hon,” she said with mock sincerity. “What’ll it be?” Everyone is ‘hon’ or ‘sugar’ in a bar like this, men and women alike.
“Whatever you have on tap will be fine. Maybe some peanuts or pretzels if you have ‘em,” I replied.
“Cold out there tonight, isn’t it?” she asked as she wiped down the table with a damp rag that was probably clean when she started her shift many hours ago.
“That it is,” I said, not wanting a lot of conversation, but not wanting to be impolite either.
From the other side of the room, one of the men at the other table hollered in a loud, rude manner, “Hey! Can we get some more beers over here or what?”
The waitress stops wiping my table. She looked over at them and said, “I’ll be right with you boys,” as she turned to go get them their beer.
“Well hurry it up!”
Assholes, I said to myself. I noticed the cook in the back looked out over his grill at what was going on. No doubt he’d seen this type of behavior before, but he wasn’t being paid to be a bouncer. He turned his back and busied himself with whatever it was a cook does at this time of night.
Once behind the bar, the waitress filled a glass with Blue Moon on tap for me, put a slice of orange in it, grabbed a bowl of peanuts, two more bottles of Bud for the assholes and headed back to my table.
When the loudmouth saw her heading to my table first, he hollered, “Hey, bitch, what the hell you doing? Get our beer over here now!”
It was hard to tell if the waitress was offended or not. A place like this gets all kinds sooner or later. She looked at me with silent exasperation in her tired eyes. I just nodded at her that it was okay, and she altered her course to bring the loudmouths their beers. She deposited them on their table when one of the men grabbed her by the arm. Holding onto her, he looked over at me with something akin to a sneer, took the bowl of peanuts, and then let go of the waitress. The loudmouth took a swig of beer, didn’t touch the peanuts, and just kept looking at me. I could see how this night was shaping up. I was really in no mood for this. I was tired and just wanted some down time. Even in out-of-the-way places like this, I guess you can find jerks.